About two months ago, I saw that Julia Rios and Meg Frank were looking to turn over the leadership of Mermaids Monthly to a new team. No experience required, they said!

I have no experience running a publishing business, so naturally I applied immediately. I assure you no one was more shocked than I when Julia and Meg chose me and my incoming co-publisher, Noelle Singh–also brand new to publishing–to take charge.

Meg and Julia generously donated a ton of their time to letting us shadow them as they put together the November and December issues, patiently answering questions, and yes, helping us plan the Kickstarter campaign (happening now! Go check it out!)

These are the things I’ve learned in the process of training to be a publisher while also planning and running a Kickstarter campaign (not dissimilar activities, it turns out!)

1. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for What You Want

Running a publishing business, even on the cheap, is not cheap. But we all thought it was important to A) pay staff as fairly as possible for their work and B) pay fair rates for writers, artists, and creators who contribute to Mermaids Monthly. We pay 10 cents per word for stories and while that doesn’t sound like a lot, it’s amazing how quickly it adds up. (Math! Who knew?!?)

Art licensed for a cover is $150. A piece of interior art is $50. Then let’s say we have three stories we love, for a total of 10,000 words. That kind of felt like the minimum amount of content we’d like to shoot for, and that meant we had to plan on $1200 per issue, times twelve, just for the content. Plus, building in money for sensitivity readers, alt text writers, editorial and production staff… We’d love to pay a stipend to first readers as well (and that’s a stretch goal!)

So do I wake up in a cold sweat at 4am some mornings agonizing over asking for $33,000? Sure I do. But making art is work, and creators deserve to be paid. Remembering that last part helps make it easier to ask people to pitch in day in and day out. In our opinion, it would be worse to ask for a smaller amount that wouldn’t allow us to pay our contributors what they deserve than to not fund at all. 

2. There Will Be High Tides and Low Tides

A Kickstarter is like a force of nature that you feel like you’re just surfing on, not controlling. It ebbs and flows. It’s hard to accept that it’s not something you can actually do a lot about. You just have to learn how to point the ship forward, stay steady, and try not to freak out.

One of the things that really helped us was planning for the low tides. Before we launched, we created a calendar of talking points so that it would be easier to keep posting when tired of the campaign or life in general. It’s hard to keep talking about one thing for 40 days straight, let alone during the holiday season! Some days we see more progress than others… and you know what, you just gotta roll with the tide and keep doing your best.

Or so I tell myself!

3. Folders Folders Folders Shared Folders

This is such a boring lesson in some ways but I cannot stress how extremely critical it is. We use shared folders for both Kickstarter planning and for publishing business.

When you first start planning a Kickstarter campaign, you’re all excited! You have so many ideas! You start collecting them and writing them on the digital equivalent of scraps of paper all over your desk! And ESPECIALLY if you’re co-ordinating with an international team–we have team members on the US East and West coast, in the Philippines, and in Lebanon–pretty soon those digital scraps are scattered every which way and you start forgetting about the awesome ideas that you had because you’re so busy moving on to the next on.

FOLDERS, people. Folders saved us. I know, it’s absurd, really, that it took us a few weeks to get used to it. You see, we use Slack, too, so we’d often brainstorm in real time in the Slack, which is really fun! And great! Because we’d get ideas! But then someone has to, you know, actually copy down those ideas, throw them up in a Google doc, and *make sure that doc is available to collaborators* (a critical point that is often overlooked by people. And by people I mean me.)

I started a folder called Kickstarter Year Two. In it, we threw in everything related to the Kickstarter planning–timelines, blog post ideas, contributor bios, cute graphics we wanted to use–and then we arranged them into some sort of order. Once we knew that everything was in there, it became way easier to say “Hey, who had that copy for the blog post? Oh, there it is–in the folder called Blog Post Copy!”

Easy peasy. Or is it??

More than simply HAVING folders, the team has to understand and agree on the foldering conventions, or else you have three folders labeled “January 2022” and documents languishing in some forgotten place that you thought you shared with the team but actually didn’t!

A lesson I learned is that while Google Drive is really convenient in a lot of ways, it does come with some drawbacks. First, as I mentioned above, it can easily spiral out of control to a thousand shared docs with no organization, making it really hard to find anything unless you remember exactly what you called it. Second, not everyone on the team was super comfortable with using the Google docs interface, and on mobile, it can really be a pain. And third, keeping track of access and permissions can be a little tricky, too.

So folders, yes; but everyone being on the same page about how they’re organized and what’s in them, also very much a resounding yes.

4. People Connect to Mermaids in Myriad Surprising and Moving Ways

I started the publishing journey with Mermaids Monthly because my feelings about mermaids have evolved in the last year, thanks largely to reading the publication. Way back in January of 2020, I thought of mermaids as cool, interesting creatures depicted in many different stories about humans’ deep and complicated connections to oceans and rivers and lakes all around the world.

As I immersed myself in the magazine, I saw so many reflections of how people understood mermaids. L.D. Lewis’s searing story in the January 2021 issue, From Witch to Queen to God, reimagines the sea witch Ursula as a powerful warrior against colonialism and slavery. The fantastic comic Andromeda by Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos and Seth Martel blends sci-fi and mythology together for a cosmic fairy tale in the February 2021 issue. The darkly horrific and yet triumphant story, How to Eat a Mermaid by K. Garcia Ley reminded me of legends (in Japan and elsewhere, and also explored in Vonda McIntyre’s novel, The Sun and the Moon) that eating mermaid flesh grants immortality.

It’s been an exhilarating journey for me, mildly interested in mermaids at the start of 2020, to running a magazine all about mermaids. Now, I see that mermaids are a complex reflection of humanity itself: how we are the other sometimes, how we feel like we don’t belong sometimes, how we, too, plunge into the unknown depths, and how we nevertheless survive.

I can’t wait to see more expressions of what mermaids and mermaid lore mean to other creators!

5. Kindness To Each Other Is Maybe the Most Important Thing

Running a Kickstarter is stressful. It is hard. It feel so weird asking for so much money, and if you’re anything like me, you can easily spiral into a whirlpool of self-doubt and self-recrimination (“What were you thinking, asking for so much?”).

And everyone working on the Kickstarter is a volunteer – we don’t get paid unless the campaign funds, and even then, there is no back pay. We’re all doing it on our own time in between work and school and family commitments and exercise and, you know, eating and sleeping and all those vital functions. Not to mention this is a holiday season with lots going on. So it’s pretty easy for someone to slip up, or forget to do something, or do something less well than it should have been done. I’m raising my hand here as someone who has definitely screwed up in the course of this campaign.

And so, I think, it’s natural to experience frustration with each other (and in general, of course.) With yourself, too. But the antidote to that is easy, actually. It’s to be kind. It’s to remember that we’re all human and trying to do our best, and we’re all united in that we WANT this campaign to succeed and we WANT to be able to publish amazing mermaid stories and poems and art throughout 2022! So, it goes a long way if we can recognize when someone is doing hard work; when we can thank them for their contributions; when we can be cheerful and positive towards each other by remembering that we’re all on the same team.

And the same goes for publishing! We’ve built in stipends for all the staff, but to be honest, the actual work it takes to run a small press is way more, in practice, than what the stipend covers, and we’re learning that. There’s still a lot of labor that we do because we care and we love what we’re working on. I would love to work on changing that, because ultimately this system of volunteers in publishing impacts accessibility and depends on relative privilege–that some of us have the time to, essentially, donate. But until we can upend the system and capitalism, we can recognize in each other that we are donating time as part of a community effort to nurture and build a thing we value.

The Mermaids Monthly Kickstarter campaign is live now, collecting funds for Year Two of the Mermaids Monthly voyage.

Bio: Miyuki Jane Pinckard writes stories about robots and magic. She’s always been afraid of the ocean but remains a big fan of mermaids and sea-creatures. Find her online at www.miyukijane.com and on Twitter and Instagram as @miyukijane.

Your immediate reading homework is this, from the NYT: MILLIONS OF FOLLOWERS? FOR BOOK SALES, IT’S UNRELIABLE. It’s behind a paywall, of course, so be advised of that if you are the kind of person who is halted by them — but I’ll do some summary of the article in question in order to dissect and reassemble its salient bits. The summary is this: it has long been assumed that people with huge social media followings therefore also sell huge numbers of books, and given the apparently low sales numbers of some of the celebrity books in question — which is to say, celebrities with considerable herds of fans following their every online move — it might be safe to consider that assumption to be a grandly bullshit one.

Big social media followings do not become big book sales.

I’ve said it forever, and it appears to remain the case, here.

Now, it is worth noting up front, before we dig too deep a hole, that the article is flawed in that it’s using only BookScan numbers, and BookScan is wildly unreliable in that it only captures print sales from certain sales outlets. It does not track e-books. It does not track audiobooks. It does not track library sales. Again, it tracks print books sold through standard print book sales points like Amazon, B&N, Target, many (but not all) indie stores. Author Katherine Locke noted on Twitter that they found Bookscan caught only 12% of the sales of one of their books — which, uhhh, is a pretty notable deficit. So, the numbers in that article are probably lower than in reality, and further, it’s capturing only one real set of authors: celebrity authors. In this sense the article could just as easily be an indictment against giving celebrities giant fucking book deals, which, y’know, I happen to agree with.

That said, I still think there’s something here to talk about, and that’s the question of what social media brings to the table for authors, their books, and the sales of those books to an audience.

Way back in THE OLDEN DAYS, in the BEFORETIMES, at the outset of this current wave of social media (Twitter, FB, IG, eventually not Tumblr, eventually yes Tik-Tok), it was a common refrain that an author had to have a “platform,” which was something of a corruption of the notion that non-fiction authors had to have a platform. For non-fic authors, that platform meant they had to have a reliable reputation in the subject matter at hand and/or some kind of demonstrable expertise in it. But the dilution of that became simply, “As an author, you should have a social media following at one or several social media sites.” (At this time, blogs were still acceptable. Remember blogs? Yeah, me neither.) It was a little bit advice, a little bit mandate. What that social media following meant or needed to look like was a set of teleporting bullseyes, and though I’m sure some publishers had hard and fast numbers they hoped to see, they did not share them with any authors I know.

The purpose of this social media following was unclear, though it was usually sold as some combination of, hey, be funny, be informative, earn an audience, oh and don’t forget to SHILL YOUR BOOKS, BOOKMONSTER. Drop the links, use the graphics, do the hokey-pokey and shake it all about. You’re an author! Also a brand! Standing on a platform! Asking an audience to love you with money! You’re like the Wendy’s Twitter account — be funny, be individual, be the best version of yourself, get attention, but also get them to eat your goddamn wordburgers.

The question is, did it work then? Does it work now?

I have thoughts.

(I mean, obviously I have them, because here I am, with this blog post. Sorry, did I say “blog post?” I meant, uhhh, really long Twitter thread. Shut up.)

Note that these thoughts are artisanal data, by which I mean, my anecdotal experience and observations. I do not mean any of this as boot-in-the-ass fact. Take it as you will.

Answer Unclear, Ask Again Later

Moving copies of books via social media does and doesn’t work, and that is about as true and as useless an answer as I can give, so lemme try to give it some dimension.

First, yes, both now and before, you can sell books on social media, though the primary and best way to sell those books is to not be the author. Meaning, you can sell books, just not your books. Which is counter to this entire point, where publishers tell authors to promote their own books, but there it is. I’ve mentioned this before but it really bears repeating: when an author does a guest post on this very website (which is definitely not a blog, we hate those now, remember), they get X number of clicks through to their books. That number varies depending on the book and the post, to be clear. Now, let’s say in addition to promoting their own book, they also mention another book they liked or loved — the link to that book will get twice the number of clicks than X. It’ll double. Nearly every time. You get more clickthroughs to books you recommend from other authors than you do your own books.

Why is this? I dunno. I’m assuming because we naturally have a gentle, simmering suspicion for anyone hawking their own wares. We’d rather hear about a book you love than a book you wrote. We want to share and participate in that kind of love. And we tend to side-eye sales pitches. Which is good! We should. If someone has something to sell, we should be just a tiny bit wary of their wares, and as always, consider the source.

Then Versus Now

The other thing to consider is that social media now isn’t the same as social media then. It’s obvious that times change, and so does everything with it, and social media is no different. It is, in fact, an entirely divergent animal from five years ago, ten years ago, and beyond. Like the coronavirus, it just keeps fucking mutating, man, and like with a virus, so much of its mutation is unseen, on the inside, its effects cascading long before we’ve really even figured out there was any change at all.

In the BEFORETIMES, social media was smaller, more nimble, and I think it was easier to establish yourself there. It still didn’t move tons and tons of books, but I do think you could find easier reach. Now, that user base is considerably larger — which sounds good, right? You wanna reach more people, so it’s good that there are more people to reach. Except, do you?

Culturally, social media is a raging brushfire. It’s an apocalyptic stock ticker of news and rage and memes and condemnation and indignation and dunks, so many fucking dunks, dunks upon dunks upon dunks. (This is a harsh take on it, and I recognize there is a lot of vital work done there, too, and a necessary platform for social justice. But it’s also a platform for shit that masquerades as social justice, too, which is tricky. But that’s a whole other conversation.) We view social media — or, at least, publishers view social media — like it’s an audience-in-waiting. But it’s not. Everybody on social media is equal parts performer and product. We’re all on the platform, and the platform is a stage, and we’re dancing for the social media companies. So, it’s hard to get above all that and actually let people know about your books. This is an attention economy, and the way to get attention isn’t… y’know, a link to your book. I wish it was. But it’s not. And it’s not, in part because Twitter doesn’t want it to be. Which leads me to the next point:

Algorithmically, it’s also a brushfire. We know that certain things generate algorithmic attention — meaning, the unseen sentient elves pulling all the levers and yanking on all the ropes are interested in juggling tweets to the top that are attention-seeking, emotion-farming tweets. Will this make you angry? Will it make you laugh? THEN HERE, LOOK AT IT. Rage and memes and dunks and such. The platform rewards the brushfire. The algorithm says, “Fire is bright and colorful, people like bright and colorful and are likelier to look at it, so MORE FIRE FOR THE FIRE-LOVERS,” and then the elves splash around gasoline and lighter fluid while chewing through the electrical cords, cackling.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve mentioned, say, a book that is coming out or already out, and had more than one person on Twitter say, “Wow, I’ve never heard of this before.” Even though I’ve yelled about it. I’ve shrieked. I’ve done my ass-shaking buy-my-book dance. I’ll endlessly promote and then go to a bookstore event (or did, in the Beforetimes), will get done said event, will thank the bookstore on Twitter, and inevitably multiple people respond, “Oh I didn’t know you were in town! I would’ve gone!” (To quote Scott Lynch on Twitter: “Painful Coda: On top of this, social media algorithms are working dark sorcery behind the scenes to throttle the actual reach of anything fucking NORMAL that we try to talk about. You have 185k followers. Does that mean 185k people see your announcement of a new thing? Lol. No.” He’s right. They don’t. I suspect it’s closer to one percent, if I’m being honest. Ten percent at the optimistic level.)

Social media is stacked against you, now more than ever.

Think Of It This Way

You’re in a plane.

You have thousands of your books in boxes.

Below you, on the ground, are your readers. Somewhere. They’re down there. It’s fine!

You want to tell them about your book, so to do so, you throw thousands of copies of your book out of the plane, in the hopes that they get copies. They will not. The books will fall into lakes and rivers, they will smash car windows and oh god you just killed a schnauzer, you fucking monster.

Even if you tell your potential readers, hey, look for my plane, wait for my book drop, it won’t matter very much. You might slightly increase the number of people who find the books. But that’s it.

(Note: please do not do any of this, it’s a metaphor.)

(Though mayyyybe it could work. Anybody have a plane? I got books!)

What I Used To Say

I used to say this:

On social media, you can sell tens or hundreds of copies of your book, but publishers really want thousands to be sold. The true value of social media is connecting with other professionals in your creative space — you gather around the digital watercooler and get to talk to other writers, agents, editors, artists, booksellers, librarians. It makes you a part of a community, and you meet these people not to use as rungs on a ladder but as compatriots and cohorts and, in many cases, as friends who honestly understand what you do and get what you’re going through. Yes, of course, definitely promote your book because that’s what your audience is following you for, they want to know about your books. Just don’t bludgeon them over the head with it, and you’ll be fine. The goal is to talk about your books in an earnest, personal way, not to be manipulative or as a sales pitch but because it’s the best way to talk about your work. And the hope is that you create that essential background noise called “buzz” simply by making people aware, because awareness is the most difficult thing to achieve. Many of our books have died, smothered by the suffocating blanket of obscurity.

What I Say Now

What I say now is that the above is still true-ish, but it deserves an asterisk as big as a kaiju’s cartoon butthole — a monster caveat, an epic yeah, except.

Yeah, except social media is a fucking wood chipper. It is not necessarily a safe or sound place for an author to be. It can become as much a distraction as an asset, and it can give you some very good days, but also, some of your very worst days. Publishers asking writers to join social media — or other writers giving this as advice — are deficit if they are not making it very clear that social media is not always a safe space. It is not a place to casually muck about, or fail in public in any way, or any of that. The ground is unstable. Beneath it are sewer clowns, and they are very, very hungry. Social media rewards you for being noisy, but it eventually punishes you for the same. And god forbid you, like many authors, have some manner of anxiety or depression. Spoiler warning: social media isn’t there to help. Sometimes it will. Individuals will be there to help you, and that’s part of the good side. But there are just as many who want to do the opposite, who not only want to stick the knife in… but who really want to give it a twist. Especially, especially, as your platform — remember, the thing publishers wanted you to have and to grow! — gets bigger and bigger. A big social media following is open water. It is deep and it is dark and you are in over your head.

Publishers should’ve never viewed this as an extension of their marketing and advertising plans. Authors should’ve never been front-line warriors in this crusade. I understand why it was sold this way — it’s a mix of, “Hey, this is just like authors going out to events and talking to people” and “Hey, maybe we don’t have to spend all that marketing and advertising money now that there’s this giant free space where we can just shill books 24/7 with the help of our new unpaid salesfolks, authors.” (Note, this last point is also why there is current resistance to getting authors back out into the world. Some of it is, yes, because COVID is still scary and uncertain, but some of it is publishers seeing and saying, “Hey, we sold books just fine in the Quarantimes of 2020, why should we pay for authors to do in-person events ever again?” It will be necessary for authors and booksellers and other event-having staff to push back on this narrative, because it has been born, now squalling in its crib.)

The problem with publishers seeing this space as that value-add is that there are also considerable value deficits in place — put more colloquially, the juice ain’t always worth the squeeze.

And it can be a real fucking squeeze.

Beyond that, if you can navigate it, it’s not that social media cannot have value. And it’s not that you can’t still try to get blood from that rock. But to my mind it’s a place you go because you want to be there, not because it is a necessary or even useful channel to Sell Your Books. It maybe never was, but now in particular it’s just difficult to sell books in the middle of a brushfire. I’m there. I do it. I don’t know that it reaches many people at all anymore. I don’t know how much longer I’ll keep doing it. It’s not a fun place to be. I don’t enjoy it. It feels more like an obligation, one whose yield is minimal, like I’m plowing a mostly-fallow field.

I still like this space, of course, because I can engage with points and own the space and inject a little nuance. Not that this is a blog, of course. No no no those aren’t a thing anymore.

*stares shiftily at you*

Wait But Should I Get On Tik-Tok Immediately?

That’s the current advice I hear. YOU GOTTA GET ON TIK-TOK. BOOK-TOK IS THERE. YOU GOTTA BE THERE, MAN. YOU GOTTA DANCE AND SHIT. YOU GOTTA DO THAT THING WHERE THERE’S TEXT ON THE SCREEN AND YOU POINT TO IT AND MAYBE LIP-SYNC SOME STUFF AND PEOPLE ARE LIKE, WOW. YEAH. SHAKE YOUR BOOK. LICK IT. I DUNNO YOU GOTTA DO SOMETHING TO GET THOSE LIKES.

(Does Tik-Tok even have likes? Shit, I dunno.)

(I’m so old.)

I am not going there.

First, because I don’t want to.

Second, because nobody else wants me to, either. I mean, if you thought I was cringe before, just wait till I show up there and gallumph about like Jedi Kid, trying to hawk my bookish wares. Jesus. It’s horrifying just imagining it, and I suspect the real thing would be a thousand times worse.

Third, it’s not even the written word. At least Twitter requires me to exercise my writing skills (“skills”) in some capacity. Tik-Tok is just, oof. I’m an, uhh, behind the camera guy.

Finally, like with all social media, Book-Tok is powered more by readers than by writers, isn’t it? Same as it’s been elsewhere — it’s readers talking about and showing what they love, and that is what moves books. Word of mouth continues to be the primary driver for how books are sold.

The chain is this:

Publishers should make as much noise as they can about a book. Booksellers and librarians help carry that torch. And at the end of the day, it goes to readers. Readers who want to share their love of certain books, and whose love is (excuse the abject cheesiness here) the eternal flame that will keep burning for a story and for an author. That’s it. The author doesn’t need to be in that chain at all. And honestly, maybe we shouldn’t be. Except at the end, to sign it and answer your questions.

But, as with all things, YMMV. This is all pure opinion and conjecture. Others will have very different experiences, and that is as expected. You do you, pikachu.

Anyway hey uhhh buy my books or I die!

The Book of Accidents! Dust & Grim! Holidays! Books! Huzzah!

*immediately creates an OnlyFans account*

I’m so sorry. That post title is terrible. Terrible. I should not be allowed to continue, I should flog myself here and now, and yet, onward I go, stubborn and spiteful.

What I’m trying to say is, hey, look, The Book of Accidents is, for today, $2.99 for your gently humming, quietly vibrating, reality-enhancing e-book machine. So, for a penny shy of three bucks, you can get your haunted house that isn’t a haunted house, your scary coal mine, your scary THING in the BOTTOM of the coal mine, your serial killer who disappeared decades ago, your cycles of trauma broken and unbroken, your pain passed down through generations, your art that comes alive, your boy that feels too much, your emotional seawall. It’s a book that is truly twenty years in the making, and it means quite a lot to me, so I hope if you haven’t checked it out, this might nudge you into giving it a go. (And if you have the physical copy, this isn’t a bad price to secure a digital backup.)

Please tell others! Chase them with this good news! And a machete! I mean, don’t do that last part. No chasing, no machetes, please. I beg of you. Forget I said anything at all.

Your buy links:

Kobo

B&N

Apple

Amazon

And if you are kind enough to review the book and vote for it in the final round of the Goodreads Choice Awards, I will love you even more than I do now. Which I didn’t even know was possible!

Have fun at Ramble Rocks! It’s a park! It’s a coal mine! It’s an amusement park! So ramble on down and ride the lightning, won’t you?

Not a whole lot going on this week in the lead-up to the holidays, so I’ll keep this update brief —

Invasive is $1.99 for your ebookmachine today. Not sure how long it lasts. But if you want a novel where people are attacked by flesh-farming ants, boy howdy, do I have the book for you. The ants are a metaphor for anxiety! But also they’re actual ants, so.

Reminder that The Book of Accidents is up for Goodreads Choice in Horror.

Saw the first episode of Wheel of Time and liked it a bunch. The cast is great. It was gorier than I expected — lots of guts strewn about and exploding Trollocs. I read most of the series when I was a kid — high school into college. Met Robert Jordan at a signing one time (he had this magnificent goat staff which strongly suggests he is, or was, a wizard). I tapped out by… book nine, I think. The books seemed to get longer while the span of time the books encompassed got shorter, and it just felt like a slog-ass drag. I’ve heard Sanderson (unsurprisingly) stuck the landing, though. I’d like to go back and re-read but holy crap, where do you find the time? ANYWAY. First episode of the show was cool. Will keep trucking with it. I wish it didn’t look quite so… TV? A show like Game of Thrones looks filmic. The MCU shows, too. But this feels like TV. Which isn’t all bad — I found the Witcher show looked a little TV-ish, too. But for a show Amazon spent a buttload of cash on, it occasionally felt a little cheap-looking. Too glossy, too. Still. I’m in, for the moment.

Maya and the Three on Netflix was fuuuuucking great. I mean it’s a kid’s show so I guess I should say flippin’ great or something. Whatever. But it’s nine episodes, self-contained, one season. Funny and amazing battle scenes and a lot of heart and suspense.

Also caught Shang-Chi, which I liked a lot, too, but it’s hard not to feel a little burned out on the standard MCU origin-story plot arc. This did some new stuff, which I liked, and the first half of the movie is fucking electric, with some of the finest martial arts superhero fight scenes you could imagine. The second half gets a little boggy in CGI fantasyland shit, and the movie whiffs on some pretty big moments — moments that the MCU movies usually excel at articulating (meaning, those moments where everyone seems beaten, the hero/es rally, music swells, whoa, gosh, my feelings, whatever). And hard not to think, “Wow, I think I wanted Xialing to be the protagonist of this? Or at least an equal?” Still, it’s pretty great, and eminently rewatchable.

I want to care more about the new Spider-Man movie but don’t that much? I find that the Tom Holland movies are a blast but do a whole lot of work to make Spider-Man not about Spider-Man. The first two felt like they were really Iron Man handling shit, and then this one might be too much Doctor Strange. I love the multiverse collision idea, and I suspect when I see it, I’m going to pee my pants with joy, but right now I can’t quite summon the excitement or the nostalgia over trying to mash this stuff up in a way that feels cogent and not like a nostalgia grab.

What I did like a whole lot was Netflix’s The Harder They Fall, holy crap. That’s got style for miles, that movie, and the players are goddamn electric in it. It is a joy from start to finish. Great Western. Instant classic. Give Jonathan Majors more roles. More! More. MORE, I SAID. *shakes TV*

I read an excellent book — Alma Katsu’s The Fervor. Fucking terrifying. A ghoulish slice of historical horror. I am reminded how good a writer she is. Not out yet. April, I think. Would make a great limited series, ala Midnight Mass. And with that book, I think, I’m closed officially to blurbs for the moment. I need time to do some research work and also pleasure reading. (Not that blurbing isn’t pleasure reading. But it’s different than just being able to nab a book off the ol’ tbr and go to town.)

My kid just read Amira and Hamza: The War to Save the Worlds by Samira Ahmed, and before that, Ghost Squad, by Claribel Ortega. Loved both if you need good middle grade for your kidlets. Or yourself, I won’t judge.

Thanksgiving is coming up. Pumpkin pie is bullshit but I’m getting one anyway. (I make pie, but only at Christmas.) Apple pie is the true ruler of our house, and is the greatest pie that exists. Though I am willing to hear your opinions on your favored choice of pie. Also turkey is mostly bullshit. Gonna roast a chicken instead. Roasted chicken seems so hard, and then you do it, and it was simple and is amazing, and also isn’t a turkey.

Though the real game is rib roast, and that’s what I make for Christmas.

Did you see the terribleminds 2021 gift guide? WELL DID YOU. Gifts for writers and beyond.

I think that’s it for now.

See you next week. IN YOUR NIGHTMARES.

Moo hoo ha ha.

And now, photos.