Best Fan Writer
Bitter Karella: Midnight Society is the only good reason to be on Twitter. Every horror and SFF fan should read it.
The thing that strikes me the most about Midnight Society is its erudition and its tendency to shy away from the easy joke. For me, as a Lovecraft fan, this is most obvious in its jokes about Lovecraft. A lot of people know that Lovecraft is racist but are unfamiliar with the details and just sort of round him off to their stereotype of what the 1920s were like. On one hand, this is very fair, there is no reason for most people to be familiar with the exact shape of Lovecraft’s prejudices; you can say “he’s an absurd racist, yes even for a man of his time” and move on. On the other hand, I think it really improves the work that Midnight Society Lovecraft is racist in the exact way that actual Lovecraft was actually racist. As someone who has read some of the letters, it rings absolutely true. Plus you get to make jokes about Lovecraft’s paralyzing fear of Italians and deep suspicion of foreign food.
Bitter Karella has some deep cuts in which horror writers she makes fun of. Victor LaValle! Your reading list will triple if you’re a regular reader.
My one criticism is that I wish there were fewer Rowling jokes. Bitter Karella is transfeminine so I get it, and the jokes are consistently hilarious. But I think I’d enjoy it more if a smaller percentage of the jokes were about people who want to deny me necessary medical care, especially since Rowling isn’t a horror writer.
Best Related Work
How Twitter Can Ruin A Life: Thoughtful article about the Isabel Fell situation. (In case you’re not familiar, a trans female writer wrote a story which some people interpreted as transphobic. It sparked a vicious Twitter hate mob which led to her being hospitalized and to her detransition.) How Twitter Can Ruin A Life includes Fell’s only public statement on the situation. It also contextualizes the situation in terms of the broader dynamics of Twitter as a website. In my opinion, Twitter is incredibly destructive to art and to careful thought. I love this in particular:
“The powerful want to say that we are entering a dangerous new era where ‘people disliking things en masse’ has coalesced into some kind of crowdsourced [weapon], firing on arbitrary targets from orbit and vaporizing their reputations,” she wrote to me in an email. “The use of mass social sanction gives the less powerful a weapon against the more powerful, so long as they can mobilize loudly and persistently. This is not new. Shame and laughter are vital tools for freedom.”
She cautions, however, that “like all weapons, it will do the most damage when aimed at the least defended, the isolated, those with no one to stand up for them, publicly or privately. And we must be careful with the temptation to use it inside our own houses to destroy shapes we think are intruders.”
Debarkle: You know, I kind of love this? People’s self-published, rambly, digressive, poorly edited, typo-ridden books should be nominated for Hugos. This is what fandom is all about.
Debarkle is a history of the Sad Puppies. I recommend it if and only if you have r/HobbyDrama bookmarked and want to read four hundred pages of an r/HobbyDrama post. While Debarkle does go on tangents constantly, it’s usually possible to skim until you get to the fun drama part.
Debarkle also made me understand the Sad Puppies for the first time. The things they explicitly wanted were kind of incoherent. There was no shortage of straight white men being nominated for Hugos in the 2000s. Not only have fun, pulpy books always been nominated for the Hugos, they specifically targeted John Scalzi, who only writes fun, pulpy books. So, like, what.
However: the Sad Puppies’ actual objection wasn’t about straight white men or pulpy books. Their objection was that people like them don’t get nominated for Hugos. In theory, Hugo voting is open to everyone with forty bucks to spend on a supporting membership. In practice, Hugo voting is, quite naturally, dominated by the kind of people who go to WorldCons, and they tend to recommend certain books to each other. People culturally similar to Larry Correia and Brad Torgerson—people who like guns, vote Republican, served in the military, are Mormon, etc—don’t really tend to be nominated for Hugos. Naturally, Correia and Torgerson find this kind of alienating.
But Correia and Torgerson have two other problems. First, they are thin-skinned and prone to playing the victim and unable to tolerate things like “if you are nominated for an award some people might give bad reviews to your book.” Since they felt very persecuted by the WorldCon fandom, they lashed out.
Second, they fundamentally don’t understand that artistic quality is different than popularity. People culturally similar to Correia and Torgerson who understood that distinction, like Brandon Sanderson or Howard Tayler or even Eric Flint, quickly distanced themselves from the Sad Puppies. The purpose of awards, if you don’t understand that artistic quality is a thing, is to promote your friends and sell their books. Therefore, the Secret Masters of Fandom must have been using the Hugos to help people they like sell more book copies. But the Secret Masters of Fandom have a double standard. When Correia and Torgerson try to do the same thing, the Secret Masters of Fandom started complaining that the books “are bad,” even though they sold lots of copies so they couldn’t be bad! There’s a fundamental disconnect here. The Sad Puppies fundamentally didn’t understand that, when WorldCon fandom is all fans of a certain author, it’s because people recommend books to each other or are more likely to read their acquaintances’ books or check out the book of an author who was on an interesting panel, and not because people were dictating whom they should vote for—because, for them, the latter is the only reason that an award list would be different from the bestseller list.
The Rabid Puppies have a different motivation. The Rabid Puppies are motivated by Vox Day being absolutely obsessed with John Scalzi for no obvious reason, and wanting to destroy the Hugos to fuck with him. Vox Day is a phenomenally weird and unpleasant person so this is not really that surprising.
True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee: Stan Lee must be a nightmare to write a biography of, because as far as I can tell he’s lying any time his mouth is moving. Every two pages in True Believer, the author says “and I fact-checked that story of Stan’s and absolutely none of it is true.” You have to imagine that one of the most difficult writing tasks was to think of two hundred different ways to say “and Stan Lee made all of that up and none of it happened.”
This is funny and even charming if Stan Lee is making up rebellious exploits he did as a teenager. It is much less funny and charming if he’s making up that he did all the writing in order to bilk his writer-artist collaborators of the credit and money they rightfully deserve.
I was previously not very informed about the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby disputes, and tended to believe Lee’s viewpoint because it was the only one I heard. This book converted me to being a firm believer that Jack Kirby created the Marvel universe, even though it scrupulously presents both views and doesn’t take a side itself. Here is my case:
While both Kirby and Lee said false things, Kirby’s false statements seem more like exaggeration or a faulty memory, and Lee’s false statements seem more like blatant self-aggrandizing lies.
Kirby’s work before and after his collaboration with Lee was often classic. Lee’s work without his collaborators was mostly vaporware, with occasional excursions into Stripperella and a touching faith that this time people will want to buy his book of humorous captions on news photos.
Steve Ditko fairly uncontroversially did write most of the Spider-man stories on his run, with Lee only contributing the dialogue. For many of the stories, Stan Lee didn’t know the plot until he got the completed pages. And yet Stan Lee took credit for writing the Spider-man stories. So we know he definitely takes credit for writing things he didn’t write.
Stan Lee strikes me as a grifter. His true talent and passion in life wasn’t writing: in fact, he only got his job at Marvel through nepotism, and much of his career was spent on failed attempts to leave comics for literally any other writing job. His true talent and passion in life was self-promotion, building the brand of Stan “The Man” Lee who created some of the most iconic characters of the 20th century. He loved giving talks at colleges, signing autographs, talking to adoring fans, cameoing in movies, and giving his biographer a headache by making up all kinds of stories that were in no way true. What he didn’t love was writing.
The end of Stan Lee’s life was ignomious. For the last thirty years of his life, Stan Lee was surrounded by other grifters. It’s unclear how much he was aware of the constant stuff ranging from “well, that’s sleazy” to “outright scam” happening under his name, but even if he mostly wasn’t, at some point it is culpable ignorance. After his wife’s death in 2017, which meant she could no longer protect him, the grifters and his daughter began to straightforwardly exploit and abuse him for money. While the exact truth is difficult to work out (Stan Lee’s inner circle also lies whenever their mouths are moving), it’s clear that he was badly mistreated.
Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight To End Ableism: The moral I got from this book is that everyone should write more physically disabled characters. The bar is so low. Like, literally, if you put in any effort into research—enough to know that blind people have facial expressions, most blind people have some light perception, white canes are expensive and Daredevil will not just throw his in the alleyway every time he goes superheroing, and blind people do not touch strangers’ faces to find out what they look like—then you are beating the vast majority of people who try to write blind characters. Similarly, if you manage to have a blind character in your horror story who is neither a completely helpless vulnerable victim nor a serial killer whose disability is played for body horror, you are beating literally every other horror story other than A Quiet Place. Write more physically disabled characters! It’s so easy to improve on what other people are doing!
Dangerous Visions And New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction 1950-1985: A very uneven essay collection. I will now tell you about the two essays I thought were most interesting.
First, the 1970s were a sort of golden age of gay male adult science fiction because the publishers really did not care what you put in the book as long as there was a sex scene in every chapter. Here are some things that happen in various books: Men wear waistpurses because their only clothes were “loinstraps” (a cross between a loincloth and a jockstrap) which didn’t have room for pockets. “Gaysex” is the language of interspecies diplomacy, done by SEXCOM, the Space Exploration Command. In a future where everyone is immortal and promiscuous, the most valuable commodity is a virgin. Pacifist aliens sentence a man to death by starvation (which is, after all, nonviolent), and force his crewmates to visit him naked so they don’t smuggle food, and then his crewmates realize that all of them can produce a certain protein-rich substance on demand. A man has to fuck people on five planets in order to get an invitation to the coolest interstellar party, only to discover that the party isn’t happening but as a consolation prize he can ascend to Godhood. A gay dude with mind control powers runs for Congress and gets gay marriage laws passed. Multiple books have earrings which sang songs from Uranus (yes, this is a fart joke, although I’m not sure why earrings specifically).
Second, the popularizer of the phrase “Black is beautiful” wrote a science fiction novel. It is… bad. The main character, named after the author, can standing press over five hundred pounds, has multiple university degrees, and has reached “a peak of physical perfection no other man in all of history has attained!” He gets twenty of the richest self-made black people in America to fund a program where he finds the most murderous black men in America and sends them to an island. On the island, the murderous black men are brainwashed to perfect loyalty and obedience; if they betray the cause, they will kill themselves. This strike force would be used to kill all the racists in America and thus win equal rights. Also, the Governor Wallace expy is named Governor Malice and the science division develops flying saucers. This book sounds incredible, in that I can’t believe it.
Never Say You Can’t Survive: Never Say You Can’t Survive is a book about using writing to survive an oppressive society, which theme I have proceeded to totally ignore in favor of interesting information about Charlie Jane Anders’s writing process.
Anders’s writing process is anarchic. When she begins a book, she typically feels lost and confused, with no idea of where she’s going. She thinks of beginning a book as a sort of blind date: if it turns out not to work out after a few pages, then she just drops it, and maybe comes back a few years later, and maybe just thinks of it as writing practice. She regularly “cheats” on the stories she’s supposed to be writing with sexy new stories, and often switches over to the new story.
If a book goes “off course,” Anders often takes it as a sign that the actual plot of the book is whatever she’s getting distracted by. She sometimes comes up with a plot by looking at what is implied by the plot threads she came up with so far. If she’s looking forward to writing a scene, she writes it, and worries later about putting it in order. She’s rarely sure of her character arcs until she’s written a bunch of random out-of-place scenes, so she has a sense of how this character can change.
Anders worldbuilds by going “oh, there’s a scene in a nightclub now, I guess I should figure out how nightclubs work in this world.” She writes scenes where a bunch of different characters are hanging out, and then centers the book around the ones who sparkle together. She throws in a dozen plot devices and then in revisions cuts out whichever ones didn’t end up panning out. She declares that characters are in a location for reasons probably and then figures out what the reasons are in revision. She writes conversations between characters as occurring in The Blank Void, and then goes back in and comes up with something interesting for them to do. Occasionally she writes a scene where characters are, say, sneaking into the fortress to steal the secret plans, and then in revisions changes it so they’re sneaking into the fortress to rescue someone.
Anders rarely has an idea of how the feelings work in her story until she finishes the first draft: in the first draft, it’s just a series of events. She does a “feels pass” where she makes sure that everyone is feeling something in every scene and that she understands and communicates what they’re thinking and how their emotions hit them. She tries to include both thoughts and physiological sensations.
Apparently Anders “often” changes a book from first person to third person, or vice versa, in revisions, which I cannot imagine. I would die.
Anders claims that plotter versus pantser is a false dichotomy, but she really seems like the queen of the pantsers here.
Looking at Anders’ chaos, I feel permission to lighten up a little bit with my writing process. I am probably not at full “just change an entire subplot in revisions, yolo, it’s fine” but I have tried writing a few more scenes without any idea where they go in the final product.
Anders often finds that her best stories come from anger: she will draw on a deep pool of anger, and then it doesn’t necessarily show up in the final draft. Urgency, desperation, humor, and joy can all come from a deep sense of anger about the way the world is.
Anders has little tolerance for conversations about status and who’s in and who’s out. If trapped in this conversation, she recommends breaking in at the soonest polite moment and saying, “what book have you been enjoying lately?” Then the conversation will be about books, which is (after all) what we’re here for.
Anders’ Three Questions For Working Out Your Theme
What personal shit are you working through with this story?
What things keep happening or are connected in a way besides pure causality? If something keeps coming up, make it a motif!
What are the characters obsessed with?
Eleven Top Tips From Charlie Jane Anders For Avoiding Writer Burnout:
Give yourself lots of bribes. Think of revising, rereading, and ruminating as work that’s just as valuable as writing.
Try low-stakes instant gratification writing, like tabletop or storytelling games or fanfic.
Cheat on your current project with the sexy new project.
Connect with other writers at a writing group or workshop.
Follow a writing routine that separates writing time from paying-the-bills time.
Read things you like, especially out of your genre.
Reread something you wrote in the past that you still like.
Try changing how you write. Speech to text? Longhand?
Skip to the parts of the story that excite you.
Just write something even if you have no idea how it will fit into the final project.
Never stop brainstorming. When you quit writing for the day, try listing five things that might happen in the next scene, and then next session see if any of them grab you.
Best Fancast
Worldbuilding for Masochists: Each episode is a deep dive into some aspect of worldbuilding—social change, travel, storytelling—with a guest author whose work explores that particular theme. The hosts have clearly read a lot of history and each episode is educational about its topic. If you write fantasy or science fiction, I recommend listening to any episode that looks interesting or like it intersects your own interests. (I’d personally steer clear of the more social-justice-y episodes, because they’ve unfortunately fallen victim to the idea that White People Just Can’t Write From The Point Of View Of People Of Color And Should Stay In Their Own Lane. Stick to the horse information.)
The Coode Street Podcast: In-depth hourlong interviews with various authors. Be careful, listening to the Coode Street Podcast has a bad habit of adding at least one new book to your reading list every time you read an episode. At least sometimes they’re novellas.
Hugo, Girl!: Each week, the hosts discuss a different Hugo-Award-winning piece of fiction. The thing I like most about Hugo, Girl! is that each episode has various segments: Boob Talk, where they discuss sex in the book; Feminist Favorites and Misogynist Moments, where they talk about what they liked and didn’t like from a gender perspective; the best of the Goodreads reviews; Soap Stuff, where they talk about the plot points and characterization decisions that were pulled straight from Days of Our Lives; and Star Wars or Lord of the Rings?, where they debate whether the story is more similar to Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. (Or, once, Back To The Future.) A lot of book podcasts wind up kind of shapeless and rambly, or just being plot summaries or reviews. Hugo, Girl!’s format allows them to really analyze the book from a variety of angles. I’m reliably left with things to think about.
Be The Serpent: I reviewed this one last year but it is still quite good! It’s very much a simulator of the experience of hanging out in a Discord channel with your best friends fangirling about your favorite books. One thing I really appreciate is the diversity of the fiction the Serpents discuss. They will absolutely place a del Toro film in conversation with a Nebula-award-winning novel and an Untamed fanfic, and treat all of them as if they have an equal amount of artistic merit and are equally worthy of serious consideration. The Serpents never apologize for liking “lowbrow” art, and that’s something I really appreciate—reading a lot of books is good for you!
You should read *Kirby: King of Comics* by Mark Evanier if you want to learn more about Jack Kirby's side of the Kirby/Lee thing--it's a fantastic history of Kirby's part in the Marvel (and DC) mythos, complete with LOTS of examples of his work. It's equal parts biography and book as art object.
The saddest part to me is that Roz Kirby survived her husband by a year and was unable to get more than one royalties paycheck out of Marvel. Kirby never got paid for the continuing use of his work, only the time he put in to pencil. Stan Lee (and those surrounding him), however, did live long enough to benefit from the push to pay royalties that was spearheaded by the Kirbys and other Golden Age comic artists.
Oh man, a while back I read a book called "The Secret History of Star Wars", which does a bunch of untangle George Lucas's lies and talks about how the Star Wars movies actually got made. The whole Stan Lee thing sounds worse...