2017: The Tired Sounds, A Wake

2017 summation post: This year's been an interesting case, for me. I taught two Litreactor courses, lectured at the Odyssey Workshop, and travelled far more than I usually do--I was a fill-in guest of honor at Necon, then ended up going to Necronomicon for the first time (with Steve, which was fun). I didn't go to Readercon, for the first time in years. Though I didn't write as much as I should have, every story I wrote was at least either solicited or placed while I was still writing it, and my bibliography has finally passed the 100 short stories mark. I made a deal for two more collections of short fiction from Trepidatio, and continued to put together my forthcoming collection from Cemetery Dance. I worked on Nightcrawling, my next novel, and did an amazing three-part interview with This Is Horror. I wrote one poem and a bunch of Dark Comforts Patreon posts. I finally managed to get Cal's tonsils removed, and scouted and applied to high schools for next September. I continued singing with Echo Women's Choir and beaded a crazy amount of necklaces, some of which I sold. I got used to referring to myself as neuroatypical, and thinking of myself as a writer with a 30-year body of work. I also suffered from near-constant insomnia, eventually beginning a course of medication for anxiety and depression, which has definitely improved my outlook.

The world in general continues to spiral out of control, meanwhile, which I have no possibility of doing much about. Things are as they are. All I can do is deal with what's in front of me, love my loved ones, and keep on going.

So--what did I like, this year? Let's talk about that, because it's always a little more interesting.

This year saw the release of S.P. Miskowski's short story collection Strange is the Night and Nadia Bulkin's collection She Said Destroy, both of which I was really happy to be asked to blurb. I think of them as role models, women whose ideas and style will heavily influence the genre going forwards. This year also introduced me to the work of Kristi DeMeester, whose novel Beneath and collection Everything That's Underneath are equally brilliant. Her story "The Room in the Other House," in particular, rocked my world in that eat-your-brains way, just like Nadia's "Endless Life" and S.P.'s "Ms. X Regrets Everything," which made me even more certain that I need to write a book about a cult.

From amongst my uniformly great CZP publishing-housemates, David Demchuk's The Bone Mother and Stephen Michell's Only the Devil is Here really knocked my socks off. I was also happy to blurb my former student Victoria Dalpe's first ChiTeen imprint novel, Parasite Life, a nominal YA vampire story that happily breaks all the rules of that genre.

I linked to a bunch of brilliant short stories over this year, mostly by women, mostly from Nightmare Magazine and The Dark. Some that stand out are Amal el Mohtar's award-winning "Seasons of Glass and Iron," Tamsyn Muir's "The Woman in the Hill," Cassandra Khaw's "Don't Turn on the Lights," Silvia Moreno-Garcia's "Jade, Blood," Chesya Burke's "He Who Takes Away the Pain," Robert Jackson Bennet's "Hollow Choices," Livia Llewellyn's "The Low, Dark Edge of Life," Eliza Victoria's "Queen Midnight," Bruce McAllister's "The Witch Moth," Carlie St. George's "If We Survive the Night," Nadia Bulkin's "The House That Jessica Built," A.C. Wise's "The Last Sailing of the Henry Charles Morgan in Six Pieces of Scrimshaw (1841)." Stuff I read on my own includes Helen Marshall's "Caro in Carno," A.C. Wise's "I Dress My Love in Yellow," Anton Rose's "Mandible," Matthew M. Bartlett's "Master of the House," Megan Arkenberg's "But Thou, Proserpina, Sleep," Richard Gavin's "Banishments," Mike Griffin's "The Lure of Devouring Light," Daniel Mills's "The Christensen Deaths" and Sonya Taaffe's "The Creeping Influences." There were no doubt many others, but these stick out.

On TV, I enjoyed The Exorcist Seasons One and Two, Twin Peaks: The Return, Netflix's Mindhunter, The Punisher and Stranger Things 2, and a variety of other seasonal divertissements, including way too much HGTV. I began catching up with the later seasons of Oz, moving backwards, and have just reached season one; this probably explains why I was moved to post just over 45,000 words' worth of new Oz fic on AO3, along with my fixed-up old stuff. That story, a cisswapped Beecher-centric AU called "Always Tried to Be A Good Girl, But I Can't Really Say That That's True," is ongoing.

One of the most exciting books of this year for me was Grady Hendyx's Paperbacks From Hell, a glossy tour of the 1980s horror boom that reminded me where my formative influences lie. This caused me to dig out lots of used paperbacks from that same period that I've amassed over the years and cut them with "new" ones, including stuff like Judith Hawkes's lost classic Julian's House, Alan Erwin's batshit insane Skeleton Dancer and Maggie Davis's surprisingly wonderful Forbidden Objects, which reads like All Heads Turn as the Hunt Goes By written by somebody who gets that slavery was a bad fucking thing whose influence no one will ever escape. I was also chuffed to realize I had one book that he champions already, Jessica Hamilton's Elizabeth, which could potentially be reprinted as the weirdest piece of YA ever. Scott Thomas's Kill Creek, John Connolly's A Game of Ghosts (I just walked into Chapters-Indigo one day and found it waiting!), Adam Nevill's Hasty for the Dark and a quick tour back through Ramsey Campbell's novels and short stories complete my list of literature consumed during 2017 that made enough of an impression on me to remember.

Amended to add: Okay, I'm a dumb-ass--I also read and enjoyed Nick Cutter's Little Heaven, Caitlin R. Kiernan's Agents of Dreamland, Josh Malerman's Black Mad Wheel and A House Under a Lake, Paul Tremblay's Disappearance at Devil's Rock and Benjamin Percy's The Dark Net. I started/bought other stuff from this year, but didn't get to or through it. This is how the Gemma Files do.

In terms of films, I saw less films in the theatre than probably ever before. Wonder Woman, obviously; Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, It: Chapter One, Thor: Ragnarok, Justice League. I went with my Mom to see I Am Not Your Negro, Pedro Almodovar's Julieta and Paul Verhoeven's Elle, but caught up with Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper on demand. I saw Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water in the theatre, with an audience that was huge, mainly my age and monumentally pleased. Saw Logan with the same sort of audience, most of whom were weeping. Oh yeah, and The Dark Tower and Atomic Blonde, my first double bill in years, the first showing on my own (also unlikely!).

On DVD, Netflix and BluRay, you can take that number and probably triple it. I re-watched a lot of things, but also just watched stuff, some of which went right in one ear and out the other--pure eye-candy, pure background noise. I watched Viral three times on VOD just because it struck me as somethjing Nadia Bulkin might like. Because of re-reading Kier-La Janisse's cinematic autobiography House of Psychotic Women, I watched/re-watched a fair deal of things like The Blood-Spattered Bride, Let's Scare Jessica to Death and Symptoms, seeking to codify my own neuroses. I also watched a lot of demented Indian horror movies like Ludo, which starts out as a Tarantino-esque sex comedy but ends up like some weird Anne Rice back-story about a possessed ludo board that turns you into an incestuous vampire forever trapped in the shopping mall built over your grave, as well as the first Pakistani zombie film, Hell's Ground. And all that.

In podcasts, 2017 brought the debut of Sunny Moraine's one-woman apocalypse Gone, while it also brought the crash-and-burn ending of The Black Tapes Podcast. The Magnus Archives, Pseudopod and No Sleep continued strong, and The White Vault made a good showing. These Are Their Stories enabled my crushing habit of mainlining Law & Order: SVU while up all night, but Nocturne, Unexplained, Haunted and Criminal both helped me sleep and kept me interested while awake. I'd love to guest-star on Norman Wilner's Someone Else's Movie. Serial Killers and Cults remain guilty pleasures, just like the Paris catacombs episode of Haunted Places. The Mysterious Old Radio Show Appreciation Society is always fun, and Knifepoint Horror came out with a bunch of new stuff as well, which had me loving Soren Narnia's odd, hushed, flat delivery. I'd kind of like to start my own podcast, but have more than enough shit to do already, right? (Right?)

In other listening-to-soothing voices news, Audible has ALL the Valancourt re-issues of Michael McDowell's wonderful 1980s Southern Gothics. This allowed me to catch up with Cold Moon Over Babylon and The Amulet, neither of which I'd read for twenty years. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, folks.

All right, that's about it. And now, on to something less enjoyable.