Happy Dancing

The Incredibly Risky Scheme that Bill Gates Keeps Pushing

April 2, 2024

Climate change keeps getting worse: 2023 was the hottest year on record, and it's not even close. Despite increasing investments in clean energy and other...

Writing Trans Stories For Fun (and Liberation)

March 25, 2024

The Trans Rights Readathon is going on right now. Roughly a thousand people are reading trans stories and celebrating trans narratives, while raising money...

Prestige Creates a Permission Structure for Experimentation

March 19, 2024

I absolutely loved the novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace when I read it back in the day. I devoured it, forcing myself to read all of those bloody...

I Stopped Loving Captain Kirk

March 13, 2024

I used to look up to Captain Kirk, Star Trek's fearless leader, when I was a kid. When I was seven or eight, I had a homemade Starfleet captain shirt, which...

My Favorite Comedy Films of the 2020s (So Far)

March 7, 2024

Last week, I told y'all about one of my favorite comedy TV shows, Extraordinary. (The second season is out now on Hulu, or on Disney+ outside the USA!) And I...

The Funniest TV Show You're (Probably) Not Watching

February 27, 2024

One of the frustrating things about loving television is the extent to which a small number of shows seem to suck up all of the attention — and if you love...

Bonnie Raitt's Career Ended In 1986

February 20, 2024

Bonnie Raitt's career ended back in 1986. Her long-time record company Warner Bros. had sat on her album Nine Lives for a few years, refusing to release it....

How To Build Your Online "Brand" Without Burning Out

February 13, 2024

Recently, there's been a lot of talk about people, especially writers and other creative people, needing to have a "personal brand" on social media. This...

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish Is The Best Superhero Movie Ever

February 6, 2024

No, seriously. I am going to fire up this hot take — and I might even convince you that I'm right. So I finally watched Puss in Boots: the Last Wish, because...

Here's What Bugs Me About Comics

January 30, 2024

I love comics so much — some of my earliest memories involve visiting the Million Year Picnic and New England Comics, and gazing in wonder at all the...

10 Space TV Shows That Don't Get Enough Love

January 24, 2024

Everybody talks about Star Trek, the various Star Wars TV shows, and Battlestar Galactica. But space is way, way bigger than that — space is, in fact, pretty...

Reboot Star Wars!

January 15, 2024

Just a heads up! The trade paperback collection of New Mutants: Lethal Legion (by Enid Balám, Elisabetta D'Amico and me) comes out tomorrow! It's a silly,...

The Difference Between Deceptively Simple and Deceptively Complex

January 10, 2024

Hey everyone! I'm afraid I don't have time to write a brand new newsletter this week. My mom has been visiting from out of town, and I'm under a bunch of...

Doctor Who's Unsung MVP, Best TV Shows of 2023... and Some Rants!

January 3, 2024

Before we get started, a shameless plug! New Mutants: Lethal Legion, the collected edition of the miniseries I wrote last year, is coming out January 14....

The Real Reason Why We Want To Punish the Unhoused

December 27, 2023

As 2023 ends, more and more people are being left with no place to go. Wars, atrocities and natural disasters are creating incomprehensibly vast numbers of...

How To Fix Goodreads

December 18, 2023

Last week, a nauseating scandal hit the book world. Basically, a white author created fake accounts on Goodreads, and used them to leave a slew of one-star...

The Pesto Manifesto!

December 11, 2023

Just a heads up! If you want to get a signed copy of one of my books as a holiday gift for someone, you only have a few days left to order from Folio Books —...

A Productivity Hack That's Been Helping Me Lately

December 5, 2023

Hey everybody! If you're looking to get a holiday gift for the humans (or other sentient beings) in your life, I just wanted to mention that you can get...

My Favorite Science Fiction/Fantasy Books of 2023

November 29, 2023

First off, what I've been up to lately... I realized that if folks are subscribed to my newsletter, they might actually be interested in what's going on with...

Doctor Who Spinoffs I'd Love To See

November 21, 2023

Doctor Who is back! This coming Saturday sees the first new episode in absolute yoinks, and there's tons more to come. Returning showrunner Russell T. Davies...

Why Does God Hate Figs So Much?

November 15, 2023

From 1999 to 2005, I ran a website called godhatesfigs.com. I realized that I've never talked about it in my newsletter, so here's the whole story. (Warning:...

The Lesson That Superhero TV Shows Keep Learning

November 7, 2023

Two pieces of news struck me recently. First, Superman and Lois is ending with its upcoming fourth season. This bums me out, because I love that show. Tyler...

Why I Don't Like Halloween

October 31, 2023

I didn't always dislike Halloween. When I was a kid, I kind of liked it: I used to dress up as one of the Doctors from Doctor Who almost every year (see...

Why Is It So Hard For Hollywood To Create Brand New Heroes?

October 25, 2023

The other day, director Matthew Vaughn argued in favor of going back and retelling the story of Anakin Skywalker and his scrappy kids. Vaughn said he would...

12 Male Role Models From Science Fiction and Fantasy

October 17, 2023

Lately I feel like everyone is talking about masculinity and what it means to be a good dude. The other day, I was on a panel at the Pride on the Page book...

Jedi Knights and Vulcans Both Suck Now. What Happened?

October 10, 2023

Jedi Master Plo Koon and T'Lyn, a Vulcan character on Star Trek: Lower Decks Something strange happened to both Star Wars and Star Trek around twenty-five...

News Flash: Trans People Have Internalized Transphobia!

October 3, 2023

Trans Solidarity March in Washington DC (Photo by Ted Eytan, Creative Commons) A dozen years ago, Julia Serano called me up and asked me to speak at Girl...

There's No Queer Liberation Without Fighting Capitalism

September 27, 2023

This pink flag that says QUEERS AGAINST CAPITALISM has been hangging in my apartment for as long as I can remember. It comes from some rally/event I attended...

11 Books That Changed How I think About Space Opera

September 19, 2023

A detail from the cover of Stainless Steel Rat: Deluxe Edition from 2000 A.D., by Carlos Ezquerra and Kevin Cosnell, based on the characters created by Harry...

7 Hot Takes About Star Trek

September 8, 2023

Hey everybody, happy Star Trek day! I'm just barely recovered from COVID now and haven't had time to write a new newsletter, so please enjoy this repost of a...

The Internet Is About to Get a Lot Worse

August 22, 2023

We've all watched in horror as red states have banned books in schools and libraries. We've seen teachers fired merely for reading a book about gender...

One Thing (Almost) Every Aspiring Writer Needs

August 15, 2023

I'm regularly asked what advice I have for newbie writers, and I usually say stuff about trying to find community by joining a writing group, going to...

Stuff I Love Right Now

August 3, 2023

I usually include a recommendation at the end of every newsletter for a piece of music, a book or a TV show/movie. I haven't been doing that lately, because...

If you see me on Twitter, it's not me

July 29, 2023

Thank you to everyone who just subscribed to my newsletter! I really appreciate it, and I promise that I will be putting out new posts at least once a week...

The Year of the Woman... and What Happened Next

July 7, 2023

Hey y'all... sorry I haven't published a new newsletter in a couple weeks. I'm desperately trying to get my new adult novel to my editor before I fly to...

The Vital Lesson Superhero Movies Should Learn From Deadpool

June 18, 2023

As you read this, The Flash is in theaters, and it's somewhat underperforming, with an opening weekend on par with Black Adam. As I said on Mastodon a while...

"Churn" Might Actually Be a Good Thing for Streaming Services

June 5, 2023

If you've been reading a lot of coverage of the Streaming Wars [TM] lately, you've probably been hearing about the problem of "churn." Churn, we're told, is...

Revision is the Process of Going from General to Specific

June 2, 2023

Here's another half-baked essay about revision — since I'm in the middle of revising a novel right now! (If you missed it, last week's essay was also all...

Revision can be fun. No, really.

May 24, 2023

Revising a work of fiction is pure agony. This is one of the main tenets of the writer credo (or maybe just a huge meme among writers.) And yeah, it...

Some (Probably) Worthless Thoughts About Content Moderation

May 10, 2023

Here's an incredibly crappy fable: Once there was a young person of great distinction who wore the most scintillating pair of kaleidoscopic pants. We'll call...

10 Hot Takes About Star Wars

May 4, 2023

Hey, everyone. I'm reupping a piece I wrote for Star Wars Day back in 2021, because I figure most of y'all never saw it. I hope the Force is treating you...

What People Have Been Saying So Far About Promises Stronger Than Darkness!

May 2, 2023

It's been a few weeks since Promises Stronger Than Darkness came out, and I have been so chuffed about the response to this one so far. I've never written a...

What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures

April 17, 2023

Science fiction is full of miraculous technology. You've got instantaneous teleportation across great distances, time travel, faster-than-light starships,...

Here's What I'll Do If You Buy My New Book!

April 10, 2023

Hello everyone! My novel Promises Stronger Than Darkness comes out tomorrow. It's the last, and I think the most fun, volume in my young adult trilogy that...

EVERYTHING You Need to Know Before Promises Stronger Than Darkness!

April 4, 2023

There's just one week left before the release of Promises Stronger Than Darkness, the final book in my young adult trilogy, which I've been calling...

Don't Say Characters Lack "Agency." Here's Something Talk About Instead.

March 29, 2023

There's one common term that I was pretty careful not to use in my writing advice book, Never Say You Can't Survive: "agency." As in, "characters in a story...

Here are Some of My Favorite Trans/Non-Binary Books!

March 20, 2023

Some amazing folks, led by author Sim Kern, are launching a Trans Rights Readathon starting today, to raise money for trans organizations. I meant to tweet...

The First Article I Ever Wrote About Trans Issues

March 13, 2023

I've written countless articles and essays about trans people over the past twenty or so years, including some recent ones in Teen Vogue, the San Francisco...

Writing Comic Books is HARD. Here's Why

March 6, 2023

I've heard prose authors say stuff like, "I wish I could just write comics. You just have to write some dialogue and sketch out some action, and the artist...

7 Hot Takes About Star Trek

February 21, 2023

1. The Federation is most interesting when it has an ideological foil. The original Star Trek pitted Captain Kirk against fake gods, rogue Starfleet...