Dead Girls Don't Dream out today!

November 12, 2024

Happy birthday to this weird little book. Dead Girls is the first novel I ever fully drafted, the book that came close to breaking me in revisions, and is...

A post full of distractions

November 4, 2024

My book is out next Tuesday. The US elections are THIS Tuesday. My nervous system is in full fight-or-flight mode. So this newsletter is a full-on link spam...

The only ghost story that happened to me

October 17, 2024

Over on Bluesky, Georgina Kiersten was asking for folks’ stories of hauntings. I have one, but thought I’d share it here instead. It’s seasonally...

Robert Heinlein would hate me

October 4, 2024

[Before we get started, the writer Scott Lynch has very graciously offered to pay for three people to attend my 4-week horror writing course, and there is...

Single braincell summer

July 26, 2024

So this week, I decided to try watching 9-1-1, an ABC drama about LA firefighters that is popular on Tumblr (the last social media site where I still enjoy...

a belated TDOV newsletter

April 1, 2024

Yesterday was Trans Day of Visibility1, which is, hmm, something I have complicated feelings about. Like, I'm celebrating my visibility in a society that has...

AWP; Dead Girls on Edelweiss and NetGalley; cat tax

February 6, 2024

Quick email of news! First bit of news: I'll be at AWP this week, speaking on a panel with an incredible line up of other trans authors. The Trans Fantastic:...

Foz Meadows' FINDING ECHOES – Excerpt and chat

January 30, 2024

Hey, friends! I'm sick again (fourth time in two months, ugh) so I was thrilled (read: blearily excited between coughing fits) when Neon Hemlock asked if I'd...

Cover reveal: DEAD GIRLS DON'T DREAM

January 5, 2024

If you've been subscribed to this newsletter for a while, you'll know that I've been working on a novel for approximately 43 years, or since about 2019,...

Mini-interview! Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin on Why Didn't You Just Leave

July 23, 2023

Hello friends! Instead of your usual programming, I've got a mini-interview with Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin, co-editors of the forthcoming horror anthology...

Summer Updates and Excerpts

June 16, 2023

It's been a while since I've posted any kind of substantial update on my writing and teaching, so here we go! First bit of news: I'll be teaching my 4-week...

Many worlds, many feelings

March 16, 2023

If you’ve read either of my novellas, you might’ve guessed that I love multiverse stories, or any tale about alternate worlds and alternate selves. It’s the...

Dawn of the Horror Writing Class: The Awakening

February 6, 2023

I've been attempting to write a newsletter for...over a month now, but they keep getting away from me. One has turned into a 2000+ word essay about gender...

Cover Reveal & Interview: Suzan Palumbo's SKIN THIEF

January 27, 2023

I'm so excited to be hosting my very first cover reveal (of many? one can only dream), for none other than Lesbian Satan herself, Suzan Palumbo. You might...

Seasonally spooky recommendations

October 27, 2022

I full intended to write a newsletter this month about the brilliance of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, the perfect one-season anime about teenage girls...

Let's get together, before we get much older

September 16, 2022

It’s September 2007, fifteen years ago. I live in Olympia, Washington, and I’m taking my second year-long break from college. I have moved out of the weird...

On finishing a Frankenstein draft

August 11, 2022

Greetings from the other side of having FINISHED A DRAFT. Was it a good draft? No. Can it be fixed? God, I hope so. This is the biggest problem-child rewrite...

Horror Writing Course 2: The Revenge!

June 13, 2022

It's baaaaack! I'll be teaching another round of Thrills and Chills: Horror Story Writing starting September 10. This 4-part class taught through Atlas...

5 lessons from learning to be a teacher

May 30, 2022

I fell into being a teacher mostly by accident during my MFA. I fully expected to hate teaching. My first semester, I did, and apologies to anyone in that...

Long live the memeification of unionized labor

April 8, 2022

Worker solidarity has become a meme, and honestly? THAT’S GREAT. I am 100% for the mimetic dissemination of radical labor organization. I love that Chuck...

Can we find comfort in horror stories in hard times?

February 24, 2022

I’ve been trying and failing to write this letter since Monday, because any good news is constantly tempered by the fact that there’s war happening in...

(some of the) 2022 books I'm personally hype for

January 15, 2022

Welcome to the 2022 Q1 Hype Train Me, six weeks ago: I'm going to write a newsletter of 2022 books that I'm greedily awaiting. Me, on Tuesday: Oh shit, the...

Things that genuinely gave me joy in 2021

December 15, 2021

I had a long and very melancholy post written, but nobody needs to be subjected to me trying to find meaning in the fact that I've been suffering from...

"The Great Resignation" would be a good book title

October 20, 2021

And one that I'm sure some clever author will steal for their re-imagining of CS Lewis's The Great Divorce. Instead of a rainy town as purgatory, it's a...

Revision Diary: Zeno’s Paradox

July 9, 2021

So, funny story: back in late April, I threw out the two months of work I’d done on Burned and Buried and pretty much started over. I’d been making progress...

Weddings, readings, and panels (oh my)

May 14, 2021

Hello and happy spring, friends! May and June are shaping up to be busy for me, so here’s a quick rundown of where you can find me over the next couple...

Put it in my eyeballs: new(ish) trans and queer books to be excited about

May 4, 2021

I’m still buried deep in novel rewrites and wedding planning, so no essays or reviews are forthcoming for now. Instead, this is just a quick round-up of...

When book promotion turns into teachable gender moments

April 24, 2021

You all know I'm trans, right? I put it front and center on all of my bios: "Nino Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer," followed by several examples...

Hugo noms, preorders, and panels (oh my)

April 14, 2021

It is finally SPRING here in NYC, which means a dizzying back-and-forth between beautiful, bright, warm days that you long to spend sprawled out in a park...

news and notes

March 16, 2021

PERSONAL NEWS, BOTH SMALLISH AND BIGGISH, BECAUSE IT SURE HAS BEEN A WEEK. Hugo nominations close in THREE DAYS! If you are able to nominate and have not yet...

So what are you reading?

March 7, 2021

Fanfic is my ultimate comfort read-slash-coping mechanism, and my relationship to it is not always super healthy. Where I used to read fanfic to participate...

Alone together, here in the dark

February 26, 2021

I was a theater kid all through high school and college. For a long time, a career in theater was the end goal, though the role I imagined for myself changed...

Revision diary: Rebuilding worlds

February 16, 2021

This is cross-posted from my Patreon, so apologies if you are seeing this twice! I generally try to keep the two separate, but this seemed relevant to the...

When you're an elephant who has been swallowed by a snake

February 3, 2021

News first, because I actually have news to share! FINNA made the Locus Recommended Reading List! Anyone can vote in the poll, so if feeling moved, you can...

When all you've done is all you can do

December 17, 2020

There’s a particular image in my head that I’ve been trying to work into a story since May. Nibs and I moved to into an apartment in NYC in May, an odd...

Good news in strange times

April 6, 2020

1) First, I'm fine. Nibs and I are back in Vermont, and probably will be for a while. It's weird, after spending so much time traveling, to be really,...

Reddit AMA!

April 2, 2020

Hey all! I’m going to be over on r/books in a bit to chat about whatever you want....

Open weekend thread: #PandemicReads

March 27, 2020

Happy Friday, friends. Most of us are approaching weeks 2 or 3 in isolation at this point, and I’m curious. What are you reading, watching, and listening to...

Plotting the Unthinkable

March 22, 2020

This tab has been sitting open on my laptop for the past ten days or so. I don’t really need to say why, right? Most of us have been watching world events...

a list of disaster movies that have nothing to do with epidemics

March 13, 2020

This week is bad for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. I have about 95% of a newsletter written about the amazing plotting in The Wicked and the Divine....

Artifice and Architecture: A New Gothic Revival, Part II

February 3, 2020

Quick reminder: if you like my thoughts about the nature of stories, you might also like my fiction. You can buy my short story collection Homesick or...

A New Gothic Revival: Part 1

January 10, 2020

(Hi! It’s been a while! November was consumed by doing a book tour for Homesick, and December was a necessary recovery month. But I’m back now, and will try...

Short and spooky: horror film mini-fest

October 31, 2019

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me, and it’s about to get busier. This week I’ll be reading at Rhizome in Washington DC and paneling at the Baltimore...

How I planned my cheap-ass book tour

October 26, 2019

I’m taking a quick break from writing about narratives this week to instead talk about the business side of writing. I saw the following thread literally...

Scary Stories to Keep In the Dark

October 19, 2019

I don’t know if I can tell you how profoundly Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark affected me as a kid. I don’t just mean that it scared the pants off me or...

Reading list: trans dopplegängers

September 25, 2019

So last week, I posed this question on Twitter: Nino Cipri is looking for work @ninocipriI'm writing a newsletter on the game Her Story this week which...

Her Story: Splintered Selves and Shattered Narratives

September 20, 2019

Stories about doubles and dopplegängers abound. My first encounter with them was probably Stephen King’s The Dark Half, which follows in a long line of...

Form and Function in Horror

September 12, 2019

It’s September, which means it’s basically October, which means I have license to dive face-first into my first and foremost love: high-key creepy...

"And death killed him."

September 4, 2019

I wrote last week about the Bread and Puppet Theater, a radical puppet theater based out of Glover, Vermont. This week, I want to examine one of their...

Bread & Puppet Theater

August 26, 2019

Back in 2009--although it makes me die a little to remember that was ten whole-ass years ago--I spent a summer working as an apprentice puppeteer to the...