Hello.

Yesterday, I published a long essay on Alex Jeffers's novella A Mourning Coat and what happens if you read it as urban fantasy. Whether you've read the novella or not, I think it's interesting in relation to how we define urban fantasy (and I borrow heavily from Stefan Ekman's book on urban fantasy in my analysis).

Also: if you haven't yet purchased my collection Oddities: Fantasies & Science Fictions then what are you waiting for? (If you're waiting to get through the holidays and holiday spending, then I totally understand: email me if you'd like a free copy or hold off until we get a couple of months into 2026—the book can wait).

For today's newsletter, rather than having one or two super long items, I've put together a slew of different things I've encountered, or been thinking about, or want to recommend. The result is quite long and items vary quite a bit in tone and length, but I didn't want to drop any because I felt they were too insubstantial or too heady or half-baked. So feel free to scroll through and only read the ones with the subheads that catch your eye. In fact, I highly recommend taking this approach.

I hope you have a wonderful rest of the year!

On Renee Gladman's Ravicka novels

I read Gladman's first three (of four) novels in a two and a half week span. They're short; they're elusive while also profound; they're strange in ways that are new to me. I liked them a lot, and Gladman is verging into the territory of Han Kang and M. John Harrison that I wrote about in September newsletter of unusual comfort reading.

Ravicka is a Ruritania (like Le Guin's Orsinia), that is, a vaguely central/eastern/northern European country that exists within our a version of our world (the U.S., France, Hungary and other nations are mentioned across the Ravicka novellas) but without the need to define a specific country. At the same time, Ravicka is elusive. It seems to be a sort of modern city state but with ancient roots that is in the midst of a crisis that has lead many of its' residents to leave (some of them may have also been killed or imprisoned). The nature of the crisis isn't quite clear. It seems to be a crisis of architecture (buildings wander) and meaning.

In the first novella, Event Factory, a linguist visits the city and has various adventures/misadventures, always getting lost and then meeting up with someone who then leaves or she leaves. She thinks she can figure things out even though she is aware that knowing some of the language isn't enough: there's also this entire gestural aspect to the culture that affects meaning and relates to situation and status. The books ends with the linguist leaving and Limci assuring her that "Ravicka will remain"(126).

The second book is titled The Ravickians. In it, the Ravickian novelist Luswage Amini attempts to attend a reading by Zàoter Limici (who plays a minor role in the first book as does Amini, or, at least her work and presence as an author does because the foreign linguist admires her greatly). Travel is difficult in the city. One can't just go to a place and so Amini finds herself in various sectors of the city that aren't where the reading is. Amini does make it to the reading, however, and the middle of the novella reproduces Limici's remarks as well as his reading. Afterwards, a group of writer friends, including Amini, Limici, and Amini's love and inspiration Ana Patova (an architect whose main architectural practice is writing books because cities in crisis don't do a whole lot of building or at least not of the type of structures Patova would design) go to a café and attempt to reconnect with each other and then also attempt to leave.

The third book is called Anna Patova Crosses a Bridge (Patova and Amini met in the middle of a bridge) and is about Patova's attempts to write, to visit people (especially other writers), to understand the crisis and the city. The book has no designated chapters. It's made up of sections. Each section is two pages with the second page filled up anywhere from 15% to 90% with text. It is somewhat illuminated by the previous two books and somewhat illuminates the them, but it's a flickering, weak candle. It is about many things, but like the second book and a bit like the first book it is about the essential nature and also impossibility of art and connection in a world that seems to lurch from one crisis to another.

These books are puzzling but not impossible and flood with resonance and meaning, especially now, but really at any time, for there is always a crisis and language is always difficult. If you do decide to read them, read these first three in a row (they are quite short—their page counts are even shorter than they seem because the pages are small; the print versions are petite).

These three books are full of sentences and passages that I could quote. And yet, to do so is to not portray the experience of the book because the most quotable sentences are in contexts that don't make sense or make sense slantwise or obscurely. These books are weird but the weirdness isn't quite that of most weird fiction. Akin to and drawing on the same influences and techniques, but differently.

Nevertheless, I'll indulge in one quote. This one is from Anna Patova Crosses a Bridge:

"There was a crisis within the crisis of our crisis that seemed to affect us most when we were sitting together over coffee. It was a crisis of communication that made us stutter in ourselves and made us silent with each other. Not entirely silent but limited severely in pushing forward a conversation, as if our language presumed we wanted to discuss the crisis, which it would not allow, and seemed to find our efforts to ask each other about our work as evidence of that desire"(60).

On an idea for another Curiosities project: Marlowe in SF&F

The Curiosities section of my website is devoted to projects that aren't fiction or criticism. In particular, I'm interested in acts of literary bibliography and history. I think we don't place enough emphasis on those, although I will note that some of the best stuff to come out of SF&F meeting the internet are projects along these lines.

I thought of one recently that I want to tackle, and I'd love your help with it.

Let's create a list of every spec fic work featuring Christopher Marlowe or his work. Yes, this idea came to me when thinking about the novels of John M. Ford (The Scholars of Night).

I am aware that Elizabeth Bear has a series that features Marlowe. There are a few others tickling the back of my mind that I'm sure I can rediscover with some internet sleuthing.

There is also a GoodReads list or two that kind of speaks to this, but it's both too limited and casts too wide a net, and it doesn't include short fiction.

If you have suggestions, reply to this email or hit me up on Bluesky. Thanks!

On trying to read romantasy

I tried and failed to read romantasy this year, including reading some novels I didn't find all that interesting, several that I bounced off entirely, and a few that were fun to quite good). You may be thinking: why even attempt that project?

The short answer is that I like to read (some) romance novels; I like to read (some) fantasy novels; and I really like to read fantasy novels with romance plots.

I went into this project knowing that it would be difficult to find titles that would work for me. I'm used to this. There are a lot of regency romances that I find unsatisfying, but when an author/title hits, it's a lovely thing that I really enjoy. There are also large swathes of fantasy that I'm just not interested in.

There is one novel I've read so far that I really liked: All Woven With Ivy by Thea Hawthorne. The prose is very good to excellent. The fantasy worldbuilding is well balanced with the romance and the two intertwine in interesting ways, although, oddly enough, I felt like the romance could have been a little stronger. Even so: if the description intrigues you, I'd say give it a try.

But, knowing the dangers of a) a guy giving advice to mostly female writers [even though one who has read in all three genres]; b) making judgements based on encounters with only ten or so titles in a booming genre; and c) expecting more of a commercially-focused genre, I'm still going to make three observations. They may be way off base, and I just happened to largely run into the bottom third of what the field has to offer, but:

1. Thin fantasy worldbuilding, indeed, a sometimes hostility to fantasy worldbuilding, is unfortunate when it happens because I guarantee that it's more fun (more work, yes, but more fun) for both the writer and the reader when the worldbuilding (often a quirky magic system or magical setting) and the romance are both robust and intertwine (although I have to admit, and this is just a me thing, when the magic and sex scene intertwine, I often find it humorous rather than sexy [but again: this just a me thing; I can totally see how it'd be awesome for other readers]).
2. I don't expect, don't even want, literary prose from a romantasy novel, but please stop telling the reader how to feel, especially when you've already portrayed that in the work itself; trust the techniques of fiction (metaphor, dialogue, gesture, free indirect discourse, etc.), instead of having a scene or a moment and then rehashing it after it's been depicted; telling is important to prose fiction (more important than showing, actually), but in terms of exposition, not as a gloss on what's already there in the text.
3. A little mixed metaphor can be fine, but when it's incessant, I begin to suspect that I'm in the hands of a writer who doesn't know how to write metaphor; this is a pity because both romance and fantasy offer opportunities for interesting metaphor that bounces off their strengths as genres and all the more so when both are present in equal measure in a novel.

On Uses This and musicians

Over about two months, I went through every Uses This entry filed under the musician category in reverse chronological order. If you don't know Uses This, it's one of the gems of the open web: a long-running website where people answer four questions:

1. Who are you, and what do you do?
2. What hardware do you use?
3. And what software?
4. What would be your dream setup?

Many of the people who respond are artists or work in software or game development or are activists or academics or some combination of those. I've subscribed to the Uses This RSS feed for ages and haven't read every single interview (there are, as of right now, 1,299 total), but I've read a lot of them. I love how diverse they are in not only what gear is used but also in how the respondents answer the questions.

I decided to go through all of the interviews in the musicians category because now that I make music, I'm interested in how others make music (I kind of always was, which is how I realized I should try it myself). Here are some observations from reading the 104 interviews under the musicians tag:

1. Many of the musicians use very little gear (hardware or software) to make music with; this was not exactly a surprise to me but really emphasized how much learning about music production through youtubers who have a ton of gear warps your perception of what's needed.
2. It's interesting to trace which digital audio workstations (DAWs) get mentioned: Ableton Live is not very prevalent in the beginning and then gets gradually more popular and then dominates the answers and then things get a bit more mixed once you get to the past five years or so.
3. For almost all of the entries, I didn't stick with the interview: I clicked through or did some internet sleuthing to find the music the artists have made; it was both heartwarming and sad to see how many links were dead or led to Bandcamp pages where there are only two or three releases or the releases stop in 2018 or 2021 or were dead, etc. One of the beautiful things about how accessible music production has become and how easy music distribution can be is that creative people can phase into it and then move on to other things; but then again: I wonder about how other life events and pressures led to them stopping, and I would like us to work towards a world where it's easier for musicians because I know that not every voice that went silent wanted to.
4. Most of all, the diverse array of approaches, tools, and genres was a lot of fun to experience and gives you a more kaleidoscopic sense of music making than if you're only experiencing it via streaming playlists; this is why it's important, imo, to document who artists are and how they work: to give us a sense that art can be approached in so many ways by so many different people.

I recommend clicking on the Uses This link above and choosing one of the categories and exploring it. There are a lot of worse internet rabbit holes to go down.

On Big Fiction and the impossibility of ending a series

I had a thought about epic fantasy series in relation to Dan Sinykin's Big Fiction and his point that the change in publishing to conglomerate publishing has an effect on the writers and the texts they produce.

The problem for George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss is that conglomerate publishing makes it impossible for them to end their series because conglomerate publishing doesn't really want the series to end. Now I know it seems like I'm taking individual psychology and agency out of this, but tell me this: what's the point of Martin and Rothfuss ending their series? By not doing so, the industry can extend their work out into other modes of selling (lesser works; fine editions of the existing works; games and comics, etc.) and no one ever needs to be disappointed by the ending. This is especially true for Martin: what does he gain by finishing the Song of Ice & Fire books? They'll only be compared to the television series and the previous books in the series. If there is no ending, there is always more that can be extended. Sure, these authors could finish their main series and then work on a different one or write sequels, but it's the unfulfilled promise of the main series that keeps everything still relevant. The incompleteness keeps the desire alive. And even those fans who swear off the whole project because they're annoyed by the next book living in continual limbo still have some embers burning waiting for the right project to bring them back into the fold.

The Brandon Sanderson fans will point to him and say that he's overcome this because he keeps writing books and always delivers, but he's in a similar situation in that he's made the scope of the Cosmere so large that the planned projects extend well into his late lifetime. Indeed, he not only always delivers he overdelivers—adding new characters and worlds to the Cosmere that only underline that there can never be an ending to his project because works can exist that never even get announced until they've been completed.

A passage from Han Kang's We Do Not Part

It's almost useless to pull a passage out of Han Kang's work because to put it in isolation is to ignore that what you select may be completely undone or transformed or recontextualized a paragraph or a chapter later.

Nevertheless, I'm going to do it:

"As Inseon set a plate of kimchi on the table, I noticed that she looked more at peace than she had in Seoul. It can be difficult to distinguish forbearance from resignation, sorrow from partial reconciliation, fortitude from loneliness. I thought about how difficult it can be to tell these emotions apart on the basis of facial expressions and gestures, about how the person in question may struggle to distinguish these feelings in themselves."

Put this one in the category of "other people are a mystery to me, and I suspect we're all a mystery to ourselves," which is something I come to believe more and more the longer I live.

On gaps in reading

We all have gaps in our reading. My most notable ones, works that given what you know about me might come as a surprise, are probably that I've never read Moby Dick or anything by Heinlein or Cloud Atlas. I'm sure there are scores of others.

I think it's good to have gaps in your reading. Even if you're a fiction writer or critic.

If we were all smooth spheres of perfect knowledge of our field, then our work might be more likely to be less lumpy and weird, more homogenized. And that's neither fun nor interesting.

At the same time, I think it's good to not be too proud of those gaps. Never ashamed of them, of course. But not willfully ignorant in a way that blinds you completely to what's happening in the field you're working in. We all know what happens when a lit-fic focused writer turns their gaze to science fiction and ends up presenting clumsy executions of well-worn tropes as if they were something new. It's not good. Maybe read a little bit in the corner of the literary world you're planning to write in.

So how do you decide if you're being too proud and stubborn about refusing to read a work? I don't know. I don't think you can know for sure until you actually read it. This is the frustration and delight of reading as a writer and/or critic. This is where you rely on your friends, on critics and authors you trust, and on your instincts, on what it is speaking to you in the moment.

But it does need to be an active effort of both resistance/refusal and searching/consuming. Beware the author who is not an ever-foraging omnivore. Especially if you are that author.

On not knowing if Madeon is spot on or completely wrong

So I read this interview on the Synth History blog/zine with an electronic musician and DJ named Madeon, and I was struck by his answer to the classic artist Q&A move of what's one piece of advice you have for other/younger artists:

"I think to make good work, especially if you're trying to make a career out of it, you've got to make sure you have three ingredients, a little bit of each of these.

So one ingredient is a little bit of the zeitgeist. A little bit of what excites you about right now. What's in your environment, the stuff that resonates with you, the stuff that you love happening right now around you.

And then a little bit of something timeless, something that was always true to be good. Something that you can look back and learn from, like institutionally old material.

And then you've got to make sure that you have 1/3 of it that is incredibly intimate and personal, that's unique to you and your story."

I think this may be the best summation of what it takes to become a popular artist I've ever read. At the same time, I feel like there's a key piece meeting that I can't quite identify. Perhaps it's simply that it's packaged too nicely. That its' a bit glib. Or maybe I think the mix is wrong (and it most certainly is). But I also can't think of any piece of popular art I like that doesn't have those three ingredients. So maybe Madeon is right, and I shouldn't diminish the source or the form it arrived to me in.

On a reason to watch or re-watch Andor Season 2

The thing that has stuck with me most is not the seeming timeliness of the show's themes, but how good the costume design is in relation to the show's themes and characters.

That may sound like I'm diminishing Andor's achievement, but while I think there are limits to what it can teach us about fascism, I also think that the costume design is just about perfect and a model for all types of art, and specifically in how detail, rich, resonant detail, matters to theme and tone.

On music you should check out

This was the year some fifth gen kpop girl group debuts actually caught my attention; the year I developed a deeper appreciation for techno played live (not DJ-ed; actually performed live); and the year I explored minimalist experimental classical music further.

Here are some recommendations:

1. The STOOR Live techno sets are always great, and I really like this one featuring Orphx, Regis, Surgeon, and Speedy J: YouTube
2. I find this set at SUPERBOOTH 24 by the self-described melancholy pop artist Never Sol to be both moving and charming and a model for how I'd approach things if I ever were to perform live (which isn't going to happen): YouTube
3. I'm not a fan of jazz, but ulla's jazzy, glitchy, electronic, weird, ambient, sometimes almost simplistic (in the actual definition of the word; not the when people use it when they actually just mean simple) 2022 album foam is a fascinating listen as an album: Bandcamp
4. If you'd like a collection of electronic music that overtly eschews AI for hardware synthesizers, then check out Analog 25: Bandcamp
5. If you'd prefer something with a beat, then check out Landscape from Memory by Rival Consoles: Bandcamp

On structure

One of the truisms of the 4th St. Fantasy convention is that point of view solves everything. I don't disagree with that and one of the problems that can crop up with genres and sub-genres is that they tend to have a default POV, and one that is sometimes strongly preferred by readers and acquiring editors.

Point of view has a huge impact on tone, style, characterization, pacing, etc.

So, yes, in a way point of view solves everything. However, it only goes so far in its' solutions. And I'd say the thing that actually solves everything, actually snaps a work into place is structure.

Which leads me to this question: which comes first point of view or structure? The easy answer is that that will vary by the author, the genre, and the work being written. There's a longer answer. One that might be more helpful as a bit of writing advice than "it depends" (even if the thing young writers most need to learn in relation to the meta of fiction writing is "it depends") But I'm going to have think some more on if I really believe the longer answer exists and, if so, how to articulate that. If I arrive somewhere interesting, I'll write it up in a future edition of the newsletter.

On aging and flavor

Flavors I've come to enjoy or come to enjoy even more as I've aged:

• Raspberry
• Green olives
• Seaweed
• Feta
• Roasted garlic
• Fake cherry
• Cardamom

Flavors I've come to dislike or dislike even more as I've aged:

• Banana
• Buffalo sauce
• Blue cheese (although I still like it, just not as much as I used to; also no offense to the city of Buffalo with these two choices)
• Salted caramel (I will still eat it and there are occasions where it's perfect [especially if it's an actual, well-made caramel and the salt isn't overused], but too often it's introduced into situations where either plain caramel or no caramel at all would be better)
• Green pepper (I used to tolerate it, but now I can't abide it—it also overpowers any dish it is in)

On continuing to read Jameson's seminar on aesthetic theory

Since I last reported on this reading project back at the end of September (and remember this is happening because some kind, anonymous person purchased a book from my Bookshop Wishlist), I have completed Lectures 4 through 8. I don't have a ton to say about them, but I did want to spend a bit of time on the latter part of Lecture 5 where one of the students in the seminar reports on Hug von Hoffmansthal's The Lord Chandos Letter, which Hoffmansthal presents as a letter that an English gentlemen (Lord Chandos) wrote to Francis Bacon. It's fiction, of course, and generally considered one of the hallmark and inaugurating works of modernism. It was one of the five German language works I used for the presentation part of my exams for my comp lit degree, so I have a long history with it.

In the letter, Lord Chandos, who had been a fairly prolific man of letters, relates how he has experienced a crisis and stopped being interest in writing.

The student spends quite some time summarizing the work and then includes a reading informed by and sometimes directly quoting from a tutor he had had at Oxford, Professor Richard Shepperd. I don't know that it's an unusual or groundbreaking reading (it's been two decades since I reviewed the secondary literature on it), but it also seems fairly solid to me, and I agree with the student who mentions this as his favorite part of Shepperd's analysis: "if he [Chandos] is to find his proper place within Creation, he has to dethrone reason from its earlier position of imperial sovereignty and allow it to find a much less exalted place within the democratic federation of faculties that constitutes the human personality" (181-182).

I don't know if I agree with that. Most of my relation to Ein Brief (which is what it is called in German) is about the nature of the crisis Chandos experiences and his response to the crisis and not at all about what he should do about it. I suppose Shepperd would point to the various attempts at modernist art as explorations of modes of exploring those democratic faculties (and the student alludes as much). But I do think it's an interesting thing to take away from Ein Brief, especially if you're going to use it (as many scholars do) as a way of talking about the modernist art that followed in the wake of Hoffmansthal.

Speaking of that: in his response, Jameson notes that the letter can be interpreted in a variety of ways, which is part of why I'm so interested in it, of course. One of the ways he thinks about it is in relation to Adorno's concept of nominalism, which "is the crisis of the universal" and which turns "particularity" (non-universals, particulars, singularities, not so much subjective experience as a subjective experience that is genuine or "a reality that you hold onto") into "an example of nothing, but which is a kind of event" (184).

I don't fully understand his argument—I should probably dive into the index and find all the pages where he discusses nominalism—but at the same time it's making sense to me when I think about my experience with modernist art, and the way it combines form with particularity in a way that approaches but also resists the universal: this way of describing experience in a specific manner that is about that manner rather than being about other experiences and ideas. I think of, for example, the way in which Kafka's work is almost parabolic but rejects the main function of parables. Or how cubism rejects forced perspective and messes with the planes of the subject of the work but isn't make some sort of positive or universal statement about the meaning of the subject.

And then I also wanted to pull out one sentence from Lecture Seven that I found fascinating:

"Most contemporary artistic products are a lot simpler than those of high modernism, but they are also more advanced; and they are more advanced because all of that advanced modernism has been absorbed and simplified and then mixed up with mass culture" (231).

I don't even know what to do with that.

On 2026

This was supposed to be the year I:

1. wrote more than two pieces of literary criticism (instead I wrote exactly two)
2. finished up projects and put them out in the world (I did manage to publish my story collection!)
3. release a melancholy/synth/indie pop EP or album (I did manage to release two singles)

Maybe this is just the speed I can go at, and I should be okay with that.

If I am going to try to do a bit more, then I'm going to need to find a way to do substantial creative work one or two mornings or evenings during the week (pretty much all of my writing and the difficult parts of making music almost always happens Saturday mornings with a little bit done Sunday afternoons). I'm not sure I can do that.

On the other hand, I feel like I've grown artistically this year in ways that are different from the previous 13 years (which is when I first got serious about writing fiction).

That's interesting to me.

And that's what this is all about for me: to engage with things and create things that are interesting.

One thing I've learned, even as I've resisted it and had to learn it over and over again, is that my mind demands the interesting.

So as much as I don't enjoy living in interesting times, I hope that 2026 is as interesting of a year for me creatively as 2025 was. And I hope that 2026 is whatever kind of year for you that you're hoping for.

I'll be back in your inbox at the end of January.

Take care!