Hey. So, uh, it’s September somehow? And not even the beginning of the month, but the end? We’re knee-deep into Spooky Season already! My dogs have started celebrating, with an Halloween advent calendar bigger than they are. I haven’t been able to find a human equivalent, but Home Depot does have a giant, animatronic man-eating plant which would probably scratch the same itch. Now if it was only ever in stock …
Anyway, things and stuff. Time. Pandemic. I guess the one good thing about all the anti-vaxxers making it impossible for me to leave my house is that I’m at my computer a lot, and if I’m at my computer I’m writing something. So what have I been up to during the vast majority of 2021, what have I been doing in this, our year of slightly-less-perpetual garbage fires? A lot! Or at least it seems that way because I haven’t properly updated the blog since 2020. I would like to amend that oversight right … now.
First and foremost (and most recently) I wrote an article for WIRED about Mass Effect, Tali, chronic illness representation in video games, and seeing an immunocompromised character written as an actual character and not a one-dimensional joke.
Way back in February, I wrote about Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel for Nerdist. It was not a flattering article, because it was not a good documentary! The producers exploited a young woman’s tragedy for shock value, reinforcing stigmas around mental health while also enabling the same kinds of armchair sleuths that caused the story to spin out in the first place. I talked about this more in an interview with Buzzfeed Daily, too.
Also, I wrote a lot of stuff for Cracked, with more on the way! Some highlights include articles about the worst vampire movie ever made – the stone-cold bad-movie classic Billy the Kid Versus Dracula – the ’80s kids cartoons that led me (and my brother) straight to Troma, a treatise about The Mandalorian and middle age, comic-book villains that make more sense with other heroes, America’s very first UFO sighting, a plea to bring back Star Wars’ snot vampires, and, of course, a dive into the remarkably compelling theory that Shakespeare is a Klingon in the Star Trek universe.
What else, what else? My efforts to find a literary agent remain fruitless – there was the requisite despair and talk of giving up forever, and then I changed tacks entirely and applied to be a part of Pitch Wars. After fifteen years of hermitude, I think I’m going to give this whole “being part of a writing community” thing a try.
Speaking of, I’ve also started writing short stories again, and it’s very fun and I’m not sure why I stopped in the first place. A bunch of those are out, surfing the slush piles of the interwebs, so we’ll see if anything comes of that.
Most of this summer was spent in the depths of both depression and anxiety, but then my doctor gave me some meds and now I feel fucking great. Cue the Jonathan Coulton song. Or better yet the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend song. Seriously, don’t be afraid of prescriptions. They can help immensely and they’ve gotten a bad rap.
I’ve also been playing a lot of Fortnite and I regret nothing.
Right, well, I think that’s everything. I’m not going to promise to update more because I do that literally every time and I think we’ve all seen how that goes. Instead, let me just leave you with a reminder that I have a number of books for sale, including the giant-size Exponential Apocalypse omnibus and The Great Gatsby (but With Werewolves), and purchasing them and/or leaving a review would be wildly beneficial to both my ability to sell more books and my ego.
[come up with a witty sign-off and put it here]