monthly digest: november 2025
alien ghosts, boring bot music, my new best friend, and more.…
Grey November, I’ve been down since… since… since… well, I’ll get back to you on that.
November in fiction
a november ghost story
I didn’t want to be cleansed. Things were fine as they were. I could feel death inside me, smooth as an egg. I knew what it was. In the Gospels Christ says, if a man is rid of one demon, he’ll just end up with seven more. I didn’t need seven. I only needed one.
Not a lot to say about this one. I was in a mood.
November in posts
makes a guest appearance to suggest romantasy is not boring.2 Celebrity interventions in politics continue not to matter (and may actually hurt the endorsed) and I’m going to buy a hammer so that if I ever want to write something like this again in the next two years I can hit myself in the head. Increasingly, increasingly is on the increase.Also, since it’s almost December, I will share this archival post about buying presents:
November in reviews
November in perfume
November in Japanimation
November in research
I want to discuss here, not anything I actually read, but one of the best purchases I have made for research purposes: this “gooseneck phone holder.” Allow me to explain.
Some archives have very strict rules about copying documents. Others do not. The University of Oregon will let you photograph everything you want, but if you want something digitized by them, you have to pay for it (fair). That gets expensive. So what I realized is that my initial approach—which was to go, take notes, and photograph only what seemed important—was not going to work. I was going way too slow. What I actually had to do was photograph everything and read it later. So in the evening all the pictures I take are backed up, and then eventually I collate them into PDFs that I can actually use.
But holding your phone arm stable for hours while you flip through documents with your other arm has one big drawback. It hurts. So if you are going into a place that doesn’t care if you take eighty million pictures with your phone, this bad boy will save you so much back pain. It’s basically a way to turn your phone into an overhead scanner, but it’s cheaper and it is easier to pack. I did not have this thing the first time but I have one now and it’s my best friend.
Anyway I’ve got about eighteen thousand words that, depending on the day, leave me feeling either like I am communing with the world spirit whose worlds flow through me or like I’ve produced unreadable garbage and I need to delete it all and maybe burn my computer for good measure.… trust the process. I was remembering recently how when I was first writing pieces I would draft them six or seven times before they ever went to the editor. I feel like the book is probably going to be rewritten four times or something before all’s over.
November in stuff I liked that’s neat
Friend of the newsletter
has written a comedy of manners about the Desert Fathers. I read this excerpt sort of assuming I wouldn’t like it… But by the end I was cracking up. I hope the full manuscript finds a home if it hasn’t already.
November in Boswell in the snow
The most wonderful month of the year looms.…
December in ghost stories
The last story! I spent most of November tinkering away at something that wasn’t going to work and then on the 26th I thought of an idea that would work. I would call the result of writing something so rapidly… “heavy handed.”
There are no plans for monthly short fiction in 2026. The compost heap has been depleted. 2027, maybe.
Some things I have pre-ordered in December
The only pre-order I can find in my emails is John Darnielle’s This Year.
December in perfume
I’m doing Marissa Zappas.
December in Japanimation
December 6: Grave of the Fireflies
December 20: My Neighbor Totoro
Normally I would not want to schedule something so close to Christmas, but we just can’t end the year on Grave of the Fireflies. I discovered a couple days ago that a new translation of Akiyuki Nosaka’s original “Grave of the Fireflies” story just came out in the UK, by the way. I will not be able to get a copy of that but I have been reading a different collection of Nosaka’s stories, The Cake Tree in the Ruins. (Nosaka also has a comic novel called The Pornographers. Looking at the cover I can remember that I’ve read this book, but I could not tell you a thing that happens in it. I will probably not re-read it before December 6.)
However, it looks like I can get the Patlabor works through the library here, so my plan is to start January off with Patlabor unless something goes wrong, and we can spend January and possibly February catching up with Oshii. I had a chance to see Angel’s Egg on the big screen in Eugene and even bought a ticket but then I didn’t go, but surely that restoration will be coming out in home video form before too long…?
Somebody got sort of annoyed at this post and was like, if AI products are boring, what’s making up the market for AI? Well, it has to be said, being boring has never stopped things from being successful. But also, the statistics toward the beginning of this video are enlightening. The streams on AI-generated music are mostly other bots.
The fourth guest post on this newsletter and the only one that is not about Taylor Swift.
(grave of the fireflies mentioned) (stampedes into the comments section) the short story "american hijiki" was written the same year, during nosaka's bad boy era........ ok tbh he never left that era but yknow. it contains his recollections of the postwar occupation. nosaka is a huge character -- here's a video of him punching his bff nagisa oshima after giving a toast at the latter's 30th wedding anniversary (the story is that they mistakenly didn't call him up to the stage bc they thought he had already left, but he was still there, waiting and getting shwasted) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1CNy0eIzuY i really can't say enough things about this dude. google his whiskey ads. idk