Well, here we are, at the end of October. Happy Florence + The Machine new album release day to all who celebrate.
To start with something that’s actually important, I was honored to sign this letter from The Freelance Solidarity Project about culture writing:
Next.… Here’s a question from BDM Industries to you. Once a year, in early December, I do a stats roundup post for nosy people (complimentary). So I do a subscriber breakdown, the most read post, the least read post, etc. Are there any stats people are curious about… that do not require me to go into the forsaken land that is the place where people list reasons they have unsubscribed?1 The truth is that the stats here are generally pretty stable across posts. About a third of you open everything.
Anything people want to know may or may not be something I can figure out but I’m asking now because it gives me a month to see if there’s a way for me to do it. Will I actually use that month? No. Still, as a priest once said to me, about the feeling that you’re confessing something you’re going to do two seconds after leaving the church: you never know what will happen. You could get hit by a car.
I can already tell you that the most popular ghost story is February’s, though. That one was in the Substack Post twice, so it’s not really a contest. Diva.…
October in fiction
A friend told me that some people have been banned from the Bodleian Library for “400 years.” I became a little stuck on this idea. What if somebody couldn’t move on until they got the Bodleian to forgive them? Actually setting a story at the Bodleian seemed like a bad idea, though. I’ve never been there. However, I am very bad at returning books and have had the special debt collector libraries use sent after me twice.
So, uhhhh.…
The one register that I haven’t really done in this set of stories is “scary.” I think this story is scarier than the others but I don’t know that it’s scary. Unless, like me, you know you would probably get eaten in a library-based system of afterlife judgment. I did have a dream once where I discovered libraries have a secret credit score and mine is so bad that I couldn’t even check out new books until they’ve been out for a month.
October in posts (not Taylor’s Version)
I can’t sleep but at least I’m helping Johnny Dollar track his expenses. There’s a coyote hanging around, and I don’t like it. On the Old Time Radio beat, please enjoy this awkward snippet from Suspense, which I heard at like 4:30 in the morning:
The person who… the person who… is there a verb for this? Guess not.
October in posts (Taylor’s Version)
Literally nobody said to me “we want an open thread,” but I knew you wanted one, so I made one anyway. That turned out to be a good idea because hahahahahaha the discourse after this album was… a lot.2 I posted my thoughts on discourse but then discourse kept happening so I had even more thoughts on discourse. I also had a post about Taylor’s ability to control her own narrative that may or may not mostly have been an excuse to complain about somebody who was annoying to me once.3 Also, like every other kind of too online Taylor fan, I am very into this remix.
Not Showgirl related: I’m never going to write about this completely insane subreddit, because looking at it for even a short length of time makes me feel like I’m sticking my hand in a vat of acid, but I hope somebody is studying them in lab.
October in reviews
The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism (Judith Merril, collected 2016)
Come Down to a Lower Place (Yi Seoyoung, tr. Janet Hong, 2025)
October in writing abroad
October in perfume
October in Japanimation
October in research
Janus was a feminist zine started in 1975 and edited (initially) by Jan Bogstad and Jeanne Gomoll.4 There is a lot going on in the pages of Janus. There is drama that involves Marion Zimmer Bradley—would you believe it? Yes, you would. One issue features a long tribute to the film Rollerball, which I had never heard of. Have you heard of Rollerball? Should I watch Rollerball?
In Janus No. 6 there’s an account of a lunch among the zine editors and some other people, including Suzy McKee Charnas. At a certain point Charnas goes off into a doomsday scenario involving the “manchild pill”:
When I read this my first response was: what are you talking about? As far as I can tell, Charnas is referring to a 1976 article in Psychology Today. The moral of this story is: if you ever think you’ve gotten to all the various paranoid fears about population running around in the seventies, you will be wrong. There is always another one.
Also, this anecdote from Being Michael Swanwick forces me to ask the question: am I behaving way more normally than I need to? Because, like.…
I was at a SFWA function once, and I heard this “puff puff puff” at the back of my neck. I turned around and there was young Mr. Jonathan Lethem, who was very new then, and still a science fiction writer. He smiled at me and said, “I’m breathing down your back.” A year later he was more famous than I was. And it has to be said, he did it clean. He did it fair and square. He never denied being a science fiction writer, but he was able to make it into the mainstream anyway. So kudos to him.
I wonder.
November, November, November… I just like writing “November”…
November in ghost stories
Looking back, a number of these ghost stories (February, May, September) have asked the question: “You might say this situation is ‘bad,’ but what if it’s cool and good, or at least fine, actually?” November is also one of these stories.
It is also a short monologue. Very short. Short!
Also: only two ghost stories left! Crazy.
Some books I have pre-ordered in November
Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves (Chris Dalla Riva)
The Slicks: On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift (Maggie Nelson)
I used to have sort of an easy lazy way of keeping track of pre-orders that no longer works and every month I discover something that should have been in this list that wasn’t. So if you’re like wow, how did she miss this book, just imagine I didn’t.
November in perfume
Double feature of Imaginary Authors and Sorce as we discuss the question on everybody’s mind.… “Millennial twee: good or evil?”
November in Japanimation
November 8: Dallos
November 22: Castle in the Sky
“Post with most unsubscribes” is also not on the menu.
Even my beloved r/swiftiecirclejerk became more of a defensive fan space.… That said, SCJ’s still got it.
It’s how she would want it.
For context, here’s an extremely incomplete but perhaps helpful slice of what’s happening around 1975:
The Left Hand of Darkness makes Ursula K. Le Guin the first woman to win a Hugo for best novel (published 1969, award 1970)
The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974)
“The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (James Tiptree, Jr., 1974)
The Witch and the Chameleon (a different, more short-lived feminist zine) (1974)
Dhalgren (Samuel Delany, 1975)
The Female Man (Joanna Russ, 1975)
Khatru Symposium: Women in Science Fiction (1975)
“Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (James Tiptree, Jr., 1977)
James Tiptree, Jr. is “outed” (1977)
Analog’s “special women’s issue” (1978)
So 1975 is a big year for my purposes and in an early stage of the book proposal I thought about trying to structure it around the lead up to and then fallout from 1975. (I did not do this, because it was a bad idea.)
On cultural cuts in the press, we have IMDB. (Which is a cryptic way of saying I am BDM.)
Part of me would love to hear from authors comparing "what I thought this book was going to be when I first envisioned it" versus "what it ended up being." But maybe that's one of those things that spoils the magic.