September came, September went. September felt… brief? My 2026 planner came in the mail yesterday. Is that legal? I don’t think that it’s legal for there to be another year after this year has lasted for a year? Mods?
I’ve booked my next trip to Oregon and will be there in late October but I now have a slightly better grasp on the situation. I think. We’ll see?? I have:
a raincoat
a button up plaid shirt
And I know not to try bar shampoo again.
September in fiction
a september ghost story
Every girl at St. Monica’s wanted a friend who had been assigned to Vernon Hall, but nobody wanted to live there.
Toward the end of May, I wrote this down in my Notes app: “The ghost had a knife sticking out and can maybe move on if somebody takes it out but it doesn’t quite want people to, it’s attached to the knife.” I would like to say that the weird grammar of this sentence was because I was writing this down at one in the morning but the merciless computer tells me it was written at half past five in the afternoon. When I ran across the note again, it seemed to me like the natural place for this ghost was a school.
The initial concept was clearly more about a ghost in denial, or how we love our suffering, or whatever, but… when I started writing the story it went in a different direction. I draft most of these stories by writing them by hand until I hit a point where I can stop writing. Then I type them into the computer, editing and finishing them and so on. But the initial drafting is mostly guided by a sense of what ought to come next. What ought to come next here turned out not to be what I planned at all and the lines I wrote for the therapists almost felt like I was satirizing my initial idea.
Emily is named for the Joanna Russ story “My Dear Emily.” Vernon Hall, and the other halls, are all named after women writers of spooky stories. Mildred… named herself I guess.
September in posts
Heathcliff, it’s me, it’s Cathy, I’m wearing a historically inappropriate dre-eee-EEE-eeess. Ursula K. Le Guin assembles the crème de la crème (maybe). Perhaps all of us are the lure on the great deep sea angler fish that is media. We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to say, orange man bad. In the run-up to Showgirl, let’s remember reputation (only version). I committed the sin of writing about tweet (luckily it’s only venial).1
September in reviews
I said I was going to review Again, Dangerous Visions this month because I sort of assumed I had hit a few stories that were duds but that it would improve. Unfortunately almost every successive story in Again, Dangerous Visions feels like an attack on me, personally, to the point that I would rather do my incredibly last minute deferred taxes than read it. I still do have to read it, so…
Maybe next month.
September in writing abroad
September in perfume
September in Evangelion
It’s done. We definitely went out with a whimper here, huh?
September in product
I finally found the right replacement sunscreen. (Previously.) It is Sun Bum’s mineral sunscreen. Please update your records accordingly.
September in research
Item one, from She Saved Us from World War Three: Gardner Dozois Remembers James Tiptree, Jr:
She had a strange house. It was mostly glass and it sat over a stream that ran into one side of the house, through the living room and out the other side. There were lots of plants. In her bathroom, sitting atop the toilet tank, was a tank full of Siamese fighting fish. She also had pet tarantulas, which she took out and showed us and let walk all over her. Raccoons would come in at night through the spaces where the stream went in and out of the house.
She had three desks in her office. One was for James Tiptree, another was for Raccoona Sheldon, and the third was for Alice Sheldon, I guess for whatever she had to write in her real persona. They all had different colored inks and different colored paper. You couldn’t mistake a Tiptree letter. It was very distinctive looking. If you ever get a chance to see them in the archives, you should take a look. Blue paper, as I recall, with dark purple or blue ink.…
She told lots of anecdotes. One was how she had saved the world from nuclear destruction. She also worked for the CIA, as a photo analyst. At one point everybody was freaking out, thinking that Russia was about to launch a nuclear attack, and they recommended that we launch a preemptive strike to neutralize this. They thought that missile launchers were spreading across the tundra. She analyzed the photographs and proved that they were actually hay ricks. So by doing that, she saved us from World War Three.
Another one she told was that at one point toward the end of his term, when Eisenhower had had his stroke but was still the president, it was [her husband]’s job to sit with him and keep an eye on him. He said that Eisenhower sat there all the time, all day, drawing pictures of Richard Nixon and making X’s across them.
Item two, from the February 1980 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The relevant part is the right-hand column, three ads down, but there is also, as they say, “a lot going on here.”
In April 1980 the fruit of this mailing campaign came in and the letters section is almost totally dedicated to the personal and critical failings of Joanna Russ. (There is however space for somebody else to complain about Lisa Tuttle.) I gather from the letters that this was inspired by Russ’s review in February 1979—which concerned What Happened to Emily Goode After the Great Exhibition (Raylyn Moore), Rime Isle (Fritz Leiber), The Year’s Finest Fantasy (ed. Terry Carr), Lord Foul’s Bane (Stephen Donaldson), and The Grey Mane of Morning (Joy Chant)—and her subsequent response to her critics in November 1979.
September in whether or not Tate McCrae did a murder
CMAT definitely thinks she did a murder.
However, if we’re being honest, nobody sells the sheer ominousness of this song quite like Ms McRae herself.
Spooky season approaches…
October in ghost stories
I may have psyched myself out about doing a GHOST STORY in OCTOBER otherwise known as GHOST MONTH.
Some October pre-orders
Herculine (Grace Byron)
The Mind Reels (Freddie deBoer)
Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art (Celeste Marcus)
The Essential Patricia A. McKillip (Patricia A. McKillip)
Minor Black Figures (Brandon Taylor)
Plus three “Lovecraft Reanimated” texts from Honford Star: The Call of the Friend (JaeHoon Choi, tr. Janet Hong), Alien Gods (Lee Suhyeon, tr. Anton Hur), and Come Down to a Lower Place (Yi Seoyoung, tr. Janet Hong). These will be written about in some way next month because I got them early and have already read them.
October in perfume
We’ll be doing Olympic Orchids.
October in Weeb Studies (Still Needs A Name) (It’s Not Like We’re Studying Weebs?)
Castle of Cagliostro (October 3)
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (October 18 or, if the manga takes me a longer time than I expect, October 25)
The plan is to cover Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Satoshi Kon, and Mamoru Oshii, in roughly chronological order. However, some of the Oshii is proving to be very hard to find, and I don’t want to try to lug the Nausicaä manga to Oregon, so it’s jumping up the queue.
October in Taylor Swift Studies
Do people want to do an open thread again? I’m sort of constantly ping-ponging between “I am going to hate this album” and “I am going to like this album” and if I hate it I don’t know that I wanna post through it… but I’m supposed to write a review of it Elsewhere so it might be nice to have a thread as a place for the TSS community to chat. Otherwise, I suggest heading to the only (other?) sane Swiftie place online, r/swiftiecirclejerk.
Also I got a fun orange sweater but it’s so warm right now that I feel like I will not actually be able to wear it… boo.
It’s kind of a nice upcoming month and change for me—Florence Welch is coming at the end of October and the final version of Hayley Williams’s new solo album is coming at the beginning of November. (RAYE is coming some time next year but that’s a bit past “and change” territory.) Also, Hayley Williams is now on Substack and worth following as she posts like a normal person and not like a famous person.
> Castle of Cagliostro
Fine, I'll watch it again! (Love it)
As for weeb studies, "More Trouble Than It's Worth", "It's Not (That) Deep". OK, OK, I jest. I'm not very good with catchy names. "The Curious Case of Moving Pictures". I give up.
I skipped that tweet article, after two paragraphs I started hearing this faint noise and my tongue tasted of copper. It's probably for the best.