Morgan Crooks's Blog

I���m going to take a slightly abbreviated approach to this year���s best-of lists and mostly focus on movies. It���s not that I didn���t read or listen to music but for whatever reason I feel uninspired to talk about either topic. C���est la vie!
So in no particular order are five movies I greatly enjoyed watching this year.
Firstly, Avengers: Endgame. Well, I guess there is some order to this list because literally the first thing I thought of in terms of movies I���ve seen is this movie. It is inevitable! This is the one MCU flick it���s hard for me to remember as simply a super-hero film. Although I found its predecessor a bit more more compulsively watchable, I really enjoyed this film. First of all it���s tone, which veered from despair, heist hijinx, parental reconciliation, to epic mega-brawl was never boring. Even the gorgeous mess which is that final fight has its own interior logic and sports some of the best looking cinematography this side of Black Panther. With Endgame MCU found a way to transcend some of the limitations of the super-hero genre while stamping into place a archetype for the future on how massive story-telling has to be to improve on this saga.
Secondly, we have Parasite. Strangely similar to Endgame in the genre bending aspects, this film is one best watched with little context. There is something oddly inspiring about a film which can mesh together comedy, horror, and pathos in a single highly restricted set. The acting is incredible and the final scene really sticks with me now months after I saw it.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I was dreading the ending of this film and perhaps Tarantino was too because the film certainly took its sweet time getting to its point. Even so, I find it hard to dismiss this film as simply another Quentin Tarantino film. In a way I haven���t seen since Inglorious Basterds this film stretched out its premise in new and interesting ways. It���s a movie that asks you to sit, be patient, and wait for its surprises. One of my favorite QT films of all time in all honesty.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. I watched this film three times in a row and I would happily see it a fourth or fifth. It���s an entirely respectable end to the sequel trilogy and a somewhat less convincing capstone to the Skywalker saga. Similar to the last JJ Abrams helmed Star Wars movie I enjoyed the first two thirds an enormous amount. It���s fast, effortlessly fun and good-natured, and a lot of fun. If I���m less impressed with the final act it���s more a problem of strange ambiguities the film seems to think it needs to hold on to. In any case I think the final scene, the last word in the Skywalker story, is just about perfect and certainly worthy end to the story as a whole. Star Wars is dead! Long Live Star Wars!
Late Night: It dawned on me that this comedy was a bit of a speculative fiction work as well. The speculation of a world where a woman has been a long-running successful talk-show host is a bit discouraging in its premise but also weirdly liberating. In addition to be wickedly funny, this is a story about how the old survives alongside the new and how each has something to teach the other. A timeless theme that struck me as timely when I watched it.

I’m going to take a slightly abbreviated approach to this year’s best-of lists and mostly focus on movies. It’s not that I didn’t read or listen to music but for whatever reason I feel uninspired to talk about either topic. C’est la vie!
So in no particular order are five movies I greatly enjoyed watching this year.
Firstly, Avengers: Endgame. Well, I guess there is some order to this list because literally the first thing I thought of in terms of movies I’ve seen is this movie. It is inevitable! This is the one MCU flick it’s hard for me to remember as simply a super-hero film. Although I found its predecessor a bit more more compulsively watchable, I really enjoyed this film. First of all it’s tone, which veered from despair, heist hijinx, parental reconciliation, to epic mega-brawl was never boring. Even the gorgeous mess which is that final fight has its own interior logic and sports some of the best looking cinematography this side of Black Panther. With Endgame MCU found a way to transcend some of the limitations of the super-hero genre while stamping into place a archetype for the future on how massive story-telling has to be to improve on this saga.
Secondly, we have Parasite. Strangely similar to Endgame in the genre bending aspects, this film is one best watched with little context. There is something oddly inspiring about a film which can mesh together comedy, horror, and pathos in a single highly restricted set. The acting is incredible and the final scene really sticks with me now months after I saw it.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I was dreading the ending of this film and perhaps Tarantino was too because the film certainly took its sweet time getting to its point. Even so, I find it hard to dismiss this film as simply another Quentin Tarantino film. In a way I haven’t seen since Inglorious Basterds this film stretched out its premise in new and interesting ways. It’s a movie that asks you to sit, be patient, and wait for its surprises. One of my favorite QT films of all time in all honesty.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. I watched this film three times in a row and I would happily see it a fourth or fifth. It’s an entirely respectable end to the sequel trilogy and a somewhat less convincing capstone to the Skywalker saga. Similar to the last JJ Abrams helmed Star Wars movie I enjoyed the first two thirds an enormous amount. It’s fast, effortlessly fun and good-natured, and a lot of fun. If I’m less impressed with the final act it’s more a problem of strange ambiguities the film seems to think it needs to hold on to. In any case I think the final scene, the last word in the Skywalker story, is just about perfect and certainly worthy end to the story as a whole. Star Wars is dead! Long Live Star Wars!
Late Night: It dawned on me that this comedy was a bit of a speculative fiction work as well. The speculation of a world where a woman has been a long-running successful talk-show host is a bit discouraging in its premise but also weirdly liberating. In addition to be wickedly funny, this is a story about how the old survives alongside the new and how each has something to teach the other. A timeless theme that struck me as timely when I watched it.

Initial Walk by Morgan Crooks (2019)As the light rail car picked up speed, Morris felt his heart race increase. On the speakers, the jangling guitars marking the start of REM’s It’s the End of The World played.“What is this about anyway?”King County Advisory Executive Marrion Tims zipped up the front of her dark purple uniform and grimaced.“Did you watch the videos?”“The cartoons?”Now Tims’ eyes blazed. “Instructional videos and mandated onboarding material.”A glint of something bright attracted Morris’ attention. Far to the south, close to Tacoma, something flared in the bright blue sky.“What the hell was that?”“We don’t have a lot of time and I need to know whether you’re ready for the fight.”“I’d like to know what’s happening.”The windows rattled in the Link Light Rail’s frames and Morris heard a faint thud. On the horizon the glint dimmed as he caught sight of the first trail of smoke.“Are we under attack?” Capitol Hill by Morgan Crooks (2019)
Executive Tims brought the cuff of her uniform to her mouth. “I will need to increase our velocity to 65 kph. The aberration has arrived.”At this request, the green woods and modern condominiums became a blur as they sailed past. For the first time, Morris realized that no one else was in their car. First one and then a trio of helicopters passed overhead, the heavy thump thump of their rotors audible over the rattling din.Executive Tims sat back in her chair and watched Morris. In the distance were more sounds, each one growing steadily louder.“Are you telling me Evangelion is real?”“More or less.”“Voltron?”She nodded.“So I’m supposed to, what, help manage the flow of traffic with all of Seattle under attack?”“You are going to help us defeat a monster.”As if on cue, the crest of an enormous scaly head rose above the hills of Rainier Valley. There was a tremendous explosion, and Morris saw red flame blossom and turn into waves of thick black smoke. As the smoke cleared the general outline of the creature became clear, and Morris had little surprise in recognizing it as the Freemont Troll.There was chatter from the overhead speakers. Tims again spoke into her cuff. “Acknowledged.”“What’s going on?”
“The monsters first appeared 150 years ago. There is something that does not like the idea of industry and technology and humans building cities. Everyone so often the earth spits up one of these titans and we’re off to the races.”
Morris was slack-jawed as the colossus heaved into view. No matter how much of the thing he saw, there was always more to see, some impossible detail too large and coherent to deny, too large to ever believe.“How does that thing even stand? It should collapse in on itself.”“Monsters are too big to fail,” Tims said with a wry smile. “The size is their entire point. They are meant to be a dark reflection of the immensity of modern reality. Think of Godzilla. Born of nuclear hell-fire, a dark commentary on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”“Yeah, but that’s a movie.”“Movies, cartoons, and books, all art serves that part of the brain which doesn’t go to sleep between catastrophes and still seeks coherent lessons.”“Are you saying this has happened before?”“It happens constantly. That is the point of this type of media. It’s so ridiculous and illogical precisely because it must reflect the preposterous scale of the threat.”“What threat?”“Modernity itself. Each Kaiju, each titan is an avatar of the destructive part of our own reality.”“How do we fight something like that?”“Each city has its own way. Seattle and Tacoma decided the most natural course was the King County Metro. Each of the major methods of transportation around Seattle and its suburbs is a separate defense function. The ferry, street cars, buses, monorail and the light rail, they form the five rings on the fist of the King.”“How do you fight a monster like that with a light rail car? Am I missing something?”“At the outset of World War One, the general outlines of the German’s assault on France was already etched into the transportation system. The trains brought the troops from the towns and burgs of the German countryside to the frontier. Seattle’s public transit system is designed to safeguard the people who live here from enormous monsters.”“Yeah, but they’re trains,” he said. “And buses.”“You are looking at the thing without appreciating its symbol. Think of the Voltron Lions. The point of the lions is not that that the leonid body plan makes the most efficient combat platform but rather that the symbol of robot lions inspires and reaches back to ancestral memories of valor and might.”“The monorail is based on ancestral memories?”“Nostalgia for future pasts, I suppose. Look, it doesn’t matter. In a little over five minutes we are going to reach Seattle Center and you are going to need to join with the rest of the team.”“I’ve never even driven a train before, let alone a mech!”“Recall how the Voltron robots are driven forward by a pair of joy sticks and big buttons that appear when they are needed. Or think of the “Drift” as it appears in Pacific Rim. You will know how to control the King County Defender because it is your destiny to drive the Link Light Rail. Reach out and grasp the true nature of the Link Light Rail. It is not meant to be steered or controlled. It is meant to fight.”Morris sat back and closed his eyes. Around him the noises of the cabin died away. He reached inward and outward with his mind and found the faintest of flickers on the edge of his awareness. There was something in the train that was waiting for him. Had, in fact, always been waiting for him.Freemont Troll (Wikipedia)When he opened his eyes, he was seeing through the front of the train, the rails rushing beneath him. He had somehow opened another set of eyes within the train and he could feel the powerful electical current supplied by the overhead catenaries caused the Siemans S70 to surge forward. With his new perception he knew course he had to take. The Link Light Rail lifted off of the tracks and swiveled in air. Behind him the monstrous outline of the Freemont Troll stomped through the tiny tidy homes of lower Seattle.
Morris reconfigured the body that was his and the train together. He formed arms and legs. The rails rose up and formed a double-edge sword. Although he had had no more than a lesson or two in fighting, he assumed a defensive stance and watched the Troll approach his position. A signal light blinked red in front of him. He knew it would go green.

The following is the press release for the March 16th 2019 Opening Ceremony. for the renovated Woburn Public Library. As it mentions, I'll be reading an original poem for the dedication as a part of the ceremony. Thank you very much to the Woburn Library, Rebecca Meehan, and Andrea Bunker for asking for poetry to be included in the ceremony and for choosing my work.

Woburn Public Library Grand Re-Opening
Welcomes the Public on March 16: 2-5:30 pm

For immediate release:
Contact: Rebecca Meehan, rmeehan@minlib.net

Woburn Public Library AdditionMayor Scott Galvin, the City Council and the Trustees of the Woburn Public Library proudly announce the grand re-opening of the newly renovated and expanded library on Pleasant Street in Woburn Center. The $31.5 million City-bonded project restores the 19thcentury National Historic Landmark, designed by celebrated architect Henry Hobson Richardson, while adding a new wing to meet the needs of Woburn’s 21stcentury community.
On March 16, from 2-5:30 pm, the public is invited to spend the afternoon with us, explore the new spaces, rediscover majestic historic spaces, and experience the library's new state-of-the-art technology, featured in almost every department. From a laptop vending machine to the new Maker Space’s powerful laser cutter and 3D printer, there's a lot to check out.
A never-ending story time will be held in the Children’s Room throughout the afternoon, where you can also see the new robot themed check out kiosk. And, if you don’t already have one, librarians will be on hand to help you sign up for a library card, so you can access everything the library has to offer.
“This library project has been an outstanding example of the citizens of Woburn coming together to restore the crown jewel of our community, which will now also provide the space for its rich resources to serve as a true cultural center for all of Woburn’s residents,” said Woburn Mayor Scott Galvin.
The original 1879 building, H.H. Richardson’s first commission after Trinity Church in Copley Square, Boston, reflects the architect’s unique blend of Romanesque structure with his admiration for local flora and fauna (integrated into the architecture in, for example, the botanical carvings on the pilasters in the Frizzell Study Hall). The glass wall of the new addition provides a spectacular view while new openings in the sandstone façade provide easy access between the original historic and the new spaces. The major addition and renovation were designed by CBT Architects, who drew on their experience renovating the Thomas Crane Public Library in Quincy, also designed by H.H. Richardson, restoring the Senate Chamber at the Massachusetts State House and creating the new wing at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, blending the beauty of the original building with the needs of the 21st century Woburn community.“We are so proud to celebrate the completion of this extraordinary project,” said Richard Mahoney, President of the Woburn Public Library Trustees. “This dream has come true thanks to the support of our staff, patrons, the Friends, the Foundation, the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, Mayor Galvin and the City Council.”
The opening celebration will include performances by the Woburn Memorial High School Band, and a performance by the Woburn Memorial High School Acapella Choir, as well as a ribbon-cutting and a reading of an original poem written by Woburn resident and local author Morgan Crooks to mark the occasion.

Arisia 2019 is over!

It’s back to the real world this week after an entire weekend in Arisia 2019. I go to this convention every year, but this one will definitely be special to me. For one thing, this is the year that felt, at least for a moment, like it wasn’t going to happen. If the debacle with the e-board wasn’t enough, there was the strike at the Westin. The convention felt slimmer this year for sure. A lot of people self-selected to not come this year and honestly with the smaller, more confined venue of the Boston Park Plaza, that was a decision enormously beneficial to my enjoyment of this con.
I had a blast. I was more invested in the panels this year because I wrote a portion of them. It’s one thing to go to a panel and listen for reading suggestions, or new ideas, or people to follow on social media, but it’s quite another to put together a panel of people to create a very specific conversation and then get to sit back to see how the discussion plays out. I loved that aspect of being Writing Track Manager and honestly I’m looking forward to doing this next year if Arisia will have me back. It was a great experience.
So, what did I actually DO at the convention? Well, I had five panels total, two Saturday, two Sunday and one reading panel on Monday. The two on Saturday were my ‘experiments,’ a live DnD event with writers and a looser more casual panel I called Shop Talk. The DnD panel, I think, went off better than I could have hoped. James Cambias did an amazing job as a DM, and Ruthanna Emyrs, Brent Weichsel, and Trisha J. Wooldridge all did a phenomenal job playing out a fun little dungeon delve Cambias concocted. I called this a proof-of-concept for the writing track and I consider the concept proven. Next year I am going to see if I can arrange AV support though. There needs to be a display of the map of the adventure for the audience and microphones. Other than that though I had no complaints.
The shop talk panel went well too. The purpose of the panel was a small group of writers to talk about their experiences actually writing and I have to say that went off pretty well. James Cambias, Keith Yastuhashi, and Andrea Hairston were all pretty game to try the looser format and although this was my first moderating job and I definitely could tighten up my game, I really appreciate the patience of panelists and audience as it paid off with some really great conversation.
Sunday was a bit more traditional. I took part in a Conlanging panel in the afternoon and a Marvel Year in Review panel in the evening. Both were a lot of fun, the “All Words Are Made Up” panel being a bit more academic and the Marvel panel being pretty much straight fun. Heather Urbanski continues to impress me as one of the best moderators I’ve met and as a result that panel had some truly great interactions between Dan Toland, Bob Chipman, and Marianna Martin, PhD. The impression I’ve built up recently of Marvel fandom is of a community interested in celebrating what’s good about the franchise and pushing for further improvements with each movie. I guess another way of saying this is some people enjoyed Black Panther the most out of MCU films this year and some people enjoyed Infinity War. Fans are able to - wonder of wonders - sit at the same table and talk about what they liked about both movies without dissolving into acrimony.
The reading on Monday was a great chance to listen to Athena Andreadis, PhD and Kristen Janz read their story and while also getting a chance to read my published work “The Emissary.” If you are interested in hearing me read any of my other work in the near future, I have some exciting news.
Although this hasn’t been publicized completely, I’m going to say that I’ll be reading one of my poems at the opening ceremony of the new Woburn Public Library on March 16th. I hope to see you there! I should be just about recovered from my weekend at Arisia!

The title of this post (and the panel I’m participating in for Arisia 2019) come from a random exchange between Thor and Drax in last year’s “Infinity War” movie. It’s what Thor replies when to Drax when the always literal-minded hero doubts the existence of Niðavellir its forge. It’s a funny throw-away line and the title of this post because I think there’s always been a bit of defensiveness on my part when I add some invented vocabulary to a story of mine.

Nidavellir from Avengers: Infinity War (2018)The art and craft of inventing new languages has a surprisingly long history. A 12th century nun by the Saint Hildegard is credited with one of the first (sadly incompletely recorded) constructed language. There was also a period during the Enlightenment when the creation of ‘philosophical languages,’ meant to resolve age-old problems and reshape society, were the vogue. Gottfried Leibniz, for example, tried to a create a language that was logically self-consistent. The task proved too much for him, but that drive to bring the people of the world together through languages (instead of dividing them) which lead to progressive language experiments such as Esperanto.

Of course no survey of conlanging would be complete without a discussion of JRR Tolkien and David Peterson. Tolkien because his genius for languages ushered in an era of more naturalistic, living conlangs. I greatly admire David Peterson for the work he did fleshing out George R.R. Martin’s languages from the Song of Ice and Fire.

Even at this late date, it’s impressive to look over Tolkien’s achievement. The various languages created for the Lord of the Rings feel real - possibly because Tolkien created such a rich history and cultural context for Sindarin and his Dwarfish language. The languages don’t feel random, they feel lived-in and alive.

I found it interesting that Peterson, when given the task of creating plausible languages for the Dothracki and High Valyrian, quickly discovered that Martin had not followed Tolkien’s example in creating languages for the people of his world. For some reason, even when reading the books, I had assumed that Martin had done extensive work on the languages underpinning his imaginations. To find that is not so doesn’t really detract from the books, but it does add a lot to Peterson’s achievement.

It also made me wonder something - how much work on conlanging really needs to be done for your average fantasy novel? Do you have to be a linguist to get much benefit out of the process or can even a little bit of conlanging improve a speculative work?

This is not simply an academic question for me because my current long form work (let’s not call it a novel - at least not yet) involved the creation of three separate conlangs for the setting. One was based - very loosely - on Welsh, another on classical Japanese, and another inspired by aspects of the Yolgnu language of Northern Australia but with much of the lexicon invented whole-cloth. I’ve found the experience incredibly rewarding and fun - but also, a lot of work. Although that part of my pre-writing is largely done at this point, I nevertheless wonder if it was worth it. Will anyone really come to appreciate the work put into these languages when I don’t (and never did) intend to write much of the work in untranslated original conlangs.

All I can offer is one example of what conlanging provided my work. Very early on, I knew that the mythical beings of the sun and moon had strange names in the indigenous language I invented. Using reverse etymology, it became clear that the sun was derived from the phrase ‘head-scorcher’ and the moon from the phrase ‘branch-hewer.’ This seemed to me to be a very aggressive way to describe the sun and moon and a bit odd.

I had a choice at this point. On one hand I could’ve simply hand-waved a different etymology or gone with them. Figuring the point of conlanging was to allow happy accidents I began to conceive the sun and moon in this setting as something very different - weapons left over from some primeval, cosmic war. That idea later spun in many other fruitful directions.

So is conlanging worth it? I can’t say but I will suggest that conlanging provides a depth and wonder to speculation that can be missing if you confine yourself to one language and its words.

Anything that persists for an entire decade as a recurring entertainment event begins to mean more than simple entertainment. It’s inevitable that once a franchise like the MCU has continued for long enough that its overall significance has to be factored in. I don’t think fans quite appreciate what genre movies like these used to be like before MCU.

Battle on Titan Avengers: Infinity War 2018It’s really not the special effects or effective mix of humor, action, and character development. It’s the fact that all three of things happen within the persistent universe. Because no Marvel movie is the last Marvel movie, and there’s always another one to develop the characters, fans have a different relationship to this franchise.

It’s more like what comic books are, obviously, where no matter what crazy stuff goes on in a crossover event, you have a reasonable expectation that your favorite character will be back the next month or the month after that.

There have been good MCU movies, mediocre movies, and one that I’m pretty sure qualifies as a bad movie. There are also an assortment of television properties that range from epic to fairly boring.

But what does it mean?

As a writer, what really impressed me about the 2018 MCU offerings (Black Panther, Infinity War, and Antman and Wasp) was the nifty trick it seemed to get away with. Check online and the innumerable youtube video essays and you get this picture of a master-plot that connects each and every movie, with details, character points, and the odd artifact all connected in a hyperaware fashion. People watch movies for all sorts of reasons but I think what really hooks people - HOOKS me for one example - is the sense that these movies are building on each other, telling long form stories that carry through from one two hour spectacle to another.

In other words, MCU has found a new way to be epic and all it costed them was a few very diligent continuity experts and enough money to craft a few epic money-shots per film.

After that, fandom takes over. We know that these stories are going to continue and that even very superficial details or relationships in one movie might come back in a later one.

Let me give one example - The Vision. The Vision appears in a total of three films: the Age of Ultron, Civil War, and Infinity War. In each of those films, the Vision maybe gets nine minutes in each. And yet in that time, we get a sketch of The Vision’s origins as a mechanical being, a few spectacular examples of his powers and the bare-bones development of his relationship with the Scarlet Witch AKA Wanda Maximoff. I want to be clear, when The Vision gets offed (twice!) in the closing moments of Infinity War, I really connected with his story. It worked for me. How does Marvel accomplish stuff like this?

First off, it’s important to state how little support went into making these moments develop. The relationship of Wanda and The Vision, for example, consists of maybe three conversations in Civil War and then the brief scene of them as fugitive lovers. Elizabeth Olson and Paul Bettany sold their scenes and created something that came off as genuine out of the most minimal of stories. The other angle is that there is even though there isn’t a lot to work with between these three stories, there is something. Each of the movies suggests just enough to make the relationship plausible without distracting from the real plots of those movies. This is a nifty trick and one only possible because the assurance of another and another movie down the line gives directors the confidence to insert sub-plots that aren’t going to pay off for another couple of movies. These subterranean storylines only exist because MCU is popular enough to support the storylines of secondary characters. MCU is popular because even if Iron Man,The Hulk, Captain America and Thor aren’t your favorite characters (back in the day, I was an X-Men fan first and a Marvel fan a distant fourth or fifth), there is this constant virtuous cycle that promises that your character is going to be brought in and be made as an integral part of the overall story - not just a cameo.

The other thing that’s happened more recently is that MCU, as it’s expanded its ranks of heroes and villains, has found its own way to express a mythic impulse. One of the things that bugs me about the DCEU, is that each character is always portrayed as a god first and a human being second. Justice League made the mistake of assuming that epic settings and lots of CGI baddies makes for epic story-telling. MCU has both of those things too but it also has characters that start off as relatable and sympathetic and THEN get involved in epic scenarios through their relatable ambitions and fears. My favorite MCU movie so far - Captain America: The Winter Soldier - was one of the best Phase 2 examples I can think of. Even though the final showdown over the Triskelion suffered from a little of the Big Bad Explosions Spectacle that many comic book movies do, it also that incredibly personal and savage battle between hero and his best friend. That’s the stuff of mythology - The llliad,The Epic of Gilgamesh and Star Wars. The most recent Sony Spiderman movie is one of the first non-MCU movies in a while that’s figured out the code. Personal conflicts leading to Cosmic Conflicts = Epic movie-making.

I originally called this last of my year-end posts “Alive in…” because honestly I couldn’t think of a more general or truthful way to labeling the intention of these posts: “I was alive in 20XX and here’s what I saw.” That’s the way it’s seemed to me in the past.
Heading Across by Morgan Crooks (2018)I had a tough year in 2018 but I survived. There are many, many things that happened that made this year difficult but I’m still alive and I hope for a better 2019.

I guess I’ll start at the top. As many of you already know, I’m getting divorced early next year. Lauren and I have gone through rough patches before but at some point this year it became apparent to both of us that we were trying very hard to keep something going that was making us both miserable.

So, in the next few months I will be: selling my house, filing a lot paperwork, transitioning to some other living situation, and figuring out where to go next. In part, although this has been incredibly difficult and I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do, the hard part is over. The change is happening and I am coping with it as best I can. Again, most of you that read these posts already know this and if you don’t the most likely reason is that I have not been fortunate enough to be in your company long enough to explain what’s going on. I’ve kept it off social media because by the time I figured out what was going on, for the most part it was already old news. I sincerely apologize if this is the first time you’re hearing about it and that makes you disappointed. I will buy you a beverage of your choice at your earliest convenience.

There was Arisia. That was a thing in 2018. I’ve already posted a couple of thoughts about the failures at the top and my own struggles to come to terms with what the allegations meant for the convention and my role within in it. I will sum up by saying, the people who messed up are gone and the people replacing them have demonstrated repeatedly that they get the severity of the situation and are working very hard to remedy them. I continue to want to be a part of that and I continue to look forward to Arisia 2019. If they’ll have me, I look forward to starting this process all over again in the summer of 2019 and inviting even more of you to the convention. Arisia will be a far stronger convention this time next year because of the struggles and heartbreaks of this year.

Back one saturday morning in February I made an either or decision. The cafe I meant to go write at was packed and I really didn’t want to write at this other place so I decided to bring my coffee to the Winchester Public Library. While washing my hands in the men’s bathroom I started hearing this screaming coming from outside. The screaming was so loud and alarming, I thought a wild dog had gotten into the building and people were trying to chase it back out. I wanted no part of that noise, so I stayed in the bathroom until it stopped. Coming out, I found that a maniac had attacked a girl with a knife, stabbing her fatally. Someone who tried to intervene was also stabbed. There was blood everywhere and when the emergency response arrived they wheeled the poor woman outside. I saw the knife.

I don’t think this year ever really righted itself after that point, honestly. I didn’t write as much for a while and I’ve never completely shaken a feeling of unease and imminent collapse. Of course I’ve talked and continue to talk with someone about this and it helps.

Talking helps. I think that’s the thing I’ll take away from this year. One life is too big to fit inside of a single person. It’s shared, passed around, given back slightly rumpled. I knew that prior to this year, but this year went a long way to convincing me to try to be as much a part of others’ lives as they are for me. To try in someway to give back to others as much as they gave back to me this year.

I was alive in 2018. We were alive together. Nothing fills me with a more a more intense or durable feeling of well-being than that simple fact. Thank you for all that you were this year and I will try to return all that you gave me as soon as I possibly can.

For my third year-end wrap-up blogpost, I’m going to share the things I’m most glad I read this year. In previous editions to this post, I’ve focused on novels and short stories I read that were published in that calendar year. I’m going to have to have to do something a little different this time.

In years past, one of the motivating factors pushing me to read current writing was my own desire to update and broaden my own writing skills. I wanted to see what was out there and who was writing stuff I wanted to read.

This year I have been involved in this longer project which has changed my focus to a lot of mythology and non-fiction books. I’ve read some books released this year but rather than rank them separately I’ll fold them into what left a mark - literary-wise - this year.

The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander. A couple years back Uncanny Magazine published Bolander’s “Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies,” which was one of the most savage and funny take-downs of a sub-genre (“what does makes those serial killers tick”) I’ve had the pleasure to read. “The Only Harmless Great Thing” is an altogether different beast although it embodies Bolander’s gift for using a breezy and acerbic voice to bore right through the BS. Here, the story alternates between the plight of Radium Girls and an Indian Elephant killed in a useless publicity stunt. The way these stories are explored, through an alternate reality, where one injustice blends in with the other, the sickly glow of radiation and industrial priorities throwing uncomfortable shadows on both.

The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay. I’ve now read enough Tremblay to say this is one of his better books. While not as fiendishly knotty as “Head Full of Ghosts,” this novel is perhaps more immediate and appalling. A couple settles into a wilderness cabin with their daughter, expecting a week of relaxation and family bonding. Instead they are attacked by a group of strangers committed to saving the world from an impending catastrophe. The way this scenario plays out is disturbing, bloody, and inevitable. It’s also a hell of a good read.

Rust Maidens by Gwendolyn Kiste. It’s been my pleasure to put something by Kiste on my best-of lists and monthly review posts for a few years now. Quite simply, she writes stories I like reading in direct but effortlessly evocative ways. Returning to her hometown, Phoebe Shaw begins to wonder if a strange affliction that claimed her childhood friends decades before has returned. Kiste mines the rust-belt decay of the mid-west to describe a concept with one foot in social commentary and one foot in cosmic horror.

Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton. This is the first novel I’ve read by Hamilton and I have to say I’ll be looking for more to read. There’s something at once leviathan and also appealing about this tale. Due to the time-shifting elements of the story, each vignette told by a separate member of a contact team sent to a distant uninhabited world, I immediately began thinking of Hyperion by Dan Simmons. While there are a lot of similarities between the two, Simmons mined literary references to create one of the classics of cosmic horror, and Hamilton hews closer to space opera, albeit Space Opera with an unusually diverse palette of story-telling styles and better-than-average idea extrapolation. First of a trilogy apparently so don’t expect a neat-and-tidy resolution.

Space Opera by Catherynne Valente. I’m sure the genre of science fiction humor did not die with Douglas Adams but for the life of me I can’t think of anything with as much fun and loopy charm as Valente’s Space Opera. Told from a similarly arch and all-knowing narrator as Hitchhiker’s Guide, Space Opera here refers to a trans-interstellar musical competition with incredibly high stakes. Fail to impress the judges of this Eurovisionesque musical sing-off, and your world is destroyed. One catch: every intelligent race which hears Earth’s music agrees, our music is terrible. Another catch: Earth’s only hope, the glam-rock has-beens “Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes,” broke up years ago and is no longer on speaking terms.

With special mention:

This year, in the interest of my ongoing project, I ended up reading a bunch of classics I’ve been meaning to get to for years. One was the “Silmarillion” and the other was “The Once and Future King.”

“The Once and Future King,” is a weird one I think. I think somewhere in the 80s or 90s it stopped getting mentioned in the same breath as “The Lord of The Rings” and “The Wheel of Time” as must-read classics of the fantasy genre. It sits in a strange liminal place in the YA, Serious Adult Literature divide. Add to that the metafictional elements, the sincere but odd philosophical meanderings and you're left with something which checks a lot of boxes without fitting comfortably on any one shelf. Or at least that’s my take on its current reputation. Anyway, having read this lengthy work, I want to put a good word in. T.H. White’s book is amazing and should literally be read by everyone. There is something about this recreation, reimagining and resurrection of the Arthurian Cycle which makes what was good great and what was bad an essential paradox to the narrative. In a similar fashion, I would humbly suggest that the Silmarillion is perhaps not as imposing and dreary as its reputation suggests. To be sure, this is not the Hobbit nor the Fellowship. I’ve heard it described as the Elven Bible, which is both witty and apt but also unfortunate. If what you liked about The Lord of the Rings is storytelling told on a mythic and epic scale, with subtle and astute references to existing mythos then you want to read the Silmarillion, or at least listen to a good audio version of it.

To continue my year-end best-of list, I’ll next move to movies that I really enjoyed this year. As usual, this is not a list meant to be what I think had the highest artistic merit of all movies released this year. I watch a lot of movies but I don’t watch nearly enough to be able to make a statement that sweeping. These are movies I liked a lot and I continued to think about for the rest of the year (however long that might be at this point).
#5: Annihilation. I honestly didn’t think this was going to wind up so far down my list (number-wise). I loved the book this movie is loosely based upon by Jeff Vandermeer, and think that in terms of capturing the mood and translating the basic idea of the story for a wider audience this movie does an incredible job. It is a beautiful, awe-inspiring cerebral science fiction and damn unsettling to boot. It’s not at the top of this list because ultimately it didn’t seize my imagination or hit me with a hammer blow of feelings like some of the others below did. That said - absolutely one of my favorites this year.
#4: Colette. Do I like this film or the complicated feelings I had watching it because of events in my own life? I can’t be sure and in any case what’s the point in trying to disentangle one’s reaction to a film from its merits. The facts on the ground are simple and compelling enough. Keira Knightley gives quite possibly the performance of her career. This is Dominic West’s best performance since the Wire. The story manages to capture an impressive length of the title character’s development from a talented but naive country girl to an artist in full command of her ambition and career. It is wickedly funny in places and heart-rending in others.
#3: Spider-Man into the Spider-verse. This was the year that I became a fervent MCU fan but there will always be room in my heart for works like this movie that try something different with the superhero genre. Set in an alternate reality from Tom Holland’s version of the Web-slinging Hero (really several alternate realities), Into the Spider-Verse is a very clever exploration of this particular mythology. It leans somewhat on the original Sam Raimi trilogy but doesn’t really rest there either, cutting an exciting, fresh, and inclusive universe all its own. This is clearly Sony’s attempt to get back into the superhero game but if they start making movies like this, I will absolutely pay to watch them.
#2: Mission Impossible: Fallout. Simply the best action film of the year even when stacked up against the film below. I love smart and well-crafted action and this film had that in abundance. Tom Cruise was at the top of his game (did you hear he learned how to fly helicopters for the climatic copter chase?), the plot is fast-moving and complicated without being bewildering, the conflict is at once global and high-stakes but also plausibly personal. At some point they’re not going to be able to make Tom Cruise action films any more, this is one of the most compelling reasons to miss Mr. Cruise’s particular set of talents.
#1: Avengers: Infinity War: Ah, Infinity War. I watched this film many times and loved every single time. I think the best and most accurate thing I can say about the film is that this felt like my reward for sitting through all 20 previous Marvel movies. There are elements to this story that makes everything that came before it better and deeper. There is also the simple fact that this movie is a hell of a lot of fun. While not every character gets a fully realized role in the film (how could they) my multiple rewatches have left me more and more impressed how cleverly the whole project ties together. The editing and pacing are top-notch, giving just enough information and emotional heft to sell its many, many action scenes. I don’t know what Endgame’s going to be like but I cannot wait for it.