Girl Genius for Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Jun. 25th, 2025 04:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
For our 25th anniversary, Krissy and I were planning to go to Iceland and spend a week or so there, getting to know the country. Then the pandemic happened and we ended up spending the anniversary at home. Fine, we would just reschedule Iceland for our 30th anniversary. But then I was invited to do a convention in Iceland last year, and we tacked on an extra five days after the convention to do all the things we planned for our 25th anniversary. This left our 30th anniversary suddenly unscheduled.
Fortunately, I had a backup: I had always wanted to visit Venice, not just for Venice itself, but also, goofily, for the fact there is a Church of the Scalzi there, and a Scalzi Bridge, and, heck, why not, even a Scalzi restaurant. Honestly, how could I not go? Krissy indulged me, and on the week of our anniversary, off we went.
We spent a full week in Venice, which appeared to surprise the people there when we mentioned the fact to them. Apparently Venice is usually a couple-days stop at most, tourists grimly marching themselves from the Doge’s palace to the obligatory gondola ride to wherever else they went before they were hustled back onto a bus or cruise ship and sent off to whatever the next destination was. The fact we were in town for a whole week impressed the locals. They seemed to appreciate that we wanted to take in the city at a leisurely pace.
Which is what we did! We did have two days where we had a private guide to give us a walking tour of the city (including stops at the aforementioned Doge’s palace, St. Mark’s basilica and the Scalzi church) and to take us over to Murano to watch glass being blown. And of course we rode in a gondola, because, hey, we were in fact tourists, and not afraid to do touristy things. But most of the days there we woke up late, wandered around the city and maybe took in a museum or church, and then ate at a bunch of restaurants and hung out in a bunch of bars, mostly on the water, and watched the city go by in various boats. Venice, as it turns out, is a lovely city to just be in. Krissy and I mostly did a lot of not much, and it was pretty great.
Mind you, Venice is one of the most overtouristed cities in the world, and as a visitor you can certainly feel that, especially on the weekends, in the space between the Rialto Bridge and the Piazza San Marco. It’s Disneyland-level crowded there. I can’t complain overmuch about that fact without being a full-blown hypocrite, but we did understand that our role in town was to drop a lot of money into the local economy in order to balance out our presence. We were happy to do that, and, you know, to be respectful of the people who were helping to give us a delightful vacation. By and large the Venetians were perfectly nice, did not seem to dislike us merely for being Americans, and in any event we got out of town before Jeff Bezos could show up and make everyone genuinely angry. No one blamed us for Jeff Bezos, either.
One of the things I personally genuinely enjoyed about Venice was just how utterly unlike anywhere in the United States. Yes, I know there are places in the US where they have canals; heck, the Venice in California was once meant to have them all over the place. But it’s not only about the canals. It’s about the fact that no matter what street you’re going down, what bridge you’re crossing or what side canal you’re looking down into, parts of everything you’re looking at have been there longer than the US has been a country, and none of it accommodates anything that the US would require. There are no cars in Venice, no Vespas, not even any bikes. If you’re going anywhere, you’re walking or going by boat. It’s very weird to have no road noise anywhere. You don’t realize how much you get used that noise, even in a rural area like the one I live in, until you go some place without it. I mean, there are boats with engines. The sounds of internal combustion are not entirely gone. But it’s dramatically reduced.
As mentioned, we stayed in Venice for a week, which I think is probably the right amount of time to be in the city. We didn’t see everything it had to offer, but then we weren’t trying to; if and when we go back there will still be new things to explore. But I did get to check off visiting the Scalzi Bridge, Church and restaurant, and the last of these was where Krissy and I had our actual 30th anniversary dinner. It’s was pretty good. I did not get a discount because of my last name. Alas. Here’s picture of the interior of the Church of the Scalzi:
Slightly more ornate than the one in Bradford, Ohio, I admit. But in defense of the one in Ohio, it’s much easier to dust.
Would I recommend Venice to others? Definitely. Spend more than a couple of days. Be respectful. Spend a decent amount of money. Have an Aperol Spritz. If you’re from the US, enjoy the fact there is nothing like it in the American experience. Maybe avoid the Rialto Bridge on the weekend. And there you have it: an excellent Venetian vacation. I hope you’ll enjoy yours as much as we enjoyed ours.
— JS
Published on June 24, 2025
Published on June 24, 2025
Screenshot: Lionsgate
Published on June 24, 2025
Image: UKTV
Published on June 24, 2025
Published on June 24, 2025
Credit: A24
Credit: A24
Do you hear a rustling in the trees? Have you caught glimpses, just out of the corner of your eye, of mysterious robed figures in places where you wouldn’t expect them? Does the quaint legend in the small town you’re visiting feel like it might be just a little too real?
If you have answered yes to any of these questions, steel yourself, because you just might be in a folk horror story. And if you are, things are bound to get stranger.
Folk horror as a genre has a long history, but the term dates back only to the early 1970s. It blends folklore with horror elements, and can be found in film, literature, television, and even music. And if you’ve been paying attention over the past seven years or so, you may have noticed that it’s everywhere.
I first became interested in folk horror when I saw Ari Aster’s hit film Midsommar (2019), where a trip to Sweden for a summer solstice festival takes a stomach-churning turn. The film gets a lot of credit, as does the New England Puritan psychodrama of The VVitch (2015), for propelling the folk horror renaissance. But in many ways it’s a spiritual successor to a line of films that began in the 1970s—in particular the British, pre-Nicholas-Cage version of The Wicker Man.
But the folk horror trend hasn’t been confined to movie theaters. Television has gotten in on the fun recently with shows like Yellowjackets (2021), with its haunted forests and girls driven to cannibalism, and British miniseries The Red King (2024), with its island-bound cult. And of course there’s always literature—you know there’s a folk horror renaissance underway when Lucy Foley, an author best known for blockbuster releases of stylish whodunits, delivers The Midnight Feast, a take on her usual tales that features threatening ravens, robed figures, and a forest full of possibly-hallucinogenic wicker creatures.
But the current interest in folk horror is not only nothing new, it fits into a pattern that goes much further back than the 1970s. From the turn of the twentieth century onward, there’s been a waxing and waning fascination with folkways in popular culture which, given the current state of the world, has arrived right on schedule.
To understand why, it’s helpful to look at the Industrial Revolution. The rise of mechanized labor and mass industrialization was famously a time of economic upheaval, but also social change, with the rise of labor unions and the women’s suffrage movement, as well as subtler, but no less profound, shifts. As the average worker in the United States and parts of Western Europe (especially Britain), went from someone doing agricultural labor in the country to someone doing industrial labor in the city, individuals and communities struggled with what that meant for them—and what, in the sudden rushing tide of progress, might get swept up and washed away before they had the chance to save it.
“Saving it,” whatever “it” may be, became a quest, or even a career, for many. Folklore studies, which had only come into existence in the early nineteenth century, saw a boom in popularity, with Folklore Societies established in Britain and America in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Researchers like Olive Dame Campbell traveled through Appalachia collecting and documenting traditional folk music, partly motivated by the fear that, as people left the rural mountain communities for work elsewhere, the songs would be lost.
This era also saw some of the first folk horror literature, although it wasn’t described as such. Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, in some ways the Great Late-Victorian Novel, has had many and varied layers of metaphor ascribed to it, but at its core, it follows the story of Jonathan Harker, a cosmopolitan urbanite who goes into the Transylvanian woods, where strange and ancient things are lurking, and wanting to devour him.
Because that’s what folk horror is so often about: the new, the man-made, the controlled, encountering the old, the overgrown, the unknown, and finding that its powers still hold sway. And in times of struggle, or confusion about one’s place in the world, that thought can comfort as much as it can frighten.
The second great folk revival, after the turn-of-the-twentieth-century folkloric boom, came in the late 1960s through the 1970s. This was the era of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez in the world of music; of macrame, embroidery, and handicrafts in fashion; and of The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, and The Blood on Satan’s Claw on the silver screen.
It was also a time of profound social change. The postwar period had cast its eyes towards social justice, with the Civil Rights movement and the second wave of feminism. At the same time, the Vietnam War and protests against the draft sparked physical conflicts, while the Cold War was steadily simmering in the background. Bob Dylan was being entirely literal when he wrote “The Times, They Are A-Changin’,” and in this time when social roles, race, gender, and peoples’ relationships to their government were being questioned, people looked back, for comfort, for guidance. In the case of folk horror as opposed to folk music or handicraft-inspired fashion, they looked back to scare themselves, as a way of understanding what they were experiencing.
Which brings us to today. They say that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” and the current rhyme is suspiciously similar to the chanting of a mysterious group of cloak-wearers in a folk horror film.
We are arguably in the latter portion of a second Industrial Revolution, this time powered not by a boom in manufacturing, but by the rise of the internet. Once again, the idea of “what does the average job look like” is up for questioning, down to whether or not that job is done outside the home, or remote in your kitchen. Social upheaval is afoot, with questions about immigration, LGBTQ rights, women’s health, and more at the forefront of political life. And so, once again, we turn to things that remind us of what we imagine to be a simpler time. And we wonder.
But what really is the “horror” in folk horror? The fascination with folklore and perceptions around pre-Industrial life isn’t confined to horror. Arguably, trends like the paleo diet, with its promise of eating like our distant ancestors, are part of them, to say nothing of Taylor Swift literally titling one of her mega-release albums “Folklore.” Even the infamous Labubus, those tiny totems causing stampedes in shopping malls, are initially based on Nordic folklore. Labubus aren’t scary, though; at least, not intentionally. Folk horror, however, has transcended the general folk revival to become its own recognized genre, and that begs its own questions. Why does this interest in a past, real or imagined, that could arguably be meant as a comfort, turn so quickly and so fiercely to the frightening?
There is the traditional explanation: that we’re drawn to folk horror because we want to be reassured that the world isn’t changing faster than it can handle. At the end of Dracula, Jonathan Harker is victorious. But at the end of the original Wicker Man, and of the 2006 remake, the policeman is consumed by the flames. And while the Count is defeated, the Translyvanian woods remain, offscreen, with all the strange things they contain, that neither Harker nor the reader can forget. Thomasina signs the book; the Midsommar festivities end with a new initiate willingly joining. And these are all celebrated among folk horror enthusiasts as great endings in the genre; the alternative would not satisfy.
Maybe the horror in folk horror is our own power to dominate and tame the world. Maybe the reason that technological revolutions and folk horror revivals go hand in hand is that being the most powerful thing in the world is, inherently, a terrifying amount of responsibility. And we turn to these stories as a way of reminding ourselves that not everything is within our control, no matter how hard we try. And that, whatever we do to it, the Earth is still watching.
But what if there’s another side to it?
What if folk horror is something we’re drawn to, not as a reassurance, but as a reminder? Whatever happens in nineteenth-century Transylvania, seventeenth-century New England, or a fictitious Swedish commune, at the end of it, the book closes, and the lights in the theater turn back on.
It’s become fashionable to describe our flawed present as a “cyberpunk dystopia.” A popular meme claims, erroneously, that a modern office worker has less leisure time than a medieval peasant. And yet, when we look seriously at the past, it’s almost overwhelming to see a veritable conga line of bigotry, violence, poverty, and disease.
Maybe that’s why we’re drawn to folk horror. Because when modern life is exhausting, and overwhelming, and threatens to burn you out, as it inevitably does for everyone at least some of the time, folk horror will be there. It will be the fanged creature half-glimpsed in the overgrown hedges, teeth sharp and gleaming. It will look us in the eye, and wink, in a way that says “hey, it beats the alternative.”[end-mark]
The post Folk Horror Is Having a Moment — And That Makes Perfect Sense appeared first on Reactor.
We’re gettin’ the band back together! And this time, they’re gonna rock the political climate in foreign countries. Author Travis Kennedy is bringing you the best of hair metal bands with espionage on the side in his debut novel, The Whyte Python World Tour. Follow along to see how his Big Idea will shred… your expectations of 80s bands!
TRAVIS KENNEDY:
In my debut novel, The Whyte Python World Tour, the CIA recruits a hair band to foment regime change in the Eastern Bloc at the end of the Cold War.
That’s not the big idea I want to write about here, though, and I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t dream it up on my own. There’s nearly a century of evidence that the CIA has meddled with popular music to influence public sentiment all over the world. More specifically for my purposes, there’s a longstanding rumor – made popular by the fantastic podcast “Wind of Change” by Patrick Radden Keefe (2020) – that the CIA wrote the hit Scorpions song “Wind of Change” after the Berlin Wall fell, to rally Eastern Europeans into harmony with the Western world through the power of soft metal.
By the time I heard the podcast, I had been thinking about writing a book in the world of glam metal for almost twenty years – and even earlier on some level, since I was a little kid in the 80s watching MTV even though I wasn’t supposed to. Eight-year-old Travis saw metal guys as zany party animals without a care in the world. The cool kids in the back of the bus. In more recent years, I read autobiographies and biographies and watched documentaries from the era, believing all along that there was a story to be told there that could be bigger than the standard “Behind the Music” drama about how everything was great until it all came crashing down.
I didn’t entirely know why the genre captivated me so much. The entertainment factor never let me down, of course; a lot of their adventures are objectively funny. These borderline-feral Muppets were suddenly swimming in fame and fortune, and they didn’t have any of the tools to handle either. That was a good place to start. But I did learn quickly that my childhood impression of the glam metal bands was all wrong.
Because more often than not, these guys were not the cool kids in the back of the bus. They were misfits. Outcasts. They had abusive and tragic childhoods.
They usually weren’t popular. They did badly in school. People had no expectations for them. And they didn’t have much expectations for themselves. But they had this one thing they loved and were good at.
Music.
And while they were misfits on their own, when they found each other and played together, they unlocked these superpowers. The castaways and dropouts – with their massive hair, and makeup, and spandex – dominated the zeitgeist of the back half of the 1980s. It was one underdog story after another, like the Mighty Ducks or the Bad News Bears.
There it was: that simple but true BIG IDEA, proven over and over: that when misfits and outcasts find their communities, they can accomplish really big things together.
By the time I listened to “Wind of Change,” I knew already that metal dudes shared a lot of hidden traits. They were resourceful. They were adaptable. They were willing to live in circumstances that most other people weren’t. And they were constantly underestimated.
Those are actually really good qualities for spies!
So, while the concept was still hilarious to me, it was also weirdly kind of plausible. Now I was off and running, and a fascinating thing happened – the big idea kept finding different ways of telling itself in the story. Without spoiling too much, the band Whyte Python is not the only group of underdogs in this book; and whether it’s their Agency handlers or the people living under dictatorships a world away, the spark of music becomes a pretty powerful connector for disparate outcasts who go on to accomplish big things together.
Make no mistake, The Whyte Python World Tour is a satire. But always present is the belief that art – even if that art is party metal, played by feral Muppets – has immeasurable power when it’s shared. When it means something to people, and helps them find other people who have the same feelings about it. You’re doing that now as fans of this website, and every time you give a recommendation for a book or an album or a movie you loved. Participating in culture means that you’re a part of a thousand little movements, inspiring others to seek new ideas and talk about them with each other and maybe build something amazing out of it.
So on behalf of the band, let me be the first to say: welcome to the revolution.
Tell your friends.
The Whyte Python World Tour: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop
Author Socials: Website|Band Website|Facebook|Twitter|Rikki Thunder’s Facebook|Davy Bones Facebook|Spencer Dooley Facebook|Buck Sweet Facebook
Published on June 24, 2025
Art by Dan Rossi
Art by Dan Rossi
Even in the earliest stages of editing the anthology Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, I knew the book would open with an epigraph from the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia—where he argues that “the future is queerness’s domain.” Or, put another way: something about queerness is always “not yet here.” We’re always thinking, writing, and living our way toward it. I’ve got a tattoo of this phrase, not yet here, under my left collarbone; it’s a reminder that there are future possibilities out there somewhere, no matter how rough things get in the present.
Speculative fiction, too, is grounded in thinking about what has been, what is not, and what could be. In sf, we imagine our way into other worlds and other futures! Given that, I think there’s a natural connection between queer/trans life and culture and speculative fiction itself—it’s in those horizons of possibility. It’s in futurity: how we think about where we’re at right now and where we might be able to get from here, for better or for worse—and also how we imagine making communities, surviving together, and maybe even flourishing (despite all the forces working to the contrary).
This sense of “queer futurity” was the guiding theme for Amplitudes, and it was on my mind constantly as I selected and edited the stories gathered within it. However, “queer futurity” is also a theme that runs through many, many other queer speculative stories—including these five books and films I loved, each of which deals with queer pasts/presents/futures while offering imaginative possibilities for continuing queer and/or trans existence.
But isn’t this a second-world fantasy novel, you may be asking? Yeah, it is, and that’s why I think it’s required reading for thinking about “queer futurity”—and also for seeing what stories can really do when we’re elbow-deep in imagining other possible worlds than these. To put it bluntly: Metal From Heaven absolutely fucking rules. I rarely get as excited as I did while I was reading clarke’s deeply-grounded yet expansive constructions of queerness, gender, anarchism, and revolutionary resistance. This book is toothsome, horny, hallucinatory, sometimes-nasty, and what I like to call ‘compassionately unforgiving’ in its visions of what surviving the world together as queer and trans people can require.
What was it that hooked me first, though? There’s a scene, early on, where a young Marney receives the recently-deceased Tita’s black suede jacket—smelling of cigars and lilac perfume—and climbs onto a lurcher (picture a motorcycle) behind a big, thick, strong woman who inspires immediate, passionate admiration. Marney then rides away with her and her people, becoming part of a new world: an underground world, a resistant world, an utterly queer world. If you know, then you know, and it only gets better from there.
At a place known only as the Palace, isolated in the desert, the narrator tends to an elderly queer man named Juan Gay as his death approaches. Juan has a project he’s passing on to the narrator, alongside his own life-stories: reclaiming the queer histories contained within the sexological publication Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. He also wants to hear the narrator’s life-stories too: how he came to be at the Palace, what happened around the time when they originally met while institutionalized, and more.
Storytelling and strange queer temporalities form the core of Blackouts, particularly in the dreamlike and unmoored weirdness of the Palace. Sometimes the novel explores the queer past as another country, another world, which we must at turns imagine and invent and uncover from where it’s been so thoroughly redacted/destroyed/obscured. Sometimes it’s about the awkward and painful present of living your life post-dislocating-disaster, arriving in the form of a breakup or a relapse or a recurrent trauma—and sometimes it’s about the potential queer futures we find in stories, or in our relationships to one another, especially cross-generational ones that show us where we’ve been… and where we might still go.
I haven’t even gotten into what Torres is doing with the physical object of the novel, either, what it’s like to hold in your hands. The inclusion of archival photos, the pages from Jan Gay’s Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns with the thieving homo/transphobic doctors’ notes all blacked out, the choice to print with brown ink instead of black… it was electrifying to experience as an artist. But I’m going to cheat and borrow from the blurb as my closing pitch, because they’ve said it best:
“The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures? […] A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.”
If it’s more short fiction you’re after, McCombs’s Uranians was one of my favorite sf collections of the last few years. Whether we’re talking about the titular novella “Uranians” or the other stories in the collection, like “Laguna Heights” and “Toward a Theory of Alternative Lifestyles,” the quick-witted prose and cleverly speculative conceits of each piece are a delight. Sometimes an upsetting delight, when the push and pull of a well-crafted queer story that tangles with trauma and desire leaves you feeling wrung out after—but still, a delight nonetheless.
The novella that anchors the collection is also, perhaps, the piece that resonates most with the idea of “queer futurity.” Sure, it’s a science fiction piece set on a generation ship. But more to the point, it’s shot through with ideas on the strange nature of queer temporality (plus so many intertextual references)—which is made even stranger by the closed world of the ship. Furthermore, the protagonist’s entanglement with arts like opera and poetry drives the story just as much as the dramatic conflicts with self and other that unfold throughout, so it’s got layers. (And I would be remiss not to mention that I also appreciated, very much, how McCombs handles queer eroticism and desire in this collection.)
Want even more short stories? Then I’d recommend picking up the Neon Hemlock anthology series We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction. Series editor Charles Payseur works with a guest editor for each volume—including Ryka Aoki (forthcoming), Darcie Little Badger, Naomi Kanakia, CL Clark, and L.D. Lewis—to put together a collection of (as it says right there in the title) the best queer and trans speculative short fiction from previous year.
One thing I really appreciate about this series is that the stories always come from a variety of publications. I’ve usually only read a handful of them before picking up the new volume. In the 2023 collection Darcie Little Badger edited with Payseur, there are stories from well-known magazines like Fiyah and Lightspeed… but also stories from original anthologies published by both big and small presses, like Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology and Worlds of Possibility. The editors have provided a much-needed service by drawing queer and trans sf from venues where it might’ve otherwise slipped readers by during the previous year—and then presenting it to us anew, like a gift.
I can’t ignore how much of my time has been occupied by excellent queer/trans film and television recently, so I’ve got to include Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow too. Our leads, Justice Smith and Jack Haven, deliver an intimate, agonizing portrait of coming-of-age shaped by trans longing and suffering alike. Schoenbrun draws techniques from experimental film and horror movies, combines them with the emotional resonances of ‘90s queer-kid fandom for shows like Buffy, and weaves from those threads an affect-driven narrative about what it fucking feels like to be trans in a world designed to crush it out of you. I saw this one in theaters—twice, despite and because of the fact that it wrenched me into my constituent atoms each time—but watching it in a dark living room with your phone tucked away somewhere else and no distractions will work too.
I Saw the TV Glow crosses between fantastical sequences and the characters’ lived realities, often oriented around their shared attachment to the YA fantasy tv series The Pink Opaque (a theme which appealed deeply to me as a lifelong sf/f nerd). Owen’s young adulthood, which is the centerpiece of the film, will strike a painfully relatable chord for many trans audiences. And maybe it hits most intensely for those of us who also grew up in the ‘90s, but I hear tell it lands just as hard for younger and older folks. While I left the theater afterwards feeling skinned, just raw to the air, I also felt more whole—more hopeful, even. The film constantly gestures toward more survivable possible futures for its leads. Maddy, for example, offers a glimpse of how some young trans people do get away: they run from their families, they bury themselves in the earth and experience a kind of death, the “freefall of utter precarity” that transition can feel like… and then come back new, reborn, ready to try and help an old friend onto the same path toward possibility.
But ultimately it was the street chalk-drawing that opens the smothering final section of the film, reading “there is still time,” that really got me. What a powerful message of queer resilience and futurity—that it’s never too late: for transition, for queer becoming, for a life that doesn’t suffocate you into nothingness. Honestly, those are some of the most hopeful words I can imagine. Even within the uncertain space where the film leaves us, Owen still has time, and the Pink Opaque is always out there, waiting on the horizon.
Though all five of these stories are pretty different from one another—and from the ones in Amplitudes, too—they all share that resonating belief in queer and trans futurity, queer and trans potentiality.
Always, so long as you’re alive: there is still time.[end-mark]
The post What If Things Were Different? — Five Works of Queer and Trans Futurity appeared first on Reactor.
Vanessa Ricci-Thode is joining us today to talk about her novel, The Dragon Next Door. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Tollar’s got a stolen dragon egg, and that’s the least of her problems.
Tollar is a hero for hire who just wants to deliver a stolen dragon egg to its kin and get on with her next adventure. But when the dragon hatches, imprints on her, and refuses to leave, Tollar enlists her pyromancer best friend and neighbour, Beenala, to help keep the dragon alive. Tollar’s chaotic life exacerbates Beenala’s overwhelming anxiety, and being stuck at home leaves Tollar feeling stifled and unwanted. To make matters worse, in order to hide an entire dragon from local and foreign hostile factions, Tollar must risk exposing the truth behind her unprecedented power as an aquamancer and face being chased out of the only home she’s ever known.
When Draminedes, perhaps the worst spy in the world, lets slip that the people Tollar stole the dragon egg from are much worse than she thought, Tollar and Beenala realize their home is in danger. Now Tollar needs to stop making herself the outsider and Beenala needs to find some courage so they can team up with this unlikely ally to save everything they love, including each other.
This sapphic ace romantasy is complete with mutual pining and odd-couple energy and is full of marginalized characters out living their best lives and having adventures while being nurturing and supportive in their relationships, including bonds between humans and dragons.
What’s Vanessa’s favorite bit?
This ace romantasy is a queer light in the dark, a book about community and resilience and fighting for justice and who and what you love. It’s got big flashy magic, a charismatic MC with a big personality, and lots of zippy banter, but the scene-stealer and my favourite bit is, without a doubt, the baby dragon.
The book itself is a queerifying and genderflipping of odd-couple action movies I’d been watching, but the dragon, Bale, was always going to be central. To poorly quote the Dude, she “ties the room characters together, man.” I’ve got an anxious homebody (Beenala) and an audacious wanderer (Tollar) and I needed to keep the latter in one place for a bit and pull the former out of her comfort zone. So naturally I gave them a baby dragon to take care of.
The dragons in my world are intelligent, sentient creatures with some anthropomorphic traits and a capacity for human languages, and they aren’t cuddly and small. This one hatched already nearly the size of a house. Good thing one of the characters is fearless and the other is a pyromancer. There are fires to put out and rules to lay down about who and what is and isn’t food. “The dog is not for eating!” (Don’t worry, no dogs are ever harmed in my books.)
One ARC reader described the dragon as “a fire-breathing puppy with zero survival instincts” and this is the truest thing I’ve ever read.
Tollar stole Bale’s egg from the baddies and rushed home to Beenala where she knew they’d be safe (and oh my how she was wrong). So in addition to having to teach a house-sized, fiery toddler with forearm-length teeth some manners, they’ve also got to hide her from their neighbours and extended family.
Bale is the emotional core of the story, the thing that brings Beenala and Tollar together in more than friendship, but she’s also very much the comic relief chaos muppet. From terrorizing
the local monkey population, to “helping” with the farming, to threatening that maybe some people are for eating, Bale is good for a laugh. But she’s not a baby forever, and there’s a point where she becomes A Force. She represents everything that’s at risk, but she also offers a solution. She becomes a powerful part of a community fighting back for justice.
So that’s why Bale the dragon is my favourite bit, and I hope she brings joy to others who read the book!
LINKS:
BIO:
Vanessa is a Nebula-nominated indie author wading through stigma, disabilities, and imposter syndrome to support other authors at every stage of their career and increase visibility to the indie community. She’s been deeply involved in her local literary scene for well over a decade, currently as co-founder and events director of KW Writers Alliance where she runs an annual local author book fair as well as regular writer drop-ins. She has seven fantasy novels published, including four books of the Fireborn series and her ace romantasy, The Dragon Next Door.
She’s a Halloween enthusiast and tree nerd who loves dogs, astronomy, and travel. If she’s not hibernating, she can be found in her butterfly garden, achieving her final form as a garden witch. She lives in Waterloo (no, the other one) with her spouse, daughter and very good dogs.
My friend George sent me this picture of me and Krissy — which I had been literally trying to find for years! — where she and I were at the wedding of my friend Clete. I was a groomsman, which is why I’m dressed up; Krissy is dressed up because, you know, wedding, you’re supposed to look nice. I seem to remember the wedding taking place in 1995, although I might be off by a year; either way, this is us, roughly 30 years ago.
And here we are now!
30 years is a lot of time and also, not nearly enough time with someone if you love them a lot. Fortunately for us we get to keep going. Not gonna lie, though, I miss my hair. Krissy’s still looks spectacular, of course. That’ll have to be enough for the both of us.
Also, hello, we’re back in the United States now. Venice was lovely. I’ll post some more pictures of it soon.
— JS
Published on June 23, 2025
Neal Shusterman photo credit: Gaby Gerster
Neal Shusterman photo credit: Gaby Gerster
Scythe author Neal Shusterman has another adaptation in the works. This one is based on his short story, “Dawn Terminator,” and is being developed by Netflix under the title, Dawn.
“Dawn Terminator” was first published in 1996, but was updated and included in his short story collection, MindWorks: An Uncanny Compendium of Short Fiction, which is set to come out in November 2025. In the short story, the sun has deadly solar flares that a family in a plane heading to Alaska, tries to survive.
“The shorter the piece, the more economical you need to be with story and language,” Shusterman told Publishers Weekly about his approach to writing shorter works of prose. “You have to get a lot across in a very limited amount of time. I find short stories can be a palate-cleanser between larger projects. Also, sometimes I have an idea that just doesn’t feel big enough to be a novel, so I get to explore it in a story. Both forms are rewarding in different ways.”
The screenplay for the Netflix adaptation is being written by A Minecraft Movie scribes Neil Widener and Gavin James. Dylan Clark Productions, the company that backed Carry-On and Bird Box, is producing.
The project is still in its very early days—the script isn’t finalized yet—so no news on casting or if/when we’ll see the adaptation make its way to Netflix.[end-mark]
The post Neal Shusterman’s “Dawn Terminator” to Get Adaptation at Netflix appeared first on Reactor.
Published on June 23, 2025
Credit: Disney
Credit: Disney
Since its founding on June 22, 1970, Walt Disney Archives has housed numerous artifacts and memorabilia from Disney projects. Within its walls, archivists collect, preserve, and prepare some for exhibition.
We see all of this, and more than a few Easter eggs, in an almost five-minute clip largely shown from the point of view of an artifact: a tiny figurine of Pinocchio.
The video’s summary describes what we see as we follow the puppet who turned into a boy:
From a bustling research room to a treasure-filled storage facility, our plucky hero journeys through the storied spaces where Disney history is collected and preserved. But when the item reaches a formidable digital preservation lab, chaos erupts—sparking a wild chase through the Archives’ cavernous warehouses. At last, the object finds its rightful place: a new home where it will be protected and celebrated—and be reunited with a long-lost friend.
Is this video a little cheesy? Yes! Is it also kind of cute? Also yes! There are an innumerable number of worse ways to spend five minutes, so go ahead and give the video a watch. As the quote from Walt reminds us at the end, “I hope we never lose some of the things from the past.” This Pinocchio figurine is one of those things.
Check out the clip below.[end-mark]
The post Follow Pinocchio Through This Tour of the Walt Disney Archives appeared first on Reactor.
Published on June 23, 2025
Screenshot: United Artists
Feeling the Monday Blues? Have I got the cure for you. Introducing one of my recent favorite artists, 6arelyhuman (pronounced barely human)!
Imagine the most hype, energizing club music that makes you want to take shots and dance till the sun comes up. No, not Kesha, but pretty close in vibes.
I came across 6arelyhuman on TikTok last year, and their song “Faster N Harder” ended up becoming my number one song on Spotify for 2024. I listened to 6arelyhuman’s songs on repeat daily for months last year, and I’m still loving them. They self identify as a freaky alien here to create absolute bops.
Here’s the song that started my obsession:
Don’t you just wanna dance your pants off?! Well let’s keep the party going with some others I really love from them:
And technically on this next one they’re only featured and it’s actually Odetari’s song, but I still really like it:
So, are you feeling amped? You simply can’t be in a bad mood after you listen to this music, trust me, I’ve tried.
Don’t forget to check 6arelyhuman out on Spotify, and let me know which song was your favorite in the comments. Have a great day!
-AMS
Published on June 23, 2025
Credit: Disney/Pixar
Published on June 23, 2025
Image: Starz