Review: Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey

It’s not always wrong to love a monster, as long as you love the right one.

Cover illustration and design by Will Staehle

Sarah Gailey is a writer who has undergone a remarkable shift over their career, tilting from a purveyor of breezy, heisty, hippo-filled romps five years ago (NoaF nanoreview here) to someone who has realized that their real strength lies in—whatever the hell kind of monstrous grim horror story we have here in Just Like Home.

I want to pause here to emphasize that when I say whatever the hell kind of monstrous grim horror story we have here, I mean it in the best possible way. I don’t typically seek out horror as a genre, but I’ve deeply enjoyed Gailey’s previous work, and it hasn’t escaped me that the bits I’ve enjoyed best—The Echo Wife (2021) and ‘Bread and Milk and Salt’ (2018) most notably—have been the darkest and grimmest and most monstrous. And it was on the basis of this trust that Gailey has instilled in me that I read this book—a book I absolutely, under no circumstances, would have dreamed of picking up if I had not already trusted Gailey to take care of me.

And they did. I mean, sort of. Wowzers. This is a doozy of a rough ride. It starts out with a dedication--to everyone who has ever loved a monster—and it follows that path all the way down to a surprisingly touching and horrible and satisfying and really bizarre conclusion.

Vera Crowder returns home after a decade away, called back by her mother who is dying and wants Vera to be ready to settle the estate. Once she is back at the Crowder house, the book loses no time in fulfilling the promise of its dedicatory note by introducing three core monsters. The first is Vera’s father, Francis Crowder. He’s no longer around, having died years ago, but it becomes clear quite quickly that Francis was involved in something Very Bad, something that was responsible for the enforced estrangement that has distanced Vera from her family home for her entire adult life. Whatever it was, it made her family into a sort of celebrity among the true-crime loving community. Surfaces are protected with plexiglass to preserve the house in the state it was when the whatever-it-was actually happened. True crime writers and artists and probably rather twisted fans visit the house to spectate on the site of whatever-it-was. But, for all that Vera seems to recognize that badness of whatever-it-was, she is unwavering in her loyalty to Francis. She loved and adored and trusted him when she was a child, and in all the flashbacks to Vera’s childhood he appears as the epitome of a good father. And even now, as an adult, with the perspective of years and maturity and distance, Vera yearns after his memory, treasuring traces of his letters and journal pages in a way that seems quite incompatible with the monster he seems to have turned out to be.

Such a set-up leaves a reader of less skilled narratives expecting that the truth will turn out to be something obvious and predictable—he was actually a sexual predator! Vera must come to terms with the truth of what a monster her father was! Fortunately, Gailey eschews such tedious tropes, and the actual truth of Vera’s father, and Vera’s relationship with him, turns out to follow a much more unexpected path, one that is entirely in keeping with the starting dedication of the book.

The second monster is the house itself, Crowder House. Vera’s relationship with the house is characterized by a kind of childlike, magical trust that goes well beyond nostalgic affection for the times we felt safe and protected as children by virtue of our ignorance of all the things that make us unsafe. When she snaps her fingers four times, anything distressing—strange shadows, unwanted noises—fades. Francis built the house himself, and built it well, designed it to meet his specifications—including the requirements of whatever-it-was that looms over the Crowder family’s downfall. Even when some deeply, unpleasantly weird stuff starts happening—black ooze, moving furniture, traces of monsters under the bed—Vera’s sense of comfort and safety in this house never falters. She’s aware that the house is being weird, but she does not seem as freaked out by the weirdness as the situation warrants, and her desire to get to the bottom of it is connected with her love for her father and her desire to understand the house more than with fear or horror. This was a very good thing for me, as a scaredy-cat reader who doesn’t like to be frightened. If Vera had been afraid, I would have been terrified. Since Vera was not afraid, I was fascinated—and when the true nature of the house is revealed in the final chapter, I was delighted and horrified and comforted in equal measure.

The third monster is Vera’s mother, Daphne, whose monstrous nature is built along much more mundane lines, but no less chilling ones for all that. She has always been a cold and unloving woman, seeming to see Vera as a rival for her father’s love. After whatever-it-was went down, Daphne banished Vera from her childhood home and welcomed the true-crime vultures to Crowder House, capitalizing on the same gruesome whatever-it-was that made it impossible for her daughter to remain there. Even now, as she lies dying in a hospital bed in the dining room, unable to stomach anything except lemonade, she rejects Vera’s attempts at reconciliation, preferring instead the attentions and company of her most recent guest. This guest is an artist in residence, living in a shed in the yard that has been furnished and fixed up for the use of these sorts of guests, leeches who take inspiration from Crowder House to make art that cannot be anything but a truly tone deaf appropriation of sick tragedy. (I suppose a case might be made for viewing him as a sort of monster, a kind of second-hand voyeur whose goal is to titillate the sorts of people who get off on true crime, but his monstrousness, and the kind of love he might inspire, is weak and pale in comparison to the Francis, Crowder House, and Daphne.)

Throughout the book, Vera’s entirely mundane actions—visiting a hardware store, buying a bed frame, heating up frozen lasagne—take on sinister overtones. Everything she does is connected with her childhood, and whatever-it-was that Francis did to turn his family into a pariah, and Crowder House into a magnet for weirdos who fancy themselves artists. Through flashbacks and conversations, we do, eventually learn what that inciting action was, how it is that Vera can still love her father despite his involvement in it, and the secrets that Crowder House holds which she only now manages to uncover. And again, I must hasten to add that Gailey again eschews such lazy, easy narrative tropes as, ‘He had reasons’ or ‘it was all a misunderstanding.’ The revelations make sense, but, as with all of Gailey’s best work, it is a sick sort of sense, that is twisted and dark and weird, and, in the end, equal parts comforting and horrible.

-- 

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 8/10, well worth your time and attention

• Wildly messed up families
• Very well-constructed childhood homes
• All sorts of monsters

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. She is on mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative

Reference: Just Like Home. Sarah Gailey. [Tor Books, 2022].

Review: Can't Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne

 A low-stakes, cosy fantasy that unfortunately fails to pull together the magic it needs to really make the story sing.

A while ago, Elizabeth reviewed Travis Baldree's hit novel Legends and Lattes, talking about what works (and doesn't) in making it such a cosy fantasy story. I predominantly agree with her assessment, but would like to add that, at least for me, there was something in there, some little spark of magic that made me get why this got so big, why people loved it so much. Yeah, it was flawed, especially with regard to the clichés and lack of depth of character backstory, but something about it did just... click.

Of course, when you have something so wildly successful, there are going to be other stories hot on its heels - there are plenty floating around at the moment, some of which so clearly play by play copies that it's hard not to laugh - but one that seems to have caught some buzz of its own is Can't Spell Treason Without Tea, and indie published novel by Rebecca Thorne. It's not quite got the intense upswell of tiktok love that Baldree got, but it's definitely doing the rounds as another great example of cosy fantasy, without seeming like an exact duplicate.

Can't Spell Treason Without Tea follows Reyna - a royal guard to a frankly horrendous queen - and her girlfriend Kianthe - the leader of the mages of the neighbouring kingdom - in their long-hoped-for escape from both of their lives by running away from their responsibilities and setting up a cafe-cum-bookshop-cum-library together in a little town on the edge of nowhere. They need to escape the strands of their old lives, make friends, and figure out how to do this new thing that has been in neither of their skillsets up until now, and see if their thus-far-long-distance relationship can stand up to living, working and simply being together. So much the similar, you might think.

Unfortunately, Thorne does not have that little spark of magic to make it all hang together.

And it's interesting to see this, because so many of the key ingredients in the two stories are the same: sapphic love interests, the desire to open a little shop in somewhere far away, a focus on the baked goods/food in general, the kindness to be found in community, escaping the roles we play in the familiar stories, found family, all that good stuff. But what you get out of the story at the end is very different.

I think one of the key issues in Thorne's work is actually quite simple - we come into the story with the romantic relationship already in place, and nothing about that relationship changes in the course of the book. And I so wanted to like that about it. I wanted to be happy to see a stable relationship in place, and have the story not be about falling in love, but simply being in love and responding to the plot together, as a couple. There are few enough examples of this dynamic in good stories, and it's something I really treasure when it's done well, because well... once they've fallen in love, does that have to be the end of the story? It's not how it is for most people. It's not how it feels like it ought to be. And yet... here... it just doesn't work. I found myself wishing for that same old new relationship story instead because then there would feel like some sort of stake, or change, or tension or... something. Their relationship is nice, but no more than nice, and I wanted it to have a substance it was lacking - a substance that it being the beginning of a relationship would at least paper over with drama.

But it's more than that - not only does the relationship not really change, we also never get the relationship really showcased in how they react jointly to issues. We don't see Reyna and Kianthe strongly pulling together in the face of whatever drama is thrown their way. What we mainly see is them taking turns on whose go it is to be stressed out by something the other person has done. And while that can be incredibly realistic in terms of actual relationship dynamics... by the time we've had the third go around of it in the story, it feels somewhat dull. We know how it's going to play out, and then it does, and it just feels... pointless.

But I don't think this is an inherent flaw with this style of story. I think you can have a good, stable relationship at the heart of a good story, where the actual relationship doesn't change all that much through the course of the story. But it isn't this one.

Some of that is unfortunately also due to the story around it - Thorne has not set things up well to make this strong relationship the core of a strong narrative, simply because so much of what goes on around it is, to be blunt, a bit of a mess. And again, it would be easy to critique this as inherent to the low-stakes that come part and parcel with a lot of cosy fantasy, but I think that would be a mistake. There's actually quite a lot of stakes happening throughout the story here - dragon attacks are nothing if not dramatic - but the prose, the tone and the general emotion of Thorne's writing do a lot of work to downplay them in a frankly strange way. It's a rare story that makes a near death experience feel a bit bland, but this one does it. Kudos, I guess? What the problem mostly comes down to is the general vibe the whole story has of being meandering - there's not coherent plot drive at any point that makes it feel like a joined up, moving story on an actual track towards something. It's just some things that happen. And that lack of cohesion underpins everything that happens, robbing it of the drama or emotion it might have because it doesn't fit into any sort of greater pattern, it just... is.

Again, to compare it to Legends and Lattes, for all that the two are superficially similar in their low stakes, what Baldree does do is give a constant sense that we are building towards something. Viv has her end goal of her coffee shop and all the stuff that happens in the story either works towards her achieving it, is a problem sent that might prevent her achieving it, or is a benefit that comes from the process of trying to achieve it. It all ties together and feels purposeful, tight and has movement, even when the actual events that happen are incredibly small scale, like the bard wanting to come in and play to her patrons.

Can't Spell Treason Without Tea however has cast its net too broad; there are wider bits and bobs that pop up throughout the story that don't really tie back into that central plot core of the café/bookshop dream, and they just serve to rob it of the drive it would need to keep the lower stakes parts of the plot interesting. Thorne is just too interested in too many things. And many of them are interesting things! I really liked the subplot about the two competing political powers from the two countries wanting to be in charge of this nowhere town on the border, and their having to work together to solve a dragon problem. But it felt like a subplot that came from - or frankly was the whole of - another story altogether, and just pulled us away from what CSTWT could have been on its own. 

And we have enough parts like this that we end up with really quite a long-feeling book, for all its 388 pages. Somehow, it feels bloated and stagnant through much of the middle part, without ever even being long enough to have much of a middle part in the first place.

I do wonder if this is a risk inherent with cosy fantasy as a genre. Obviously it can be done well and right - I think both Legends and Lattes and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches have something to recommend them as fun, light, enjoyable reads - but I think when you strip out higher stakes drama, you really have to be conscious of the craft of what's left to make sure it holds together as a story, with a pace people want to read. The pace doesn't have to be fast - not all stories need to be high-speed adventure romps - but there needs to be something that keeps pushing you on to read, to want to find out what happens next, or how, or just to know that it's all happy in the end. There needs to be a feeling of purpose, even at the lowest level, somewhere, that holds it all together as a "story", not a catalogue of some events that happened to some people, and the lower the stakes you strive for, the higher the risk of this failure state becomes. Maybe you fix it by adding a little bit of stakes, as a treat. Maybe you fix it with making the characters incredibly compelling, or their development particularly interesting. Maybe you put in a smidgen of a mystery. Or maybe you just hone everything to a perfect, crisp point so even the lowest of low stakes still feel considered and deliberate. There are many ways to make it work. But in the same way as the failure state of hard sf can sometimes be "textbook", I think there are enough cautionary examples out there now that we can see the failure state of cosy fantasy is just... some things what happened. And that is, to an extent, what has happened with Can't Spell Treason Without Tea.

Fundamentally, it's such a shame, because there's so much in here that could, without a lot of change, have been a fun, light, low stakes bit of fun. It's so close to getting it right. But it hasn't, and given its similarity, what that means is it ends up feeling like just another of those rip-offs, attempting to snag some of the glory from Legends and Lattes' success, when in many ways, it could so easily have been its own, albeit similar, self.

And thus I would sadly say, if you have read Legends and Lattes, don't read this, because it's just... not as good. And if you haven't read Legends and Lattes... well, just read that instead if you want something in this mode, because it does it a whole lot more competently.

--

The Math

Highlights: some amusing subplots with quite funny characters, cosy vibes

Nerd coefficient: 4/10

Reference:  Rebecca Thorne, Can't Spell Treason Without Tea [Rebecca Thorne, 2022]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

The Writer's Guild of America is on Strike

This week, for the first time in 15 years, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) called a strike against the major Hollywood studios. Pencils down. Unlike 15 years ago, however, the "major Hollywood studios" now include names like Apple, Amazon, and Netflix.

A lot of the reporting I've seen this week has been...not great. Not biased or misleading, necessarily, but incomplete, lacking crucial context, and subject to the routine both-sides-ism of many mainstream news reports. So to the best of my ability, I'd like to walk readers who are interested through what this strike is about, how we got here, and why the Guild position that this is a strike about an existential threat to the profession of writing for film and television is in no way a hyperbole.

Full disclosure, while I do belong to a Union, I am not a WGA member. I recently participated in negotiations for my Union and helped achieve a pay raise for other film and video professionals represented by my bargaining unit, and I lived through the 2007-2008 WGA strike. In many ways, that strike cost me a burgeoning screenwriting career. I'll address that later, but the point is that writers are going into this work stoppage with eyes open, aware that there will be personal costs, and yet they go in — in service of the greater good of all writers, and future generations of writers. While I acknowledge the familiar trope of the "Hollywood elite" and the popular characterization of professional artists as entitled or ungrateful or what-have-you, I reject that. This work stoppage underscores why we have Unions at all — this is fundamental E pluribus unum shit.

Let's take a walk together.

This is not about “wages”

Much of the reporting I've seen around the WGA strike has said something along the lines of "Writers are asking for increased compensation." To my mind, this is a meaningless sentence. No Union I'm aware of has an agreement that ties employee compensation to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), so every Union, during every bargaining cycle, will ask for increased compensation to, at the very least, keep up with inflation. In my experience, even during economic downturns Unions will usually get an annual pay bump or contract bonus. This is basic, basic Union stuff. So while the WGA proposal does include a raise to writer minimums, this is not the issue.

There are two core issues behind this strike: 1) The studios have engaged in systematized practices of eliciting free/discounted work from writers while their own profits have ballooned, and 2) the advent and proliferation of streaming services has irrevocably changed the nature of filmed entertainment. This is crucial to understand. We are on a new planet, and while the studios may feel that, sure, the oxygen content is different but everybody who keels over can be replaced, the Union would like to acknowledge that yes, we are on a new planet, but no, writers are not interchangeable cogs to be worn out and tossed away. The difference is that stark, and almost that literal when it comes to the integration of AI.

For context, the last time the WGA contract expired was in 2020. Streaming had advanced out of its infancy, but because of the pandemic, all of the Hollywood guilds decided to punt on contract negotiations and mostly extend the previous contracts. This was entirely justified. Nobody wants to go public with demands for more money for prestigious jobs when millions of Americans are out of work and locked at home. But the reality was that the landscape had already, irrevocably changed from when the previous contract had been negotiated in 2017. So 2023 is a reckoning that has been brewing for essentially the entire lifetime of streaming television.

Free Work

In 2018, the WGA rolled out an initiative called "No Writing Left Behind." At issue was the practice of studios bringing in multiple writers or writing teams to pitch on "open writing assignments." This means the studio bought the rights to, say, Slinky, they want to make a Slinky movie, and they bring in 20 writers to give them detailed breakdowns of what the beginning, middle, and end of a Slinky movie might be, and who the characters are. Young writers would routinely spend 4-6 weeks preparing a detailed pitch and presentation, and after they gave it in person for a studio or producer, they would leave behind a written summary. In practice, many studios and producers would know in advance that they were never going to hire any of these writers. They would instead sift all of their pitches into their ideal Slinky movie, and then hire an A-list writer to write the actual movie, using the unpaid work of all of the job candidates as a backbone. Sounds insane, right? It was regular practice. This exchange from a 2018 episode of the Scriptnotes podcast highlights the issue.

Imagine working 4-6 weeks for free. And then a year later seeing the work you did show up in a movie that makes a billion dollars at the box office. Seriously.

Before the 2007-2008 strike, I was a young feature writer, and the spec market for original screenplays still kind of existed. But without representation, I didn’t have the ability to send a script out to the entire town. Instead, through word of mouth and relationships, I wound up with a number of screenplays in development with some serious production companies, including some with offices on studio lots, run by people who used to run studios. Including with people who went on to win Best Picture Oscars. But the deal was always the same for me: we love this script, it’s almost there, we’d love to bring it in and get it set up, but we’d like you to make a few changes first. For one company, I did 12 rewrites on a feature screenplay. That’s a lot of work for no pay.

This kind of thing happens even with represented writers whose scripts have been acquired by studios, under the guise of what’s called a “producer’s pass.” A studio contract to write a feature film will have one or more “steps” in it, and each step has a definition and a dollar amount attached. Many deals are a “one-step” deal, which means you turn in the first draft of a script, and that’s it. The studio can offer you more to do a re-write, but once the script is turned in, that’s the end of the contractual obligation. So you write your script, hand it to the producer (who isn’t the studio — they are different entities), and the producer says it’s great, change this-this-and-this, and we’ll hand it in. That second pass the writer does through the script is a producer’s pass. You want to hand in the best possible script, the script that’s most likely to get you the opportunity to do the re-write, the one that’s most likely to get the studio’s greenlight, so you polish it up. Or fully rewrite it, you know, depending on the producer’s notes. Or do that 12 times before the producer is willing to turn in that “first draft” to the studio.

At one point, I was doing that on four different original scripts with four different production companies. I was writing full-time, even had a borrowed office that I went to, and I wasn’t getting paid. I was not alone. With the recent shift of original feature films largely to streaming platforms, I’m not sure how prevalent this remains today, but it happens, and at the time it was common practice.

Writing Teams

The other practice that I don't see mentioned anywhere, but was a big problem for a long time, is the idea of "paper teams." Under WGA agreements, a writing team was treated like an individual. So if you and Sharon, who you grew up with, dreaming of making movies or TV shows together, decided to work together as writers, you would count as a single writer. If the WGA minimum for a 60-minute episode of TV was $40,000, you and Sharon would both get $20,000 instead of the $40,000 you'd get if you worked individually.

Fine. That's not tyrannical. It sucks, but you opted to work together, etc. It's not the best, but you buy the ticket, you take the ride. It's important to note here that you two don't actually get that $40,000. You will have an agent (who got you into the room to even be considered for the job), who gets 10%. You will have a lawyer (who made sure your contract wasn't full of termites), who gets 5%. These days, you'll probably also have a manager, who isn't regulated by any governmental agency, and will take maybe 5% or maybe 10%. So from the jump, the two of you are making at best 80% of that writing fee. And then you pay taxes, which we'll peg at maybe 35%. 

 
You are now at $20,800. For the two of you, that's $10,400 each, for however long you worked on that project. You sold a script. It's going to be on television. You are living the dream!

And if that's all you sell this year, you are living below the Federal poverty level.

But it's cool. You get hired onto the show as a Staff Writer, and you get a weekly rate in addition to your episode fee. So that's a little better. But now imagine that there's no Sharon. It's just you, and you've been busting your ass for years to get your first TV job. Everything goes well, and a producer for a successful TV show tells you, "Look, we love your writing. We think you're perfect for the show. We want to bring you in. But there's another writer we love just as much. Are you cool if we say you two are a team? That way both of you get hired, you're both on the successful show, and you both have an on-ramp to the TV career you've always dreamt of?" If you say "yes," you are now working for half of the industry minimum scale rate. But you're on a hit show??

Many writers had to settle for this. They were a team with another writer on paper only, and got paid half of the WGA minimums for episodes, rates, and residuals. (Writers get residuals when their episodes are re-aired, and if the show is sold into syndication. So if TBS buys the rights to re-air the Slinky TV Hour, which was originally produced by Warner Bros. TV, those writers would also get a residual based on the licensing fee.)

So with broadcast and cable television, writers are paid for 1) writing the episode, 2) being staffed on the show, 3) a residual for every time the episode re-airs, and 4) a residual based on the license fee when the show is sold to syndicated TV. You could have a good run with Slinky — work on it for a few years, about 40 weeks a year, with the ability to develop projects of your own during the 12 weeks or so of hiatus, waiting for the next season. As a writer you generally go to set to shepherd the episodes you’ve written through production. You learn how to talk to the crew, to directors, and to get the thing you saw in your head, and wrote on paper, up onto the screen through production and post-production. It's not trivial — it is a difficult skill to master, and it generally takes a number of tries.

Between the open writing assignment pitches and the paper teams, the studios had exhausted a ton of credibility over the last few years, with the WGA stepping in with efforts like No Writing Left Behind and negotiating for the end of paper teams. Then came mini-rooms.

Mini-Rooms

With a few exceptions, TV shows are written by a bunch of folks in a writer’s room. Standard network TV orders were generally somewhere around 22 episodes. It’s just way too much for a single person to write, or even five people. So the writers would work under the direction of the showrunner, who’s also usually credited as the Executive Producer, and that person’s the last say before something would go to the network. In film, since the emergence of the auteur theory in the 1950s, the director is seen as the top creative on a project. In TV, it’s the showrunner, who is also a writer.

These 22 episodes would keep the writing staff busy for about 40 weeks a year, as I’ve mentioned, because the show is still being written even while it’s in production. The writer’s room will assemble, they’ll break major beats of the season, a bunch of story ideas, character arcs, all that, and get some scripts written before cameras roll on the first episode, but from that point on, both operations will run simultaneously. Writers traditionally cycle out of the room to guide their episode on set and through post-production, and then cycle back into the room.

Shows for streaming platforms, as we are all aware, have much smaller orders. Somewhere between six and 13 episodes now constitute a full season or limited series. So when you work in streaming, you no longer have 40 weeks of employment for the year, if you get staffed. And to be clear, just because you work one season on a show, even if it gets renewed, there’s not a guarantee you’ll be asked back for the next season. So even with the network model, there’s a ton of uncertainty and turnover. But writers would often be placed on exclusivity agreements while the future of their show was decided by the network, so they couldn’t take another job, and would just have to wait to see if they were offered the next season.

In previous WGA negotiations in 2014, the terms of those unpaid holds were re-evaluated for the streaming era, because you might have a writer who works twelve weeks on a Netflix show, which premieres a year or more later because the room and the set aren’t running in tandem — the whole show is written before cameras roll — but the writers would be on a hold pending a decision on the series’ renewal, and can’t go find more work. There were writers who found themselves in situations where they wrote for a show that was becoming a huge hit, but were prohibited from going out and finding more work for months and months. In 2020, the WGA negotiated limits to those exclusivity provisions, and established that writers employed in mini-rooms of less than 8 weeks duration cannot be subject to holds of this kind.

Not many people can make ends meet by working eight weeks and then being forced to sit at home for the next few months. And even with the protections now in place, having to go out an try to score your next gig while working your current gig is tough. When I started my video production business twenty-some years ago, I was spending half of my time doing work, and half of my time looking for the next work. It’s not the kind of situation you would expect card-carrying Union members to find themselves in, let alone many members, all the time. But an acquaintance of mine, who is one of the workingest TV writers in town, started out on a network show, and I remember when that series ended, they wound up working on three different shows for two different networks the following year. And they were lucky (and good…very, very good and in-demand).

But the companies are not only totally fine with this arrangement, they want to make it more prevalent. Two common practices today: mini-rooms of low-level writers doing the heavy lifting on breaking seasons and episodes, before a streamer has decided if they are going to move forward with the show, and streamers wrapping the room and sending all the writers, except the showrunner, home before physical production starts.

In the first scenario, the studios get to read what a show will be, how the season will go, and have a good idea about the entire arc of it thanks to the work of junior writers who got paid for just a few weeks. But they didn’t write episodes, so they won’t get any episode fees or residuals if the show does get picked up, nor are they guaranteed a spot in any eventual writer’s room if the network decides to move forward with the show. It’s like the open writing assignments issue all over again, with only a nominal fee paid upfront. So as a young writer, you’re being forced to bounce from show, to show, to show with no kind of stability and no ability to plan, which affects every life decision from where you live to if you will try to start a family. This is not a sustainable model.

And that leads to the second scenario, where only the showrunner is left for the actual production. The showrunner’s job is massive. There are reasons individual writers would take the helm on individual episodes. There are very, very few people in this business who can shoulder all of the responsibilities of a showrunner on a show in production without any additional creative support. It is a recipe for creative and professional burnout, or even worse outcomes. And the industry forecloses its own training ground for the next generation of creators and showrunners. A common refrain I have heard from writers over the last few weeks is that it’s not uncommon for a writer to have been on staff on three shows, and have never been to set, let alone through post-production. Again, this is not a sustainable model. You will have an entire generation of show creators and showrunners who have no experience beyond the writer’s room, and the quality of programming will suffer, subscriber bases will erode, and the pursuit of profits today, as we see in so many other areas, will close the door to long-term success.

This is in many ways par for the course for the new breed of studio: Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc. I recognize that no matter what sector they may operate in, every public corporation in America is actually in the same business — paying dividends to shareholders. But these companies in the streaming space bring with them a number of particular, specific worries.

Tech Companies and AI

First of all, the tech sector is famously Union-averse. So they’d rather the WGA just go ahead and fuck all they way off. They are also not in the TV business, they are in the technology money business. So they will find ways to pay writers less, and they will engineer structural systems to ensure that they can continue driving down the cost of using people to generate content. They will cry poverty as their rationale. The WGA estimates that their entire package of demands will cost the studios somewhere around $450 million. To put that in perspective, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, David Zaslav, made nearly $250 million in 2021 through salary, stock, and other compensation. Apple is the most valuable company in the world, with somewhere between $50 billion and $900 billion in cash-on-hand alone and a total market cap of almost $3 trillion. Amazon is worth over $1 trillion, as well (and for what it's worth, Amazon's initial foray into entertainment creation was to ask aspiring writers to send in scripts for a "contest," and the grand prize would be -- not money, no -- Amazon would produce your script and monetize it for themselves). We’ve probably all heard that Netflix has been losing subscribers and value, but they also have earned a reputation for throwing tons of money at stupid projects. They have also earned a reputation for hiding their metrics.

You now have a situation where the residual rate for streaming is a fraction of the rates for traditional broadcast and cable television, no way to verify how many people are actually watching anything (I guess we just have to take their words for it…), vertically integrated employers who both produce and distribute the content, so no more licensing fees and residuals, business practices designed to employ the fewest number of people for the shortest period of time, like Uber drivers for “streaming content,” no more pipeline for professional development, and employers who also happen to be developing AI tools designed to write things. This all adds up to an environment, just like the WGA has said publicly, that aims to make the profession of writing for film and television a gig economy.

If you don’t think the studios will try replacing a mini-room with ChatGPT, and then giving whatever it spits out and the executives sift through for their preferred iteration to a small team to actually produce the scripts, or even just to a showrunner to lead it through production, then I think you haven’t been paying attention. Remember famous tech start-up Napster? Their entire business model was facilitating the transfer of art they didn't pay for, millions of times a day. This is tech's jam. I mean, check out the companies' response to the Guild’s proposal on AI:

An annual briefing on how they're going to be eliminating more writing responsibilities? Nah.

So be wary when you hear the kind of “one side says this, the other side says this” reporting like in this NPR excerpt:

And be wary when you see phrases like “the Guild also complained…” where the verb choice is doing a lot of work, none of it benefitting the writers:

Consider, instead, this LA Times roundtable quote from Liz Tigelaar, showrunner of Little Fires Everywhere:

"Every single writer." This is, in fact, an existential crisis for the future of professional writing in filmed entertainment. Media framing that suggests otherwise is misleading at best. And…might be worse than that.

For my own story, what happened to me after the 2007-2008 strike? I had bad luck. I had gotten a manager right before the strike at a boutique management company, and it went under during the strike. My new manager was also out of work. Three projects of mine were at companies that also went under, or downsized the executives I was working with during the strike, so those projects no longer had homes. The fourth project was at a big company that was no longer seen as a solid investment for its corporate parent, and was shuttered a few months later. I tried to get some of the projects set up again, but in the end, I just ran out of time. When the strike was called, my first child was about nine months old. I had a family, rent was going up, and we ran out of runway. I had to pivot back to the kind of production work I was doing before I moved to LA, and that was kind of that for screenwriting.

That’s the future the Guild and its members are trying to fend off for everybody. A future where the only people who can write, the only voices that make it to our screens, are those of people who can afford to not work, who won’t run out of runway, or people that don’t have families and can commit to working 16-20 hour days as the showrunner on a limited series with no other support.

That’s a future none of us should want.

Posted by Vance K — Emmy-winning producer and Hugo Award-winning co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together. Union member.

Knights of the Zodiac is an exactly acceptable fight movie

Many punches are exchanged by all

One doesn't go to watch a fight movie expecting great themes. One wants visually interesting choreography and physically believable acrobatics. By that standard, Knights of the Zodiac just about delivers.

The plot is the same you remember from the 1986 anime series: the Greek goddess Athena has reincarnated as a human girl, and a team of supernatural fighters is recruited to defend her from the other gods and their minions. Through the ensuing brawls, our protagonist, the Pegasus knight Seiya, exemplifies the virtues of tenacity, loyalty and courage. This setup is simple enough for any viewer to follow through the 114 episodes of the series. Seiya and his brothers-in-arms meet progressively stronger enemies, grow stronger in turn, and keep the world safe. There isn't much else to the story.

Where the anime stood out was in its art style. There are only so many ways you can draw ambiguously teenaged soldiers punch the guts out of each other, so these fights are colored with ethereal halos and the ocassional psychic attack. Of course, the most visually interesting part of the show was the way armors could rearrange their pieces around a knight's body; this detail was a small bit of Transformers-like appeal that kept the continuous punches from getting tiresome.

Unfortunately, this movie adaptation discards what made the show visually unique. Its armors look generic, lackluster, boring. This is not entirely the movie's fault; it is inherently hard to translate the stylized expressiveness of hand-drawn shōnen animation into the real faces of human actors. Compare these two images, supposed to represent the same character:

With obviously digital choreographies rendered in videogame quality, Knights of the Zodiac fails to provide the thrills of the cartoon. Seemingly aware of this shortcoming, what the movie lacks in artistry it attempts to compensate for with drama. The family dynamics of the girl destined to awaken as the goddess Athena hint toward themes of motherhood, abandonment, resentment, and broken trust, and their dramatic resolution is just adequate enough. We're not here to complicate the human experience; we're here to watch sparks fly.

However, we've watched these sparks before. It's bizarre that Famke Janssen was cast for this movie and put in a costume that calls back to her days as Jean Grey, when the heroic climax of Knights of the Zodiac retreads the ending of X-Men 3, only with less stabbing. This obvious reference is too distracting and detracts from the supposed seriousness of the moment.

On the whole, Knights of the Zodiac is a not-too-bad adaptation, with fight scenes that keep the eyes busy and the mind switched off. It leaves space open for sequels, because of course everything must now, but in its own right, it is just about OK.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Nanoreviews: Unraveller, The Mimicking of Known Successes, Tread of Angels

Unraveller by Frances Hardinge [Macmillan Children's (UK)/Amulet (US)]

Clara's review of Unraveller already covers most of what makes this book so great: Frances Hardinge always brings intriguing magic and thoughtful moral complexity to her particular brand of YA, and her latest is no exception. Set in a world where humans live alongside the otherworldy denizens of the Wilds, Unraveller focuses on Kellan, a boy from a community of weavers who has been cast out after gaining the uncontrollable ability to unravel both fabric and curses, and Nettle, a formerly cursed girl, as they travel the country of Raddith unravelling the various curses that its inhabitants have placed on each other - ranging from mildly inconvenient to the truly horrible. The curses themselves are gifted by the Little Brothers, spider-like fae inhabitants of Raddith who also take a keen interest in ensuring its technology doesn't develop too extensively. When someone is given a "curse egg", they have the ability to lay a curse on someone they feel has wronged them, but the punishment for even having a curse egg - let alone using it - is extremely steep, even before the emotional cost and stigmatisation for the curser is taken into account.

We follow Kellan and Nettle as they try to discover the source of a curse on Kellan, which appears to be making his abilities stronger and more unpredictable. Along the way, Hardinge sketches out the various impacts that living with this particular brand of otherworldly justice has had on Raddith's society, and what, if anything, can be repaired after a curse has come to pass. As tales of fae morality being imposed on humans go, this is a seriously good one, and Kellan and Nettle's mildly prickly friendship forms a wonderful core around which the rest of the narrative unfolds. If you haven't read any Hardinge before, this is a great place to start.

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older [Tor dot com Publishing, 2023]

It feels appropriate to be talking about this book (again, following one of my Nerds of a Feather colleagues, this time Arturo) at a point when many of the genre fans I know are grappling with the definitions and purpose of "cosy" fiction. Perhaps this will become an essay for another time, if this fan ever gets her proverbial shit together. The Mimicking of Known Successes, billed as cosy Holmesian fiction, divides much of its time between university campuses and windswept train platforms and comfy carriages, but perhaps not in the location you'd expect: this is the human settlement on Jupiter, to which the survivors of humanity fled after Earth became uninhabitable, with habitats floating in the, uh, clouds of our biggest planetary neighbour and connected by a planet-spanning train network. We follow Mossa, an investigator looking for a missing academic, and her ex-girlfriend and classical geographer Pleiti, who Mossa approaches to help with the investigation into her colleague. Together, the two uncover a deeper conspiracy surrounding this disappearance, with implications for Earth's future and the people who get to decide on it.

Part of the cosiness here is aesthetic: Older does a fantastic job of creating a colony that seems comfortable and interesting and dynamic, even as we see characters grapple with the historic loss of Earth and the limitations of their current home. The novella opens in a remote settlement at the end of the railway line which Mossa refers to as a "piece of grit", but it's a piece of grit with a surprisingly nice pub and pleasant residents, not some desperate, impoverished outpost. People are doing OK for themselves, and for each other, on Jupiter, even if some are more OK than others, and it makes for a very different atmosphere than the gritty "everyone is one step away from a cold, unpleasant death" aesthetic that pervades most colonisation stories.

Beyond that, though, The Mimicking of Known Successes provides a perfect mix of personal stakes with wider implications for humanity's future, with Pleiti and Mossa rekindling their relationship and grappling with what this case means for their respective careers while also piecing together the answer to the mystery, and its full stakes. At the heart of those stakes is the academic debate for Earth's future, which is introduced to us as an interdepartmental war between different geography disciplines (finally, geography gets the respect and centrality it deserves!), and effectively revolves whether recolonisation of Earth should take place with full understanding of Earth's former ecosystem and its recreation, or whether humanity should be trying to build something new and adjust as they go along. I would read an entire Mars Trilogy-style doorstopper featuring characters arguing about the ins and outs of terraforming along these lines, but here it's just one strand in a much shorter narrative. Moreover, it's inextricably tied to Pleiti's position as a classicist (the "understand everything first" position) working in an academic institution alongside colleagues who, for various reasons (such as "being men") do not give her views the respect she feels they deserve.

Mimicking of Known Successes has a great ending to its mystery and its romance, but it also leaves the door open for more stories in this world - which we are getting! I, for one, am very excited.

Tread of Angels by Rebecca Roanhorse [Saga (US)/Solaris (UK) 2022]

I haven't seen as much about this Weird Western as I'd expect given that it's Rebecca frickin' Roanhorse, but if you're looking for a diverting adventure into a frontier town of angels and demons (hey, "angels and demons" is a bingo square for Reddit's r/fantasy bingo this year!) you could do much worse than this novella. The setting here is a mining town where the ostracised "Fallen", descendants of rebel angels are put to work mining Divinity (created from the body of Abaddon, because what else would it be) under the watch of the virtuous "Elect". Celeste is a Fallen, but she has been raised by her Elect father and only recently reunited with her sister Mariel, who spent her childhood with the pair's mother. Now Celeste is trying to keep her head down, but when Mariel is accused of murdering one of the settlement's leaders, her sister is given just 24 hours to prove her innocent, aided only by her demon ex-lover Abraxas.

Standing between Celeste and her sister's freedom are an entire town's worth of deep secrets, not least those of her own sister, and most of the action here is about one woman coming up against an entire system which is stacked against her, not least because of the baked-in presumption of moral goodness in the angelic Elect (their leaders are literally called Virtues!) and the stigma against the Fallen. The adventure here is firmly in "satisfyingly tropey" territory, and while the end result is a story that didn't make a huge lasting impression on me, it's certainly an enjoyable read, with depths of worldbuilding that would lend themselves to further stories in this setting. 

POSTED BY: Adri Joy, Nerds of a Feather senior editor, dog owner, aspiring mermaid, having an increasingly weird time about her own biography

This version of Peter Pan & Wendy goes straight for the symbolism

Think happy thoughts

The tale of Peter Pan has been adapted so many times that it has even had space for a totally forgettable prequel, a plainly atrocious sequel, and a teen romance remake. At some point it was going to be Disney's turn to revisit this story. So far, Disney has been happy with intentional mediocrity when producing live-action copies from its catalog of animated classics, but their new Peter Pan & Wendy is something else. Like the best adaptations, it's most interesting where it's not faithful.

You know this story. You've watched and rewatched it to the point you can quote it. It was read to you as you were getting ready to sleep, and you will read it to your children. But if we imagined that something new could be said with these characters, if they still had more story to offer us, what would they say? In this version, it turns out that Captain Hook has a deeper, more complex past that sets him as Peter's dark mirror image. It's not too difficult to add this layer to the character; Hook's relationship to Peter has always been one of exact contrasts. Whereas Peter is the immature male archetype that only lives for pleasure, Hook is the jaded male archetype that is incapable of pleasure. Both run away from life, both dread the passing of time, for dramatically opposed reasons. Here the theatrical tradition of casting the same actor to play both Hook and Wendy's father is abandoned, because Peter's enmity with Hook is not treated as a Freudian murder-of-the-father-figure fantasy. Instead, Hook is something more interesting to consider: he's the man Peter is terrified of turning into.

Peter Pan has the rare quality of being a fairy tale created in the 20th century, when the world had already seen diesel engines and electric light bulbs and the Suez Canal and heart surgery and Morse code over radio waves, but still within the timeframe when no one had heard of mustard gas, transistors, lasers, plastics, antibiotics, and nuclear fission. It was a transitional period, the last time anyone could conceive of a viable British Empire. Neverland is the last fantasyland that British children would know just before all fantasies were shattered. British children would go on to discover others; there would come Middle Earth, and Narnia, and Discworld, and (ugh) Hogwarts, but those places are colored by the bloodshed of the 20th century in a way that Neverland is not. Much like Peter himself, Neverland is in a suspended state, spared from time and its ugliness. With its cheerful pirates and grateful Natives, it's the last place where the British Empire could keep thinking of itself as innocent.

In that timeless bliss of ignorance, Peter and Hook turn from discrete individuals into symbolic forces. As tends to occur in the great hero/villain pairs, they made each other into who they are: it was Peter who cut off Hook's hand, and it was Hook who chose to bring his pirates on a lifelong hunt for Peter. Fittingly for two archetypes defined by their relationship to pleasure, the duel where Hook loses his hand can be read as an allegory for castration, with the hook being a malformed phallic substitute capable only of pain.

None of these ideas is new. Critical analyses of the psychological subtext of Peter Pan have repeatedly described their dynamic as almost constituting one dual character, as foreshadowed in the early scenes where Peter tries to chase and subdue his shadow self. What makes this movie unique in that regard is its willingness to openly explore that subtext. In the scenes where Peter and Hook discuss the hurt they still feel over their past connection, one can imagine either of them as talking to himself across time. If the two halves are not reintegrated, they will remain stuck in their endless battle, doomed to live as unfinished facsimiles of masculinity.

As a character who refuses to grow up, Peter is difficult to write for. In modern Western storytelling we expect the hero to learn and evolve. But Peter is a character type like those of Greek tragedy: when we meet him, he already is who he'll always be, and his flaws drive the events even more than his conscious choices. This movie finds a clever solution to the problem: as in the original text, Peter declines to settle in the real world to live with real parents, but once back in Neverland, he sets for himself a new mission that may challenge his self-image and even pull him out of his stubborn infantile ways.

The changes made to the story are not as drastic as one may suppose. They draw from what was already present in the text and extrapolate from reasonable conjectures critics have made for decades. Perhaps it could be argued that making all these ideas explicit flattens the content of the story and leaves little for the viewer's mind to chew on, but the visual symbolism makes up for what is lost in abstract depth. (One great example is the hideout where Peter lives with the Lost Boys, a cavern that Wendy enters in a shot deliberately filmed like a descent to the underworld, which unifies the themes of Peter's unconfessed longing for a mother with the hideout serving as a substitute womb.)

The counterpart to the choice of giving Peter an opportunity to grow at the end of the story is the choice to make Wendy a coequal protagonist. In her case, the moment of growth comes sooner: she realizes that ceasing to grow would be a form of death, so instead she gives herself the power to choose her future. The rest of her journey consists in trying to teach Peter that the same path is open to him.

There's a curious irony in a remake that presents such a strong case against staying anchored in the past. It may be a sign that Disney is finally learning to retell its classics in an innovative manner. If so, that's a happy thought to keep your spirits lifted.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

 A deeply bizarre and grisly love story about freedom and choice. And an alarming amount of murder.

My initial response to finishing this novella was "what the fuck did I just read?", and I stand by that assessment... but in a positive way. It's a deeply peculiar book, and one that's somewhat hard to describe when dragged outside the confines of the story.

It's a reimagining of the little mermaid, but... after the story...

A mermaid and a plague doctor go on a journey, both haunted by the darkness of their pasts...

What if the really important part of the little mermaid was the murderous revenge she got on the entire kingdom...?

Creepy woodland child-cults are never a good sign! Do not trust them, even if you're functionally immortal...

All of these are perfectly reasonable ways of talking about the story. Essentially, we meet up with a mermaid after her offspring have devoured the kingdom of the prince who married her in her revenge, when a mysterious plague doctor sort of kind of invites her to come with them, wherever they're headed to, seemingly unphased by the total carnage she's caused. On their way to wherever they're going, they come across a group of children hunting one of their number in the woods, a chance encounter that leads down a dark and bloody path to the plague doctor's history, and the mermaid's future.

But even this does not give a true sense of what the story is, because it's one of those stories which simply refuses to be confined to its plot. It's not about what happens, but how. And the how is vividly, lusciously, darkly, incredibly gorily, sumptuously and intensely overwrittenly, in the best possible way. It is a story I devoured, simply and precisely because the prose was delicious.

It goes in hard right from the first paragraph, which includes:

I pause. In the penumbra, the fading dusk gorgeted by coral and gold, you could be forgiven for mistaking the ruined house a ribcage, the roof its tent of ragged skin. The foundation, at a careless look, could pass for bones, the door for a mouth, the chimney a finger crooked at the sky, or at a wife who would not be a saviour.

And if anything, it only goes in harder as the story goes on.

This is the core of this novella's appeal in my opinion - if you like that level of intricate prose construction (and don't mind the grisly nature of the story), you will probably enjoy it immensely. If, however, you don't, or prose just isn't an interest or priority for you, this might be one that passes you by.

What's interesting about that, at least for me, is that I tend to prefer my stories to be character driven. And this isn't, really. We see a lot of the characters, but they are often opaque to each other and to us. We see through the mermaid's eyes, hear her thoughts, and yet even then she is remote and cold. Which is by design - she's meant to be alien, a creature living in our world but not of it, born of the chilly abyss of the sea, and hungry and uncaring and vengeful from it. So we see her, we spend the time growing to know her very well, and yet she remains cut off from us emotionally, by her very being. Where the prose is overwritten, the emotions are understated, the stuff of hints and shared looks leading to shared understanding, left for the reader to parse or not.

And as we progress through the story, it becomes clear how deliberate this is.

Because while it isn't all of what the story is, or is about, some of it is the story of someone who has been stripped of agency, of personhood, and who has exacted her revenge, but is still living with the legacy of what was done to her by a man who wanted to own her. Who told stories about her that misled the world about her nature. Who cut out of her tongue so she couldn't tell her own stories to counter them. So the fact that our access to her is at arm's reach feels especially fitting. We will know her as she wants us to know her, and no more, because she deserves that choice now.

We know the plague doctor, at least at first, at an even further remove. They speak little, and their emotional responses are something of a mystery to the mermaid, and so they are to us, through her interpretation. And while we never really get a deep sense of them through their words and perspective, we do begin to see the plague doctor as a deeply emotional person through their actions. It is more their story than the mermaid's, really, though it is told through her eyes.

But the two go together, as both of them are people who had their choices taken away from them, and were made into something else by people who had the power to do what they liked. Where the mermaid responds to this with bloody vengeance, the plague doctor has chosen kindness and healing, at least for now. What they feel about the mermaid's choices remains hidden to us, behind their mask and the mermaid's incomprehension of human feeling.

And so at its core, it's a story of two people who've suffered the greatest of injustices against their persons, and how they choose to live beyond that, how they respond to it, and how they relate to each other in the wake of their shared and different experiences. Because whatever emotion there is or is not in how we see them each through the mermaid's eyes, what there plainly is is fellowship, right from the start, and that link is such an appealing one, such a lovely one, that it keeps you invested through all the grisly body horror that comes with it.

I'm normally too much of a wuss for this kind of darkness, but in this, I didn't mind it. The writing transforms it into something beautiful at key moments, and the core dynamic between the two main characters makes it worthwhile even when it isn't beautiful. It makes a very strange, dark story, all told, but one whose wonder lies in that strangeness. It ends up with the feel of some old, dark fairy tale we don't tell anymore, where nothing is explained, a lot of people get murdered, and if there's any moral at all, it's not a gentle one. But sometimes those are exactly what you want, and this does it brilliantly.

--

The Math

Highlights: beautiful, intricate, grisly prose; unapologetically brutal protagonist

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy, [Titan Books, 2023]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea