Well, this is the end of 2017, and thank fuck for that. I’m very busy with working on various Best of 2017 lists and looking forward to 2018 stuff that will be published over the next week or so, and 2017 seems intent on ending by giving me an absolutely splitting headache. I’ll be spending the rest of the night popping aspirin and probably going to bed well before midnight, but in the meantime, here are the last links of the year.

Twelfth Planet Press is going to start publishing novellas!

Foz Meadows has a breakdown of a writing contest scam that decided to target writers on Christmas Day.

There’s a good interview at Lightspeed with Louise Erdrich about her new book, Future Home of the Living God.

At Tor.com, Michael Livingston explains why A Knight’s Tale is his favorite medieval movie.

Also at Tor.com, a pretty comprehensive list of sci-fi and fantasy movies and television to look forward to in 2018.

Electric Literature lists 46 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2018.

Smugglivus continues (and will keep going until January 7):

• 8 Special Episodes That Remind Me There’s Still Magic in the Holidays by Michi Trota
• Smugglivus Recs by Jim C. Hines
• Geeky Games for the Holidays
• Memory, Music and Joy: Pixar’s Coco
• Media Comfort Foods by S.L. Huang
• Looking Ahead: A Comfort List for 2018 by Barbary Morais
• Books That Got Me Through 2017 – Juliet Kemp’s Smugglivus Post
• Games of Smugglivus with Andrea K. Höst (You can also check out Höst’s influences and inspirations for her Touchstone Trilogy.)
• On Other People’s Achievements

There’s a new Doctor:

RIP 2017.

There’s so much I hate about this time of year: the financial stress, the societal pressure to conspicuously consume, the fraughtness of family gatherings, the cold and (paradoxically) the fact that we never get decent snow in Cincinnati in December. However, I’ve come to kind of love Christmas Eve. I’ve finished all my holiday baking and candy-making, so I’ve got an apartment full of delicious sweets. the shopping is all finished, and it’s almost time for my favorite part of Christmas: wrapping presents (this year’s theme: brown paper packages). Christmas wrapping means I’m FINISHED. With everything! The whole messy business! Also, I am very good at wrapping things really beautifully, and I love doing it.

So, Christmas is a bit of a mixed bag for me, but I’m glad it’s almost done with for the year. The rest of this week will be taken up with getting together my end-of-year wrap-up stuff, Best of 2017 lists and a bunch of New Year’s resolutions that, let’s be real, I’m probably mostly going to forget about sticking to halfway through February. I’m also doing some last minute short fiction reading, and I would love recommendations, so tell me what short stories and novelettes you read and loved in 2017 in the comments or shoot me an email at sfbluestocking (at) gmail (dot) com!

Speaking of short fiction, A.C. Wise has a fantastic list of her favorites of 2017, with links to a lot it that’s free-to-read.

Civil Eats lists their Favorite Food and Farming Books of 2017, just in case you wanted to make some 11th hour additions to your TBR like I did.

You can hit Literary Hub to check out the Best Reviewed Sci-Fi and Fantasy of 2017.

Space.com lists the Must-Read Space Books of 2017.

The next issue of Uncanny Magazine is out on January 3, but you can already see it’s lovely cover and read its table of contents.

Book Riot already has a list of 24 Amazing Feminist Books Coming Out in 2018.

If you’re excited about next year’s sequel titles, B&N’s Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog lists 30 of them.

There’s a new Naomi Novik book coming out in 2018: Spinning Silver, which I’m hoping is based on her story of the same title that appeared in last year’s The Starlit Wood. I can’t wait to have a copy of it to look beautiful on my shelf next to Uprooted.

Also coming up in 2018, and quickly (January 3!), is Season 11 of The X-Files, which I am kind of unreasonably excited for, even after the decidedly mixed quality of Season 10. This coming week I’ll be preparing, possibly with the aid of these lists of Gillian Anderson’s favorite episodes and/or this Mulder and Scully Ship Guide over at Syfy.

It’s just one more sleep til the Doctor Who Christmas Special and the introduction of Jodie Whittaker as the 13th Doctor. In the meantime, I’ve been enjoying this Doctor Who yule log video:

It’s been a good week for takes on The Last Jedi, now that the initial hype has died down:

• “Star Wars’ Vice-Admiral Holdo and Our Expectations for Female Military Power”
• “The Last Jedi has no respect for nostalgia — and that’s a good thing”
• “‘Star Wars’ Has Created a Villain Too Real for Its Own Fantasy Universe”
• “The Last Jedi is the A Feast for Crows of Star Wars”

All instances of “icicle” will now be replaced in my vocabulary by:

#FolkloreThursday shared an erotic folktale for the holidays: The Yule Buck and the Girl.

I learned that women in the mid-1800s used to catch on fire and die horribly with pretty alarming frequency. Not a “fun” fact, but interesting.

The Book Smugglers’ Smugglivus celebration continued:

• A Very Anyta Christmas Menu
• Seven Young Adult Fantasy Books You Shouldn’t Miss from 2017
• Top Five Accidental Favorite Contemporary YA Novels of 2017
• “Everything in the World Wants Something” a Crown of Stars Short Story by Kate Elliott
• List of Things That Got Me Through 2017
• Stephanie Burgis’ Comfort Reads
• Karen Healey’s Smugglivus
• Rediscovering Re-Reading with Forest of Glory
• Reading Romance in 2017: Happily Every After Afters as Resistance and Respite

This week was mostly eaten up by holiday baking and finishing up my last bits of Christmas shopping. I’m relieved to be finished (although I’m still waiting on one ordered item and a replacement for a book that arrived from Amazon with a creased cover). Still, I’m done! I’m DONE. I might, if I feel like it this week, hit the pet store to get some cat treats or something for the cat, but honestly I’ve even worked hard to plan meals for the week and do grocery shopping so I should barely need to leave the house at all unless I want to between now and Christmas. Which is good, because this week is going to be filled with candy-making and even more baking.

I had intended to read a lot more this week, while waiting for oven timers to go off and stuff, but after racing through Tansy Rayner Roberts’ excellent new novella, Girl Reporter (out 12/19 from The Book Smugglers: pre-order here), I’ve been moving a little more slowly through Ada Palmer’s newest Terra Ignota novel, The Will to Battle (also out 12/19, from Tor). Girl Reporter is a delight, cover-to-cover, and the perfect way for the Book Smugglers to end their first year of novella-publishing. I’ve loved Ada Palmer’s series since the beginning, but I have to admit it’s a very dense, heavy read for this time of year, so I’m only about a quarter of the way through. I’m hoping to finish it and have a review out by Tuesday, but we’ll see.

Also, I got to see The Last Jedi yesterday. It was everything I wanted it to be. I didn’t cry nearly as much as I expected, but I am nevertheless full of feelings about it. I’ve got enough to do this week already that I’m not going to commit to writing about this movie, but if I do, expect ALL the feels and ALL the spoilers. Also, porgs are great. Don’t @ me.

I really enjoyed Jeannette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun when I read it a few weeks ago. This week she was on The Skiffy and Fanty Show to talk about the book.

The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog has the cover reveal for European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, the sequel to Theodora Goss’s excellent 2017 novel, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter.

There’s a new story by A. Merc Rustad at Lightspeed: “The House at the End of the Lane is Dreaming”–plus an Author Spotlight.

I highly recommend “Maiden, Mother, Crone” by Ann Leckie and Rachel Swirsky on this week’s Podcastle.

And “Haunted” by Sarah Gailey at Pseudopod. I read this story last year in Up and Coming, and found it really memorable. You can read the text of “Haunted” over at Fireside Fiction.

Uncanny Magazine has posted the guidelines for submissions to their special dinosaur-themed issue.

At Lady Business, forestofglory takes a look at The State of “The State of Short SFF.”

Electric Literature has a list of 9 Essayists of Color You Should Know About. There were a couple of new-to-me names on here.

There’s going to be a new She-Ra: Princess of Power on Netflix!

The Book Smugglers’ Smugglivus celebration continues apace:

• A Very Fantastical Librarian Smugglivus
• A Smugglivus Post by Reading the End’s Jenny Hamilton
• The Best Ladies in Fantasy for 2017 – A Vlog by Kitty G
• “A Slow and Satisfying Love Affair With Blade Runner Pays Off” by Fonda Lee
• Smugglivus Bonanza With Aliette de Bodard
• All the Reasons I Love Killjoys (That Aren’t Spoilers)
• Five Favorite Feminist Podcasts
• Five Book OTPs I Shipped Hard in 2017

And, finally, there’s a full-length trailer (at last!) for the adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation:

I’m very close to changing the title of these posts to “Depression Blogging and Things I’ve Read On the Internet Lately,” since that’s what they mostly consist of, week after week. Mental health-wise, things always feel like they’re getting better, which beats the alternative, I suppose, but at this point there’s no telling when that feeling of better is going to manifest as actually being better, in terms of productivity. This time of year, it’s not helped much by the fact that I have actual things to do. This week was a bit of the calm before the storm, and I still felt busy. The week to come is going to be filled with holiday baking and candy-making and the last of my Christmas shopping and planning Christmas dinner and seeing the new Star Wars movie and crying about Carrie Fisher.

I’d like to say I’m still hopeful that I’ll be able to get some writing work during the next couple of weeks, but at this point, I think I’ll mostly be wrapping up some end-of-the-year last-minute reading before I move along to reading 2018 work. I will have some end of the year “Best of” lists, and I’d like to publish some book reviews, but I’m trying to end 2017 by being kind to myself. It’s been a rough year, and I’ve been beating myself up for months over falling so far behind on so many things I wanted to accomplish. I think I’m ready to quit that now and start making plans for how to do better and be happier about it next year, so that’s what I’ll be doing. Also, waiting for Black Mirror Season 4 to show up on Netflix (December 29!):

This week, I took a break from longer books to read a pair of novellas. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s crowdfunded Prime Meridian was not at all what I expected at first, but it’s a story that grows in the telling and I was well and truly in love with it by the end. It’s only available to Indiegogo backers so far, but it will be getting a broader release on July 10, 2018, and it’s not too early to pre-order it. I also read Winterglass by Benjanun Sriduangkaew, a dark fairy tale that borrows some motifs from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen to tell a story of three women engaged in a war with each other. It’s utterly gorgeous and full of Sriduangkaew’s characteristically lovely prose and sharp wit. There’s also a great interview with Sriduangkaew over at The Future Fire this week.

There’s a new collection of essays out from Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters. You can read excerpts from it in several places:

• At Brain Pickings: Ursula K. Le Guin on Anger
• At Literary Hub: Who Cares About the Great American Novel?
• At Electric Literature: Ursula K. Le Guin Explains How to Build a New Type of Utopia

Today, I cracked open the next book in Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series, The Will to Battle, which hits shelves December 19. This week, at the Tor/Forge blog, Palmer wrote about “Other Story Ingredients Beyond World, Characters and Plot.”

Fonda Lee’s Jade City is (still) one of my favorite books of 2017, and it’s ALSO still on sale for $2.99. This week, Lee talked about 6 Books at Nerds of a Feather.

There’s an interview with The Odyssey translater Emily Wilson over at Book Riot.

Literary Hub has a two-part interview with Samuel R. Delany:
Part One | Part Two

Prism Stalker is officially the first new comic of 2018 that I’m super excited for.

Marvel’s Jessica Jones has a Season Two release date (March 8, 2018) and a trailer:

This year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award was announced, but it’s sadly ho-hum compared to some previous years.

The Fandomentals’ Carol Awards for Game of Thrones Season 7, however, is a wild ride.

Tor.com has you covered for this month’s new releases:

• December New Releases in Fantasy
• December New Releases in Science Fiction

I keep thinking of checking out The Orville, but every time I start getting close, I see something like this list of 6 Misogynist Messages From The Orville, and it reminds me of why I don’t like much of anything that Seth McFarlane does.

This list of 50 Free Printable Bookmarks makes me wish I used bookmarks more often instead of index cards and receipts.

Pantone’s 2018 Color of the Year is Ultra Violet:

This was the first full week of Smugglivus, and it was full of great guest posts over at the Book Smugglers:

• Martha Wells’ Books of My Year
• Eric Smith’s Young Adult Sci-fi and Fantasy Novels That Gave Me Hope in 2017
• Standing Under the Mistletoe With Interlude Press and Pene Henson: It’s All in the Kiss
• Rachel Neumeier’s 10-ish Favorite Books
• 2017 Book Yelling With Sarah Gailey
• Carlie St. George’s Pop Culture Recs for the Dark Days
• The 50th Anniversary of The Prisoner – Paul Weimer’s Smugglivus Celebration

I loved this piece at Tor.com about The Witches of Winter.

Apex Magazine is now available in print!

The second half of Uncanny Magazine #19 is available online. My favorites from this issue:

• “How to Survive an Epic Journey” by Tansy Rayner Roberts
• An Interview with Tansy Rayner Roberts
• “The First Witch of Damsara” by Zen Cho
• “The Designs of Designer Baby”  by Millie Ho
• “Apathetic Goblin Nightmare Woman” by Cassandra Khaw
• “The Secret of NIMH” by Mari Ness
• “Monitoring My Mind: MST3K and Me” by Natalie Luhrs
• “Counting the Stars on One Hand” by Mallory Yu

I’ve been wild about Vina Jie-Min Prasad since I read “Fandom for Robots,” but this week I learned about a couple more stories she’s published in 2017:

• “The Spy Who Loved Wanton Me” at Queer Southeast Asia
• “A Series of Steaks” in Clarkesworld

Rachael K. Jones’ “The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant” is my favorite short read of the week. As the author says, “we don’t have enough deranged cannibal she-cyborgs running the food trucks in our fiction.”

I think I’m going to give up on optimism about productivity for the foreseeable future, as I believe the reality is that the combination of ongoing struggles with depression, holidays, and US political garbage is just not very conducive to doing anything but baking, eating too much, and trying to chill the heck out (with mixed-to-poor success, frankly).

It hasn’t been an all-bad week, though. I’ve read a lot. Finished A War in Crimson Embers by Alex Marshall on Monday, then knocked out Spencer Ellsworth’s second Starfire book, Shadow Sun Seven, over the next couple of days. And this morning, I finished the most recent issues of both Uncanny and FIYAH, so I’m caught up on the magazines I read regularly. I even took the time earlier this week to watch that awful new Christmas movie on Netflix, though I still haven’t gotten around to watching Godless.

This coming week, I’m reading some novellas–Benjanun Sriduagkaew’s Winterglass, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Prime Meridian, and Girl Reporter by Tansy Rayner Roberts (coming soon from Book Smugglers Publishing)–and probably getting around to Godless while also getting super excited about getting to see a new Star Wars soon. Also getting hyped about: Black Mirror season four, which Netflix needs to at least give us a release date for before I burst from anticipation.

I am kind of into strange holiday traditions. Last year I learned about Yule Cats (see image at top of post) and Caganers. This year, I found out about the Mari Lwyd, and you should, too, because it involves a festively decorated horse skull, singing, and bothering one’s neighbors.

Jade City author Fonda Lee did a reddit AMA, and it was great. Buy her book.

Shadow Sun Seven author Spencer Ellsworth was interviewed by Paul Semel.

Ellsworth also popped over to Terribleminds to share 5 things he learned while writing Shadow Sun Seven.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia started a Twitter thread that amassed over 200 recommendations for SFF books by writers of color.

The Wertzone’s Cities of Fantasy series went to Asshai.

The Book Smugglers just published a collection of Octavia Cade’s essays on Food and Horror. There’s even a giveaway that’s going on for 5 more days.

Catherynne M. Valente’s next book–Space Opera–has a cover!

When asked to “name a badder bitch than Taylor Swift,” Twitter delivered.

There are some gorgeous character posters for Hello, Rain, the short film adaptation of Nnedi Okorafor’s short story, “Hello, Moto.” Here’s one, but be sure to visit the link for more:

I may have cackled–a lot–at “20 Authors I Don’t Have to Read Because I’ve Dated Men for 16 Years.”

You can now read Ursula Vernon’s 2017 Hugo acceptance speech online. You can also download it for free and have a permanent copy of this beautiful whale fall illustration on your reading device in addition to the lovely speech.

Speaking of somewhat strange and macabre trivia, since that seems to be my theme of the week, Mental Floss has a pretty comprehensive history of rat kings up this week. You’re welcome.

I loved Vina Jin-Mae Prasad’s recent story in Uncanny, “Fandom for Robots,” but her new story at Fireside, “Portrait of Skull With Man,” just shot her to the top of my list of new writers to nominate for next year’s Campbell Award.