Firstly, I hope everyone had or is having a happy nondenominational winter section of time full of some kind of delicious baked goods! (I tend to the Amateur Astronomer Nighttime Appreciation Celebration with iced sugar cookies, myself.)

Secondly, something extremely fun happened!

Recently, Esther at Fantasy Magazine asked if I wanted to write about dragons.

DID I EVER.

“Three Dragons” is the result of some serious nerding out and a refusal to cull quotes (they’re all awesome, I put them all in there, I regret nothing). The research was fun, and kind of dangerous, since now I have a whole separate research folder for a project that may or may not include “The Imprint of Her Foot Serpentous” in the title, because as soon as I saw that phrase I figured I either had to write something for it or start a band, and I’m all out of band.

Please also note that in the middle of an article that pretends to know what it’s talking about I still managed to fangirl Smrgol, because that dragon deserves it.

P.S. A close runner-up for the photo was this dude, who looks completely flummoxed by the stupid human who shoved itself into his mouth and insists on being eaten.

My latest Intertitles column is up at Strange Horizons! Frame Story is the one where I completely nerd out about two really impressive films, Drive and Shame, and some of the formal elements that they employ to great effect as narrative devices.

I liked both of these movies to a somewhat-surprising degree; I tend to come down harshly on movies about Dudes Falling Apart with damsel-in-distress leading ladies AND movies with a lot of violence and overly-objectifying nudity, but both movies rose above those problems. The violence in Drive is nasty, but avoids glamorization, and the nudity in Shame serves its purpose and is, at least, less titillating and more gender-equal than, apparently, the nudity in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In fact, the violence in Drive and the nudity in Shame serve largely opposite purposes – every instance of violence in Drive is meant to shock and horrify and track how far down Driver has fallen, and the repeated nudity in Shame dulls the impact of it, so that the longer we follow his sex addiction, the sadder and emptier sex looks. (Not that either movie is flawless, but both of them were interesting and thoughtful, which is more than a lot of movies can say.)

The column is basically a mash note to color story and lovely frames, and that’s because those movies are gorgeous. However, the scripts are also stellar – some really standout exchanges in both – and I can’t even explain how beautifully these movies are acted from the leads* on down. Even actors with only one or two scenes (Oscar Isaac can make one line mean ten things, Nicole Beharie gives us a whole character arc in two scenes in Shame, and Lucy Walters walks away with her scenes in Shame despite having ZERO lines). I will be playing catch-up on some of 2011′s movies for a while, but I’d actually put these out as two of the year’s best, and not just because they are gorgeously put together.

The movie that is getting early buzz for Best Picture is, apparently, The Artist, which I would get except I saw that movie, and despite the fact that it’s cleverly put together and there are nice hat-tips aplenty to silent films and Singing in the Rain, I found that movie a much more facile treatment of Dude Falling Apart, and the leading lady’s only emotional arc was Keep Loving Dude (and Overact Beyond What Pastiche Requires), and so as nicely put-together as it was, I’d recommend either of these movies over it in a heartbeat.

* Fassbender is getting some early nominations for his work, but I am honestly surprised that Ryan Gosling got shut out of the SAGs and the Golden Globes, because he hit that movie out of the park, and should get more notice for that than he’s gotten.

What I did this weekend:

I saw Breaking Dawn, Part 1. It was, in its own way, a fascinating example of a film that has all the content of a horror movie and none of the context. Also in its own way, it was stupid and cringey, and when Jacob looks into the eyes of a newborn and falls in love with the hottie she’ll become if he can just babysit her for the next 18 years, you honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry. (I laughed. Then I made horrified faces at my friend.)

Speaking of awful movies that are seen with friends, the other thing I did this weekend was a guest post at The Night Bazaar, in which they asked me to be both personal and sincere at the same time, and write up some people I am thankful for. I included my family, the family that keeps my family up at night, and all the friends who have ever sat through a terrible movie on my account. Because seriously, everyone who comes here with WHAT WAS THAT on the tips of their fingers is fighting the good bad-movie fight (it’s a real fight, shut up), and it’s awesome. Thank you.

For this month’s Intertitles, I caved in to a long-standing wish to talk about a film that is the cinema equivalent of having your heart pecked out by the world’s most beautiful birds, The Fall.

It has some truly spectacular acting, even more amazing design and cinematography, and some problematic moments that I am never sure what the hell to do about, but one of The Fall’s most interesting facets for me has always been its unforgiving take on the power of story – especially the limits of story.

“There’s No Happy Ending With Me” is up now at Strange Horizons, and is full of nerding about this movie. It contains some spoilers, but this isn’t the sort of movie that loses anything by being spoiled, both because of its structure and because nothing can really spoil you for its execution.

(I touch on this briefly in the article, but to no one’s surprise, what I love almost as much as the film is what went on behind-the-scenes, because some of those shenanigans are intense. And that’s just the lead actors, and not the dozen-plus years of scouting locations or the four-year piecemeal shooting schedule or anything.)

Including some self-promo, handbell choirs, and a confession about the nerdiest things in my attic.

First, stories!

1. My terrorism-and-toads story “Bufonidae” will be appearing in the inaugural issue of Phantasmagorium, edited by Laird Barron! It seems like this horror number might be available around Halloween, which is handy, so stay tuned.

2. John Langan and Paul Tremblay’s anthology CREATURES is alive! (It’s not actually in all caps, I think, but I like to type it that way and then imagine I’m a newscaster in a 1950s monster movie.) Covering thirty years of monster stories, the Table of Contents is pretty awesome. Alongside this august company is “Keep Calm and Carillon,” my horror story about a handbell choir.

The anthology is available now online and at booksellers in various places.

2.5 (On another Tremblay-related note, I was flattered to see he enjoyed Mechanique, though I would like to go on record as being against bringing back hissing in movie theatres, since I think that’s a danger to the public in case of a sudden influx of snakes in the building.)

3. I generally don’t talk about process, because it’s widely variable by project for me and it makes me feel a little unqualified to pretend I know what I’m doing all the time, but over at Clarkesworld, I do a little talking about style, approach, and how I clearly stayed home a LOT in college. (Bonus appearance of the best mural ever!)

4. And over at BookBanter, I answer some questions, including what advice I would give to aspiring writers, which is the write-a-million-words advice, because that is advice I believe in.

Related: I went home a few weeks ago to spend some time with family. Part of the weekend included me cleaning out some things from the attic. Alongside the historical costumes (now passed along for someone else to enjoy) and clothes so out of date they were cool again (now passed along for some hipsters to enjoy), I found a box of my old writing.

It included a few pages of the Star Trek tie-in novel I wrote when I was 11 or 12 (in ProWrite!) and printed out from my dad’s dot-matrix printer. I had hand-drawn a cover that I attached to it. It was about Guinan using her alien powers to bring Tasha Yar back from the dead for necessary plot reasons I cannot remember, and the time-paradox problems that ensued. It was called “Obfuscation.”

I showed my mother.

“Oh, that’s sweet,” she said. “How old were you? Eleven?” She paused, thinking. “Yeah, I remember you didn’t leave the house much that year.”*

I kept it – it’s tucked safely away underneath the X-Files spec scripts I wrote in high school, which we speak not of. The box is big spanning grade school through college; I’m going to guess it’s one million words. I’m glad I wrote them, and I’m extra glad they are being kept somewhere far, far away.

* This is true of any year.