I figured a good way to start the year is by nerding out all over the place, so this week I have a guest post up at the blog of astronomy-camp alum and Affair-to-Remember-lover Marjorie Liu!

Since I know she understands deep and abiding love for fictional people, I took the opportunity to list ten movie relationships that should have happened, for values of “list” that really mean “talk about how you banged their invisible dolls together with more determination than you addressed many real-life things like calculus.” (In fact, cutting down the list was so hard that technically I squeezed in eleven, because it’s really difficult to watch Wings of the Dove and NOT think a frank conversation could have set up the best triad in a hundred-mile radius.)

The list includes some couples that would have gotten together except they died (Alice and Uncas!), couples that would have gotten together except Austen couldn’t bring herself to pull a switcheroo at the two-thirds mark (Elinor and Brandon!), couples that would have gotten together if Picard had ever, ever learned how to talk to a woman for like two damn seconds of his life (PICARD, GET IT TOGETHER), and couples that were clearly together and just never got the screentime they should have, like these two:

(The couple that trades unauthorized ammo together stays together!)

For those who enjoy some free books alongside their couples not quite getting together and/or pop culture, I’m also giving away copies of Mechanique and Geek Wisdom. So if you’re so inclined, head on over and check it out!

I don’t tend to do big year-in-review posts, but this year I wanted to take a second.

Behind the scenes, there were ups and downs (family, day job, work-life balance, and the like), but I came out the other side of 2011 all right. I even managed to get out of the house enough to attend some lovely cons where I hung out with some lovely people, and there were no champagne fights or anything!

Writing-wise: I published my first novel, Mechanique! It is a great feeling to hold a novel you wrote in your hands, as it turns out! I had some positive reviews which pleased me greatly (positive reviews tend to do that), and have really enjoyed hearing from people (strangers!) with whom the book resonated. But really, most aspects of it were rewarding in some way, right down to the book launch party, for which some friends (and a family member I tricked!) worked their asses off for nothing more than free snacks.

I also got a nonfiction book under my belt this year! Geek Wisdom, in which my co-authors, Stephen Segal, and I gathered geeky quotes and set out to talk about how being a nerd was like a philosophy course, only with more dice and movies and computers and stuff, was a blast.

Short-fiction-wise, I had a dozen stories come out this year (of which I am perhaps particularly fond of “Demons, Your Body, and You,” “Semiramis,” “The Nearest Thing,” and “Study, for Solo Piano”), and some reprints, of which I am particularly glad for “And in Their Glad Rags” in Happily Ever After, and “Keep Calm and Carillon” in Creatures.

Movie-wise, I saw some really great movies this year and some extremely questionable ones. Drive and Shame might be two of my favorite movies that came out this year; the bad ones seem too numerous to mention and often too painful to recall. I must say that, especially in light of some of the completely shit movies I saw this year, Red Riding Hood seems to be on a lot of people’s Worst Movie Ever Made lists, which I find a little suspicious. Don’t get me wrong, it is definitely a bad movie. However, its biggest crime to many people seems to be that it’s directed by a woman who found commercial success with a blockbuster teen-girl movie that also had a love triangle, and is now condemned to be accused of repeating herself forever for things like having helicopter shots of landscape in two movies in a row, which, seriously. Without defending a movie that is for sure not a good movie, the vitriol and content of the criticism is still a bit eyebrow-raising, I think. (I mean, I saw Beastly this year. BEASTLY.)

Tonight ends a year that was often fun, sometimes tough, often interesting, and awash in coffee. I’m at home for the duration, and have spent the morning cleaning up so that I can spend the evening writing, and start the year as I mean to go on. (I’ll also be honoring my family’s oldest and most hilarious tradition, banging a pan on your doorstep at midnight to keep the devil out. Since I live in an apartment and am not a total jerk, I will be tapping a wooden spoon against a pan for about five seconds and hoping the devil is a pearl-clutching sort and that does the trick.)

Wishing you and yours a happy start to the New Year!

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.