Tadd Adcox

Novel in a Year: First Draft with Juan Martinez - StoryStudio Chicago This is the year to write your novel Novel in a Year: First Draft is a unique opportunity to join a writing cohort, study novel craft, workshop key scenes, measure your progress, meet deadlines, and g...

I'm teaching a First-Draft Novel-in-a-Year class for StoryStudio in 2026, with particular attention paid to (1) structure & accountability + (2) fun, playful ways to get it all done. Applications are open (spread the word if you can!):

www.storystudiochicago.org/advanced-wri...

A genuinely wonderful thing to receive in my inbox. Can't recommend this newsletter enough

"Dummkopf," "Warmduscher" fuck all the way off with that

Sorry no the language you were thinking of is "German"

Incredibly funny to watch the right wing going Oh so just because I love money and hate poor people I'm a bad Christian according to "the pope"???

I am extremely on the side of "if you have a spine, you are more likely to win," and even if you lose, isn't it better to have a spine?

whatever you think of Spanberger, the fact that her opponent ran a campaign based almost entirely on transphobia and is on track to eat shit in the biggest blowout the state has seen since 2009 is unambiguously a huge win

Kill the Jockey is a good time

ergot. innovative + experimental horror

In honor of the day, I'm posting scary stories:

Here's "A Memory" in @ergot.bsky.social, loosely inspired by the "Einstein room" in Paganini Horror (1989)

"In the new house there was a tunnel...one could pass through and find on reaching the far end that one had returned to the tunnel’s entrance."

I suppose so--but in that case, I don't actually feel like I'm being "pushed against" in any significant way. It's clear (to me) I'm against that, there's no interesting sense of strangeness or unsureness

I would say that one way for a movie to be interesting for me--which isn't necessarily the same as good--is the sense that it is pushing against me in some way

Absolutely--though I guess I'm ultimately more interested in movies that feel like they don't obviously "mean" things I already agree with--movies that stick out in uncomfortable ways from my understanding of the world (Alien certainly falls into this category)

Ralphus shaving the critic, while Sardu looks on

...Horror, and particularly B movies or junk movies, are where you're most likely to encounter a true other, something that sticks out in a way that, for reasons of art or ineptitude, we cannot fit into our comfortable picture of the world as we understand it

Ralphus and Sardu drinking beer from big ole steins

Early on, my now-wife asked me why I like horror films, as someone whose values are generally leftist, I suppose, and anti-violent. It was a good question. The answer, I think, was that horror movies are the genre in which you're most likely to see something you haven't seen before...

A critic, hung up by his wrists

For me, this was the one wrong note the book really struck. Not just that this wasn't *my* reasonf or watching junk film, but I wasn't really convinced it was Coldiron's, either. It felt a little too proper, too respectable. It felt like an excuse.

Sardu, facing the camera; torture instruments and women in lingerie behind him

In Katherine Coldiron's Junk Film--which overall, I'd recommend unreservedly--she argues that the reason, or at least a major reason, to watch bad movies is because they teach you what good film is...

A man drilling into someone's head

Oct 31 is Blood Sucking Freaks, a movie which I first encountered as the B movie in a Joe Bob Briggs double feature, during the pandemic, a week or so after the birth of my first kid. I was pretty sure I was hallucinating while I watched it. Maybe I was? 1976, dir. Joel M. Reed

Little boy dressed up like a spaceman pointing a toy gun at a little girl

So what is, or what was, the B movie?

One of many shots in Robot Monster of the titular Robot Monster roaming through a grassy area, in long-shot, looking for--victims? A plot? Meaning of some kind?

...a term which continues to have relevance even as its opposite, the "feature film," no longer functions as anything other than, perhaps, as a pretentious synonym for "movie of a certain length"

Dinosaurs fighting

Even as the original economic conditions of the B movie faded into history, we continued and continue to need a term to describe this "other" of respectable cinema--something to capture the Tromas, the Full Moons, the Corman productions...

The robot monster confronting a woman who is clutching the straps of her dress tightly to herself

My partner HM has suggested an analog in the Greek satyr plays, a requirement of Greek drama, in which tragedy was accompanied by the raunchiest, most taboo-breaking works possible--that the sacred, in other words, must be accompanied by the wildly profane

Some sort of strange ray, causing the picture of the Robot Monster to be replace with the film's negative

The interesting moment for me is when the B movie becomes interesting *in itself*, rather than simply as a description of cinematic filler--when the "B movie" transitions from its original, literal definition into a genre which might exist independently of any main feature

Intentionally Disposable Art: The Teen Agers Films Intentionally Disposable Art: The Teen Agers Films | Vague Visages (Vawg-Vee-Sawj)

A lot of these movies haven't survived, and shouldn't have. Katherine Coldiron has a fantastic essay on "Intentionally Disposable Art" about a series of movies, The Teen Agers, that probably shouldn't have stuck around, but somehow did

The robot monster--ie, dude in a gorilla suit with a space helmet--standing next to the bubble machine, in front of the cave

B movies were originally intended to be what we’d now call content (disparagingly)--if the main feature was what got audiences in the door, the B movie was what assured them they were getting their money’s worth by filling up X amount of time. Whether the movie was good was beside the point

Little boy asleep in front of a bubble machine in front of a cave

"B movie" is a term that has significantly outlasted the conditions of its original usage, when a B movie was the second and usually lesser movie in a double feature (similar to the "B side" of a single).

Little boy dressed up like a spaceman pointing a toy gun at a little girl

So what is, or what was, the B movie?

Honestly having a lot of trouble deciding what movie to watch as The Last B Movie of Halloween (2025)

and he began to wonder if perhaps the unease which he felt when thinking back to this movie, and which he had previously ascribed to some overlooked brilliance in the film itself, were not in fact attributable instead to the very dullness of the movie, which by slipping so cleanly from his memory left in its place something like the residue of a nightmare, encountered after awakening not as a coherent narrative but in a series of images or memories throughout the day that one cannot quite catch hold of, triggered seemingly by the act of wiping a soap stain from the edge of a glass or opening one’s dresser drawer to search for something lost, though the nature of the relationship between triggering action and half-remembered dream-image remained obscure.

Finally another from @ergot.bsky.social: "A Haunting," inspired not so much by the movie Ghosthouse (though I love the movie Ghosthouse) as by the experience of having watched the movie Ghosthouse too many times

www.ergot.press/authors/Jame...

Happy Halloween!

www.hempressbooks.com/shop/p/denma...

It is this, one suspects, which accounts for the popularity, even ubiquity, of applications which, for a small fee, or more often at the price of gathering certain personally identifiable information, construct an AI replica of the now-dead relation, animating old photographs, answering questions and otherwise conversing in a text-based chat generated from the corpus of recorded communications, including letters, emails, direct messages, voicemails and other audio, social media posts, and snippets of video uploaded to the cloud, all of them gathered while the relation in question was alive; and which explains the fact that these services continue to grow, year after year, even though surveys of the public, including a significant number of those who subscribe to these services, describe them as “morbid,” “disquieting,” “icky”; despite the fact, indeed, that the vast majority of users for such services say that, prior to subscribing, they did not consider themselves the sort of person who would sign up for such a service, and having signed up, they report they take little or no comfort in the interaction, finding it as unsettling in practice as they previously found it in theory. Yet each day more and more of these avatars are created; more and more of the internet is filled up with the nearly although not exactly perfect motions of the dead...

"City of the Dead," which doesn't especially feel like fiction these days, + 2 others at 3:AM Magazine

www.3ammagazine.com/3am/three-st...