Hi, lovelies. Here’s my month in books, movies, and games.
Books
The Game Writing Guide: Get Your Dream Job and Keep It by Anna Megill is a wonderfully practical guide to understanding how to build and maintain a career as a writer in the games industry. Her advice — which is based off interviews with dozens of writer mentors, as well as her own experience writing for games such as Fable, Control, and Dishonored, among others — runs the full gamut, from job hunting, writing resumes and cover letters, building a portfolio, and interviews to moving up within the company once you have the job and leadership roles. All of this advice is delivered in simple, well-organized, and straightforward manner — with little dashes of humor sprinkled in — making the book easy to ready and follow. Where Megill is less confident in her commentary, she admits so upfront and presents insights of other mentors or other avenues for seeking this information. For those interested, I wrote up a few of the insights I learned from the book. 
It should be no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to my blog that Junji Ito is one of my favorite horror writers. Tombs is another phenomenal collection of short graphic tales from this master of the genre. The collection offers eerie and terrifying tales of a town with tombstones growing throughout its streets, a haunted clubhouse, terrible body horror, the hell of neighbors, and creatures dragged up from the depths of the sea — among other wonderfully haunting stories. As with each of Ito’s books, the horrors of the tales are illustrated beautifully in his signature black and white style.
I’ve been following Chuck Wendig’s blog for a long while, and I have loved his wild, cuss-heavy way of discussing writing and the writing life. Now, I’ve finally come around to buying and reading one of his actual books — and I can definitely say I’m a fan.
Two of the books I loved this month focus on women finding power through transformation. In Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon, a heavily pregnant Vern escapes from a religious compound into the woods, where she gives birth to twins. For a while she lives wild, raising her children as she pleases, all the while they are being hunted. As time passes, Vern begins to grow in strength, experiencing a physical transformation she doesn’t understand.
The second book was Goddess of Filth by V. Castro, in which a group of friends perform a play seance, laughing and drinking until their friend Fernanda begins chanting in Nahuatl and appearing to be possessed. As time passes, Fernanda continues to act strangely, “smearing herself in black makeup, shredding her hands on rose thorns, sucking sin out of the mouths of the guilty.” With her mother in a moral panic over the changes, Fernanda’s friends try to find a way to help her in any way they can.
I read two fantastic poetry books this month. The first was 
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones is a dark tale of revenge, in which four American Indian men find themselves facing the consequences for their actions as youths. One by one, they are slowly hunted down by a strange entity, bent on making them pay. Beautifully written and shockingly gory, the story unfolds shifts between each of their points of views. The Only Good Indians blends intense action with sharp social commentary, presenting a book with a powerful and moving conclusion. The evolution of this story provided a number of surprises and ultimately left me in tears by the end. Fantastic.