TIS FRIDAY, and for those of you with jobs that care about this, Memorial Day is creeping ever closer. One more full week and then PART WEEK TIME. While we wait for that to happen, here’s a bunch of cool links to occupy you over the weekend. Ever wondered how the sausage of film and TV casting gets made? The Guardian has a superb article about Nina Gold, the queen of casting. This is a pretty extraordinary excerpt of oral history done by Zora Neale Hurston, an interview with a survivor of a slave ship. George Yancy writes about what…
Leave a CommentAuthor: Gin Jenny
I’ll eat my hat if Lara Elena Donnelly hasn’t written a damn lot of fanfic, and I mean that as a very high compliment. Armistice is the sequel to last year’s book Amberlough, which was sold to me as a gayer secondary world Cabaret, an extremely accurate description of its contents. Armistice is, frankly, even awesomer, and I am delighted as hell that it exists in the world. Armistice picks up three years from the close of Amberlough. Cordelia has spent the last three years working for a fragile resistance against the Ospies, whose hold over Unified Gedda has only…
Leave a CommentTHE MURDERS HAVE BEGUN in our Frankenstein readalong, and I have to admit that I was not expecting quite such a rapid onset of murder and mayhem. “Rapid” in terms of how much of the book has elapsed so far, not rapid in terms of how much time has elapsed. As I may have mentioned in my last anger-post about horrible Victor Frankenstein and his horrible decision-making process, he legitimately just lets the chips fall where they may w/r/t the ten-foot-tall monster he’s made. Like he makes this monster, the monster gets away, and then two years go by. Chapter…
Leave a CommentSo, over on Twitter dot com recently, Hannah Moskowitz wrote a very smart thread about how publishing should oughta take some lessons from fanfic. And then Max Gladstone wrote an also very smart thread in response to say that mainstream publishing maybe already does take those lessons. And then a bunch more people said a bunch more things about fanfiction and genre fiction and literary fiction; and my friend Maureen (she blogs at By Singing Light and is the best!) and I decided to sit down and thrash it all out. (The title is a joke. We don’t really crack…
2 CommentsSince its release in 2016, Naomi Alderman’s The Power has been impossible to miss, receiving accolades from the New York Times and President Barack Obama, among many many others. The premise is that women — through a new organ called a skein, located at their collarbones — suddenly become more physically powerful than men, able to transmit strong jolts of electricity. Things go downhill pretty quickly. I resisted The Power because I am tired of power and the things people do to keep it. 2016 was the year Alton Sterling was killed in my home state. 2016 was the year…
Leave a CommentY’all, I’m thinking about changing the name of this project to Shortly Ever After. Would that be fun, y/n? I’m also commissioning a little graphic for it, which I’m unduly excited about. We are now in a new situation where my brilliant friend Julia introduced me to the bibliographic and note-taking app Zotero, which I have been using to tremendous effect in several unrelated areas of my life. One of these is that I now have Clarkesworld and Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Lightspeed and Tor dot com original fiction and Strange Horizons and Uncanny in feeds, and whenever they post…
Leave a CommentSo the time has come for Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon, and like last time (or the time before? idk), I was supposed to have plans this day and then the plans got NOT EVEN CANCELED, just rescheduled, which is like, the best of all possible worlds. (The plans were a crawfish boil. I’d have been so sad if it was canceled.) This will be my master post, and I will update it as I go along! Feel free to ignore everything, but your takeaway regardless should be that readathons are the best. In Conclusion Y’all, I’m going to be super real…
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