Sidetracks - January 12, 2015
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ladybusinessSidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag.
➝ I wrote a peer pressure laced post recommending One Piece for Smugglivus. I convinced at least three people SO I GUESS WE'LL SEE WHAT HAPPENS.
➝ Ana G. and I launched Fangirl Happy Hour. Episode #1 will be out on Tuesday, January 13!
➝ Science Fiction and Fantasy as 'home' genres — neat essay on "belonging" to certain genres, and the value of reading outside those spaces to make genre texts more valuable.
➝ Why I'm me, and not someone else… — excellent look at writing as a women in adult SF spaces. Also relevant is a storify discussion about this same topic by
➝
➝ Robots Are Starting To Break The Law And Nobody Knows What To Do About It. AMAZING
➝ *puts on VolCom staff hat* Want to come volunteer for the Organization for Transformative Works? We're looking for Communications Graphic volunteers, Tag Wranglers, and Development & Membership staff! :D
Book Acquisitions
Purchased: Stolen Songbird by Danielle L. Jensen, Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett
Gifts: Alliance in Blood by Ariel Tachna, The Kick-Ass Writer by Chuck Wendig, The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane, Upgraded by Neil Clarke (from Clare ILU CLARE THIS IS THE GREATEST!)
Added TBR: The Vagrant by Peter Newmen (via A Fantastical Librarian), The Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley (via A Dribble of Ink), I am Princess X by Cherie Priest, The Wicked and the Divine: The Faust Act by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, & Matt Wilson (via
samjohnsson), Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, Mars Evacuees by Sophia McDougall (via nymeth), The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (via Feminist Texican Reads), Silver on the Road by Laura Anne Gilman
➝ I did some things:
- At the end of 2014, I reviewed Scott Westerfeld's Afterworlds for Shiny New Books. It's a happily ever after story about lesbian YA authors and you should read it.
- I completed my assignment for Yuletide 2014 and wrote You can have the town (why don't you take it) — Dracula (2013) fanfiction about Lucy Westenra starting an events business with Renfield.
- I also stuffed a bunch of fandom_stocking's, mostly with book recs lists, but I did manage to write one short fic about The Musketeers. You Get What You Need is piece of Cardinal Richelieu/Captain Treville fluff about hand holding. Yep, looks like I continue to ship weird in 2015.
- Finally, I took part in Smugglivus and wrote about ten great books by chromatic female authors.
But enough about me and my shameless self-promotion.
➝ I'm already a little bit tired of awards news (ignore me, I'm just grumpy because I think awards should happen at the end of the year), but I was excited to see the announcement about the 2014 Cybils finalists.
➝ Maggie Stiefvater has a deliberately tricksy presence on Tumblr, so I'm not sure whether to believe that she is writing about a pack of girl street racers. I really want it to be true, though!
➝ This Medusa illustration is very important to me right now. I really wish there were a fan exchange where people would write fic about art you love.
➝ If there were such an exchange someone would write me a story to go with this incredibly cute picture of a female knight and her lady, right?
➝ A response to the idea that millennials have no attention span for serialised drama. Well done going beyond ROTFL.
➝ Zen Cho's upcoming book, Sorcerer to the Crown sounds like a story I could adore:
SORCERER TO THE CROWN is set in London in the early 1800s and it’s about Zacharias Wythe, England’s first black Sorcerer Royal. (As in, he’s a black guy. Not as in black magic. Zacharias is very virtuous!) But his life sucks. England is running out of magic, his colleagues are mean and racist, and everyone thinks he killed his predecessor. When ambitious (and inconveniently magical) orphan Prunella Gentleman demands that he take her away from the school where she’s drudged all her life, Zacharias refuses, of course. But Prunella’s stumbled upon English magic’s greatest discovery in centuries, and things are about to get a whole lot more complicated for the both of them.
➝ Maybe Idris Elba will be approached for the next Bond, but who even knows anymore? I'm still holding out hope though because Idris as Bond would be a fan dream come true for me, especially if they kept Naomie Harris as Moneypenny.
➝ Finally, Malinda Lo On Self-Rejection and Writing From a Marginalized Perspective, following on from the #dontselfreject hashtag:
The fact that I have personally made that symbolic leap in my imagination doesn’t mean the fight is over. I still live in a world that is still extremely heteronormative, and now that my imagination has thrown off that worldview, I’m more aware than ever that I see things and write things differently. Seeing that stark difference raises the specter of self-rejection over and over again. It’s those voices saying: You’d make more money if you wrote about straight people. You’d get more marketing support if you wrote this mainstream thing instead of that diverse thing.
It’s totally obvious what I should do if I want to be a bestselling author — or even to have what people in the business would think of as a "breakthrough" book.
But is that the kind of writer I want to be? That’s the struggle I’m in now. I’m at the point in my career where I sense a turning point. I have plenty of mainstream aspirations, but they battle daily with my still-developing consciousness around diversity. The struggle to not self-reject continues for me, as I imagine it does for all marginalized writers throughout their careers.
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Date: 2015-01-18 01:01 am (UTC)Jodie, that picture of the lady knight and her lady is so sweet. It reminds me of Claire Hummel's Historical Disney Princesses, especially in its coloring.