Sidetracks - August 1, 2015

[helloladies]

Sidetracks 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.

Renay

➝ Via ajaromano, I found Fanspeak: The Brief Origins Of Fanfiction which is a fascinating look at a piece of fanfiction's history. Lots of great historical tidbits!

➝ After way too long The Hugo Award rec sheet for 2016 (stuff published this year) is updated (except for all the short fiction I'm going to add from the recently announce survey, but, baby steps). Anyone can rec stuff via the rec form. It's for the Hugos, yeah, but it's also just a great way to acquire recs of cool media. :D

➝ Amal El-Mohtar discussed gender and reviewing on Twitter, and it got turned into the handy Storify. Some great thoughts from Amal, as always.

➝ I'm late as always to these things, but A Fantastical Librarian turned five back on July 21! Congrats, Mieneke. :D

➝ There's still time to submit your favorite short SFF fiction from April 1 to June 30 to the short fiction survey. :D

➝ And because I've been a little remiss in mentioning it in awhile, if you've read any great, critical articles or essays on speculative topics this year, submit them for consideration in Speculative Fiction 2015, edited this year by Foz Meadows and Mark Oshiro! Submit things by other people, but also yourself! Don't self-reject! It's all anonymous so no one will know but you, anyway. ;)

Jodie

➝ Let me begin with a cheering gifset of US gymnast Gabrielle Douglas throwing down her awesome at the US all-around. You may remember her from this little thing called the 2012 Olympics.

➝ Sarah McCarry linked to the impressive personal essay A girl I used to know and I'm kind of stunned by how great it is. It concentrates on kindness, how kindness can be absent from attempts to be an Ally (with a capital A), and how distancing it can be for a person to be related to abstractly rather than as a complex individual.

➝ I haven't listened to this yet but Graphic Audio has adapted the first five volumes of Ms. Marvel into an audiobook. Great idea, right?

➝ Speaking of adaptations you never knew you wanted - The CW is developing 'a hyper-stylized, gritty adaptation' of Little Women 'in which disparate half-sisters Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy band together in order to survive the dystopic streets of Philadelphia and unravel a conspiracy that stretches far beyond anything they have ever imagined – all while trying not to kill each other in the process.' And that's just their opening statement about the show. For once, I might follow pre-production details as they're released.

➝ How Advertising Hijacked Feminism is a fairly positive take on a new breed of ad campaigns that position themselves as feminist. The range of feminist ads, the authenticity of the corporate identity behind these ads, and the conflicted feelings these ads can stir in women is too wide a subject for this article to tackle fully, but it does provides an interesting look at what these ads need to really work (depth, genuine commitment to feminism, relevance, and female creative leads).

➝ Throwing the book at sexism in publishing tells a familiar story about gender and publishing but is well worth a read:

Last week Tramp Press received its 1,000th submission. Over the last couple of years Lisa and I have read more than a thousand pitches, a thousand cover letters. With a number this large, certain patterns become obvious. On our submissions guidelines on the Tramp website Lisa and I ask writers to talk about their influences: it’s always interesting to see what people are reading and being informed by, and where a particular writer would place their work in terms of style or theme.

Inspired by the other counters – the people working at Vida; Nicola Griffith – I conducted a tally of my own. Out of the last 100 submissions, 148 influences have been referenced. Only 33 of the writers listed as influences are female. 33 out of 148. I read letter after letter from well-meaning, perfectly nice men and women who list reams of writers they admire, without apparently noticing that the writers they are listing are all of one gender.

➝ Somewhat related: Natalie Luhrs examines the Ethics of Reviewing. I'm most interested in this section:

Promotion is the publisher’s job and reviews on retail sites and on GoodReads are seen as being net positives for the various discovery algorithms. I understand that in the current bookselling climate getting a book noticed is a challenge, but I suggest that this is not the consumer’s problem. Reviewers who review for pay do have an obligation to produce reviews in exchange for monetary compensation, but as I said before, their primary audience is the reader.

➝ Ianto Jones will return in the Torchwood Audio Dramas. This is uncalled for and wonderful, and I'm sorry (not sorry) to bring this up again but any release about Ianto that doesn't refer to him as 'Jack Harkness' beloved Ianto' is just incomplete and weird. It's canon and really important to any description of his background.

➝ Tansy R. Roberts' Musketeer Space series (a gender flipped version of The Three Musketeers set in space) is complete. This means I can finally read it!

➝ Take a look at this great Harry Potter cosplay from YALC.

➝ And here are some beautiful pictures of an albino Humpback whale.

➝ Closing out with this cute gothic comic set in the 1930s - The Girl With the Skeleton Hand.