Laughing Couple

So much linkspam this week! It’s an avalanche! Or something.

• Laughing for the Camera Love this series of pictures. Also, here’s the Smiling Victorians group on Flickr.
• Aliette de Bodard on Mixed Race People in SFF 
• Maurice Broaddus on SMOFs and being a fan of color
• Describing POCs without Food Metaphors
• Pregnancy in Speculative Fiction, a reading list
• CREATe: a trade fiction author’s perspective Charlie Stross on how the shift to digital has affected his career as a writer.
• Shooter Boys and At-Risk Girls “I rebelled because I was a child and I wanted to be human.”
• What made Mary Ingalls blind? Probably not scarlet fever.
• Bookish Not entirely sure what I think about this, but it was all over my Twitter feed earlier this week.
• The Pulp-O-Mizer! I think, of all the images I’ve seen people posting from this, this set is my favorite. And this exchange in the comments made me really happy.
• In case you hadn’t heard: the bones of Richard III were found in a parking lot. Longest game of hide and seek EVER.
• People of Timbuktu save manuscripts from invaders
• I’m an English Professor in a Movie Indeed you are sir, indeed you are.
• Games Workshop is a trademark bully They seem to think they’re the only ones allowed to use the words “space marine”. They are full of crap.
• When We Defend Romance Reading as Escapism the Critics Win I especially like the comparison of the wordcount from 7 HQN Presents to other genre fiction which isn’t seen as being as fluffy as romance.
• The Relevant Elephant in the Room Er, yes. Pay attention to me, please!
• Blogging Like No One is Reading While I pretend that you aren’t reading!
• How Much Promo is Too Much? And in addition to the flood of promo, there’s another issue, too: how do you deal with not liking the book that everyone else is ecstatic about? Example: Charlotte Stein’s Addicted? For me it was a DNF. Which made me sad because I wanted to like it but for whatever reason, it really did not work for me.
• Urban Fantasy 101 This blog post sort of makes me incoherent with nerd rage. Interview with a Vampire is not urban fantasy. Laurell K. Hamilton’s Guilty Pleasures is not the first “modern” urban fantasy novel. And Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks certainly does count even though the writer’s definition seems to be “must have kick butt heroine in leather pants” (unless there are vampires involved in which case it’s automatically urban fantasy). I don’t even.  And that ties into this next link, which looks more closely at the romance genre and how it intersects with speculative fiction and how things get a bit weird…
• Crossroads: Romance – More Powerful than You Could Possibly Imagine Okay, so I am totally linking this because I am mentioned in it (there was a quiet “eeeeeee” when the pingback came in yesterday), but it’s also a fantastic post and Gerwel articulates my feelings about romance and speculative fiction in a way that I haven’t been able to:
  

  When speculative fiction is written from a foundation in the romance genre (as in the “paranormal romance” or “science fiction romance” sub-genres), the results are very different from when romantic elements get incorporated into an otherwise speculative foundation. The ways in which both the stories get constructed and the ways in which their themes of power get developed are very different, rely on different devices, and produce different effects in the reader.

  Also, there is an awesome Venn diagram!

  

  Shamelessly stolen from here.

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone! I’ll be spending mine reading Line and Orbit by Sunny Moraine and Lisa Soem. I’ve been really, really, really looking forward to it. So far, I’ve read the prologue and YES. THIS. MORE.