Creative Costumes of Still-Practiced Pagan Rituals of Europe
(Photo by Charles Freger)
- The Whale, Flensed My friend Angela sails on the Kalmar Nyckel and recently wrote this evocative and haunting piece about a beached pygmy sperm whale in Lewes, DE. This piece involves graphic descriptions of animal death and disposal of its body so it may not be for everyone.
- My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me
- The real mommy wars
- Middle Grade Bloggers as Fans, Gatekeepers, Partners of the Industry, & Members of a Gender-Imbalanced Community This is really interesting! Be sure to check out part 2 (linked at end of this link).
- Stephen King: An Unlikely Lifeline In Turbulent Waters I also devoured Stephen King’s books as a teenager.
- Race, Sexuality, and the Mainstream
- I’m always reticent to discuss matters of race.
- Judging a Publisher by Its Cover
- What’s an author event worth?
- Authors in the Classroom
- I’ll note that this sidebar was published the same year as Myst.
- Zero opportunity employers
- ‘Serial Adopters’: How Evangelicals Are Exploiting Orphan Market
- Unfortunately, as you probably already know, people
- Why does female-leaning fandom come in for such criticism? Because hey! It’s not a real issue until a man writes about it! Okay, okay: it’s a good and thoroughly researched essay. But this just chaps my ass because I’ve been watching this nonsense happen my whole damn life (and it was happening before I was born: see teeny boppers and Beatlemania).
- Daniel José Older has a fantastic roundtable at Strange Horizons: Set Truth on Stun: Reimagining an Anti-Oppressive SF/F
- Why Jonathan Franzen’s social media fear indicts the entire publishing industry I have a major beef with the first paragraph: “…the recent influx of women writing fantasy has necessitated the creation of entirely new subgenres: urban fantasy, paranormal romance, etc.” No, actually. No. Urban fantasy has been around for thirty years. That is NOT RECENT. And paranormal romance may be a bit newer, but I’d argue that it’s an outgrowth of gothic romance but with actual supernatural creatures. But the presence of the ladies in speculative fiction did not cause these subgenres to be created.
- FYI: Why Do I Poop More When I Have My Period?
- Splattered with Shit ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: FLOUNCE.
- How To Be A Professional Author And Decent Human On The Internet
- Professor feminism is back at it Warning: Huge Shithead warning.
- HS Continues to Attack Feminist WoC online Further Huge Shithead warnings.
- ‘We Felt Like We Were Above the Law’: How the NCAA Endangers Women
- Broad Universe is doing a survey on women writers in speculative fiction.
- Plagiarism Alert: For the Summer by Shey Stahl Oh, FFS. Stealing from fan fiction is still stealing.
- So Goodreads changed how how they’re enforcing their TOS (I can’t figure out if this is a new change or just them enforcing something that’s been there for a while). They announced it last Friday afternoon and deleted reviews and shelves of a number of site members. In a group that most members don’t belong to–and they haven’t sent out an email, either.
- And then David Gilmour happened.
- The transcript of the interview–which, if anything, shows him to be an even bigger asshole.
- Found poem in the comments
- Virginia Woolf: A Biography by David Gilmour
- The Loneliness of the Old White Male
Finally, Vienna Teng’s new album was released this week. It is wonderful. Especially wonderful is “The Hymn of Acxiom”.
So that’s why! I always wondered about the poop thing (I’m being 90% serious here *grins*).
Ben Aaronovitch is trolling us all. He uses Renay’s rape threats to be all “me, me, me, me” and *epic flounce*. I can’t even.
Paranormal romance is WAAAAY older than “recent.” And I don’t mean its antecedents (e.g. The Vampire Lestat) are, I mean the genre itself, recognizably. Laurel Hamilton’s first Anita Blake novel appeared in 1993, TWENTY FUCKING YEARS AGO. Granted, they started as mystery novels, but the romance elements came on pretty quickly. The recognizable genre was a direct outgrowth of BTVS, which first aired on TV (and introduced the Angel/Buffy romance) in 1997, which is SIXTEEN FUCKING YEARS AGO. That was the same year as the first Harry Potter book, but I don’t hear people railing against Rick Riordan, Christopher Paolini, and Garth Nix as some influx of men to the all-new kids/adults crossover fantasy subgenre.
Because believe me, from inside the industry? The explosion of YA fantasy and the explosion of Paranormal Romance and Paranormal* Fantasy are pretty fucking identical. They play out the same way within the publishing house, and have been for long enough that people’s whole careers have been made on them.
*I call it paranormal fantasy instead of urban, to distinguish it from the slightly older genre exemplified by Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, etc.
@–E: Ayup. Also, I am pretty sure you got paranormal fantasy from me because I was using it to distinguish the current iteration from the work of de Lint and Bull before I knew you. 😉 But it’s absolutely NOT new and it pisses me off when people write about it like it is because it’s not hard to do the research. Diana L. Paxson’s Brisingamen came out in 1986. It has all the hallmarks of a modern paranormal fantasy novel: female MC who comes into magic powers unexpectedly, world that needs saving, will they or won’t they romantic tension thing. I’m way less familiar with the romance side of paranormal as I haven’t read a lot of it so am not familiar with the history.
Most of the complaints I see about YA have to do with how there’s too much romance/love triangles/feeeeeeelings for it to be interesting to boys.
Thanks for the lovely collection of links (and for including mine)!
I definitely did not get paranormal fantasy from you. I worked 14 years in trade publishing long before I met you. 🙂 A GMTA situation.
I’m willing to allow the haters the concept that paranormal fantasy and paranormal romance didn’t exist as specific publishing categories until perhaps fifteen years ago, with a marked uptick about a decade ago.
I still don’t think of that as “recent.” I think of that as long enough ago that I’m completely surprised the market isn’t yet saturated, but hey, people keep reading it, in all its permutations, from really good stuff to the sort of super-creepy stuff that appears on WTFBadFantasyCovers.
Part of the problem for women (and the fiction they like), is that, like women’s clothing, their fiction is always marked. Any deviation from something that could have been written by a white, hetero man, and the book starts to gravitate toward a “woman’s book” classification (with bonus that if a man does it–hello, Arthur Golden–it remains out of the pink ghetto because the author has a penis). As with all other aspects of ingrained societal sexism, men read “normal” books and women read “special category” books.
The only time men’s books become “special category” is when they go so far to the two-fisted, grunting manly-man stereotype that not even most men will read them. They’re intended for a specific (dare I say “misogynistically conservative”) audience. My previous employer had a whole series of fiction about Navy SEALs full of bad sex scenes, and the copyeditors were instructed to rewrite the casual racism. Comparing those to romantic thrillers with Navy SEAL heroes (usually written by women) is simultaneously hilarious and horrifying.
But what REALLY chaps my ass is that this sexism is new. Or at least not particularly old. Does anyone think for ONE FUCKING MINUTE that if Harper Lee wrote To Kill A Mockingbird today (allowing for the cultural differences of 50 years) that it would have been marketed to adult males? That it could have even come to the attention of the Pulitzer committee? Ditto for Gone With the Wind. Hell, nowadays, GWTW would get kicked back to the author with instructions to give it an HEA ending.
The business of slicing and dicing the market into “normal” and “special target audience” is a phenomenon of the last 30 years. Prior to that there were “genre” books, almost always paperback originals. (If it was hardcover, it was “mainstream.” c.f Stephen King, right from the get-go with Carrie.) And prior to that the distinction was mostly “trashy pulps” (paperback) vs “regular fiction.”
If there’s anything I can consider a redeeming feature of the outpouring of self-pubbed fiction these days, it’s that self-publishers don’t seem to care about marketing categories except in a general way. They want to reach every possible audience, not just the segment that a professional publishing house’s marketing department might go for. And that’s working in some strange ways, and perhaps breaking down reader expectations–or at least I hope so.