Girl’s Hair-Do Reveals Love Life: A signal and a challenge.
Due to massive link overload, this week’s linkspam had to be broken into two posts! Enjoy!
- WTF, Plus Size Clothing Manufacturers?
- Game of Thrones: death, destruction and a whole load of relationships visualised (spoiler alert)
- Multiplicity
- Dear Diary “I protected his vanity in my own diary.” Mary Ann is such a beautiful writer: “Perhaps the diaries would allow our ships to pass the other close enough to clasp our hands across the railings, just for a moment.” Cannot wait to read her book.
- English May Have Retained Words From an Ice Age Language
- This might be the best obituary I have ever read.
- Today in what’s wrong with the economy: full-time writers at a hit TV show who make $500 a week and enjoy no benefits
- From the BBC: how not to eat healthily for £1 a day
- The sun is at last setting on Britain’s imperial myth (via)
- So what do you think of my story where I made use of another person’s culture?
- American Indians in Children’s Literature on three of Francesca Lia Block’s books: Weetzie Bat, Pink Smog, and Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys.
- In defence of the 1970s: Germaine Greer was there as well as Stuart Hall
- What Should We Call Girl Pain?
- Braving the Fantasy Debates – Not Only Epic, but Romantic
- Reading Order Lists This is amazing–must have taken so much time to compile these.
- Fifty Has Seldom Looked So Good Bared Such lovely lines in that building. I don’t think I ever made it to the Sheldon when I lived in Lincoln.
- John Scalzi on the RT Booklovers’ Convention While I am really glad that John had such a good time at a convention which is near and dear to my heart, I have to wonder about how this was framed–very often, men in predominantly female spaces get unconsciously special treatment from the female participants and it would have been nice if John had acknowledged this. On the other hand, my experiences at RT have also all been very good, too, and I’m not sure that my experience was typical, either, as each time I’ve been has been as a member of magazine staff.
- RT editor Mala Bhattacharjee has thoughts on this topic, too. I agree with her that the cover models are often treated like meat–which is not cool or okay at all.
- Jim C. Hines on Fandom, Conventions, and Race.
- It Is in Our Nature to Need Stories (via) “Nature shaped us to be ultra-social, and hence to be sharply attentive to character and plot. We are adapted to physiologically interact with stories.”
- Sarcasm & Stars; The Lowest Form of Reviewing? This is absolutely fascinating, especially from my perspective as a former professional reviewer–I had a lot of reasons for moving on, but one of them definitely involved wanting to feel more personally invested in my reviews.
- Tobias Buckell has a theory about the fate of today’s book bloggers. And I wonder if this is part of the conversation about historical romance, too. Most romance readers have read a lot of historicals and there’s a lot of talk about the sameness of the settings and characters and I think we’re seeing people doing this: “They seek out ‘artist’s artists’ and are not happy when those voices aren’t welcomed by the mainstream, because these are stories aimed at people who’ve simply consumed a terrific amount of fiction to be able to enjoy the work.”
- The only reviews that matter.
- The Best Author Letter Ever Seriously. The best.
- 50 Shades (to be a Lover)
- Writing the Next Great American Woman’s Novel “Organization and labeling are supreme virtues, above most other less supreme virtues like equality and fairness.”
- Tor Books says cutting DRM out of its e-books hasn’t hurt business
- How to Kill a Vampire (Series) and As Charlaine Harris Ends Her Sookie Stackhouse Series, An Illustration Of Fandom Gone Too Far
- Think of Yourself as a Writer Great post on academic writing–and writing in general.
- By the Numbers: Parents, Children, and Libraries
As with Friday’s post, thanks again to Jessica for her assistance in collecting these links. Much appreciated!
I really like that author blog post about bad reviews, and I liked what she says in the comments too: ‘A book is not just a book – a book is a conversation.’ … The author sets up the conversation – puts up the pillars and the beams, but the conversation is between the book *itself* and the reader – not between the author and the reader. Because, while the author provides the tools and materials for constructing the story, the actual *work* of story construction happens in the mind of the *reader*, not the writer. And the writer is – and should remain – absent. ”
As for historical romance, I think the connection you make with the Bucknell piece is spot on. I think we forget what an unusually savvy bunch of readers we bloggers are. When I first started reading romance, I thought I would never get tired of it, never learn the terrain, or feel it was familiar. So many books are published every month, that I wondered how more experienced readers could complain about not finding what they wanted. But now, five or six years later, much of it feels samey, been there done that. And while non-romance readers will likely attribute that to the same book being written over and over, I think it’s down more to my greater experience. I think classism and racism (among other isms) have always dogged the genre and still do. But with the rise of self-pub and digital independent pubs, I just don’t feel like we are in an time of unusual constriction. But that’s just my perspective. I am no industry expert and probably don’t have the broad view of sales and the like that others do.
Finally, people keep sending me these articles, like the one by Susan Faludi on Shulamith Firestone in the New Yorker, about the fate of the women’s liberationists/radical feminists of the 1970s (this is a different group from the Gloria Steinems) and it’s just heartbreaking in too many cases. We don’t do so well taking care of our elders though, and I guess there’ s no reason to think this group would be any different.
I loved the author letter.