I find myself yearning for a new wip. Which is perhaps not a good thing considering I'm about to start revising Wake at Landfall (for real this time I swear) (definitely intended to trunk that one for a full year yep)
Trans Possibilities in the Speculative Works of Andrew Joseph White is a short essay about the author's SFF YA work, which possibilities are available to trans characters in those imagined worlds, and how the books' audiences might influence those writing choices!
bsky.app/profile/spec...
Purple background, white text, which says This piece sets out the ways in which the possibilities of gender transition are presented in "Hell Followed With Us" and "The Spirit Bares Its Teeth," White's first and second published novels. "Trans Possibilities in the Speculative Works of Andrew Joseph White" -- Leo Astrum
New essay for subscribers! @leoastrum.bsky.social examines the possibilities available to trans characters in two novels by Andrew Joseph White.
Subscribe now to read it (and 12 other essays across the year!) for just AUD30/yr (~GBP16 / USD22).
www.speculativeinsight.com/subs
I wrote a thing about the way genre, audience, and transness intersect in these books! 👀👀
a square painting of a small island on a very blue lake, a ring of stars floats above the few trees on the island
a square painting of blue mountain against a blue and pink gradient sky, the mountain is covered in water ripples and several stars dance above them
ultramarine blue has my whole heart 💙
I have a Kobo (Clara BW) and it seems to work pretty well, though mine is very new. I struggle to imagine that the higher price points are worth it unless you really, really like touch screens for ereaders. Also I have a case for mine that has a stand and it's good!!
"I used Claude to help me..." and you've lost me because I just can't believe any of the article as you've proven you've not done the work and the data supplied can't be trusted.
A digital drawing of a loosely drawn landscape with expressive strokes, depicting two little cotttages among trees in front of two white mountains.
#repostyourart day 5: mountain
This was also for #pleinairpril last year!!!
A square painting featuring a landscape of tall green grass against a red background, a large yellow orb with a halo floats above the clearing
Watcher in the Field, 2024
It's this thing where like. I know "his or her" is '''''progressive''''' in the sense that a specific kind of man makes himself the default in discussions about writing and literature. But ohhhh my god the casual erasure
A screenshot of an extract of text. It reads: Strengths and Flaws The protagonist of a novel has to be extremely “round,” with many contrasting sides to his or her personality. For one thing, this makes the
Trying to psych myself up to revise my novel by reading what other people have written about revision and lol lmao. My protagonist's pronouns are they/them
i do my very best not to participate in “readers these days” discourse because:
1. i’m always suspicious each craze is just 1 fourteen-year-old on tiktok saying stuff
2. even if it’s twelve thirty-six-year-olds, they are not my audience and were never going to be.
It's weird to think that if education was free i'd probably have at least one doctorate right now. I would have never stopped going to university if i could have. I know there's a lot of problems with academia, but I really just enjoyed learning stuff i was interested in.
a book cover with a gothic-looking city in dark blues and greens with some yellow lighting. adrian tchaikovsky says 'a triumph of the imagination.' wickhills by premee mohamed.
Well I just got the OK so I am doing MY OWN DANG COVER REVEAL
WICKHILLS has a cover now! Illustrated by Tom Roberts and designed by Russell Trakhtenberg!
Which I copied and pasted so I would not make a typo! Anyway, BEHOLD!
us.macmillan.com/books/978125...
Wait oh my god it's ONE LONG SLAB??
With the HP trailer dropping tomorrow, here's the whole deal:
If you watch the show, hell even just the trailer, I will think less of you. I will dislike you. I will think you don't care about trans people.
That's it. It's been years. There's no wiggle room. No qualifiers. You care or you don't.
'Good thing' (on the y-axis), improving steadily from 1930, especially from 1945, then declining sharply from 1979, improving again from 1997, then falling through the fucking floor from 2010 onwards, thanks to George Osborne and associated psychopaths
Every UK graph
Something really neat one of my lecturers did (in 2019, fwiw) was that he marked an article as "vital" when it was a journal only available physically (not online at all). He told me when we discussed what I'd read that very few students ever read that specific piece and said they couldn't find it 🫠
Truths About Writing Most people will ignore what you write Someone dead did it better than you You will be misunderstood That's all ok
Note from my notebook (2017).
Seconding the suggestion for Andrew Joseph White's adult horror, You Weren't Meant to Be Human - definitely fits the bill of dark horror (with SFF elements). It's body (specifically pregnancy) horror about a trans man being forced to keep a pregnancy in a murder worm cult
Blue Prince DEFINITELY counts! That's secondary world fantasy right there (with fantastically crafted worldbuilding)
I think I could have done without it, honestly 😅 I was not equipped to handle it and no one - including the librarian who handed it to me - flagged to me that reading it might be challenging.
Kevin Brooks' The Bunker Diary - I read it at 13, I think. Teenage boy imprisoned in a bunker, the captor stops feeding everyone and he 1: has to eat his protector after the man dies of now-untreated cancer and 2: loses his mind and dies.
It fucked me up severely! It won a kidlit award that year.
do not ask yourself whether or art is good instead ask is it sincere was it cathartic was it fun to make is it made by me and don’t forget to stay silly
Me: "the weather doesn't affect my moods"
The Sun *comes out*
Me: "everything is beautiful and wonderful actually, what a privilege it is to be alive"
Yes, but I'm on the older end of gen z and I'm a historian, so ymmv 😂 I think I first discovered Watergate through asking 'so why are controversies called -gate' when I was maybe 15/16, if that helps
I mostly want to know if the reader thinks it landed what it was trying to do - and what that thing is. I'm uninterested in, like, point scoring for how good it is at representation (quality or quantity) specifically. Just wanna know what it's good/bad at on a writing level!
Apologies if you know this already, but my recollection is that it's a staff surveillance thing - admin really want to know who's striking/who's a union member/whose students REALLY want classes to run. Lecturers, for union reasons, want that information as far out of admin hands as possible
From my own experience with UK unis, my instinct would be that most of the classes will not be running, if they are it will be with vastly diminished students, and the only time I asked a lecturer directly if a class was running, they basically said "I'm not telling you" 😅
The most helpful any everyday technology has ever been is GMail's "You wrote 'Attached is' but no files are attached." reminder and I don't need any tech to be more intelligent than that.