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The State of the Fics

adding a read more to this because it’s getting long

Be whooo youuu areee

I tried to narrow this down. I really did. Instead you get 54 of my favorite queer books, not including the series many of these are attached to.

Also some of these authors I've read their entire backlist or close to it, so I didn't include all of them. (Looking at you, Allie Therin, KJ Charles, Cat Sebastian, Lily Mayne, Foz Meadows, Tavia Lark)

Do we have any in common?

wearethekat

May New Releases

*The Last Contract of Isako, Fonda Lee (5 May). Corporate samurai space opera.

Death’s Daughter, SA Barnes (5 May). Death’s daughter Jocasta is quietly attending university undercover when he names her as his successor and makes her a target.

Platform Decay, Martha Wells (5 May). The latest book in the Murderbot series, and a full novel.

*The Girl with a Thousand Faces, Sunyi Dean (5 May). Hong Kong gothic about a young woman confronting a powerful ghost. My review.

Radiant Star, Ann Leckie (12 May). A planet on the brink of being absorbed by the Raadchai empire allows one last man to be mummified as a living saint, which has unexpected political consequences.

We Dance Upon Demons, Vaishnavi Patel (12 May). A reproductive health care worker fights both human attacks on her clinic and supernatural attacks after she develops mysterious powers. My review.

Make Me Better, Sarah Gailey (12 May). Horror novel about a vulnerable woman pulled into a community that promises an end to loss.

*Vile Lady Villains, Danai Christopoulou (12 May). The Klytemnestra x Lady Macbeth book. My review.

All Hail Chaos, Sarah Rees Brennan (12 May). Sequel about a young terminal cancer patient who is transported into her favorite series as a minor villain.

The Tapestry of Fate, Shannon Chakraborty (19 May). Second Amina al-Sirafi pirate book.

Palaces of the Crow, Ray Nayler (19 May). A band of children and suspicious crows surviving in Lithuania during World War I.

Mortedant’s Peril, RJ Barker (19 May). A cleric who reads the memories of the dead must solve a mystery where he himself is the main suspect. My review.

Startup Hell, Caitlin Rozakis (19 May). A young witch is just trying to make it in the corporate world when she discovers her boss dead in the process of summoning a demon.

The Fake Divination Offense, Sara Raasch (19 May). m/m fantasy romance about a half giant fantasy sportsball player fake dating a cheerleader.

Bone of My Bone, Johanna van Veen (26 May). Sapphic nun relic road trip in war-torn seventeenth century Europe. My review.

New release masterpost here.

sarahreesbrennan

That’s me with the chaos! And I love Martha Wells and Fonda Lee, am especially excited for Tapestry of Fate as I loved Amina, and I will be doing a storytelling panel in July with RJ Barker at Waterstones Leeds. 🎉

mamawasatesttube

the thing about media literacy is that understanding why the author chose to specify that the curtains are blue is the same skill set as understanding that the way the author characterizes all black characters as angry or all chinese characters as meek and silent is racist. it is the same skill set as being able to identify when a news source is biased or when someone is feeding you propaganda. the ability to ask "why did this person choose to present this premise in this specific way?" is a critical skill in a world full of misinformation. why are the curtains blue? maybe it's a characterization detail. maybe it's extraneous worldbuilding. why is this character written as being right all the time? maybe you're intended to disagree with them. maybe it doesn't matter. maybe you should still ask why.

horrorlesbians

after you read the poem “the woman dies” a lot of media makes you mad

horrorlesbians

Excerpts from The Woman Dies by Aoko Matsuda

butch-king-frankenstein

"The Woman Dies" is a short story, not a poem.

Interesting how the only part of it people share is the opening three paragraphs, conveniently excising the parts that talk explicitly about rape, as well as the parts that display an explicitly Japanese viewpoint.

blessings-grow-meadows

ROLLS for days....

bucketofdeltav

So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.

melyzard

elodieunderglass

@bucketofdeltav says the URL is here: http://tumblr.com/star-system-generator

Follow @star-system-generator and get more of the good stuff by joining Tumblr today. Dive in!

halondrus

tobiasdrake

One thing I will always appreciate Fullmetal Alchemist for is the fact that they let Roy Mustang be complicit in genocide.

Mustang is an Atoner figure. Something that plagues Atoner figures is when writers are too precious about the characters we're meant to like to actually let them be guilty of something serious.

The Atoner might be trying to make amends for their involvement in the Great '87 Hotel Massacre, and then three seasons in you find out what happened. And it's like, "I drove a taxi to the hotel, and the KILLER was in it! I ferried the killer to the hotel! That makes me responsible, and now I must atone for being nearby while the killings took place! And also vanquish the real killer who is the villain for this season."

Or maybe the Atoner did do the killings but they were under mind control the whole time and would never, ever have done it in their right mind.

But FMA said no. Mustang, Hawkeye, Hughes, even Armstrong to an extent though he suffered a breakdown and fled during it. They did that shit. They followed their orders and they did that shit. And it haunts them.

Roy did that shit. And his atonement, his grand ambition, is to see everyone responsible for that shit brought to justice for their crimes. Including himself.

That is how you write an atonement plot.

zuzuxb

Juniper's room

not100bees

The thing about Miss Piggy is that she kind of has a Roger Rabbit comedy superpower where she wins nearly any conceivable fight she's in. But unlike other characters of which that's true, like say, Bugs Bunny, who tend to win because they make the opponent play the game with their rules, Miss Piggy wins because the joke is that she can beat the shit out of literally anybody.