#laura goode

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2026: May Wrap-Up.

Ha!!! I finally read More Fiction!! It's only taken me *checks egg timer* three (3) months,

Anyway! This was the Month of Bot, and also the Month of Read As Many Of My AAPI Authors As Possible, and I finished three (3) tricky scenes of my revision project (with a jumpstart on a fourth!) and wrote some sanity-saving side quest material! Good birthday month, I think :)

Reviews linked!:

THE MURDERBOT DIARIES + PLATFORM DECAY ★★★★★ Best beloved series! I was delighted that PLATFORM DECAY narrowed the scope back down from A Planet to a micro-subset of #MyHumans. I cackled. A Lot. Liked this one more than SYSTEM COLLAPSE (not as much as NETWORK EFFECT)(NE is my Very Favorite).

THE LANGUAGE OF LIARS ★★★★ Loved Huang's first novella enough to preorder subsequent releases, started here because aliens and language and translation and spies. Very good. If you liked the idea of Kuang's BABEL but thought the treatment was lackluster, try this instead. (If you enjoyed BABEL, as I did, definitely try this!)

HAIR ON FIRE ★★★★ Afghan women poets for this month's Poetry Quest installment! Very much poetry in exile; appreciated the introduction for context (other volumes in this series haven't had intros lol). Favorites were Mahbouba Ibrahmi, Mariam Meetra, and Nadia Anjuman.

THE WATER OUTLAWS ★★★½ I was daisychaining my Huangs, yes. Genderbent queer-friendly wuxia retelling of an old Chinese novel. Started kind of slow, picked way the heck up.

THE CHOSEN AND THE BEAUTIFUL ★★★★ Daisy(ahaha)chaining my retellings, too, apparently. Gatsby! Jordan Baker style! Immigrant! Queer! Fantasy! Vo nails the atmosphere and the vibe--the source material absolutely could have benefited from literal magic, yeah.

THE KILLING SPELL ★★★★ One of my bonus side quests this year is Try To Read New Things As They Enter My House Ish, and I've had this one on preorder for a while! More language magic! Hawaiian this time! Vaguely post-apoc. Was pleased by the bonus Russian.

PITCH CRAFT ★★★★★ Impulse grab at the library, AKA the best place to impulse grab things. Goode is hilarious and All Writers Are Just Like That™, I Guess. Was not expecting to cry at the end of a writing/business book, but here we are. (Books that make me cry get 5 stars almost automatically.)

THE HAUNTED BOOKSTORE ★★★½ Cute! Fun! Just enough heart crimes to keep me engaged! I don't usually read manga (so please don't take this as a qualified stamp of approval lol, I don't go here), but I liked these a lot. Perfect for writing project vibes, too :)

ANNA AKHMATOVA - 117/942 pages read. Made it through Evening! Scribbled a bunch of fragments in my notebook (short example: "Getting drunk on the sound of a voice/That resembles yours" (96) like ma'am please--). I do appreciate how massive the text in this book is, that makes it much less daunting.

I'm...about a month behind where I hoped to be for Revisions (I can't decide if it is Helpful or Maladaptive that I have month benchmarks flagged on my scene card whiteboard; I definitely finished "April" earlier last week), and I'm back to a Big Stretch Where Everything Needs To Be Rewritten lol. Also! Turns out! I gotta have my submission for critique put together and sent by the end of July, which. Does somewhat accelerate pieces of my timeline, yes. (Oops.) I have knitted so little this year, you have no idea. However! We persevere!! If you hear a writer howling in the distance, don't worry about it, they're just time-crunched and resenting the time-suck of the dayjob.

Under the Cut: How I Conceptualize ~*★Stars★*~

★ - This was Bad. I would actively recommend that you do NOT read this one, no redeeming qualities whatsoever, not worth the slog. Save Yourself, It's Too Late For Me. Book goes in the garbage (donate bin).

★★ - This was Not Good. I would not recommend it, but it wasn't a total waste or wash--something in here held my interest/kept my attention/sparked some joy. I will not be rereading this ever. Save Yourself (Or Join Me In Suffering, That Seems Like A Cool Bonding Activity).

★★★ - This was Good/Fine/Okay/Meh. I don't care about this enough to recommend it one way or another. Perfectly serviceable book, held my interest, I probably enjoyed myself (or at least didn't actively loathe the reading). I don't have especially strong feelings. You probably don't need to save yourself from this one--if it sounds like your jam, give it a shot! Just didn't resonate with me particularly powerfully. I probably won't reread this unless I'm after something in particular.

★★★½ - I liked this! I'll probably recommend it if I know it matches someone's vibes or specific requests, but I didn't commit to a star rating on Goodreads. More likely to reread, but not guaranteed.

★★★★ - I really enjoyed this!! I would recommend it (sometimes with caveats about content warnings or such--I like weird fucked up funny shit). Not a perfect book for me by any means, but Very Good. This is something I would reread! Join me!!

★★★★★ - I LOVED THE SHIT OUT OF THIS, IT REWIRED MY BRAIN, WILL RECOMMEND TO ANYONE AND EVERYONE AT THE SLIGHTEST PROVOCATION (content warning caveats still apply--see 4-star disclaimer). Excellent book, I'll reread it regularly, I'll buy copies for all my friends, I'll try to convince all of Booklr to read it, PLEASE join me!!

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2026: PITCH CRAFT by Laura Goode.

I was at the library waiting in line to print a clean copy of a scene, as one does, and this book was literally face out at eye level, so I thought "...yeah, sure, there's a chapter about querying in there, might as well" (because while I have a query letter writing book on my shelf, it was published in 2008, and this one came out last year--perhaps the times have changed, all that).

I was anticipating only reading that single chapter, but then the Introduction was titled "The Art of Losing Is Hard as Fuck to Master" and proceeded to come for my jugular Over and Over and Over again, and then the first chapter was called "Confidence is Performance: And How to Do It," which also came for my jugular, and so I accidentally wound up reading the whole book instead.

Great news: Goode is hilarious and Altogether Too Relatable (I suspect all writers really are basically the same, given the craft books I've read this year)(a Representative Quote, from the intro: "even though I was, in my own current estimation, a no-talent garbage fire destined for a life of broke, bitter obscurity"), and also deeply practical. Most of this book was very oriented toward the business side of writing (like it says on the tin!), but the introduction and the last chapter, aptly titled "Break Glass In Case of Emergency: The Fire Extinguishers of Emotional Regulation That Every Writer Needs," were some of the most honest and down-to-earth takes on craft and success and failure that I've read in a long time.

In short: I was not expecting to cry at the end of a book categorized "Business--Writing," but Here We Are™.

If you've done any amount of research about pitching/querying/etc., the long-form fiction chapter might not be super helpful--I've tried this querying rodeo a couple times, so the stuff in here was a good refresher but nothing New new. The nitty gritty of pitching shorter pieces and proposals and such was new and interesting to me, but not quite what I need right now. Those first chapters and last chapter, though, absolutely made this read worth it for me. I did literally laugh out loud and also cry and also also snap increasingly unhinged commentary to my friends.

You can read most if not all of the intro on the Big River's website as the "free sample," and if you vibe with that, I definitely recommend picking this up! Felt like it could be in conversation with Stephen Marche's ON WRITING AND FAILURE, which I also recommend.

[mappingthemoon]

Even still, I find a fine and vital distinction between the act of confession and the act of disclosure, and it was in the decade or so that I did not call myself a Catholic that I began to chafe at how often the descriptor 'confessional' was applied to women writers. To confess is to unburden oneself of sin with remorseful intent: I have done wrong and will not again; I am sorry; I seek forgiveness. Not at all incidentally, in its classical Catholic sense, a confession is also made exclusively to a man. And because the act of confession predicates remorse, the term 'confessional writer' as it is colloquially used is at best inaccurate, and at worst overtly judgmental. To call a writer 'confessional' is to connote that she is ashamed of herself, or should be. To call a writer 'confessional' is to shame her before reading her. So when I position myself 'against confession,' I mean that no woman should be made a confessor without her consent."But the etymology of 'confession' richens beyond remorse. Late Middle English: from Old French confesser, from Latin confessus, past participle of confiteri, 'acknowledge,' from con- (expressing intensive force) + fateri, 'declare, avow.' An intense acknowledgement. A forceful declaration. Also confession of faith: a statement setting out essential religious doctrine.

Laura Goode, “Against Confession: On Intersectional Feminism, Radical Catholicism, and Redefining Remorse”

[therumpus]

From about 8–10 p.m., with Little Butt asleep and husband making pickles in the kitchen, I plow through a hundred more pages of Americanah, riveted. Jesus Christ, this book is like, Toni Morrison/Susan Sontag good. This book is first viewing of Beyoncé’s Lemonade good. This book is Simone Biles good.

THE READ ALONG #5: Laura Goode.

[e-volt]

I bet that dog-walking trollop called the cops on us.

Laura Goode, Sister Mischief

[e-volt]

This is an unbearable kiss, unbearable, unreal, unimaginable.

Laura Goode, Sister Mischief

[e-volt]

Hip-hop is a reflection of your surroundings and an instrument of change.

Laura Goode, Sister Mischief

[e-volt]

It's not like I want to get discovered, exactly, the way you hear actresses getting picked off at diners. It's more about my own road to discovery like pecking my way out of a shell. I just want to roll deep with a pack of talented bastards. Doesn't everybody?

Laura Goode, Sister Mischief