Me Time
Holy Toledo!
Did you ever have a vacation that ended up not really being a vacation? That's what happened to us last week when we headed to a strange hotel right outside of Toledo, Ohio for what was supposed to be a lovely family vacation. My wife's mom and aunt booked an Air BnB nearby. We were in the strange hotel along with my brother-in-law and his husband. So why Toledo when my mother-in-law lives in Cincinnati? It was the hotel, which everyone thought was a great idea. Why? Because it has a pool, a sauna and a Jacuzzi in the room. Yes, a pool.
It turns out the pool was on the first floor of our two-floor "suite" along with a garage for the car we rented. But the entire suite has NO WINDOWS. You went to bed at night in the dark and woke up the next morning in the dark.
I had to work the entire week and never got to go into the pool. And my mother-in-law fell out of bed on the second night, fractured her hand and had to leave early. So it was not a fun week and we were thrilled to get home at the end of it.
I hope those of you who've had recent vacations had a better time.
I do have some good news...
The wonderful folks at I Heart SapphFic are featuring Speculative Fiction and Dystopian genres in the coming weeks as part of their Reading Challenge series. I've agreed to give away the first two books of my trilogy (The Papercutter and The Border Crosser) during each Challenge. So make sure you subscribe to I Heart SapphFic for this and for all the other fabulous stuff they do.
Oh and more more thing. Lesbian Visibility Day/Week is coming up and Jae is featuring books where a main character identifies as a lesbian. My first book, Exception to the Rule, will be included.
Sapphic Lit and Other Book Stuff
How BookTokers get paid - Vox
In a market where it’s notoriously difficult for anyone to make a living, BookTok is helping a select few people make a whole lot of money. That state of affairs raises a surprisingly knotty question: How much of that cash is making its way back to the creators who made the videos that are generating all of these book sales in the first place? And how is it getting to them?
How Kindle novelists are using OpenAI’s ChatGPT - The Verge
Everybody gets closer and closer to using it to write their stuff, and then they stop, and everybody seems to feel like they have to announce when they’re talking about this: “But I do not ever use it its words to write my books.”
‘We’re book nerds’: the female friends opening bookshops together | Books | The Guardian
“The pandemic gave us the push we needed to take the leap of faith, providing definitive proof that life is anything but predictable,” they recalled. “Large booksellers have a great range, but for us the value is in introducing people to new titles along with our key themes of land, sea and self.”
What Is Upmarket Fiction? | Jane Friedman
It has universal themes everyone can connect to, with a hyper-focused plot.
Take a Lesbian for a Drink: On 50 Years of Rita Mae Brown’s “Rubyfruit Jungle”
She took Rubyfruit Jungle to a small independent feminist press called Daughters, Inc., launched in 1972. Run by Houston oil heiress June Arnold and lawyer-editor Parke Bowman, the press paid Brown $1,000 and printed 5,000 books, available via mail order in lesbian and feminist publications. Eventually, 70,000 copies of the hardcover edition were sold. “They couldn’t print them fast enough,” Brown told Time.
The herstoric journey of Joan Nestle - Queer Forty
A vital new collection of iconic essays by writer, activist, and community herstorian Joan Nestle, reminds us of her landmark contribution to lesbian culture.
National Novel Writing Month — How to Avoid Token Representation
Good representation involves any story that includes a diverse cast and follows each of their story lines fully, allowing them to be well-rounded characters that contain depth and get adequate development.
Character Type & Trope Thesaurus Entry: Jester - WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®
The Character Type and Trope Thesaurus allows you to outline the foundational elements of each trope while also exploring how to individualize them. In this way, you’ll be able to use historically tried-and-true character types to create a cast for your story that is anything but traditional.
Writing Mistakes Writers Make: Basic Character Descriptions - Writer's Digest
You can learn a lot more about a potential love interest by the way they treat the waitstaff on a first date than you can by waxing poetic about how crooked their smile is.
Women now dominate the book business. Why there and not other creative industries? : Planet Money : NPR
the economist helps us think through potential reasons why women trail men in many creative industries, but have had spectacular success in achieving — in fact, surpassing — parity with men in the US publishing business.
Opinion | How to fight book bans and win - The Washington Post
library supporters can point out that censorship has costs and wastes public resources
The Official SCBWI Blog: What It's Really Like to Have Your Book Banned as an Author
It brought up a lot of emotions, which hit me in stages. I thought it might be helpful (for myself and others) to share
Freelance Book Reviewers Job Opening in , New York - PW JobZone
Publishers Weekly, the international news platform of the book publishing industry, is looking for experienced freelance book reviewers for both traditionally published and self-published works.
News You Can Use
Opinion | Where Is the Road Map for Growing Gray and Staying Gay? - The New York Times
Just like I’ve had a queer way of being young, I want a queer path forward into growing older.
The legacy of the ‘fiesty’ and ‘fire eating’ Lesbian Avengers
They were edgy. They were unapologetic. They were fierce. They were in America’s face and breathing fire, literally, after a lesbian circus performer taught the activists how to eat fire to protest a firebombing. Their mantra became “The fire will not consume us, we will take it and make it our own.”
17 Women Who Changed the Course of LGBTQ+ History
In observance of Women's History Month, we present some of the most significant LGBTQ+ women activists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
When Wise Women Were Witches. The wiping out of women healers in… | by Olivia Campbell | Medium
Wise women who practiced folk medicine and midwifery were natural targets of suspicion: often spinsters or widows, peasants who needed to work for a living, lady loners sidelined by society, but they played an important cultural role. And some understood their expertise. They were often right to be skeptical of the skills of these newly professionalized physicians. Universities didn’t teach much more than Christian theology, philosophy, and Hippocratic theories. So unlike their university-trained professional male counterparts, lay women practitioners could offer both knowledge and experience.
Moon Lesbian Flag, Explained | Autostraddle
Apparently, there is a Pride flag called the Moon Lesbian Flag, meant as a contrast to the Sun Lesbian Flag, which is different entirely from the standard Lesbian Pride Flag I was familiar with.
Amelia Abraham | At Cherry Grove · LRB 18 January 2023
Cherry Grove is a form of resistance, she said, and yet it is political without being overtlypolitical; it has always been chiefly a resort, a place to escape from the homophobia of the outside world.
The ‘Double Closet’: Why Some Bisexual People Struggle With Mental Health - The New York Times
Even as more people identify as bisexual, persistent stigmas remain, with many not feeling fully accepted by their communities.
Helpful Tools
BookFinder.com: New & Used Books, Rare Books, Textbooks
Its bare bones design is unchanged from 1997 and feels like a Craigslist for books. It’s an aggregated meta-search engine that simultaneously looks for a book on Amazon, Ebay, Abe, Alibris, Bibio, and 100,000 indie booksellers. It will find all copies available and arrange them by price, and supply the link for purchase from the source.
