As part of World’s Without End’s ‘Women in Genre’ challenge I am reading a sci-fi or fantasy novel each month from an author I have never read before. For more information on the challenge visit: https://www.worldswithoutend.com/authors_wogf.asp.

Who Fears Death

By Nnedi Okorafor

On one level ‘Who Fears Death’ follows the fantasy bildungsroman formula to the letter. It features an underdog protagonist, a wary mentor, an evil wizard, and a prophecy that will affect not only the characters but their whole world. But what makes it different is its setting. Who Fears Death is set in post-apocalyptic Sahara Africa, a desert world blanketed in magic. While the broad plot points might be familiar the issues it engages in (such as war and rape) are portrayed in a way that’s more insightful than your usual Campbellian sword and sorcery tale.

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I’m pleased to announce that issue 1 of Crowded Magazine is now on sale in a variety of formats. You want it as a PDF, you want it as an app, you want a full colour hard copy that you can leave to your grandkids? We gots it. And no matter what format you buy it in, you get a ton of great art and stories, including a story of mine! ‘House Hunting,’ is a darkly comic suburban horror/fantasy about a little girl and a hobo fighting demons.I like it and I hope you do too.

Spend your money here!

Con or Bust is an organization that helps fans of colour attend conventions. Every year they raise funds through an awesome auction. There’s a ton of great stuff being sold off, everything from care packages to homemade jewelry to story crits to countless books (I have my eye on a couple of Cory Doctorow books that are on the auction block). So go, take a look, see if there’s anything that catches your eye…but God help you if you outbid me.

http://con-or-bust.org/

As part of World’s Without End’s ‘Women in Genre’ challenge I am reading a sci-fi or fantasy novel each month from an author I have never read before. For more information on the challenge visit: https://www.worldswithoutend.com/authors_wogf.asp.

Doomsday Book

By Connie Willis

The premise of ‘Dooms Day Book’ is a great hook with multiple barbs. Kivrin, a young historian at Oxford Collage in the near future, goes back in time so she can see for herself what the medieval ages were really like. So that’s hook number one. As soon as she goes, an epidemic breaks out in Oxford and the whole city is quarantined. Also exciting. And then the characters in 2055 Oxford start to suspect that there might be a connection between Kivrin going back in time and the epidemic. Better and better.

But even though I found the basic plot intriguing, for the first half of the book we don’t get much closer to the heart of the mystery. The characters spin their wheels, going on for pages about the problems at hand without getting any closer to solving them. With Kivrin this is a bit annoying but it’s offset by the fact that Kivrin is an interesting character in an interesting setting. Interesting characters and an interesting world can make up for a lack of movement in the plot, and the Middle Ages section of the book delivers on those fronts.

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As part of World’s Without End’s ‘Women in Genre’ challenge I am reading a sci-fi or fantasy novel each month from an author I have never read before. For more information on the challenge visit: https://www.worldswithoutend.com/authors_wogf.asp.

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

I would not classify ‘Mr. Fox’ as fantasy. In fact, I would say it’s unclassifiable. I suppose that if you wanted to grab it, pin it down and examine it under glass and label it you could call it ‘slip-stream fiction,’ but why would you want to do that? Butterflies are so much prettier in the air then they are framed on a wall.

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A few weeks ago I mentioned that Girl Friends volume 2 is on sale. Not too long afterwards I learned that it hit #5 on The New York Times manga best seller list! Congrats to Milk Morinaga and to the rest of the team at Seven Seas.

Seven Seas will be releasing another Milk Morinaga title in the summer called ‘Kisses, Sighs, & Cherry Blossom Pink.’ I’m working on the script re-write right now and, just like with Girl Friends, it’s a very sweet series featuring high school girls in love. I’ve been listening to Tegan and Sara’s newest album while I work (it’s being streamed online at the CBC Music website until Jan.28th) and it’s kind of perfect music for listening to when you’re working on a shojo-ai manga. ‘Heartthrob’ is much more of a pop album from Teagan and Sara rather than an acoustic indie album, but all the synth and production makes it seem like J-pop’s distant Canadian cousin. Considering the album’s title it’s no surprise that pretty much every song is a love song in one way or another. It sounds not only like the kind of thing that Nana and Hitomi (the main characters of K,S, & CBP) might listen to, but the lyrics sound like thoughts they might have (I especially like the chorus from ‘I’m Not Your Hero:’ ‘I’m not your hero/but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t brave/ I never walked the party line/ But that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t afraid’) .

It’s also a good fit for a reason that is both superficial but important. Teagan and Sara are both gay. Their songs are not explicitly about being in love with a girl or being in love with a guy- they pretty much only use the pronoun ‘you’ in their songs, which aside from adding ambiguity also makes their music that much more intimate. I’m not gay, and I’m pretty sure Milk Morinaga isn’t either (just going by her author notes at the end of Girl Friends), but in a world full of hetero-normative works she’s created several touching manga with down-to-Earth, realistic characters (relatively at least. Even with it’s slight layer of fantasy it’s still more realistic than %99.99 of yaoi manga). Teagan and Sara’s music likewise offers something different from most popular media, coming from a different and less represented point of view. So maybe that’s why it works as such a good soundtrack for Kisses, Sighs, & Cherry Blossom Pink (but mostly, I think it’s ’cause of the pop-y, synthy love songs).

Actually, it’s been on sale for over a week, but whatever. The point is it’s now on sale!

‘Girl Friends’ is a fantastic shojo-ai (girl’s love) manga that manages to be cute and fluffy while still down to earth. I was really pleased to work on it with Seven Seas and hope that people enjoy it as much as volume 1. Buy it from Amazon here.

There’s a giveaway for ‘Absolute Visions’ on Goodreads! Absolute Visions is an anthology from the writers at the Absolute Write forums. It’s a really great collection, and I’m not just saying that because a story of mine is in there (I wrote ‘The Machine the Loved Alan Turing’).  So, if you a Goodreads user based in the States and are interested in a copy, please enter:

http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/40997-absolute-visions?auto_login_attempted=true

Thanks a ton to Sage at the AW forums for hosting this contest.

It’s been a week since New Year’s, right? Thank God. Now I can stop doing all the things I promised I would do.

All right, not allllll the things. But I think I bit off more than I can chew.

Here’s my 2013 goals:

1. Successfully participate in W1S1 (monthly challenge).

2. Participate and win NaNoWriMo.

3. Write every day.

4. Apply to the Clarions.

5. Read a short story a day.

6. Participate in the ‘Women in Genre Reading Challenge’ over at Worlds Without End: https://www.worldswithoutend.com/authors_wogf.asp

7. Write the play I’ve been planning.

Nice, manageable goals that don’t seem that intimidating when you spread them out over the year. But what’s tripped me up is all the reading I’ve promised to do. I’ve become a book club addict. There’s the Women in Genre Challenge, but there’s also the Absolute Write SF/F book club, plus the short story a day thing. Also, a friend and I have a little book club of two where we read classic novels (the bigger the better). So far we’ve read ‘War and Peace,’ ‘Les Miserables,’ ‘Crime and Punishment.’ For the first part of this year we’re reading ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’ But before I can get to any of that I want (no, need) to finish Cory Doctorow’s ‘For the Win.’

I love reading, and even though I’m excited about reading all these great novels and stories it’s starting to stress me out. So yesterday I decided to say screw it. If I don’t read a short story a day, I’m not going to cry over it. I still like the idea of reading a short story a day and I still want to have read 356 short stories by the end of the year, but I figure I can always do it when I have time. Or I can find ways to combine them, like reading a collection of short stories from a female SF/F author.

I also plan on updating this blog more often, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.