Books! People Never Seem to Stop Loving Books!

did you guys see the poem from a couple of days ago in poetry dot org’s daily poem it was so good and a treat to read 

been thinking about it since i read it 

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vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

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“Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all - And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - And sore must be the storm - That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm - I’ve heard it in the chillest land - And on the strangest Sea - Yet - never - in Extremity, It asked a crumb - of me.

-Emily Dickinson

Happy Pride :) 

EDIT!

Now available as prints! Thank you to everyone who’s interested!

im a blorbo apologist but also they did every bad thing they did and i will get mad if u ignore that. complexities

I am not blorbo’s apologist, I’m blorbo’s defense attorney. And baby, we are going for a plea deal cause he absolutely did that shit.

unavoidable that you will be the villain in someone else's story. You will be painted in an unfavorable light. You will be the irredeemable one. and all of this will happen despite how nice you might usually be or how kind or how respectful or how warm. and you will just have to move on.

shit, sorry, I'll delete that post right away. I didn't know he was a mythologist at all, let alone that he was infamous for positing a "universal" narrative structure that reduces a variety of works and storytelling traditions to variations on a single Jungian theme regardless of whether their actual contents line up with his thesis. I only knew about his work with Canned Soups.

Sext: let’s go to a bookstore and I’ll pick one for you & you pick one for me 🥰

[research life]

The start of a new semester! Some snippets of the recent study sessions🎀✨📖

intelligent girls are attractive. believe in a good education. learn to speak in another language and know what's going on in the world.

My cartoon for this weekend’s @guardian books

The horror, the horror...

writers and artists will go "this isn't good enough." my brother in christ, you're creating something new out of nothing and expressing yourself creatively. your productivity and unrealistic standards of perfection do not define you or the worth of your art. you're doing great.

Here’s what 7 years of journaling and scribbling looks like :)

Funniest thing about putting out a new fic is that people read it, same few people comment(!), and then every other fic you've written starts getting hits too. Like hey guys how's it going, Khajiit has other wares for you.

AO3 does not allow payment for Khajiit, but comments and kudos are better than money in many ways.

khajiit needs no coin, traveler. khajiit needs dopamine.

So it is. :) (I've got a Tumblr with the other version, but there's only one post on it, the purpose of which is to redirect people over here.)

Meanwhile: I consulted with @petermorwood, and yeah, he confirms: that was Liverpool in 1988—Follycon, which was that year's Eastercon.

I'd always been a convention-fandom person since I fell into (then mostly Trek, but later SF and fantasy) fandom in New York, and then later in LA, in the mid 1970s. Before online life, cons were the main way for fannish people to meet up and/or network with other fans and pros. So when I relocated to this side of the Atlantic with Peter after I finished assorted TV and novel work in LA in '87, it made sense for both of us to keep doing the same thing: touching base with old friends made at earlier conventions elsewhere, and making new ones.

It was so super to cross paths with Neil at last. Peter had known Terry for a good while; since their first books both came out in the same year, it'd only been a matter of time before they ran into each other on the UK convention circuit, which is relatively small.

In '88 the two of us were digital nomads before the infrastructure really supported there being such a thing.* We spent some months during that period wandering around the UK in Peter's Volvo, trying to work out where we wanted to live, while staying in various pubs and holiday cottages.

Partly as a result of this peripatetic lifestyle (and over later years, due to ease of access from Ireland), we wound up hitting a lot of UK cons: particularly the Albacon conventions in the Central Hotel in Glasgow, where we repeatedly caught up with Terry, and the yearly UK national convention, Eastercon. Follycon was the 1988 iteration of that, and Terry was there, and introduced us to Neil.

And then (as Neil mentions) over dinner we discovered that the three of us shared a passion for J. P. Martin's Uncle books, which are—to put it mildly—deeply subversive and wildly funny. (And nowhere near as well known as they deserve to be.) The meal kind of morphed into a recite-your-favorite-quotes-and-dissolve-in-laughter session, and by the time the bill arrived, that was it: as in the C.S. Lewis quote, "with what looks to [others like] amazing and elliptical speed", we were friends.

Since then we see each other in the flesh pretty much when circumstances permit. (I seem to remember exchanging waves with Neil across [racks memory] the pre-Hugo reception at the Glasgow Worldcon in '95: but we were both busy with con-oriented stuff and couldn't pause for more. Such is life.)

Now that online exists, though, it's a whole lot easier to wave across the room than it used to be. ...Of course nothing can truly replace those face-to-face late-night chats in a mostly-empty convention bar. But this is pretty good too. :)

*During this period I just barely missed being the first person ever to storyedit an animated series completely online, from a flat built into the walls of a castle in Scotland. Using MCI Mail, ffs!—which was pretty much all the non-Internet email there was back then. It's a shame the deal came undone. That would've been a trip.

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