For those of us of a Certain Age, who grew up in a Certain Cultural Context, there is a birthday that comes with a default soundtrack.
When I get older losing my hair, many years from now
Some sentiments in the song mark the point of view as strongly gendered—and gendered within certain specific cultural expectations.
Will you still need me?
The speaker assumes that the value they provide will eventually decline—
Will you still feed me?
When I wrote a story about an epidemic, complete with administrative mismanagement, I hadn't intended it to be immediately relevant to the world the book was released into. (Though, of course, all fictional themes can have metaphorical resonances with contemporary life.) The elite of Rotenek respond to periodic bouts of river fever by "social distancing" -- i.e., by leaving town for their country properties. In Floodtide, a further quarantine measure was to block traffic across the river, in the belief that the source of the disease was the poorer quarters of the city.
Today, my department at work is taking me out for a lunch celebrating my 15 year anniversary at the company. My plan and goal (knock on wood) is to be here to celebrate my 20 year anniversary and ideally to retire at some point shortly thereafter. I don’t know whether my career path is at all typical of my generation, but it’s certainly different from that of my parents’ generation and feels different from how my younger friends talk about career expectations.
As regular readers (all six of you) know, every month my podcast does a round-up show that includes a list of new and forthcoming lesbian-relevant historicals (including historic fantasy). I get the content from three primary methods: 1) Buzz on the net; 2) Searching on Amazon using "released after" and keywords = "lesbian" + "historic"; and the topic of today's blog 3) checking the websites of those publishers who release relevant books often enough that they're worth checking individually.
(This is an essay I've had kicking around in draft for a while, but the first couple paragraphs exaplain why I decided to polish it up and post it.)
A Note on Commenting
Lately I've been thinking about a topic in the general field of literary gatekeeping. To some extent, these thoughts were inspired by my new venture as a contributing book reviewer at The Lesbian Review. One of the reasons Sheena has been urging me to join the reviewers there is that they didn't have anyone who specialized in historical fiction, so for the most part, historical fiction simply wasn't getting reviewed. And since historicals are a favorite genre of mine...
I hope that thing about "New Year's Day is a sign of what your year will be like" thing isn't true for me, because early on the 31st I started getting that throat-tickle thing that presages a cold, and sure enough I spent the next two days in bed trying to sleep off the germs. I can't control that aspect of how my year started, so here's something I can control. I made an off-hand commitment on Twitter the other day to balance out my self-pitying "what have I done all year" posts with a positivity post about nice writing-related things that have happened this year.
I’m debating whether I want to put out any New Year’s resolutions (or my more usual irresolutions) for 2018, but the end of the year is a good time to look at my post from 2016/12/29 when I laid out my resolutions for this past year and see how they played out. My one solid resolution was: “I'm going to stop doing things just to try to impress people who don’t actually care. And one of those things is blogging five days a week.”
Here I am on my usual review day without any reviews lined up (though I may do movie reivews of "Battle of the Sexes" and "Coco" at some point). So I thought I'd reprise a feature I did last year. This is not a "best of" list. This isn't even a "best of what I consumed" list. No claim is made that the items on this list have an objective value over any other items I might have placed on the list. But these are 20 items--grouped into 4 general categories of 5 items each--that I blogged about and that have stuck with me for some reason.
