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NECROBANE

Cover art I did for 'Necrobane' written by Daniel M. Ford, and published by Tor Books. This is the second book in the swords and sorcery series following Aelis De Lenti. She's journeying deep into the snowy wilderness with Maurenia, the mercenary she's fallen for, and Tun her half-orc friend, to find an immense necromantic power to stop an undead army, and prevent a war. Tun is a returning character. A fur trader, naturalist, and close friend of Aelis. I again had to interpret what he was going to look like based on my reading of the text. Admittedly, I didn't get to read this one because of the schedule, but he is described in the first book, so I had it. Tun is a Nordic word and given he comes from the snowy mountains of the North and has braided hair I read him as a viking orc, which sounded cool to me and hopefully it is to you too. Thanks to AD Esther Kim!

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If i had an evil doppelganger i would simply invite it to come live with me. if i can get a wfh job so can it, i'll even let it borrow my resume. Cut our housing costs in half. Double our odds of getting chores done because we each know the other is Watching And Judging if we don't do the thing we said we were gonna do. Way easier to make the bed. Write twice as fast by trading off outlining and drafting. Sure i'd occasionally lose some sleep from holding my bedroom door shut at 3 a.m. while it tries to force its way in to murder me, but what roommate is perfect

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you know how sometimes a character will mention a food they like and then the fandom will turn that into like 60% of their personality?

ax animorphs is the best character because he genuinely is just Like That in canon. he has repeatedly called the cinnamon bun one of humanity's greatest inventions. he gave a cinnamon bun to a girl he liked as a present. he keeps a framed picture of a cinnamon bun in his otherwise sparsely-decorated room. one time he ate an entire tray of cinnamon buns so quickly that he horrified bystanders and had to have the paramedics called. he later admitted to practicing eating cinnamon buns to prevent himself from going ballistic again. he begins promoting cinnabon as an andalite tourist destination after the war. literally all of these sound like silly headcanons you would read in a tumblr post but they're all real. the cinnamon bun lover of all time.

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I thought today about a villanelle I had an inspiration there and then I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel

It’s hard to keep the poems rigid shell On track inside my mind, so when I thought today about a villanelle

I thought about refrains re-rung like bells And how simple it might be to begin; I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel

The line below these two, I brag to tell Is simply coded as =A1 I thought today about a villanelle

And this stanza’s refrain, I needn’t spell It out; it equals A3 and is done! I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel

I planned to use this better, really sell The bit; but flew too closely to the sun. I thought today about a villanelle I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel

[Description: The above text is pictured in individual cells in column A of an Excel spreadsheet. The sheet’s title in the workbook is “Sheet Two Villanelle” and to prove the truth of how it was constructed, Cell A23 is selected; at the top of the image you can see that it does not actually contain any text, but just the Excel formula “=A1″. This is probably Art, somehow.] 

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Is your essay on The Left Hand of Darkness vs Ancillary Justice available somewhere?

Afraid not -- it was for a class, and I'm not really comfortable sharing it online. I'm happy to go into a bit more detail, though. It's an essay that started out with me just writing down something that fascinated me about Ancillary Justice as if I were telling a friend about it.

Putting it under the cut because I'm sure I'm going to run long even just casually paraphrasing it. (Honestly, I have to edit my expository writing for concision, usually, rather than struggling to reach a word count.)

Also quick prefacing note: I haven't read either of these books in many years, and I don't have copies at hand, so any quotes or specific details are from memory.

Content warnings for, uh ... a sort of inverted sci fi transphobia / intersex discrimination in my analysis of The Left Hand of Darkness, and also mentions at the end of rape and colonialism. And I discussion the association of violence, especially sexual violence, with masculinity.

I started out by examining Seivarden from Ancillary Justice and how completely Leckie obscures her characters' actual genders, both in terms of biological sex and self-determined identity. Seivarden is the most obvious case of this, since Breq says "I knew Seivarden was male" pretty much on page 1, but continues to refer to Seivarden with she/her, as with every other character, since Breq's primary language doesn't include gender markers.

(My professor showed us an interview where Leckie talks about using she/her as a gender-neutral pronoun to push back against the idea of masculine-neutral as default, which I think works quite well. Referring to everyone as "they" wouldn't have so thoroughly emphasized the difference between English and Radchaai, since we're used to "they" as indeterminate-gender. Using "she" as neutral/indeterminate gender registers as strange to the English-speaking reader in a way that parallels how the Radchaai come off to in-universe cultures that do have gendered markers; you see this in Provenance and Translation State especially, since they have non-Radchaai narrators -- though I couldn't discuss that in my essay since I hadn't read those books yet; Translation State wouldn't even come out for a few more years.)

It's also notable how Leckie completely divorces physical descriptions from gender. Most of the ways Breq describes people straight-up skip features that are considered gendered from an Earth/American perspective; occasionally we get something like the priest's beard, but we have no context for whether this is a gender marker in their culture. After all, Breq explicitly notes on page 1 that gender markers can vary widely from culture to culture, and that even those typical for a culture can be contradicted. So, when we come to Breq's casual statement "Seivarden was male," we don't actually know what that indicates about Seivarden, physically or socially. Does Breq's "male" indicate a biological trait -- i.e., does Seivarden have a penis? Or is "male" Seivarden's social gender?

We don't know, because Breq doesn't care -- she gives us very little info on gender roles among the Radchaai; they're just not important to her. And yet Breq using the word "male" does indicate that Rachaai have a concept of gender, or maybe it's biological sex. It's just not considered important enough to affect the pronouns used to refer to you; the Radchaai language only has one set of third-person personal pronouns, which Leckie renders as "she/her."

The contrast here is to Ursula K. Le Guin's narrator in The Left Hand of Darkness, whose name I did have to look up. Genly is a cis man from a culture with strong gender roles, and he brings an incredibly cis perspective to the ambisexual, monogendered Gethens. Like, I spent my whole read cringing at his insistence on assigning gender to the Gethen's physical and social traits: talking about how Estraven had a man's determination but a woman's sensitivity, a man's jaw but a woman's eyes, whatever. It's painful to read this guy show up on a planet full of people who don't adhere to a gender binary and start imposing that binary upon them.

(Not a criticism of Le Guin, though: she was writing in the 60's, plus I have to wonder how much she intended Genly's perspective to come across as excessively gendered.)

Now, I forget how I made this pivot more gracefully, but from here I moved to discussing how despite being a monogendered society, Geth actually does have strict gender roles -- they're just not the male/female binary that we're used to. Instead, the Gethen's idea of gender is that everyone who goes through regular kemmer cycles -- and thus, from an external binary-focused perspective, moves between male and female -- is "normal." And individuals who actually stay "male or female" consistently are considered "perverts," socially stigmatized. In Gethen terms, these "perverts" are doing gender/sex wrong.

In essence, Le Guin turns her own society's idea of gender roles on its head. By putting Genly Ai, a cis man, in a society where he's the gender pervert, she asks cis readers: What if you were the one outside the norm, not the man wearing a dress or the woman with a beard? Not to put words in her mouth, but I think there's a hope there to inspire readers to think about what that Othering feels like -- and to open their minds to the concept that maybe a male/female gender binary doesn't have to be a universal truth. (This paragraph's ideas are coming new to me as I discuss this topic again 6 years later, which is cool.)

On the other hand (the right hand of darkness?), there's never any suggestion in the Imperial Radch series that anyone's gender is wrong, just that it's not important enough to merit another set of pronouns. You can have whatever gender you want, under the Rachaai; they just don't care. They'll oppress you for a thousand other things -- citizenship, ethnicity, class, lineage, whatever -- but gender? Not important enough to discriminate over. Radchaai society isn't monogendered, like the Gethen; nor is it fully genderless. Rather, it's gender-disregarding. Gender-agnostic, if you will.

NOTE: If you don't want to think about rape today, this is the place to stop reading.

So that brings me to the conclusion of my essay, which highlighted how through her obfuscation of gender, Leckie divorces gender not only from physical characteristics but also from social dynamics around violence and sex. In The Left Hand of Darkness, when Genly notes that the Gethen have no history of warfare, he explicitly positions war as a male practice, describing the war-free Gethen as "like women, or ants." He also refers to the idea of war as rape, suggesting that when the Gethen's forerunners were genetically altered to remove the standard male/female binary, they "eliminated the male that rapes and the female that is raped," thus removing the impetus for war. (I don't think that's the exact wording, but it's pretty close; that sentence stuck in my mind.)

So, war and rape are both masculine practices, to Genly -- except, when we look back to our right hand, we see the non-masculine Radchaai running around the universe just doing so much war. It's their thing; their society runs on imperialism. They might disregard any gender roles, any "male that rapes" and "female that is raped," but that doesn't stop them from going to war.

It doesn't stop them from engaging in rape, either; the priest of the colonized people Breq is guarding at the beginning of Ancillary Justice specifically notes that ancillaries are preferable to fully human Rachaai soldiers because an AI won't beat or rape people for fun. It's notable here, perhaps, that the priest referring to the possibility of personally being raped by a Radchaai soldier is the one with the beard, one of the few characters Leckie deliberately describes with traits that her readers could identify as gender markers. Maybe the priest is male, maybe the Radchaai soldiers are female; their genders are irrelevant to whether the latter might rape the former.

The violence inflicted by both war and rape isn't linked to gender, for Leckie; it's driven by who in society has power. Who has the power to abuse with impunity? And who does society allow to be abused?

I hadn't read the rest of the trilogy at the time, and now I forget whether it's in book 2 or book 3 -- I think book 2 -- but this appears also in one of the later Ancillary books, when again one of the rare solid indications of gender is one of the colonized people agreeing to help Breq on the condition that Breq protects their brother from the Radchaai heir abusing him -- I don't think the abuse is explicitly described as sexual, but it's implied.

Not sure if this was longer than the original essay, but thanks to anyone who read to the end!

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just some of the the changes in design for the Penguin Symbol on old Penguin Paperbacks 

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Boromir Lives AU: We Didn't Have a Choice

Alternate title is They're All Just Kids With PTSD, Your Honor

This (ridiculously long? omg why so long, I did not mean for it to be this long) comic is a good example of how my plotlines usually develop---I'll write what I think is a self-contained story and then realize there are whole new narratives beyond it. This is how my first novel, Woodwalker, became a trilogy---I was writing it as a standalone novel until about the last three or four chapters, when I realized I'd kicked off a whole new series of political events. For this AU, I was thinking about how it would feel for Elboron to grow up in the long shadow of his parents, and idolizing his uncle(s) while also wondering how he'd ever measure up. For Boromir, I think he'd be so fulfilled to see his nephew get to come of age in a gentler world that he and his brother and all the others didn't get. Though if he had a future as anything other than a soldier I'm pretty sure it would be as a TikTok star showing us how to create a perfect ballerina bun. Show us your products, Boromir, dang.

This comic also reminded me that I clearly have a distinct set of author tropes because this has STRONG Veran vibes (Sunshield, Floodpath), with a young character feeling overwhelmed with the legacies of his parents. This is a bit of an opposite arc, though--- Veran wants to follow in his mother's footsteps but isn't allowed to, and so gravitates toward diplomacy, while Elboron feels pressured to take up soldiering like his namesake but would rather study language. Come to think of it, the manuscript I turned into my agent a few weeks ago also has some of these themes, which either means I need to stop writing quest follow-ups or start a Protagonists With Heroes For Parents support group.

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Boromir Lives: Helm's Deep

Boromir Lives: Whump-Time After Pelennor

Boromir Lives: GO TO SLEEP

Boromir Lives: Aragorn's Coronation

Boromir Lives: Faramir and Eowyn's Wedding

Boromir Lives: It's a BABY

Boromir Lives: High Uncle of the White Tower

Boromir Lives: The Haircuts

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I'm going to brag for just a minute, but this is my friend! And this book is fantastic!

I was one of the beta readers for A Fae in Finance, and it's witty and clever and has a great narrative voice. It's a book that dares to ask "what if your boss sucked so much he got you trapped in fae?" and "are things really so bad if you still have your cat with you?"

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As a former librarian I'm actually required to remind you that many libraries that subscribe to Libby are opted into a program that lets you subscribe and access magazines for free with no wait

And that this is actually a really fun, low cost way to not only access news and larger cultural magazines, but also to get free patterns for many different crafts that you can screenshot if need be and that lower the financial barriers to entry for trying new things

From my experience working in both academic and public libraries, many libraries are use it or lose it funding-- I have to say this because a lot of patrons feel guilty for how much they use the library and how often they're using it funny enough, but the worst thing you can do for libraries is not try out new features and not use what's already given to you as much as possible.

The numbers that come as a result of your patronage are how most libraries justify their continued existence in times of financial hardship, which sucks but, go check out some magazines on Libby!

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I've got some! Thought I'd have more but it turns out the majority of the trans books on my lists are YA, middle grade, and/or sci fi. So here are the titles that do qualify:

Ones I've read:

The Witch Roads by Kate Elliott (trans character is not protag but a major character; transphobia is a plot point but not a norm or the main drive)

Rules for Ghosting by Shelly Jay Shore

The Tensorate Series (4 novellas) by Neon Yang

The Adventures of Amina el-Sirafi by S. A. Chakraborty (trans character is present all along but not revealed until the very end)

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie (extreme fave, no romance tho, just fantasy)

From my TBR:

The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy

The Yoke of Stars by R. M. Lemberg

I am mostly missing trans books for my progress pride reading challenge, so I am looking for recommendations! Feel free to rec your own published books/original stories as well.

I'm hoping for:

Adult (not YA or MG)

Trans (including nonbinary) main or major character(s)

Fantasy and/or romance (esp romantic suspense) preferred

Books where the main plot or character arc is not about the character being trans ("trans character does fantasy or romance or suspense stuff" is most preferred, "trans character navigates being trans in a setting" is okay, "person figures out they are trans and/or comes out as main story arc" is least preferred)

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murderbot is peak queer rep because it’s about living as an inherently transgressive form of being, it’s about the complexity of passing, or the complexity of hiding, or the nuance of never fitting binaries and not wanting to even when fitting those binaries is seen as “better”, and it’s about making people uncomfortable just by existing, it’s about measuring forms of freedom and having to decide which you’ll save and which you’ll sacrifice. but most importantly it’s peak queer rep because murderbot is free for like five minutes and it immediately attracts the nearest supposedly-rare transgressive-illegal-superbot (ART) in a hundred light year radius to be its best friend, and what’s that if not your classic Queer On Queer Magnetism

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It's always what are you doing murderbot? how are you doing murderbot? and never we made everyone watch The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon and we all think all of your opinions on it are correct also here's 7 packets of drones and a military-grade laser cannon that can kill a combat bot in one shot

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If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

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I would love to see a fantasy novel where the lore that the reader / protagonist learns at first is not true

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we need more pathetic female characters written by authors who don't hate women

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Do you guys ever think about how Vetinari believes that all people are inherently evil, but then he does things like:

Giving people others would deem irredeemable second chances (Lipwig, the other thief too, he even regretted the death of Lupine Wonse, the guy who summoned a dragon and tried to kill him); spends time with ppl who see only the good in everything (Carrot, Leonard); treats and values ppl like individuals and actually cares about them (that scene in Jingo where he tells Vimes that it’s good that people didn’t get killed in the war).

So I thought,

What if he doesn’t want to believe that everyone is evil. What if he had arrived to that conclusion just from his actual life experience with the assassins and guild leaders, because that’s all he had seen other people do. But he tries to spend time with good people and give criminals second chances because he wants to be proven wrong. To be proven that his philosophy is actually wrong and “there is some good in the world and it’s worth fighting for.”

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Murderbot, a construct that was built and used to do extreme violence it's entire existence : I hate talking to people but I will try to resolve this situation peacefully if I can, threats only make people panic and then they take irrational decisions. Extreme violence is sometimes unavoidable but last resort.

ART, a peaceful research transportation : I love talking to people because I can threaten them with extreme violence right off the bat and it makes them do what I want (ads more totally-not-weapons to it's research equipment)