News — representation

It's December already. This month can be hard for a lot of people. Between the increasing darkness, the cold, and the various stresses of the holiday season, it's a tough time for many.

I can't speak for others, and I'm the last person to offer advice on how to get through this time because it's different for everyone. But one thing that helps me is having a good stack of stuff to read.

Books have been my escape, and the characters inside have been my friends, for as many...

It's one of the oldest and most common pieces of writerly wisdom: Write what you know.

At a glance, it seems easy to pooh-pooh. After all, science fiction writers have (presumably) never met an alien from the planet Zork, and to my knowledge, no one has personal experience becoming a werewolf. In real-world terms, everyone writes things outside their own lives, even if it's only the main character's age or career or home town.

On the other hand, there's something to that when it comes to certain things, particularly the emotions that ride...

This month, we've been talking about books and subjects that bust binary norms. This can be in the realm of who we love, or it can be in the realm of who we are. Bi-, pan-, and asexuality as well as polyamory tear down the walls of who it's acceptable to love. Books with such characters are still too few and far between. Trans and intersex characters challenge ideas of who we are, and there aren't nearly enough of those, either.

I often find, as both a reader and...

For some time, there have been great discussions going on in the LGBTQIA+ book world. The vast majority of popular queer fiction is either romance or features a romantic relationship. This is not bad at all. It's wonderful that romance includes couples (and more) of all kinds. Still, even within that, there's an emphasis on same-gender, monogamous couplehood.

This is beginning to change as we see more people writing #OwnVoices stories that transcend these boundaries. In some older books, non-binary genders and/or attractions were almost non-existent or subsumed by...

In keeping with this month's theme of creatures, paranormal, and urban fantasy, I thought I'd open a discussion on how these things reflect our real world---and where the line is on using otherworldly as a metaphor.

When the book The Black Witch, by Laurie Forest, arrived on shelves, it was amidst a furor. The novel (and by extension the author) has been accused of racism, ableism, and homophobia. (Note: I have not read it and cannot firsthand confirm this. You can read...