Big, big props to Emily Skrutskie’s Bloodright trilogy, just finished the final book in a downright binge. Read the last few pages with a huge smile.
Over the top, space battles galore, sweet central queer relationship plus found family.
@bookstodon #SpaceOpera #DisasterGays #QueerRomance
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[#]selfPromo #fantasy #books #romance #QueerRomance
We were talking about first lines today in the #writephant chat. These are the first lines from my last four books, which are down the cosy end of the spectrum but have plenty of plot (and also romance and always happy endings):
The Uses of Illicit Art: As had become his morning routine on the day the London papers arrived in the seaside village of Lovelly-on-Sea, Kit Whitely came into the bakery to collect a tray of tea and treats and take it across to share with Miss Edith Knight
The Use of Myriad Arts: It was the summer of the Great Stink, Parliament greatly regretted its riverside location, and Genevieve McAvey was attending a hanging.
Fair Haven: The pie smelled about right now
Domesticated Magic: Mateo was up well before the sun to dress in the formal robes for the morning ritual, and he was not happy about it.
See all my books at https://wendypalmer.au/books/
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Reading about the first opium war and came across what seemed an interesting contrary take, but the author lost me with this sentence.
I wonder which of Queen Victoria being:
had any relevance whatsoever to how involved the British head of state was in foreign policy at that time…
I kind of feel the implicit bias here indicates the risk of implicit bias in the rest of the analysis…
[#]history #QueenVictoria
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NSW law: Serious maladministration is "conduct … that is unlawful, or unreasonable, unjust, oppressive or improperly discriminatory, or based wholly or partly on improper motives".
Internal review of the hospital executives who decided they had the right to interfere in people’s personal medical care and ban a safe and legal procedure at a rural public hospital because they had a personal objection to it: nah, all good, no serious maladministration here
Kudos to these doctors for pushing and taking it further, and at least it sparks a discussion about abortion access for rural and regional women.
And thank you, ABC.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-20/doctors-complain-to-corruption-watchdog-over-abortion-ban/104820934
[#]Australia #AbortionRights #AbortionBan
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🤦♀️ after quite few books/stories published on draft2digital, I only just realised I have to press Enter to make it add the search keywords I’ve typed into the metadata 🤦♀️
[#]WritingCommunity
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So for some reason I woke up at 4am and decided to search “do dogs have belly buttons”
(No, I don’t know why. For starters, I HAVE a dog with a furless belly and so an easily visible belly button 🤷♀️)
Most of the website page descriptions confirm Yes
Two go with No — same site, vetexplainspets. ChatGPT obviously.
What I found interesting was how the phrasing of the question dictated its answer: the first question was “why DON’T dogs have belly buttons”, and this obviously primed the autocorrect to provide a no answer.
The second version, though, was “where is a dog’s belly button”, so, although it answers no again, it goes on to add that all mammals have belly buttons and tells you where to find one on a dog, because that’s what the question asked for.
[#]AISlop
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Was having a good bee inspection, smoker going well, bees markedly mellow…and then I glanced down and saw something massive crawling towards my face — shouting “Jesus Christ” and flailing my arms about alerted a guard bee or two 😝
(It was just a very large stick insect or maybe praying mantis (I didn’t let it stay on me long enough to find out!))
[#]beekeeping
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Continuing on to read the New Yorker article about the plagiarism case (sleep, what’s sleep?), it’s striking that 10-15 years ago, the plaintiff was receiving rejections along the lines of the work not being novel enough (vs the point in the first essay about the sameness of trend-chasing slop)
“I thought the writing, the storytelling, in this manuscript was simply wonderful,” one e-mail read, but “we are . . . looking for things that fall into a newer territory.” Another editor wrote,“While the writing is really great and Anna was a very likable heroine, I worry that there are not enough new and different elements to the story here that would set it apart from the rest of the novels in the competitive paranormal/romance/YA market.”
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“I have no clue if people will think the book is good or whether it will be a hit or a flop. But I do know that is a novel only I would have written, for better or worse. It is made of my tastes, memories, quirks, and obsessions. It is something I added to the world that would not have been added otherwise.”
Art in the Age of Slop: a fairly depressing read regarding the publishing industry but it ends on a strong note 😊
https://substack.com/home/post/p-154332279
[#]WritingCommunity #publishing
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[#]TIL that certain anatomical votives were classified by the British Museum as “big toes”.
Behold, St Cosmo’s big…toe
[#]history #votives #priapus #IsThatABigToeInYourPocketOrAreYouJustGladToSeeMe
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_WITT-320
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
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This article about men deserving better than what toxic masculinity reduces them to reminds me of the controversy in Australia a few years (hah, DECADES) ago when a religious leader excused men for sexual assault of women on the grounds that you wouldn’t blame a feral cat for eating uncovered meat.
Naturally this provoked outrage from women, and a good deal of xenophobia (it was not a Christian religious leader). But I do not recall much response from men.
I asked my partner: he said men were no better than feral cats, doesn’t that offend you? I got only a shrug.
https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/113835074231162009
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Jane Austen scholars or experts…
I’m trying to get a sense for how her books were viewed in the 1840s. I know collected editions were being released by then, but I’m trying to work out if there was a vibe of “those are boring classics my parents read” or if younger people would have been into them. And did the language or social mores already seem a bit old-fashioned by then, or was change slow enough that it wouldn’t feel like reading a 1980s book would to us?
Secondly, would Wickham’s character have been immediately apparent to readers from various narrative cues a modern reader might not spot, or would it have been a huge twist when he’s revealed as morally deficient? If the latter, how soon was the twist generally spoiled for new readers? (Ie if a young reader picked up P&P in the 1840s, would she go in knowing Wickham’s a scoundrel and/or knowing the plot in detail?)
Lastly, long shot, is there any evidence of proto-fanfic (people writing in diaries or letter about Lizzie getting together with Wickham or other outcome)? I think I recall another author of the era getting complaint letters about how his characters should have acted, for example.
[#]JaneAusten #PrideAndPrejudice #Wickham #Regency #LitHist #Austenites #history
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Contemplating my next WIP, and if the love interest for the MC should be the mysterious new neighbour or the grumpy groundskeeper, and I’ve just realised the groundskeeper has a giant maremma-type dog, so, yep, he wins.
[#]WritingCommunity
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[#]PennedPossibilities 557 — For the writers who have more than one WIP: How do you balance multiple projects at once?
Well, I look at which one has the closest deadline…
…and then I don’t work on that one.
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This is a lovely story about art, community, healing, mental health
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-14/hiromi-tango-japanese-australian-artist-healing-art-flowers/104730772
[#]GoodNews #art #mindfulness
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Been complaining about this for years — coffee prices for a Lipton bloody teabag
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-13/australian-tea-culture-cafes-falling-behind-other-countries/104792524?
[#]tea
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You know, if I really focus, I can damn well get WIP Draft 2 finished today.
Focus. Put the iPad down, and focus.
[#]WritingCommunity #ShouldBeWriting
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This whole thing about a company needing more “masculine energy” reminds me of those old research stats about how men assume women are talking too much, ie more than 50%, during a conversation when the actual percentage is ridiculously low.
Or judging that there’s too many women in a movie’s crowd scene once it’s about 25-30% women.
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I just heard a podcast ad for the Sol Reader and I honestly thought it was a spoof ad at first: it’s a wearable ereader.
https://solreader.com/
I don’t know how to feel about this. I’m trying to work out who or what it’s for … if you struggle with distractions, a standard ereader (or plain old print book) and putting your phone out of reach works just fine. This feels like they went “VR! But for books!”
@bookstodon
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Red, White and Blue is on sale at Kobo, and I’d happily buy it if it weren’t for the cover version…
(I’m still slightly miffed the covers of my copies of the Captive Prince trilogy got updated…I can’t decide if I like the new covers or not, but I really liked the minimalism of the originals)
[#]books #BookCovers @romancelandia
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text/gemini
