Evil Katey/Good Katey

Books, stories, editing by my dear friend Carrie Cuinn to raise money for incoming medical bills. Please check it out and see if you can help!

theoncominghope:

“Time and again, we see fans and creators alike defending the primacy of homogeneous – which is to say, overwhelmingly white, straight and male – stories on the grounds that anything else would be intrinsically unrealistic….The answer tends to be as ugly as it is revealing: that it’s impossible for black, female pirates to exist anywhere, that pixies and shapeshifters are inherently more plausible as a concept than female action heroes who don’t get raped, and that fairy tale characters as diverse as Mulan, Snow White and Captain Hook can all live together in the modern world regardless of history and canon, but a black Lancelot in the same setting is grossly unrealistic. On such occasions, the recent observation of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz that “Motherfuckers will read a book that’s 1/3rd elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they (white people) think we’re taking over” is bitingly, lamentably accurate. And it’s all thanks to a potent blend of prejudice and ignorance: prejudice here meaning the conviction that deliberately including POC, female and/or LGBTQ characters can only ever be a political action (and therefore an inherently suspicious one), and ignorance here meaning the conviction that the historical pervasiveness of sexism, racism and homophobia must necessarily mean that any character shown to surpass these limitations is inherently unrealistic.

Foz Meadows speaks the truth: http://fozmeadows.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/psa-your-default-narrative-settings-are-not-apolitical/

I know I reblogged this a while back, but I dig the highlighted section here. and it’s worth reblogging FOREVER.

theoncominghope:

“Preserving the patriarchal societies in so many fantasies doesn’t make sense to me. I understand the argument that we should not whitewash history, and I fully agree—when it comes to actual history scholarship. But abiding by the historical fact of sexism in a fictional universe that is otherwise not bound by historical fact, I’d say, accomplishes nothing as much as reinforcing the idea that it’s the default order of things.

That’s a problem because of the ways it still is the default order of things. Art has had enormous power to affect progress, but it can also have a troubling fealty to traditions both real and imagined. It’s that impulse that led to Katee Sackhoff being booed at Comic-Con for playing a character whose version in the original Battlestar Galactica was male. Or makesAaron Sorkin wistfully yearn on The Newsroom for the days when America was the greatest country in the world because we “acted like men” and were “informed by great men.”

Read the full article here: http://www.themarysue.com/sexism-in-historical-fantasy/

Fabulous review of By the River (swimmer boy, fairy tales, river town, tattoos) by DarienMoya over at PantsOff. Eeee!

laydownanywhere:

• a great deal of show creators/writers are aware of fandom and slash. people have been tweeting creators/actors their fanfiction for a really long time. 
• also Google is a thing. 
• as is the New York Times, TIME, The Guardian and many other news sources. 
• fandom and fanfiction is not a secret; the idea that slash is popular among women is not a secret and that involvement with fandom creates loyal fans.
• thus creators and writers will throw little bones to fandom via queerbaiting
• this is sort of bad
• queerbaiting involves fetishizing queerness but never committing to it. queerbaiting is like playing gay chicken, queerbaiting is meant to tantalize but not explore the relationship, queer baiting is the equivalent of telling your friend you care but then screaming loudly as possible NO HOMO
• queerbaiting is not progress
• thank you for letting me use bullet points

TWO WHITE GUYS TOUCHING.

Mmmmmnope.

(via northstarfan)

shannonhale:

When I do book signings, most of my line is made up of young girls with their mothers, teen girls alone, and mother friend groups. But there’s usually at least one boy with a stack of my books. This boy is anywhere from 8-19, he’s carrying a worn stack of the Books of Bayern, and he’s excited and…

(via hdharris802)

3. So, ‘Scripped’, is available for pre-order (Scripped) and I think it’s about time I asked you a little bit about it. Why is it called ‘Scripped’ and what’s the meat of the book (pun intended)?

I see what you did there, and I like it. So, it’s about this guy called Jonah who wanders a little too far from the familiar in a West Virginia forest. He ends up glamored into the Appalachian version of Faerie. Some of the rules are what you’d expect if you’re a fan of the old mortal-napping fairy tales. Some not so much. On top of slowly forgetting who he is and where he came from, Jonah ends up, for lack of a pre-existing word, scripped.

Scrip is a kind of substitute money. The coal companies in the US paid (and I use that term loosely) the miners in housing and paper credits only good for redemption at the company store in town. On top of feeding and clothing their families with it, they also had to buy their own equipment, which meant they started out in debt to the company and never got out again. You can imagine how ugly things got when they started unionizing.

So this fae version of the company town is the impression all that blood and sweat left on the land. It’s nasty and cold in there, but mortals have sunshine–and their skin is so warm.

Having read the novel I know there’s a lot more involved in it all then that but I think there’s a nice overall blurb for those that might wonder about the title.

Love as an unforgiving master/mistress would be something to bear in mind when reading too…

Yeah, definitely. My brother actually calls the book is a love story, and he’s not wrong. But it ain’t pretty.

(Source: vitka)

Scripped Soundtrack, day 8

Beck: “Jack-Ass”

Maybe he really should kiss her, he thought again, just as the frost slipped down his throat like some silvery ghost. Maybe if he took small breaks to get his warmth back, he could have enough for both of them. Maybe if he showed her what it was like to feel that, to feel really alive like she did when she was in his world, she’d understand and let him go back.

He shivered and flushed the thought out of his system.

He didn’t want to. And he didn’t want to think why.

-From Scripped by KV Taylor (YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME)

What the hell is this? (Day 1)

Scripped Soundtrack, day 4

Phish: “Weigh”

There she was, beautiful and smiling and dirty. With the silver knife from the sink in her hand.

She knelt by the mattress. “Can’t get away anyhow, Jonah,” she said, as if this were an everyday conversation. She leaned forward, put one icy hand on his bare stomach, flattened her palm there.

His belly went cold, even on the inside.

“But you better hold still, or it’ll get messy. Don’t worry, I’m real good at this.”

He opened his mouth, but she put her free hand over it and brought the knife up to his right arm. He twisted violently against the ropes, but all he could see was the shining handle of the knife in her grubby hand.

Scripped Soundtrack, day 3

Coldplay: “Lost!”

“You all die eventually, don’t you?”

Jonah supposed that was true. “You won’t?”

Tal’s lips curved. It wasn’t a smile, but Jonah wasn’t sure what it was. “Don’t remember, but pretty sure I already done it.” Then he turned his head, caught Jonah’s eyes with that same belligerent stare. “You don’t remember nothin’?”

Jonah fought not to take a step away from the strange boy and his massive aura of… bad. Anger. Whatever it was. “Only sometimes. It’s hard.”

“That’ll heal too.”

“I’ll remember?”

“No. You’ll stop altogether.”

-From Scripped by KV Taylor (YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME)

What the hell is this? (Day 1)

Scripped Soundtrack, day 1

Interpol: “Pioneer to the Falls (Orchestral)”

So I have this book coming out next month, a fucked up Appalachian Faerie story called Scripped. (See: You Can Never Go Home) I do this thing when I’m writing a book where I make a huge playlist and listen to it nonstop. When I go back months later and edit, I bring it back up, and usually add to it a little. The resulting list can remind me, even years later, of precisely how I felt when I was writing a given scene.

So here’s the first one on this list. The actual lyrics to “Pioneer to the Falls” are perfect for Scripped, but the eerieness of the instrumentals behind them, stripped down to just the orchestral arrangement on this one, really gets the freakiness right.

I’ll be back with more in a day or two, and those ones will come with actual excerpts. In the meantime, I’d just like to say that in no way do any of these artists endorse me, my book, or kidnapping, people-skinning, human-kissing fae. It’s just a thing I do for fun.

(Not the kidnapping or—oh, you know what I mean.)

microboz:

A reader wonders if she really wants to know the dark side of her favorite author (Dickens)

I think about this a lot because I tend to have extremely rigid and weird standards about giving people my money. I’m that girl buying the $4 carton of eggs, you know, the one who makes you roll your eyes and mutter under your breath that I’m a pretentious cock. (I’m not, I’m just neurotic, but that’s another issue.)

When I was a kid, I never wanted to read interviews with my rock star idols—they usually turned out to be obnoxious pricks. Then I got a little older and started liking them FOR being obnoxious pricks (see: Oasis). Which is why this at the end of the article made me happy:

…needing to believe that your favorite author lived in an exemplary way, embodying all the virtues of his best work, is an adolescent desire, passionate but ultimately unfair.

But they were obnoxious on a personal level, like Dickens here.  Reading DROOD didn’t bother me, and in that one, Simmons’s Wilkie Collins as narrator is positively scathing about him (which is also another story altogether, but anyhow). I thought it was brilliant.

There is, however, a difference between ideological differences and personal ass-hattery, as the article also points out. While I’m not quite as bothered about the politics and ethics of dead writers, I do have a problem with giving money (read: validation) to living authors who are miserable human beings, who work against issues that are important to me. Like Naipaul and, though he’s not mentioned in this article (god forbid we mention genre fiction, I guess), Orson Scott Card.

Though in their cases, since I’ll remember them being alive even after they’re not, I’ll probably still have a hard time giving their estate money. I’m sure they’ll be devastated to learn of this, of course.

Sylvia Cochran, The Deepening World of Fiction (via aaronpolson)

Reblogging cuz people need to buy this book. It’s fabulous. And scary. Couldn’t put it down.