The SF&F Book Chat
Last week The SF&F Book Chat started up again after our annual summer break, and I have just realised I have been running this weekly drop-in book club for three years now. Three years! Time flies when you're desperately trying to find short-yet-interesting-books on a weekly basis having fun.
Over the years the core concepts of the Chat have remained the same - every week I turn up in a Dublin café to chat about a standalone SF&F story that is always legally available as an ebook or online - but we have made two significant changes since the Chat started:
Over the years the core concepts of the Chat have remained the same - every week I turn up in a Dublin café to chat about a standalone SF&F story that is always legally available as an ebook or online - but we have made two significant changes since the Chat started:
- From October of last year we've been putting the Chats up on Meetup.com. This has really helped the Chat break out of the friend-of-a-friend attendee pool that can hamper a club from expanding. If you're running any kind of regular event where strangers are welcome, I highly recommend spending the ~€3 a month required for an Organizer account.
- The Chat was 3 months old when I had a Road To Damascus moment courtesy of Juliet McKenna and decided to make sure 50% of the books chosen each month were by women. That has been... a challenge, to put it mildly, but I have actually managed to achieve that target every month. And I have found it progressively easier to come up with stories by women each month, because now my brain has been trained to see them when they're right in front of me. Like Rubin's Vase. And my every-increasing Amazing Must-Buy Authors list is testament to the success of this strategy (Oh, that list is so long now...).