Looking back (I'm not doing one of those lists that assume that life is more or less NORMAL, not that they ever particularly match the lifestyle of a Crabby Ol' Bat Hedjog.
Best thing I got during the year: 2 A-Z + 1 Pfizer vaxxes.
Best things I bought during the year: new computer, it really does show up how massively, massively sluggish the old ( Read more... )

What I read
Had a vague recollection that I had heard fairly well of Heyer's Frederica (1965), and I will give it points for being able to see the Alpha Hero growing and changing under the impact of the older and sensible heroine (and her brothers), but even so, there were rather annoying aspects, like again, She Is Not Like Other Women, who are ( Read more... )

I daresay other people have seen this one to which my attention was drawn by someone tweeting about it: My wife is an accomplished author who also holds down a fulltime job in an unrelated field, mostly for the benefits. When we had our first child last year, we agreed that she would pause her writing career-something had to go with a new baby at ( Read more... )

Yes, my dearios, after thinking, nay, I would say, even brooding upon the matter for some while, have finally made a slight beginning on Those Boxes Upstairs in the Boxroom (wot the estate agent's description very falsely referred to as a third bedroom, no wai), which have been sitting there for a very considerable while taking up space and ( Read more... )

Still feeling somewhat wishy-washy - not sure if this is reaction to the shots (booster site still a bit sore, for the record) - or whether it is merely the product of unwonted physical exercise, i.e. walk to health centre, standing for a considerable while in a queue, walk back (mostly uphill), not to mention the psychological effects of seeing so ( Read more... )

I know I first clicked on this because someone tweeted a line or two that sounded like ponceyness to the max begging for a codslapping, but when I actually read it, there was certainly something I would consider as deviation into sense, or at least what I could only acclaim as a recognition of It's All More Complicated:
Retail Therapy: An excerpt ( Read more... )

I am all for rediscovery of genuinely neglected, or at least 'under-recognised' and interesting writers of the modernist period who didn't perhaps fit neatly into the high modernist canon for reasons to do with issues around class, gender, race, etc: but I'm not altogether happy with the 'an Intellectual Ahead of Her Time' label here, because she ( Read more... )

How women conquered the world of fiction: 'From Sally Rooney to Raven Leilani, female novelists have captured the literary zeitgeist, with more buzz, prizes and bestsellers than men. But is this cultural shift something to celebrate or rectify?'.
(We remark that women have been doing rather well in the world of fiction since the days of Aphra Behn ( Read more... )

Over the weekend I came across a twitter-thread going off on somebody for complaining that the world-building in some fantasy series was exhausting to to get to grips with -
And at first I thought, sigh, here was a person of the kind described by EM Forster in Aspects of the Novel (1927), who will not pay that additional sixpence of suspension of ( Read more... )

I daresay many of my dr rdrz have already encountered this (siiiiigh): I longed for novels about female desire - women empowered by sex and their expressions of lust. So I sat down and wrote my own.
Which seems to me to be doing for its different genre what so many authors have done for science fiction/fantasy - i.e. not actually read any, or at ( Read more... )