Links: Tarot Cards, GBBO, The Ripped Bodice, & More!

Happy Wednesday! We’re all back from RT16 in Las Vegas and trying to return to our daily routine. (It’s harder than it looks.)

Before we begin, a quick housekeeping note from Sarah! She just discovered a horrible filter in place in her inbox that was diverting a lot of the inquiries and requests for recommendations to the wrong folder, and is horribly upset about it. If you’ve emailed her looking for a recommendation or about advertising, please email her again, as she’s given that filter a thorough lecture and it shouldn’t be troublesome any longer. Also, she apologizes to everyone who went without a response the past six weeks!

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We love the Great British Bake Off here at the Bitchery and heard about some awesome news! Do not click the link if you haven’t seen the latest season because there are spoilers. However, Nadiya Hussain of season six has signed a three-book deal with Harlequin for contemporary women’s fiction, plus a book deal for an upcoming cookbook as well as a children’s book. You go, Nadiya!

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The Ripped Bodice is a bookstore filled to the brim with romance novels that was backed on Kickstarter and, if you’re like me and leave nowhere near the West Coast, Jezebel has a good look at how things are going:

“We certainly get guys in here who are not into it,” says Leah. “But [some] men come in here and are like, “What is this, really?” She reminds Bea about the guy who came in the store the other day, she guesses he was about 22 years old, who said to her: “This is a big store. Do you really think that you should have a store this big, just devoted to romance?” To which she responded, “How many comic book stores are there in the United States?” He answered, “Oh, good point.”

If I’m ever in the same state as The Ripped Bodice, you can bet your butt I’ll find a way to get there.

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If you love fairy tale reimaginings in all forms, check out artist Yoshi Yoshitani’s #fairytaletaror hashtag on Twitter!

Thinking of the symbology of #tarot & fairytales, I made the Little Mermaid as the fool. Maybe more? #fairytaletarot pic.twitter.com/BkhcqmeKam

— Yoshi Yoshitani (@yoshisquared) March 25, 2016

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As someone who spends a lot of time on the internet, I know that the cardinal rule is: do not read the comments! But I do find them fascinating. Recently, The Guardian took a look at abusive comments to see if there was any correlation between comments and an article’s author or subject matter. Just a warning, have a glass of wine (or a strong drink of your choice) handy:

New research into our own comment threads provides the first quantitative evidence for what female journalists have long suspected: that articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about.

Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.

And the 10 regular writers who got the least abuse? All men.

Some of the information isn’t too surprising, but I loved the interactive graphs.

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Lastly, Sarah was quoted in an article regarding romance authors and pen names – and sometimes the crappy fallout that can happen when an author’s real identity is revealed:

Author and blogger Sarah Wendell remembers the Judy Mays ‘scandal’ vividly.  Wendell, author of Everything I Know about Love, I Learned from Romance Novels and co-founder of Smart Bitches Trashy Books.com covered the events on her blog. ‘I definitely recall that entire awful incident, and I think about it a lot, especially since attitudes toward sex and towards women’s sexual agency haven’t changed much in the time since – unfortunately,’ says Wendell. ‘Culturally and socially, we don’t always find rational acceptance when a woman embraces her sexuality, whether it’s through writing erotic fiction or reading it.’

On the bright side, there was a silver lining to the Mays “scandal.” There was such an increase in royalties that she was able to put her son through his final year of college.

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Don’t forget to share what super cool things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!