Links: Cats, Carrie Fisher, and YA Authors

Workspace with computer, journal, books, coffee, and glasses.Happy Wednesday! For all of the Bitchery members in the States, I hope you all had a safe and happy 4th of July! But now it’s back to the daily grind!

This links comes to us from Reader SB, whose “freelance and full-time streams crossed” when she was asked to copyedit this piece on a woman’s research on the romance world:

I meet such interesting and energized women, gorgeously decked out in all manner of flirty sequins and lamé, dressing for themselves and each other: a mother and daughter in attendance together, the mom an avid reader and her college-aged daughter hard at work on a vampire romance. A woman who tells me how her full-time responsibilities for two small children had left her feeling “all mommy” and little else until writing romance novels gave her a sense of voice and newfound self. A lawyer turned top-selling author who jokes with me, flipping the putative stigma of popular romance fiction on its head: “Sometimes I’m embarrassed to tell people I’m a lawyer!”

It always makes me feel a little warm and fuzzy when people enjoy interacting with the romance community!

REMINDER! The RITA awards ceremony is Saturday, July 16th. If you have a RITA Reader Challenge review you’re still hoping to submit, no reviews will be posted after that date. Also, when turning reviews in, keep in mind that we need to read through it and edit it, so probably sending it in at midnight on the 15th is a little tricky! Any questions, feel free to email me!

Carrie Fisher is starting an advice column over at The Guardian called “Advice From the Dark Side.” Or at least that seems to be the working title. Fisher specifically asks for questions and emails from “young folk”:

Now, I want you all to consider calling upon me with your carefuls and I will provide solicited advice, based on a life filled with pratfalls and accidents (both in traffic and out). But – and I say this with a thing like love – let the questions come from the younger members of our congested world.

No, really. I can’t help you with your homework; but I can tell you what I did if I’ve had an experience like yours. Throw it at my wall and see what sticks. What you do with that info is up to you.

The first column hasn’t gone up yet, but I’m very interested in seeing the first crop of questions. I’m also hoping Gary Fisher will make an appearance at some point!

Cats and reading converge in this super cute webcomic, Breaking Cat News! Thanks to Reader Elizabeth S. for the link and if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to read through the archives.

For YA readers out there, the A.V. Club was a great interview with four YA authors in which they talk about their audience, whether or not to include sex in their books, and more:

Creating characters that are both confident and occasionally insecure falls to YA authors, whose creations fuel both imaginations and a whole industry. The A.V. Club sat down with four of the most renowned female YA authors at BookExpo America earlier this spring to suss out how these adult women view their followers and what they think their responsibility is—if any—to the young readers of today.

And as a sidebar, I’m always stunned how beautiful covers in the YA genre are. Seriously, they have some top notch designers.

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!

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Comments are Closed

  1. Oops, thanks for the reminder on the review!

  2. chacha1 says:

    I would have loved to leave a comment on the “feminist ethicist” piece but stupid Disqus refuses to work for me. 🙁

  3. Susan says:

    DA reviewed the Breaking Cat News book some time back and I couldn’t download it fast enough. I’ve also been working my way through the archives on the website–I’ve been trying to pace myself so I can sample it bit-by-by rather than just gorge myself on the whole thing in one sitting (as I’m wont to do).

  4. shoregirl says:

    I absolutely love Breaking Cat News. The link here leads to one panel that is about books, but the whole series is a winner. Read it now, so 20 years from now you can say you read it in its first few years. It is that good. And not just because I like cats.

  5. shoregirl says:

    Also, I really like that the piece about romance research is in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. When I was a professor, it was my absolute go to source for good research about higher education (funding, long term trends, faculty problems, etc.) I haven’t finished the piece, but it looked interesting.

  6. shoregirl says:

    Sorry, “Inside Higher Ed”, not “Chronicle of Higher Ed.” The Chronicle is slightly more serious and number crunchy, but Inside Higher Education is also good.

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