Happy Hump Day! These links are all about writing, reading, and romance, which are a few of our favorite things in the Bitchery. I hope your week is going well and, if it isn’t, you’re able to engage in some self-care soon!
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If you’re hoping to get in shape after all the holiday eat, Meljean Brook has put together a rather unorthodox superhero workout regimen. The regimen was inspired by some rather athletic-looking Justice League action figures.
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I’m sure many of you have heard about Hillary Clinton’s stereotyping of the romance novel genre and, if you have to read one response piece, I highly recommend this one by Lisa Kleypas:
Women deserve to be recognized as multifaceted. And they have the right to be complex sexual beings and to go to work without being harassed or groped and to spend their hard-earned money on whatever kind of books they like.
Romance novels are about wholeness and the right of readers (and all women) to be accepted and loved for who they are. To achieve. To be heard. To be imperfect. To get back up on their feet after they’ve been knocked down.
I don’t want to spoil the last few lines, but they’re rather amazing.
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I know writers are always looking for what works best for them and I thought Roxane Gay’s writing insight was really illuminating:
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Every time I share this I feel awkward because the advice is so simple and seems trite but it was not offered tritely and I do not offer it here tritely. When I was going on the academic job market, worrying about the campus interview, my friend Matt Seigel told me to just be myself because otherwise, if I got hired as the person I was pretending to be, I would have to keep up that pretense for the rest of my career. He was absolutely right about being myself, for better and worse.
Is there anything else you’d like to add that might be interesting to readers and fans?
I play competitive Scrabble.
And of course, I love how honest she is about some of the answers.
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Need more royal romance recommendations? Sil of The Book Voyagers has a Twitter thread on royal romances with characters of color. I also highly suggest following her on Twitter for just great recs in general.
I AM DOING THE THREAD WATCH ME DO IT.
Because we are all so excited about Meghan and Prince Harry, this is a thread w/ contemporary royalty books with POC as leads. (One or both characters are POC)
— sil ♡ (@thebookvoyagers) November 30, 2017
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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!
That superhero workout regimen had me snickering into my coffee! I think I have some action figures around here somewhere…
I read Lisa Kleypas’ excellent response in The Washington Post. It started on the front page of the ‘Style’ section and continued inside. All was well on the front page, but some brain dead headline writer just had to work the phrase ‘heaving bosoms’ into the line over the continuation. *headdesk*
Oh yay! Thanks for including Sil! She has great recommendations.
@Heather: I hate when Sil starts doing recommendation threads because my TBR just explodes.
Awesome about royal romances with POC!
My favorite royals books are the Molly Jamesons, but I’d love to read some with POC!
Speaking of POC royal weddings, I hope everyone heard about the woman who met an Ethiopian prince in a DC nightclub, and their eventual wedding? This is (hopefully) a link, (sadly) to the NYTimes piece:
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/fashion/weddings/she-met-her-prince-the-great-grandson-of-haile-selassie.html
I am pretty disinterested in hereditary monarchy, but descent from Solomon and Sheba seems like the biggest bragging rights going.
Here’s some fun for you. An AI was fed all 7 Harry Potter books and this is what came out: http://botnik.org/content/harry-potter.html
And for some really out-there entertainment, how about a webseries where Loki and Kylo Ren are roommates? https://www.themarysue.com/kyloki-the-series/
Reading about Hillary’s comment crushed me…
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