To everyone in the U.S., we hope you have a safe and happy Fourth of July! Wear sunscreen and keep an eye on your pets during the fireworks. To anyone not celebrating the holiday and not in the U.S., we want you to have a great day, too! I will be grumpily be eating my weight in hot dogs because 1) I hate the summer and socializing in the heat 2) but boy, do I love hot dogs.
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Going to RWA? Sarah will be doing a live podcast taping. They’ve been a huge hit at the RT Conventions and I’m so excited to see RWA get some love. Check out the details here and be sure to RSVP. Hey Sarah, maybe we can turn this into a traveling show?
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Just because Pride month is over doesn’t mean we can’t all use more LGBTQIA+ romance recommendations! As always, feel free to leave some of your personal recs in the comments.
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I think Instagram is starting to rival Twitter in terms of my favorite social media account. When I saw this profile on “The Glamorous Grandmas of Instagram,” it made me want to (one day) be as cool and self-assured as these women.
“I flaunt it,” she said. “I’m not 20. I don’t want to be 20, but I’m really freaking cool. That’s what I think about when I’m posting a photo.”
Her brash voice is one in a chorus of like-minded contemporaries and women in their 70s and 80s, who are taking on matters of aging with an audacity — and riveting style — their mothers might have envied.
Married or single, working or not, and most often grandmothers, they are asserting their presence on Instagram, intent, in the process, on subverting shopworn notions of what “old” looks and feels like. They are, to hear some tell it, “100 percent slaying.”
If you’re on Instagram, go follow these women!
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Attending a convention soon? Author HelenKay Dimon has one piece of universal advice: don’t be an asshole.
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I really enjoyed this Twitter thread on how badass an animal is in comparison to their skeleton.
animals rated on how badass their skeletons are vs their regular appearance: a thread
— meg (@MegLegbird) July 2, 2018
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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!
Hope this isn’t too political but sometimes it helps to laugh at the crazy. YMMV.
So a not nice guy named Alex Jones said that the Democrats planned to start a civil war on July 4. The reply on social media was a twitter thread called #secondcivilwarletters (i.e. letters home from the front of this fake war) that ihas grown huge and is hilarious, I especially like Beverly Jenkins contribution saying “Romance writers have joined the war. Leading us are our vampires, werewolves, and shapeshifters. Behind us are kickass women wielding swords and witches with unlimited power. We’re cocky. We got this. Home by deadline. Love you. Mom”.
@JoannaV: The letters are brilliant. I’ve been following along and enjoying every bit of creativity and bite the writers express.
As a woman-of-a-certain-age myself, neither a grandmother nor glamorous, I’m a little put off by the article’s use of “brash” to describe such an intelligent and confident woman (although points for “aging with audacity”). She is so much more than any of those adjectives and nouns. We all are, for that matter.
WAIT. GORGEOUS GRANDMA ALERT. I read this great book by Chloe Blake called A TASTE OF PLEASURE. It came out this week. Anyway, the heroine’s Mom is a former supermodel. Dani (the heroine) is a chef going through a rough time, and she calls her Mom up for sympathy and support, and her mom says, “We are not normal. Normal people aren’t Michelin starred chefs. I made love to David Bowie for God’s sake.”
AND IT WAS AMAZING.
Just a quick squee about Anyta Sunday, a new-to-me M/M writer – her Signs of Love series is absolutely adorable. Lovable characters, great dialogue, relatively low angst, and lots of feels. The perfect antidote to current events-induced anxiety!
For LGBTQIA+ books, here are some of my faves:
Controlled Burn by Erin McLellan (currently out of print, but I hope it will find a new publishing home soon because it’s amazing)
Anything by Roan Parrish (so much emotion, and lots of weird-rather-than-quirky characters)
Annabeth Albert’s Out of Uniform series (hot military guys!)
If your catnip is gay romance with a touch of kink (some books more than others) I always recommend Jaime Samms.
[…] Linkity from Smart Bitches. […]
Amanda – just want to shout out to a fellow hot dog lover! *fist bump* They are so bad for you, but oh so good!!!
This might be of interest to some of y’all: storybundle is putting a bunch of dark fantasy novels out: https://storybundle.com/blog/darkestdaysfantasybundle/
(StoryBundle describes itself: “StoryBundle features indie authors from all different genres and styles. We feel it’s important to find those titles that aren’t on the New York Times bestseller lists and give them exposure. This isn’t just because we want to encourage and stimulate independent authors to tell fantastic stories, but because we’re readers too and we want more stuff to read. The more authors there are out there, the more likely it is there will be works that appeal to us. We love reading.
So with that in mind, we choose authors from all over the place, all with quality work that we think you’ll enjoy reading. We read all the titles ourselves (like we said, we love reading) to make sure they’re up to snuff, so you’re pretty unlikely to get any duds. You can count on each book being in the bundle being a book we’ve enjoyed ourselves.)