Crying, Fairy Fruit, & More

Workspace with computer, journal, books, coffee, and glasses.It’s Hump Day! I hope you all have been reading something great this week. If not, Rec It Wednesdays are back at the Smart Bitches Instagram account. Every Wednesday afternoon, we put up a question in our Instagram stories where you can submit whatever trope or genre you’re looking for. Throughout the week, we answer the requests, which are then saved in our highlights for you to revisit at your leisure!

If there are any aspiring historical romance authors in the Los Angeles area, The Ripped Bodice is hosting a workshop with author Rose Lerner on February 17th!

As someone who is obsessed with the fae in romance, I loved this piece on “fairy fruit” by author Roshani Chokshi:

There is something both blasphemous and sacred that comes to mind when I think about fairy fruit. The consumption of that which is sacred is a ritual that has always awed me. Growing up, I had a very eclectic upbringing. My father is a practicing Hindu, and my mother is a practicing Catholic, and so my siblings and I were exposed to both religions. One of my favorite things about accompanying my mom to church was watching the ceremony of the Eucharist. When I was little, I used to try and open her mouth, desperate to know what happened to that perfect, white circle of bread. I was convinced it must have tasted like a slice of moonlight.

If you haven’t read anything by Chokshi, I highly recommend that you do so. She writes some beautiful fairy tale and mythology inspired YA.

Is your TBR pile a lost cause at this point? Good, because check out these 2019 book recs from Black Nerd Problems.

Swoon Reads has an announcement! They’re partnered with A&E TV to bring YA romance adaptations to television. What do you think? I always want to support more romance in media, though sometimes I’m jealous that YA gets all the cool stuff.

When I’m on my period (which is now), I watch a lot of uplifting, talent reality TV clips. This one made me ugly cry, but it was worth it:

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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!

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  1. DiscoDollyDeb says:

    I liked this article about an SF writer and linguist who developed a female-centric language for a series of books she wrote:

    https://lithub.com/this-science-fiction-novelist-created-a-feminist-language-from-scratch/

  2. Vicki says:

    Thanks for the link. Great article, much to think about.

  3. Escapeologist says:

    The female-centric language idea reminds me of the women’s secret writing in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FCK71U/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_Hx8pCbHRXWQHZ

  4. Mrs. Obed Marsh says:

    Weyrwood is a text adventure game from Choice of Games set in a Regency fantasy world where the magic-using Gentry depend on a magical currency: if they run out of it, demons turn them into soulless thralls. You play as a young gentleperson (like in most CoG games, you can pick your character’s gender and sexuality) trying to maintain their financial standing while engaging in intrigue between your fellow gentry, the demons, and the forest spirits that maintain the magical Wood. There’s a lot of interesting romance options! The first three chapters are free, but the full game is $4.99.

    https://www.choiceofgames.com/weyrwood/#utm_medium=web&utm_source=ourgames

  5. Jennifer says:

    I love Mandy Harvey!

  6. Hazel Austin says:

    @DiscoDollyDeb: I think I still have dusty battered copies of Native Tongue and its sequel Judas Rose. Not great novels, perhaps, but the concept and the language were brilliant.

  7. DiscoDollyDeb says:

    @Hazel Austin: After I read the article, I went back through some of my old reading journals and discovered that about 25 (pre-Amazon) years ago I’d jotted those books down as “sounds interesting,” but no further notations, so I never found or read them. Perhaps, like so many things, the concept was better than the execution.

  8. Woofb says:

    “Native Tongue” is definitely worth a read. I like the illustrations of Sapir-Whorf that make it more concrete, especially the “negative” words at the back (words where Laadan specifies something missing in a masculinised language, like “un-pillow”–a person who encourages you to lean on them only to remove support when you need it.

    Sapir-Whorf is out of fashion now, but there are still many words which “used never to exist”: the entire concept needed to be invented. Think about gender and sexual minorities nowadays: there are concepts for cis, trans, transmasculine/transfeminine, asexual, aromantic, pansexual, and non-binary. The modern concepts these words denote did not exist in the same way (and frequently did not exist at all) twenty years ago. Before that, “gay/lesbian/bisexual” did not exist (as positive terms owned/created by their own community) until people used and disseminated them. Earlier in the fight for civil rights, “African-American” wasn’t a word, and n_____r wasn’t one of the worst words in the language (that’s a thing modern people can be proud of, instead of “a bad word” being bodily functions or religious, racial slurs can themselves be really horrible because they’re racial slurs).

    All those social changes didn’t just happen. They happened because people thought of them, fought for them, and disseminated them.

    Native Tongue screams “Reagan years” in a way Handmaid’s Tale does not, although they’re both thought-experiments extrapolating a future American theocracy. Where Native Tongue does shine is in its humour and social satire, as the bubbles of the pompous men are pricked by canny women. Unfortunately, it’s probably biological-essentialist: all the males are bad and all the females are good, in the sense that the narrative never quite inhabits the male characters as humans.

    It’s worth a read, though, particularly if you’ve been butting heads with a lot of mansplaining.

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