Author: Stitch

Stitch writes about what needs to be written.

News for Patrons!

Stitch

I keep forgetting to update patrons (and people who might want to become patrons) about what’s going on on the my Patreon page. So here’s what’s gone on recently and what you can expect in the future!

Currently:

If you’re a patron, you have early access to a giveaway I’m hosting so you can get your entries in before the giveaway officially opens tomorrow. Note that episode two of Nerdery Squared has a code for you to input that’ll give you extra entries as a bonus for being my patrons!

Next, Episode one of my podcasty thing Nerdery Squared has been opened to the general public. Episode two, mentioned above, has a lot of yelling about fandom & shipping, how DC’s Trinity are being portrayed, and my dissatsfaction with representation in the book world.

March’s Urban Fantasy 101 post: WERELIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS! OH MY! is up for readers in PDF form!

What’s also up is the reward for $10+ Patrons: the prologue for The Consort an M/M/M romantic fantasy that revolves around the unwanted incubus Iirin and his arranged bonding to two of the Tals (earth/nature divinities) in his home country’s God Quarter.Read More »

Elektra steals the show in this second trailer for Netflix’s Daredevil Season 2

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Elodie Yung is going to own the role of Elektra. Seriously, watching the new trailer for Netflix and Marvel’s second season of Daredevil gives me all of the feels.

Elektra is a character that’s been criminally underused over the years and has existed in a nigh perpetual stasis in the same time. Frank Miller killed her off ages ago, but she’s really never had the chance for rebirth the way that some many (male) characters have had.

So seeing her onscreen and fighting alongside Matt is wonderful! We had some great female characters last season,  but you can always use more. Also,  I’m still pretty sure the show has yet to pass the Bechdel Test as it’s used so I’m hoping that it’ll do better on that front and not only have the female characters in Daredevil interact with one another, but for them to do so without dealing with them only talking about the men in their respective lives.Read More »

A Political Stitch

Stitch

Note: if it’s not clear (but it should be), this is a celebration of my identity and my Blackness because February is Black History Month and it’s taken me this long to put my thoughts together.

“I didn’t know you were so… political,” my supervisor says to me on September 11, 2015.

It’s not a compliment.

What it is is a rebuke about the discussion I’d been having (mostly with myself) as I collected information about the Iran Deal and US interference in that part of Asia for a friend’s project. Because apparently, talking about the fact that the United States needs to get out of that part of Asia and stop interfering the way its done for like sixty years is problematic. My voicing that the Iran Deal was a good step forward to all of this was apparently disrespectful on September 11th.

I disagreed then and I disagree now, but what stuck with me was the idea that I suddenly became political that day.

Not when I spoke to one of my coworkers about her focus on making fun of AAVE or when I pointedly shut my office door on a discussion of who had it worst throughout history. Or not even when I spoke about my (a)sexuality with these people I thought were also my friends.

I was apolitical until what I was saying was too much to ignore.Read More »

bib.li.o.file – 2/16/2016

Stitch

This week we’re working on a ton of different stuff.

In my Hemispheric 1850s class, we’re looking at Nancy Prince and thinking about the creation of her own Archive as her narrative withholds more than it exposes.

Nancy Prince – A Narrative of the life and travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince

Carla Peterson – “Colored Tourists”: Nancy Prince, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Ethnographic Writing, and the Question of Home

Sandra Gunning – Nancy Prince and the Politics of Mobility, Home, and Diasporic (Mis) Identification

In Transgressions, we’re technically done with the Marquis De Sade. We’re currently focused on theorists, many of whom talked about de Sade. This week we’re reading Georges Bataille and his thoughts on de Sade, eroticism, and boundaries. We’re also reading a little bit of Nick Mansfield’s Subjectivity and I’ve provided a bonus text in Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess because you can’t think about transgression without excess.

Bataille – The Use Value of de Sade

Bataille – Erotism: Death and Sensuality (We’re reading: – introduction, chapter 5, chapter 10, chapter 11, chapter two in part two)

Nick Mansfield – Subjectivity

Linda Williams – Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess

Lastly in Critical Literary Theory, we’re studying Deconstruction!

Jacques Derrida – Dissemination (Barbara Johnson’s 31 page introduction)

Derrida – Of Grammatology (we’re reading “That Dangerous Supplement”which is on page 141 of the book)

Terry Eagleton – Literary Theory: An Introduction (The chapter on Deconstruction.)

 

Love Hate – My Contentious Relationship With Contemporary Romance

Stitch

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Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary romance – both the erotic and non-erotic kind.

I’ll admit it: contemporary romance is my thing.

Somehow, I fell for the genre despite being utterly uninterested in romance in my day-to-day life. My favorite books are “neighbor next door” romances, the ones where the couple is made up of two folks that I could imagine riding the bus with or chatting with about comic books. My favorite movies are romantic ones – I even ditch my “no comedies” stance for rom-coms because I love the idea of love that’s funny.

Hell, I’m still half convinced that the scene in Captain America: Winter Soldier where Sam and Steve were talking after their run was something plain out of a meet-cute. The film was good, but my brain is still so sure that what should’ve come next was something cute and fun that ended with Steve and Sam adopting a Greyhound and moving into a townhouse in DC.

So yeah, I love contemporary romance.

It’s a great genre because it’s real.

The characters in contemporary romance stories are supposed to be people that you know, people that you can identify with. They’re supposed to have an air of realism because that’s the draw of contemporary romance: these characters and scenarios seem to scream, “Hey, this love is normal love. It could happen to anyone! It could happen to you!”

Except of course, if you’re a person of color or you’re not cisgender and heterosexual.Read More »

Valentine’s Day Drabbles x 6

Stitch

Six drabbles for Valentine’s Day and my (current) favorite ships.  Sort of NSFW.

Pairings: Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes (MCU), Bruce Wayne/Dick Grayson(DC Comics), Harley Quinn/Poison Ivy(DC Comics), Harvey Dent/Bruce Wayne (DC Comics), Sasha Hadley/Zeke Parker (Original Fiction/Wizardverse), Alexandra Andrade/Isabella Pulido (Original Fiction/Temptation Valley)

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Flashback Friday : WOC as Props in Pop Music

Stitch

Originally written in hm… 2013, I think in response to Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, and Lily Allen using WOC as props in their videos.

 

Nicki-minaj-beez-in-the-trap

There’s such a huge difference between how WOC and white women treat WOC (specifically Black women because they make the most appearances in hip hop videos and videos poking fun at hip hop videos).

Look at Nicki Minaj. In Beez in the Trap, she was on the floor with the girls. There wasn’t a disconnect between what she was doing and what they were doing.

Missy Elliot may not have dropped down to the floor in her videos, but you always got the feeling that she was proud of her fellow WOC for being badass and beautiful and that’s why they got such a high position of power in her videos.

I honestly can’t remember M.I.A.  ever doing a solo video where WOC weren’t the front and focus of the music video.

Meanwhile, white celebrities thrive over using Black bodies as hypersexualized props in their music videos.Read More »

Internalized Misogyny and that Damned Slash Shipping Post: A Response

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(Wherein I answer the first part of @legendofzeldamajorass‘s question, sort of answer the second, and promise try to do a better job about fleshing out my comments at some point soonish when I’m not swamped with work.)

This is in response to Slash Shipping, Pseudo-Progressivism, and Reinforcing Patriarchal Standards in Fandom

First things first: Girls and people perceived to be girls are spoonfed some seriously toxic thoughts about what it means to be a girl and what femininity as a construct is from the moment that they’re born.

Think back to high school, if you weren’t a teenage girl, you were around them. How many of them were super nice to one another across the board? When you exist in a society that has made an industry out telling women they’re not good enough and never will be, you wind up with some pretty twisted views of what you’re supposed to be like.

One of the pushbacks I keep seeing to my post on slash shipping and pseudo-progressiveness is that people like you and like others assume that women aren’t capable of actively expressing internalized misogyny and that we shouldn’t confront the fact that it’s something that’s so very present in fandom spaces.

I was a teenage girl once. I was also a teenage slash shipper and have been a slash shipper for the past 13+ years. And I save everything. So I can go back and look at the slashfic I wrote and read back then and see very vividly the internalized misogyny that was present in my erasure of female characters or how I used them as villains more often than not. And I can also see the evolution of my writing as I turned my academic research towards queer history and gender studies.

And I’m still evolving! Because people talked to me, they called me out and they called fandom out. And I learned just as much from them as I did my textbooks.

So why should we you know… not talk about the fact that internalized misogyny (and internalized racism) is something that our fellow female fans need to grow out of because it definitely informs the way that a majority of them tend to gravitate towards the white dude ships when they ship slash.Read More »

Urban Fantasy 101: Single White Vampire

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This month in Urban Fantasy 101, we talk about the single white vampire myth and how urban fantasy authors (erroneously) equate vampires with whiteness.

Urban Fantasy 101 - Single White Vampire.jpg

Why are so many vampires in Urban Fantasy fiction French (and white)?

I have issues with the way that popular vampire mythology and fiction remains singularly focused on white, European, male vampires.

I know that Anne Rice popularized the notion with her white French vampires back in the day, but that’s not an excuse or an explanation for the lingering trend or the genre’s reliance on putting French vampires all over the place – especially where no French vampire has ever belonged.Read More »

bib·li·o·file: 02/08/2016

Stitch

Getting your hands on good academic texts can be difficult.

That’s why I’ll be sharing my reading list for my classes (along with digital copies of some of the books) in the literature department. You don’t have to read everything (I know I certainly won’t), but it’s a good start if you’re curious about what literature majors do all day when they’re not wailing about being a literature major.

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[Book Review] Lustlocked: A Sin du Jour Affair

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LUSTLOCKEDCOVER

Title: Lustlocked: A Sin du Jour Affair
Author: Matt Wallace
Rating: So Freaking Highly Recommended
Genre/Category: Urban Fantasy, Fae & Faries
Release Date: January 26, 2016

Publisher: Tor

Order Here: AMAZON | AMAZON (KINDLE) | BARNES AND NOBLE

It’s officially tradition for me to be tipsy when I review the awesome Matt Wallace’s Sin du Jour stories. I started that tradition back in October when I picked up Envy of Angels during a half-drunken stress-shopping run. It was so worth it.

Fast forward to last Tuesday when my kindle sent me a notification letting me know that Lustlocked was ready for me to read on my kindle. I started making high pitched noises then and I haven’t stopped yet. Yes, I am making high pitched noises in between swigs from my delicious Strongbow cider and somehow I haven’t choked yet.

Lustlocked is amazing from the opening pages where we’re reintroduced to Moon and the other members of Sin du Jour’s stocking and receiving department. I really love how Matt sets the stage with this part of the crew. Read More »

Lucifer – Pilot: The Good, The Bad, and the Oh-So Ugly

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Lucifer title card

I’ve wanted to write this since September when I got my grubby little hands on the pilot episode of Fox’s Lucifer series that showed at San Diego Comic Con.

I’m a huge fan of the character. I got into The Sandman in middle/high school and then dove headfirst into Mike Carey’s run of Lucifer, the spin off that looked at Lucifer kind of concurrent to The Sandman. I also have read and LOVED the first two issues of the new Lucifer book that Holly Black is writing on. On top of that, I was a religious studies minor in undergrad (who spent a fair amount of time studying all things Lucifer).

So when I say I’ve got opinions on this new Lucifer show, I’m coming from a place of expertise and knowledge.

Instead of writing a 3000 word angrypants rant about why this show is basically THE WORST, follow along as I look at the good, the bad, and the oh-so-ugly of Fox’s pilot episode for Lucifer.
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