How many times has this scenario happened to you:
You’re reading an Urban Fantasy or Paranormal Romance story and a shapeshifter shows up that isn’t a wolf. They’re lions, tigers, or bears and guess what… they’re all white.
It happens to me a lot and frankly, I’m sick of it.Read More »
Earlier yesterday, I wrote a series of tweets about why online journalism’s push for writers to work “for exposure” is terrible and the reality of what life is like for someone who does it. (Thread starts here.)
Here are some more (bitter) thoughts.
There’s something so very upsetting about the idea of online journalists (amateurs, newbies, and professionals alike) working “for exposure” as a rite of passage with no token payment or help with getting further along in their writing career.
Writing for exposure means that you get to spend hours, days, and even weeks of your time working to put out an article or essay that you aren’t getting paid for. This work comes on top of your day job or your education and can in fact take time away from things that bring you the money that you need to live off of.
And I think it’s wrong that journalism as an industry has conflated “earning your due” with “working for free”. Now it seems that freelancers that don’t want to or can’t write for free are “lazy”. They’re seen as trying to get over the established idea of building your brand and then building your bank account.
But here’s the thing:
When you work for exposure, the companies you’re writing for or that you want to write for aren’t seeing that you deserve to be paid for your writing. They’re not. What they’re seeing is someone that they don’t have to pay to create content for them and they won’t pay you unless they absolutely have to.Read More »
Title: The Terracotta Bride
Author: Zen Cho
Rating: Highly Recommended
Genre/Category: Fantasy, Mythology (Buddhist), Romance, Lesbian Fiction. Steampunk,
Release Date: March 10, 2016
Order Here: AMAZON (KINDLE)
I really enjoy Zen Cho’s writing style.
Her novel Sorcerer to the Crown was one of the books I spent most of 2015 waiting for and believe me, it was worth the wait. She’s just a fantastic writer who can make me ugly cry with just a few lines and her characters almost seem to leap off the page.Read More »
My nine year old niece wants to be a scientist when she grows up. For holidays and birthdays she begs for science kits and star wars stuff (because she dreams of being a scientist in SPACE). She does experiments and uses her telescope every night she can.
She’s also started getting into older movies about scientists and when she heard that Ghostbusters would be coming out with the core four characters as ladies, she was so excited because she would get to see a super cute Black woman onscreen as a scientist with Leslie Jones’ casting.
Except…that’s not what we’re getting, is it? At least, not from the first trailer…Read More »
I started Stitch’s Media Mix in March of 2015 and I’ve been trucking ahead ever since. I started this blog because I wanted to try applying to different websites for writing gigs and needed a more tangible (and professional) source for my writing than my tumblr.
The blog started off as a portfolio, but over the past few months, it’s definitely evolved into something else.Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Trigger Warnings for suicide ideation and description of those thoughts.
2015 was not a good mental health year for me.
Not at all.
It seemed like I had one major depressive episode after another, existing on a roller coaster that was all brief highs spaced out with huge long spirals of intense sadness and a general sense of unworthiness.Read More »
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
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)
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.)
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 »
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)
Originally written in hm… 2013, I think in response to Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, and Lily Allen using WOC as props in their videos.
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 »
(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 »
This month in Urban Fantasy 101, we talk about the single white vampire myth and how urban fantasy authors (erroneously) equate vampires with whiteness.
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 »
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