Awards:
File 770 shares the British Fantasy Award winners; Jen Williams took the award for Best Fantasy for The Bitter Twins; Little Eve won Catriona Ward the Best Horror Novel awards, and Aliette de Bodard took Best Novella for The Tea Master and The Detective.
Books and Writing:
For anyone who has a bucket list, here’s something to add: Stephen and Tabitha King’s house will become a museum, archive and writers retreat.
October 23rd, 2019. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | 6 comments |
Nobel Prize for Literature:
The Nobel Prize for Literature Committee awarded two prizes, one for 2018 and one for 2019. Olga Tokarszuk and Peter Handke are the awardees for 2018 and 2019 respectively. Here is more information from the BBC.
Olga Tokarczuk’s work sounds like something I would like to read; it has elements of magical realism and the fantastical. Her most recent novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, was published in 2009. She has won many honors throughout Europe including the Man Booker Prize.
October 16th, 2019. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | 4 comments |
The brave wizard trio of the HARRY POTTER series were quite familiar with Hogwarts’s infirmary.
In Cassandra Clare’s MORTAL INSTRUMENTS series, the Shadow-hunter Institute also has a nice infirmary, although it looks like they outsource most of their medical work to the witch/warlock community.
Magical communities have their medical needs, just like everybody else, with some special twists. If you’re a werewolf and you are injured in wolf form, are you better off with a veterinarian than a surgeon who works on humans? Do vampires suffer from anemia?
October 10th, 2019. Marion Deeds | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 15 comments |
Yom Kippur is the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. It started a few minutes before sunset yesterday.
Octopus Dreaming:
PBS’s Nature ran a show on the octopus. A scientist studies Heidi, the octopus who lives in an aquarium in his living room. He captured this eerie, beautiful footage of Heidi changing color while she was apparently asleep. These colors manifest in the octopus while it is hunting or eating, so the scientist “narrates” Heidi’s dream.
Nobel Prizes:
The Nobel prize in physics was awarded to a Canadian scientist and two Swiss scientists for their work on exoplanets and the evolution of the universe.
October 9th, 2019. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | no comments |
Steel Crow Saga by Paul Krueger
Paul Krueger’s first book, Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge, was a quirky, fun urban fantasy in which magical bartenders saved Chicago from primordial evil. Based on that, I was eager to read his 2019 novel Steel Crow Saga. After I pre-ordered it, I began to read, on Twitter and other places (I follow Krueger on Twitter) that it drew heavily from the tradition of Japanese animation and the series/game Pokémon.
October 3rd, 2019. Marion Deeds and Kat Hooper´s rating: 4, 5 | Paul Krueger | Audio | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Conventions:
Tad Daley shared some more WorldCon pictures on File 770.
Some self-promotion; I’ll be attending AtomaCon in November. It’s a cozy South Carolina convention. I’m not a guest, just a participant, but look forward to meeting any FanLit fans who might attend.
Awards:
Gollancz and Ben Aaronovitch are sponsoring a fiction contest open to Black, Asian and minority ethnic writers in Britain. (The British term is BAME.) This sounds like an excellent contest and a very good idea.
October 2nd, 2019. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | 3 comments |
Deaths and Memorials:
Aaron Eisenberg, who played Nog on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, died last week at the age of fifty.
Books and Writing:
Heather Demetrios wrote an article last week that got a lot of attention. Taking a “learn from my mistakes” approach, Demetrios outlined how she blew through a couple of big advances without doing enough planning, leaving her nearly broke and scrambling when her books didn’t earn out.
September 25th, 2019. Marion Deeds | SFF Reviews, World Wide Wednesday | 1 comment |
Cherie Priest’s 2019 Southern Gothic novel The Toll delivers the creeping terror, the strangeness and the surprises I’ve come to expect from her, since she is the queen of this subgenre. From the weird, dying little town of Staywater, Georgia, to a house haunted by dolls, to “granny women” and ghosts, to that thing in the swamp, The Toll builds and delivers on a mood that progresses from shivery to biting-your-fingernails suspenseful.
September 25th, 2019. Marion Deeds´s rating: 4.5 | Cherie Priest | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Awards:
I can’t believe people have to do this, but apparently they do… Archive of One’s Own issued a statement explaining that their Hugo win was for the concept of the archive itself, and the achievement of creating a space and a community for fanfiction, not for anything written or produced on the archive. AO3 is a community of people who write fanfiction, which means they are using worlds, concepts and characters developed by someone else. No writer on the site “won” a Hugo for their fanfiction.
It turns out that some of the people who apparently needed this reminder are File 770 followers.
September 18th, 2019. Marion Deeds | SFF Reviews, World Wide Wednesday | 3 comments |
They’re all the rage; hidden libraries, secret libraries, magical ones, forbidden archives and lost collections. They’re locations and plot fuel for books, stories, movies and television shows. And we all have our favorites.
Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library, in the series of the same name, spans realities and dimensions; some libraries, like the Vatican Archives in Dan Brown’s ROBERT LANGDON series, are firmly rooted in one world, but go back centuries. One of the most popular libraries, the library at Alexandria, has been gone longer than it existed, but it still grabs our imaginations.
September 12th, 2019. Marion Deeds | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 17 comments |
What a fascinating exploration of Edwige Fenech's contributions to the giallo genre! I love how the post highlights her unique…
Pretty challenging book. Cut by half, speed up the cadence. Trying to figure out the plot, the main point of…
Thanks for the kind words, Marion! Coming as they are from a professional writer, they are much appreciated!
Wonderful review, Sandy.
The "body count" bothered me a bit less because being dead seemed more like an inconvenience than anything else... unlike…