Feeling A Little Bit Slow Right Now - Because While I Caught On Pretty Quickly That Season Two Of @ardenpodcast

Feeling a little bit slow right now - because while I caught on pretty quickly that season two of @ardenpodcast was doing Hamlet, it took me sitting with that knowledge for 11.5 episodes before I retroactively realised that season ONE of Arden was doing Romeo & Juliet

I managed to improv a version of this in (I think) Vigil: Tourist Trap, but this is the thought-through version.

I strongly dislike fantasy settings where magic is a thing certain people have or can use and certain people can't (and I'm not only talking about the Dowager Transphobe's setting here). This take draws from old English folkloric magic, which was more about just ... learning the right names to say and rituals to perform to get an effect you want.

What you need to remember about magic

is that it's not a force or a resource - it's an act.

It's not something you can have. It's not something you can use.

It's something you perform.

Listen to Vigil

The DAY this newsletter went out, I changed the working title of Project Tallneck AGAIN.

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The sequel to Knives Out is officially titled “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mistery”

and and and, the public regret Le Guin expressed had an influence on Ann Leckie's decision to use "she" as the default neutral pronoun in the Radch trilogy!

Orbit Books

He Said, She Said - Orbit Books

I decided pretty early on, when I first was playing with the elements of what would become the universe of ANCILLARY JUSTICE (US | UK | AUS)

Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness was a big deal in feminist science fiction for being one of the first widely popular and critically acclaimed works to do cool shit with sex and gender (which was certainly nothing new, but previous such works had rarely "taken off" the way LHoD did). It was criticized for referring to the genderfluid characters with the indefinite "he," which was a la mode in style guides at the time, instead of using alternating or gender-neutral pronouns. In time Le Guin came to agree with this criticism; she considered her decision not to take things further one of her biggest literary regrets, stating that "I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns."

I tell you this only because the phrase "I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns" is one I think about a lot.

Y’all I’m WEEPING

The Stance™️