I love that people send me links to articles about Roman women turning out to be extraordinary! In this case, a scholar of Trajan’s Column is talking about the relevance of female figures on the relief sculpture, suggesting that women were more involved in military forts than previously thought.
Colleen McCullough, one of Australia’s bestselling authors, has died. Rather than link you to the meme that did the rounds after the shameful obituary that did the rounds, I’ll send you over to Hoyden About Town who wrote respectfully about McCullough’s life, work and attitude. She was basically awesome. And oh, thanks to those Masters of Rome books which I read at a critical point in my teens, she basically shaped my life.
Kameron Hurley has done that rare thing of publicly discussing her book advances, comparing them to actual day job income and also showing how her Hugo wins affected her financial bottom line: What I Get Paid For My Novels: Or, Why I’m Not Quitting My Day Job I also want to point writers (especially writers who have dayjobs) to her Life on 10,000 Words a Day: How I’m Hacking My Writing Process post, which shows that not all writing methods work for all writers, and one amazing writing day per week can be more effective than seven steady sensible days. I’m pretty sure Kameron’s current system would kill me, but I appreciated her showing it as an alternative to the accepted wisdom (ha) of ‘write every day’.
A lovely review of the first issue of Uncanny Magazine. Speaking of Uncanny, check out this piece on the history of cosplay in their new issue: The Future’s Been Here Since 1939: Female Fans, Cosplay, and Conventions by Erica McGillivray.
Myke Cole on being a man writing from a woman’s point of view and how sex changes everything.
Australia, We Need To Talk About Fairy Bread. My favourite thing about this article is how many commenters jumped in to correct the false idea that fairy bread is a substitute for birthday cake. Because that’s just crazysauce. But the rest of the article is basically true and if you never had fairy bread at your birthday parties then you totally missed out.
The big publishing announcement of the last fortnight is Zeroes, by Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan and Deborah Biancotti. Obviously a Scott-and-Margo collaboration would in itself be exciting but for those of us who have been waiting for a Deb Biancotti novel for a long time, that’s the bit that is especially squeeful. DEBUT, BABY!
This lovely post shows (as do our dozens of comments every week) exactly why we do Verity! every week: because people genuinely need to listen to a bunch of women talking about Doctor Who on a regular basis. (I’m the identity and social analysis power ranger!)
Finally, it’s the 25th anniversary of Saved By the Bell. I make no apologies.