Jan. 11th, 2010

starlady: Fuck you, it's magic.  (kick ass fantasy)
I just like saying "umpty-bajillion."

Via [livejournal.com profile] officialgaiman, this website (run by a female grad student writing her MA thesis on Mirrlees, yays!) collects scads of information about Hope Mirrlees, including the full text of her first novel, Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists. I don't even know what a Jansenist is. For that matter, I had to make a special trip to the library to find a dictionary that could tell me the adjectival form of "John" today (for the record: Johannite). I may or may not have bought what seems to be the last used copy of Michael Swanwick's monograph Hope-in-the-Mist on the internet as a direct consequence of these things. I may or may not be officially obsessed with Hope Mirrlees now.

Also, 2010 will see the inauguration of the Tanabata Wishes fanfiction exchange, a Yuletide-style challenge centered around small East Asian fandoms. More details can be found at [livejournal.com profile] tanzaku, the main LJ community, and at [livejournal.com profile] tanabata_admin. Fic will be hosted on the AO3; this post by [livejournal.com profile] pyrefly on integrating Tanabata with [community profile] dark_agenda is also worth specific consideration. ETA: follow the admin community here on DW with [syndicated profile] tanabata_admin_lj_feed, thanks to [personal profile] elke_tanzer. /ETA

Finally, June 2010 will see Lightspeed Magazine open for business. As editor Sean Wallace notes in this post at his LJ ([livejournal.com profile] oldcharliebrown), LM does not have author quotas, but it does seek a diverse population of writers to match its diverse audience of science fiction readers (and the same can be said for the other publication he co-edits, Fantasy Magazine). For all these reasons, I encourage writers of all backgrounds who've been thinking of sending science fiction and fantasy stories on the rounds to submit to these two magazines (full disclosure: I read slush for FM).