Writers and writing, part umpty-bajillion

[starlady]

I just like saying "umpty-bajillion."

Via 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 tanzaku, the main LJ community, and at tanabata_admin. Fic will be hosted on the AO3; this post by pyrefly on integrating Tanabata with dark_agenda is also worth specific consideration. ETA: follow the admin community here on DW with tanabata_admin_lj_feed, thanks to elke_tanzer. /ETA

Finally, June 2010 will see Lightspeed Magazine open for business. As editor Sean Wallace notes in this post at his LJ (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).

Comments

[lian]

...hee, and amazon told me I'd receive Lud-In-The-Mist in the mail tomorrow :3

[starlady]

It's so good!

I made a feed...

[elke_tanzer]

For those of us who on DW want to keep up with the LJ's announcements:

tanabata_admin_lj_feed

:-)

Re: I made a feed...

[starlady]

Awesome; I'll add it to this post.

[kindkit.livejournal.com]

Jansenism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jansenism) is a term I've only encountered in theological contexts--it's a predestinarian variety of Roman Catholicism that was especially influential in France. I'm not sure what "one of love's Jansenists" would be. The Jansenists were regarded as very stern and moralistic, so perhaps it connects to that somehow. Huh.

ETA: Or the key point may be the Jansenist idea (taken from Augustine) that the human will is innately corrupt and tends naturally towards evil rather than good.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Posts on the website indicate that the book is set in 17thC France. I'll have to read the article before I read the book. Thanks!