In which I catch up to my TBR, at least on Kindle, and read whatever the hell I want instead.

This podcast episode (part one of two) about Thomas Kinkade was a hell of a listen this week. Like a lot of middle-class(ish) Americans who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, this art was omnipresent in the atmosphere for a large chunk of my life. And as an enthusiast of jigsaw puzzles and embroidery, let me tell you, this aesthetic is still inescapable in certain quarters.

But inadvertently, these episodes also illuminated (ha) for me how I feel about other forms of art built to be technically skilled, hearken to a mythical small-town past, and avoid any hint of complexity lest it make anyone uncomfortable for a split second.

That kind of art makes a lot of people feel warm and fuzzy and uplifted, and that’s great for them. I hope they enjoy it. They don’t have that effect on me, though. Maybe I’m just a broken human being; I don’t deny that. But it was gratifying to me to hear that someone else out there is left cold by the sort of thing that’s supposedly universally appealing.

I’m not going to be a snob about it — if you love that kind of art, in any medium, I love that for you. But they don’t hit me the way they’re intended to hit their target audience. So I guess I’m just not in their target audience.

Some threads with interesting book recs:

Books with ace/allo romance : r/LGBTBooks (reddit.com)
It must be Yell About How Great At the Feet of the Sun Is o’clock again, how time flies.

Looking for ace/aro protagonist : r/LGBTBooks (reddit.com)
A shorter list, but one with some good references.

(Am I dealing with guilt over having an aspec antagonist in my next story? Obviously, yes. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.)

As of this morning, I’ve finally finished all the books I bought during the first Cozy the Day Away Sale in April. Yeah, four months ago. I bought about 30 books, I’m a slow reader, and I jumped in and out of the list as well as other unrelated books. But now we’re done!

And I have even less idea of what “cozy” is than I did when I started. Well, that’s useful information in itself. I’d hoped to learn, and I did; just not what I expected to learn.

Just got back from the local science fiction / fantasy / horror literary conference, Confluence — as a fan / reader, obviously, and as an aspiring something-or-other, I suppose. The event continues — it’s a 3-day conference — but since I didn’t know what to expect or whether I’d be wildly out of my depth, I just went for most of one day.

And I had a great time. Attended some panels, watched some concerts, shopped in the dealers’ room:

More print books than I’ve bought in the last two, maybe three years combined. Feminist SF anthologies, solarpunk short stories, Things I’ve Heard About A Lot But Haven’t Gotten Around To, a nonfiction book my spouse handed me with a comment like “this looks like it would be up your alley” (it’s the plague one), another nonfiction book, and a writing prompt workbook from a local literary organization. Oh, and a cute little resin dragon figurine, one of two we picked up there. (Chibiterasu already lives here. The other dragon went on our Nerd Wall in the dining room.)

A quick jaunt, all things considered, but thought-provoking and interesting. For as long as I’ve been writing and as much as I love it, talking about it has almost always been an online-only phenomenon for me. Social anxiety is a huge part of the reason, of course. But that’s one of the things I wanted to test today: observing and soaking in some atmosphere without having to talk much with anyone. And because books and/or writing are things I could listen to people talk about literally all day, the fascination outweighs the fear.

We’ll see what the next steps are and how those feel. I’m glad I tried it out. My TBR pile will feel it, but hey. Worth it.

I’m in the middle of a book that I’m dying to talk about — no suspense here, it’s Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle — but then I thought it would be weird to ramble about that, I only really talk about books at the year-end round-up when I dump out all the graphics from Goodreads and talk about all the books I read that year at once.

And then I thought, why in the world do I do that, anyway?

So I’m going to catch up on what I’ve read this year so far, more or less (rounded down to an arbitrary point, so I can pick it back up next time). It’s been a more themed year than usual, which has been kind of wearing; I usually jump around genres more than this. But it’s also been interesting in its own way.

Here we go.