Weekly Update 07/02/2021
Hello!
As you may have surmised from my recent silence, I have been very busy, and also moderately unwell, and also extremely tired. Apologies for this - unfortunately, it's the fact of being chronically ill as I am on top of travelling, but now I'm finally back home I'm going to try to get back into the swing of things.
Firstly, today I'm doing an online panel at /r/Fantasy's StabbyCon alongside some other excellent short story writers - Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Eugenia Triantafyllou and John Wiswell! We're answering a lot of questions about writing short stories and working in the short story format, so absolutely feel free to bop along and read through our answers and put in some questions of your own, whether they're about short story craft or broader questions, or specific questions for any or each of us about our characters, our worlds, specific stories, or anything similar! Don't worry if it takes you a while to see this email - I'll keep getting notifications from the thread even in the next few days and weeks, so it doesn't matter if you come late but still want to join in. :)
Also, I was thinking that something I might start experimenting with in these round-ups is including media I've really enjoyed as well as work I've put out, just because I know a lot of people engage with the same sort of stuff I really love and enjoy!
I'm currently replaying the Witcher III, having just started my replay there which I love to pieces and absolutely always recommend, but some recommendations I have from the past few weeks are:
Quinton Review's breakdowns of iCarly and Victorious. These are very long video-essay style breakdowns of every episode of iCarly and Victorious respectively, looking at the broader themes of each series, the ways in which they succeed and fail and so on, and they're just GREAT. They're so in-depth, they look at things from such a lot of angles, and are just wonderful, I can't recommend them enough.
Reel Injun - This is a great little documentary basically exploring the ways in which Native Americans have been depicted in cinema, and how those depictions impact people's ideas of actual Native and Indigenous peoples in Canada and the US, and how things are increasingly changing with more and more Native directors and so on. Some other documentaries I really enjoyed are Disclosure and Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen.
Deadly Cuts - I loved this, this is a kooky little Irish comedy that I just watched last night. It's about four hairdressers in Dublin who're all from a working class, hard-done-by area in Dublin, and they're getting menaced by a local gangster while they're trying to run to take part in a big hairdressing competition. It's so real, so funny, I loved all the characters to bits, and the comedy is really great, I laughed out loud a lot of times.
Ugly/Delicious - This is a Netflix documentary series and it's wonderful. It's David Chang and Paul Meehan and a host of regular different guest stars who are all sorts of weird and wonderful. Each episode, they basically pick a sort of food, like fried chicken or kid's meals or barbecue, and they just delve into the different aspects of the way different foods are viewed and consumed and considered and contrast different cultural points and different opinions about food and culture, especially in regards to stuff like racism and biases around food! I'm loving it so much.
Some other things I really enjoyed recently are The Silent Sea, the Korean sci-fi drama, I think We're Alone Now with Peter Dinklage, Much Ado About Nothing (1993, dir. Kenneth Brannagh), Encanto (which I livetweeted here), and Eaten By Lions.
New Works Published
TweetFic: Hot For Teacher
A guy starts teaching at his old high school and finds he's still extremely hot for his old stern teacher Eyes lots of sexy and BDSM and Nasty Old Man playing with a younger man who's gaining confidence!
Romance Short: The Enchanter and the Postman
4k, rated M, M/M. Just some sweetness, teasing and some back-and-forth, a lot of affection, and a cat, too! Adapted from a TweetFic.
Read on Medium / / Read on Patreon
Short Vignette: Wash
600w, Lucien Pike/Gellert Osgodby. Just a short vignette with some intimacy between the two of them.