Events

We’re one week out from the release date for Nobody’s Baby, the second Dorothy Gentleman novella and by all accounts a good time. If you’re in Seattle on March 10, you can pop on a mask and mosey on down to Charlie’s Queer Books in Fremont and hear me and Nicola Griffith (!!!!) talk about book covers, space stories, and who reviews are really for:

And if you’re in Portland on March 16, I’ll be at Grand Gesture Books with Isa Agajanian (!!!!), talking sapphic sci-fi and who even knows what else!

The Skiffy and Fanty Show had some wonderful things to say about this second novella in their review: “The prose is immersive, with never a weird word choice to pull me out of the story. By turns efficient and thoughtful, it occasionally sparkles with nifty metaphors and wonderful phrasing.”

Linkery

• Gourmet magazine (the new coop one, not the old glossy print one) has posted a fascinating interview with Ruth Reichl, who used to edit the glossy magazine, about how food writing has changed since the 1970s. I learned so much!

• You may have seen Bree (one half of kickass romance writing team Kit Rocha) posting about this, because along with many others she’s been 3D printing whistles nonstop for months — they just hit one million whistles, holy shit — but when she learned that people had been handing out dick-shaped whistles at the Minneapolis Rocky Horror Picture Show things took a delightful turn: ConsensualDickWhistles.com

• Scroll down this long and link-filled article to find an animated poem called “Octopus Empire”

Crafty

I swear to any gods you trust, the fern shawl pattern is coming, it will be here, honest. I am finishing up the final sample so I can get the photographs looking delicious, and refining the last bit of the chart, which is enormous, but which I’ve kept as both One Enormous Chart and also Three Manageable Sections so you can use whichever is easiest for you when knitting! The knitting chart software automatically translates chart rows into text — not with AI, just based on what I put in the chart boxes — which is a huge help but also makes me worry that any errors I’ve made will compound themselves and someone will somehow knit this shawl in a way that destroys the fabric of the universe. What can I say? It is an anxious and unreliable time we are living in and catastrophes feel close at hand.

Reading recs

This month’s NYT column (gift link) features one of the most bonkers romances I’ve read in a while: Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die is a romantasy where the knight hero is a cowardly himbo, the evil sorcerer hero starts mean and stays mean, the knight gets turned into a vulture and also a woman, and one particular scene had me outright screeching “The moon?!?!?!” It’s a good, weird time and extremely funny!

Also featured: A lovely small-town romance with a beekeeper heroine (Honey Bee Mine by Sarah T. Dubb) and newsletter favorite Lydia San Andres’ debut contemporary, Only Friends!

Hope to see you soon, and happy reading!
Olivia