Notes
🔖📚 Read Shadow and Bone author Leigh Bardugo: ‘People sneer at the things women and girls love’ by Sian Cain (The Guardian).
She really is my hero.
🔖📚 Read Falling in Love With the Avengers, America’s Most Toxic Work Force by Leigh Bardugo (New York Times, gift link)
I love Leigh Bardugo so much.
💬📚 “I hunker down with books when I need time to process what’s happening in my own life.
Books give me the space to breathe.”
- Kelly J. Baker, Final Girl: And Other Essays on Grief, Trauma, and Mental Illness
Currently reading: Final Girl: And Other Essays on Grief, Trauma, and Mental Illness by Kelly Baker 📚
Austin Kleon says to climb your creative family tree. Kelly is like an intellectual big sister, so I’m starting with her. (Katie Rose Guest Pryal is another.) 📝
Finished reading: From Bad to Cursed by Lana Harper 📚
Loved it even more than Payback’s A Witch. Full review coming later this week.
📚💬 “Disaster and hero, monster and martyr, beauty and beast . . . Choose your own dichotomy. Because it doesn’t matter. We were always built to be both.” Lana Harper, For Better or Cursed
W: I just don’t have a framework for doing this kind of writing…
Me: You need to read a lot of it and then just start writing.
W: holds up invisible mirror
If generative AI traffic is declining, does that mean AI can just become another tool we use and we can talk about it normally without talking about it exclusively?
Everybody else: You seen Barbieheimer yet?
Me: Nah, I’m going to the theater to see Terminator & Robocop. (Time travel is rad. So are retro cinema experiences.)
The belief at the beginning of a writing project that we don’t know how to write it comes for all of us who write, no matter how many writing projects we’ve finished or awards we’ve won, and IT HAS COME FOR ME RIGHT NOW.
I just donated to and joined Students Protecting Education, a national organization that a group of high schoolers started in response to book banning in their community. It’s awesome that young people want to step up to save the world. It’s critical that we don’t expect them to do it alone.
I love that they were able to let Worf’s skin be the same color as Michael Dorn’s.
Welcome to the analog part of qualitative data analysis. Whenever I get to the coding-the-codes stage, I need to channel Austin Kleon and use my hands. I sometimes handwrite the codes on index cards, but this time I printed them up and am cutting them into strips.
In the US? You might think the Kids Online Safety Act is good but before you decide, please read this piece at Ars Technica, this piece from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and this week’s newsletter from Charlie Jane Anders. Then if you think it’s bad, contact your congresspeople.
My aspiration as a parent is to one day have a plan for the day and a half of free time my kid has the first week of school.
If you’re in New Zealand and you have improv experience, you should probably go do this workshop with Bianca Casusöl. She’s the best.
🔖 Read To Be a Consumer of Culture Means Living in a Hostage Situation by Aaron Bady (Slate)
A great exploration of the role of fan labor in culture work.
Looking at my On This Day page, I found this blog post about letting go of self-punishing goals. I really needed it, as I’ve spent much of this vacation staring into the ocean and making plans for how I’ll do everything better once I get home.
📚🔖 Read The Parentified Protagonist: From Shifting Roles to Shapeshifter, a guest post by Stephanie Willing (Teen Librarian Toolbox).
📚 Book Riot’s Literary Activism newsletter is always valuable. This week, Kelly Jensen takes a deep dive into the use of ChatGPT to decide whether books should be removed from libraries.
Finished reading: Payback’s a Witch by Lana Harper 📚
It’s a witchy romance between two bi women and it has a punny title. What’s not to love? Moderately steamy.
📚💬👱♀️ “When Pearl Dragon and cheap wine and even magic have all failed us… there will always be Buffy marathons.” Lana Harper, Payback’s A Witch
😭 I’m not crying, you’re crying.