Kimberly Hirsh

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:01:34 -0400

Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 20:20:46 -0400

Doing some seasonally appropriate reading tonight.

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 17:23:25 -0400

O captain my captain

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 16:08:34 -0400

📚🗨️ “Humans ubiquitously suck. I know I was one at some point, but I like to think I’ve grown since then.” Taylor Grothe, Lethal Kiss

I'm a NaNo Rebel writing about children and fandom.

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 18:22:34 -0400

Some stuff went down with NaNoWriMo before the official non-profit closed. But the original founders created a new thing, and I signed up just now. I’m participating as a NaNo Rebel, which is to say, I’m writing something that’s not a novel. I also have set my word count goal much lower than the standard 50K.

I attended Fan Studies Network North America this weekend. I always find fan studies conferences energizing. As a post-academic PhD holder whose only institutional affiliation is with a PreK-12 school, any scholarship I do will make me an independent scholar and while that has some limitations (a lot of limitations), it also comes with some freedoms. Including researching whatever I want and not caring how publishable it is, where I publish it, or if anybody but me finds it useful.

I mean obviously I want other people to find it useful. But it’s okay if they don’t.

In their presentation, “Who counts as a fan? Pre-discursive boundaries of fandom in early childhood,” co-authors Giulia Villani and Danilo Calaresi mentioned that children are an understudied population in fan studies. I’ve recently started feeling like maybe I could engage in scholarship again (it only took 5 years from my defense for me to recover!) and I’d been casting about for my current area of research interest. This is tied to my day job, to my interests as a parent, and to my interests as a person who has engaged in fannish behavior since I myself was about 3 years old. (The Muppets were my first fandom, in case you’re curious, if we’re counting things like acquiring merchandise as a fannish activity. And we are.)

So for AcWriMo/NaNoWriMo, my goal is to write a literature review of at least 1500 words synthesizing the current research literature on children and fandom. To arrive at this word count goal, I looked at the lit review chapters of my dissertation and divided each of their word counts by 5, as I had about 50 references for each of those and so far I’ve only found 12 for this project. They clustered around the 1500-word mark, so that’s where I set my goal.

But my real goals, more than a word count, are by the end of the month to have:

a concept map of the literature in this area
a synthetic note for each article or book chapter
a list of ideas for future research in this area, including possible action research to undertake in my role as a school librarian

I’ll try to blog throughout the process, too.

Here are my NaNoWriMo 2026 badges!

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 11:58:32 -0400

I was going to do something besides lie on my couch and look at my phone but (gestures at meat cage, then at everything else). Today I have had brunch with a friend, returned something to Torrid, and scheduled a pediatrician appointment. Isn’t that enough?

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 08:07:11 -0400

📚🗨️ “What’s life without the pursuit of knowledge? When you have a nearly limitless lifespan, after a while the only thing to do with yourself is learn… I want to read everything. All of it… When my body finally gasps its last, I want to be a verifiable library in kinda-human form.” Taylor Grothe, Lethal Kiss

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 21:00:36 -0400

Finished reading: The grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer 📚

Sophy herself is a delight.

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 10:04:17 -0400

I want to capture something cool that happened at school/work. A kid ate a pepper from the school garden, not knowing it was a spicy pepper. Now that kid has a new interest in spicy peppers and their SHU ratings and is doing independent research on it. I love when kids find and pursue new interests!

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:12:49 -0400

📚🗨️📝 “if your business is words, a notebook can be at once your medium — and your mirror.” Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 06:42:06 -0400

People are going to try to tell you spooky season is over at the end of October, but you don’t have to listen to them. If you want, it can be spooky season all year.

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 11:10:05 -0400

Finished reading: We ride upon sticks by Quan Barry 📚

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 09:15:44 -0400

🎮 Played Professor Layton and the Curious Village.

As charming as it was the first time I played it.

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 16:26:12 -0400

Finished reading: Dead Beat (Ninth House Series, 3) by Leigh Bardugo 📚

I love this whole trilogy so much. I love how Leigh Bardugo always manages to leave me with a sense of hope, even in a series where there is so much active evil in the world.

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 16:20:43 -0400

📚🗨️ “That was the gift of coming from nothing. You learned to work with what you had.” Leigh Bardugo, Dead Beat

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 02:59:21 -0400

The movies loved cold-eyed assassins and flinty lone wolves. But the world needed people who wept and fought on, saps and suckers and fools who had their hearts broken but kept loving anyway, women who knew how to work magic with nothing but water and flour, a little salt, and a will that could grind iron to dust.

Leigh Bardugo, Dead Beat 📚🗨️

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 02:45:37 -0400

📚🗨️ “There was something embarrassing about dying as a sophomore. It just lacked dignity.” Leigh Bardugo, Dead Beat

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 20:53:34 -0400

📚🗨️ “She wanted to hide in the dark and let someone else sort it all out.” Leigh Bardugo, Dead Beat

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 10:31:00 -0400

🎮 Played Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney — Trials and Tribulations.

I really like how they tied everything together and wrapped it all up in this one.

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 05:24:22 -0400

📚🗨️ “Maybe that was the secret truth of courage. You didn’t face danger; you just got used to it.” Leigh Bardugo, Dead Beat

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 08:26:15 -0400

My kid is 10 today. I still haven’t found the guts to write my birth story. I’m so proud of the kind, clever, funny person he’s becoming.

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 03:22:14 -0400

Finished reading: Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo 📚

A re-read. I just love Leigh Bardugo’s work. So. Much.

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 21:54:28 -0400

📚🗨️ “He’d been washed up on a familiar shore, but the sea had changed him.” Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:35:39 -0400

📚🗨️ “You had to decide who you were willing to go to war for and who you trusted to jump into the fray for you. That was all there was in this world. No heroes or villains, just the people you’d brave the waves for, and the ones you’d let drown.” Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 09:49:34 -0400

You know what word academics in the social sciences and humanities love? Bricolage.