“Why are Biden’s poll numbers so bad?”

This is the question too many ~serious political analysts~ ask themselves in very serious think pieces, as the terrible race to the 2024 U.S. general election gets underway.

I posted most of this rant to mastodon yesterday morning, and while there are many things about mastodon as social media that I prefer to twitter, social media is inherently more transient than blogs for me; I wanted this in essay form, and to expand on some things I barely touched on before typing ‘finis’ over there.

Reader, beware: political rant ahead; if you come to this blog for genre reading or crafting, avert your eyes for now, and return tomorrow for something more to your taste.

A house painted like a rainbow

A bit over five years ago, I wrote a post on Karen Knows Best, about Equality House, in Topeka, Kansas.

This past week, someone else wrote a beautiful story about its meaning to him and the community and the state–and what it can mean for all of us.

“River of Teeth” by Sarah Gailey

Update: edited on May 24 2018 to change pronouns to those preferred by the author.

Last year I became aware of Sarah Gailey on twitter (see here and here). Though I haven’t shared them here, I have very much enjoyed their pieces on Tor.com (they wrote a whole series on The Women of Harry Potter, starting with Hermione, and then there’s “In Defense of Villaineses”, and “Do Better: Sexual Violence in SFF”).

Anyway, I finally snagged a copy of “River of Teeth,”  their debut novella, based on something that really almost happened. (Check out The Atavist piece that was the inspiration, or this Wired article for a summary.)

Beware: there’s violence, gore and death on the page. I wouldn’t say it’s lavishly described, but it’s graphic. Oh, and this is not a romance.

“River of Teeth” by Sarah Gailey

This is an alternative history set in the 1890s. In this timeline, H.R.23621 (aka, the Hippo Bill) actually passed, so that hippopotamuses were imported into the US to breed–for meat–in the marshy areas of the Gulf Coast. However, shit happens (doesn’t it always?) and what we have now a body of water where feral hippos roam, a blight on the country and a danger to both the environment and the populace.

Here, have a blurb:

Language again: inclusion v erasure

(Please see update at end of post)

I often harp on language usage, and I’m often irked when authors use it thoughtlessly.¹

This post by Alexis Hall expands on a couple of reasons why we all should think a bit more about how we express ourselves:

And for that matter, LGBTQ+ has issues as a term because it implies the inclusion of groups of people who are often, in reality, excluded by the mainstream LGBTQ+ community. And, bringing this back to publishing, it’s especially problematic in romance because very often LGBTQ+ is used to basically mean m/m. And part of me says that the use of inclusive language is a necessary precursor to genuine inclusion, but part of me says that it can be used as a smokescreen to disguise to absence of that inclusion. And my poor word choice at the RITAs is a good example of this. I instinctively used the more general term and, in so doing, betrayed my own failure to recognise the achievement of a writer of non-m/m LGBTQ+ romance.

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