Outer Alliance Spotlight #23: Catherine Lundoff February 26, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , add a commentWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #23. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is author and editor, Catherine Lundoff.
Catherine is a lesbian identified bisexual, who married her partner of 16 years last September. She’s been writing since 1996, and has amassed a long list of queer speculative and erotic fiction sales, including the recent “Great Reckonings, Little Rooms” in Time Well Bent: Queer Alternative History, and “The Egyptian Cat” in Tales of the Unanticipated #30.
She received a Lambda nomination for the lesbian ghost story collection, Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades in 2008, and also won the Golden Crown Literary Award in the Lesbian Erotica category that same year for her short story collection, Crave: Tales of Lust, Love and Longing. She is currently reading submissions for a new anthology, Hellebore and Rue, which she is co-editing with JoSelle Vanderhooft.
Catherine is a regular at WisCon and Gaylaxicon, and she’ll also be appearing at MarsCon next week in Bloomington, Minnesota. If you can’t make it out to see her in person, you may find her online on LiveJournal, MySpace, Facebook, and GoodReads. She lives in Minnesota with her wife and two cats.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #22: Elizabeth Bear February 19, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , 2commentsWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #22. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is Campbell, Hugo, and Spectrum Award winning author, Elizabeth Bear.
Elizabeth Bear won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005, and has since written several award winning novels and stories. Bear’s novels often include queer content, and her long trail of award nominations reflects this. Carnival was nominated for the Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Lambda Literary Award in 2006 and shortlisted for the Gaylactic Spectrum Award in 2007. New Ansterdam, Dust, and Whiskey and Water were shortlisted for the Spectrum in 2008, while A Companion to Wolves (co-written with Sarah Monette) also received Spectrum and Lambda nominations that year. In 2009, All the Windwracked Stars, Ink and Steel, and Hell and Earth received Spectrum nominations, and the latter two (treated as two volumes of a long novel, The Stratford Man) won.
Bear’s success is not limited to novels, though. She’s had stories reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies, and two of her shorter pieces have won Hugo Awards: “Tideline” for Best Short Story in 2008, and “Shoggoths in Bloom” for Best Novelette in 2009. She also writes for a fictional television show called Shadow Unit with a team of other authors including Emma Bull, Sarah Monette, and Amanda Downum.
In addition to her website, Bear maintains a LiveJournal and a Twitter feed. Her new novel, Chill, is coming out on the 23rd, and a novella, Bone and Jewel Creatures will be available in March.
Linkdump #7 – Reading and writing February 16, 2010
Posted by zeborah in : links , 1 comment so farIt’s been way too long since I last posted a linkdump, but here’s a few meaty links:
Inspired by the Writers of Color 50 Book Challenge, the Queer Authors 50 Book Challenge has been created to encourage reading books by queer authors. The FAQ includes links to lists of queer sf authors and to zahrawithaz’s list of More than 50 books by Queer People of Color for inspiration.
Richard Norton, a scholar of gay history, has a website of essays on Gay History and Literature – there’s a particular focus on the 18th century (including a sourcebook of hundreds of primary documents from 18th century England) but the essays range from centuries BCE through to the 20th century.
Writing Gay Characters by Megan Rose Gedris covers topics including:
- Why write gay characters at all?
- “Gay Characters” vs. “Characters Who Just Happen to Be Gay”
- Avoiding cliches.
- Romance: How Much is Too Much / Not Enough?
- Gay characters in children’s/ young adult fiction
- Books with Excellent Gay Characters
For more regular linkdumps, please let me know of any interesting links in comments, by email, on the Outer Alliance forum or bookmark them on delicious or diigo with tag “outeralliancelinks“.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #21: Rick Reed February 12, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , add a commentWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #21. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is horror author, Rick Reed.
Rick has written several novels, both speculative and not. His novel about reincarnation and love, Orientation, won the EPIC Award for Best GLBT Novel last year, and two of his books are currently EPIC 2010 Awards finalists. Dead End Street is nominated in the Young Adult category and VGL Male Seeks Same is nominated in the Contemporary Romance Category. He’s also got a new novel called Blue Moon Cafe coming out in March from Amber Allure, and a short story in the forthcoming I Do Two charity anthology from MLR Press (proceeds go to the Lambda Legal).
Rick currently lives in Seattle with his partner and their Boston terrier, Lily. He is on Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook, and he maintains a blog at http://rickrreedreality.blogspot.com/.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #20: Hamish MacDonald February 5, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , 4commentsWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #20. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is author and bookmaker, Hamish MacDonald.
Hamish has been designing and publishing his own books for a decade, beginning with the Y2K thriller, doubleZero. All of his books feature gay characters, but he’s quick to point out that their sexuality is not the only thing that defines them. “In writing books, I try to create accessible, fun stories that clip along yet deep down ask a fundamental question about some issue we’re facing,” he says. “The homosexuality is always incidental to the story, but it’s something reviewers have singled out and use to describe the books; I think that’s narrow — straightness doesn’t need a warning label, nor is its inclusion taken to be a statement.”
Originally from Canada, Hamish gave in to the desire to live in place where his name would be commonplace, and relocated to Scotland in 2001. He lived in Edinburgh for 9 years, but is currently planning to move up into the highlands. In addition to creating books from scratch, he also passes on instruction and advice for others in his podcast, DIY Book. He keeps a blog on his website, and can be found on Twitter as hamishmacdonald.