Dealing with Aces

“It’s only a game, why do you have to be mad?”

2019 Illustration

-OVERWATCH- Fan Art

Book seller

Crystal seller

He sells flowers

She will sell you a pumpkin this fall

Would you like to purchase.. bean?

They are regulars. They buy mushrooms for soup

She has more options

Don’t be scared, he’s just been doing this for years and is passionate about garlic

Can I interest you in...melon?

Witch’s familiar needs coins to buy ingredients from toad next door

Politics, especially when it comes to issues like health care, is not an intellectual exercise for people like me; it is literally a matter of life and death. The American for-profit “health care system” let two of my sons die from lack of money, and I’m fortunate to have survived, because it has left me to die on more than one occasion. It nearly let one of my exes die, as well.

Politics, especially when it comes to issues like health care, is not an intellectual exercise for people like me; it is literally a matter of life and death. The American for-profit “health care system” let two of my sons die from lack of money, and I’m fortunate to have survived, because it has left me to die on more than one occasion. It nearly let one of my exes die, as well.

The goose

is running loose

to the sound

me: okay, whose fault is it now

anxiety: ... wasn't me

depression: ... wasn't me

OCD: ... wasn't me

me:

.

.

.

This final picture will make you 300% gayer:

Fantasy books written by women are often assumed to be young adult, even when those books are written for adults, marketed to adults, and published by adult SFF imprints. And this happens even more frequently to women of color.

This topic’s an ongoing conversation on book Twitter, and I thought it might be worth sharing with Tumblr. And by “ongoing,” I mean that people have been talking about this for years. Last year, there was a big blow up when the author R.F. Kuang said publicly that her book The Poppy War isn’t young adult and that she wished people would stop calling it such. If you’ve read The Poppy War, then you’ll know it’s grimdark fantasy along lines of Game of Thrones… and yet people constantly refer to The Poppy War as young adult – which is one of its popular shelves on Goodreads. To be fair, more people have shelved it as “adult,” but why is anyone shelving it as “young adult” in the first place? Game of Thrones is not at all treated this way…

Rebecca Roanhorse’s book Trail of  Lightning, an urban fantasy with a Dinétah (Navajo) protagonist has “young adult” as its fifth most popular Goodreads shelf. The novel is adult and published by Saga, an adult SFF imprint. 

S.A. Chakraborty’s adult fantasy novel City of Brass has “young adult” as its fourth most popular Goodreads shelf. 

Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand, an adult fantasy in a world based on Mughal India, has about equal numbers of people shelving it as “adult” or “young adult.” 

Book Riot wrote an article on this, although they didn’t address how the problem intersects with race. I also did a Twitter thread a while back where I cited these examples and some more as well. 

The topic of diversity in adult SFF is important to me, partly because we need to stop mislabeling the women of color who write it, and also because there’s a lot there that isn’t acknowledged! Besides, sometimes it’s good to see that your stories don’t just end the moment you leave high school and that adults can still have vibrant and interesting futures worth reading about. I feel like this is especially important with queer rep, for a number of reasons. 

Other books and authors in the tweets I screenshot include:

Witchmark by C.L. Polk

A Ruin of Shadows by L.D. Lewis

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Day Before by Liana Brooks

A Phoenix First Must Burn edited by Patrice Caldwell

Shri, a book blogger at Sun and Chai

Vanessa, a writer and blogger at The Wolf and Books