somebody rec me sth else to watch

First of all, I’m not going to get into an argument about the relative merits of different styles of writing. Each will inform the other and doing any of them consistently will help you improve. This is as true of academic writing as it is of writing fiction or writing advertising copy. Practice makes better. 

When it comes to finding time to Do All The Things, it really comes down to making choices and making a plan. 

You’ve got a lot of hours per day and a lot of hours per week that you can work with. Some of your time will be spent sleeping, eating, commuting, and in class. Outside of those necessities, you also need to spend time doing chores and doing your homework. 

After you’ve got all of those out of the way, the rest of your time can be spent on the fun things: socializing (in person or online), exercising, learning things that interest you, reading, writing fic. 

I’m not saying that you need to get a planner or anything, but it doesn’t hurt to organize your time if you’re having trouble fitting everything in. When your workload at school or at home increases, you’ll have less time for the fun stuff. That’s when you need to decide between going to the movies or writing another chapter of your fic, for example. 

Accept the fact that you are one person and you can’t do all the things all the time. Once you accept that, it’s just a matter of figuring out what your priorities are on any given day or week. 

I got active in fandom during my postdoctoral residency.  And so I did my fannish activities in the moments in between - waiting for appointments, on the bus, in clinics between patients, etc..  It was my “happy place” the place where I rested so I took it everywhere with me.  

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

me at 6 years old with a wine glass full of grape juice: