Writing Cupcakes on Tissue

A reminder that I’ll be following from my main account, so you’ll see it show up as “antique-symbolism” :)

Super-Optimists vs their Pessimistic L.L.’s

Kara to panic as she woke up, confined in a suit, considering that she has a history of claustrophobia due to being trapped in a pod for 24 years after her planet exploded in front of her eyes when she was 13

A dramatic, attractive helmet removal

Professional

Find other writers, publishers and ways to market your work through these searchable databases and search engines.

Litscene: Use this search engine to search through thousands of writers and literary projects, and add your own as well.

Thinkers.net: Get a boost in your creativity with some assistance from this site.

PoeWar: Whether you need help with your career or your writing, this site is full of great searchable articles.

Publisher’s Catalogues: Try out this site to search through the catalogs and names of thousands of publishers.

Edit Red: Through this site you can showcase your own work and search through work by others, as well as find helpful FAQ’s on writing.

Writersdock: Search through this site for help with your writing, find jobs and join other writers in discussions.

PoetrySoup: If you want to find some inspirational poetry, this site is a great resource.

Booksie.com: Here, you can search through a wide range of self-published books.

One Stop Write Shop: Use this tool to search through the writings of hundreds of other amateur writers.

Writer’s Cafe: Check out this online writer’s forum to find and share creative works.

Literary Marketplace: Need to know something about the publishing industry? Use this search tool to find the information you need now.

Writing

These helpful tools will help you along in the writing process.

WriteSearch: This search engine focuses exclusively on sites devoted to reading and writing to deliver its results.

The Burry Man Writers Center: Find a wealth of writing resources on this searchable site.

Writing.com: This fully-featured site makes it possible to find information both fun and serious about the craft of writing.

Purdue OWL: Need a little instruction on your writing? This tool from Purdue University can help.

Writing Forums: Search through these writing forums to find answers to your writing issues.

Research

Try out these tools to get your writing research done in a snap.

Google Scholar: With this specialized search engine from Google, you’ll only get reliable, academic results for your searches.

WorldCat: If you need a book from the library, try out this tool. It’ll search and find the closest location.

Scirus: Find great scientific articles and publications through this search engine.

OpenLibrary: If you don’t have time to run to a brick-and-mortar library, this online tool can still help you find books you can use.

Online Journals Search Engine: Try out this search engine to find free online journal articles.

All Academic: This search engine focuses on returning highly academic, reliable resources.

LOC Ask a Librarian: Search through the questions on this site to find helpful answers about the holdings at the Library of Congress.

Encylcopedia.com: This search engine can help you find basic encyclopedia articles.

Clusty: If you’re searching for a topic to write on, this search engine with clustered results can help get your creative juices flowing.

Intute: Here you’ll find a British search engine that delivers carefully chosen results from academia.

AllExperts: Have a question? Ask the experts on this site or search through the existing answers.

Reference

Need to look up a quote or a fact? These search tools make it simple.

Writer’s Web Search Engine: This search engine is a great place to find reference information on how to write well.

Bloomsbury Magazine Research Centre: You’ll find numerous resources on publications, authors and more through this search engine.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus: Make sure you’re using words correctly and can come up with alternatives with the help of this tool.

References.net: Find all the reference material you could ever need through this search engine.

Quotes.net: If you need a quote, try searching for one by topic or by author on this site.

Literary Encyclopedia: Look up any famous book or author in this search tool.

Acronym Finder: Not sure what a particular acronym means? Look it up here.

Bartleby: Through Bartleby, you can find a wide range of quotes from famous thinkers, writers and celebrities.

Wikipedia.com: Just about anything and everything you could want to look up is found on this site.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Find all the great philosophers you could want to reference in this online tool.

Niche Writers

If you’re focusing on writing in a particular niche, these tools can be a big help.

PubGene: Those working in sci-fi or medical writing will appreciate this database of genes, biological terms and organisms.

GoPubMd: You’ll find all kinds of science and medical search results here.

Jayde: Looking for a business? Try out this search tool.

Zibb: No matter what kind of business you need to find out more about, this tool will find the information.

TechWeb: Do a little tech research using this news site and search engine.

Google Trends: Try out this tool to find out what people are talking about.

Godchecker: Doing a little work on ancient gods and goddesses? This tool can help you make sure you have your information straight.

Healia: Find a wide range of health topics and information by using this site.

Sci-Fi Search: Those working on sci-fi can search through relevant sites to make sure their ideas are original.

Books

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Literature Classics: This search tool makes it easy to find the free and famous books you want to look through.

InLibris: This search engine provides one of the largest directories of literary resources on the web.

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Google Book Search: Search through the content of thousands upon thousands of books here, some of which is free to use.

Indie Store Finder: If you want to support the little guy, this tool makes it simple to find an independent bookseller in your neck of the woods.

Blogging

For web writing, these tools can be a big help.

Technorati: This site makes it possible to search through millions of blogs for both larger topics and individual posts.

Google Blog Search: Using this specialized Google search engine, you can search through the content of blogs all over the web.

Domain Search: Looking for a place to start your own blog? This search tool will let you know what’s out there.

OpinMind: Try out this blog search tool to find opinion focused blogs.

IceRocket: Here you’ll find a real-time blog search engine so you’ll get the latest news and posts out there.

Word count (total): 7497

Word count (today): 1978

Yay I accidentally wrote more than I was going to. I didn’t count the little paragraph that I added to the last chapter, so I thought I had to write more. Now I ended up with a pretty nice word count and I’m happy.

I didn’t write a single word until about 5pm though. I should probably not procrastinate that much in the future. But technically it wasn’t my fault. My mother in law is sick AND we’re having problems with power (there’s a short somewhere and we sometimes don’t have power in part of the house. thankfully the computer I write on isn’t affected). Also, we had to buy a new smoke detector.

LGBT Icon → Marlene Dietrich [1901-1992]

Marlene Dietrich was a queer icon almost as soon as she hit the silver screen: She followed up her debut in 1930’s Blue Angel with Morroco, a movie that saw her singing in top hat and tails and kissing another woman on the mouth.

Happy birthday, Sarah Waters!! The Welsh author and queen of lesbian historical fiction turns 51 today!

In an interview with The Independent, Sarah proclaims, “I pay attention to women’s secret history and lives” (x).

Sarah was born in Pembrokeshire, Wales on July 21, 1966. Her father was an engineer, her mother was a stay-at-home mom, and she recalls her childhood as being “pretty idyllic.” Encouraged in her creativity especially by her father, Sarah spent her youth making crafts, writing poems, and overall being “a bit of a nerd.” After graduating high school, she went on to earn degrees from the University of Kent, Lancaster University, and Queen Mary, University of London. Her research for her PhD thesis, Wolfskins and Togas: Lesbian and Gay Historical Fictions, 1870 to the Present, served as the foundation for many of her future novels.

Her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, was published in 1998 and was an instant success. Telling a love story between two women in 1890s London and named after Victorian slang for oral sex between women, Tipping the Velvet has been translated into over 24 different languages and was adapted into a popular BBC miniseries in 2002. To date, Sarah has written 6 novels in total which have earned her several Lambda Literary Awards and two separate “Writer of the Year” awards at the Stonewall Awards. Her 2002 novel Fingersmith was also been adapted into a miniseries in 2005 and also served as the inspiration for Park Chan-wook’s 2016 film The Handmaiden.

The Handmaiden, adapted from Sarah Waters’s novel Fingersmith, was the breakout film from 2016′s Cannes Film Festival (x). 

In a 2015 interview with AfterEllen, Sarah reflects on how her own identity affects her writing by saying, “I’m writing with a clear lesbian agenda in the novels. It’s right there at the heart of the books…That’s how it is in my life, and that’s how it is, really, for most lesbian and gay people, isn’t it? It’s sort of just there in your life.“ Sarah currently lives in London with her partner Lucy Vaughan.

On this day in 2014, Mary Lambert’s Heart on My Sleeve album first hit shelves. The lesbian singer and songwriter’s debut album contained the hit “She Keeps Me Warm.”

The cover of Mary Lambert’s debut full-length album Heart on My Sleeve (x).

Mary Lambert first got her start in the world of slam poetry, representing Seattle, Washington – not far from her hometown of Everett, Washington – in the 2008 Brave New Voices International Poetry Competition. In 2012, she reached the mainstream’s radar by co-writing and providing vocals for the song “Same Love” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. As a lesbian, she was the only LGBT person to work on the track.

Adapting the success of her verse from “Same Love” into her own independent material, Mary wrote “She Keeps Me Warm,” which became the first single of her Heart on My Sleeve album in January of 2014. The album as a whole was released on October 14, 2014 to a positive reception. The songs “She Keeps Me Warm” and “Secrets” were highlights of the album, giving wlw everywhere new explicitly gay tunes to bop to. Mary is currently working on her second album, but until then, the lyric “I can’t think straight, I’m so gay” from “Secrets” will remain our mantra. 

It is not lesbophobic to point out your biphobic attitudes.

It is not lesbophobic to criticise the erasure of Bi/pan/ace women in lgbtqia history.

It is not lesbophobic to demand our place in lgbtqia discourse and culture.

It is not lesbophobic for Bi/pan/ace women to consider themselves wlw.

It is not lesbophobic for Bi/pan/ace women to want to reclaim slurs such as d*ke or consider themselves butch/femme.

Lesbophobia is a huge problem. And Bi/pan/ace women often experience it along with biphobia and Bi erasure.

Karen Memory - Elizabeth Bear

In brief: A starved Indian girl. A wounded Chinese outlaw. A U.S. Marshall. A man who can control minds. Karen knew working in a Rapid City brothel would be interesting, but sure if this ain’t a whole other level. First in a series.

Thoughts: This is another book I didn’t expect to be so good! Why I’m surprised by that, I don’t know. I’ve read Bear before and liked her, and this ticks a lot of boxes for me. Steampunk Wild West. Tough and sassy women. Excellent narrative voice. Feminist. Diverse. Queer.

This isn’t an easy book to categorize outside those labels, and I think that’s also one of the reasons I liked it. There’s a mystery—but it’s not about that, really. There’s a bit of romance, but it’s not about Karen getting the girl. There’s some steampunk adventure stuff, but there are only a few gadgets and the story’s not built to show them off. It’s a very character-driven story, but not one that’s clearly about character development. More than anything, it’s a tale, something you’d hear at a bar or over a campfire. It’s comfortable and welcoming, and a wild ride at the same time.

Other things I liked: Karen’s humour, which leans towards earthy and innuendo; her knowingness about people and especially men; the fact that the biggest steampunk-ed thing is a sewing machine; how much the women in this stick together; the sheer diversity of the cast; the way sex work is portrayed extremely positively; the way the story escalated without me realizing much it was doing so; the way Karen goes about wooing Priya. And just about everything else.

Seriously, there’s so much that’s good about this book, I don’t know why it’s not hitting more rec lists on here. Is it too old? Too ‘adult’ even though the protagonist’s in her late teens? Is it the sex stuff? (It shouldn’t be. There’s no actual bonking.) It’s light and entertaining and diverse, and I’m so glad it’s continuing as a series even though it works perfectly as a stand-alone.

Warnings: Misogyny, in general and specifically against sex workers. Violence against and murder of sex workers. Societal racism, racist slurs against Black, Native, and Chinese people (almost exclusively from bad guys), and use of “sallow” and food metaphors to describe non-white skin tones (but not exclusively so). Frank talk of sex and sexuality. Fire.

Today is the second anniversary of Zolita’s Immaculate Conception EP, which dropped on this day in 2015. It was the lesbian pop singer and aesthete’s very first music project and featured the hit song “HOLY." 

The cover art for Zolita’s Immaculate Conception EP (x).

Zolita first exploded onto the scene with the music video for the song "Holy,” and rightfully so, for the video shows two girls falling in love amidst their otherworldly religious all-girls academy. The label’s describes Zolita’s high concept music video as, “A young girl explores a lesbian relationship in a patriarchal schoolhouse and starts a secret feminist girl cult.” The Immaculate Conception EP was dropped on October 13, 2015, but after the release of the “Holy” music video in June of 2016, Zolita’s fan base of young wlw grew. 

Just this month, she began releasing new music and setting the stage for the release of her new EP. The first single from the EP, “Fight Like a Girl,” is a politically charged synth pop fantasia and a response to "the spirit” Zolita felt at the 2017 Women’s March on Washington. In a recent interview with Out Magazine, she spoke on her position as a queer artist by saying,

“There are so many artists in pop music who claim queerness (which is great), but they are so afraid to make art that is actually queer. They run away from using pronouns in lyrics or same-sex partners in music videos because they want to be palatable to the general public. I want to make pop music that queer and marginalized people feel like is made especially for them. Queer people have been connecting to and projecting their experiences onto heteronormative music their whole lives. Is it really so heard for me to ask straight people to do the same with my music?"