Transgender Experiences in Weimar & Nazi Germany.

#LQBTQ #Trans #Germany

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueuKM6Wqoc0

Books: Favourite Kobo Plus reads, May’26

Hello to new subscribers; I will reiterate my usual assurance that I won’t overload your inbox. I only post once a month, mostly these short book reviews and every now again a new-release announcement for my own books.

The choices are ever-growing on Kobo Plus – either Kobo’s algorithm finally worked me out, or more authors are breaking out of the Kindle Unlimited exclusivity prison, or both. These were my favourite books this month, all available on the K+ subscription, but also through your favourite retailer, and some on Hoopla too.

Fiction

Curse of Bronze by Tansy Rayner Roberts

Beth, the unassuming and sensible member of a family of adventurers and daredevils, unexpectedly inherits her aunt’s townhouse and promptly has to solve a mystery or two. An enjoyable novella with a hint of romance-to-come, riffing off Beauty and the Beast (what with Beth’s cursed talking furniture and the lion-man next door). I look forward to reading the follow-up, Tomb of Brass, out in June. (I also read and enjoyed the Castle Charming collection by the same author this month).

The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente

Tetley lives on one of the last floating refuges in drowned world, Garbagetown aka the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. We follow her life as we learn how she got her name, why she’s hated, and her new secrets. Technically a dystopian tale of our future if we don’t take climate change seriously, but told with dark humour and hope in Valente’s usual expansively lyrical fashion. Highly recommended.

Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove

The Conan Doyle/Lovecraft mash-up you weren’t expecting and didn’t know you wanted. In this version, the original stories, and Holmes’s lauded rationality, are the anodyne cover for the eldritch horrors he and Watson must battle. Lovegrove also writes straight Sherlock stories, so is very good at the voice and world while adding a suitably supernatural twist. The Cthuluhu Casebooks has three stories in its original run, plus a more recent fourth volume.

Uncanny Aviator by Jenya Keefe

A steampunk-ish m/m romance. Lord Cay, a Cinderella rags-to-riches type, is suddenly iced out by his formerly loving husband and falls afoul of blackmail. To escape, he makes up a plausible lie, promptly plunging himself and everyone around him into even more trouble. I found this very charming, and truly felt for Cay whenever Adrio was mean to him. At first I thought it was an honest-talking-would-have-solved-this situation but ended up finding both parties’ actions believable. Satisfying, will happily read more by this author.

Clockwork Heart by Heidi Cullinan

An actual steampunk m/m romance (from 2017, so perhaps back when steampunk was big last time?). Cornelius is a tinker, a clockwork engineer, with a medical specialty. He, slightly traitorously, saves a enemy soldier from death…by implanting into him a clockwork heart it turns everyone wants. Keeping Johann hidden involves a fake relationship, of course, which soon turns real, of course, with plenty of plot (and sex) along the way. It is a complete story, but there were two more planned which did not eventuate (or at least which aren’t yet on Kobo) — you can see those pairings being set up in this story, but otherwise nothing is left hanging.

Flowers by Night by Lucy May Lennox

Samurai Tomonosuke and blind masseur Ichi develop a relationship in nineteenth-century Edo, negotiating class (/caste) differences, Tomonosuke’s unimpressed wife, and disasters natural and manmade. This is phenomenal in its evocation of Japan’s bygone history at the cusp of the big shift into modernity, the very non-Western acceptance of unconventional masculinity/femininity, and also where the lines of acceptance were drawn across the many different sub-groups.

Non-Fiction

Bodysnatchers by Suzie Lennox

A non-fiction account of the prolific theft of corpses, mostly in Scotland and Northern England, to supply anatomy schools, using the newspaper articles and court reports of the time (it reached its peak in the 1820s and early 30s, in the gap between a boom in medical student numbers and the Anatomy Act which provided the many bodies needed for practice1). This is a Today I Learned sort of book. TIL Burke and Hare never dug up a body, they jumped directly to life-snatching (thus this book doesn’t cover their murder spree in anything more than a paragraph or two). TIL early medical students had to source their own corpses for their anatomy lessons before the industry “professionalised”. TIL sometimes the bodysnatchers would cut to the chase and break into homes to steal the laid-out bodies before burial. TIL they’d send bodies cross-country in public coaches, stuffed into trunks; a pair of students even Weekend-at-Bernies’d their prize. TIL the quickest (and least respectful) technique to get a body out of a buried coffin without having to dig the whole thing up. It does get a little repetitive at points (there’s only so many ways this story can go, really), and I would have liked more exploration of the tension between the very blasé thieves and surgeons, the angry, disgusted parishioners trying to save their departed loved ones with overnight watchers, locked cages and booby traps, and the judges who would openly tell juries such acts were necessary for medical advancement and hand out light sentences, but this is a truly fascinating and macabre eye-opener of a read.

A Clear Case of Genius by Admiral Sir Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall and Philip Vickers

Hall’s autobiography (incomplete as not all chapters survived the sixty years between writing and post-embargo publishing) about his time leading the secretive early Intelligence unit known as Room 40, simplistically, the WWI precursor to Bletchley. Vickers added the explanatory notes and maps for helpful context. I’ll be honest, I read this as research for a future WIP and didn’t think I’d enjoy an old-fashioned and rambling account of some self-important admiral with one of those twee upper-class in-joke nicknames, but I was wrong: Hall’s voice is clear, self-deprecating, and droll, with many fascinating spying titbits and anecdotes. The Blinker nickname comes from a facial twitch, because this is the same era when an Enid Blyton character could be nicknamed Fatty without anyone raising an eyebrow.

And

I have a second draft (technically, a sixth(?) draft, given the back and forth, but let’s just go with second), and a cover (check it out on my Books page if interested), and a planned release month (early August). I will soon have a blurb, because that’s what I will make myself write while I take the usual short break before tackling the make-it-good third draft. Ahem, “third” draft.

I also have something almost as painful to complete as this bloody manuscript: an author photo. It only took me a solid fifteen years of publishing (you can see it over here, if you happen to want to know what I look like2).

Books: Favourite reads, March’26

Hit a major reading slump1 early in the month, but thoroughly enjoyed the books where I did manage to get past the first chapter, or first few pages, or first line, it really was that kind of month for kneejerk DNFs… Non-fiction also suffered, because everything I tried was just plain depressing in light of the handbasket’s current trajectory. So it ended up being a fiction month, and pretty much 100% queer in one way or another.

Fiction

The Paper Boys by DP Clarence

Extremely charming contemporary gay romance: it’s journalists divided by rivalry and class, it’s funny and sweet, it’s British humour, it’s completely my jam. I read all three currently available Brent Boys books (standalone but loosely following a group of friends/roommates; I don’t have to tell you how contemporary series work), and eagerly look forward to more by this ex-journalist author.

Out of the Loop by Katie Siegel

This is a Groundhog Day story with a difference: it starts when Amie wakes up the next morning, for the first time in two years. It then deals with the aftermath: how do you, a homebody with anxiety about trying new things, cope with unpredictability when you’ve grown comfortable knowing exactly how your day goes…while also solving a murder and pursuing a second-chance romance with your ex-girlfriend? Does a great job with a new angle to an well-known plot device.

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes

Holy shit, this was amazing, and I say that as someone with aphantasia aka I cannot picture what the hell this “tree stump” city looks like, but I’m still here for it. There’s two storylines: the first follows Guy and Dawn, exterminators who hunt the myriad of pests that attack the city, as they encounter a new and deadly vermin. The second follows the arrival of a mysterious stranger into the political minefield of the upper city. Of course the two storylines intersect eventually – the more attention you pay, the faster you’ll see it. I really liked Leech by this author; I loved this one for the rare trifecta of great writing, characters, and plot. (Darker than my usual recommendations, however.)

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

As with Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series, this uses the notion that magic makes children vulnerable to otherworldly predators/demons and that a magical boarding school is the best way to solve that problem (while causing secondary problems: a buffet of magic kids sure attracts the demons…). Instead of following students, however, it follows a career teacher, Walden, whose job, among many others, is to protect the school from demonic invasion. When a major outbreak almost destroys the school, it raises personal demons from the past, literally and metaphorically. I’ve loved all of Tesh’s previous books and this is no exception; I especially liked the way the rhythms of a busy school year flowed through the text (without being dull about it); her past as a teacher makes it very genuine and it matters as part of the plot too. I’m also glad to see the magical boarding school genre reclaimed, modernised and deepened.

The Pairing by Casey McQuiston

I didn’t read this when it first came out due to a deep aversion to contemporaries that is only just lifting (I guess I’ve swung from “need anything but the real world” to “need an alt-real world that is better than this cursed timeline”). I’m glad I came across it again – I loved it. The second-chance queer romance is good (very sexy, very pining; you might have trouble if you don’t like to see your romantic pairs hook up with others) but the love letter to the hedonism and sheer intensity of a fantastically idealised European food and art tour when you’re young and desirable and full of appetites is unsurpassed. It made me want to bake a focaccia and open an artisanal bookstore on the cobbled backstreet of a tiny mountain village.

Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die by Greer Stothers

Sir Cameron finds out he’s the star of a prophecy which predicts his death will bring about the fall of the dark lord. Sir Cameron doesn’t love this turn of events, but he figures there’s one other person featured in that prophecy who also won’t like it… Just plain fun, and I am enjoying the modern crop of dark-lord books that play with the concept.

Into the Midnight Wood by Alexandra McCollum

There’s few plot threads, but mostly it’s a mismatched roommates m/m romance between David and Meredith, set in a fantasy-normative world (ie the presence of magic and magical creatures is never questioned nor explained, which I really liked) – but not an entirely queer-normative world (Meri cops some schtick from his family). This is the type of story that I often find a bit too cosy, but it has good writing and extra depth, particularly with Meri. I also got a little stomach swoop every time someone was accidentally or purposefully mean to him, and I hardly ever have physical reactions when reading, so that’s an ringing endorsement of the extent of my engagement with this couple 🙂

Hell’s Heart by Alexis Hall

As it says on the cover, sapphic Moby Dick in space. The first-person narrator (“call me whatever the fuck you like”, but really just “I”) and Q join a crew hunting an atmosphere-dwelling Leviathan under the captaincy of, you guessed it, A. I’ve only come across negative-leaning mentions of this one so it’s likely a YMMV one; as much as I have liked or loved all of Hall’s books, my very favourite is the “gender-swapped Sherlock Holmes in a SF world” one, so Hell’s Heart is right up my alley and I loved spending time with it. It’s extra fun if you’re passing familiar with Moby Dick but it’s not necessary.

Writing News

I finally have a (very ugly) first draft complete, hallelujah, it was like pulling teeth. I tend to switch to a procrastination novel when I get this stuck, but my brain(/Mr Bolshie MC) wasn’t having with that either. Fortunately, the only thing worse than writing when in this mood is not writing, so I cudgelled this monster out of my head at about 100 words a day.

I’m usually editing a final-draft-shaped MS during the annual Easter family holiday Up North, but this year, I’ll put this eldritch horror of a first draft aside for valuable fallow time and amuse myself collecting cover ideas.

All that to say there will be no May release, but there will be a release at some point this year!

#AmReading "Sick and Dirty: Hollywood's Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness" by Michael Koresky. Not very far in, but I think it's going to be fascinating. It's about finding value in older film depictions of queerness. Seems to be a bit in response to "The Celluloid Closet."

#Movies #LQBTQ #Nonfiction
@bookstodon
#Bookstodon

Cuando se habla del movimiento por los derechos de la comunidad trans, muchas personas piensan que se trata de algo nuevo, un invento del mundo moderno, ideas extravagantes que no existían en un pasado en el que todo era más simple y puro. Pero la realidad es que siempre han existido personas cuya identidad de género no corresponde a la usualmente asociada a su sexo biológico.

#LQBTQ #trans #nazis #fascismo

https://www.maikciveira.com/2023/06/como-los-nazis-destruyeron-los-derechos.html?m=1

Landeswasserversorgung BW 💦 – spannende Einblicke, vor allem für die Kommunalpolitik, die bei der Wasserversorgung Verantwortung trägt.

Bis 2030 will die LW klimaneutral arbeiten – starke Ziele! 💪🏻🌍

Und Abstecher zur Abtei Neresheim – gut zu sehen, dass sich auch in der Kirche endlich etwas bewegt 🏳️‍🌈✨

#wasser #wasserversorgung #grundwasser #kommunalpolitik #kommune #klimaziel #klimaschutz #erneuerbare #badenwürttemberg #neresheim #abtei #kloster #kirche #lqbtq🏳️‍🌈 #kirchengemeinde #wallhausen