white queer cis lady of 22 years
fairytales, kissing, an inordinate number of fabulous ladies, more kissing
"basically vomits feelings constantly"
"infuriating to behold"
--tastykake
sometimes i get so angry at my own instinctive reaction to the inclusion of queer secondary characters in ya lit like OMG YES YES THIS IS SO EXCITING— even a non-derogatory acknowledgement that queerness exists in a book and i’m like I’M OKAY, IN THIS BOOK I COULD EXIST AND BE OKAY!!!!
and i hate being pacified by my new status as an acceptable side figure in someone else’s important life, i know that progress is slow and this is still miles better than anything i had growing up but it’s not enough, i don’t want to be content with it, i don’t want to be grateful to presumably straight authors for confirming my existence, i don’t want to be pleasantly surprised by it every time, but i am still so simply happy just to exist
but then i think about how all of the queer characters are still secondary and all of the queer romances are still secondary
and i shouldn’t have to be secondary!!!
that awkward moment when you finish a book and you’re left with all these feelings like ok i’ll just carry around this huge emotional burden for the rest of my life
Amazing blog post by N.K. Jemisin, specfic author and woman of color, whose books I really need to read.
Her explanation:
Explanatory note: This is an essay I wrote for the forthcoming anthology The Miseducation of the Writer — essays by writers of color on genre literature — to be edited by Maurice Broaddus, John Edward Lawson, and Chesya Burke. I’ll keep you posted on deets as they come.
i would kill five hundred thousand babies* for this to be a queer romance, omfg i find all of the sevenwaters books so unbelievably sexy, i have gotten alarmingly invested in each of their romances to the point of totally ignoring all the family history because fuck me, someone touched someone else on the face, when will they be 2gether, i am going to diiiiiiiiiiiiie
and all my kingdoms!!! for this to be a sexy book
for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
*not really
a thing I want to get better at is remembering books after I have finished them, like when you are reading a book, it swallows you up and then you are done and emerge from its mouth and blinking in the world
but then after a while for me the feelings and thoughts of the book have to fade because I have to be a real person, and so many of my day things are default and ordinary
but I want to get better at carrying my bookselves with me, I mean the reflections and ideas and realities they gave me, like strange and bright touchstones in my pockets
currently reading the Bridgerton romance novels, THEY ARE DELIGHTFUL, I recommend all of them so far!!! I am having strange dejavu reading them, but I know I haven’t read them before, and the only possible conclusion is that obviously in a past life I was a Bridgerton.
Here is the first one, it is called THE DUKE AND I, it is charming as a wily debutante! It involves a fake engagement, ooh la la!
I must inform you that sadly the cover illustration never happens quite like this, but there are some thrilling escapades wherein our heroine lures our hero into a garden to have her wicked way with him!
also the hero is a very bad and very dangerous rake who also has a stutter, which titillated me more than I shall say because I am a lady
OOH BOSOMS
but there was one thing that bothered me for which I want to warn:
our hero, Simon, had daddy issues up the wazoo (for excellent reasons) and didn’t want to have children because of them, but like, also wanted to have children, he just needed to work through his feelings first
and so the heroine, Daphne realized all of this, and then, while on top during the sex act, during which he was sleepy and a little drunk, bore down on him so he couldn’t pull out and might impregnate her
and I love you Daphne, but that’s not okay!!!!!!!!
otherwise though A+++++ orgasms everywhere
