Thank you so much to all of last week’s guests! The last two guest posts are going up tomorrow and Tuesday, but before announcing the schedule, here’s how to catch up on anything you’ve missed so far.
All of the guest posts from April 2020 can be found here, the first week in review can be found here, the next week in review is here, and in last week’s guest posts:
- Sangu Mandanna (Celestial Trilogy, The Lost Girl, Color Outside the Lines) shared about the difficulty of holding on to creativity in the midst of a global pandemic and discussed a few things that have helped get her creativity flowing again.
- Shveta Thakrar (Star Daughter, “The Rainbow Flame,” “The Shadow Collector”) discussed messages in fiction and examining internalized ideas about the path a story must take—and how and why the female friendship in her fantasy debut novel changed after early drafts.
- Jennifer Marie Brissett (Elysium, Destroyer of Light, “A Song for You”) discussed working on her upcoming second novel and the experience and pressures of writing the sophomore book.
- Andrea Stewart (The Bone Shard Daughter, “Dreameater,” “This Doesn’t Appear to be the Alien I Paid For”) discussed fairy tales and fiction, exploring what happens after a couple gets together, and writing an established relationship between two of the women in her debut epic fantasy novel in “Happily Ever Aftermath.”
- Robin Kirk (The Bond, The Hive Queen, “Love Is a Wild Creature”) discussed the power science fiction has to inspire and teaching a course on human rights with fiction, interviews, and talks by Ursula K. Le Guin, N. K. Jemisin, Octavia E. Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and more.
And the recommendation list project has been updated and opened for new recommendations! In 2013, Renay from Lady Business asked readers to submit some of their favorite science fiction and fantasy books written by women and we’ve been collecting submissions every year since. After updating it to include last year’s submissions, the list now includes 2,710 titles, many of which have been recommended multiple times. (There’s one book that’s been recommended 58 times!) It’s also possible to add more books to the list: you can add up to 10 of your favorites (or, if you’ve already done that, 10 of your favorites read over the last year).
A Note on the Recommendation List Project Search: It was brought to my attention this weekend that the search on the list was no longer working—something must have changed with the API sometime after I tested it earlier this month, which is odd timing since there’s never once been a problem when testing it each year and then it suddenly stopped working after I’d tested it this year. In any case, the search is working again, and I’m sorry if you ran into any problems with trying to add books. Please do let me know if you run into any further issues, and if you have some books you’d like to add, please add them!
Next week, Women in SF&F Month 2020 continues with guest posts by:
April 27: Jeffe Kennedy (Forgotten Empires, The Twelve Kingdoms)
April 28: Reni K Amayo (Daughters of Nri, “Andromeda”)
