Tag: glbt

#Review: SOVEREIGN, by April Daniels

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

32565582

You may, perhaps, recall my exuberant review of April Daniels’ Dreadnought  from back in February.  I bought that book early and was kind of taken by surprise by it when it showed up in my mailbox, and then I was taken by surprise a second time when I enjoyed it as much as I did.  And it’s not only still on my shortlist for the best books of 2017, right now it’s still easily the best book I’ve read all year.

The sequel, Sovereign, showed up in my mailbox on Wednesday.  I preordered this motherfucker the second I found out it was available.  Thursday night, despite having slept all day and being generally exhausted, I made the terrible mistake of starting the book before bed, and as a result did not get nearly as much sleep as I wanted to.  Friday I woke up, took the boy to day care, came home, made myself breakfast, sat down in my recliner, and didn’t move again until I’d finished the book.  Partway through all that, I sent the following Tweet:

And I was telling the truth!  I did, indeed, have shit I wanted to do yesterday!  Shit involving my own books!  And I did absolutely none of it, because once I picked up Sovereign there was absolutely nothing else in my life that I needed to do other than finish that gatdamb book as quickly as I could.  April Daniels is the real deal, Goddammit, and now she’s written both of my two favorite books of the year.  I love this world, I love Danielle Tozer, I love the way this book does everything Book 2 in a series needs to do while setting up the third book quite nicely, and every single damn one of you needs to go pick up both of these books and read them right now because they are fantastic.  I wish I was half as good as Daniels is at this stuff.  Half.  I don’t know when the third book is coming out, but I plan to literally be the first person to preorder it when it does.

Why are you still here?  Go buy books, dammit.

#Review: DREADNOUGHT, by April Daniels

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

51CxH4-aSoL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpgI don’t remember buying this book.  I don’t remember where I first encountered it, either, but it must have impressed me, as I must have pre-ordered it immediately.  I got a notification from Amazon that it had been shipped and actually had to look it up to figure out what it was.  And then I read the blurb and I was like, oh, right, this is definitely something I want to read.

I can’t call this the first great book I’ve read in 2017– it’s the third, actually– but one of those three was a kids’ book and the other was the third book in a trilogy.  So is it okay if I call this the first new hotness of the year?  It’s my blog, so yeah, it is.

This is one of those books where the premise will let you know right away whether you should buy the book or not: Daniel Tozer is a fifteen-year-old boy who happens to be the closest person when the world’s greatest superhero is killed, and he inherits the powers of that superhero, Dreadnought, when he dies.

And the first thing Dreadnought’s new powers do is remake Daniel’s body into the perfect body Daniel has always wanted.  Which means that Daniel becomes Danielle, and wakes up with unimaginable power and a woman’s body.

So that’s the first three pages, and there we go from there.  The broader beats of the story are sorta predictable, and you can probably imagine several of the complications that work their way into the story– friends, parents, a superteam that may not be what Danny thinks they are, and another high school friend who turns out to be a hero too.  The worldbuilding is solid (this is the first book of a series, so there’s room for not everything to be explained) and the action is solidly written– as fascinating as the premise is, you absolutely have to be able to nail action sequences to properly write a superhero novel, and Daniels excels at it.

So, whoever it was that turned me on to this book (Charlie Jane Anders blurbs it, so maybe it was her?), thank you.  I can’t wait for the next book in the series, and you should go read Dreadnought right the hell now.

In which I settle on a topic eventually

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics5 Comments

rmzyzrgeominqun2qwga(I’ve used this image before, but I feel like it’s appropriate given yesterday’s events.)

I haven’t written an actual post in a couple of days; everything’s been pictures and links since Tuesday evening.  This isn’t from a lack of stuff to talk about or anything; I have a lot of posts on the back burner but I don’t particularly want to write any of them specifically right now.  I haven’t heard anything, positive or negative, about any of the interviews I’ve had; if I haven’t heard back from District Four by Tuesday of next week I’ll assume they don’t want me.  I’ve been getting a fair amount of fiction done although the deadline for the Baen contest is seriously breathing down my damn neck and I don’t have anything I like for it yet.  Again, I have like four different working ideas for it, but none of them have forced their way out onto a screen yet, especially with BA 8 eating up so much of my time.  Hell, one of them is even a BA story.

Actually, hell, I’ve already got the glitter image up; I may as well talk about the gay marriage ruling yesterday.  I had a hazy idea that there was a case pending in federal court somewhere but didn’t know that we were close to getting a decision, so abruptly seeing a Tweet just as I was about to shut down my computer and meet my mother for lunch was an immensely pleasant surprise. (I texted her immediately and told her I needed a few minutes for celebration and to do the Facebook equivalent of yelling “First!” as I posted the information everywhere I knew how to.)

I don’t know that I’ve changed much as a person since getting married; I suspect you’d have to ask my wife about that.  One way that I know I’m different, though, is that I’ve really lost all patience with dudebro humor about what a horrible trap marriage is or comedy that is mostly centered on complaining about wives and significant others.  Lemme make this clear, in small words: Marrying my wife was hands-down, no-doubt the best thing that has ever happened to me in my life.  There is literally nothing more important to me than keeping my marriage strong and my family together.  Nothing.

This means a couple of things to me:

  1. I have no patience whatsoever with people who whine about their spouses/being married.  Let me make sure I’m clear: the word I chose was “whine.”  Plenty of people are trying to save a struggling relationship; that’s not “whining.”  You want to hear whining?  Pull up any comedy station on Pandora and wait a few minutes.  Divorce is legal.  Nobody made you get married.  Fix your relationship, quit your whining, or get the fuck out.  Oh, you have kids?  I don’t care; you’re fucking them up whining about their mother all the time and probably raising your sons to be assholes.  Stop it.
  2. I have less patience with the idea that someone shouldn’t be able to marry someone else because some third party, unconnected to the two getting married, thinks it’s gross if they rub their bits together.  I’ve dropped friendships with people over this.  It’s horrible evil fucking bullshit and I will not put up with it in my life.  Note that if you attempt to argue with me about this in comments my response will be to ban you and delete your comments on the spot, no discussion.  Whine about tolerance for your evil all you want; you’ll be whining into the void and I won’t hear you.  Enjoy your inevitable historical irrelevance; your heartache amuses me.

So glad my state isn’t part of this anymore.

I… wait, what?

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics13 Comments

I’m not good on gender/sexuality issues, okay?  I admit it.  I’m trying to get better about this stuff but half the time just keeping track of the pronouns and the prefixes and the abbreviations is so fucking exhausting that I just try and default to “leave everyone the hell alone” and try not to worry about it beyond that.

But… okay, the author of this article is being a prat, right?  A word that I very carefully chose because as far as I can tell it’s gender-neutral while still being insulting?  I want to take real problems seriously but I don’t think you get to simultaneously complain that 1) you use the ladies’ room because you feel safe in there and 2) you are constantly assaulted in the ladies’ room because you don’t look like a lady.  Those shouldn’t both be true.  And apparently this person identifies as trans, but is biologically female and not looking to transition, which is the part where my lack of knowledge screws me up because I thought “trans” meant you were biologically female but wanted to present as male (or vice versa) which… once you’ve made the decision to go out of your house looking like a man, should mean “just use the damn men’s room, nobody makes fucking eye contact in there anyway?”  Right?  I think?

(Men do not talk to each other in the men’s room.  You could be a goddamned three-legged blue-skinned space alien with an echidna dick and so long as you didn’t try and peer over the damn stall dividers ain’t nobody gonna look at you.  This is known!)

Somebody help me out here and let me know what I’m missing.

(EDIT: relevant detail:  I have been a man with long hair, long enough and curly enough that I’ve been addressed as “ma’am” by people who weren’t approaching me from the right angle to see my beard.  Never had a single second of trouble with anyone in a men’s room.  I call bullshit on the “every long-haired male” line.)

Monday miscellany

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Music, Television1 Comment

A whole lot of stuff today, most of which isn’t worth its own post and I don’t want to have 300 posts today anyway, so you get a bunch of bullet points.  Enjoy some commentary and a bit of open self-promotion:

  • The entire northern part of the state is on a travel warning again and school has already been called off for Tuesday.  Both my wife and my son are home; we’d have had to pick him up from day care (they closed at noon because of the travel ban) and I had to clear the driveway before getting anywhere was even possible.  I figure Wednesday is downgraded to “doubtful” at this point from “I’m sure we’ll be back” earlier today.
  • Despite the headline of the previous post, I’m actually not upset about the weather, nor am I angry with the various people posting “Awesome out here in California!” or “Hey, it’s 65 degrees here in Florida!” people.  I prefer cold weather to hot under all circumstances, period.  I admit if I still lived in Chicago, where there’s nowhere to put the damn snow, I’d be miserable, but clearing the driveway every once in a while isn’t actually that big of a hardship– I’d rather plow the driveway than mow the damn lawn any day of the week.  That said, I’m growing ill about the lost time before the ISTEP test.  I really am going to be writing a letter to the State Board of Education and the State Superintendent to advocate for pushing back the test at least a week.  It’ll be interesting to see how contractually bound we are to the dates we’re scheduled to.  Pearson doesn’t give a damn about the contract, mind you, but I suspect our state officials will.
  • The Internet is for porn; everyone knows that.  I finally figured out what Twitter is for last night; Twitter is for snark.  Watching the Grammys, for example, isn’t terribly exciting (exceptions in a moment).  Watching the Grammys and mocking it on the Internet along with half of the world is hilarious.  I know I talk about Saladin Ahmed a lot around here, but Christ the guy was on fire last night and it was hysterical.
  • What Twitter appears to be less good for: driving traffic to websites, at least as far as I can tell.  Nobody clicks on links in Twitter.  I’ve had blog links retweeted by celebrities three times– Cherie Priest RTed my “10 best books of 2013” post and both Lyrics Born and Lateef retweeted links to yesterday’s post about them (also: Lyrics Born and Lateef the Truthspeaker and Cherie Priest read something on my blog, squeeeeeee) and it led to maybe four hits from Twitter yesterday and maybe six when Priest did it.
  • That said, I have 93 followers right now and I want 100 today.  Follow my twitter feed!  There’s a button right over there on the right!  I’m funny sometimes, I promise!
  • Also, I should hit 1,337 blog followers today, which makes my inner Internet nerd happy.
  • Speaking of naked self-promotion, note the “Short Fiction” page that’s been added to the header up there.  If you’re a newer reader there’s a couple of stories up there that you may not have seen.  I’ll be beefing this up in the future, especially if the summer writing grant goes through– I find out about that in less than a month.
  • Back to the Grammys:  I don’t usually watch them; the Grammys actually are what people say the Academy Awards are and usually they are best ignored.  I’m glad I caught last night’s show, though, if only because it was so amazingly, unashamedly weird.  Steven Tyler’s weirdly inappropriate affection made Smokey Robinson want to put on the Ring of Doom and bamf off the stage.  Cyndi Lauper was painfully, obviously, amazingly drunk.  Pharrell’s hat was just obvious and amazing.  The Macklemore/Queen Latifah/Madonna thing was weird and creepy and somehow both massively inappropriate and inspiring at the same time– like, Latifah’s gay, right?  Everyone knows that?  She’s got a long-term partner.  So you have the straight white guy, and it’s not like the Grammys repeatedly recognizing white rappers over more talented black rappers (coughKendrickLamarcough) isn’t already a problem, and he’s rapping about how being gay is great, then you pull out the mostly-closeted gay lady to marry a whole bunch of people, both straight and gay couples and a couple of notably interracial ones as well, and CBS does their damnedest to only focus on the straight couples while it’s happening, and meanwhile Madonna is there for some reason and she’s leaning on a cane and looks older than Betty White.
  • Somebody– can’t find it right now– said that Macklemore’s unique talent was managing to come off as a douchebag even when he’s being perfectly sincere and saying things you agree with.  That’s not far off from the truth, near as I can tell.
  • The Awkward Taylor Swift Dancing tumblr.  You’re welcome.
  • Good stuff, though:  The Pharrell/Daft Punk/Stevie Wonder/Nile Rodgers collaboration was awesome, but holy shit were they overshadowed by the Imagine Dragons and Kendrick Lamar’s mashup of Radioactive and m.A.A.d city
    earlier in the show, a performance so outstanding that by rights it should have ended the entire ceremony on the spot.  Like, the Grammy people should have just sent everybody the fuck home and released the rest of the awards by email or something.  I wasn’t terribly familiar with Lamar before the show; I downloaded his (also Grammy-nominated, but it didn’t win, see above bit on Macklemore) album on the spot.  Sadly, I haven’t had time to listen to it yet; I’ll report back.  That shit blew me away.
  • Cutting to that poor little country girl right after the Lamar/Imagine Dragons performance was the cruelest decision of the evening and I can’t believe they did it.  They went from a showstopping performance straight to something that was deliberately staged to look like a show in a poorly-attended country bar, complete with lame Christmas lights sewn into clothes and fucking neon cacti, and meanwhile the audience was wiping sweat off their foreheads and going to the bathroom.  I may download her album too just out of pity, if she hasn’t retired from music out of sheer embarrassment by now.
  • My wife and I are both pretty digitally connected people, right?  So much so that we can’t really tell each other things that have happened anymore without beginning with the phrase “You’ve probably already heard this, but…”.  We had a particularly bad example of this this morning, one that may well be a sign that the two of us need to reevaluate our lives:  I cleared off the driveway and let her know that I was going to go take a shower, then as I was drying off afterward she knocked on the door to the bathroom and said “Hey, you probably already know this, but school’s cancelled tomorrow.”  Because apparently it is reasonable to my wife that I’m on my phone checking Facebook and Twitter while I’m showering, or that perhaps I check my phone before drying off.  Which entertains the crap out of me.
  • No, shut up, I didn’t know yet.

That’s enough for now.  I’m bound and determined to get The Benevolence Archives 5 done today, so you might see another post from that this evening sometime.