OTW Guest Post: Fanboundbooks and robins-egg-bindery

In today’s OTW Guest Post, Fanboundbooks and robins-egg-bindery,  two members of Renegade Publishing, talk about their community of fanbinders and their inaugural in-person meetup.  Read more at  https://otw.news/a4f002

Author Spotlight: Talia Bhatt

We're excited to highlight Talia Bhatt, author of the current club read Dulhaniyaa. Read on to hear how her identity and experiences informed her writing, and how queer love is a jailbreak.

“Desi trans lesbian” feels, sometimes, like an ephemeral identity.

I am situated nowhere transhistorically and barely transculturally, having to borrow the language, social trappings, and forms of identification of the nation(s) that colonized and impoverished mine to even express my embodiment and positionality coherently. In a world where Afsaneh Najmabadi can pose the question “Is any one of you a lesbian?” to a room full of Iranian transsexual women and get blank stares, as she relates in Professing Selves, or where Deepa Mehta notes in her groundbreaking lesbian romance Fire that Hindi lacks even a word to express the concept of a woman loving another intimately, romantically, carnally, I am unmoored and unfixed, an anomaly because I dare to imagine my transsexuality independent from men.

“Woman are for men”, assumes every culture with harsh patriarchal contradictions—which does not entirely exclude the West—and trans women doubly so, since the abhorrence of non-heterosexual modes of living and social organization leads many from cultures like mine to presume that a woman would only transition to be with a man. A profound loneliness dogs my very existence, alerting me to the wispy shadows of a shrouded past that barely had a record of women like me prior to the midpoint of the 20th Century, only whispers and rumors and sensationalist gossip scrawled in academic journal by Esther Newton, alluding to the idea of a “man” that, having availed of hormones and surgical interventions, now sleeps with lesbians—the scandal. 

No ancestors that are mine to claim.

Dulhaniyaa is not a particularly melancholy book, though a certain pensiveness pervades the opening chapters. There a story within the story written in subtext, in allusions and word choices and snippets of dialogue, that Esha and Billu and Dolly and others are aware of: my homeland, my motherland, my culture and my nation and my state—it is not a place for queer women. It is certainly, emphatically, not a place for a trans woman who fancies herself still attracted to other women, or even indelibly non-binary in a way. Women like us have no names, no pasts, and almost certainly no futures within the narrow confines of the constructed and stifling heterosexual hegemony.

A reviewer was kind enough to sum up Dulhaniyaa for me better than I ever could, stating triumphantly that “Queer love is a jailbreak.” It’s a quote that has stuck with me both for how simply it states a core theme that I certainly labored to convey without necessarily consciously meaning to, as well as for how profoundly vast and unencompassable the prison I find myself in is. My shackles are Time and Language itself, my cell the land I was born in, my wardens its people. I am a refugee in a sense that many, many queer and especially trans people tend to be, evicted and disowned and erased from hearth and homeland.

I wrote Dulhaniyaa because someone broke me out of that cell. She saw the woman I was as well as the woman I could be, and helped me bridge the gap between the two. She is now my wife.

Queer love is a jailbreak. Get your pickaxes ready.

Many thanks to @karinrebloggardju for bringing this question to my attention. I have no expertise on proper cat placement. Suggestions of good taste in the comments, please!

🤘

Could I ask for a fusion of Princess Celestia and Zecora, please? No extra limbs, eyes, heads, etc, please. I think using the colors in Celestia's mane for the zebra stripes would be pretty. If you want, obviously. Do whatever makes you happy. 😌

Lovely guest art by @tatersblog! Check out their other guest art as well

If you would like to be a guest artist, please message @mothinmay

Haengbok Felix ☼

moodboard by @selendrea

this post ghost-written by @turtleytea who i think is supposed to be a koopa from mario

Check out my guest post for Fantasy Cafe's Women in SF&F Month regarding SAINTS OF STORM AND SORROW coming in June from @TitanBooks

I discuss using fantasy fiction to dig into troubling topics in today's Women in SF&F Month guest post, "Fantasy Safe Spaces: Facing the Specters of the Past Now They’ve Come Back to Haunt Us."

The Department

The Department Susan Cathleen Powell, 2019

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Sabrina Hawthorne is a fellow enthusiast of rare RPGs. She's the one who actually found a write-up of The Revolution by a GM for a table of players who didn't want to read the whole thing. We originally met at a mini-golf course, of all places (fuck you, windmill), and ended up chatting about mechanics in card-based games. When she told me about this one I knew it was a perfect fit for the blog and invited her to write a guest post. Here it is!

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You know the SCP wiki? You know those articles that dive super far into the deep history, where characters straight out of the Hebrew Bible use arcane orbital lasers to wage a planet-wide war on mutant flesh monsters, and bigfoot is there too?

The Department is one of those, in the form of a hack for The Quiet Year.

You play as the board of directors for the titular Department, who are the SCP foundation in all but name. Your researchers have come across an anomalous archaeological dig site, and it’s your job to guide the organization to learn as much as they can about it – and the secret world history it’s a part of - before it’s destroyed by the vague sleeping horror that you disturbed when the site broke ground.

For the most part, the game runs the same as The Quiet Year, but with spookier and more bureaucratic flavor text. There’s a phase at the end of each round called a Board Meeting that’s a bare bones hidden role board game that doesn’t really feel as scheme-y or capitalistic as it wants to, but other than that it runs smoothly.

The real life of the party is the Countdown mechanic. Whenever a player draws an Ace of any suit from the deck, the Countdown advances, causing more strange occurrences and anomalous dangers to crop up around the dig site. When the last Ace is drawn, the game ends, and players are strictly forbidden to tie up any loose ends that their improvised story left hanging. And since in this one you pull from a combined deck of 52, those aces can come randomly at any time.

There isn’t any art in The Department, which makes sense. It’s 12 pages, and it’s only that long because of a very thorough section on consent and safety tools. Nonetheless, it’s packed with exactly the kind of style that this game needs. The front and back covers look like a manila folder, and the whole thing looks like a partially declassified government document.

Susan Powell apparently sold a few of her games through her onlyfans page, alongside more of what you might expect of an onlyfans page. I got my copy from a friend though, and I haven’t been able to track Susan down anywhere on the internet.

“You did well, Little Dragon” by malistaticy

Submission for The Spirit Tale of Fire Lord Ozai Art Contest.

The inspiration is from chapter 13, the scene where Zu-Ozai tugs on lil’ baby Azula’s bangs. So cute. I was trying to ape the style of the show, can’t say I totally succeeded. Had an enormous amount of fun though. Spot the turtleducks!

Back to SToFLO on AO3 or RR.

OTW Guest Post: Zhuwen Zhang

Today's OTW guest, Zhuwen Zhang, discusses her research on connections between fanworks and personal identity.  Read more at https://otw-news.org/2s3ukxdz

Author Spotlight: Apolline Lucy

This week, we're excited to bring you a guest essay titled Exploring the Dark and the Romantic in my Upcoming Novel: THE SILVER BIRDS from author Apolline Lucy. THE SILVER BIRDS will be released on September 26, 2023.

When the idea for my novel struck me, I immediately knew I wanted it to be a sapphic enemies-to-lovers story. Sapphic, because I wanted to write about women; enemies-to-lovers because I basically live for this trope. But I didn’t want romance to be at its core. I wanted to craft characters filled with rage and wants for revenge, characters so fiercely protective of the ones they trust enough to love, that they became monsters.

By mixing gore—the visceral, the violent, and the gruesome—and sapphic—love, desire, and identity—I wanted to explore the darkest corners of human existence, defy expectations, and create a space for queer characters to exist outside the confines of heteronormative narratives. My novel isn’t about characters being lesbian—they just happen to be. It’s about them grappling with their own demons and external threats.

That being said, the horror elements in THE SILVER BIRDS do serve as a metaphor for the discrimination and violence LGBTQ+ individuals have historically faced. The book explores the themes of survival and resilience, reflecting the real battles queer people face in their daily lives. But it’s more than just thrills; it's about empowerment. It’s about wanting to give voice to characters from different backgrounds, ethnicities, and identities, and make fantasy a more inclusive and richer genre.

As THE SILVER BIRDS is self-published, I had the freedom to explore taboos and delve deep into themes of obsession, vengeance, and the blurred lines between love and violence. Some scenes are quite graphic and might have faced heavy censorship in traditional publishing. But I believe they challenge readers to confront uncomfortable truths and question the boundaries of desire, love, and violence.

Despite the darkness, my novel ultimately celebrates sapphic love. It’s a reminder that love is a powerful force, even in the face of adversity. I’m committed to writing happy endings because the world is already a terrible place, and I want my books to offer an escape. Yes, I will torture my characters, present them with impossible choices, and reveal terrible consequences for their actions. But I will also grant them happy endings. Love must triumph, even in the darkest of places.

Guest star, Superdoada! :D

Taking selfies while midair and piggybacked doesn't really work...

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moodboard by @selendrea