Malinda Lo

This image popped up on my tumblr dash earlier this week:

Ambre Saint-Clare, a professional mermaid performer!

I had no idea anyone could be a professional mermaid performer! But that sent me searching for more photography of the mythical, and wow, there are some talented photographers out there. Here’s some mid-week eye candy full of the surreal (photos link to the artists’ Flickr pages):

“Le Feu Follet” by Helen Warner

“Dream Logic” by Helen Warner

“The Meliae’s Dress” by Helen Warner

“Waiting on the wind” by Rachel Baran

Wonderland “The Distant Pull of Remembrance” by Kirsty Mitchell

“Legerdemain” by Miss Aniela

Last week, to launch Bin 42, I created a series of graphics that illustrate some of the survey results from Public Policy Polling’s recent national poll of American voters’ beliefs about conspiracy theories.

Some of the statistics are thankfully low (the reptilians!), and some are, to me at least, surprisingly high (the JFK conspiracy). What’s also interesting is something I chose to not show in the graphics for lack of space: a lot of Americans “are not sure” about these things. CONTINUE READING →

Lately I’ve been asked several times about the possibility of a Huntress sequel, and while I’ve answered that question before, I guess it’s time for an update. So today, I present you with The Definitive Answer to the Question of Whether There Will Be a Sequel to Huntress:

Probably not.

More specifically:

Right now, no, I don’t have any plans to write more in that world. But never say never! Honestly, I know what happens after Huntress: a lot of stuff! But beyond the fact that I have different projects in the pipeline now, and I don’t have a lot of time to write about that stuff, I also have the problem that Huntress was published as YA, but the stuff that happens after Huntress is probably not YA. It’s hard for one book to be published as YA and the sequel to be published as regular adult fantasy. That might not be a problem if Huntress was a giant breakout success, but it wasn’t. (Which is why I especially treasure readers who loved Huntress!)

Also, in 2012, I wrote this:

With Huntress, I also started out planning to write a standalone. It was all plotted out and everything, with a clear arc for the characters and it came to the ending that I eventually wrote. But along the way, I did realize that the story could be bigger. And … yeah I have an idea for a sequel. BUT! It is not about Kaede or Taisin. They are in the story, but it’s not about them.

Yes, this is one of the things that I know could happen after the end of Huntress, but I’m not working on this book right now, or maybe ever. I get a lot of ideas, and some of them come to fruition and some of them don’t. This particular idea has sort of faded from my interests. I probably should never have posted about it, but hey, the Internet: it’s forever.

So for now…no sequels. But I hope that you might enjoy the other things I’m working on. The thing is, as a reader you always want more of something you enjoyed, which I totally get. But it’s the writer/creator’s job to figure out what else you might like that you never expected. You can’t know you’ll like it until you try it. It’s true that what I’m writing now is very different, but it still comes out of my brain. Hopefully that means there will be some similarities!

And there you have it. I’m not going to say no sequel ever absolutely not! because I can’t predict the future. But please don’t sit around waiting for a sequel. If it happens, it’s years away at minimum, and right now it’s very unlikely. I hope you will try some of the other stuff I’ve written in the meantime.

Newsy

Bin 42, the (fake) website in Adaptation and Inheritance, launched last Monday! Check it out for all your conspiracy theory needs.

Thinky

• See The Fascinating Evolution of Cover Art From 12 Legendary Queer Books (Autostraddle) — Indeed. Very fascinating!
• “The Gender Coverup” by Maureen Johnson (HuffPost Books) — This is what YA Land (including me) was agog over last week. Still thinking through some responses, including:
• “In Which I Have an Unpopular Opinion” by author Justina Ireland — I share her opinion: “The problem here folks is the binary.”
• And even more food for thought on gender in YA from author E.M. Kokie, who draws attention to the fact that girls in YA novels rarely if ever get to describe their own bodies using anatomically correct words: “In Our Own Words”

Pretty

World War I lesbians

Uncovered: NASA’s Retro Drawings of Humans on Mars (Mashable)

My interests are diverse.

It’s only been a few weeks since I made some tweaks to my website, and those tweaks are already obsolete. The thing is, my website is a work in progress, and I guess over the past month or two I’ve been thinking a lot about my web presence and what I want to do with it. So, here’s the biggest change:

I’ve turned off all comments.

I’ve been struggling with managing comments for years, and for a while now I’ve been experimenting with leaving them on for some posts and turning them off for others. Recently I realized that the potential for any comments at all (even on a frivolous post about nothing important) has been filling me with dread. Because you know the internet — it’s full of killjoys who will pop by to say “I hate this, you suck” as soon as you say “I love this.” Also, I think that in a world where there’s a twitter feed called Avoid Comments, commenting is largely broken. There are some websites out there with intelligent, interesting comments (like Whatever), but I see how much effort it takes to manage and maintain that commenting community, and I don’t want to spend my time doing that. So: no comments.

I’ve been doing this no-comments experiment for a couple of weeks now, and I do feel much freer to blog about anything and everything. That’s really the main reason I wanted to turn them off — so that I could feel like my website is my website. If you come here, you’re going to get, well, me.

As some of you know, I’ve been posting on tumblr quite a bit, too. However, as much as I post on tumblr, I get ten times as many visits to my website proper. I don’t want to leave the vast majority of my readers out of the loop! I’m hoping now to post more often here on my official website, so that you won’t be missing much over on tumblr. I want my website to be the main place for my content, period.

A few weeks ago when I posted that brief update about changes to my website, I’d installed a tumblr widget in the sidebar. I found that I didn’t like it — it just was never formatted well, and I don’t know enough to reformat it. So I took it out. Instead, I’m just going to be posting more often, as I said above. In order to make sure you don’t miss anything important, I’ve added a sidebar box called “Featured Posts,” located in the right sidebar second from the top, so all my news is pulled out and highlighted.

Last but not least, I don’t want you to think that because I’ve turned off comments I don’t want to hear from you, my readers. That’s not true. My contact info is right here, and you can always post on my Facebook page, ask me a question on tumblr, or chat with me on twitter.

I guess during my last month or two of thinking about my web presence, I’ve realized that I’m not only a novelist. (Ha! The thought that I could think that blows my mind.) I’ve been blogging and writing critically about pop culture since 2003. That’s ten years. I can’t give it up. I love writing nonfiction, and I intend to continue doing it. Right here on my website.