Victoria Janssen's Blog, page 23

My May and June Reading Log

Fiction:
Wonder City Stories by Jude McLaughlin went along well with my recent comics reading. Wonder City is full of superheroes, and they all have stories: young superheroes just starting out, old superheroes who aren’t sure what timeline they’re in, legacy superheroes avoiding superheroism for all they’re worth. I particularly liked that the interweaving storylines of the various pov characters gave the effect of an actual comic in prose form. Bonus: a range of genders and sexualities as w...

Readercon 2016 Schedule

I’ll be at Readercon this weekend in Quincy, Massachusetts. Hope to see some of you there! Here’s my schedule.

Friday July 08, 2016
3:00 PM, C
Fantastical Dystopia.
Victoria Janssen, Ada Palmer, Andrea Phillips, Sabrina Vourvoulias, T.X. Watson.
Dystopia is popular in YA fiction for a variety of reasons, but why do authors frequently base their future dystopian society on some flimsy ideas, rather than using history to draw parallels between past atrocities and current human rights violations...

Me and My Boi Blog Tour

Despite having read hundreds of Regency-set romances, my story for Me and My Boi: Queer Erotic Stories, “Measure of a Man,” is the first time I ever attempted to utilize that time period myself. Being me, I chose to do so with a twist or two–or three–on a trope-y plot.

“Measure of a Man” is a story of discoveries, acceptance, and happy endings.

Here’s how the story begins:

Jerusha Pettifer desperately needed this position.

He checked the fall of his breeches to make sure everything was fasten...

Me and My Boi is out!

Me and My Boi, edited by Sacchi Green, is finally out this week. Me and My Boi celebrates lesbian bois, butches, and screw-the-binary free spirits; cool bois, hot bois, swaggering bois, shy bois, leather bois, flannel bois, butch daddies, and the girls (and other bois) who wouldn’t have them any other way.

My story in the anthology, “Measure of a Man” is my first ever Regency-set story.

There’s a blog tour, and anyone who comments on any of the posts will be entered in a drawing for one free...

My April Reading Log

Fiction:
I finally read The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth by Sarah Monette. I have had this book since it came out, and every time I saw it, I would think, “ghost stories are scary! I’ll read that later!” Then one weekend I just started reading and I went all the way through with only minor stops for doing stuff. It wasn’t scary in the way I feared it would be scary. The scary was perfectly within my tolerance! My favorite thing about the series of stories were t...

My March Reading Log

Fiction:
The Immortals: Olympus Bound by Jordanna Max Brodsky was a strange but intriguing mixture of Olympian gods with a suspense novel involving serial killings. The Olympians are fading away as they live in the modern world, gradually losing their powers, and some losing their minds as well as their memories (altered by human myth-telling). Artemis is the implacable protagonist, living in New York City and protecting women but not really managing to deal with new technologies or making ne...

My February Reading Log

Fiction:
Taking the Lead by Cecilia Tan is a contemporary romance with BDSM, first in a new series. The heroine and her sister have inherited their gazillionaire grandfather’s secret Hollywood BDSM club, and the hero is a rock star who’s fallen for the heroine and who happens to be dom to her sub. The characterization is terrific and I love that they have multiple problems going on: keeping the club secret is a big one, but the heroine is also trying to fight her way through the Old Boy Netwo...

My January Reading Log

Fiction:
Vulcanization by Nisi Shawl is the awesomest steampunk story ever; Leopold II of Belgian Congo colonialist infamy wants to rid himself of visions of the people he’s victimized, using a strange device. After reading King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild a while back, this story is especially satisfying. Shawl has a steampunk novel coming out in September from Tor: Everfair. I am so excited!!!

Here is my enthusiastic preview o...

My Arisia 2016 Schedule

I’ll be attending Arisia January 15 – 18, 2016 in Boston. My panel schedule is below.

Friday, 5:30 pm, Bulfinch
“Guilty Pleasures: The Fast and the Furious”
After appearing to be stalled (so to speak) post-Tokyo Drift, the Fast & The Furious franchise has taken off over the last decade to become a monstrous success. There are few guiltier pleasures, but also few major action movies that regularly feature women and people of color, and certainly few that get praised by the likes by Roxane Gay....

My December Reading Log

Fiction:
There’s Something About Ari by L.B. Gregg was novella length, I think, a m/m romance that never took off for me, though I did finish it.

I picked up another in a long-running series. Obsession in Death by J.D. Robb was fairly rote, but it was ideal for circumstances in which I was constantly being interrupted. I was very happy each time a new characters/s had to be updated on the crime; that was very helpful in re-orienting me to the story.

And I finally read A Stranger to Command by...