Friday open thread: fannish wish lists

[dolorosa_12]

Look at me, shamelessly incorporating today's snowflake_challenge prompt into this week's open thread:

Create a wish list of fandom things (podfic, graphics, playlists, canon recs translations, research help, vids, sky's the limit!) that you'd like to receive.

(Note that this is not meant to be a list of things that annoy you about fandom and wish would be different.)

Feel free to treat the comments of this post (if it gets any) as a mini fest and fulfill any requests that you'd like/are able to do. If you've already written your own post for this Snowflake prompt, feel free to link it in a comment rather than rewriting the whole thing again.




I always need to start off my response to this specific prompt by stating that I have a lot of weird baggage around asking for things or sharing wishlists outside of specific contexts (exchanges, birthdays, etc). My family definitely falls on the extreme Guess Culture side of things (which works really well in that context — genuinely, no one ever has to ask for anything, everyone always just intuits what is needed), which has left me with an unbreakable lifelong sense that asking explicitly for things, apart from in clearly defined contexts, is entitled, greedy, and ungrateful behaviour. So I always need to work through those emotions and get past the sense that writing this wishlist is ungrateful and inappropriate. (This is entirely a me problem; just to be clear I never feel this way when I see other people's wishlists in any context.)

Okay, I feel better now! Onward to the list:

The big one, really, is for any fic at all — not written by me — to exist for my tiny fandoms-of-one (bonus points if it's focused on my favourite characters/relationships within those fandoms); you can see most of those fandoms listed on my intro post, with more detailed prompts on my template author letter, although not every fandom listed there falls into the 'fandom-of-one' category and many of them already have quite a lot of excellent fic

I'm certain that I have excellent gifts already, but in case anyone else feels so moved, I'd love gifts for Fandomtrees

I'd like recs for professional author newsletters to subscribe to (I enjoy newsletters that are a bit like blogs/Livejournal posts of old — a good mixture of publishing news, personal life musings, interesting links, photos of cats/food/gardens/hobbies/etc — rather than just blasting out information about publication dates, events and so on)

I'd like recs for visually interesting Instagram accounts to follow (I enjoy accounts that post about gardens and the natural world, food and cooking, crafts such as hand-dyeing fabric, handmaking jewellery from resin, flowers, sea glass, etc, architecture and interior design, or photos of specific natural or built environments)

One last fandom thing which feels too selfish for me to write down, but I know what I mean, so I'm just putting it into the universe

That's my wishlist. What about you?

Comments

[muccamukk]

(Note that this is not meant to be a list of things that annoy you about fandom and wish would be different.)

You get it.

[dolorosa_12]

It's a pity it needs to be reiterated.

[yarnofariadne]

If you don't mind a bit of shameless self-promo, I think my newsletter might hit the right buttons for you! Here's the December edition if you want to take a look. It goes up publicly on Patreon/Ko-fi on the 8th of each month, and I link it in yarnofariadne_writes when it does. (I used to mirror it on Mailchimp but their pivot to AI meant I had to shut that down and I haven't had the bandwidth to figure out another email solution; if you're solely looking for emailed newsletters, feel free to ignore me!)

As for my own wishlist, I'm always happy to receive podfic of any of my works! I'm not going to ask for too much because I don't know how much I'll be able to offer in return, but I'll keep an eye out and see what I can do. ♥

[dolorosa_12]

That actually looks very much like what I'm looking for — I actually don't like emailed newsletters and tend to set them up as feeds on Dreamwidth if possible, so the fact that yours is links posted to a comm suits me very well!

I hope you get lots of lovely podfic.

[ursula]

Are you reading Max Gladstone's newsletter? I really enjoy his musings.

[dolorosa_12]

His newsletter is great! I am already reading it, but it's exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for.

[raven]

I would like recs for low-key space opera type SF that isn't written by men! I've read Arkady Martine, Ann Leckie, Emily Tesh, Becky Chambers and Ruthanna Emrys all recently, I've just picked up KB Wagers and Malka Older, and I still want more to scratch this particular itch. I just want rockets and space colonies it turns out!

[topaz119]

Hi! If you can lean into romances set in space operas, Jessie Mihalik might give you a new option or two. And Ilona Andrews is a husband & wife co-writing team—-most of their books are paranormal but their Innkeeper series has a very space opera-ish feel to it.

[raven]

Thank you, I will check those out!

[nerakrose]

you might enjoy Seven Devils & Seven Mercies by L.R. Lam & Elizbeth May - this duology was described to me as 'star wars, but queer'. imo the 'star wars' part of it is the grungy rebels more than it is, idk, clones and stormtroopers, and it is indeed very queer. I liked the characters and world building a lot. and like star wars it is what it says on the tin: rebels in space taking down an empire.

*takes notes* I'd not heard of Ruthanna Emrys, KB Wagers or Malka Older before!

[raven]

Thank you! I've heard of LR Lam but I haven't read any of their books, I will take a look!

[dolorosa_12]

I think some Aliette de Bodard Xuya universe space opera stories would qualify here. If you haven't come across these before, it's a sprawling universe of loosely linked short stories and novellas, set in a space opera universe heavily influenced by Vietnamese history and culture, with sentient mindships who keep families' histories and are treated as part of those families. Some of the stories are lower-stakes than others.

I'm not sure it counts as 'low-key', but Kate Elliott's gender-swapped, queer space opera retelling of the story of Alexander the Great is also amazing. There are two books published so far (Unconquerable Sun and Furious Heaven), with the third still being written.

[raven]

Aliette is a friend but I am very bad at keeping up with her books, thank you for the reminder! And I will def check out the other.

[falena]

I don't know how much of an obvious rec this is, as this is is a 20-year old book, but last year I read the first instalment of Elizabeth Moon's space opera series "Vatta's War", Trading in Danger and I tink it might be what you're looking for. I enjoyed it a lot and added the next instalment on my 'buy it when you find the ebook at a reasonable price' list.

[raven]

Thank you! I will make a note!

[topaz119]

Catherine Newman has a very chill newsletter, Crone Sandwich. There is an option to pay, but for now I think all her content is free. And Cat Valente has a gloriously ranting periodic one, Welcome to Garbagetown, which is about 50-50 paid/free.

::fingers crossed that I can still code links on my phone…::

[dolorosa_12]

Thanks for the recommendations — I'll have a look. And the links seem fine.

[ambyr]

Alaya Dawn Johnson has a lovely newsletter, a little about writing and a lot about her life in Mexico. https://alayadj.substack.com/

[dolorosa_12]

Thanks for the recommendation. I've enjoyed at least one of her books, and having had a quick look, her newsletter looks like exactly the sort of thing I was asking about.

[got_quiet]

I can give you a few instagram recs:

retrog19 - Japanese architecture photos. Lots of great facades.

Something a little more out there but very cool is tanaka_tatsuya. He's a photographer who creates micro images using every day materials. Often food is involved but not always. It's always whimsical and creative stuff.

[dolorosa_12]

Thanks for the recs — they both look great!

[olivermoss]

John Rogers (Leverage, Librarians, etc) has a newsletter he's just started up: https://buttondown.email/kungfumonkey I follow it via RSS

Some of it is focused on screenwriting specifically, but I am still enjoying it

[nerakrose]

do you have this RSS feed set up on DW? if so do you mind linking me to so it so i can follow it too?

[dolorosa_12]

I'm not sure if this works for buttondown email newsletters, but Substack ones can be added as a feed to Dreamwidth and followed on your reading page. Just go to the Feeds page and add the URL with /feed after it
(for example https://alayadj.substack.com/feed ) and follow the prompts. It's not RSS, but at least it takes the thing out of email inboxes and into Dreamwidth, where it can be followed like any other journal.

[nerakrose]

yes I tried that but kept getting an error message. I did manage to find the feed set up from somebody else (even though they'd misspelled as john rodgers) so I'm following it now.

link: https://johnrodgers-feed.dreamwidth.org/

[olivermoss]

I use Feedbro instead of DW's RSS, so I haven't set it up here

[nerakrose]

thanks anyway!

[dolorosa_12]

Thanks for the recommendation!

[falena]

I don't know how obvious a rec this is, possibly very obvious, but I enjoy tremendously Ann Friedman's newsletter, which is called The Ann Friedman Weekly. If you don't know her, she's mostly a journalist, though she did write a book about friendship a couple of years ago, and her newsletter fits your requirements perfectly! She writes very well and shares interesting links and feels like an old friend, somehow. She's on maternity leave right now so every week she's sending out an essay on he journey into motherhood. I unexepectedly found these essays absolutely fascinating (it's atopic I normally don't care much about), she has an interesting perspective as she'd always been staunchly childfree...anyway the essays start with with the 11/17/2023 issue of the newsletter, if you want to check out her archive to see what her standard newsletter is like pick one before that date.

[dolorosa_12]

Thanks for the recommendation — not an obvious one at all! I will have a look through the archive and see if her writing is something I want to subscribe to.