Beyond Selidor

The current snowflake_challenge prompt is: Talk about a current fannish project that you are creating or enjoying.



I have one current fandom-adjacent project, which involves transcribing ten+ years of newspaper book reviews — which I currently only have in printed format, and which were published before the specific newspaper had an online edition — onto dolorosa12, my longform reviews blog. The oldest of these reviews is now over twenty years old, and the most recent were published around 2012-13, so they're an interesting (to me) cultural artefact of both my own teenage thinking, and of a world in which both publishing and journalism were very, very different. The transcription is pretty slow going at the moment because the earlier reviews really do just exist on paper, so I have to retype them word by word, but as it progresses I should speed up as the post-2007 reviews exist as Word files that to which I still have access.

This project is, as I say, fandom-adjacent rather than fully fannish, but I don't have anything on the go when it comes to the latter. I've been idly thinking that instead of fruitlessly requesting the same two fandoms, characters and prompts every year since I first started participating in Yuletide, I should accept the inevitable (that no one will write those things but me) and just try to write the fic of my heart, but I haven't made much of a start on that. And I have a long list of ideas that have been in my head for years (in some cases, decades) that I really just should commit to writing, except that I find it really hard to do this kind of thing without a prompt and a hard deadline. (My own prompts, and my own deadlines don't count.) As you can see from the above reviewing project, it's been more than ten years since I've been a paid journalist, and yet it never really leaves me — I need a brief, and a deadline, and then I can write, and without those things, I'm adrift!

My project of backing up all my old newspaper book reviews continues, and I've now managed to post everything up to the end of 2004. I still feel the same tendencies I deplored initially — the penchant for treating my own preferences and tastes as facts rather than opinions, and to make sweeping statements without much evidence to back them up — are there, although I'm not sure my opinions of the specific books reviewed would have changed much in the intervening twenty years, just my manner of expressing such opinions!

The reviews are:

Bleak glimpse forward to a decaying world — review of Jackie French's Flesh and Blood dystopian YA novel

A magical, mythic tale — my review of Sophie Masson's In Hollow Lands (children's fantasy literature inspired by Breton mythology and medieval history)

Rich avenues wandering the streets of Quentaris — a review of several books in the shared world Quentaris children's fantasy series

Convict tale full of twists and treats — a review of Jackie French's Tom Appleby, Convict Boy (children's historical fiction)

Comforting reminder of a simpler world — my first foray into the newspaper's Sunday 'Borrowers' column (in which reviewers wrote about older books that might be borrowed from the library, in this case Rumer Godden's The Greengage Summer)

Only one has the magic touch — a review of more Quentaris books and other Australian children's fantasy novels

Depth and quality to keep every child happy — a round up of books I recommended parents buy their children for Christmas/summer holiday reading

It would be interesting to revisit some of these books (the Rumer Godden in particular), since I'm absolutely certain I would interpret them in very different ways, even if my overall opinion of their quality is likely to remain the same.

It's been a strange weekend so far, mainly due to the coronation, which was unavoidable even if you didn't watch it on TV (which I didn't). The whole thing has been a cacophony of limp, waterlogged bunting, flopping forlornly against people's foliage in the torrential rain. There were several moments of peak Britain that left me helpless with laughter, but the one that took the cake was the giant, water-drenched, ugly handmade crown, displayed in the centre of St Ives in a fenced-off area at the foot of a statue of Oliver Cromwell, as if the statue were a zombie that might come to life and go on a beheading rampage at the sight of the crown.

Matthias and I were in St Ives in order to walk out to a nearby village for lunch, and although we got a bit rained on, the food was good, the pub had a fire going in the wood-burning stove, and the whole thing was worth it. I stuck up a little photoset on Instagram.

Today things have been a bit more routine — the regular early morning swim, crepes for breakfast, and a quick walk into town to get lunch from one of the food trucks at the market. I'm attempting to finish my current book (one of the Comfortable Courtesan series) and catch up on Dreamwidth, but other than that nothing hugely eventful.

I have started a new project, though. Between 2001 and 2012, I was a newspaper book-reviewer for several Australian broadsheet newspapers, mainly reviewing YA, but also adult SFF, historical fiction, and the occasional work of autobiography and author interview as well. My first article was published because — at age sixteen — I took extreme exception to the Sydney Morning Herald's literary editor's review of Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass and wrote her an incredibly pompous and angry letter accusing her of not having read the books she reviewed. Rather than ignoring my unhinged rantings, she wrote back, saying if I felt she'd done a bad job, did I think I could do better, and offered me the chance to review three books as part of a 'summer reads' round-up by various reviewers.

This review with the SMH was kind of a one-off, and I didn't pitch any reviews to any papers until early 2003, when an off-hand conversation I had with my mum about the fact I felt J.K. Rowling owed a debt to Roald Dahl in terms of his influence on her work caused Mum to encourage me to pitch this idea to a bunch of newspapers. The Canberra Times took me up on this offer, and I ended up writing for them for the next ten years.

My vibe, at least in those early days, was that I was an actual teenager reviewing the books aimed at my age group, but it really was another world in terms of how reviewing worked. It was made very clear to me that — although I was a teenager — I was not writing reviews aimed at other teenagers or the readership of the books, but rather for parents who were deciding whether or not to buy such books for their teenage children. At least for the first half of the time I wrote for the papers, book blogging wasn't really a thing (to say nothing of social media), and Australian and other publishers had a much more extensive and well functioning marketing infrastructure, even for debut or midlist books. Likewise, newspapers still had a flourishing arts/features ecosystem — for the entire time I wrote, The Canberra Times had a full- or part-time books editor on staff whose main responsibility was to solicit and edit book reviews and interviews with authors. I wasn't paid particularly well — 10 cents per word (apart from the handful of times I wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age, which paid 60 cents per word), but it was a lot more in terms of hours worked than I got in my other high school/uni jobs in the food/hospitality industry! And I used to sell the review copies of the books on to a secondhand book shop for a reasonable amount of money too.

In any case, all this is by way of preamble to saying that over the decade I worked as a reviewer, I wrote tens of thousands of words, and none of it survives in any digital form as the newspapers weren't fully online at that stage. I have some of it in Word files on a usb stick, but the majority of my reviews and interviews only exist as printed copies which I've stored in a hanging file at my mum's place in Sydney for the past twenty years. I've now decided I'm going to gradually copy these over onto dolorosa12, my longform reviews blog, for the sake of digital preservation.

I haven't been able to track down that 2001 Sydney Morning Herald piece, so I've started with the first two articles I wrote for The Canberra Times, the Dahl-Rowling piece, and an extremely pompous and negative review of the 2003 shortlisted nominees for the Older Readers Children's Book Council of Australia award. Obviously, these were written a long time ago, and my understanding (and thankfully, mode of expression) has developed a lot since then — what's obvious in those first two articles is a tendency to assert broad claims as fact without any evidence, or treat my own tastes and preferences as facts rather than opinions. And, when it comes to the Dahl and Rowling piece, it goes without saying that my feelings about both authors and their works has changed a lot since 2003! (That being said, I think I was correct in noticing the connection between the two, it's just that the real reasons why they are similar are not those I highlighted in my article. It's their bigotry and mean-spiritedness, which finds expression in a sense in their fiction that the world is full of adults who are arbitrarily cruel to the children in their care, and the world is indifferent to the plight of those children, whose only recourse is cleverness and resourcefulness, but which is much more vicious and nasty than these superficial narrative similarities.)

In any case, I am linking to these two old 'reprinted' articles here, but I really want to emphasise everything I've said above. I was eighteen years old when I wrote them, and I was a very young, very pompous eighteen-year-old, with the kind of self-righteousness that can only come from never really being challenged or stepping outside of a particular set of experiences. (Being given a paid reviewing gig for a national broadsheet before I even had the right to vote or had started university, and treated like a precocious prodigy for reviewing the books aimed at my own demographic honestly didn't help in this regard.) I hope my reviews slowly improved over the decade or so that I wrote for the paper, but that remains to be seen as I continue to repost them on my blog.

The reviews' titles are the ones given to them by subeditors when they were published in the paper:

Rowling owes a debt to Dahl
'Worthy' short-list, but not much fun