Crabs in the Bucket Preview
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Latest stories
Crabs in the Bucket Preview
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My Roman Empire Was Queer AF
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(Filipp Romanovski / Pexels.com) One of my fav things about June is how much queerness comes out of the woodwork. Another fav thing is seeing certain quarters of society try to push back on it. And one of my fav arguments is that queerness is a modern invention. While that’s true to some degree, the historical record shows us queer people have existed since time immemorial. They maybe didn’t call...
Why We Need Queer Books More Than Ever (Again)
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At this point, I feel like I’m writing one of these posts at least every year, but it remains true. We need queer books now, more than ever before. (Sharon McCutcheon / Pexels.com) Why are queer books so important in this particular epoch? Well, we can argue queer books are important for queer people so they can recognize themselves in the pages of fiction. That’s what I’ve argued before, and...
What Is M/M Romance?
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If you’re just diving into queer fiction or even fanfic, you’re probably running across new terminology. “The olds” might make fun of teens and college students for having a lot of slang they don’t understand. Truth is that you’ll find a lot of almost incomprehensible jargon in almost any niche. (Wallace Araujo / Pexels.com) So, at this point, you might be wondering what, exactly, “m/m” romance...
What Is With All These Book Retreats?
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A book shop often fulfills similar functions, including author events (Iryna Varanovich / Pexels.com) A recent trend I’ve noticed is the sudden abundance of “author” or “reader retreats”—events designed to put authors and readers in close contact. Many of these are cropping up in the romance space, where readers might be fanatical about an author’s work. Authors, certainly, are always looking for...
Arr, Matey: Book Piracy and the Indie Author
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Ahoy, matey! The Jolly Roger ready to set sail with a boatload of booty– I mean, books. (Mike Bird / Pexels.com) At this stage in the game, we all know book piracy is pretty rampant. Whether it’s someone in a country where the major stores don’t operate, or it’s someone who is tight on cash who still really wants to read a book, or someone is trying to stick it to “the man,” or it’s someone...
Writing Unapologetically Smutty Romance in a Conservative Era
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Or, Why Respectability Won’t Save You I think we can all agree we’ve entered a rather conservative era. It’s been a while coming, the first rumblings of it emerging fifteen years ago now. It gained momentum after the 2016 US election and snowballed from there. The pandemic threw fuel on the fire, and, well, here we are. Neo-fascists and alt-right parties are gaining support across the globe. We...
The “Other” in Romance
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Scary … or sexy? (Lisa from Pexels / Pexels.com) Monsters—or otherworldly beings—have almost always been popular subjects for fiction. We can trace vampire romances back at least to the nineteenth century, when we see Carmilla and Dracula both emerge. Neither is truly a romance, but both of them feature some relatively seductive monsters. Horror and romance have always walked a fine line...
How I Went from Pantsing to Plotting
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If you’re a writer or hang around writer communities much, you may have heard a lot of different lingo. We’re working on our WIPs, we all have a copy of something called Save the Cat or Romancing the Beat, and so on and so forth. (Ron Lach / Pexels.com) Some of that terminology revolves around how writers go about writing their books. In general, there are assumed to be three different “types” of...
The Multiverse of the Omegaverse
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Omegaverse fiction, also known as a/b/o dynamics or a/b/o fiction, is having a moment. The trope really got its start in fanfic circles over a decade ago now. It’s only been in recent years that it’s made waves in the realm of indie publishing. Now, it seems, omegaverse is everywhere you look. At first blush, omegaverse is confusing. I’ve written a primer on this worldbuilding trope and how it...
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