Friday Ephemera (720)
On cyclists, an illustrated poem. || The Electrocula, 1962. || Careful who you hire. Related. || 131,000 historical maps. || He’s 43 and entering his Club Ho phase. || Alcohol may help. || The progressive retail experience, parts 549 and 550. || Road obstructed by wrong ‘uns, cue dairy product. || The Greens. || Big gulp. || Glittering, dazzling, etc, and so forth. || Go with the black number, it’s slimming. || Hear the voices of the marginalised. || Hard to know where to start. || It was the Seventies, everyone was doing it. || Incoming. || Incoming 2. || A meal and a show, they said. || “Tasty and versatile python meat.” (h/t, Rich Rostrom) || Progressive anthropology. Related. || I’m sensing a little tension. || Dumbass detected. || Man with fake nails issues ultimatum. || And finally, no, you first.
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“My God, what ugly madness have I escaped only by accident?”
By all means, avoid Archive of Our Own, one of the world’s largest repositories of fanfiction.
At least they emphasize tagging your story so everyone can get a clear idea what kind of perversion you’re supplying.
Which brings to mind the fascinating subculture of explicit fiction written by and for women. These are available on Amazon, but because of their subject matter they cannot be advertised.
What to do? The result has been book festivals, but with some differences from, say, what you’d find in Hay-on-Wye (note: Never have been there but have heard about it, so I may be wrong).
These events are ticketed with rather high prices (starting at $20, extra if you want early access). They go by rather innocuous, cute names like “Readers Take [host city]” or “Rebels and Readers.”
The high ticket price helps pay for the convention center / hotel space, and also keeps out the unwary reader looking for a, say, Barbara Cartland, and not a romance featuring a Mafia / Russian Mafia / motorcycle club hero (what I call “restraining order romance,” because no sane woman would go near them in real life).
The event my wife and I attended out of anthropological curiosity featured books emphasizing daddy kink, doctor kink, “50 Shades” like romances, and more.
As authors ourselves (but not this type), we had a great time talking with the creators, and commiserating about bad editors, bad covers, relatives who treat our business like a hobby, and all the other minor miseries of the writers’ life.
And the women who bought these books were nothing like the furtive raincoat wearing men haunting the local p*** palaces back in my day.
All in all, a pleasant day spent.
Never even heard of it, thankfully. David’s fine establishment gives me as much anthropology as I can stand.
The Urban Dictionary does have some utility.
That come with mustard?
Even Wiktionary.
Is that the town Theodore Dalrymple likes so much for its bookstores?