Some links for this cold Sunday!

Story rec:

* Go and read Carmen Maria Machado’s amazing story Inventory at Strange Horizons. Note: it’s somewhat sexually explicit, just in case you want to read it at work or something. 😀 But a wonderful, gripping story.

Stuff I’ve been meaning to link for the past age:

* A great post by Kate Elliott about the male gaze in sf&f. (Incidentally, I recommend reading Kate Elliot’s Spiritwalker series – wonderful worldbuilding and great characters. I’m eagerly awaiting the next instalment.)

* A Magical Words post by David B. Coe about the impostor syndrome in writing. Magical Words is a great specfic writing blog that I regularly follow – lots of great posts about the craft and life as a writer. In this post, David B. Coe deals with something that’s all too familiar to perfectionist me: the “impostor syndrome”:

Impostor Syndrome is the belief among people who have accomplished something — anything — that their accomplishment is in some way a fluke, a mistake, or the result of a random act of charity from someone in a position to advance their career. It is the belief that, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, they do not belong, they have not truly earned their success. They are, this syndrome leads them to believe, impostors who are merely pretending to be skilled or talented. Any moment now, others will see through their deception, and they will be subjected to abject humiliation before being thrust back into the dim obscurity that they so obviously deserve.

I’m trying to get over the Impostor Syndrome. Most of the time, I can see myself as a “real writer” (and did even before I got published). After all, I write. But insecurity combined with perfectionism too often leads to the sort of questioning that David writes about in his post.

* Theodora Goss writes about writers and families: how the people closest to a writer relate to their writing. I’m going to take this moment to say: Dear family and other close ones, in case you happen to read this: even when I draw inspiration from a real person or event, it’s usually always fictionalised. Sometimes something that seems to be inspired by my real life is actually just my imagination. Sometimes something that seems imagined is actually real. Eh. This is all disjointed; I blame the weird allergic sniffles and sneezes I’ve been suffering from all day. Perhaps this: writing is writing; and I am me. Sara the writer is partly the same as Sara the person you have dinner with. We overlap, we’re the same person, but what the writer writes is certainly not always what the person thinks.

Was that confusing enough? 😀

edit: Just found this amazing story in the form of footnotes: Footnotes, by C. C. Finlay. I love using non-narrative genres to convey a story. Also, ♥academia♥.