I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

John Scalzi, The Dispatcher: Murder by Other Means:( when murder isn't fatal, what do the criminals do? )
Stephen King, Later: ( he sees dead people )
Katherine Addison, The Witness for the Dead: ( he talks to dead people )
Ben Aaronovitch, What Abigail Did That Summer: ( magic shenanigans )
Martha Wells, Fugitive Telemetry: ( why do all these humans keep getting murdered? )
C.L. Polk, Stormsong: ( magic weather )
KJ Charles, The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting: ( marriage and the alternatives )
David Wong, Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick: ( if this goes on, social media x mafia )
Naomi Novik, A Deadly Education: ( it eats you starting from your bottom )
Genevieve Cogman, The Dark Archive:( at last )
Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians: ( hunt gone wrong )
Stephen King & Joe Hill, In the Tall Grass: ( bad things happen )
N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became: ( sentient cities )
Cherie Priest, I Am Princess X: ( visitation from beyond the grave? )
Grady Hendrix, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires: Salem’s Lot meets The Stepford Wives, sort of. ( Read more... )
Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland: ( the monster is you )
Daryl Gregory, The Album of Dr. Moreau:( animal/human hybrids in a boy band )

But first, has anyone been following the current season of The 100? I have a number of episodes piled up and I can't bear to watch unless they've scored some significant victories so far. Anyone who could provide nonspecific information about this would be greatly appreciated.

KJ Charles, Wanted, a Gentleman: ( more Edwardian romance )Justina Ireland, ( Dread Nation and Promise of Shadows )

T. Kingfisher, ( Beauty and the Beast/Clockwork Boys )Cherie Priest, Bloodshot: ( contemporary urban vampires! )

Catherine Asaro, ( more Ruby empire )

Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver: ( spoilers turn silver to gold )

First, Grana is one of my favorite clothes shops--the materials are really high quality and their modal/cotton tops are the softest I've ever had. There is a big clearance now, and if you use this link then you get 10% off and I get $20 in credit. (Socks & tops are really cheap in the clearance.)

I went to see Alexandra Petri's To Tell My Story: Although the structuring conceit is a loose retelling of Hamlet, with a modern-day fangirl as the tragic protagonist Elsie, there are a number of other fandoms represented, most obviously Harry Potter, secondarily Twilight (though only identified as “vampire” in the promo materials, grrr), MCU (similar, grr), LoTR, Sherlock, and Historical RPF (Abraham Lincoln). Some observations:

1. Just as Ready Player One hails as its ideal reader an 80s fanboy, this play hails a 21st-century fangirl. I laughed a lot.

2. Me, a pedant: Technically, this isn’t a “fanfic,” but a “fandrama” or “fanwork,” though I understand why they used the more well-recognized term.

3. For a number of reasons, commercial “fanworks,” if you accept the application of that term to them—and for this play at least I think we should—tend to be metafictions, interested in the mechanisms of storytelling (see, e.g., Jasper Fforde’s series, Dumas père’s Kean as remixed by Sartre, Supernatural’s Fan Fiction and Slash Fiction episodes), especially if you include in the metafiction category retellings from the perspective of a character whose experience is elided from the original (see, e.g., Wide Sargasso Sea, Lo’s Diary, The Wind Done Gone, Jacqueline Carey’s retelling of LoTR). This play is no exception, as the title indicates, and I also sense a reference to Hamilton’s “who lives, who dies, who tells your story”—especially since Petri’s play, much more than Shakespeare’s, emphasizes that you (the character) have little to no control over those things. In Petri’s version, Elsie is not able to orchestrate the narrative for Horatio to repeat.

4. The program fascinated me because the format is very specifically taken from the Archive of Our Own, with its major tags, additional tags and kudos count, as well as fandom categorizations. And I’m pretty sure all the additional tags are canonical, even though some of them are not what we envisioned when we set up the additional tags field. That’s folksonomy for you. Anyway, obviously I don’t think there’s any trademark problem, and wouldn’t be for a creative work even if it used more of the Archive’s trade dress, but it’s notable that the AO3 now provides some standard formatting choices.

A few reviews, in the fannish theme:

Joe Harris & Dirk Maggis, The X-Files: Cold Cases (audiobook):( Scully! )
( I am Princess X & Princeless )

Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology: Gaiman retells some of the key Norse myths, and it’s enjoyable, though I liked Astolat’s version of Thor’s near-marriage to a giant better.

Okay, all else aside, #bae_of_pigs is a brilliant coinage, no? Perfect synthesis of present pop culture with historical political scandal.

( lots of old favorites, with sf, fantasy, sex, horror, and Richard Siken )

So, I haven't been trying to post every day for astolat's challenge, even though I would like to. I post almost every weekday at my pro blog, and it's the start of school, so I've felt a little overwhelmed. But it's a good idea. I'll see what I can do.
( Courtney Crumrin! )

( Terry Pratchett/Stephen Baxter; Cherie Priest )