Speculative Reminiscences: Weekly Recap for 2/2/2014

As part of the Blogging 101 class I just finished up teaching for Bellevue College, I organized a bunch of my links into a handout. Here it is online for ease of clickability, but I’m going to break it into separate posts for easier posting and post one chunk each day because it’s 11 pages long as is. I’d be happy to answer questions or discuss any of the links or the overall list philosophy in comments.

Resources for Blogging 101, Bellevue College, Summer 2011

Contents:
General Social Media Resources
Facebook and Twitter Resources
Google+ Resources
StumbleUpon and Other Social Bookmarking Resources
SEO Resources
Google Analyics Resources
Youtube Resources
Promotion Resources
General Blogging Resources
Places to find social networking and blogging news

Matt, here’s the link for the Google Analytics on WordPress plug-in.

I’ve read some great stuff in the last month or so, and wanted to point to some books that I thought people would particularly enjoy. Most of these were read on the Kindle, and I will usually link to that version if it’s available.

I loved Amanda Downum’s The Drowning City and The Bone Palace. Her work reminded me a lot of Martha Wells’ richly textured fantasy, and I thought Savedra was the best of any trans character I’ve encountered so far in fantasy. In grabbing links for this blog post, I realized there’s a third, Kingdoms of Dust, so that’s getting snagged right now.

Gemma Files’ fantasy western, A Book Of Tongues, was awesome and features a great character in the form of Chess, a saucy red-headed ex-whore and hexslinger who’s following his lover Rook and the rest of his outlaw band. I’m looking forward to the sequel, A Rope of Thorns, to the point where I am saving it for sometime when I can sit down and happily devour the book in a single setting.

I finally finished up the Hunger Games trilogy with Mockingjay. It’s a good, solid trilogy, but the first remains my favorite.

Joselle Vanderhoof was kind enough to give me a copy of Sleeping Beauty Indeed & Other Lesbian Fairytales while I was at ArmadilloCon. I got very tired of retold fairy tales while working with Fantasy Magazine, but there’s plenty in here doing something interesting rather than just regurgitating the tale.

I went back and reread Barry Hughart’s The Story of the Stone since I discovered it on Kindle, and knew I wanted something good for a plane trip. I first ran across the series in ancient days and still think it’s a lovely piece of fantasy and I wish there were more than just a few books about Master Li and Number Ten Ox.

The same trip was good for reading Masked, edited by Lou Anders, an anthology of superhero stories which is a nice addition to that field and has some stories

Rereads included E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series, which I re-read every few years as comfort food, and just love. They take place in early 20th century small English towns and feature village life at its most intensely gossipy and social. I must admit, I read a lot of books with the thought “boy, a fantasy version of this would be great” lurking in the back of my head, and this is one I’d love to see translated, although I think it’d take some major talent to pull it off.