Happy Pride & Catching Up With Exciting Stories
- 6 hours ago
- 4 min read
Widow’s Bay, Dungeon Crawler Carl, KJ Parker's Making History
Queer Cheers
This upcoming weekend marks my city’s Pride Celebration, in its 45th year and apparently the second largest such event in the world.
It feels a little strange to realize that I haven’t really focused on Pride Month around here this year. But I think it’s an essential aspect of my writing year-round, which is perhaps more important than one month of screaming about it all together?
And that seems like an important parallel to my relationship with Pride overall: that I honestly identify with and take more joy in everyday queerness than in the overwhelming spectacle. Not that I don’t see the real historic, current, and future importance of being loud and proud—but as with so many things, maybe it’s okay for different people to play different roles.
This past year especially, I’m thankful to say that I’ve been a part of and experiencing queer community every week if not every day. It’s hard to express how much of a positive impact it’s had on me—not just in affirmation and meeting people with similar interests, but also in shaping the way I think and providing me a degree of separation from the general culture I find so alien and alienating.
Anyway, this weekend I’m also participating in the 30th annual pride & remembrance run on behalf of that wonderful community and a few incredibly important organizations working towards a safer and kinder world. I’ve never asked for pledges around here, so instead please consider donating a few bucks to my fundraising page if you’re able!
Exciting New Stories
I also wanted to briefly discuss a few items which are currently taking up space in my head! As with my previous 'catching up' post, I hope you'll bear with me as I tidy up my ADHD mind in preparation for more focused pieces to come.
I've said once or twice before that Midnight Mass is probably my favourite TV show that's ever been made, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that I'm currently enthralled with the newly released Widow's Bay. (I was thinking of trying to binge the latter half of the season in order to fully discuss it today, but I think waiting and savoring it is healthier on all fronts.)
No spoilers today beyond the show's premise, which is of an isolated island community experiencing a terrible supernatural curse. Where Midnight Mass took that prompt to delve into the heart and soul of its characters and beautifully explore topics of addiction and faith, Widow's Bay instead follows a mayor desperate to establish their town as a tourist destination. The show (so far) executes both its horror and dark, deadpan comedy wonderfully—as long as you're willing to genuinely pay attention, because it isn't in the habit of spoon-feeding anything to viewers scrolling on their phones.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is another SFF series that's grown to enormous popularity in the last couple years while looking quite different from the speculative fiction I tend to read and write about. It's a LitRPG, meaning it heavily incorporates elements of tabletop roleplaying games—such as character stats, monsters, quests and overall progression fantasy—into the reading experience.
I won't pitch you on it yet, but I'll admit I'm enjoying it more than I expected (especially since I bounced hard off of the first LitRPG book I tried). It's mostly just entertainment for entertainment sake so far—I'm almost done the second novel in the series—but there's also an interesting anti-capitalist sentiment which I'm informed becomes far more central in later books. Anyway, quite entertaining and the audiobooks have been a welcome companion to my runs and walks over the past two weeks.
K.J. Parker's Making History was the pick for one of my book clubs this month, and it was a treat to return to this deadpan and cynical man's mind after spending over a year away. This new novella plays with many of the same tropes and ideas as his The Siege trilogy, particularly the tricky relationships between power, accepted truth, and reality.
I thought Parker's ideas were incredibly important back in Fall 2024, and while I wasn't wrong, I couldn't foresee just how omnipresent they would become in the world of accidental and intentional AI misinformation. Social media and the rapid news cycle allow rapid proliferation of these untruths, and make it so much easier for people to take in the content without seeing the fact-checking (occasionally) being done in comment sections.
And believe me, I'm all too aware of the irony that my almost two-year-old shitty AI-generated art remains the only portraits of Parker's The Siege characters online. If I have money someday, I'd love to commission actual art for these characters and more, but for now, alas. K.J. Parker is utterly fascinated by ideas of what is genuine vs. simulacra and has either found or implanted a similar mindset in me, and yet it's still terrifying to see these ideas come to life around us. So I fully recommend Making History as an easy jumping off point into Parker's larger bibliography, if those ideas are interesting to you too!
Celebration
Regardless of my personal relationship with huge Pride festivities, hugely successful new book series and the truthfulness of art, I want to remind myself (and perhaps anyone reading) to take the chance to celebrate when we can.
I was a very different person when I started this blog two and a half years ago; isolated and anxious, worried to an extent that I'd already read all the good and interesting speculative fiction that existed. Clearly I couldn't have been more wrong, as fascinating new stories come out every month and help me see the world in new ways. Likewise I continue to meet and get to know more people, and continue to grow as a result. It's worth celebrating!
So happy Pride, happy storytelling and happy beginning of summer!
Thanks for reading and until next time <3
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