Episode 63: Rat Queens

This week, Andi and Lise waxed philosophical fangirl about the first 2 collected volumes of the comic Rat Queens, put out by Image Comics. First launched in 2013, Andi is horrified that she didn’t look into these sooner and thanks Lise profusely for telling her to get with it and read them already. ComiXology might have the best description of the Rat Queens:

Who are the Rat Queens? A pack of booze-guzzling, death-dealing battle maidens-for-hire, and they’re in the business of killing all gods’ creatures for profit. It’s also a darkly comedic fantasy series starring Hannah the Rockabilly Elven Mage, Violet the Hipster Dwarven Fighter, Dee the Atheist Human Cleric and Betty the Hippy Hobbit Thief. This modern spin on an old school genre is a violent monster-killing epic that is like Buffy meets Tank Girl in a Lord of the Rings world on crack!

Rat Queens is also full of diverse characters (primary and secondary), kickass women, and LGBTQ rep (it won a GLAAD award), including Betty, one of the queens. Great world-building, awesome characterization, strong writing, explorations of relationships and past baggage – Rat Queens is the shizzle. Give this comic a read and re-read!

Shout-outs: Lise recommends Jodi Taylor’s Chronicles of St. Mary’s books, which are a time traveling historians saga (and Andi will be running out to read) that Taylor insists you NOT call time travel because it’s “about a bunch of disaster-prone historians who investigate major historical events in contemporary time.” And Andi is just about done with Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth (Lise’s recommendation), which is mind-blowing and so much awesome – lesbian necromancers who also do some space travel. I mean. Why would you not want to read that? Also, Andi wants a poster of the cover.

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Episode 62: Book Talk

Andi and Lise each read a book and then talked about it. The cool part is, they didn’t tell each other which book they decided to read, so it was happy fun discovery time!

Lise read Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth (2019), which is, basically, lesbian necromancers in a gothic space palace with swordplay and intrigue and why the hell wouldn’t you want to read this awesome-ness? Gideon, the MC, is trying to escape a life of paranormal servitude but her childhood nemesis won’t let her leave without yet another service. And that nemesis is the powerful daughter of the 9th House, and in order to succeed in the emperor’s contest of wits and skills, Harrowhark needs her cavalier—Gideon on and her sword. Lise raved about the world-building, characterization, and Muir’s writing style.

Find out more about Tamsyn Muir on Amazon.

Andi read April Daniels’ Dreadnought (Nemesis Book One; 2017), an emotional roller-coaster of a ride starring teen Danny Tozer, who inherits the powers of superhero Dreadnought. In the transfer, the inheritor becomes their true self, and Danny is at last the young woman she has always known she’s been. But she has to deal with her unaccepting parents, coming out at school, figuring out where she fits in the league of superheroes, how her powers work and, on top of all that, the supervillain who murdered the previous Dreadnought. Andi loved the dialogue, the pacing, adventure, and yes, even the gut-wrenching turmoil Danny had to face.

Find out more about April Daniels on Amazon.

Andi’s shout-out this week was to true crime books; she just finished the late Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer and plz don’t read this at night kthx. AND check out the TGIFemflash fancon in February, 2020! Here’s the link.

Lise’s shout-out was for the TV series The Good Place, in which a woman ends up in a heaven-like utopia afterlife by mistake, but she then works to change her ways so she can stay. You can catch earlier seasons on Netflix.

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Episode 61: Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse

Andi and Lise FINALLY got to talk about Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse because Lise put off seeing it until recently and then, as Andi suspected, it blew her mind.

Into the Spider-Verse is an animated origin story about Miles Morales, a teen who is, of course, bitten by a radioactive spider and is faced with taking on the mantle of Spider-Man in the wake of his universe’s loss of the previous Spider-Man. He also has to deal with villain Kingpin’s manipulation of the multiverse, which results in several incarnations of Spider-Man (that include two women) entering Miles’ universe. It’s an origin story and a story about found family and mentorship set against ground-breaking animation that includes fabulous characterization, dialogue, humor, anxiety, and sadness. It’s pretty much everything you want in a film, and both Andi and Lise highly recommend it. Good for all ages (but if you have trouble with animation and flashing lights because of a medical condition, maybe check the trailer first).

More info:
IMDB
Trailers ONE and TWO
First 9 minutes of the film, via Sony
CNET.com review

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Episode 60: Our Writing Processes

Andi and Lise get a little personal and talk shop about their respective writing processes. Both write spec fic, though Andi also writes romance and mysteries, and those genres take a different approach. They discuss how they approach different projects, what kind of preparation they do, multitasking different projects or not, outlines or not, and tools of the trade. They also talk about how writing influences how they watch, read, and analyze other creators’ work.

Writing platforms they talked a bit about:
Word
Scrivener

Notebooks (as in actual paper!) both use for project notes/character sketches/plots/timelines:
Moleskine
Link to a bunch of different notebooks (Andi uses several different kinds, usually plain-covered or something with a skull on the cover…lol)

Andi and Lise both recommend doing NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month, which is every November. 50,000 words in a month is what NNWM is about. Try it! Great community, great fun!
NaNoWriMo

Find them at their websites:
Lise MacTague
Andi Marquette

And finally, Andi geeked out about the start of the final (sob) season of Killjoys. Lise got raved about the excitement of She-Ra’s third season.

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Episode 59: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Season 2

Andi and Lise fangirl over season 2 of She-Ra: Princesses of Power, which is sadly only 7 episodes but they love it anyway, especially the way the characters interact and how they deal with very human problems as they’re caught up in bigger issues. In this season, there’s a bit of an impasse between the princesses and the Horde, though Catra is trying to prove she can take over the world while the Princess Alliance tries to work together to keep the world safe. S2 is more about characters and relationships, past and present, and adds a lot of depth to the storylines and character arcs.

You can watch Seasons 1, 2, and soon (August 2!) 3 on Netflix.

Also, Lise recommends the D&D podcast Spell Check, which is a group of YA authors playing…you guessed it. D&D! Find it on Soundcloud and all over the podverse.

Andi caught the latest Hayley Kioko video, starring Hayley and a group of friends as teenaged witches at private school. The song is “I Wish.”

And ClexaCon has opened registration for its April, 2020 event. Also, another queercon will be taking place in Tampa at the end of May, 2020. Find out more at QFX Events.

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Episode 58: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

LGO morphs into the Kameron Hurley fan club as Lise and Andi dive into her latest book, The Light Brigade, a time travel military science fiction novel that explores themes of militarized capitalism, war, and connection through the eyes of grunt Dietz. Through tech that disassembles soldiers and sends them as beams of light into combat zones and reassembles them upon re-entry, Dietz realizes that she is experiencing the war between Earth and Mars differently than others: she’s jumping around its timeline, which gives her a unique and horrifying view of battles and comrades lost and gained. This is a uniquely layered, tightly-written story that stays with readers long after they finish the last page, as its themes resonate with contemporary issues.

Find more about Hugo-winning author Kameron Hurley at her website.
More information about The Light Brigade HERE.
Synopsis and review of The Light Brigade at Publishers Weekly.

Andi and Lise talk with Kameron Hurley on episode 52 of the Lez Geek Out! podcast HERE.

Also this week, Lise and Andi shout out the Golden Crown Literary Society convention, which is going on right now!

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Episode 57: Hot Fuzz

Andi and Lise talk about “queer coding” this week, and how it appeared in the 2007 movie Hot Fuzz, a British parody action comedy with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. HF is part of a related trilogy of movies called, loosely, the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, based on a joke from the first of the three, 2004’s Shaun of the Dead.

“Queer coding” means that a movie’s creators and characters don’t deny a queer subtext in a movie. In HF’s case, there was supposed to be a cisgender heterosexual female love interest, but instead, script writers Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright gave all her lines to the other male character, which resulted in a really interesting relationship between the two male main characters, that could be coded as queer and wasn’t denied by the characters or the writers.

Also, it’s just a hella fun movie.

For more info on HF and queer coding vs. queerbaiting, see Mary Kate McAlpine over at Medium.

For a peek at how the show’s writers and characters thought about HF as slash fiction, see Fanlore.

And Lise’s weekly woo-hoo is Amazon Prime’s Good Omens miniseries, in which sworn enemies an angel and a demon have to team up to save the world. It’s based in the 1990 novel of the same name by the Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett.

Andi’s woo-hoo is for the first season (not sure there’ll be more!) of the series Gentleman Jack, based on the 19th-century diaries of English noblewoman Anne Lister, who, if she had the terminology, would most likely have identified as lesbian.

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