When we shift from historic individuals to literary figures, there's a corresponding shift in the emphasis within types of motifs. The reasons women might choose to pass as men in real life were often economic or practical. In literature, there must be a reason that is important to the plot. Given how (relatively) common it was in real life, cross-dressing to join the military is fairly rare in fiction, outside of the specific genre of "female cabin boy" ballads.
LHMP
Blog entry
I've written up a new set of tag descriptions. You can find the permanent page with access to the tag-links here. For reasons of internal website structure, this is going to duplicate the content of that tag essay to get it into the blog feed. (Life is complicated.) But you'll now find that permanent page in the LHMP drop-down menu.
The season of people posting their "top 10" or "10 favorite" for the past year is a bit fraught for authors. There's always the hope that maybe, just maybe, your work will have been among someone's favorites, or considered by someone to have been among the best of whatever category it is they're considering. For those of us whose work falls outside the popular categories, and when that work came out at the very end of the year when most people have already drawn up their lists, it's best just to close our hearts and move on.
Working through setting up the tag pages is taking longer than expected, so I'm going to do this in smaller chunks. I'll present each chunk in a blog entry then put them together into the permanent "tag essay" page when I have each group collected up. Why does it take so much work? Here's my process:
The purpose of tags on Lesbian Historic Motif Project posts is to make information relatively easy to find. The topics covered under “people/event tags” identify specific historic texts and authors, or historic individuals or events that are discussed in LHMP publications. This essay is intended to explain briefly how the “people/event” tags are being used.
We've come to the largest and most diverse set of LHMP tags: "People/Works/Events." It's taken me a while just to start organizing how I'm going to present these, and I've only barely started writing up the brief descriptions to accompany each one. So today's post is just a high-level overview. (I.e., I don't have anything else to post on LHMP day, so this is what you get.)
There's a new Lesbian Historic Motif Project podcast up on The Lesbian Talk Show. Check it out!
The correspondece of Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus reveals love between women in the African American community in post Civil War America.
I'm still considering whether I want to continue posting teasers for Mother of Souls now that it's out. They don't serve the same purpose now that people can actually go read the book, and it's getting harder and harder to pick interesting selections that don't include significant spoilers. So while I'm thinking about what I want to do with Writing Blog Tuesday, it seemed a good time to do a year-end summary of what I've produced this year. At this point, everything that's going to be published is out there.
Today's LHMP addition is a Tag Index Page for "Misc. Tags - Households, Relationships, and Groups". The set-up of this type of content page means I currently can't "embed" the index page itself in this blog post. Click through for the full content. Or check out the teasers below.
Pages
