It's a common (and tiresome) critique of historic or fantasy novels that place women in pre-industrial military roles that such a character and activity is simply implausible. "Women couldn't do the work." "A long-term disguise as a man is not believable." And so forth at tiresome length. The best counter to such critiques is to drown them in data. Alas, even that approach won't satisfy the more stubborn of the nay-sayers.
LHMP
Blog entry
One of the questions raised by today's LHMP post is, "What does it meant to identify a poem or a poet as 'lesbian'?" especially in an era with different categories and expectations than our own. I raised a similar question in yesterday's blog about queer characters in historical fiction. When we write a character in a historic setting, we're telling two stories: the story of how that character relates to the past, and the story of how that character relates to present-day readers.
The e-book giveaway for Through the Hourglass was quite a success in encouraging non-spam comments on the blog! I had twelve entrants (which may be a record for any random giveaway I've held to date) and the lucky winner is Andrew Barton. My blog software doesn't currently request e-mail addresses for commenters, so Andrew, you'll need to e-mail me through the contact link to get your e-book. (Specify epub or mobi format.)
I'd been thinking of doing a book giveaway here just to get some non-spam comments on my blog, and then the historical romance anthology Through the Hourglass, which includes my Margaret & Laudomia story, won a Golden Crown Literary Award this weekend and the publisher said we contributors could give away copies to celebrate.
OK, so the answer is that the blog doesn't auto-post yet. I must have been told that, but we discussed a lot of things in the website work sessions and the information is probably buried in the to-do list. But I'm still able to set up blog posts in advance and only have to hit the "publish" button on the relevant day.
I had another work session with my website designers this weekend and we're one more session away from the Go Live of the new site. This will not yet be the Go Live of the new LHMP interface, since that involves a few complicated technical problems (as well as a lot of clean-up of the existing data), so one of the interim tasks is making sure that nothing gets too broken during the two-part move. (I imagine I'll spend quite some time finding and correcting internal links in the archives so they point to the new LHMP home and not to LJ.)
This will be the first time when I publish a new LHMP entry directly to the new website. Maybe next week I’ll experiment with setting up a post-dated publication date. Exciting adventures!
Remember: Friday we start on publication #100 and I open (and explain) the combined promotional event for the LHMP and the upcoming release of The Mystic Marriage. Stay tuned and start thinking about what your favorite LHMP post has been.
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