I’m thrilled to say that this past week has actually been almost sort of normal after several weeks of hectic running around between Cincinnati and Huntsville and dealing with the final illness and death of my partner’s mother. While we still aren’t completely finished with that–we have one more trip to Huntsville coming up, just for a weekend, to finish cleaning out her house–I think the worst part was just not knowing what was going to happen or how long it might take, and that part is over. Now it’s just wrapping up loose ends, which is sad and hard but it’s a thing we can actually do something about instead of a thing that just makes us feel helpless.

On the bright side, I guess, we inherited a cat, Isabelle, who we love in spite of her being very antisocial, and yesterday we adopted a kitten, Spot, who we are hoping will be a friend for Isabelle and help encourage her to come out of her shell a little. It hasn’t worked so far, but Spot is freaking adorable (see header image). I haven’t had a kitten since I was a teenager, and I’d forgotten how much fun (and distracting–seriously, a kitten is nothing but a tiny destroyer of productivity) they are.

Also on the bright side, I recovered much more quickly from the last trip, so I’m starting to get caught up on some writing. This past week, I caught up on my Game of Thrones recaps (both Episode 8 and Episode 9 went up this week), wrote a couple of book reviews (for Pride’s Spell and Faith), and revisited my preseason predictions about Game of Thrones. I’m not quite where I’d like to be in terms of content output, but I’m getting more into the right neighborhood than I have been the past few weeks. Plus, with this season of Game of Thrones ending, I’ll soon have Mondays free for more reading (and writing about what I read).

All week I’ve been encouraging people to head over to Kickstarter to back Crossed Genres’ Hidden Youth anthology, which is a sequel to the Long Hidden anthology they published a couple of years ago. It’s got an excellent table of contents, editors, and cover art by the incomparable Julie Dillon, and there’s only 10 days left to back it. $10 will get you a copy of the Hidden Youth ebook when it’s finished. $15 will get you a copy of Long Hidden as well. Bart Kay from Crossed Genres talked more about the project in an interview earlier this week.

Speaking of crowdfunding, N.K. Jemisin talked about Patreon in an interview at Book Riot.

The Book Smugglers have announced the contributors for Speculative Fiction 2015. It’s not available for purchase, yet, but it will be soon. In the meantime, you can pick up the first Book Smugglers Quarterly Almanac.

Dark Horse is going to be publishing both Serenity and Avatar: The Last Airbender adult coloring books.

The winners of the 2016 Locus Awards were announced.

A shortlist was released for a new award inspired by late writer Eugie Foster–the Eugie Award.

Joe Sherry is still working his way through this year’s rather abysmal Hugo shortlist over at Nerds of a Feather.

A Fantastical Librarian interviewed Yoon Ha Lee about his new space opera, Ninefox Gambit.

At Tor.com, Katherine Langrish has some thoughts on writing meaningful fantasy.

Jim C. Hines takes a look at what it would look like if we women were written they same way men are: Part One, Part Two.

Justine Larbelestier has some advice on writing POC protagonists as a white writer.

Brandon Sanderson is posting his lectures on writing online.

The Frankenstein Bicentennial Project and NaNoWriMo are recreating the dare that inspired Frankenstein.

Meanwhile, these new illustrations for Frankenstein are lovely.

If you’re interested in the horror genre more generally, you must check out A History of Horror on Vimeo:

“Watch Game of Thrones with Leslie Jones” has been added to my (and no doubt lots of other folks’) bucket lists.

Apparently women in the UK are only just now allowed to participate in professional jousting events.

Book Riot lists 100 Must-Read Books of Speculative Fiction in Translation.

Hot on the heels of word that Hulu is doing The Handmaid’s Tale comes the news that Netflix is adapting Margaret Atwood’s historical novel, Alias Grace.

HBO released a first trailer for their upcoming SF show, Westworld, which is making me rethink my plan to cancel my HBO Now subscription now that Game of Thrones is over:

The first trailer for The Girl With All the Gifts was also released this week. I haven’t read the book, but the movie looks excellent:

So, this has been an exhausting week in every sense of the word. This past weekend, my partner and I were in Huntsville again, this time to finalize final arrangements after his mother passed away earlier last week. We actually made it home by mid-week, but we’re really only just now getting more or less recovered and settled back in at home, partly because we’ve ended up adopting his mother’s cat, Isabelle, and it’s taking her a while to get settled. The bad news is that we’re not entirely done with Huntsville. We’re still going to have to go back in a couple of weeks for at least another day or two in order to finish going through his mom’s house. The good news is that that should be about it, and life should soon be pretty much back to normal (plus cat).

Unfortunately, this has made for another profoundly unproductive week. I haven’t even managed to finish my usual Game of Thrones recap, though I do plan to have it finished before this week’s episode airs. I’ll also be back to live/drunk-tweeting the episode this week. Sadly, last week it was all we could do to use our cell data to stream the show to where we were camping in Huntsville.

Finally, I should have something approaching a normal book reviewing schedule from here on out. I’ve got several reviews nearly finished, and I’ve already made a decent start on my summer reading list. Now I just need to get caught up on writing, which will be happening soon. I actually expect this week to be a good one for productivity, as I don’t have a ton else to do for the first time in a long while. On the bright side, though I didn’t get any real writing done this week, I did do a good deal of reading, including internet reading.

This week marks the 200th anniversary of the dream that inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. There’s a writing contest, judged by Elizabeth Bear, being held to celebrate, and there’s never a bad time to reflect upon the influence of Shelley’s novel and its continuing relevance.

In sad news this week, Lois Duncan has passed away at age 82. I don’t know anyone of my generation who isn’t at least passingly familiar with her work, which has functioned as an entry point to genre for teens for many years.

The finalists for this year’s John W. Campbell Memorial Award have been announced.

Nalo Hopkinson announced an altogether new award, the Lemonade Award, “an annual kindness award to recognize five people and groups who in the previous year have done something that makes positive change in science fiction community.”

Joe Sherry continues his Hugo reading at Nerds of a Feather. This week he rated the Best Novel finalists.

Feminist Frequency broke down the gender balance of the games showcased at this year’s E3. It’s not encouraging. Which isn’t surprising, but still.

Carrie Fisher is getting an advice column over at The Guardian.

The Toast finally tells us what it would be like if Oscar Isaac was your boyfriend.

There’s a brand new Laura Mvula album, and it’s incredible, obviously.

The Mary Sue interviewed Kameron Hurley.

Sofia Samatar was interviewed over at the Bookslinger.

This week marked the release of Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit, which I haven’t gotten around to quite yet, but is one of my most anticipated new releases of 2016. Lee has been making the rounds of the SFF blogosphere to promote the book, and it’s done nothing but whet my appetite for it.

• Yoon Ha Lee guest post at Terribleminds: 5 Things I Learned While Writing Ninefox Gambit
• SFF in Conversation at the Book Smugglers: Yoon Ha Lee on Being Trans
• The Big Idea: Yoon Ha Lee
• Yoon Ha Lee at the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog: Better Sci-Fi Through Gaming

File 770 interviewed Cixin Liu about The Three-Body Problem and Chinese sci-fi.

Juliette Wade guest-posted at Ann Leckie’s blog to talk about the world building in Ancillary Justice.

I’m starting to feel as if I will never be productive again, to be honest. This week was looking to be better than the last couple, but then my partner’s mom died on Monday. We had been planning to come back to Huntsville this coming Tuesday (6/14), but instead we ended up scrambling for funds in order to get back down here sooner so we can arrange things–which neither of us really know how to do, though Google has been a great help in that regard. So now, we are camping to save money because it turns out that travel and funerals are expensive and hoping to wrap things up before potentially heavy rains move in in a few days.

Still, best case scenario I think we’re looking at being home around Wednesday, and in the meantime we have limited internet access (curse you, 3 GB data plan) and are going to be pretty busy with wrapping up his mother’s final affairs. I am hoping to get a good amount of writing done this week, time permitting, since that can be done offline, and I do plan to watch and livetweet Game of Thrones as usual (we’re pretty sure that won’t take us over on our data). However, I’m not going to promise my normal recap on Monday, as that’s when we’ll be able to get to work on some of the stuff that we can only do on business days, and I’m not certain when I’ll have time/internet to actually post any of the things I hope to finish writing.

If there is any bright side to any of this, it’s that we are camping at Monte Sano State Park, which is very pretty (see header image). Also, I guess I am also hoping to do some reading while I’m here, even if I haven’t finished writing about everything I read last time we were here.

All that said, this is also why there aren’t a ton of Weekend Links this week. Sadly, I just haven’t had the time, and as I mentioned last week, I’m still really, really feeling the loss of SF Signal’s link posts. I’m certain that I’m missing out on all kinds of stuff that I just don’t have time to search out on my own.

I’ve already posted my annual Summer Reading List, which I’ll be working on this week, but if you’re looking for an even more comprehensive list of must-read books this summer, io9 has you covered.

If you’re not already looking forward to fall, you should be. Tor.com just revealed the covers and descriptions for their Fall 2016 line-up, and it’s so exciting. You guys. That cover for A Taste of Honey. And there’s another Lychford book by Paul Cornell. I mean, I read all the Tor.com novellas anyway, but this looks like it’s a bumper crop.

If you need something to read now, I cannot recommend Lightspeed‘s People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! special issue enough. Read the editors’ manifesto here, and then go buy the magazine.

For something a little different, you can check out David Brin’s list of some of the best sci-fi webcomics around. I’m not super into webcomics, myself, so it’s nice to have someone else do the work of finding and suggesting a few.

There’s a new Feminist Frequency video up! In “Lingerie is Not Armor” Anita talks about the absurd bullshit people dress women in in video games. This isn’t just a problem in video games, though. For more info than you could ever want on this subject, check out Bikini Armor Battle Damage.

I did not realize that Malka Older and Daniel Jose Older were siblings, but now I do, and this interview/discussion with them is excellent.