Well, it’s been another rough couple of weeks here, unfortunately, and my last burst of productivity before the most recent trip to Huntsville turned out to just not be sustainable. The trip itself was a mixed bag. We accomplished a lot of clearing out of my partner’s late mother’s house, and we retrieved the majority of stuff that he was interested in keeping. However, as much as we got done, it wasn’t enough, and there’s still a decent amount of work still to be done as some yet-to-be-decided point in the future–only next time without air conditioning. On the bright side, even though we were a little overly optimistic about our ability to clear things out in a single weekend, we have a better strategy (or at least some ideas for a better strategy) for the next weekend we head down that should make that our last visit to Huntsville for a long time. Also, I finally got to try Dreamland ribs, which I was almost too exhausted to really enjoy but were almost certainly worth the drive all on their own.

The worst part, this time around, has just been the sheer amount of time it’s taken me to recover fully from the trip. Usually I drag for a couple of days after getting home, but honestly this weekend has been the first one since that I’ve actually felt pretty normal. I’m still not completely back up to speed, and I’m horrendously behind on all kinds of things, but I am finally feeling physically and mentally well enough to really dig into getting caught up. I’ve seen Ghostbusters twice and Star Trek: Beyond once already, so there will be reviews of those coming out this week (spoiler alert: I loved them both). While I haven’t been writing the last couple of weeks, I have been reading, so I’ve got plenty of book reviews planned as well.

You may have noticed a change in the look of the blog, which I’m much happier with than what I had going on before even if it is still a work in progress. In addition to the change in looks, I’ve got some ideas for some new regular features here at SF Bluestocking. Most notably, I’m currently trying to work out some kind of system for reproducing something kind of sort of like SF Signal’s link posts. I haven’t completely figured out how to not spend ages on collecting links every day, and I have a feeling that part of the method is going to mean a reduction in scope and/or frequency from what the wonderful folks at SF Signal spoiled us with all these years, but it was such a valuable resource for the community and I’d love to be able to provide some version of that here. That said, I don’t have an exact timetable yet for when I’ll be rolling out this and other changes. My partner and I still have another trip to Huntsville to wrap up (for real and finally) the last bit of his mother’s last affairs, and I’ve still got some other things to do this summer before my daughter (and niece and nephew) head back to school in the fall. Right now, though, my plan is to just roll changes out as I accomplish them, and whatever I don’t finish this summer I expect to make real strides on during September and October.

In the meantime, I’m hoping that things are going to be more normal from here on out in terms of writing and posting. I didn’t get much done this week, but I did catch up on all my internet reading–except for all the news coming out of SDCC, which will merit its own post or two early this week once I get through it all. For right now, here’s about three weeks’ worth of weekend links:

Fandom Following has been posting plenty of postmortem stuff on season six of Game of Thrones, but the part I’ve been most interested in has been their series on Sexism and Season 6.

• Sexism and Season 6: Part One takes apart the whole “Women on Top” thing in general.
• Sexism and Season 6: Part Two examines the individual women’s narratives presented in season six.

If you need a lolsob after that, I highly recommend checking out their Season 6 Carol Awards as well.

The David Gemmell Awards shortlist was announced, and voting is open until August 19, 2016.

There’s about a week left to vote for this year’s Hugo Awards, and Joe Sherry has finished reading all of this year’s nominated novellas and novelettes.

The table of contents for The Year’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories 2016 was released, and there’s some great stuff there.

Angry Robot Books turned seven, and publisher Marc Gascoigne stopped in at Fantasy Faction to talk about what he’s learned from founding an award-winning publishing house.

At Salon, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer talked about the value of diversity in science fiction.

Clayton Moore interviewed Ann and Jeff VanderMeer at Kirkus, where they talked about their most recent anthology–the wonderfully enormous Big Book of Science Fiction.

Also at Kirkus, a nice Andrew Liptak piece on The Absurd Kurt Vonnegut.

Meanwhile, at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, T.W. O’Brien writes about Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.

Also at the B&N blog, this nice interview with Faith writer Jody Houser. I loved the comic miniseries when I read it, and issue one of the ongoing book just came out this week.

The Book Smugglers’ Trope Anatomy series continued this month with a look at some of the most insidious and unpleasant narratives surrounding fatness.

It looks like Terry Pratchett’s Wee Free Men is going to be a movie, and penned by his daughter Rihanna.

Ghostbusters came out, and Kate McKinnon’s Jillian Holtzman is marvelously, joyously queer–as a salty parabola.

Gillian Anderson shared an amazing picture of young Kate McKinnon dressed as Scully from the X-Files.

Lethe Press now has a Patreon page where you can support their queer and speculative fiction.

The Learned Fangirl talked about The Never-Ending Debate Over Women in Comedy.

At Terrible Minds, S.L. Huang wrote on the subject of manpain.

Margaret Atwood was interviewed at LitHub, where she talked about Donald Trump, witches and flying cats.

Ursula K. LeGuin called on fantasy and sci-fi writers to envision alternatives to capitalism.

Speaking of Ursula LeGuin, Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press announced that they’ll be publishing an Earthsea omnibus in 2018 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the series.

Mithila Review has a great list of Asian science fiction and fantasy recommendations from some notable writers and editors.

Tor.com kicks off a series on 100 African Writers of SFF with a look at what’s going on in the genre in Nairobi.

At Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog, Sarah Kuhn talks about her favorite bit of her new novel, Heroine Complex.

Finally, Michi Trota also shows up there to talk about Uncanny Magazine‘s recently started Year Three Kickstarter.

If you back the project for just $25, you get a full year’s subscription to Uncanny, but there’s a ton of great rewards at all backer levels.