It’s been another sort of slow week for me in terms of writing, primarily because I’ve been playing a lot of the new World of Warcraft expansion. I hadn’t even planned on buying it, to be honest, but it turns out that it’s really good, the most fun I’ve had playing WoW since probably Wrath of the Lich King. However, it also hasn’t helped that I think I’ve been slightly depressed lately, and nothing kills motivation like clinical depression. Last weekend, I didn’t even get around to doing my regular weekend links.

Instead, I’ve been engaging in a lot of self-care, and I think I’ve managed to head off anything more serious. After rushing to max level with my druid in WoW (Bigmamapain on Dalaran server, if you want to say hi), I’m sure to be spending less time in the game going forward. I’ve been working on wrapping up the last bits of what I’ll be able to finish from my summer reading list, and I should have my autumn list out this week, along with some kind of plan on how to accomplish my goals with a little more regularity going forward. I hate to say, but I think I’m going to have to start giving myself deadlines. This summer (and, really, the whole year before that, what with breaking my foot and all) saw some major disruptions to the routine I had gotten myself into, and I need to figure out some way to get back into a reasonable groove of exercising, eating healthy, reading and writing. I was much happier and healthier when I was doing those things in reasonable proportion to each other.

I’m currently reading Nisi Shawl’s new novel, Everfair, which was one of my most anticipated new releases this fall. So far, it’s excellent, and I’ve also been enjoying her posts and interviews around the internet this week:

• The Book Riot Live Interview: Nisi Shawl
• “Representing My Equals” at Tor/Forge Blog
• SFF in Conversation: Nisi Shawl, Everfair, and “About What I Did” at Book Smugglers
• The Big Idea: Nisi Shawl
• Nisi Shawl Discusses Everfair, Diversity in Publishing, and Giving a Voice to Those Silenced by History at Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog

The other big news of the week was the 50th anniversary of Star Trek:

• The Kickstarted documentary For the Love of Spock is now available through iTunes and Vimeo, with DVD and Blu-ray available for pre-order. It is excellent, and I highly recommend at least renting it.
• Star Trek writer D.C. Fontana was interviewed at the Daily Dot.
• Happy 50th Birthday to Star Trek at the Wertzone (includes links to all the previous posts in Adam Whitehead’s Star Trek at 50 series as well)
• The Making of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Greatest Episode, “The Inner Light” at io9
• “What Deep Space Nine does that no other Star Trek series can” by Annalee Newitz at Ars Technica
• For Star Trek‘s 50th, NASA Interviews Nichelle Nichols & George Takei About Fiction Inspiring Reality at the Mary Sue
• “This is Our Work: What Star Trek Asks of Us” by Mary Anne Mohanraj at Uncanny Magazine
• “All True, Especially the Lies–Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cardassia” by Una McCormick at Uncanny Magazine
• “To Boldly Imagine: Star Trek’s Half Century” by Andrew Liptak at Kirkus

The winners of the 2016 Aurora Awards have been announced.

The African Speculative Fiction Society has announced the creation of a new award for African writers of SFF, the Nommos.

If you like Lady Business, you’ll be happy to learn that you can now support them on Patreon.

N.K. Jemisin was interviewed at The Atlantic. As always, everything she says is worth reading.

On the eve of publishing her anthology, Women of Futures Past, editor Kristine Katherine Rusch has a lot of feelings.

At LitHub, Gabrielle Bellot writes on the magic of Miyazaki’s literary imagination.

Foz Meadows answers eight questions at Tor.com. At her own blog, Meadows wrote a great post this week about the plausibility of diversity.

Feminist Frequency looks at body diversity in video games:

I read Charlotte Ashley’s “La Héron” months ago when it was included in the Up and Coming anthology of work by Campbell Award-eligible writers, and it’s definitely a story that has stuck with me. This week “La Héron” showed up on Podcastle. I highly recommend it.

I know I’ve talked many times about how much I love Tor.com’s novellas. If you are still on the fence about them, you can now download a sampler for free.

Finally, I haven’t started reading it yet, but I’m really excited about this new free anthology from Islam and Science Fiction, Islamicates.

I’m not even going to make excuses for this week’s lack of writing productivity. I did do some other stuff, though, like cooking some meals, getting my daughter all ready for 8th grade, baking some things, playing No Man’s Sky and finally watching Stranger Things. I’ve also been trying to get through a little more of my summer reading list while trying to figure out my fall plan, so I’ve been reading a good bit. I even recorded a little bit for a Cabbages and Kings podcast about this year’s Clarke Award shortlist, where I talk a little about why I loved The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet so much. I feel as if I’ve been busy, just not writing. I didn’t even get started on this until late Sunday and only then because our planned evening excursion to see the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream outdoors was aborted due to a storm.

Last weekend, of course, was this year’s Hugo Awards ceremony at MidAmeriCon, which I didn’t get to attend. I did watch the live stream of the actual event, however, and it was nice to see Vox Day and his Rabid Puppies lose again (in pretty much every conceivable way, to be honest). What I was struck by, personally, was how different the atmosphere seemed this time around. Last year, the Puppies and their slates managed to cast a pall around the whole proceeding, and numerous No Awards didn’t do much to alleviate things. This year, most people seemed to be having fun, and there were only two No Awards among a whole bunch of deserving winners.

Cora Buhlert’s Hugo posts are worth checking out if you want the full scoop, as she does a great job of collecting all the various posts on these things.

The longlists and votecounts for this year’s Hugos were released right after the ceremony.

Chaos Horizon did some immediate analysis that suggests that the Puppies may be losing interest in this game.

Almost Diamonds has a de-Puppied shortlist.

Due to the Puppies once again interfering with the real awards, George R.R. Martin once again handed out Alfies at the Hugo losers’ party.

N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season took home the award for Best Novel, which it richly deserves. I was genuinely surprised to see it win against Uprooted, which has won pretty much every other award there is, and the popular Seveneves and well-liked Ancillary Mercy, but it was definitely my top vote.

Michi Trota of Uncanny Magazine became the first Filipina to win a Hugo, and her acceptance speech was wonderful.

At Book Riot, Troy L. Wiggins explains why N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor’s Hugo wins are a victory for black readers.

Chuck Tingle dealt with his Hugo loss exactly how one could expect:

And Tor.com takes a look at what this year’s winners will be working on next.

There’s still nine more days on the Hath No Fury Kickstarter campaign, and they’re well into stretch goals at this point. This is shaping up to be an excellent anthology, and $10 gets you a digital copy of it.

The project was featured this week at Geeks of Doom, and editors Melanie Meadors and J.M. Martin also appeared on the A Kind Voice podcast to talk about it.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time won the Clarke Award.

Lady Business has introduced a new feature, Raiders of the Lost ARC, which kicks off with Courtney Schafer sharing some underappreciated novels of the 1980s.

Maria Dahvana Headley and Victor LaValle talked Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the book’s 200th anniversary.

Malka Older was on Midnight in Karachi, and I cannot wait til November’s elections to be over so I can maybe start reading Infomocracy.

Brain Pickings dug up a recording of Neil Gaiman reading “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury.”

I loved Effie Seiberg’s short “Thundergod in Therapy” when I read it months ago, so I was pleased to see it on Podcastle this week.

Feminist Fiction and Tor.com both had posts on rape in fantasy this week. The general message, as always, is do better.

From LitHub, “There Is No Secret to Writing People Who Don’t Look Like You” has been going viral this week. It’s well worth a read for any writing types.

Bitch Media talked about the limits of celebrity feminism. Turns out celebrity feminists have been plain old fallible humans all along.

This Pornokitsch review of No Man’s Sky manages to touch on pretty much everything that I find so wonderfully enchanting about the game.

Even if you hated Ghostbusters, you have to admit that its VFX were excellent:

I will have more thoughts on Stranger Things coming out this week, but in the meantime I’m just glad I’m not the only one who really fell in love with Barb:

While I’m still slightly concerned that I’m never going to be truly productive ever again, this week was definitely an improvement. Regardless, I didn’t accomplish half what I would have liked to finish. Instead, I finished school shopping for my daughter, read a couple of books, finally watched Suffragette (It was good. I cried.), cooked some meals, and even exercised some in an effort to try and get back into a more healthful routine. All of which is good, but obviously not what I had hoped to spend the week doing.

Still, it wasn’t a bad week, all things considered. The exercise, in particular, goes a long way towards improving my energy level–I’m also quitting Red Bull, which doesn’t help anything (except my chances of developing diabetes, probably)–but the truth is that there just are never enough hours in the day for me to do everything I want. One of these days I’m going to come to terms with this.

The Kickstarter for Ragnarok Publications’ Hath No Fury anthology hit its funding goal this week and has moved along to working towards stretch goals. Meanwhile, editor Melanie Meadors has started hoofing it around the SFF blogosphere to promote the project. You can read her guest post at Terrible Minds and her great interview at Fantasy Book Critic.

Yesterday was H.P. Lovecraft’s birthday, and earlier this week saw the publication of Kij Johnson’s Lovecraft-inspired Tor.com novella, The Dream-Quest of Velitt Boe, which has made this a bit of a Lovecraft[ian]-heavy week in terms of internet reading and listening.

• At the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, there’s a wonderful roundtable discussion between Kij Johnson and fellow Lovecraft-inspired authors Kassandra Khaw and Ruthanna Emrys where they talk about reclaiming the Lovecraft Mythos.
• Kij Johnson appeared on Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy this week to promote her book.
• At Kirkus, John DeNardo points out that Lovecraftian fiction is alive and well, with an excellent list of recent books to check out.

Tangentially related (because there’s a cat in The Dream-Quest of Velitt Boe) is the Wertzone’s post on the cats of science fiction and fantasy.

Mothership Zeta published a look at some of the other companion animals in popular fantasy. I don’t know about you, but I still want a Pern dragon, even after 25 years since I first discovered Dragonflight.

At Ars Technica, Annalee Newitz writes about why Star Trek keeps going back to its roots.

The Establishment covers the evolution of LGBTQ+ YA literature.

Book Riot lists SF in translation for Women in Translation Month.

There were two movie trailers of note that dropped this week, for Hidden Figures–about black women working at NASA in the early 1960s–and for Arrival, based on the Ted Chiang short story “Story of Your Life.” Both of these look excellent.

Finally, this happened:

Which is mostly a reminder to me that I should get back on track with my Dune readalong, but is also a reminder of how awesome Kyle MacLachlan is.

So, I am completely over 2016 already. In a year that has already been full of illness, stress, death, and grieving, this week added one more to the pile. Isabelle, the cat that we inherited from my partner’s late mother, passed away unexpectedly. In hindsight, I think she was probably sick–she’d been not eating very well for a couple of weeks, but I’d chalked it up to a change in her food and my daughter being out of town for a week–but two vets had looked at her and said she was healthy less than two months ago, so there’s really no telling what happened. She was mostly unfriendly and highly neurotic, she only really seemed to bond with my daughter, and we didn’t have her very long, but we loved her and we miss her.

I feel like most of this year (and part of last year, what with breaking my foot) has just been about me justifying why I haven’t accomplished things I intended to do or explaining away my lack of productivity, but come on. It really has been a fucking doozy. It’s like every time we return to some type of normalcy, another thing happens to derail things. So, it’s been a sad week, really. It started off okay, but quickly went straight to hell, and the last few days have been spent largely just feeling sad (and sore–turns out gravedigging is hard, even for a cat), reading (An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows), and playing video games (No Man’s Sky).

Still, I did manage to find a few things of interest on the internet this week.

Uncanny Magazine‘s Year Three Kickstarter has just over two days left, and they’re well into stretch goal territory now. Sure, you can buy the issues later, but if you support it now, you’ll help ensure that each issue is extra-full of great fiction and essays.

Meanwhile, Ragnarok Publications’ just started a Kickstarter for Hath No Fury, a new anthology of stories with female protagonists:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmmartin/hath-no-fury-an-anthology-where-women-take-the-lea

Naomi Novik’s Uprooted is the winner of this year’s Mythopoeic Award.

William Gibson did a Q&A over at Gizmodo that is a reminder of why we all ought to read more William Gibson.

Sady Doyle’s piece on Suicide Squad encapsulates about 80% of why I’m in no hurry to go see it. (The other 20% is Jared Leto.)

Tor.com lists 10 SFF anthologies in translation from around the world.

Renay at Lady Business came up with this list of 60 essential sci-fi and fantasy reads, and it’s pretty much my favorite thing of the week.

Sarah Gailey’s essay “In Defense of Villainesses” is pretty great, too, though.

If you aren’t reading Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s comic, Monstress, you ought to be. Then you should go read this profile of them over at the B&N Sci-fi and Fantasy Blog.

N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate is probably my most-anticipated read of 2016, and it’s coming out in just a couple of days. Lit Hub takes a closer look at the radical sensibility that sets this series apart from so much other epic fantasy.

The Mary Sue asks if queer representation counts if it’s unconfirmed. Spoiler: Nope, not really.

Mythcreants has some tips for creating realistic cultures.

Finally, a new trailer for Rogue One dropped, and it looks amazing:

This week has been more or less normal, which is nice. I haven’t been quite as productive as I’d like to have been, but I did manage to churn out reviews for a couple of movies I’ve seen recently, and I read all of the Saga trade paperbacks that I ordered a few weeks ago (how have I never checked out that comic before?). It’s also been nice enough to go outside a little, and I caught a few new Pokemon. Finally, I’m also working on quitting energy drinks and getting back in the habits of eating healthy and exercising that I was doing so well at before I broke my foot last year. This all kind of sucks because I love Red Bull and hate exercise and healthy eating, but the truth is that I do feel better and get more done when I take better care of myself.

It’s also been a somewhat slow week for me in internet-ing, mostly because of the reading and being out of doors, but I did find a few things of interest to share.

First of all, I know I shared it last week already, but if you haven’t read it yet Fireside Fiction’s Special Report on #BlackSpecFic is absolutely required reading.

As is Emma Newman’s guest post at The Mary Sue, where she talks about why feminism in fantasy is so important.

Also at the Mary Sue this week was a wonderful interview with author Becky Chambers, who is every bit as lovely as you would expect after reading her novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

N.K. Jemisin was interviewed for this month’s Clarkesworld, which has done nothing but whet my anticipation for The Obelisk Gate, the second book in her Broken Earth trilogy.

If you only listen to one thing from this week, be sure to check out Margaret Atwood on Midnight in Karachi.

Book Riot offered some much-deserved praise for antiheroines.

At Mythcreants, they picked apart six bad arguments against social justice in speculative fiction.

Fandom Following finally posted the third part of their breakdown of the rampant and virulent sexism in Game of Thrones’ sixth season.

There were two bits of GRRM news this week: first, the announcement of a special 20th anniversary edition of Game of Thrones, then the news that Wildcards has been optioned for television.