A few things make a post

[annathepiper]

Some good reading on the Intarwebz today! First up, I bring you today’s Big Idea column over at the Whatever, where Mr. Scalzi brings word of Brad Meltzer’s new children’s books about Amelia Earhart and Abraham Lincoln. Parents of small children, especially daughters, go check this out. Especially if you’re fans of Calvin and Hobbes. The art for the Amelia book looks adorable.

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Meanwhile, Jim Hines has put up a good post today going over a writing advice question I hear time and again: i.e., whether you should try to write to the market. I said over there, and I’ll say here too, that even though “don’t try to write to the market” and “be aware of the market” seem contradictory on the surface, for me they’re actually kind of not. You want to be aware of what people who aren’t you are writing, so you aren’t writing in a complete and utter vacuum, and accidentally writing stuff that people lost interest in reading five or ten or even more years ago. Plus, you never know what awesome ideas you may have spark for your next book.

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Fellow Carina fantasy author Shawna Thomas is talking up her work over at Eleri Stone’s place, and in particular about coming-of-age fantasy. Go give her a look, ’cause fantasy by Carina is love!

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I’ve been following the news posts on TheOneRing.net for a while now, because hi, yeah, Tolkien geek, yo. But this post of theirs made me up and join their message forums for the express purpose of voicing my appreciation to their forums member who wrote some nice fanfic about Dís, the mother of the dwarves Kíli and Fíli, the only female dwarf Tolkien ever named. Looks like Cirashala’s getting her epic on with further fanfic about the character, too, based on what she’s saying in the thread that the news post links to. I approve!

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And last but least, speaking of Tolkien, I’m posting about reading fantasy in other languages over on Here Be Magic today! I talk up the Trilingual Hobbit Reread, but also a couple of the novels I want to read out of Quebec SF/F as well, like the ones by Élodie Tirel I’ve been talking about, as well as Esther Rochon.

C’mon over and tell me about nifty non-Anglophone genre works English speakers should know about, won’t you?

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Comments

[vatine]

There are, of course, the two queens of YA fantasy. On one hand, Swedish Astrid Lindgren (in the "definitely fantasy" we have The Brothers Lionheart, Mio, my Son and Ronja, the robber's daughter; the Pippi Longstocking corpus probably falls within "fantasy" as well) and on the other, Finnish (although I believe Swedish-speaking) Tove Jansson, whose wife (well, I guess they weren't technically married, since I believe same-sex marriage wasn't legally available in Finland at the time) hailed from Seattle. That's essentially the Moomin corpus.

On the crime/thriller side, it seems most of the good Swedish stuff is now all over the anglosphere (Mankell, et. al.).

On the somewhat-weird-SF side, Denis Lindbohm is a prime example, but I have absolutely no idea what the state of translation is.

If you're looking for classic (in the sense of "old", not necessarily in the sense of "brilliant") Scandawegian Sf, there's Oxygen and Aromasia, from 1878,