Author love

Oh, I knew there was a reason I liked Tamora Pierce!

I mean, first, she's a good writer. If her writing were food, it would be something like chicken divan--not especially fancy or highfalutin', but good, solid, wholesome, comforting food. Food you would bring to a family potluck. Food the other people in your house will also gobble up. (Can you tell what I made for dinner tonight? ;P )

Second, she wrote good solid female characters back before it was common to do that. I mean, back when the covers of "Sword and Sorceress" (a fairly ground-breaking series of short story anthologies in which the main characters were female) looked like this*:


she wrote a series with a female lead who was a person and not a sex object. And somehow, she managed to get a cover for the books that looked like this:


Plus, she has lesbian characters in her books without making a huge thing of it. You know, just like we're normal people who would live in the world or something. ;P

THIRD, not only does she have ONE public livejournal where she writes about the writing process and stuff like that, but she ALSO has a SECOND public livejournal where she writes about POLITICS and stuff.

What's even better? From what I've read thus far, her politics are really good (that is, if you're a wacky feminist like I am).



Now, I've just got to get over my shyness, and post a comment one of these days. I keep reminding myself that if she has them public, it's because she's writing stuff that she doesn't mind having read by people who have been reading her books for, oh, the last 22 years. She would not have put a link to her ljs on her main website if she didn't want people to look at them. She responds thoughtfully to the comments that people make to her posts.

But... but... I guess it's that worry that she will be annoyed by my comments or something. Or that it's stalker-like to read her blogs. But come to think of it, it's probably LESS stalker like to read and comment than to just read. Yeah. Let's see whether that inspires me to comment.


*And yes, I'm aware that the stories INSIDE "Sword and Sorceress" weren't nearly as offensive as the covers would imply, and that there were other ground-breaking writers of sci-fi/fantasy both before and after Tamora Pierce. And I like lots of them, too, and have some serious author-love for a lot of other writers. So no need to educate me on the vast array of feminist sf/f available in the mid-eighties. (Or now, for that matter, since two or three decades has really seen some progress on that front.)