Melissa, A Watkins(also a writer and a bookworm)

I'm here all weekend!

(I have got to get better at this promotions thing.)

I keep forgetting to check this app. *waves* What's going on?

It's so strange, as a Black person, to go to events about our culture in non-Black spaces.

I'm at this thing about Wu-Tang Clan and when the speaker(also Black) brought up the 36 Chambers not ONE person hollered "Wu-TANG!".

I'm not sure if I'd be more offended if they had. 😂

Esperance, Adam Oyebanji

Oh this was GOOD good. Totally surprised me. Wrote it up for May Lightspeed, will say more then.

And if you don't know how to be or make friends with IRL Black people, then the answer is always NO YOU CANNOT DO THE THING. Take them braids out. That ain't the Harlem Shake anyway. Our mac n cheese is not runny, IDC IDC just be you and your people and leave us alone unless we're friends.

I will never enjoy those posts that are like "hi, I'm (xyz ethnicity), can I do this (Black cultural thing)?"

OMG go make a friend.

The Get-Together, by @ctaylorbutler.bsky.social, illustrated by Lonnie Ollivierre.

Picture book about a multi-generational family gathering. So much fun, and beautifully illustrated. Got this for a kid I know, want to keep it for myself.

That Time I Got Drunk and Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf, by Kimberly Lemming.

Lemming really doesn't miss with her Blackety-Black monster romances--they're always cute, hot, and laugh out loud funny. I will say I wasn't expecting the tentacles, though.

Southern Comfort, by Sandra Kitt

Bougie beach romance by one of the Black romance OGs. So cute. Sooooo dated! (Although it was published in '04, not '94 as I'd assumed.) Scratched a good nostalgia itch.

A Palace Near The Wind, Ai Jiang

Ecological science fantasy with a lot of interesting twists and a painfully naive main character. Wrote about it for April Lightspeed so won't say more here.

The Coddling of the American Mind, by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff

Oooooh, I hated this book.

Great reference section tho.

Condomnauts by Yoss, translated by David Frye

REALLY weird sci-fi about a class of intergalactic sex workers who are also first contact alien ambassadors. The main character is a queer Afro-Cubano but still a little heavy on the regressive machismo for me. Also--content warnings abound.

The Very Fat Conker, Enid Blyton. Read this as a kid and it's been tickling the edges of my memory lately so tracked it down. Will refrain from making boredom in the pre-TV age jokes.

I'm not a "putting this in the universe" kind of person but I would really love to write a limited streaming series about Bill Pickett sometime in the next 5 years.

It tickles me that the village in Kimberly Lemming's Mead Mishaps series is called Boohail. They be hailing the hell out of some boos, for sure.

Hero.

SO MANY REJECTIONS LATELY. SO MANY FOLLOWUP SUBMISSIONS.

And yet I continue to write.

If this behavior were transported to any other part of my life, it would probably be considered a kink.

a drag queen is speaking into a microphone and says filth is my life . ALT: a drag queen is speaking into a microphone and says filth is my life .

Me, staring at a crunchy filthy draft covered in notes and wrong verb tenses, hoping it'll become a well-wrought story someday...

There is a Police Officer in My Foyer | Nicole Chulick This essay by Black woman writer Nicole Chulick is an apology, a lament, a plea for understanding as she grasps hold of the anger that always slips from her fingers. Exploring, in a whisper, the compu...

"America likes its angry Black women best when we are poor and husband-less and mourning. I’m simply angry and Black. I apologize if that is not enough."

Nicole Chulick WROTE this. Thank you for the words.

www.midnightandindigo.com/police-offic...

I don't know how I stumbled on this essay, but I love it.

"My dad hated work before hating work was cool. His first job in the United States was as a clerk at the San Jose Department of Motor Vehicles on Alma Street. It was 1975 and the position paid $6 an hour."

Here’s what we did today

Leontyne Price is still living, and today is her 97th birthday.

If you don't know the name, pause your day and look her up now.

They're all in the voices of very different people--a s*x worker, a developmentally disabled factory worker, a renegade mayor, a repentant former megachurch pastor, etc. I haven't done much with them because I never felt confident about the voices. But maybe I should do something with them now.

In 2002-ish, I started writing interconnected short stories about different ways of resistance in a future America that had become a fearful wasteland of company towns controlled by religious fascists.

Elon Musk Wants What He Can’t Have: Wikipedia Musk and other right-wing tech figures have been on a campaign to delegitimize the digital encyclopedia. What happens if they succeed?

Might be a good time to donate to Wikipedia. Gift article (The Atlantic): www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

I just found out that Joseph Heller wrote a sequel to Catch-22. It's called Closing Time, and it's still in print. It's also set in the 90s, while Catch-22 takes place in WWII.

Not really in the mood to read war satire right now but will keep an eye out for it.

I love how these stories have similar pathways, but deeply different settings and resolutions.

The Godhood of Ima Day - Lightspeed Magazine When they take the god out of you, you wonder at first if you’ve been killed, but it wasn’t very well done, and you wish someone would hurry up and finish the job. You were strapped down and touched w...

The Godhood of Ima Day, by Cressida Blake Roe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-...

After the God Has Moved On - Lightspeed Magazine We saw her staggering down the promenade, gills flaring as she sucked for the gods’ aether that no longer fueled her breathing. By her gasping breaths we knew the god had moved on, swimming the invisi...

After the God Has Moved On, by Kate Elliott
www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/afte...

If I had a dollar for every time in the past 6 months I read a really good story in Lightspeed that explored the idea of being a temporary, uncomfortable vessel for the gods...

I'd have two dollars, but it's cool that it's happened twice.

The stories in question...