I know what I'm bouncing off in both published queer SFF and a lot of more popular fanfic
If you feel like elaborating, I'd love to hear more. I said in another post that one bounce factor for me is having the emotional volume set to 11 all (or most) of the time. But I think there's a lot more to it that I haven't pinned down yet.
Some of my earliest queer lit reading was Mary Renault, who's interested in complex little ripples of emotion and whose volume never goes higher than about a 2. Her work, for all its many many flaws, sets the bar very high for profound emotion without melodrama.
the queer lit that has genre elements but generally gets positioned more on the literary side of the shelf
Got recs? Because I'm starting to give up on sff, sad as that makes me. And I'm contemplating how many queer men who wrote excellent sff--Wilson himself, and Hal Duncan, come immediately to mind--no longer seem to be writing it. I don't know their reasons, but I do know Duncan's books are out of print. The publishing economy is awful for everyone, but I'll bet it's especially awful for writers like that, when the sff audience seems increasingly to consist of (a) young women who grew up reading YA and fanfic, and (b) a small contingent of increasingly right-wing middle aged men.
no subject
If you feel like elaborating, I'd love to hear more. I said in another post that one bounce factor for me is having the emotional volume set to 11 all (or most) of the time. But I think there's a lot more to it that I haven't pinned down yet.
Some of my earliest queer lit reading was Mary Renault, who's interested in complex little ripples of emotion and whose volume never goes higher than about a 2. Her work, for all its many many flaws, sets the bar very high for profound emotion without melodrama.
the queer lit that has genre elements but generally gets positioned more on the literary side of the shelf
Got recs? Because I'm starting to give up on sff, sad as that makes me. And I'm contemplating how many queer men who wrote excellent sff--Wilson himself, and Hal Duncan, come immediately to mind--no longer seem to be writing it. I don't know their reasons, but I do know Duncan's books are out of print. The publishing economy is awful for everyone, but I'll bet it's especially awful for writers like that, when the sff audience seems increasingly to consist of (a) young women who grew up reading YA and fanfic, and (b) a small contingent of increasingly right-wing middle aged men.