quizcustodiet

Favourite author gender and genre

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 15:15:42 GMT

My usual "go to sleep" tactic is thinking about something interesting but unstressful, e.g
"What would I do first if I won the lottery?", "what tracks would I pick for desert island discs?", "can I think of perfectly normal backgrounds for RPG characters (rather than the cliche traumatic ones like [bad force] murdered my village and I want revenge!)"

Recently I was thinking about my favourite fantasy and SF authors and noticed a funny disparity - see below.
( The lists )
My fantasy list is pretty gender balanced. My sci-fi list... is not. I think a lot of it comes from sub-genre preferences: I'm mostly into military SF which I can imagine being less common for female SF authors. ("Some Desperate Glory" by Emily Tesh was one of my favourite books last year but I won't put her into the favourite author list while I've only read one book!)

Interested to hear if other people have similar differences between genres or if it's just me!

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Parenting

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 04:48:37 GMT

Hello,

Later than advertised, some thoughts about parenting. Appropriately enough, I'm starting this while sitting on the steps at half five waiting to see if Arjun is awake for the day now or just taking a quick break from sleep.

In general, I was surprised by how massive the step up to two kids was. Logically you'd think it would be smaller than 0 to 1, but if so that's hard to remember given that 0 was a long time ago! Basically we'd gotten to a point where we were feeling really confident with Jovan, and suddenly we were faced with how to do all of that and deal with a baby as well.

I've been on shared parental leave since 1 April. With lockdown, that's been a bit more intense than I bargained for - I'd been expecting to have Jovan in nursery three days a week, and to have some places to go outside the house! Fortunately Southwark has kept the parks open. Running Jovan around and giving Arjun some fresh air are both key to a good day, and we don't have a garden so much as a ground-level balcony with extra pruning. Shreena has been amazing about building some breaks into her (very busy) new job so that she can help with the kids for a bit of a break during the day.

Arjun is delightful- one of the things that has been great about the last few weeks has been how fast he's warmed up to me. Shreena is still definitely the center of his universe, but I feel like I've moved several galaxies in towards the centre with the parental leave.

At the moment, Arjun is 9 months old. He's almost walking, but hasn't really bothered with crawling. He is a total force for chaos, charging around the house holding on to our hands looking for things he can knock over or bang with a stick. He's delightful! He thinks Jovan is the funniest person in the world, but still stands his ground when (e.g.) Jovan tries to take a toy he's playing with.

Jovan has overall been really good with Arjun, but is definitely jealous of time that Shreena or I spend with Arjun. I'm hoping that will improve when Arjun is walking completely on his own and they can play together more actively!

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Amazon Author Recommendations

Fri, 24 Jan 2020 20:18:22 GMT

Hello,

Long time no post - apologies! I'm hoping to be able to give a career update in the next month or so, and I should also post some thoughts about parenting two at some point. But the kids had me up at 5 today so I'm out of brainpower, and what you're getting is some authors I've really enjoyed on Kindle.

Most of these I've picked up through the Amazon Daily Deal (as I'm willing to hazard 99p on a lot), but I've subsequently bought basically everything they had on sale so I wanted to flag them for others who might be interested.

Drew Hayes

I came to Drew Hayes' work through the Spells, Swords and Stealth series, which focuses on what happens when 4 non-player characters in a fairly typical tabletop RPG (i.e. it's totally meant to be some edition of Dungeons and Dragons!). That summary could have been written to get me to buy a book, and it worked, but it was carried through with a lot of style and polish. In my opinion the characterisation is ok but not amazing (in particular, Eric and Gromph are a bit elusive - Thistle is clearly the POV character and gets most of the development) but the world-building really shines and the party banter is excellent.

Based on how much I enjoyed those, I also picked up his Super-Powered and Fred the Vampire Accountant series. Of the two, I think the former is better but both are definitely worth reading. It's particularly impressive that he's worked out the details of three worlds that work very differently but hang together well. The Vampire Accountant books score slightly less well for me because character development is very slow - the later books provide enough detail on earlier events to persuade me that the author had thought through the characters at least sub-consciously, but what we see in the first couple of books is quite a lot of people becoming massively loyal friends and allies to Fred without obvious justification.

T. Kingfisher aka Ursula Vernon

I got into this through Swordheart, which slightly reminds me of Sense and Sensibility crossed with The Hobbit - it's refreshing to have a thirty-something woman who's better at running a house than running people through as our heroine, and it was interesting to get the cross-over between the very Regency plot about inheritance and the rest of the novel's fantasy elements.

I enjoyed it so much that I then read The Clockwork Boys, The Wonder Engine and Minor Mage. all of which I enjoyed immensely. While the world-building is very good, I think the strength here is primarily the banter. In the final case, it's mostly with a talking armadillo!

I think in both cases I enjoyed the way that they took a slightly sideways look at fantasy. T. Kingfisher in particular reminds me of Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton.

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