Bosom Friends update and stuff goes boom

i’ve been working on Bosom Friends over the last couple of days – it hadn’t moved on much since it started, and I offered to help get it revitalised.  Now we have a growing list of lesbian historical fiction (over 70 titles already) and it’s interesting to see the trends.

--There’s a LOT of Westerns.  I suppose it is a time when women had more freedom so that would explain that!

--There’s also a lot of governess stories.

--There are no salacious covers. Why is this?  (see discussion on Cover Artists)

--There’s a lot more of it that I thought there was.  So many times I hear “Gay Historicals are popular but no-one’s interested in lesbian historicals.” Well, that’s obviously not true but that leads onto :

--It’s bloody hard to find!!  I’ve had to seek out Listmania lists and then hunt down in the “people who liked this also bought” sections of the recommended books.  Authors!  TAG your books!  Readers!  TAG the books you like!  It’s a lot easier to find things on Amazon if they’ve been tagged properly.  Yes, in an ideal world, we should rely on Amazon to place the books in the right category – but they don’t have a gay or a lesbian category yet.

And why don’t authors care about their books listings?  So many products don’t even have a DESCRIPTION. It drives me bonkers!

Anyway – here’s the updated list so far (I’m still working on it) so please:

1. If you know of other titles not included, please let me know.

2. If you want to review any books (don’t have any free ones for you, sorry) that you’ve read please let me know.

3. Let your friends know about Bosom Friends – particularly if they have an interest in the genre.

 

On a personal note, my 3 year old washer dryer blew up last night.  Seriously – Gehayi often jokes that I must be a witch because electrical products never last long, but this sucks.  It’s full of water too. I don’t think it’s just the plug because there was a definite burning smell when it went BANG. Crap crap crap.

Say that again – in English??

This is exactly why I don’t enjoy text books:

Gay and lesbian historical fictions often foreground these three topoi, their parallels with ostensibly atavistic ways of knowing enacted, for example, in Christian narratives, reveal continuities between past and present, countering the tendency in scholarship towards discontinuous periodization of the history of sex. 

and

The novel’s (The Color Purple) syncretistic use of conjure in this way also symbolizes artistic expression. 

and

Spanbauer invokes the berdache tradition especially as part of a larger pattern in the novel of undermining the authority of any one definitive categorization scheme for sexual behaviour.  Thus Shed’s name itself derives from what Eve Sedgwick might call a “nonce taxonomy” of sexual behaviour.

Save me.

From  “Gay & Lesbian Historical Fiction” by Norman W Jones.

I’m Cletus, aren’t I? The slack-jawed yokel.

It’s really not my week is it?

Went to the shop, and my car key got stuck in the car door. Simply will NOT come out. Sword in the Stone job.  Thank God I live in Norfolk and not somewhere where the car will be gone in the morning. Have to leave the car open, obviously. If they want to steal a tatty blanket, some air freshener and four bags of wine bottles, then they are welcome to them.

Will try some WD40 on it tomorrow. GRRR.