Back when I started the project that became Ryswyck, I felt pretty lonely talking about friendship as a driving moral imperative in stories. Now, though, my friends link me to Twitter discussions of friendship as an Actual Love, and big-name bloggers are tagging friendship as the stuff to give the troops, as Bertie Wooster would say.
So I decided to file some of my past posts on the subject as Best of Blog articles on this site. (The Writer and Eucatastrophe also technically counts as a best of blog article, but since it’s as close to a manifesto for this site as I’m ever going to write, it gets its own menu link.) Eventually I’ll probably add more posts from the ol’ catacombs, but this is obviously the most pressing and relevant topic, so here they are:
Let the Circle Be Unbroken: Friendship and eros in stories, originally published 12/31/13
and its later sequel
Friendship, Eros, and some notes on the Queen’s Thief series, originally published 5/24/17.
(I note that the tone of these articles, especially the first, is rather defensive; years in fandom has exposed me to a lot of shipping drama, and if you’re going to come out and say you prefer gen stories rather than erotic ones, you have to hedge it all around with assurances that you’re not some kind of purity freak, or outright homophobe for that matter. Let’s just say for the record that the Nutrition Facts on this site do not include either purity freakage or homophobia.)
By the way, if you have not yet discovered Megan Whalen Turner‘s Queen’s Thief books, you are so in for a treat. I can’t even remember who put me on to these books (probably R.J. Anderson, but it’s lost in the mists of time), but they are fabulous, clever, innovative, compelling, and witty and you should go read them right now (while you’re waiting for Ryswyck to come out).
There, I think that will do it for today.