As a fan writer, I’m personally eligible for the ‘Best Fan Writer’ award, but this space will not be devoted to me as a fan writer, but A Dribble of Ink as a publishing platform. I think I’ve published some pretty cool stuff, by some very talented fan writers, and I’d like to bring attention to some of those articles. 2012 was a big year for this blog, and I feel that several of the articles published here, and listed below, contributed positively to the ongoing discussion of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction in general.

Below, for your consideration, is a collection of asides, reviews and articles published on A Dribble of Ink:

• “Concerning Historical Authenticity in Fantasy, or Truth Forgives You Nothing” by Daniel Abraham

  The idea that the race, gender, or sexual roles of a given work of secondary world, quasi-medieval fantasy were dictated by history doesn’t work on any level. First, history has an almost unimaginably rich set of examples to pull from. Second, there are a wide variety of secondary world faux-medieval fantasies that don’t reach for historical accuracy and which would be served poorly by the attempt. And third, even in the works where the standard is applied, it’s only applied to specific, cherry-picked facets of the fantasy culture and the real world.

• “It’s Amazing the Things We Know, That Are Actually Wrong” by Kate Elliott

  Let’s say my unexamined understanding of the European Middle Ages means I view the era as a monolithic block where the oppressed women of the time were in constant danger of having sexualized violence perpetrated on them, where women had no lives outside of their relationship with a man who gave them guardianship or money, and where they could barely be said to have personality because they were too oppressed and socially inferior and ignorant to have personalities. If this is what I think I know, then my attempts to read—much less write!—a fantasy story with women who do not fit those limited and limiting parameters will fail. Understandably so, since to write outside those assumptions means my normative ideas will have been transgressed. How unrealistic a more “diverse” story will seem to a reader or writer whose views of the past are mired in these sorts of errors. How flawed, even though it actually isn’t.

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