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Every month, creators with Duck Prints Press come together to hold a literary convention-style panel on a topic chosen by our Patrons or selected by the panelists themselves. Our January panel? This Saturday, January 11 at 10 a.m. Eastern (converter) we’re having a get-together with five authors – Sebastian Marie, Puck Malamud, Alex Bauer, Tris Lawrence, and Lucy K. R. – about being a neurodiverse creator!

Description: As an umbrella term for a wide range of ways a brain can work, the word “neurodiverse” has become one way of grouping people with conditions ranging from autism and ADHD, to dyslexia and dysgraphia, to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. For creators, having these conditions can have advantages – such as changing how we see and interact with the world, helping us to unique points of view and frameworks, and supporting our work process – and they can also have disadvantages – such as interfering with ability to focus, causing mood swings that can make creativity tough, and making developing and maintaining creative habits difficult. In this panel, we’ll talk about our own neurodivergence, the ways we find our neurodivergence strengthens us as creators, the challenges that our neurodivergence introduces and how we’ve navigated those challenges, and the value we’ve found in forming communities with other neurodiverse people, touching on the extent to which we find the “neurotypical” and “neurodiverse” frameworks useful and relevant.

If you’re already a Patron, I hope you’ll join us! And if you’re not, become one today at the $7/month level or higher and get access to this panel, recordings of our past panels, and lots of other awesome benefits!

1. What are you currently reading?

• Baker Thief by Claudie Arseneault: it's not bad but it's also not really grabbing me, so I'm going really slow. I accepted yesterday that I won't manage to finish it before my current loan expires, so I put a hold on it again so I can continue. I'm about 20% in.
• Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Meshi vol. 7 by Ryoko Kui: see below, lol
• 盗墓笔记 vol. 2 by 南派三叔: since I finished 我和我对家, this is my new Chinese novel read (as picked by the survey I posted on Tumblr!). I'm taking a bit of a different approach with this one, annotating, underlining words I look up, writing definitions and/or pronunciations. Even if I weren't doing that, I definitely feel like I'm understanding this better; the sentences are more structured and the language more standard/less slang. It's written more formally, which matches better with what I've learned through studying. However, the pages are also a LOT longer and more dense with text, so it's sloooooow. It takes about 20 minutes for me to read a single page.   Also, I had thought this would correlate to English vol. 2 of Daomu Biji, but it doesn't, it correlates to English vol. 3 which is. A pity. Because that's my least favorite of the DMBJ books I've read. But oh well, what can ya do

2. What have you recently finished reading?

• Failed Princess by Ajiichi: modern yuri. Incredibly annoying characters, I'm not gonna continue this one. I'm usually pretty good at differentiating between "the author thinks this" vs "the characters think this" but this truly reads like the author has some unconsidered views on how important appearance is for a girl. Like, it's either the author doesn't get it, which is uncomfortable, or the character is like that, which is unpleasant, and either way I'm done.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime vol. 4 and 5 by Fuse and Taiki Kawakami
• Kase-san and Morning Glories (Kase-san and... vol. 1) and Kase-san and Yamada vol. 2 (Kase-san and... vol. 7) by Hiromi Takashima: modern yuri. both of these were better than the first I read in this series (which was vol. 6 of the overall series), I'll keep with it for now.
• Yona of the Dawn vol. 20 by Mizuho Kusanagi
• Sakamoto Days vol. 17 by Yuto Suzuki
• Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Meshi vol. 1 - 6 by Ryoko Kui: this is a reread. I used holiday money I was gifted in the form of Amazon giftcards to buy the full series box set and I've done nothing but reread it ever since, lmao. Bonus, my daughter immediately started watching the anime, lmao. She's such an adorable weeb. (she is 7 years old)

3. What will you read next?

Novels: poor The City We Became, getting bumped again lmao... I picked up my spo of Lout of Count's Family vol. 6 by Yu Ryeo-Han, so that.

Physical Graphic Novels/Manga: I have none from the library, but with the box set of DunMesh at hand, you can safely assume I'll be finishing my reread of that before I do anything else.

Libby Graphic Novels/Manga: none of my loans are due in the next week so it's a bit of a crap shoot, but the ones due soonest are A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow vol. 3 by Makoto Hagino and Fragtime: The Complete Manga Collection by Sato, so. Probably at least those.