Lauren Bajek

Animals are also so cool!! Animal-plant interactions are cool!! Bacteria are-- [giant hook yanks me offstage]

Plants are so cool 😭

BREAKING: We're suing Kansas for a law that invalidates transgender people's updated driver's licenses and authorizes anyone to sue anyone they suspect of being trans for using the "wrong" bathroom.

Shouts to the Zamboni riders at tonight's Sirens game!

now do caffeine!

No, it isn't parents who should decide what kids can read.

No, it isn't politicians either.

And no, it isn't librarians.

Readers are who should decide what they read. Age doesn't come into the right to read.

Not sure how many different ways I can say this.

Done 🫡

It's time.

Colin, the comrade running the shelter-in-place food program I'm working at, told me that this week he's had to turn down asks from schools to supply food directly to their sheltering families. The reason? There's not enough money coming in for that amount of food.

Let's change that.

I can't speak to what's on the MSWL website! It's a great resource, but it's not fully comprehensive in terms of what agents are out there, what they're looking for, and how they think about the market. I'd suggest "cultural criticism" may be a more fruitful keyword.

💛

I would send it to any agent who's seeking pop culture nonfiction and seems trans-friendly! Or even nonfiction overall. People don't generally split NF into subgenres as specific as "trans nonfiction."

We’re doing a query drive to raise money to help relieve acute food insecurity among families sheltering in place. Come through!

A closing thought for the day: MSWLs are a way to get a feel for an agent and their taste, but at the end of the day, you should just query. If you want to know if I'll like your project, that's what querying is for. :)

But also check out my excellent colleagues! One of them may be a better fit.

I consider PIRANESI speculative! So I'm definitely open to projects in that vein. These posts are meant to sort of gesture at my taste, not to be fully comprehensive.

There's a lot of tidy feel-good fantasy being published right now, and a lot of Glorious Revolution fantasy, and I'm not seeking either of those! I'm way more interested in the people running out into the snow in pajamas to film ICE, or getting thousands of whistles printed & shipped.

By "surreal," I mainly mean books that feel like SFF but technically aren't-- I'd love a project that takes place on a reality TV set, or largely on the internet, regardless of whether it has other speculative elements. AMATKA is an all-time favorite book.

🥲

It's #MSWL Day! As always, I'm looking for speculative and surreal fiction for adults, and I like it smart, fun, and weird.

Right now, I'm especially in the mood for:

- well-researched historical settings
- classic-mystery structures
- books with a coherent moral/political point of view

It boggles me that there's so few labor-organizing books! I've been asking for plots like this forever, too

keep seeing people talking about Hugo and Nebula nominations which means it is my professional duty to remind you that nominations for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize open on SUNDAY

Oh, and my hottest take: Bad Boy Romances are just Horse Girl stories.

(He is wild and dangerous and everyone has given up on him except for her; she is able to break through to his wounded exterior and gain his trust and now has all his strength and power under her command.)

YES YES YES

(to both of you)

This is corny, but the first time I saw a Picasso in real life, I was just like OH. You can learn about him and see his skill in reproductions, but you can't understand the IMPACT of being before one of his paintings. And that's what peaches are like.

You can make such good arguments for so many other fruits, and "peach" will remain the answer.

This looks sooooooo fun!

So delighted that @steelhester.bsky.social is a Stoker nominee for Superior Achievement in a First Novel! Love this messy queer earnest gory little book, and I'm really proud to see it get love from horror readers too.

Can you tell me more about the Virtuous Nuts??

Ali Bati's meme horse in LEGO.

Glad that people _do_ recognize it :-)

manuschwendener.ch/horses

#LEGO #AliBati #SFW2025 #Skærbæk2025

Exactly! Names are on about a hundred-year cycle right now. It's really interesting.

My other pet theory is that in many cases, the best predictor of the next decade's name trends is... the names chosen by trans people. Same tastes, but people often transition ~10y younger than they'd have kids.

I think Patricia is like Linda-- it feels dead now, but in ~20 years it'll feel nostalgic and get a spike. Effie is an interesting one because right now nickname trends are more powerful than full-name trends, and Ellie is THE big nickname right now. But with 10-15 full names funneling into it