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125K is a lot of words!
May. 11th, 2013 10:55 pmI just found out that my friends Jennifer & Sarah Diemer's Project Unicorn has, at its halfway point in the year-long project, reached 125,000 words. That is a HUGE AMOUNT of free YA fiction featuring lesbian heroines (2.5 Nano novels!) posted on the authors' website in order to provide self-representations in fiction for queer youth. From their post about reaching the halfway point, they said:
We’ve been driven to continue this because we’ve received so many emails, Tumbls, tweets and Facebook messages about the queer girls (and boys!) who are reading these stories, happy that they exist because they’re the only way they can remain in the closet safely and still read about someone like them. Renting a book from the library might be found out by their conservative parents, or they could be found out in general if they purchased a book with queer content. When these emails first started coming in, I thought it was a small number of kids, but if what we’ve received is any indication, there are still a TON OF KIDS out there who find it completely unsafe to tell their parents or guardians that they’re gay. AND THEY STILL WANT AND DESERVE LITERATURE THAT REFLECTS THEM.
This free fiction project is incredibly important, and Jenn and Sarah have put a tremendous amount of work into it. The stories are consistently high-quality, and if you like genre fiction of any sort - fantasy, sci-fi, historical, steampunk, dystopian, magical realism - you'll find something you'll enjoy here. Collections of the stories are available as well for e-readers and in hard copy so that we can support the authors in this project.
We’ve been driven to continue this because we’ve received so many emails, Tumbls, tweets and Facebook messages about the queer girls (and boys!) who are reading these stories, happy that they exist because they’re the only way they can remain in the closet safely and still read about someone like them. Renting a book from the library might be found out by their conservative parents, or they could be found out in general if they purchased a book with queer content. When these emails first started coming in, I thought it was a small number of kids, but if what we’ve received is any indication, there are still a TON OF KIDS out there who find it completely unsafe to tell their parents or guardians that they’re gay. AND THEY STILL WANT AND DESERVE LITERATURE THAT REFLECTS THEM.
This free fiction project is incredibly important, and Jenn and Sarah have put a tremendous amount of work into it. The stories are consistently high-quality, and if you like genre fiction of any sort - fantasy, sci-fi, historical, steampunk, dystopian, magical realism - you'll find something you'll enjoy here. Collections of the stories are available as well for e-readers and in hard copy so that we can support the authors in this project.
