Yuri is My Job, Volume 7

August 19th, 2021

In Volume 6, Mituski poured her hear out to Hime and instead of bringing them closer, as she hoped, it may have separated them forever.

In Yuri is My Job, Volume 7, everyone at Liebe Café is trying to patch up the rift between Hime and Mitsuki. Except one. Kanako has absolutely had it with what she sees as Mitsuki’s self-indulgent attitude to Hime. She’s not wrong…but she’s not right, either.

Hime has come up against a wall that she has long wanted to avoid. There are only two people in the world she has trusted with her truth and they each need something from her she can’t give them. Hime’s decided to take herself out of the story, in order to keep anyone from being hurt…and thereby hurting them both.

Sumika wants things to stay the same, Kanako’s ready to be there for Hime, Mitsuki wants someone to understand her for once, and Mai, attempting to smooth over the rough areas, causes cracks to appear elsewhere.

This is an extraordinary volume in what initially appeared to be merely a Marimite parody. We are full on in deep emotional drama and although I read this with every issue of Comic Yuri Hime, I have absolutely no idea where it might take us or how we will get there! That’s always very exciting.

Extra chapters here take us a little into Miman-sensei’s life last year and character and café trivia. Everything about this book kept me on my seat. Lots of emotional moments and I’m just so interested to find out what happens!

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 8
Characters – 8
Service – 1
Yuri – 7

Overall – 8

Wrapped in old-fashioned school uniforms and Yuri tropes, Yuri is My Job is a compelling Yuri drama, wholly grounded in the present.

Posted in English Manga, Miman, Yuri Manga | No Comments »


Speaking of Fanfic…I’ve Published a Kindle Novel

August 17th, 2021

This weekend I wrapped reading Silk & Steel: A Queer Speculative Adventure Anthology. It was a really fun read and I highly recommend it. One of the stories is, to readers of Okazu, instantly recognizable as a fanfic on a series we have been enjoying for a good 20 years.  It was so obviously a fanfic, that it put me in mind of a fanfic I had started some 20 years ago as well, that grew into an original novella and I had never done a damn thing with. It took me 14 years to write the story. I started it in the late 1990s and kept putting it aside. It came with me to 4 jobs that I can think of, where I occasionally pulled it out and wrote another paragraph or two. I had thought it would work for a particular publication, but by the time I finished it, that publication had moved on and wanted something different than what I wanted for the story.

A few years ago, on a lark, I created a cover for it – a cover, it turned out, that had a typo. D’oh ^_^

This week I dragged it out, gave it a dust off and found I didn’t hate it. So while I was thinking about fanfic, I put it up on Kindle. It’s not a magnum opus, it’s a fanfic that outgrew it’s skin. (This is a pun and about as funny as puns usually are.) Here’s the synopsis:

Claudia Moreno was a good soldier, but the military saw her as a problem to be disappeared. Now she has a second chance as an Investigator for A/CINet and she’s determined to make her life work.

On her first solo case, she finds herself caught up in security for the most powerful corporation in the worlds; and its beautiful, charismatic leader, Lyrin Hayasu. Who is infiltrating this mysterious Artificial/Created Intelligence’s network…? Can Claudia save Lyrin from the intruder? And, can she save herself from Lyrin?

It’s a hardboiled-ish, science fictiony, cyberpunkesque, lesbian story. A/CINet Case File: An Inside Job is available for $2.99 on Kindle.I hope you’ll read it and, if you find some interesting bits in it, drop a review.

 

Posted in Novel, Queer Fiction | 2 Comments »


Whisper Me a Love Song, Volume 1

August 16th, 2021

Himari is suuuper excited to be in high school and suuuper happy to see the different clubs, but when she sees Yori on stage performing with a band, it’s just too much for her. Moved by the performance, she seeks out Yori to tell her that she’s fallen in love with her!

Yori’s not usually the kind of person to perform in public, but when a really cute girls says this to her, she can’t not feel something, right? Indeed, Yori does feel something. But what Himari feels isn’t love for Yori, she was just so moved by the music. And so, despite the initial misunderstanding, Yori and Himari start to build a relationship. Where it will go or what will happen is still unknown, but the possibilities in Whisper Me a Love Song, Volume 1 by Eku Takeshima are endless.

If you’ve got the print volume of Volume 1 in front of you, you know what I think of this series, it’s right there on the back cover. ^_^ I was indeed charmed from the very first pages. I absolutely adore this series. It is among the several I head straight for when new issue of Comic Yuri Hime has arrived. Yori’s slight introversion, and how adorable she is when she’s trying to be cool, and Himari’s enthusiasm for just about everything, is just too cute to dislike. I love Takeshima-sensei’s art. When she wants Yori to look cool, she looks very cool indeed. The characters have layers, and sometimes you get a glimpse of the adults they will become.

I’m somewhere in what will be Volume 4 in Japanese and I love this series as much now as I did back in Volume 1. For a first-love, high school girl-meets-girl story, that’s pretty amazing.

Before I forget, I think the cover design on this edition is fab. Love the rough background and the spot-gloss image. Well- done Matt Akuginow! Translation by Kevin Steinbach is on point. At one point, Yori said something and I just shouted, “Yed, that was absolutely it!” Great lettering by Jennifer Skarupa and editing by Tiff Ferentini is invisible, which is exactly what one wants in an editor. ^_^ Great work by Team Kodansha on this, one of my favorite series right now.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 8 There is none. It’s very nice.
Characters – 9
Service – 10000 where the “service” is two girls who are having a great time as they learn to love one another
Yuri – 8

Overall – 8

Keep your drama to yourself, this series doesn’t need it. ^_^

Whisper Me a Love Song by Eku Takeshima hits just the right notes for a light-hearted sweet Yuri romance. Volume 2 and Volume 3 are out now from Kodansha!

Posted in English Manga, Yuri Manga | No Comments »


Silk & Steel: A Queer Speculative Adventure Anthology

August 15th, 2021

Some days, the weather is just perfect and all you need is something plain fun to read. Silk & Steel: A Queer Speculative Adventure Anthology is very fun to read. There are no bad stories and, depending on what you like, there are a lot of good stories and a few that just gut punch you in the right buttons and are otherwise great.

The anthology starts off strong, with a wonderfully whimsical story by Alison Tam, “Margo Lai’s Guide to Dueling Unprepared,” and continues on with a wide array of fantasy and science fiction (which, at this point, are largely identical, only, one involves spaceships, generally speaking,) and queer characters of all kinds.

For me the gut punch of greatdom came in the form of Freya Marske’s “Elinor Jones vs the Ruritanian Multiverse,” for entirely mushy story of little Erica and her little wife reasons. Back in middle school we had a tricky tray auction and I had excitedly gotten a tray of three books, one of which was The Prisoner of Zenda. The punchline was that the person who had created the tray was my now wife. “Awwww.” (The other two were A Swiftly Titling Planet, still my favorite of the trilogy, and one of the Elric books, which have now been thoroughly, permanently and hilariously ruined for me by Bimbos of the Death Sun.)

The world borrowing and building in so many of these stories are a real testament to the skills here of the authors. Cara Patterson’s “Little Birds,” and Yoon Ha Lee’s “The City Unbreachable” feel like stories we have already been told so many times and know so well. Aliette de Bodard’s “The Scholar of the Bamboo Flute” borrows a world we’re all so, so familiar with here on Okazu, and still breathes a whole new life into it.

For my money, the two best stories are “Positively Medieval” by Kaitlyn Zivanovich, which seamlessly melds fantasy and cyberpunk in a wholly unique and disarmingly adorable way and “The Parnassian Courante” by Claire Bartlett which was…perfect. Paros no Ken, step aside, this is the correct ending to that scenario.

Ratings:

Overall – 9

With a diverse cast of characters and writers, Silk & Steel was fantastic read.

Posted in LGBTQ, Novel | 4 Comments »


It’s Time for a Yuri Celebration!

August 13th, 2021

I’m taking the rest of this week and weekend off to do a couple of things:

Celebrate the Yuricon Community’s 20th Anniversary Online Event. There are a small number of spaces left before tomorrow’s event at 8AM Eastern US Time, so if you haven’t registered yet, please register today.

Work on the next Yuri Studio video (Gateway Yuri Anime, Part 3!)

Work on By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga, because we are coming on a deadline for this part of the process.

And watch the last Evangelion movie. I’m an otaku, after all.

I’ll see you on Zoom tomorrow!

 

Posted in Events, Yuri Studio, Yuricon | No Comments »