This podcast episode (part one of two) about Thomas Kinkade was a hell of a listen this week. Like a lot of middle-class(ish) Americans who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, this art was omnipresent in the atmosphere for a large chunk of my life. And as an enthusiast of jigsaw puzzles and embroidery, let me tell you, this aesthetic is still inescapable in certain quarters.

But inadvertently, these episodes also illuminated (ha) for me how I feel about other forms of art built to be technically skilled, hearken to a mythical small-town past, and avoid any hint of complexity lest it make anyone uncomfortable for a split second.

That kind of art makes a lot of people feel warm and fuzzy and uplifted, and that’s great for them. I hope they enjoy it. They don’t have that effect on me, though. Maybe I’m just a broken human being; I don’t deny that. But it was gratifying to me to hear that someone else out there is left cold by the sort of thing that’s supposedly universally appealing.

I’m not going to be a snob about it — if you love that kind of art, in any medium, I love that for you. But they don’t hit me the way they’re intended to hit their target audience. So I guess I’m just not in their target audience.

Some threads with interesting book recs:

Books with ace/allo romance : r/LGBTBooks (reddit.com)
It must be Yell About How Great At the Feet of the Sun Is o’clock again, how time flies.

Looking for ace/aro protagonist : r/LGBTBooks (reddit.com)
A shorter list, but one with some good references.

(Am I dealing with guilt over having an aspec antagonist in my next story? Obviously, yes. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.)