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A Smart Bitches After Dark Recap
It’s been a little over six months since we launched Smart Bitches After Dark, and I wanted to share some of what we’ve been doing and what’s coming up in 2025.
First: we have over 225 subscribers! WOW. Thank you so much!
I’d hoped to have 100 by December 2024, and you blew through that milepost, and crashed through the next one, too.
Thank you. Your support is fundamental in keeping the site open for everyone, and helping new readers find us, and the romance genre as well. From the squishiest, most earnest part of my heart, thank you.
If you’re not familiar, Smart Bitches After Dark is our community support subscription, where we’re building some new features and bringing back some classic SBTB as well. Here’s what we’ve been doing in the past few months!
Romance Dish Course Tea Time
After taking suggestions for the name, I’ve been sharing more in-depth discussion posts that examine some of what’s happening in the genre, and in its fandom.
The HEA is Really Freaking Powerful is one of those posts, which I later made public to share with everyone:
Portmanteaux aren’t going anywhere, and neither are attempts to market books by genre and by trope to audiences looking for that genre and trope. Thinking this hard about why the portmanteaux are popular, what they’re doing, how they work, and why they’re important has made me appreciate how inclusion of part or all of the word “romance” is signaling a very specific message: “HEA found here.”
We’ve discussed what we’ve learned about ourselves from reading romance:
Romance takes a lot of crap, some of which I myself am serving, but I could give a 20 minute talk on how romance fiction offers readers an unparalleled opportunity for exploration of the self within the privacy of their own imaginations, especially regarding sexuality.
And we’ve talked about trends in cover re-design that appear to obfuscate the presence of people of color, and how current popular styles for covers are more confusing than every to some of us.
Tara wrote about Spite Reading for Joy and Comfort, or What I read on my Spring Vacation, when she found herself in Scotland during the UK Supreme Court ruling that sex is binary, a ruling that a certain rotted someone campaigned for heavily and celebrated afterward:
As a queer person, I hate her and won’t put another penny in her pocket, especially knowing that she’s funding organizations that harm trans people and is now also attacking asexual people, nor can I read the original books ever again. I can’t rewatch the old films and I will not be watching the new show.
However, I find tremendous comfort in reading queer stories about her characters, literally out of spite for her, and am thrilled when they’re (often) written better than anything she wrote.
But in addition to the dish course, we have some regular features I love, and that are very popular with the community as well!
Tarot After Dark
Every month, Carrie writes a Tarot After Dark post featuring a different tarot deck with close ups of some of the art work, and a new layout for questioning. We’ve been very fortunate that the designers of these layouts have been so generous to let us share them!
Carrie’s approach to tarot is very open and flexible:
My personal belief is that Tarot cards are effective for many not because of occult or supernatural occurrences, but because the images on the cards help the different parts of our brain communicate in different ways.
Often the querent (the person getting the reading) is stuck in a moment or a decision, and looking at the images on the cards and exploring their symbolism can help the subconscious talk to the conscious, ‘unsticking’ the querent by giving them a new way to read the cards.
Carrie also collects and loves to feature fascinating and gorgeous tarot decks, including from independent artists.
For example, her April Tarot After Dark, Road Trip, featured the Cephalopold Tarot Deck by Kitsune and used a spread from Owl and Bone, who not only granted permission but made a new graphic for the post to illustrate the layout.
Here’s an excerpt from that post.
Card: Six of Swords
The Six of Swords is all about leaving toxic shit behind. It is a complex card, depicting grief, hope, and empowerment in a single image. It represents a difficult departure, and many artists focus on the aspect of grief that is embodied in this card. However, the card is also a hopeful and triumphant one, and to me, the octopus steering six narwhals towards safety emphasizes the more joyous aspects of this card. The seas are scary and turbulent, but you can see calm seas just ahead!
This card in this position challenges the reader to explore not only the literal but also the spiritual and emotional. I am hoping to explore various locations. But I’m also hoping to rediscover joy, to remember how much potential for delight remains in life, and to test the limits of my physical abilities and my capacity to adapt to them realistically.
That will mean letting go of some dreams and allowing new ones to take their place, and it will mean releasing previous conceptions about my mobility and energy and replacing them with new ones. What do you want to discover?
I love this feature so, so much. Especially the May/June reading, titled, WTF?! using a layout with permission from artist Evvie Marin, who created the Interrobang Tarot.
After Dark at the Movies
Carrie is also popping popcorn and watching absolutely bonkers movies for After Dark at the Movies, prompting me to make another logo because it’s fun.
I would never, ever have heard of the film Hundreds of Beavers if not for Carrie writing about it at length:
Friends, Hundreds of Beavers is the kind of movie that makes me laugh uncontrollably while I’m convinced that I am going straight to hell. Some day, some wretched day, bitterness and cynicism will fill your soul and you will feel a deep need to howl your barbaric yawp into the void while pondering the cruelty and idiocy of life. That, dear Bitches, is when you need to watch Hundreds of Beavers.
Come for the community, stay for the Hundreds of Beavers, right?
After Dark Knitting Club
Elyse has been sharing her progress on various knitting projects and on some mystery knit-a-longs, which turned out to be stunning.
Gratuitous yarn pictures? Of course. Except not gratuitous; the exact right amount.
She also talks about what she’s watching or listening to while she knits, and there are usually cat pictures because of course there are.
Muzzy’s favorite job in our house is “Pattern” where she lays on whatever pattern you’re working on. She does it with me, with our friends — apparently “Pattern” is the best job.
Clearly a very important job; excellent work Muzzy!
Quarterly Personal Book Recommendations
Every quarter, Amanda opens a form for personalized book recommendation requests from the community:
I want to stress that the more information you supply, the better I can match you with some great books.
I will fulfill the requests as they are received before the end of the quarter. Each person will receive an email from me with three books with some notes about why I selected each one.
I try not to pick books (or authors if I can help it) that are already on your Goodreads or Storygraph. If you’d like a nudge or help in what to prioritize from your TBR piles, I’m happy to do so! Just mention it in your responses.
The feedback from folks who have received Amanda’s curated suggestions have been extremely positive, including one reader who replied, “Amanda, thank you! I forgot what exactly this email was and read through thinking wow, these sound exactly like things I want to read, how random. Very excited to get reading.”
As you know, Amanda knows a lot about a lot of different books and loves to match-make, literary style.
Plus, every week Amanda shares Sales After Dark: more deals on books that are part of subscription services or are on a short-term sale, too.
Coming Soon!
We’ve got plans for the next six months, including online crafting and chatting gatherings, revisiting old skool romances, coverage of what hot topics are going around on social media, and more. I’ve also started sketching out how I can host online Romance Trivia evenings benefitting different charities. It’s a long Google doc of plans, is what I’m saying.
If you’d like to join Smart Bitches After Dark, it’s easy: $9 a month or $90 a year, and you’re all set! If you’re a reader who values what we do, and wants to keep the site open for everyone, we’d love to welcome you.
Thanks for being here, and for making the SBTB community the wonderful place that it is!
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At the suggestion of some listeners, I split the Ads & Features into two parts, in part because it was very long, and also because there are 5 Fridays in May. Woot!
This Rec League comes from Juhi. Thanks, Juhi!
Hello, everyone! How are we all doing?
