Conference and book festival organizers who want to support diverse books and authors: please, please don't leave disability out of your conversations. Invite disabled authors, spotlight disabled books, and create panels that touch on disability. Ironically, the last year of a global pandemic that disproportionately affects disabled people has ALSO been a time when:
-Disabled people have been left off conference lineups
-Panels about disability have been declined
-Disability books w/harmful rep have been spotlighted

I've been thinking for a while that one of the problems with disability rep in media is that abled people are a) used to traditional disability narratives and b) unfamiliar with the way those can feel to disabled people. So: a thread on problematic disability tropes to watch for! Trope 1: Magical cures. A magical cure is when a character is disabled for at least part of the story, but then—through magic, science, hard work, etc—"overcomes" disability and is literally or functionally cured.

As a 2018 debut I'm really, REALLY appreciating the threads going around about the difficulties of debut year, and how hard it is to hold on to your original definition of "success" when the goalpost keeps shifting. A few weeks ago I was in the car and heard an interesting radio discussion on "savoring" as an important step in the science of happiness. The person being interviewed said that psychology research finds that the happiest people are the ones who are in good health...