The Webs of Women update

Over the past few days, I’ve been gathering all the drafts, notes, and secondary sources from the presentations I’ve given this year, then organizing the key chunks of them into what might be described (if you were feeling kind) as a mutant outline.1 That means I’ve copied/pasted key parts of the presentations into chapters for the book, moving paragraphs from one or more of the presentations variously into a preface, introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The resulting draft is 12,500 words long which isn’t bad for a start (the final draft will be somewhere between 70-100K).

The presentations that have been part of the process for this project are:

1. “Tolkien’s ‘Absent [Female] Characters’: How Christopher Tolkien Expanded Middle-earth” (Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference, Tolkien Society)
2. “Heritage Starts with HER: Women Writers Writing Back to Tolkien’s Legendarium” (Tolkien Society Hybrid Seminar 2024 – Tolkien as Heritage)
3. A ‘Tolkien’ of One’s Own: Women Making Our Own ‘Tolkiens’ (Tolkien Studies Area, Popular Culture Association Conference)
4. An Incomplete Academic Fellowship: Excluding Queer Feminist Women from Tolkien Studies (GIF.Con, Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations)

I’ve published quite a few essays and contributed chapters to anthologies in previous years, but never managed to complete whole book. I have a couple that I tried to do, back in the feminist speculative fiction days, plus a third attempt coming out of fandom experiences, but they sort of stumbled to a half at different points.

This project feels very different for whatever reason or reasons.

One reason may be that, although I am drawing on my academic/research background, I plan to write this for a more general audience (albeit a fannish/nerdy kind of audience) which takes off a certain type of pressure (allowing me to still work on peer-reviewed essays!).

I’ll be posting primarily updates like this one(rather than process pieces/drafts) in future.

I have a bunch of other bits and pieces relating to the legendarium, Jackson’s film, and related topics I’ll post in between the other things — including some of my fandom meta from my LiveJournal/Dreamwidth days, or presentations that didn’t get developed (I have one on Ungoliant, and one on the reception of Tauriel), and who knows what else I might find in in the groves and thickets of my files . . . .