January 2006

In classrooms around the world, girls swap tips on how to eat less, how to ratchet up their exercise and how to mimic those perfect bodies they see staring out at them from music videos, TV, the catwalk, magazines and billboards. Somewhere, they know that these bodies aren’t quite real – that they have been […]

In the course of my writing “career” (such as it is), I’ve run across quite a few male writers who’ve told me that they have a lot of trouble writing female protagonists, and it was something they had to actively work on. I always found this fascinating because though my short stories are often female

What is even more interesting re the gaze than how the film plays it out is how it turns it around. Instead of having a narrator constantly gazing at his femme fatale or sex object (a la Hitchcock’s Vertigo, for one), Fight Club has him gaze at his hypermasculine alter ego, Tyler Durden. Both the

Yea, right. On the contrary, men at Fortune 100 companies commonly complain that due to diversity goals, women actually have an unfair advantage. “Every company I’ve worked at goes out of its way to hire or promote women to senior level positions,” says an upper-middle manager at a major food company. He adds with a

HONOLULU — A state lawmaker has suggested Hawaii’s public schoolteachers be forced to weigh in as part of the fight against obesity in students, KITV in Honolulu reported. Because teaching kids it’s OK to discriminate is cool. This gets into all those tricky arguments about who decides what “fat” is, and what about medical conditions

As mentioned earlier, I heard back from the Agent about my fantasy novel, The Dragon’s Wall. She’s incredibly enthusiastic about the whole project, thinks it’ll make a great series, but thinks it needs a total overhaul. Now, that might sound really great, but I had to hide in my room for two days getting over

Jenn got my computer hooked up to her old PC monitor, so I now have a working computer. I was starting to go a little nuts with the other half-baked solution I came up with. I haven’t even finished paying this little number off, and the LCD screen up and died on me. This monitor’s

Writing like a mad woman. I’ve got that damn God’s War draft to finish, and I’m going to look over some of those rewrite suggestions for the fantasy saga that the Agent gave me, and see if it’s salvageable. If I can get that damn fantasy saga right, well, it’s a great investment. It’s seven

Ah, the pissing gallery: Straw feminists (I am not a real feminist and I cater to men’s opinions of me) Ide’s Place (I’m just a reactionary idiot) It always makes me sad when I upset long-term posters I respect, like Ide Cyan, and likely many more who haven’t been vocal about how upset they are

Still sick, but working stuff out. I think the combination of house stress, writing stress, sickness stress, a bad reaction to some DayQuil that made me feel like I was in an aquarium, and the fact that really, truly, while being this sick I really, truly, shouldn’t be at work just got to me. I