Apparently it is! 2016 has been a profoundly terrible year for pretty much everyone. It’s been a great year for me, professionally. I had my first ever short story sale and my first pro short story sale, I joined SFWA, and I went to Viable Paradise, where I met writing heroes and found an incredible … Continue reading So, is this an eligibility post?
Last time, I promised you some actual peer-reviewed academic research on romance novels, but then I immediately undermined both the words “peer-reviewed” and “academic.” Let’s get started right away by looking at “Love Means Never Having to be Careful: The Relationship Between Reading Romance Novels and Safe Sex Behavior”, in the Psychology of Women Quarterly. The … Continue reading The Kids These Days and the Novels: 2 Stoning 2 Romance
Picture yourself at a yard sale on a weekend morning. You can find used furniture, clothes and toys from kids who left home for college a few decades ago, some kitchen gadgets that were “As seen on TV” back in the 1980s, and so on. But what really has your spidey sense screaming is a … Continue reading The Kids These Days and the Novels: Stoning the Romance
Ed. note: The below post was written for us by longtime friend Amber Bird. In case my name isn’t a clear enough indication, I’m basically a female human. I grew up on science fiction, which means I grew up on a lot of stories where the main protagonists were usually male. Like many things in my … Continue reading Guest Post: Too Many Women?
J[onathan] T[ownley] Crane’s book Popular Amusements was published in 1869. As you might guess (or maybe you can figure out from the teaser in my last post, or from the title of this one), the answer to the question “What popular amusements does Crane suggest?” is “NO!” Base ball (sic)? It’ll kill you dead. Dancing? … Continue reading The Kids These Days and The Novels: JT Crane, Popular Amusements, and Other Things That Will Kill You
Let’s turn to James Baldwin, Ph.D., who included an absolutely hilarious warning against bad books in his rather comically titled The Book-Lover. Dr. Baldwin says, “In these last years of the nineteenth century there is no more prolific cause of evil than bad books.” Wow, if the worst that people in his part of the … Continue reading The Kids These Days and The Novels: James Baldwin, Ph.D., and the Absolute Worst Things Ever
Writing the Other: Master Classes are focused, live, online workshops of just a few hours–not a six-week commitment like the excellent workshop that I did–that go more deeply into specific topics. These include writing Native American characters, writing comics/graphic novels, writing asexual characters, writing deaf and blind characters, and other topics. Continue reading WTO Master Classes
Erin, Abby, Patty, & Holtzmann Friends & good causes > isolation & unrewarding work Strength in numbers Women need to watch out for each other Follow your passions, one way or another, even if other people think you’re odd As long as you can find a way to get by–even if it your office is in … Continue reading Everything I need to know in life I learned from Ghostbusters
Apparently some people believe that nothing can be good unless a guy says so. I’m a guy. I’m saying so. More specifically… We came. We saw. We laughed our asses off. It was like the earlier films, but it was not the earlier films. There were plenty of references to the 1984 and 1989 films … Continue reading Ghostbusters 2016: It’s Good, and I’m a Guy, So You Have to Believe Me!
The world is WAY overstocked with films featuring cool guys and useless women. It can handle one that’s the other way around. Continue reading You need Ghostbusters in your life
