I have a catalog of excuses for not writing, but some things do inspire me to want to write. One such thing is the casting for the new Star Wars movie. Not in a fannish sense, but rather -- one woman? Seriously? They only came up with a role for one woman who isn't Carrie Fisher ( Read more... )

( Mild trigger warning: Brief discussion of sexualized assault in fantasy fiction. )

I just finished reading She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth by Helen Castor. Whenever I read history, I like to keep notes on anything that strikes me as useful for my fiction; when the book hits my sweet spot, like Robert Hughes' Goya, it can end up inspiring entire hypothetical novels. Disappointingly, there wasn't much that ( Read more... )

I love when it's time to swap mix CDs. On another forum, two or three times a year there's a thread where people sign up and get randomly matched to send swap mixes through the mail. Since music is never far from my mind, I plan and prep for these swaps during the off-season between threads, compiling, editing, and rejiggering playlists on my iPod ( Read more... )

This rant about the lifestyle-ization of "child-free" was intended to be a one-off thing, but it got me thinking about two rival goals in feminism and queer theory: normalization vs. asserting identity ( Read more... )

I've looked at enough OKCupid profiles to sense a couple of sociological trends. Women in the city tend to have catchier, more unique usernames, almost like brand names -- something like starforward or leftwingup -- while women out here on the island tend to have cluttered and less savvy usernames, lilkatee6780 and _suzq_4u_29 and the like. Women ( Read more... )

At some point in my internet past, I learned of the Bechdel test. It's an informal metric to gauge whether a work of fiction (a film, generally) has worthwhile female characters. A movie or a book passes the test if it features at least two female characters, who talk to each other about a subject that is not a man. Today I was surprised to learn ( Read more... )

I was going to start writing about memory and all this deep philosophical stuff but eh... it was just gonna be depressing anyway. I don't feel like bringing myself down today. I have the windows open, the birds are singing, the fans are simulating a nice soft breeze. Maybe I'll throw caution to the wind and snarf down some ice cream in a bit. I'm ( Read more... )

You wanna know one of my pet peeves? Uncritical acceptance of gender roles. I'm not saying gender, as a social construct, is necessarily a bad thing. In any case, gender divisions and their respective social roles are some of the earliest memes young humans absorb, so I doubt there's much society as a whole could do to eliminate them. (Though maybe ( Read more... )