The representation of women in fantasy (the genre, that is) by Juliet McKenna. Most modern people (including many feminists) have difficulty understanding that women's roles in modern life are largely defined by the warped historical lens of Victoriana (and the misunderstanding of "gender roles" as portrayed and enforced by male anthropologists). While certainly more limited than, say, the Golden Age of Greece (or the Goddess Europe), women's roles have had greater significance in world history than what most of us learned in school, or have seen through our popular media. Also, our fear of "women's sexual power" grew intensely magnified by Victorian Sensibility (and even in the West isn't that far beyond the insistence that women wear burkas for the sake of the poor men losing their minds in the presence of them - or do I need to bring up the idiotic meme of women being raped because of how they were dressed). Writing a "noir" where the female is relegated to the "fem fatale" or the "frail", as well as my own cultural blinders, it opened my eyes.
And while I usually save this for last, because it's relevant here:
Tweet of my heart:
@msagara: When responding to a blog about creditable female characters in fantasy novels, do not start your "good" list with Robert Jordan and GRRM.
Sam Butler on Do You Want to Be a Writer, or Do You Want to Write? This is a question I've been dealing with this past year. What is it I want to do? The good thing (depending on how you look at it) is that even in the face of my life being a whole lot easier (and probably happier in the short term), I still want to write. Or, look at it this way. Would I give up the fame, the fortune, the bikini chicks hanging out on the hatch if I could just write the next thing? Hell yes. It's a disease. Or a compulsion.
Rae Carson is giving away some cool ARCs, including Mer Haskell's The Princess Curse.
Dropping poll numbers. Not for anybody in particular, but for the Tea Party Movement. Seems as more people see the TP in action, the less they like it. The good news is there's a plurality of people who offer no opinion. Expect that to change in the next year as Americans start paying attention because of the Presidential Election. This basically mirrors my own experience. I was negative at first, but got talked off that position by a few friends. But now as I see whom the TP actually supported, and who has moved into "power" positions within the organization (I'm not really sure the TP can claim "widely dispersed/grass roots/floor up organization" anymore), and seen them in action, the less I believe it is about what was claimed, but more what I originally thought. Individuals may still hold their own values, but the organization is changing, at the very least the public face of it is changing, and not in a direction I think those friends would really support.
Also, as I said earlier, the Debt Default Crisis is going to be hung around the neck of the Tea Party. You broke it, you own it.
Nice guys do finish last (in pay). That's a PDF summary of a report soon to be published. Agreeable people get paid less (men more so than women, but that's because women, in general, are also paid less, even though that's against the law).
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