Interesting People I Don't Know

I am a reader who always reads the "author's note" and the "postscripts" and the "why I wrote this story" headers. I read the "about me" in blogs and the "profiles" on Twitter. I like knowing about the writers whose books and stories I read. "Knowing about" is not the same thing as "knowing," of course, but in the era of social media, the lines get blurred.
I was a huge fan of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. I follow her on Twitter and have been extremely entertained by her Tweets. I started reading Dakota Cassidy's hilarious books because she was so damn funny on Facebook. (A former beauty queen, she live-tweeted the Miss America pageant and had me in stitches. If Billy Crystal hadn't stepped up to host the Oscars, she would have been a good choice.)
Last month I read Lauren Oliver's lovely book Liesl and Po and two days later one of her comments showed up in my Twitter stream. I immediately tweeted my love for the book and she thanked me and it felt like an authentic book-geek moment.
Keeping up with social media takes work, and it takes time. Time spent on Twitter is time spent away from the WIP. But as someone who spends most of my life in my home office interacting with my cats and the other human who shares their space, I love the sense of connection.

Melancholy Monday Fiction--Pink Gift

Who doesn't love freebie fiction? Luna Station Quarterly, a magazine that focuses on speculative fiction by women writers, publishes stories on their site in between issues.
This week's story is Pink Gift by Lindsey Walker . Read it here. Mark your calendar for their annual drabble issue, coming soon and featuring (shameless self-promotion alert) my story "Courtly Love."

NPR's Three-Minute Fiction Contest Winners

Several months ago, NPR announced the return of their "Three-Minute Fiction" contest for flash fiction that could be read in three minutes (around 600 words). The theme for round 7 was "Arriving and Leaving."  The winners were announced tonight and you can read them here.
Here is my entry for the contest:

Exit Strategy

Toby saw the man stumble as he came out of baggage claim hauling a rolling suitcase and hefting a laptop bag over his shoulder.

He looked like he’d slept in his clothes, a white dress shirt that gapped over his belly and black suit pants that badly needed a press.

His face was sickly pale and he moved like he was drunk but Toby couldn’t smell booze on his breath or in his sweat as he walked past him.

That guy looks like a heart attack waiting to happen, Toby thought and then, as if his thought had summoned the action, the guy stumbled again, this time falling heavily against Toby.

“Sorry,” the guy mumbled, and dropped the handle of his suitcase to clutch at his left arm, which had suddenly gone rigid with pain.

Feminist Fiction Friday

I'm not much for labels. Defining a person by religious beliefs, political affiliation, sexual orientation or age has always seemed much too simplistic for me. One of the most liberating things about writing for the internet is that you can define yourself, circumventing any artificial limitations that might be placed on you in real life. Which brings me to gender.
I've occasionally written fiction under a male pseudonym, not to hide my gender in specific but to cloak my identity in general. I did it on the Dark Valentine site, for example, so that it didn't look like I was writing every other story in one of our flash fiction challenges.  I never really gave it that much thought, frankly. My writing is pretty gender-neutral and I write equal-opportunity criminals and victims.

Laurell K. Hamilton

Lately, though, I've been thinking about gender a lot. I think about it every time I read a script that refers to a flight attendant as a "stewardess" or worse, as a "stew," and every time a female college student is described as a "coed."
I think about it every time someone says "male nurse," as if the job description is gender-exclusive, like "mommy." I think about it when a woman refers--without irony--to her gender as the "fair sex." And I think about it every time I read a story that's set in a future where women apparently don't exist and if they do, it's in a role that has been outdated for at least 60 years. I think about gender when I see news stories about couples about to spawn their 20th child; stories about celebutants famous for their sex tapes; stories about a movement to outlaw abortion for any reason--including rape and incest. (I can't help but think of the famous feminist quote by Ti-Grace Atkinson--"If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.")
I know this is a cranky-pants rant but bear with me...I'm getting to the point.
Yesterday Sandra Seamans posted a link to a blog entry by Kat Howard about the invisibility of female  heroines in speculative fiction. (Read it here.) I commented on it and Sandra commented back and the next thing I knew, I was scribbling lists of women writers whose books are driven by female protagonists. And I decided that today was a good day to kick off Feminist Fiction Fridays--mini-celebrations of women who write women.

A New Home for NoHo Noir!!

Yes, the evil clown is back!  Beginning Sunday, November 20, Mark Satchwill and I will be bringing you Volume II of NoHo Noir. And we'lll be bringing the noir as never before. New characters. New plots. Sex, violence, and dirty words without the asterisks.
The story starts off with a bang as a homeless man is found beaten to death just steps away from the campus of North Hollywood High. The detective investigating the case has her suspicions about who the killer might be but she needs hard evidence. Still, investigating the case gives her a good excuse to leave her family's Thanksgiving dinner early. North Hollywood, California--they don't call it "NoHo nice."
Please check out our new site here to follow us, and  follow us @nohonoir while you're at it. 

Food Porn! The season of butter and sugar returns

Most of the year, the food prepared in my kitchen is extremely healthy. The only fat is olive oil; the only grain is quinoa; the only bread-like item is wasa light rye crackers.
I know...it's enough to send you to the nearest store to buy a package of cookies.
Once we hit the autumn solstice, though, all bets are off.
It's not that I go into a food frenzy, but from Thanksgiving on, I cook like my mother did--with butter and cream and the occasional pound of bacon.
Emphasis on the pound.
It's not like I go hog-wild--and I make sure to eat plenty of salad--but when I start putting out side dishes on Thanksgiving, anyone who thinks mashed potatoes, stuffing, sweet potato pudding, and macaroni and cheese add up to too much starch can just leave my table and head over to Denny's for the Turkey Day special.
The food might go to waist but it's not going to waste. I have aluminum foil and I'm not afraid to use it. Guests always go home with enough food to carry them through the weekend.
That's how my mother did it.
That's how my grandmother's did it.
And that's how I do it.
At least twice a year.
And I do it without olive oil.

Olive oil is a wonderful, magical elixir but I've made mashed potatoes with olive oil and it's just not the same.
Ditto for macaroni and cheese.
I shudder to think what sweet potato pudding would be like with olive oil instead of butter.
Here's a recipe for a holiday breakfast treat introduced to the family by my sister's girlfriend. Not that it uses butter and sugar.
Serve it with bacon on the side for the perfect trifecta of treats:

This post is not about Lindsay Lohan

I once saw a magazine poll that posted pictures of several male celebrities--Bruce Willis, Will Smith, Jerry Seinfeld, and one other guy I can't remember. The question was, "Would you sleep with this guy if he wasn't a celebrity?" The only guy for whom the answer was an unqualified YES was Will Smith.
I thought of that poll today as I read Brett Ratner's ever-so-classy remarks about the women he's "banged" and how he sends them to his doctor to be tested before he goes all the way with them.
One of the women lucky enough to have shared his affections was (according to him) a very young Lindsay Lohan. (Ratner, who is a decade and a half older than Lohan, apparently snagged her on the rebound from Wilmer Walderrama.) 
Readers of Vanity Fair may remember the cover interview in which Lohan discussed how betrayed she felt when the aforementioned Wilmer (who actually bears a slight resemblance to Ratner) trashed her sexual performance in print.  She was 18.