Feminist Friday Bonus Deadline Hollywood's Interview with Jodie Foster

Jodie Foster is the child star who got it right and segued into a fantastic career as an adult actress and director. Check out the interview here as she talks about her career and the DeMille Award she'll get at the Golden Globes.

Feminist Fiction Friday is Back with Kij Johnson

Kij Johnson mostly writes short fiction, but her novel Fudoki was declared one of the best SF/F novels of 2003 by Publisher's Weekly. She's won a number of awards over the year and in 2012 her novella, The Man Who Bridged the Mist won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. (You can read it here for free.) She also writes poetry and essays. You can read more of her work on her website.
An editor as well as a writer, she's worked for Tor Books, Dark Horse Comics, and as content manager for Microsoft Reader.
She's' not only won awards, but she's a final judge for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.
Twenty of her stories are archived at the free speculative fiction site (a treasure trove of stories by everyone from Isaac Asimov to Roger Zelazny. The stories by Johnson offer a large representative sample of her work and include such award-winners as "Fox Magic" and "Ponies."

Fudoki, is the second in a planned trilogy set in ancient Japan. The first, Fox Woman, was a love story about a man and a fox woman (Kitsune.) Fudoki is about Kagaya-hime, a sometime woman warrior who may or may not be a figment of the imagination of a dying empress.
Her debut short story collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, contains 300 pages of her short fiction.
She gives great interviews.
"Making the Unreal Real at GeekMom.
"An Interview with Kij Johnson" at Apex Magazine
"A Terrifying Mix of Honesty and Rigor" in Clarkesworld Magzine
Here's a Los Angeles Review of Books review on At the Mouth of the River of Bees where the reviewer focused on the sexual politicsof the stories.
If you have a few minutes today, sample one of Kij Johnson's stories and come away refreshed and impressed.

Catmoji a delivery system for cat cuteness

I do not, as a general rule, email cute cat pictures and adorable pet videos. (I made an exception for the Siamese cat "singing" the theme from Game of Thrones and I think the "Engineer's Guide to Cats" is hilarious). But one of the things I do every day is check in with Cat of the Day and I have been known to pin some of those pictures on my board at Pinterest, along with the noir book covers and the photos of haunted places. A friend of mine sent me the link to catmoji, which is basically a site for all the cat pictures everyone has and wants to share. Forget cute babies and fuzzy puppies, they go straight for the cat cuteness. If you like looking at cute cat pictures, check catmoji out.

I pick five short stories you shouldn't miss...

Over at his blog Death By Killing, Chris Rhatigan is running his annual "Five You Can't Miss" recommendations for short stories. I weigh in today. You can read my picks here.

Photo by Zsuzsanna Kilian

If one of your New Year's Resolutions was to read more books, one place to start is by reading more book blogs to help you sift through the literary silt to find the gold. Here's a  list of top book blogs compiled at Blogrank from a variety of sources (including Feedburner, Google PR and Alexa).

Z is for Zebra

Courtesy: My Cute Graphics

I'm in word snoot mode today, thinking about why my Q and X keyboard  keys aren't more worn because I am VERY fond of words that begin with those letters and even fonder of words that use both--quincunx, exquisite, quixotic. (If you want to see more words that have both letters, or any other letter combinations, check out Scrabble Wizard.)
I started wondering why Z is the least-used letter. Are there that many fewer words that start with Z?  (I mean sure, that would be the obvious conclusion but what about some facts?) As they say on NPR's marketplace, "let's run the numbers."
There's a  site called words by letter that lets you search words by length, by definition and by suffix and prefix (two words with Xs).
Vocabulary.com will give you interesting factoids like 100 SAT words that begin with W,X,Y & Z. There's only one for X (xenophobia) but seven for Z.  So that's a little counter-intuitive.
Over at TalkTalk where there's a dictionary of difficult words, the Z word list begins with zaibatsu (from the Japanese, meaning a large industrial or financial corporation) and ends with zymotic (defined as: a. pertaining to fermentation; due to development of germs entering body from outside; n. contagious or infectious disease.) I will definitely be back to that site because I love obscure words.
If I still had a paper dictionary, I'd just count the number of pages devoted to Z letters and compare it to the number of pages devoted to E.  Further research must be done!  But not today. 

K is for Katherine

Photo by Brian Lary

I learned to type my junior year in high school--thank you Pela Love Bobbitt, and I've been touch-typing ever since. Because I don't have to look at my keyboard when I type, I don't notice when the letters start rubbing off the tops of the keys until someone else sits down to use my computer and is confronted with a nearly blank keyboard.
Right now, out of 26 letters, the only ones that are still labeled are Q, P, F, G, J, Z, and X. 
I got curious. "Everyone" knows that the most-used letter in English is E but what are the least-used letters?
According to Wikipedia (don 't you love Wikipedia?) The letters least frequently used are:
Z
Q
J
X
K
V
B
P
It makes sense that I use "K" more than most people because my name begins with K but why am I typing so many more words that begin with V and B than everyone else? Do I send that many emails to my friend Berkeley?  And V?  It's not like I write about vampires that much. It's a mystery.