Size does matter

I'm short. At five foot one, I'm four inches shorter than the average American woman. I'm even short by worldwide standards, unless you factor in Bolivian women, where the average height is 4'8" or Cambodia where the average is five feet even. The average height of an American man is approximately 5'10" so I'm nearly a foot shorter than even the average man. I can live with that. My height makes it harder to find clothes that really fit--I can't afford Vera Wang who dresses petite celebrities like Holly Hunter, and it's sometimes hard finding cute shoes in my size, but in general, I've learned work-arounds for things like getting cans off high shelves in supermarkets and dusting the tops of refrigerators and posing for pictures with taller people so we don't look like a circus act.

My height was never an issue until I worked at a production company on the Warner Brothers lot. The man whose name was on the company hired an executive to run the film division so that he could expand into television and cable. The man he hired was a sociopath. He was eventually (and successfully) sued for sexual harassment by a male intern, but before that happened, he was responsible for a 100 percent turnover in the people who worked at the company. I was there for eighteen months. Within months of my leaving, there wasn't a single person left I'd worked with.

This man was tall, probably six feet four, or so, and he liked LOOMING. It was his go-to stance. He would move in really close and loom. I do not have a particularly large bubble of personal space. I can feel comfortable standing close to other people, even to strangers, but every time this man loomed over me, I had to fight an almost viseral urge to back up. I'd forgotten about that until I watched the debate last night and watched Donald Trump (who is 6'2") looming over Hillary Clinton (who is 5'7"). I can only imagine the discipline it took not to flinch away. I don't care if this is a tried and true strategy for pulling focus, the optics were creepy. If you didn't see it, here's the link. 

Ride the Pink Horse--Vintage Noir

I've always been a fan of writer Dorothy B. Hughes. She is best known for writing In a Lonely Place, but this book, Ride the Pink Horse, is probably her second-best well-known novel. She rote hard-boiled mysteries and noir-ish crime and her work has definitely held up in the 23 years since her death. The Kindle version of the book is on sale today. If you haven't had the pleasure of reading this book, now is the time to change that.

And I love that cover!

Think Spiders are Scary? Me Too

For the last several years I have written longish short horror tories just for Halloween. In the past I published them just on Amazon but I'm in the process of "going wide" with them. Right now you can find Unsanctified--the most spidery of my stories--on all platforms; by the end of the weekend, Spite will be there too.

It's going to be a really busy month, so I might not get a story out this month. If I do, it's going to be called Godforsaken and will most likely feature a cover from my favorite source of pre-made cover designs, Book Cover Designer. My "wish list" on that site is embarrassingly long.

A meme is worth a thousand words

I've worked in a sexist business since I was in my 30s. If I blushed every time a man used the C word or the P word around me, I'd  be permanently beet red. I've heard producers candidly dismiss actresses because they weren't sexy enough (or because they didn't want to sleep with them and as Rachel Maddow would say, "That's not the word they used.")

I saw one of Donald Trump's female surrogates on CNN yesterday defending what he said on the leaked Access Hollywood tape as just being the way people in Hollywood talk. And you know--she wasn't wrong. There are people in Hollywood who do talk like that. But they're not running for president.

Another Great Cover

And another book for the TBR pile. This one is a "Roaring Twenties" fairy tale retelling  that came up in the "also boughts" section when I was checking out another book. The cover caught my eye. So many books!  But this is a three-day weekend so I see some reading in my future.

Free Monday Mystery

I'm signed up for a lot of the newsletters that showcase free Kindle books. When I'm feeling a little light in the wallet, it comforts me to know that I can still have new books to read without spending any money. (I spend a lot of money on books when I have it to spare, so I'm not one of what a friend of mine calls a "greedy grabber" who won't spend money on books and just slurps up all the freebies.)
Today it's Mystery Monday, and I snagged this thriller, the first of a series set on the Oregon Coast. I'm still new to the Pacific Northwest, so I'm eager to see how it's depicted in The Gray and Guilty Sea.

A luminous novel of female empowerment

I'd heard of Caroline Herschel before, sister of the composer/astronomer William Herschel. (He is the man who discovered Uranus, which was once known as "Herschel's Planet.") When I stumbled across this book on Pinterest, on a board dedicated to beautiful covers, my curiosity was piqued. (I LOVE the cover.) The Stargazer's Sister was a wonderful historical novel and I recommend it highly.