Sandra Seamans on Sale!

Sandra Seamans' debut collection Cold Rifts is now available from Snubnose Press. And when I say it's "on sale," I mean right now it's FREE.  I snagged my copy around 12:01 a.m. and I can't wait to start reading it. Get your own copy here.

Gender Analyzer--via K. A. Laity

So the debate about whether women can write crime fiction has flared up again with interesting posts from Sandra Seamans, Heath Lowrance, and Cat Valente. In response to Heath's post, "Chicks Can't Write Crime Fiction"(which is NOT his position at all),  K.A. Laity, who writes crime, horror and romance, shared a link to the site Gender Analyzer, which uses AI to determine if a woman or man wrote the home page of a site. I ran this blog through it and GA suggests, with 77 percent certainty, that a woman wrote it.  They're also 88 percent sure that a man writes NoHo Noir. (And I guess, to be fair, they'd be right about 50 percent of the time since I share posting duties with Mark Satchwill.)  Running material through the analyzer is addictive and, may I add, a most excellent way of procrastinating.
If you're still on the fence about whether women can bring the hard-boiled, you need to do some reading. Heath's post and the comments will give you a reading list.

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.

Patti Abbott's Flash Fiction Challenge

Patti Abbott hosts some terrific flash fiction challenges and this one was irresistible. Choose any work by American artist Reginald Marsh and write a 1000-word story inspired by it.  II spent an excellent hour clicking through decades of Marsh's work. All of it was extremely evocative and lively. (See Sandra Seamans' blog about choosing her picture for the challenge.)  Here's a link to some of his work to give you an idea.  (The painting across the top of the page  reminds me a bit of my friend Joanne Renaud's work.)
The painting I finally chose, "Red Buttons," was painted in 1936 in egg tempera on board.  Coincidentally, it's now in the Huntington Library's collection, so one day soon, I can visit the original.

My story is called "A Friend in Need" and it's 992 words long.  If you go to Patti's site, you'll find links to the other stories participating in the challenge.

A FRIEND IN NEED

Nancy met Bea at Child’s Cafeteria when they both reached for the last piece of lemon meringue pie. “Let’s share it,” Bea suggested, and simple as that they were sitting at a table, talking like old friends.

Bea told Nancy she worked for an insurance company as a comptometer operator, making $28 a week, which sounded like a fortune to Nancy.

Nancy’s father ran a general store back in Ohio and delivered mail as a rural route carrier too. Gas was only ten cents a gallon but there were times when scraping together enough to fill the tank was hard because he let so many people run tabs at his store.

Nancy knew her parents were worried about her living in New York City, even though she was sharing a place with her cousin and her husband.

Nancy’s parents were one generation away from farm folk and had a deep suspicion of the big city.

Still, they knew the only work available to her in Ohio was back-breaking farm labor and they didn’t want that for their only child. Nancy had skills. She could type-write and she knew Gregg shorthand.

They were sure she’d be able to find employment in New York, so they sent her off with their blessing and $48 they’d saved up.

Her father had also sent her off with the admonition to stay away from Harlem—“No good can come of associating with colored people,” he’d told her—and her mother had added her own, vague warnings to avoid “mashers” and “men who only want one thing.”

Bea had laughed when Nancy imitated her mother’s warning about men, and taken another bite of the pie.

“How fast can you type?” Bea asked.

“Seventy words a minute,” Nancy replied proudly. She could actually type a lot faster but if she did, the keys started jamming.

Toxic Reality coming soon!

My second collection of short fiction, Toxic Reality, will be a reality within weeks. Joy Sillesen of StonyHill Productions is currently designing the cover and layout, and I'm going through the final edit and selection process,. killing my children with wild abandon. (Read Sandra Seamans' blog on the process she's going through prepping her as-yet-unnamed collection for Snubnose Press here.)

Late one night a few months ago I'd been toying with the idea of writing a title story for the collection and I came up with the story below. Well, not really a story so much as a splat of words that after a good night's sleep I realized should never, ever see print. But it kind of amused me to collect my anxieties in one big rant, so I'm posting it here.  Complete with the groovy font-playing that seemed such a great idea at one in the morning.

Acid rain  

A

Bees dying

Cancer clusters

    C

Deforestation

E-coli

          E

Famine

Genital mutilation

Hole in the ozone

Icebergs melting

    I

John Galliano

Kabul

Love Canal

             L

Mercury poisoning

Norwegian extremists

Oceans dying

   O

Pandemics

Quadriplegia

Radioactive breast milk

        R

Superbugs

Terrorism

   T

Urban blight

Vanishing species

Whale stranding

Xenophobia

                        X

Yeast infections

      Y

Zero-sum mentality

Autism on the rise

BP oil spill

Capital punishment

Ethnic cleansing

Fukishima meltdown

Greenhouse gases

Habitat destruction

Improvised Explosive Devices

                          I

Job losses

Kudzu vine

Lyme Disease

Malaria

Neutron bombs

Overpopulation

Piracy

Q Fever

Road rage

Sun damage

Traffic jams

     T

Upside-down mortgages

Vehicular homicide

War

Xenodermia

Yellow fever

Zombie apocalypse

ACEIL ORTZYIT

TOXIC REALITY