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I read a story that's set in a future where women apparently don't exist and if they do, it's in a role that has been outdated for at least 60 years.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.

The End is Near--The 5th Horseman has arrived!

As you may know, I have been a huge fan of horror writer G. Wells Taylor ever since running the first instalment of his serial The Variant Effect in Astonishing Adventures Magazine. His novel Bent Steeple, a character-driven vampire novel, is one of my favorite sanguinary tales. He's got a new book out and it's a humdinger. 

I'll be reviewing The Fifth Horseman soon but in the meantime, here's the official press release to whet your appetite. (It's already got one five-star review.)

GUNSLINGERS VERSUS THE LIVING DEAD IN THE FIFTH HORSEMAN

The Apocalypse Trilogy Goes Out with a Bang, Scream and Massacre.

The Apocalypse Trilogy by G. Wells Taylor gallops to its horrifying conclusion in The Fifth Horseman now available for download at online booksellers. This explosive mix of classic western storytelling and gothic horror delivers a terrifying and bloodstained final act to Taylor’s doomsday epic.

Pandora City sits on the cattle trail north to Babylon. One day a wounded rider arrives with death stalking hard on his heels. The legends say that four horsemen will come to burn the earth and one will come to save it. So who is this rider? Over two centuries have passed since events chronicled in The Forsaken. Survivors have climbed out of the ruins and struggle to build a new life on the frontier of a dying world.

Download the Apocalypse Trilogy Book Three: The Fifth Horseman for $3.99 at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Sony eBookstore, iBookstore and Smashwords where you can get Book One: When Graveyards Yawn for FREE and Book Two: The Forsaken for $3.99. Visit GWellsTaylor.com for links.

The Apocalypse Trilogy is a tale spanning centuries that weaves hard-boiled detectives, immortal children, zombie gangsters, angels, demons, and western gunslingers into a terrifying narrative of divine and human weakness set against a backdrop of decaying cities and radioactive wastelands.

Contact

G. Wells Taylor

gwellstaylor@gwellstaylor.com

(519) 372-1157

http://www.gwellstaylor.com

###

If you’d like more information about this book, review copies or to schedule an interview with G. Wells Taylor, author of The Variant Effect, Bent Steeple and Wildclown’s World of Change books please call 519-372-1157 or email gwellstaylor@gwellstaylor.com.

R.I.P Andy Rooney--the last of a dying breed

I always thought Andy Rooney looked sort of alike a muppet. It was the eyebrows, I think. And I always kind of got a kick out of his cranky-pants rants, even when I disagreed with him. I hadn't seen many of his broadcasts lately but I always knew he was there, like the irascible uncle at the family reunion who knows all the best stories if only he can be coaxed into focusing on them and not on the shortcomings of the rest of the relatives.
And now Andy Rooney is dead at 92.
I used to be a reporter and  I came of age at a time when "reporter" meant people who reported the news for print and broadcast, not people who chronicle celebrity gossip, keep track of movie box office figures, and indulge in public speculation about the sex lives of strangers while creating a cult of personality around their own "brand."
Yes, I know. I sound cranky-pants too. But I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in terms of Arianna Huffington's stance on freelance writers. 
I have, as they say, "skin in the game."
HuffPost grew into the media power house it became through freelancers, a number of them reporters. Last year, Huffington sold HuffPost to aol for a cool $315 million and was given oversight of aol, including their micro-news sites, collectively known as patch.com. Almost immediately after the sale, Huffington moved to eliminate the few paid writers on HuffPost and began relying on the contributions of freelancers who were free. A month ago, she turned her attention to the patch sites.
Her logic seems to be:
All reporters are writers.
All bloggers are writers.
Therefore, all bloggers are reporters.
But you know what? All bloggers are not reporters and some bloggers aren't even writers. (And seriously, every blogging template out there has a spell-check function. Would it be too much to ask that bloggers use it?)
What does this have to do with me? In October, Mark Satchwill and I were told that freelancers would no longer be paid for their work on patch.com. That meant we wouldn't be paid for our NoHo Noir stories and illos on the North Hollywood/Toluca Lake site.  (And believe me when I tell you we weren't being paid much.)
We were invited to continue the stories for free but although we love our editor, we have chosen to break out on our own with the material.
\We'll be setting up a NoHo Noir blog soon to host the new stories and we'll also (pending approval from America Online's lawyers who have been sitting on the matter for four months) be bundling the first volume into an illustrated novel.
And what does this have to do with Andy Rooney? 
Nothing much except that it feels like his death marks the end of an era when reporters were valued for their work and paid for it and respected; when stories were researched and objective and fact-checked and edited for spelling and clarity. And most of all, the end of a time when "news" meant what was going on in the nation and the world at large and not which Kardashian spent how much on her wedding.

Happy Birthday Mary

Shay is playing "the toe game" with Orange Cat, an activity both find endlessly amusing. The object is for the cat to nip one of his toes before he can pull it back and OC often wins. It's his kind of game.
He's a very social cat but not a lap cat. He'll let me pick him up and nuzzle him for a bit but he only tolerates it for awhile before he starts squirming to get down.
What he really loves is lying at my feet when I'm on the computer with his big head wedged into the toe of my sneakers. Being around feet seems to soothe him. And oddly enough, he seems to understand that my toes are not playing. Even though they're dangling there in tooth reach, he leaves them alone.
I inherited Orange Cat from my sister. I wasn't looking to add another animal to my menagerie. I live in an apartment where there's a $500 deposit for each animal, and I already had one illegal cat because moving into the place exhausted my resources and I didn't have an extra $500 to put into a black hole. (I've been here almost 7 years now. In Virginia, landlords have to pay interest on money deposited as deposits. Not so in California.)
I had every intention of finding OC a home as I'd found homes for my sister's tortoise and iguana and snakes and other five cats.
But you know what they say about making plans.
Today is my sister's birthday.
If she were still around, I'd make her a cake with brown-sugar and coconut broiled icing.  (She and I shared a love of coconut that no one else in my circle seems to have.)
Instead, I'll celebrate her birthday by loving her cat and giving him one (or two) of the special tuna treats you can buy at PetCo. They're like kitty crack.  (Yes, I'm an enabler.)  And I'll smile when I see him playing the toe game.