put a fork in it

Ugh, what an armpit of a day. Got a horrifying look at myself naked in a full-lenth mirror (unprepared) then came home to find rejection #4 for Nine Days. Took the guy less than 24 hours to turn it down. Not that I blame him. I'm an old, fat blowhard. Who the hell would want to read anything I wrote?

I'm starting to think my query letter sucks. I wrote it according to everything I could find about query letters, but it's not really "me," if you get my drift. I wish I could make it more unique-sounding. Right now it's basically this with an introductory paragraph and a closing. I worked hard on that blurb, but it still sounds like every other blurb I've ever read on the back of a mystery novel. I wish I could somehow make it convey the 'specialness' of Nine Days without making me sound like some kind of used car salesman.

belle parole non pascono i gatti

Not a good day yesterday -- got stumped and couldn't figure out where the plot should go next. Whacked around at it for a couple of hours, then gave up. Took a bath and had a minor brainstorm, which has happened to me before (maybe I'm like whatshisname and do all my best thinking in the bath tub).

When I got out, I went back to work and found myself doing something I did before, on Nine Days -- when I started that book, I had only the vaguest notion of a plot. I started writing on it with an extremely general idea of where it was going, and when I hit a road block, THEN I would start to 'outline,' by which I mean I would give up on the thing, call myself names, go take a bath, have an epiphany, then come back and write a couple of paragraphs in 'plot summary' style about where my epiphany suggested the story might go next. Then I'd use those couple of paragraphs as a very loose map until I hit the next roadblock.

I thought I was doing this because it was my first book and I was just winging it, but I'm doing kind of the same thing on South of Nowhere. After the Bath Epiphany last night, I got out and tried to start in with the fiction again, but just somehow morphed into 'plot summary' voice and got it all down on the page. Then today, I was able to work from that and get back into the work successfully.

I've tried outlining before starting to write (like everybody says you should), and I just can't do it. I know a very general idea of a main thrust ahead of time, but I don't know how it's going to evolve until it actually does. Things happen while I write that push the story along, and I can't see them in advance. Something about that is really fun for me. Not that I'm as great as Michelangelo, but it's sort of like his thing of simply removing all the stone that's not the sculpture. He doesn't know what's in there until he chips off all the extra stuff.

beam me up, scotty

Don't you hate it when your word count starts going backwards?

better mousetrap

So there's this new media out that everybody says is THE END OF READING / PUBLISHING / THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT (again). Why do people always say shit like this, every time? Are they living in the 1800's or something? Because, back then, when new stuff like this came along, it was (sometimes), indeed, the end of the old way, but usually because the old way really sucked. Cars caught on because trains were slow, smelly, and inconvenient. However, people still take trains, because some of them like it. Penicillin caught on because it kept you from dying, not because it was 'the newest thing.' These new ways of reading are like the former, not the latter, and I wish everybody would stop jostling to be at the front of the prediction line about the Death Of Everything Right-Thinking People Hold Dear.

Also, when those breathless seers wake up and realize that all this stuff is just a new way to liberate people from their money: I TOLD YOU SO.

late night observation

The more I find out about this publishing racket, the more terrified I get. It strikes me today that one of the reasons I enjoy writing is because I don't have to do it -- it's something I enjoy as outside the Daily Grind, a self-indulgent little habit to distract myself from the Horror of Life. If I were under the gun, required to churn out a certain number of words a day, I might really learn to hate it.

in techno veritas?

FML

Nobody seems to know what the fuck is going on in publishing. The self-publishers are all, "the old model is dead!" and the trads are all, "self-publishing isn't really publishing, it's just a fad for losers who can't get a real book deal." I think there's (at least) an iota of truth on both sides, but that doesn't do much to help me figure out the best way to launch Nine Days into the world.

Even if I do hook an agent and get a publishing deal, the book they want isn't likely to be the one I've written, from what I understand. It will have to be edited and packaged, which I'm pretty sure I'm going to hate. And if by some miracle I fight the power and manage to publish the book I've actually written, it'll probably sell fifty copies and then disappear, because there's no graphic misogyny or flying sparkly vampires.

Yet I  keep writing. I wonder if there's a classification for this kind of insanity in the new DSM-5?

a room of her own

Got another couple of rejections recently -- nice ones -- bringing my grand total to three.

It occurred to me the other day that it's probably not going to be easy to sell Nine Days. I mean, *I* am sick of having to choose between syrupy cozies or torture porn in the murdery mystery genre, but that doesn't mean there's a vast swath of others out there like me, with money to spend on books. Any agent / publisher that takes the project on is going to have to be willing to step out on a limb with Julia Kalas. She's neither girly sex kitten nor evil paranormal dominatrix, and those seem to be the only two sellable choices right now for female protags. So I guess I have some sympathy for the agents reading my queries. They're probably scratching their heads and thinking, "I like the writing, but I dunno if I can sell it." Which is way less ego-crushing than imagining them thinking, "What a load of crap!"

Damn. It.

I was really looking forward to the 2nd season of Sherlock. I love love love Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, and so far, all of the other characters in the series.

BUT OF COURSE, Irene Adler is now a dominatrix. Because if you have a female character of any amount of importance, she MUST BE SEXAY. She can't just be an intelligent, interesting human being (you know, kind of like Conan Doyle created her). She must titillate. She must be FUCKABLE.

CURSE YOU, PATRIARCHY.

day-after edit:

And, as if that weren't bad enough, the entire story of "A Scandal in Bohemia" has been changed so that in the end, Holmes both wins their intellectual wrestling match AND saves her ass from being beheaded. A female character in 2012, less liberated than her 1891 original. WTF?

The thing that made Irene Adler so fascinating was that she refused to conform to her gender stereotype, instead daring to match wits with men in an age when women simply didn't DO that. This new Irene Adler is little more than a pornographic fantasy. I despair. I really do.

party at my house

Got my very first legitimate, written agent rejection for Nine Days today! I feel like a bonafide professional author now.

also, please stop using the word "fuckable."

Today's Freudian Misogynist Slip comes to us from this article about Julia Louis-Dreyfus' hair. After learning that she had only been deemed "fuckable" after straightening it, Louis-Dreyfus is reported to have broken out laughing. The article remarks:

"Well, yes, that response is 110 percent correct, since, contrary to popular belief, the goal of every female comedian is not to make all the guys want to fuck them. And, even so, last time I checked, plenty of dudes were more than willing to fuck ladies with curly hair. Anyway, the insults didn't stop there..."

Emphasis added by yours truly, in case you missed the WTF moment in that paragraph. Sorry, funfeminists, you can't simultaneously object to being called "fuckable" AND argue that yeahuh you ARE TOO "fuckable." It rips the logical fabric of the universe, and nobody wants that.

Today

I'd like to be Jesse Sublett. Just for 24 hours, to see what it feels like.

slouching toward bethlehem

Work on the second book is going slow. I think I'm afraid I won't be able to perform the miracle twice.

Bruuuuuuuce

can you see me now?

We are sans cable chez Koenig, so I can barely carry on a polite conversation these days, but a while back I heard Terry Gross interview Timothy Olyphant about his role in 'Justified,' and was sufficiently intrigued to track down the first season on DVD, courtesy of the Austin Public Library.

It was really good, so I put in a request for the second season, which was, naturally, checked out. It came in a couple of days ago, and, as is usual when visiting the liberry, I had a look-see at the new books, and picked up a couple by a Well Known (male) Author. Sadly, upon attempting to read them, I was greeted by pointless references to the (male) protagonists' genitalia, early in both tomes. Of course, I put them down immediately and stuck Season Two in the DVD player.

I was struck by the contrast between Elmore Leonard's characters and the characters in the two books I'd just rejected. I'm a qualified fan of Leonard's; I don't love everything he's ever written, but the stuff I do love, I love a lot. He has this ability to disappear that I really admire -- you're never aware, when reading him, of how good he is, or sense him behind the scenes pulling the strings. He doesn't attempt to be "writerly," and for the most part avoids tropes like the I'm-so-badass-I-talk-incessantly-about-my-dick one mentioned above. The result is that you are sucked into the story and remain there, undistracted, until it's over. That's the kind of writer I want to be -- an invisible one.

published!

I got a note recently from Apollonian Press, wanting to post "Fenway" and "The Gift" on their new fiction website. I figured, what the hell, it's exposure. Go give them a page hit!

I know you're out there, I can hear you breathing

AND I have that super-secret thingie where you can look and see how many page hits you get every day. So don't give me that shit about not knowing about Nine Days' Bookface page or try to weasel out with "I have a Bookface account but I never look at it." LIAR. Go "like" the damned thing already.

In other news, as you can see over on the right, I've started the process of sending out queries. In so doing, I came across QueryTracker.net. If you're a writer you should check it out. All of the agents I found through Writer's Market are listed there, and you can get access to their information even with the free account. Essentially, I searched for agents interested in my genre, then filtered out agents who aren't accepting unsolicited queries, and checked the names I found against the list of members at AAR, which winnowed the list down to 132. Still a lot, so I worked through and made a "top picks" list of the agents who rep authors I've read and and liked. That's gotten me to a "top picks" list of 12, with a "second picks" list of 18. If none of those bite, there are the remainder of the original 132 to work through.

I know that this is just fascinating reading, but this is the kind of shit I like doing. Ferreting out information satisfies some primal need for me. Organizing it is even more fun.

don't read this if you're depressed

I'm having one of those days where the Horror of Life is just pressing down too hard. You know the Horror of Life, right? The impending death, doom and destruction hovering over everything in the world? Some days I can distract myself from it enough that it doesn't bug me much. Today isn't one of those days.

I'ma go ahead and whine in a gender-specific way: who decided that men have to die younger? That's the ultimate Horror of *my* life these days. As we've discussed, I'm a 100% introvert, so I tend to have very few friends; in fact, I tend to have one friend at a time. Right now that one friend is the Spouse, who is male and seven years my senior. Despite the fact that I've made him swear to live to be 100, I know that he's going to pre-decease me. Every woman on earth knows this about her husband, and it fucking sucks. Why do we wimmens have to be the ones going through that every time? It's not bad enough we got stuck with the childbearing and the menstruation and the culturally-ingrained misogyny?

The day is sunny and beautiful and I know it's temporary. The planet is slowly being destroyed. Slowly, so that we don't notice. That's how Bad Shit happens. We could stop it, if we cared, but apparently we don't. We just keep crapping the nest and moaning about how awful it is.

Anyway. Life. What a joke.

OK, OK

Nine Days now has its own Bookface page. I still think Bookface is evil, but I've got a novel to publish.

revenge of the nerds

Had an interesting dinner the other night with my Literary Benefactor, who shared some of his experiences in the writing biz. One story in particular stood out for me: a certain local Clique Master and minor journalistic celebrity once told him, "You're not one of us, and you never will be." Having heard that myself all my life (perhaps not in so many words, but a browse through this blaugh should make clear that Not Fitting In is one of the larger themes of my existence), it was gratifying to evaluate the two men side by side and find myself admiring the Benefactor's accomplishments more, overall. The Clique Master has almost certainly made a lot more money, and is czar of a small but well-known domain; but the Benefactor lives a much more interesting and adventurous life, and it shows in his writing. For the love of every risk-taking creative person you've ever known, you should head over to his blaugh and send him a few bucks.

tl;dr: sometimes not being in with the in crowd can be a good thing.

the holy estate

The other day I was getting started on a good nag at The Spouse about how I don't get to do the stuff I used to do before we were married -- go dancing, take road trips, go to the movies -- when it hit me: I don't enjoy those things any more. More specifically, I don't enjoy them because *he* doesn't enjoy them (you Psychology Today readers should leave now). If he's not having fun, I'm not having fun. Even if he's not there.

The culture I live in looks upon this as a problem; an undesirable loss of individuality. I, as you might expect, think they're full of shit. I'm just Getting (more) Married.

it might be finished

I'll be proofreading the 4th edit of Nine Days over the next couple of weeks, and unless I find something just ridiculously wrong, I will then start the job of trying to get the thing published. Beat the rush! Make me an offer!

i do not hate myself

I'm not "being negative" or "suffering from low self-esteem" when I say that people who manage to hang around long enough eventually discover that a relationship with me is not really worth the time and effort. I'm stating an actual fact; that is precisely what happens. It's not because *I* am not worth the time and effort, it's because I just don't care about the things that most people care about, and vice versa.

winter sucks

I thought I might get through February this year without my usual bout of SAD, but no. It was waiting for me when I got up this morning. Had an email from a somewhat unhappy client last night, but the feelings of inadequacy didn't abate after dealing with it, like they usually do. I am, today, a Huge Disappointment, to myself and everyone around me. Fortunately, I'm used to feeling like this, so it's not catastrophic, just annoying and uncomfortable. People who manage to hang around long enough eventually discover that a relationship with me is not really worth the time and effort (which is why I gave up on friendship a number of years ago), but with clients, the relationship is limited enough that I'm usually in and out before the Ugly Truth surfaces. Something went wrong on this one, not sure what.

I wonder if I will still have these moments, once I become a Famous Novelist?

but bitching about it makes me feel so much better

I heard a quote, attributed to Mia Farrow in her later years, yesterday: "I get it now. Life is about losing."

I don't think she means that in the competitive sense. I think she means that as you get older, things that you value fall away from you -- friends, your health, possessions -- and getting through means accepting that as the natural course of events, with as much grace as you can muster.

Mia Farrow would probably hate my guts.

page 285

is going to be the death of me.

it's not you, it's me

People aren't really awful, they're just people. It's me who has trouble with the world as it currently exists (and its inhabitants). I decided a long time ago that the sense of isolation I constantly feel is part of the price I pay for being what they used to call a "free thinker," but sometimes I wonder if I've just got a really bad case of terminal uniqueness.

have people always been awful?

I notice something today upon which I feel moved to remark. As a card-carrying weirdo, I have, many times down through the years, sought groups of other weirdos with whom to commune, but have never maintained a membership in said groups, because said groups (with one rare exception) all seem to spend the entirety of their collective energy on how stupid / misguided / evil non-members are. What, I ask you, is up with this?

For example. I made the decision at an early age not to reproduce. Some years ago, I looked into the "child-free by choice" groups, curious about other peoples' motivations and experience with that decision. What I found instead was a bunch of supercilious child-haters who spent all their time talking about how great it was not to have children, how stupid people who had children were, and what a raw deal they got from the world because they were so special. What the hell?

Same thing with the atheists. No real discussion of non-religious concepts and how to get along respectfully in a majority-religious world, just an endless savaging of religious ideology and its adherents.

For the record, I actually sort of like religious people and children. I'd go so far as to say that there are some of them in the world that I even love and respect. Yes, I do my share of pissing on people who don't share my world view, it's just that -- I dunno, when I go looking for community, I hope to find something more than my own limited frustration reflected, and I've been uniformly disappointed.

And yes, I am aware of the irony of bitching about how wrong these people are. I throw myself upon the pyre in order to point out the greater irony: groups formulated to support a separation from something shouldn't spend the entirety of their existence focused upon that something.

and they're off

I'm feeling manifesto-ish. Too bad I don't have time to write it down.

those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it

I went back in to re-start the final edit at page 320 after a break of several weeks, and couldn't get anywhere. Momentum lost. So I tried starting again from the beginning and worked on it a bit yesterday, but today I got roadblocked again. Will I ever get all the way through in one go? On the plus side, I still enjoy reading it. Maybe it's pure hubris, but I really think it's a good book. Today.

Shit Of Which I Have Officially Become Sick This Year, First Revision

Already listed these:

1. Question mark headlines
2. Attempts to reclaim the word 'slut'
3. The Stocking Cap Look
4. Any "celebrity" anywhere "opening up about" anything
5. "Rocking" as a synonym for "wearing"

Today I add:

6. World-class athletes dressing like hookers
7. Starting answers to questions with the word "so"

sticks and stones

Back before he invented The Simpsons and joined the 1%, Matt Groening was less-famous as the author of a comic strip called Life In Hell, which was almost solely responsible for my surviving the 1990s. Every December, as part of that strip (which is apparently still running somewhere on the planet), Groening publishes his "forbidden words" for the upcoming year. As an homage, I hereby present my own (hopefully annual) list:

Shit Of Which I Have Officially Become Sick This Year

1. Question mark headlines
2. Attempts to reclaim the word 'slut'
3. The Stocking Cap Look
4. Any "celebrity" anywhere "opening up about" anything
5. "Rocking" as a synonym for "wearing"

There will be more. Oh, yes. There will.

Meanwhile, let's hear yours.

still not dead

It's sad when a Fine Arteest has to abandon her Art to make a goddamn living. I haven't worked on the edit in what seems like forever, to the point where I'm starting to get a complex about it -- but when paying work comes my way I gotta take it. Maybe the break will be good. Maybe when I get back to the edit I'll have a fresh perspective^TM, and Nine Days will finally become the groundbreaking bestseller that turns me into a member of the 1%.

maybe it's just me

You know how, when you encounter a philosophy out there in the world, if there's any truth in it, you have that little "aha!" moment? And then, as you learn more about the rest of the philosophy, you sometimes find yourself going, "What the fuck?" The philosophy was so right about that one little kernel of truth that you just can't believe that the edifice of other stuff its adherents have built up around it could possibly be bullshit. The more you look at the collection of bullshit built around that little kernel of truth, the more you start to doubt your original "aha!" Finally, you get exhausted by the contradiction and do one of two things: accept the philosophy whole hog, figuring you can live with the questionable bits because that one kernel of truth is so valuable; or you just reject the whole thing.

I think that this explains most of what goes wrong in human lives.

i'm not dead

All of the sudden I got a shitload of paying work, none of which I felt like I could say 'no' to, considering my current state of abject poverty. Ergo, I haven't had time to work on the book much lately. However, I will be able to pay my bills for a couple of months, which means that I will keep sucking air for a while, which increases the odds that I'll be back to the edit at some point in the future.

In other news, I've had a sciatica relapse -- spent too much time sitting up in some bleachers without back support a couple of weeks ago and woke up in agony again the next day. This shit blows. It blows in so many different ways that it makes me tired even thinking about how to explain it. It wouldn't be very interesting anyway.

mice roaring

Yeah, it's probably pointless, but I'm petitioning reddit.com to remove their lovely instructional subreddit on how to rape women. If you'd like to sign the petition [NSFW], please do so here. And tell your friends.

is this how Newton felt?

As we've discussed, I have Major Depressive Disorder, for which I have been successfully treated with a combination of medication, talk therapy, and world-view modification. The other day I accidentally discovered something else that really helps -- skepticism. By which I mean demanding that the conclusions my brain comes to be supported by verifiable factual evidence.

For example. The last couple of years have been really difficult, financially. I own and run my own one-woman business, and as you might expect, people like me are the dying canaries in the economic coal mine of this New World Order. Because my brain is the way it is, somehow I had gotten my options narrowed down to 1) keep doing what I'm doing or 2) get a job. This nicely reductive thinking brought me efficiently to the brink of driving off a bridge, until I realized that I was forcing myself to consider doing something that made no rational sense. I have never, in my 51 years on this planet, been able to successfully hold a standard nine-to-five job. That is, the verifiable factual evidence tells me that it shouldn't be included in my list of options. So I chucked it out, and now I don't feel like driving off a bridge anymore. Now the goal is 3) find a way to make more money. That, I can live with.

Similar situation with a sick cat this weekend -- because of the financial situation, I'm broke. However, I have the good fortune to be married to someone without MDD who can hold a standard job, and thus, has some actual money. He's told me precisely 47,305,634 times that he doesn't mind giving me some when I need it, yet every time I ask him, I feel like a big fat loser. FOR DAYS. Factually, that makes no sense. In spite of the MDD, I'm not actually a loser -- I'm a licensed architect. I brushed my teeth this morning. I wrote a goddamned book. Maybe that doesn't look like "success" as somebody else defines it, but it's pretty fucking good for somebody who shouldn't really be able to get out of bed every morning.

In other words, looking at reality -- things that are factual -- seems to help short-circuit the trip my brain always wants to take into the Depths. Interesting.

and for my next trick

Well, ladies and germs, it appears that the sequel to Nine Days has started writing itself, whether I'm ready or not. It's calling itself Samsara for the time being. This means that I will be perfecting Nine Days and writing its sequel at the same time. Will I go (more) insane? Place your bets.

yer doin' it wrong

Damn it, I have work to do, but as usual, a discussion over at IBTP got me started on a topic near and dear to my heart and now I gotta process. Which I do, as you know, right here on the old blaugh.

It's about this whole sex-positive feminism thing. Which, I have decided, is a misnomer. In my experience, sex-positive feminism isn't actually SEX-positive, it's performing-femininity-positive. Performing femininity, for those of you who don't know what that means, involves behaving in ways that are culturally coded "feminine," such as (where I live, anyway) wearing dresses and make-up, declining to swear like a sailor in mixed company, and/or removing perfectly serviceable body hair. In the patriarchy, it is composed mainly of refusing to "let oneself go" -- i.e., maintaining, at all costs, compliance with culturally accepted beauty standards.

Now. If you google "sex-positive," 99.9% of the hits you get will be by, or feature, women. There will be pictures of women in their sexpoz outfits, blog posts by women about their sexpoz experiences, videos of women being sexpozitively 'sexy,' et cetera. The accompanying explanations will discuss how these women are exercising their right to choose how they want to be sexual, which is why they think that it's "feminist." It's not. Here's why.

In all of these "sex-positive" performances, it's the women who are central. That is, they are the subjects and objects of attention. However, if "sex-positive" was really about women's sexual interests (I'm speaking from my own unfashionably heterosexual perspective here), there would be some MEN involved. As currently practiced, "sex-positivity" is all about women's sexual performance, and thus, it perpetuates the cultural primacy of the male gaze, which cannot be feminist.

Oddly enough, though, I suspect that this failure points the way to a truly feminist heterosexuality, a female gaze feminism, in which women finally obtain the crap-free privilege to act as viewers rather than performers. As it stands now, a woman may only (publicly) view a man sexually if she agrees, either overtly or covertly, to perform for him sexually. She must be wearing a sexy outfit, or perform femininity adequately enough that her observable interest doesn't compromise his performance of masculinity (yeah, baby, that knife cuts both ways).

When women can, without cultural opprobrium or expectation of reciprocation, lie fully clothed, hairy, and makeupless on the sofa and passively watch attractive men performing to our taste, then we can talk about sex-positive feminism. Until then, it's just sexism in a skirt.

makes me proud to live in Austin, Texas

today's WTF

I've been following, with interest, the story of this attress who is trying to sue Amazon for publishing her real birth date. As some of y'all know, I was involved in my own version of this recently, and it blows my lobes that people have really become this stupid.

I know, I know, calling people stupid on the internet has become, like, the national pastime over the last couple of years, but check this. The attress argues that publishing her real birth date caused her to lose work, because of age discrimination in the entertainment industry. She's not suing the people who refused to give her work because of her age, she's suing the people who told everybody how old she actually is. In other words, she's HELPING THE INDUSTRY DISCRIMINATE. She wants Amazon (IMDB in this case) to help hide her true age, and perpetuate the fiction that she's younger than she is, so that directors can continue to think that they're casting 'young enough' attresses in all their shit. Can I get a WTF?

And for the finishing flourish: she says that the only way IMBD could have gotten her real birthdate is from her credit card information, which she used to buy her membership with them. Lady, do you even know what the internet IS? I can find out your blood type, shoe size, brand of toothpaste and last meal for five dollars. I found my closeted movie star's birth date by accident, for cryin' out loud. Anybody who knows your real name can look up anything about you and submit it to IMDB. This isn't called the Information Age because people just like the sound of the words.

I know my over-fitty homeskillets out there are all going, "Who the hell cares?" and I hear you. It's Hollyweird. It's not Real Life. Twenty years ago -- ten years ago, even -- I might be saying the same thing. Nowdays, though, we spend so much time plugged into media of one sort or another that who and what we see in it occupies a great deal more of our consciousness(es?). Used to be, you'd go to a movie once a week, and the separation between Real Life and the young, white, beautiful movie stars was clear. Now, you don't know whether the person on the other end of your videosmartphonepad is a 'real' human being or an attress. So it matters whether she's pretending to be 30 when she's really 45, because if we never see frankly 45 year-old women (or men) making a living and being celebrated for their accomplishments, the 45 year-old women (and men) of the world are going to start to feel -- and be treated as -- useless. Which they aren't.

What really, really gets me about this, though, is that the case somehow made it all the way to court without somebody involved completing the thought process outlined in the second paragraph above. I don't want to even entertain the idea that humans with that many resources are that stupid, so I'm going to believe instead that this is some kind of publicity stunt, or that the lawyer involved is desperate for work.

What do you think?

spectacular in my laziness

One less rant I'll have to write myself.

mean woman blues

duh

It just occurred to me that I don't have to wait for The Agent to respond before starting the 4th (and, I hope, final) edit of Nine Days. So I have.

Dear Mr. Letterman,

I don't have a problem with you calling Chris Christie fat. He is fat. Simply saying so is the equivalent of me pointing out that you have gaps in your teeth or are losing your hair.

The problem I have is that you're not just objectively describing him. You're ascribing personal characteristics to the man -- gluttony, laziness, stupidity, lack of self-control, etc. -- based on his appearance, which is the equivalent of me deciding that you have a low I.Q. because you're tall, or thinking that the knots on your skull indicate psychopathic tendencies.

Please remember that making judgments about people's characters based on how they look has led to dreadful historical consequences in the past. Also, I won't bore you with a lecture about the science, since you presumably have access to the internet, but simply remind you that the factors influencing individual body size are complex and varied. Everybody's different. Mocking the evidence of that difference is narrow-minded and petty.

You're better than this, Dave. I know you are.

Love, Minerva

torture porn rides again

So I came across a provocative teaser for a self-published thriller the other day. The author claims to be a feminist, and the writing was good enough to convince me to drop $3.99 on the Kindle. Six pages in, I'm treated to a graphic rape scene. Sorry, hon. You're doing it wrong.

it's over

I'm done with Facebook. I can't even joke about how stupid it is anymore. What's the point?

now's your chance

Do me a favor. Read this, then take the poll. It'll be good for your Karma.