I am not a Cowgirl; I am not a Quilter

But I guess that doesn't matter.

If it's Tuesday, this must be...

So this is how the whole of September has felt: me as Durga with at least eighteen arms and too much to do and people standing in my way who need a good poke with a sharp stick.

Where's my lion? Or tiger! I will take either.

Part of it is the normal start to the semester: the first week of classes hits like a steam engine out of nowhere even though I know exactly when it will arrive. Somehow I always seem to find myself standing on the tracks. While this is supposed to be my "pseudo-sabbatical," administrative tasks for myself and for others (writing tenure letters for two folks today) have taken up an awful lot of time. The hope is that October and November will actually be writing intensive times for the non-fiction project, but argh! So far there's been no progress on that.

Not that I haven't got writing done: just not what I planned. And there's editing to do, too. Fortunately, the editing for Kit Marlowe's first publication -- the novella "The Big Splash" -- went swiftly. My editor had few changes and a couple of questions re: period slang (it takes place in 1929 London) -- she also said it was "hilarious" which made my day! The big editing job is getting to The Mangrove Legacy, Kit's next publication. I haven't had much time to work on that comic Gothic novel, but I have to make it a priority now.

I do have a new publication, though it will be of interest to fewer of you: a review of Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre and the Limits of Epic Masculinity in the latest issue of The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures. Oh, and Stephanie wrote nice things about me over at WLoAD: the journal looks like it will be fabulous!

All right: back to work!

Publication: The Last Ant

My short humour piece "The Last Ant" is up at Wild Violet, the literary magazine that also published the even more esoteric piece "Corrections to the Rules of Fimble Fowl (for 3 players or 4)," the semi-true/semi-autobiographical piece "Me and Margery Kempe" and the MLA-inspired flash fiction story "Wixey" (bonus points for identifying the words swiped from Nabokov). Alert readers who are also Peter Cook fans may notice a theme throughout my pseudo-journalistic essay on the now extinct sub-species of ant.

I had a fabulous time yesterday in Northampton with my wonderful collaborator, the Queen of Everything. We had a delicious lunch at the Lhasa Café with my colleague May and wandered around the main drag, stopping in at galleries and for food and bevvie refueling, including at a coffee shop, The Yellow Sofa, that neither of us had stopped in before and which we found quite lovely. We had an editorial meeting for the journal of The Women's League of Ale Drinkers with the glamourous Vicky Squid in Union Station, laying out our plans not only for this issue, but for the future -- many dreams lie ahead for us to make manifest!

And yes, I did get the story on the wombat fortune (thank you all) -- but where's mine?!

BitchBuzz: Good Witch/Bad Witch

My latest column engages with an old topic:

Christine O'Donnell: Good or Bad Witch?

If you were living under a rock you might have missed the fact that television personality and part-time poker of hot topics, Bill Maher, resurrected footage from a decade or so ago showcasing rabid right-wing American Senatorial candidate Christine O'Donnell, darling of the Tea Party and self-confessed non-masturbator, as she admitted to hanging around with questionable young men and "dabbling in witchcraft,", words which have rung across cyperspace via snark express ever since.

No, it didn't help that she was sitting next to Clive Barker as she spoke about it—clearly part of the monolithic illuminati of the Gay Agenda, which operates by making rabid homophobes kind of gay.

The dividing lines are clear: on the sympathetic side, cries for a moratorium on youthful transgressions (hmmm, when did we last hear that?) and a waving hand of irrelevancy.  Yet—perhaps not that surprisingly—among the wackiest of the wack jobs—i.e. Karl Rove—there is also a concern to "cleanse" their candidate to a pristine, non-masturbating, no-premarital-sex purity. In other words, they want her to clarify her "witchy" past and show contrition and a will to do penance (oh, wait—wrong branch of the monotheism) for the error of her ways.

Read more: http://news.bitchbuzz.com/christine-odonnell-good-witch-or-a-bad-witch.html#ixzz10RqdM2az

It has proved incredibly popular, generating a lot of retweeting and Facebook repostings, as well as a long conversation on my Facebook wall. The funny thing is I saw that show when it first aired and remember it -- though I didn't remember her specifically -- because of course Clive Barker was on the show. He appeared a few times; I think he's pals with Maher. The insanity around this non-issue really steams me. We have so far to go yet: it often feels discouraging.

The best cure for discouragement: hang out with people full of energy and hope! Out at my friend Mary's with a bunch of people for a full moon/equinox bonfire last night. Have you seen the moon the last couple nights? With Jupiter hanging out nearby? Gorgeous. Mary has the most incredible sanctuary and the most amazing gardens, too. Incredible to see the gigantic blooms of the moonflowers in the dark. She told us to take one home, so I did. Enormous, isn't it! As wide as the length of my hand.

Hanging with the Rom Writers

You've already seen the tiara; that was just one perk of Authors After Dark. My roomie Susan and I were both attending for the first time. We had planned to attend with our pal Debi, who knows everybody and is a real bon vivant, so we had some trepidation, being natural introverts. But Stella and Jackie made sure that everyone felt included and kept things rolling along wonderfully. There were panels on every topic both for readers and for writers; there was a great vendor room; there was a tattoo artist, there were pitch sessions with editors and agents. There were fabulous meals--yes, it is possible to get good hotel food (wow, that salmon!)--and lots of treats from the book, chocolate and fun food groups (i.e. parties and a dance). I got even more ideas about effective promotion, met a lot of terrific people and felt quite at home.

The biggest thing I came away with, however, was attitude. When you say "romance" I know what people think: dumpy middle aged women who console themselves with chaste and unrealistic fantasies. The truth is romance writers and readers, by and large, seem to be really happy people with optimistic attitudes. They believe in happy endings because they're living them, or have every expectation that they will make it happen. So many of the writers kept saying how they based their heroes/heroines on some aspect of their partners. Better yet, they talked about how supportive their relationships were, even if they didn't really understand the appeal of, say, sex with vampires or were-snakes (so forget about "chaste")!

Spending most of my time at academic or spec fic gatherings, it was a real delight to be surrounded by so much bubbly positivity. In the last couple of years I have come to realise how much your outlook affects the shape of your life. I'm not talking about a blithe ignorance of facts; I'm talking about choosing to be happy and to be completely alive now. Now: not lost in the regrets of the past, not hiding in the hopes for the future, but engaging fully and alertly with NOW. Terrible things happen, but you become resilient. You look for the opportunities. Most of all, you don't get mired in the endless cycle of "why me?" victimhood. My default position now is "I can cope. I have skills. I have resources. I have friends and people who love me. I will make the most of this."

Susan Hanniford Crowley

Stella Price in steampunk mode

Jackie Frank as Elizabeth Bennett

Leanna Renee Hieber explains the language of the Regency fan

The general signing begins: soon packed with eager readers with ARMLOADS of books! This is in addition to the loads of freebies, raffles and gift baskets that folks got.

A bit of debate about what this item was for...

Blinded by sparkliness!

Speaking of Ale

My mug came in! At Mahar's you get your very own mug once you have tried 125 different beers from around the world. Oh sure, it took me four years to get here, but way cool :-) Etched into the glass is the logo designed by the fabulous Queen of Everything, Stephanie Johnson, for the Women's League of Ale Drinkers.

Yes, I'll be writing up my weekend with the romance writers, with luck tomorrow, but it's been an insanely busy week already and whew! Not sure when I can find a moment to breathe. Though, yes, I did find a moment to have a couple of beers with my colleagues, but that's networking!

Reminder: WLoAD needs women!

Call for Submissions

"Passion. Vision. Daring. Humour. Any alone will be intriguing--but to have them all is to be sublime."

That is the mandate of the new journal for the Women's League of Ale Drinkers, for which I am editor. We seek only work that meets these criteria, the output of creative women who may feel that their vision and passion has been overlooked elsewhere, that their daring has brought only disapproving stares, that their humour has met with stony silence. We delight in work that crosses traditional genres. We do not ask for your credentials, awards or publications. We ask for your heartfelt work.

The inaugural issue will be out for Halloween. The full colour PDF format will be a showcase of talented women.


DEADLINE
September 21, 2010

FORMAT

Writing: fiction, drama, humour or non-fiction up to 5k; poems up to 100 lines total; submit as RTFs (or paste into an email).

Images: scans of paintings, drawings, multimedia, etc. or photos of handicrafts, sculptures, etc. or original digital designs in JPGs (resolution of 300dpi).

Music, Sound and Video: via links to your site or host site (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)

And if we select your work for WLoAD, we ask that you wear the badge proudly -- link to our site and your fellow artists, promote the journal assiduously and celebrate this forum (i.e. comment on the issue and your colleagues).

Submissions should be sent to VICTORIASQUID@GMAIL.COM

Be sure to include links to your website, blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc., in the email with your submission. Thank you!

Authors After Dark

All authors must wear a tiara: shouldn't this be true every day, everywhere?

Moonlight, Lace and Mayhem -- and Me!

I'm guest blogger over at Moonlight, Lace and Mayhem today. Stop by and say hi and read what I have to say about...

football?!

Yep, it's true (and why there's a picture of Mesut Özil here). No, I didn't have a choice, it was just their theme for the month. While I'm not much of a football fan, I tried to be a good sport (heh) and at least be funny when I couldn't offer too much in the way of knowledge about the game. It did remind me of all the fun this summer in London, with all the people in the pubs going mad over the World Cup matches. You can't help but get caught up in the excitement. The whole of the city echoed with the sound of vuvuzelas for weeks.

I'm off at some point today to Seacaucus, the garden spot of the Garden State (or so I was promised) for Authors After Dark, where Kit Marlowe and I will be joining friends like Stella Price, C. Margery Kempe, Susan Hanniford Crowley and many more. I need to finish packing all my promo things and um, clothes, too. Good thing I got a fabulous haircut this morning!

Albacon 2010, Oct 8-10

Hey kids! Especially you locals -- we're only weeks away from Albacon, the capitol region's only spec fic con which runs from Friday October 8th until Sunday the 10th, with oodles of fun stuff for you to do and see.

Writer GoH: Allen Steele
Artist GoH: Ron Miller
Fan GoH: Lisa Ashton

Plus we just got news that fan fave Jackie Kessler will be able to attend (which means Jackie Morse Kessler will be there, too!). Check out my interview with Jackie where she reads from Hunger.

Check out our program! Highlights include the ALL DAY writers conference on Friday. Call in sick to attend if you need to do so, but we have pros from many different genres offering practical advice on how to get your writing into its best form and out there and published.

There's a fantasy ball Friday night and a masquerade on Saturday. All day long there are panels on books, comics (including manga),  films (including anime), television shows, science and fandom. Writers include a lot of pals of mine like Stella Price, C. Margery Kempe, Susan Hanniford Crowley, Inanna Arthen and Morven Westfield. Yeah, I will be there, too, and so will Kit Marlowe.

Three days of non-stop fun! Best of all, the discount rate of $50 for the whole shebang has been extended a little bit longer, so get your registration in as soon as possible by Oct 1st.

Seeking Crafty Women

Hey, Vicky tells me we're getting some great submissions for the inaugural issue of the Journal for the Women's League of Ale Drinkers, but we haven't got much in the way of crafty things. There's still plenty of room for lovely photos of your crafty projects: knitting, crocheting, needlepoint, sculpture, food -- the possibilities are endless!

The photo from Cake Wrecks is just to spur you on!

Here's the skinny and the general call once more: do please consider sharing your work with the world!

"Passion. Vision. Daring. Humour. Any alone will be intriguing--but to have them all is to be sublime."

That is the mandate of the new journal for the Women's League of Ale Drinkers, for which I am editor. We seek only work that meets these criteria, the output of creative women who may feel that their vision and passion has been overlooked elsewhere, that their daring has brought only disapproving stares, that their humour has met with stony silence. We delight in work that crosses traditional genres. We do not ask for your credentials, awards or publications. We ask for your heartfelt work.

The inaugural issue will be out for Halloween. The full colour PDF format will be a showcase of talented women.

DEADLINE
September 21, 2010

FORMAT

Writing: fiction, drama, humour or non-fiction up to 5k; poems up to 100 lines total; submit as RTFs (or paste into an email).

Images: scans of paintings, drawings, multimedia, etc. or photos of handicrafts, sculptures, etc. or original digital designs in JPGs (resolution of 300dpi).

Music, Sound and Video: via links to your site or host site (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)

And if we select your work for WLoAD, we ask that you wear the badge proudly -- link to our site and your fellow artists, promote the journal assiduously and celebrate this forum (i.e. comment on the issue and your colleagues).

Submissions should be sent to VICTORIASQUID@GMAIL.COM

Be sure to include links to your website, blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc., in the email with your submission. Thank you!

It Must Be True

Are You Anybody?

I had a rather surprising piece of mail this week, that made my head spin around for a minute and then re-read the message. I've been invited to be a keynote speaker.

Huh? Me?!

Apparently so. It's the eleventh annual Craft Critique Culture Conference at the University of Iowa next April. You can see this year's schedule online and get a feel for it. Here's their description:


Craft Critique Culture is an interdisciplinary conference focusing on the intersections among critical and creative approaches to writing both within and beyond the academy. This year’s conference will explore the dialectical relationship between the periphery and center, specifically questioning the nature, theory, practice or role of the periphery. We invite the submission of critical, theoretical and original creative work in a variety of media and across the humanities, sciences and legal disciplines. In the past, submissions have included not only traditional scholarly papers but also film, video, music, writing, visual art and artists’ books.

So you can see from this description (and as Katie and Sofia, the organisers emphasized), the reason they asked me was for the very thing that most of my mentors suggested I avoid doing: everything! Hee. But it's true. From the time you hit college and even more so in grad school, it's all about specializing. I'm constitutionally incapable: it's natural to me to make connections, even if they're the kind of things that no one else sees. It's quite exciting to have a chance to share that with such a lively group of young scholars and trumpet the positive side of writing across disciplines and the high/low culture divide. Big thanks to my pal Dana who apparently was the one to drop my name in the hat. Several years ago Dana was the brash teen who joined the Horror list; now he's a grad student in Media Studies. How cool is that?

My first thought was that I have to be Vonnegut-worthy in my speech. After the initial euphoria, of course, came the doubt. Then it was Jim Dixon who came to mind, in particular his "Merrie England" speech. All those years ago when I read Lucky Jim for the first time, I had no idea I would become a medievalist. How weird is that? Amis' hero nonetheless resonated with me in part for my (continuing) love/hate relationship with academia.

Then again things turned out all right in the end for Jim: he got the girl of his dreams and a cushy job in London. Could be worse, but I don't think I'll choose "Merrie England" as my topic, although there may be a medieval theme. But no Dutch courage, for sure!

BitchBuzz: The Next Big Thing

My latest column:

Women are Key in Discovering the Next Big Thing

The latest innovation from iTunes launched this week. Ping was supposed to revolutionize the music experience. Reviews, however, were tepid. The "social network for music" as Apple promotion called it turned out to be less social than existing networks and not integrated with them, a rather serious miscalculation. It's possible they rushed the launch to coincide with the iPod re-launch and it will improve, but for the moment, the sizzle just ain't there.
Everybody's trying to find the next big thing (remember Google's Wave and Buzz? Nah, I didn't think so), but the virtual landscape is getting littered with the bones of a whole lot of misguided attempts to be "the next _______" when that's really not what we need.
It's a business kind of outlook (and how well has that served the world lately) that seeks to dislodge a successful product by creating another version of the same with NEW and IMPROVED written across the package.  It's Coke and Pepsi thinking.  While slow moving organizations decide how to cope with the digital revolution that's already here, most people are just looking for fun...

Read more: http://tech.bitchbuzz.com/women-are-key-in-discovering-the-next-big-thing.html#ixzz0z3yTTQuJ

Insanely busy today but I will have some fun tonight that involves friends and drumming, so hurrah! The program for Albacon is coming together despite my lack of minions (where are my minions!), so a little less stress about that. I do have a piece of rather surprising and good news, but anon -- off to run errands including getting some food so I don't have to be embarrassed by my empty fridge.

Kit Marlowe Visits UnBound

Kit Marlowe is over at the UnBound blog with the Ravenous writers today. She's writing about cant, jargon and slang in her books and in her favorite novels. Join her and the whole crew, who are a fun bunch of folks and our wonderful hostess, the fabulous Dana Fredsti. Here's a snippet:

I love language!

I know, I know: all writers do, but I love the superfluity of language that supplies slang. I think in part it's like knowing a secret handshake or being part of an exclusive club. I specialize in rather obscure languages: for my graduate work I studied Old English, Middle English, Old Norse, Old Irish, Old High German, Middle High German, Modern German, Modern Swedish, Modern Icelandic and Latin (whew!).

But what I really love most are informal vocabularies that define a time or place...

Kit has reason to be cheery: her novella set in Jazz Age London, "The Big Splash," will be released by Noble Romance next month. Wow, barely born and already two publications! That's making a big splash for sure.

I, on the other hand, am still struggling out from under a bunch of tasks I'd hoped to have done by now so I could be back to focusing on writing. Soon, soon!

Shakespeare-a-Go-Go

I set off Sunday for a Shakespeare double-header with my theatre buddy, Ron, and got all the way to Massachusetts to fill up on cheap gas before I discovered that I had left my check card in the cash machine: D'oh!

We got to Shakespeare & Co for the first order of the day: A Winter's Tale. I had seen a production last year at the Old Vic with Sinead Cusack and Simon Russell Beale, part of Sam Mendes' Bridge Project. It's not ever been one of my fave plays: it's got an awkward juxtaposition of tragedy and comedy that I've always found jarring. Shakespeare uses one of his favorite ruses: the capricious monarch. Of course he always gives them good speeches to sell that caprice. Leontes gets a good one here and the staging and Jonathan Epstein make it convincing, and Elizabeth Aspenlieder makes you weep for her. The wacky second half in the wilds of Bohemia were funny and even included a fantastic dance by the horned men in masks. Truly pagan!

We walked the grounds discussing the play afterward and decided to make it a triple-header by attending the free performance at the Rose Footprint Theatre, a pastiche of the Bard and the theories about "the real Shakespeare" performed by the interns in the Training Institute. It was a lot of fun. I had seen many of the same actors in the lively performance of The Comedy of Errors earlier in the season. Much fun and we didn't regret that it left us a very short time for dinner. Fortunately there were still box lunches left so it was possible to have a well-balanced meal before the final play.

Yes, I had seen Richard III before. It had been in previews yet, so I was intrigued to see changes. Wow, it was tighter than ever and John Douglas Thompson just as riveting as before (and my how he can schvitz!). I love how they make the crowd complicit in Richard's elevation. It is glorious fun. While Richard is the center of the story, it's really the women I remembered most, from cursing Margaret (Elizabeth Ingram), mourning Ann (Leia Espericueta, who was hilarious in A Winter's Tale) and the tragic Elizabeth embodied by the amazing Tod Randolph, who goes from casual confidence to beaten weariness by the end. A fantastic production: it was closing day for the summer season, so a lot of the actors were gathering with friends at the end of the day. A celebratory mood: it was certainly earned. Well done, S&Co.

Work beckons: so much to get done. Where's that idleness that my pseudo-sabbatical was supposed to bring? Oh, I did do one useful thing: I got an excerpt of Pelzmantel up on Scribd. Don't know why I didn't think of it before!

Talking Book Trailers at Sia's

Here's Sia's introduction to my piece on what I learned from making book trailers: please stop by and comment, and be sure to check out the many interviews with writers featured on her blog.

PROMOTION AND BOOKTRAILERS

My guest is a favorite of mine, Kate Laity. She's written some wonderfully entertaining stories under various names, including tales of magic, myths, and legends, as K. A. Laity. 

Branding and promotion is something of interest to authors. We talk about both quite a bit and you see resulting conversations on many blogs. Another aspect of promotion is what I call gadgets. Really, they are various promotion tools used to capture the interest of potential readers and can include everything from bookmarks to booktrailers.

Like websites, booktrailers visually solidify your brand as an author. There are professionals out there that will produce both. Many writers choose to make their own. So how does one go about creating a good, eye-catching booktrailer? How much is too much? Not enough?

Kate shares some of what she's learned in the making of booktrailers.  

Thanks, Sia! You're very kind.

A hectic day so far: webmail isn't working so if you've emailed me, you're going to have to be patient. Maybe when I get home I'll be able to download it, but here on campus I keep getting "unknown error" when I try to login. Curse you, Mercury! My "quiet" semester has so far been a non-stop whirl of things that must get done NOW and I am scrambling to get to everything in a timely manner, so I look forward to catching up on things while everyone else is enjoying a long holiday this weekend. I'd like to be able to breathe again! And one of these Fridays I will get back to Forgotten Books; in the mean time, read Todd's and Patti's George's round-up of all the others for the vacationing Patti.

BitchBuzz: The Anti-Chick Flick

My latest column:

Winter's Bone: The Anti Chick Flick

Debra Granik's film of the novel by Daniel Woodrell offers a bleak world and an engaging 17-year-old heroine, Ree Dolly. She's not fighting (or kissing) vampires, she's not wondering what boys think of her and she's not shopping. Ree (played with finesse and grace by the amazing Jennifer Lawrence) takes care of her younger siblings and her mentally ill mother, dreams of joining the Army as a solution to her problems and needs to find her missing ne'er-do-well father really badly.

The film is full of women and there's not a Manolo to be seen. The women aren't made up and airbrushed. They come in all shapes and sizes—and personalities. While each one is memorable and distinct (how many mainstream films can you say that about?), perhaps the most striking character of all is the matriarch Merab, played with terrifying realism by Dale Dickey. The interactions between Ree and Merab are shot so full of tension that you could hear the audience not breathing in the theatre. Winter's Bone was the first movie in eons that I had no idea where it would go, but I couldn't wait to find out...

Read more: http://culture.bitchbuzz.com/winters-bone-the-anti-chic-flick.html#ixzz0yOBqbl81

I also saw Coco & Igor yesterday with Peg. If I get a chance, I'll write that up, too. This first week of classes is a bit hectic despite the not teaching, mostly because there's a whole lot of other things going on as well (of course), some of which I'll share with you very soon. Let me give you a head's up that tomorrow I'm guest blogging over at Sia McKye's, talking about making book trailers and what I've learned. Drop by and comment.


I got a new phone :-) Never took to the last one: it didn't help that it dropped calls all the time. I sprang for unlimited data as well, sigh. Now I can tweet without wifi.

Pseudo-Sabbatical

As some of you may remember, I am enjoying my pseudo-sabbatical this semester. I was somewhat put out to find that while it was possible to jump the line to get tenure (which I did :-) it was not possible to bend time in order to get a sabbatical. You have to be at the college six years.

Pooh.

But I really need a break, so I applied for and received a reassigned time grant, added it to the one I get for coordinating Women's and Gender Studies and then taught my remaining course as a completely on-line one. So I don't get to use my disapproving teacher look very much except in the mirror, which is hardly satisfying.

So let me look disapprovingly here. Now don't you feel chastised?

I do have meetings to attend, but it's amazing how much less onerous they are when they don't come after teaching two classes back to back. But it's a bit disconcerting not to see my students: well, that's not entirely true. Blackboard has a photo for each student on my roster. Much as I'm relieved not to have all the classroom time -- because after all, I'm going to get lots of writing done! -- I miss that interaction. But I'll be back in the classroom before long, so I better enjoy this brief respite.