Coming Soon: Burning Bridges

You may remember the tale of a certain shady publisher. Writers are a resilient bunch, however. We know how to deal with adversity: write it, publish it, triumph over it. As the Hávamál teaches us:

Cattle die, kinsmen die,
You will die the same.
The one thing that never dies
Is your eternal fame.

For good or for ill, that is. Vikings knew what they were on about. So coming May 1st and free to the world is the anthology BURNING BRIDGES. Inside you'll find:


Julia Madeleine
K.A. Laity
Mark Cooper
Darren Sant
Allan Leverone
Paul D. Brazill
George S. Geisinger
McDroll
Edith M. Maxwell
Benjamin Sobieck
Tace Baker
Joshua J. Mark
L. Vera
B.R. Stateham
Heath Lowrance

And we will rock you, as they say. Because we know that George Herbert was right:

Living well is the best revenge.

And here's the soundtrack for it ;-)

Thursday Tune: Revolution

Because I am fed up with the war against women and this sort of thing, this is my mood.

BitchBuzz: Rebekah Brooks: The Charm Offensive

I'm off to Readercon today, picking up folks along the way, including a certain mad Ukrainian in Northampton if all goes according to plan. I will doubtless post more this weekend as there are sure to be entertaining things to write about, like torturing Todd and dishing with Liz. I can't believe I'm scheduled at the same time as her twice, so I'll be missing the Norwegian metal music talk. Sigh.

My column today takes up an aspect of the Murdoch meltdown; I can't believe Americans aren't getting upset about this. Too complacent? I am mystified -- and outraged. You might want to look into that. But I suppose Fox News triumphed long ago: that's why we find ourselves in the state we're in.

Rebekah Brooks: The Charm Offensive

By K. A. Laity

If you've been living under a rock, you may have missed the complete shut down of The News of the World and Murdoch's New International's withdrawing their bid for control of BSkyB—and of course the schadenfreudegasm it generated (thanks,John Oliver, for that new term).
The gleeful noise has threatened to drown out everything, especially on Twitter, even pressing issues of a similarly nefarious nature. Even people in the States seem to have glanced up from their obsessive attention tobaseless conspiracy theories and barking madness to recognize that Murdoch and his Fox"News" have had a similarly devastating effect on their lives including the hacking of phones belonging to 9/11 victims...

Read the rest at BBHQ.

My editor removed my lovely Shakespeare quote: "Who is Sylvia? What is she / That all our swains commend her?" Too much?

BitchBuzz: Blogging by Gender

My latest BitchBuzz column is up. It was sparked by the revelation this week that the uber-macho blogger James Chartrand is really a woman and the reasons she gave for that mask:

Blogger James Chartrand revealed this week that "he" is actually a she and deliberately took up the name after finding it impossible to make a living as a female blogger and facing ridicule and dismissal. It's hard to tell whether female bloggers were more disgusted that pretending to be a misogynist jerk actually worked or depressed that nothing has changed about the contempt for "ladies" who write.

Feministing put the revelation into the context of the "pale/stale/male-ness of the media" as a whole and pointed to a study by the University of Maryland demonstrating the disproportionate threats women face online when identified by gender...

As always, you can read the rest at BBHQ. One thing I forgot to include was trying out the Gender Analyzer to see what its opinion was and got the following: "We guess http://menwithpens.ca/ is written by a woman (55%), however it's quite gender neutral." So the AI was not fooled by the macho graphics of the page.

This here blog of mine? "We guess http://katewombat.blogspot.com is written by a man (56%), however it's quite gender neutral."

I find it fascinating, the variety of ways we read gender into things. How gendered is your writing?