I am not a very public person.

Being professional is something that everyone who works should be capable of - but in general, that’s eight hours a day, five days a week. Professional behaviour is a very narrow range of polite, considerate, and largely vanilla interactions; it’s a way of navigating a world full of strangers. (Yes, there are other ( Read more... )

No child sees their mother as a person. They see their mother as a role. We’re not women, not people with significant (or insignificant) aspirations to our children: we’re their mothers.

( My thoughts on yesterday’s news. It is not a happy post; I am trying not to rant. )

Quintana once nailed a list of "Mom's Sayings" to the garage door that read: "Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I'm working." In reviews of Blue Nights, "shush I'm working" became a symbol of Didion's maternal negligence.

( My take on this single comment, wherein I try not to rant. )

Last night, when I was falling asleep at my keyboard and did not want to sleep, I went off to the internet to read about books. (Not my books, though, because that frequently wakes me up in the Bad Way, because - author ( Read more... )

The title refers to this post, by author Nora Jemisin. It is worth reading. It is not going to make your night any happierBut then again, I'm not going to make your night any happier. I don't know if people will find this post triggery--but it will descend, in all probability, into rant and a genuine, visceral anger. So this might be the time to ( Read more... )

This is sort of cross-posted from the writer web-site.

I have one half-finished post closing the entire “love as endurance” train, but I have been page-proofing and deadline crushing. Working on three books during a single year is perfectly reasonable -- as long as nothing goes wrong. When one of the three has to be nuked to page zero (twice! A ( Read more... )

I want to talk around the edges of the events at Readercon. I've never attended; I've only -- until now -- heard good to great things about it.

But in the wake of the events that occurred there, I've seen a few comments that crop up from time to time - always as an excuse or a defense of harassment: It's Aspie behaviour. He probably doesn't know ( Read more... )

I have been off-line with family things (mostly good) and the time crunch that often brings with it (mostly hair-pulling). But next weekend, Thomas and I will be driving down to Pittsburgh to attend Confluence 2012, where the GOH this year is seanan_mcguire, which is exciting!

I have a final schedule:

Fri 8:00 pm  Helpful HintsRand Belavia (F), Seanan McGuire ( Read more... )

If you spend much time on the internet in writers’ circles, you will no doubt have heard about the Stop The Goodreads Bullies web-site. Set up by anonymous bloggers, it purports to be a site created by concerned readers, readers who are dismayed and outraged by the bullies on Goodreads. These so-called bullies are reviewers. They are generally very ( Read more... )

A little bit of background history, here ( Read more... )