I spent Saturday keeping up with news of advertisers dropping Rush Limbaugh like the rotten potato he looks like, smells like, and sounds like. It comforted me to know the outrage over his comments was strong enough to make people put commercial pressure on his show. Then I ended up on Carbonite Online’s Facebook page, which stated their reasons for not advertising with Limbaugh anymore. For every comment applauding their decision, there seemed to be another siding with Rush. *Sigh*

I’m tired of standing on my soap box shouting about sexist behavior and discrimination. It feels too much like too few are listening. My voice is hoarse.

Instead, I’m now looking for things that make me feel good about being a woman—and a writer. I found one already, Flavorwire’s 10 of the Most Powerful Female Characters in Literature:

Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish adaptation of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." The Swedish title of the book actually translates to "Men who Hate Women."

Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre
Hermione Granger, the Harry Potter series
The Wife of Bath, The Canterbury Tales
Katniss Everdeen, The Hunger Games trilogy
Hester Prynne, The Scarlett Letter
Éowyn, The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Lyra Silvertongue, His Dark Materials trilogy
Janie Crawford, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Hua Mulan, The Ballad of Mulan
Lisbeth Salander, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Thinking of my own history, I would like to add at least one more. As a teenager, I loved Princess Herald Elspeth of the Mage Winds trilogy by Mercedes Lackey. Elspeth rode into battle and kicked some serious butt, never needing a man to do the fighting for her.

Who would you add to this list?

Happy Women’s History Month.

Embedding the video in this post eludes me, but you can watch the segment here.

When I met with the external reviewers who visited campus, I was asked about placement. That’s a word that educes defensiveness from many of us who teach in programs that grant art degrees.
…
Graduates of M.F.A. programs have always followed a greater variety of career trajectories than their scholarly counterparts in humanities Ph.D. programs—both because they’ve wanted to and because they’ve had to.
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One reason for this is that substantial publication is a prerequisite for a good teaching job in creative writing, and that almost always means a full-length book. Unlike young literature scholars, who need a book to keep the job they get, creative writers almost always need a book to get the job, plus another to win tenure.
…

While we who teach in M.F.A. programs can show our students how to write a strong pedagogy statement and stage mock interviews, the best job training we can give is to help students write a good book, cajole them into finishing and revising that book, and give them advice on getting it published. That also serves the students who don’t want to remain in academe; nearly all of them do want to publish books.
…

Besides, consider us an instructive preview. The dearth of jobs for Ph.D. humanities graduates, together with the related recent interest in alternative careers for scholars, suggests that a broader definition of “placement” may be coming soon to a variety of non-arts programs too.

How would you measure the success of an MFA program? How do we know whether we are “successful” after graduation? Did you enter your MFA program with a specific goal of what you wanted to accomplish after graduation?

I love her ending paragraph:

Perhaps all the focus on the nature of the prize this year is simply testament to the fact that books (and writers) are still important. If so, then the prize has done its job — we can all, as the wartime slogan exhorts, keep calm and carry on. In a Guardian comment piece anticipating Tuesday’s announcement, the novelist Jeanette Winterson (Oranges are Not the Only Fruit) wrote of great literature: ‘There is a simple test: Does this writer’s capacity for language expand my capacity to think and to feel?’  This is exactly what The Sense of an Ending did for me. Bravo.

Allfrey described the media debate regarding the nomintations as “this most revered of prizes seemed about to commit the literary equivalent of ditching the family station wagon for a red sports car.”

If you were this year’s winner Julian Barnes, would you have mixed feelings about receiving the prize?

My favorite back then was Dennis Cass’s “Book Launch 2.0,” which won the 2010 Moby Award (The Oscars of the Book Trailers) for Best Performance by an Author.

Now I have a new favorite.

Here’s Max Barry promoting Machine Man.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEN10axDJtA&feature

I can’t stop laughing. It must be the Australian accent.

Is there something that you have always dreamed of doing but have been too afraid of failing to try? Did you always want to open a restaurant, write that Great American Novel or maybe even climb a mountain! If you are ready to overcome that fear of failure, then we want to hear your story.

The new series will be called Failure Club and is “about embracing the fear of failure in order to change your life.” Meeting weekly for a year, the cast will help each other achieve their dreams.

I’m a big fan of Spurlocks, but have mixed feelings about this series. What if the people answering the casting call are just fulfilling their “big dream” of being on TV? Many reality TV shows have this problem.

Will most of the people apply because they think being on TV will give them a greater chance of getting published, open a restaurant, star in a play, or join the circus? As opposed to truly master a craft or a discipline. How will he make sure it doesn’t become another version of Starting Over?

Bottom line is, I’m worried about how he’ll make this a documentary–a style I love–and not a reality TV show–which I can’t stand.

Despite my pre-series anxiousness, I’m pretty sure I’ll watch the show. So far Spurlock has never disappointed me, and I’m a sucker for underdogs-achieveing-their-dream-type stories.

If you’re an “inspiring and fun every-day” person with “big, unfulfilled goals” and over 21 and happen to be living in or planning to move to NYC or the tri-state area, you should apply. I’d watch you every week and cheer you on. By the time the show airs, you either could have achieved your dream or be signing up for Failure Club 2.

All proceeds go to the It Gets Better Fund, as a dedication to Jeffries Morrisey, the deceased Head of Reference and Research Services at the University of San Francisco Library, and a driving force behind the calendar project.

In the Men of the Stacks own words:

There is an entire population of professional librarians out there who disagree with the way the library profession is perceived in contemporary media outlets and in the historical consciousness of the American mind.  Different people and different associations will use different means to try to change those perceptions.  This is ours.

…

What do we want to tell you about who we are?  What are these alternative images?  Easy.  We are, or [sic] course, professionals.  We are educators, programmers, project managers, entrepreneurs, program coordinators, contractors, consultants, and speakers.  We are academics.  We are authors, diversity officers, historians, administrators, deans, professors, and researchers.  We are creatives.  We are musicians, bakers, painters, and storytellers.  We are athletes, yogis, gym-rats, runners, and hikers.  We are passionate.  We are dog-lovers, radicals, conservatives, Christians, and Buddhists.  We are in our twenties.  We are in our forties.  We are in relationships.  We are perpetual bachelors.  We are privileged beings who try to use their advantages to better the lives of others.

Who are we?  We are The Men of the Stacks.

Eric built a flying tank/car, which he used mainly to go get groceries.

I’ve been gone from Bark for a few weeks because of a Swedish invasion.

My parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, my five-year-old nephew Eric, and my two-year-old niece Ellen came to stay with us. Living with little people was a blast.

Before I get into more details, I should explain that since I’m an aunt—not a parent—my job is to have as much fun as possible with the kids while spoiling them rotten. I don’t have to worry about creating learning opportunities, or if not correcting bad behavior will cause social problems down the road. As long as nobody gets hurt and there’s a lot of laughter, anything I do with the little ones is on the list of approved activities. (As far as I’m concerned, my brother and sister-in-law may have different ideas.) 

There were plenty of learning opportunities during the visit though. Mostly I turned out to be the student and the short folks the teachers. One of the things I learned from Eric is that it’s not always the main event that ends up being the most fascinating one, so pay attention to the smaller details. We went to the Spokane Interstate Fair, mainly because of the rodeo and the demolition derby. Both of those were okay events as far as my nephew was concerned, but what really blew him away were the stickers that the sheriff department and the firemen were handing out. He covered his shirt in shiny emblems, called it “a uniform” and spent a lot of time at the fair looking out for bad guys needing arresting and fires needing fighting. (We also spent a lot of time studying how the funnel cake people used a piano wire to cut thick slices from a humongous block of ice cream and talked about how all your friends would want to spend the night in your igloo if you used dairy bricks as building material instead of ice.)

Among other things, Ellen taught me that you don’t always have to conform to what society expects. If during a walk on the Centennial Trail it feels like the entire world is against you, it’s totally okay to throw yourself on the asphalt and have a little tantrum. Other walkers and bicyclists will navigate around you without a second thought. She also taught me that if you smile really big, strangers will go out of their way to figure out what you need, even if they don’t know your language. (Having wispy red curls and big baby-blue eyes may also help.)

In my writing, I sometimes get carried away with making sure that my characters’ actions are expected. I confuse “believable” with “predictable” and forget that often the unexpected is more pleasurable, as long as the motivation is properly shown. What I think the majority considers logical isn’t always the right path for the fictional people in my story. 

Watching my niece and nephew’s interactions with people and their environment made me realize that the possible outcomes of any situation are endless, and the solution to a problem doesn’t have to be the most obvious one.

One afternoon I watched Ellen wondering around downstairs with a bucket filled with little toy animals. We’d played with them in the morning and she was collecting them to go back in the play box. In a corner close to where I was standing, a plastic buffalo lounged around on its side. “Here’s another one for you,” I told my niece. “The buffalo has been waiting for you to find him. I bet he’s feeling very lonely all by himself.” She leaned over to see what I was pointing at and I left her silently contemplating the buffalo’s situation as I went upstairs. On my way back down again, I found the buffalo standing up. Nose-to-nose with a cow. Neither of them looked lonely.

Ellen checked to see if she could return to Sweden without paying for a ticket.

I recently got a contest entry back with judges’ comments. The rules were that only the first seven pages of your novel would be considered. In the opening of my story, the main character is fired in a very brusque and unfair manner. I based the scene on something I watched happen to a colleague at a previous place of employment. One of the judges wrote that my situation was completely unbelievable and would never take place in real life. He or she had several years of management and HR experience and any company that allowed what I described to happen would get sued. The judge found my research lacking and my characters’ motivation (the ones who did the firing) unbelievable.

Had I read the comments a while back, I’d probably research rules of firing employees and rewrite the scene. After all, I’ve only observed this behavior once and have very little management experience. I would have made sure that I wrote the scene according to what I thought most people would expect. I imagine the scene would have ended up believable, but also very boring.

So, I’m keeping the opening exactly the way it is and adding more unexpected, unpredicted, and sometimes illogical stuff to the subsequent pages. Because the thing is, I now write from a world where cows are kissing lonely buffaloes and small details–like free shiny stickers—can make every event and situation more fun and adventurous.

At least according to U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks, who ruled against the Texas Department of Transportation’s request for restraining the sale of a book it says infringes on its trademarked slogan “Don’t Mess With Texas.”

The Houston Business Journal reports that Federal Judge Sparks cited First Amendment rights in his ruling and concluded that TxDOT’s trademark registration does not apply to books. He also considered the amount of revenue the defendants (Hachette Book Group, Barnes & Noble, and author Christie Craig) would lose if prevented from selling the book.

According to the Houston Press blog Hair Balls, TxDOT initiated the suit because the novel “contains numerous graphic references to sexual acts, states of sexual arousal, etc.” The agency was also worried that selling the book at Barnes & Noble would call “irreparable harm” since the store also sells many TxDOT materials.

Running through my head right now are all kinds of scenarios of people confusing a romance novel with a department of transportation book. It would make defensive driving courses much more interesting. Being bad a spotting cop cars while I speed, I’ve had to take that twice. One of those times was in Texas and the curriculum was uninspiring. Judging from Ms. Craig’s cover, I’d much rather have read her book during the eight hour class.

I’m psyched over how much free publicity this book is getting because a state department of transportation decided morality falls under its jurisdiction. And I’m happy authors can still exercise freedom of speech, even if it involves a governmental slogan.

Maybe you can’t literally mess with that big state down south, but you can do so literarily.

Steward introduces my favorite segment from this week as “Books: You might know them as the thing Amazon tells you ‘you might be interested in’ when you’re buying DVDs.”

Unfortunately, I can’t make the link work so that it plays here on our blog and you have to sit through a 30 seconds commercial before you get to the humor. You really should watch it though. It’s only 5 minutes long and you get to hear funny dialogue like:

Stewart: There are stuff bookstores can do that the internet can not.
Hodgman: You mean like sheltering the homeless?
Stewart: I’m talking about having authors visit stores.
Hodgman: Now we’re just splitting hairs.

Funny Video: Stewart and Hodgman talk about that historical thing called a bookstore.

I’m disturbingly attracted to Hodgman’s idea of replacing in-store readings with in-store writings, having writers write on demand while visitors “pelt them with four-dollar scones.” Don’t you think that would make us meet our deadlines?