Quote of the day

The final line of an IM conversation between The Charming Man and myself:

"Cannibalism can be freeing!"

Curses, foiled again!

The Charming Man just shot down my idea of turning the interior of the house into a bouncy castle.

I think my brain is going.

Blog Tour!

As you may know, a blog tour is where an author visits a number of other blogs to discuss and share their lives. In celebration for the release of Dracula's Secret, Goddess Fish and I arranged a rock star tour of the blog-o-sphere!

A random commenter will be chosen to receive this lovely hand painted fan, too. :)

August 6:  House Millar
August 7:  Sandra's Blog
August 8:  Amy's Book World
August 9:  Wickedly Wanton Tales
August 9:    The Sinners Series
August 10:  Welcome to My World of Dreams
August 13:  Indie books at shardpubs blogspot
August 14:  It's Raining Books
August 15:  Magically Seductive Romance
August 16:  Dawn's Reading Nook
August 17:  Books & Other Spells
August 20:  The Bunny's Review
August 21:  Urban Girl Reader
August 22:  Zombiegirl Shambling
August 23:  Black Hippie Chick's View on Books & the World
August 24:  Chris Redding Author
August 27:  Indie Designz
August 28:  Lisa Haselton's Reviews and Interviews
August 29:  Lisa Fox Romance
August 30:  Wake Up Your Wild Side
August 30:    Sultry Storyteller
August 31:  DanaSquare

Note to the world..

Don't rub your eye after you've handled ginger.

Or this song will take on a whole new meaning.

SHOE GREED!

Vivienne Westwood Regent pumps from Zappos. Here is the description!

• WARNING! You may cause whiplash wearing these shoes in public! Others are bound to fall head over heels in love watching you prancing down the pavement in the provocative Vivienne Westwood™ Regent!
• Sensationally striped leather upper.
• Wide round throatline.
• Leather lining.
• Leather insole.
• Leather outsole.
• Spanish heel.
• Made in Italy.
• Measurements:
  • Heel Height: 4 in
  
  
  
  
  

Here we go again; the denegration of women's reading

To be clear; I have not read 50 Shades of Grey yet. I have been too busy getting Dracula Unleashed (Book Three of the Blood Wings series) into some kind of order. But naturally, I have an opinion about the nasty, denigrating comments about books that women like to read.

I have touched on these themes before in my Defense of Twilight posts, (here, here, here, here, here), but they bear repeating.

In no particular order, I want to point out the following things.

1. Women are not stupid.  
 Some critics think that the people who read 50 Shades are going to jump right in and start doing unsafe sexual practices, such as untutored BDSM. There are millions and millions of people tying each other up and spanking like crazy without having been to a single workshop at a leather conference and somehow they survive. Guess what. We do know how to do research.

2. Women are able to separate fantasy from reality.  
 Teenagers who watched the Batman series in the late 1960s did not try climbing up buildings crouched over with a single rope.

3. Women are not illiterate.
50 Shades is considered to be horribly written, with cliches and redundant phrasing. Here's a little rebuttal from Joanna Russ' How to Suppress Women's Writing, pg. 129:

Women always write in the vernacular....

In the vernacular, it is...hard to be "classic", to be smooth, to be perfect. The Sacred Canon of Literature quite often pretends that some works can be not only atemporal and universal (that is, outside of history, a religious claim) but without flaw and without perceptible limitations. It's hard, in the vernacular, to pretend this, to paper over the cracks. It's also hard to read the vernacular as Holy Writ...

Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art.

4. Women's sexual fantasies and arousal are important.
Portnoy's Complaint is considered Great Literature. Susie Bright gets told to shut up. Say no more.

5. Ultimately, it is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS what a woman reads.
Adult men can read comic books, war novels, spy novels - anything they want, really. Because it is none of our business what they read. Same for women.

Will I read 50 Shades of Grey? After I meet my deadline, for sure. I'm sure parts of it will annoy me and others will get my motor runnin'.

Just like any other novel.