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When I was of an age/interest to read Young Adult Literature, most of it was written by dudes, featuring dudes as the characters, and was directed and marketed at dudes. If female characters were present, they didn’t say anything, or were a designated love interest, or taught the Young Hero a Valuable Lesson. There were books directed at female readers but they pretty much sucked, featuring as they did date rape and cancer and orphanings and promising piano careers cut short, and did I mention the date rape and also the stalking? They were horrible, terrible, awful books.

There were a few bright spots, in my reading. Lloyd Alexander who roped me in with his Prydain books, for instance. His stuff was pretty male centric but he DID have the Vesper Holly books, books with a female protagonist who goes on adventures of the sort a male protagonist usually went on. Tamora Pierce’s Alanna/Lioness Rampant books were pretty trail blazing and inspiring, and shaped my world view in ways I’m still discovering. Meredith Anne Pierce’s “Dark Angel” trilogy (which apparently went out of print, with the final book being IMPOSSIBLE for me to find for YEARS) which flavored my dreams and my notion of what strength and love were. Robyn McKinley and Jane Yolen. Susan Cooper’s “Dark is Rising” series and sweet, strong Jane. Mary Stewart’s “Romantic Thrillers” with women who often didn’t know how to drive (my maternal grandmother, of an age with Lady Stewart, never learned to drive) but who still kicked butt and seized their own happiness.

There’s probably more, but in 30 years worth of reading, I’ve come up with what, seven names? Seven authors? And even then, most of Alexander’s work was male-centric, as was Cooper’s “Dark is Rising” books.

This is, now, changing.

Graceling is a book about a young woman “graced” with the ability to fight and kill. She hates it. She hates being under the control of her uncle the King, who sends her out as his bully and muscle. She hates hurting people. She hates herself. And over the course of the book she comes to better understand herself, and slip out from under the control of other people. She also Has Adventures and acts. She isn’t acted upon. She is a driving force. And she doesn’t end up married and with children. In fact she is opposed to marriage and doesn’t want children. How refreshing is that?

The Forest of Hands and Teeth is a coming of age story focused on a young woman whose father is vanished and presumed dead, and whose mother essentially commits suicide in the first few pages. The protagonist comes to realize that the utopia she lives in is actually a dystopia built on lies and half truths, and must escape her fate and her world by launching into the unknown, leaving everything she knows behind. As she journeys, she faces her staggering ignorance and realizes the world is much larger, huger, than anything she could imagine. It’s hard to really describe this book and how much I like it without running into spoiler territory. As with “Graceling,” the protagonist acts more than she’s acted upon. She makes decisions and takes charge and runs her own life.

Lips Touch: Three Times is a collection of 3 short stories about first kisses. I am not and have never been a fan of romance, which makes me kind of a freak, I think. In the “Alanna” books, for example, when I first read them as a teen, I actively resented the romantic bits in the story. So when I say this is a collection of 3 short stories that have a common theme of “first kisses,” please understand that it’s also about a lot more than that. Each story follows a young woman at a turning point in her life. Each must take control of her destiny, her fate, her life, and make a decision about something and then live with the consequences. And each one does.

Some friends of mine are having a baby girl and, nerdishly, one of the things I’m most looking forward to is her discovering reading. I’m incredibly glad that there are books that are written for her; not just books that she can enjoy, but books that are written with her in mind, heroines that she can easily see herself as. I spent most of my childhood running around pretending I was Robin Hood and Taran Wanderer and King Arthur. In order to star in my own youthful fantasies, I had to be male, take on a male persona. I’m excited that literature is opening up and giving young women a taste of what it means to be strong, adventurous, heroic, and female.

If you’re looking for feminist/female-centric books, you might want to check out the Amelia Bloomer Project for lists and descriptions of books.

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About a million years ago, I had a blogger account. I scrapped that and got an LJ account, back when you had to have an invite to sign up. My memories might be hazy. I might have had LJ first and then abandoned it for Blogger and then come back to LJ. I don’t really remember.

Several years ago… six? more?… I bought my own web hosting and eventually started a wordpress blog. You’re either reading this on my own web hosting, or else you’re reading a mirrored version on LJ or DW or IJ or Facebook or MySpace. Or you’ve RSSed it and are reading it in a reader. Anyway, I have a main blog which is about my life and stuff, and I have a blog that’s exclusively about having a baby and all the navel gazing and poop talk that involves. I have a blog that’s just Secret Chicago stuff, and I’d like to start specialized blogs for my fiction in general, any art that I do, and cooking. I want to segregate these different things because someone who wants to learn how to bake a potato probably won’t want to listen to me bitch about how every eraser I’ve used has lifted ink off the paper, no matter what kind of paper or ink, and left the graphite behind, just as an example.

But I know that there are people out there who are interested in the entirety of my life, crappy erasers and baby’s first cusses and baked potatoes and all. So I’d like to scrape up all my different blogs and publish them all in one place.

And I can’t figure out how to do this on space that I own.

Because I could easily start an LJ/DW/IJ account and mirror everything I post in each disparate blog over there. But I want to own the space entirely and be able to customize it and control it, and I don’t see any way to do this other than to copy each entry and paste it into a new entry at my main journal.

Any suggestions?

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The end times are upon us. Seriously.

Nesko has shaved off the goatee and mustache he has been carefully nurturing for years now. I have no idea what the true impetus is for giving it the axe, other than he has a 4 day weekend and so can start growing it back in if he doesn’t like his naked face, and not look like a hobo at work when he goes in that first day. He cited several fairly petty reasons for getting rid of all that facial hair, and in fact, was going to just take off the goatee first and leave the mustache except he looked pretty terrible with a mustache and no chin hairs. So he has barbered his entire face.

He looks weird. Also: hot. You look at the same person every day for over ten years and pretty soon you don’t really LOOK at them. Your brain fills in the blanks. You don’t notice the details. Then they go and do something drastic and shake things up and your eyes and brain LOOK and NOTICE and oh man, he’s so cute. He really is. And hot.

Happy Lincoln’s Birthday, everybody.

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I’ve been working on some fiction stuff and also drawing again, PLUS I have a child who’s discovering the joys of bipedal locomotion, so I haven’t been posting much of anything lately. I also haven’t been reading blogs.

Is anyone familiar with small press or independent publishers in Chicago who focus on fiction and short fiction? The much vaunted Twilight Tales is on hiatus.

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It is, for those if you experiencing winter in the midwest, very very dry.

If you are a normal person, you’ve probably had to deal with dry, scaly skin and nose bleeds.

I had my first nose bleed ever yesterday.

Oh, sure, I’ve had blood in my snot a few times, especially when it was super dry and I had a cold. But yesterday? I made up for a life time sans nosebleed. Blood ran in a river for, honest to God, an hour. You know how I usually exaggerate stuff for effect, comedic or otherwise?

I am not exaggerating.

A friend of mine who’s suffered such extensive, frequent nosebleeds that she wound up getting her nasal vessels cauterized, talked me through it– the nose pinching, the head tilt, the waiting. My hand cramped up from holding my nose shut. My eyes watered, and my lips dried out from breathing through my mouth. It was kind of like a nasal period, complete with giant black slug-like blood clots.

Let me tell you, internets, it was awful.

Especially because, once I stopped actual blood streaming, there was still both a faint trickle, a bit of a runny nose, and a gigantic fear of dislodging the blood clot. Yesterday was Christmas according to the Eastern Orthodox calendar, so we went to Nesko’s family’s house for dinner, and I was all paranoid that I’d 1) start bleeding again 2) people would notice I was being nasty by sucking up snots instead of blowing my nose.

We got some cash presents, which we are going to use to get humidifiers, one for each bedroom. I cannot imagine dealing with a nose bleeding baby, and would like to head that trauma off at the pass.

Feel free to tell your blood horror stories, nose blood or otherwise, in the comments.

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For whatever reason, Niko was up and down all night which meant a night of very interrupted sleep, which for me usually means weird-as-all-fuck dreams. Most memorable of them was a 2-parter that involved 2 abandoned buildings we (where “we” was me, Nesko, my youngest brother, and some other people) had recently gotten ahold of and were trying to figure out how to rehab them and what we would use them for. There was actual talk about ripping out walls, etc. Only we were all dressed like we were at a Vampire: The Masquerade LARP in the late 90s… lots of black vinyl and fishnets and eye liner and flannel and really appalling hair.

One of the two buildings had a very large room on the second floor that was all dusty floorboards and decaying plaster and lathe walls with chunks of plaster missing and the lathe showing ominously through, a big faded oriental carpet in the middle of the floor several tones lighter than it should have been from thick dust. It was a massive room with two incredibly worn out white wing chairs, and an attached nursery and bathroom. The windows were wooden framed with wobbly glass and iron counter weights. We were debating what to do with that room, especially. It had been billed to us as the master bedroom and I wanted to keep it that way, but everyone else wanted to subdivide it into smaller rooms for some reason having to do with a threat of some sort.

The lighting and everything was kind of horror-movie ish, and there was lots of dirt and grim and it was hard to actually see anything and all the wall paper on the walls looked like it had been soaking in tea for awhile.

The dream shifted, as dreams do, and I realized that I was Jeffrey Rowland from “Over Compensating” which is not something I have ever aspired to be. Some other people and I were holed up in a barn, but it wasn’t a very good barn… the walls of it were wood slats and the wood was gappy and had bits missing so you could pretty much see inside from the outside and see the outside from inside, and it would have been pretty much impossible to actually defend. I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car in this barn that was filled with junk, and there was something about breakfast so I got out of the car and then someone else came in and I yelled at them to get away from my car, so I went over to it again.

Only it wasn’t a car, it was a table that someone had made into a car by attaching casters to the legs and an engine and gear shift to the underside of the table. Because of the location of the shifter, it was impossible to read what gear you were in, but that didn’t really matter because instead of “P,” “D,” “R” etc it said “Child,” “dorito,” “coffee cup” and “lime.” (Yes, I can read in dreams about half the time.) These weren’t really, you know, very explanatory. I think there was a steering wheel, but I don’t remember. Someone my brain identified as The Sheriff burst in and I had to peel out of there and escape. I didn’t know what gear to use though! I cycled through them all, quickly, and managed to get out of the barn and drove down a country road.

Part of the problem with the table car was that the seat didn’t have wheels (although it seemed to move ok) and wasn’t actually attached to the table. It was just a wooden dining chair. So I had to keep stopping the car and scooting back into the chair because the table was pulling me forward so I was sitting on the edge of my seat. I had my foot hooked up under something on the underside of the table to try and keep it all together.

Then I woke up.

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If you were going to compile a cook book of very, very basic recipes for people who have never cooked before and grew up in houses where people didn’t cook, what would you put in?

After talking with a lot of intelligent, accomplished people I know who don’t cook, and then talking to my mom, we (my mom and I) have tentative plans to start a cooking blog with photos.

Among other things, I was thinking of doing themes. So, for instance, there’d be a post on how to cook rice without using a rice cooker, then there’d be posts about stuff you can make with rice. (For some reason, I know a lot of people who have no idea how to cook rice, and are also intimidated by it, whereas I just throw some rice and water and bouillon cubes in a pot and wander off for an hour or so and it’s No Big Deal.)

My mom cooked and baked professionally for years, and I was lucky enough to grow up in a home where “from scratch” cooking was normal and accessible. I think that gives me an edge over a lot of my peers, because I have basic skills in the kitchen and am not intimidated by most recipes. Not everyone has that.

What recipes would you be interested in seeing? What sort of topics would you expect to see discussed?

Let me know!

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Last year I only made one resolution, which was to act with less fear and try more new things. Yes, those two are very closely intertwined. I’ve been doing a generally good job at this, but need to remember to keep doing so.

• Treat each Monday as a chance to start over
• Act out of fear less, try new things
• Write at least 100 words a day of fiction
• Update the Baby Blog more frequently
• Update blog more frequently
• Keep in better personal contact with friends
• Finish “12 Days of Christmas” project by early October
• Draw more often– “real” drawings, not doodles
• Bake more bread
• Eat more pie

Do you have any resolutions for this year? Do you make resolutions or no? Do you feel bad if you don’t keep resolutions? Do you feel extra good if you do keep them?

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The Cat Sìth (Scottish Gaelic: [k?aht? ??i?]) or Cat Sídhe (Irish: [kat?? ??i?]) is a fairy creature from Scottish mythology, said to resemble a large black cat with a white spot on its breast. Legend has it that the spectral cat haunts the Scottish Highlands. Some common folklore suggested that the Cat Sìth was not a fairy, but a transformed witch.

The myths surrounding this creature are more common in Scottish Folklore, but a few myths occur in Irish folklore as well.

From Wikipedia.

The Cat Sidhe, in Faerie, has two forms: a stocky, powerful, bipedal fur-covered form with large teeth, claws, and tail; and a large stocky mountain cat type form. Cat Sidhe are skilled trackers, hunters, and guards who live in the Winter Court. Like most Fey in the Winter Court, they are more reserved than the Summer Court. Unlike most Fey, the Cat Sidhe are not immortal. They have long life spans, but they still age and die. Further, Ice Trolls (which do not live in Faerie) prize their pelts and hunt and kill them when they can.

When Cat Sidhe cross Iron Side, they are consigned to either a fully human looking form (bipedal, no fur, no fangs, no claws, no tail) or fully cat. They tend to prefer the cat form, as the human form leaves them feeling naked and defenseless. The longer they spend Iron Side, the more likely they are to be stuck in that form. As a human shaped Cat Sidhe cannot cross back into Faerie, this poses a problem.

Cat Sidhe do not tend to take part in political intrigue. Although intelligent, they are not devious or overly secretive (any more than any other feline influenced race).

Cat Sidhe, with their limited life span, do experience pregnancy– which is rare among Faerie. Females have 1-3 litters in their life time, of 3-7 kits. Generally, more males than females are born and survive. Cat Sidhe are able to interbreed with other fertile Fey creatures and humans, although it’s unlikely. Their offspring generally take after the non Cat Sidhe parent, although this is not always true, and are usually sterile.

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Do you have plans for tonight/tomorrow? What are you doing for New Year’s Eve and Day?

We were going to go out and see some friends, but decided against it because:

• If we stay out late, Niko’s schedule gets messed up for days afterwards
• By the time we got there, we’d only have about an hour before we had to leave
• Niko has a cold and is very clingy and kind of cranky
• We are old people who don’t really stay up late or drink anyway
• New Year’s Eve/Day is prime time for drunk people on the road and we don’t want to deal with that

So we’ll probably do any and all socializing the following weekend. I think I’m going to make pizza and we might get some fizzy cider or something and watch a movie. We might also go to Nesko’s parents’ house, which is five minutes away, and come home around 8:00 so as to get Niko tucked into bed and also avoid all drunken driving.

What are YOUR plans? I can almost guarantee you they’re more exciting and fun than OUR plans.

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