Yojimbo has the best music. THE BEST.

A fabulous list of what publishers evaluate when they look at a novel. I'm going to run my werewolf short story through it before I inflict it on an innocent reader.

From shweta_narayan: useful scholarship on magical traditions.

And last but not least, Joseph Bruchac is trying to wrest his rights back from Scholastic to bring his book Hidden Roots back into print. As a Vermonter with Abenaki heritage, this is relevant to my interests on a lot of levels. (I never even heard of the Vermont Eugenics project until this decade, so yeah.)

Long time no posting! I decided to drag my lazy butt (and hubby's) to the White River Indie Film Festival.

We watched Sleep Dealer, a 'fifteen minutes into the future'-style sci-fi movie that focuses on a young man in Oxaca who is bored with his day-to-day life, farming with his family and paying for money from the multinational water corporation who controls the local megadam. The action alternates from Oxcaca, Tijuana, and a seldom-seen San Diego.

In this future, the US has finally sealed off its border with Mexico; the new migrant workers are jacked into an Internet-based system that allows them to remotely control robots that do a variety of labor. The workers shuffle in and out of warehouse-like buildings, and plug into the main infrastructure using mechanical 'nodes' in their arms. Viewers of Avatar will no doubt find this familiar, although the movie predates that-- there are also some echoes of The Matrix.

The visuals are quite good, although some of the CGI looks a bit SyFy-worthy. My husband thought it wore its political agenda too clearly on its sleeve, but I found it less political than I expected, so I suppose your mileage will vary there. The actors all perform adequately, and the contrasts between the harshness of real life, the industrial world of the rich, and the hallucinogenic dream state of a service where you can buy and sell memories is very well done. I also liked the way the movie switched from Spanish to English as the narrative required, and a lot of the little details-- like coyotek as the new coyotes, who hook people up to the 'nodes' they need to jack into the system.

Recommended! It's available on Netflix now.

The Creative Muse Society is open! I'm checking it out.

jimhines is giving away a book a week to promote the upcoming Red Hood's Revenge.</a> He's a really fun author and a great blogger, so take a look.

I've been writing for a new parents' magazine for the Upper Valley-- check out the website at UVKidStuff, if you're inclined.

Also, my friend Kristen, who won the goat giveaway a while back, is getting a llama too! You can follow her adventures in fiber farming at GileadGoats.wordpress.com.

The Valley News reports that Flo McGarrell was one of the earthquake victims in Haiti. Do check out the link; his work was pretty amazing. They also note, in a non-faily way, that Flo was transgender, and use his preferred pronouns. Thank you, Valley News.

The Friday articles aren't up yet-- I'll put a link if they put it live.

Saturday's paper had an article on Zumba, a Columbian-founded dance-aerobics hybrid that's becoming increasingly popular here in the Upper Valley.

And the focus? A Nice White Lady instructor. As opposed to the Nice Hispanic Not-White lady instructor. This is why we can't have nice things, Valley News. As far as I know there are two Zumba instructors in the Valley, and you did your article exclusively on the white one? I feel a little icky.

I am the lucky winner of a copy of Strip Mauled, courtesy of jimhines! Shiny. Jim Hines, as you may remember, Bob, is the author of The Stepsister Scheme,</a> and writes awesome things about domestic violence and violence against women like this recent post about the gang rape in California.

So anyway, he recently recommended a few books, and three out of the four had headless book covers. (No, not those headless book covers, different, new ones.

And here comes the rant.

These covers are, almost invariably, targeted at women. For instance, check out the covers to David Gemmel's popular Legend; Amazon has three covers there, and lo, they all have bodies and heads! But these female-protagonist aimed-at-women books usually don't do this. Why, you ask?

Because they want you, the reader, to put your head on the heroine's body. There's something very "I am America, and so can you!" about these books. You, the reader, will clearly be less likely to identify with a heroine who doesn't look like you, so we'll be sure that we won't distract anyone with those icky facial features. (Notice, too, that the bodies of these faceless women are generally clearly white; I worry a bit that the star of Bitter Night has anemia.)

Romance novels don't generally do this, but I think it's a factor of how the sf/fantasy industry differs from romance, and how sf/fantasy may be viewed as more 'intimidating' to female readers than the comfortable romance genre.

Now, the headless cover, in and of itself, is not entirely bad. It spares the reader having to complain about how the person on the cover doesn't look a darn bit like how he/she is described in the book, as long as hair color and body type match well enough, and I think there are places where you do want to say "I am America, and so can you!" But the sheer frequency of these covers is galling, as is the fact that this almost never happens to the male protagonists, unless of course it's a romance-y book aimed at women.

Us girls are just confused by faces, guise. They're scary.

Ugh.

Um, yeah, this was supposed to link to SEIU.org's page, where you can sign up and 'get a ticket' for health care reform.

Being a woman is not a pre-existing condition. Being alive is not a pre-existing condition. And pre-existing conditions are bullshit anyway.

jimhines was running a contest to promote his book, The Mermaid's Madness, and all I had to do was ask him a question and post the answer on...yeah. Tuesday.

AH WELL.

Q: Do you now, when you encounter a new or old folk tale, find yourself mentally rubbing your hands together and thinking 'hmm, I think I can use that...'? Are you incapable of 'turning it off' at this point?

A: In the beginning, when I was working on Stepsister and then Mermaid, and was still trying to plan out where to go with the whole series, I was much more obsessive about various fairy tales and the possibilities for retellings. At this point however, the first three books are turned in, and the fourth is planned out and 1/3 written. I'm not planning on a fifth book in the series, so I'm spending a lot less time looking for new tales and more time trying to figure out the best way to bring the series to a close.

Instead, I now find myself distracted thinking about the next series after this one. I've got two and a half characters in mind, some ideas for setting and plot, but my brain is in that exploratory phase where I can't go five minutes without another "Oooh, what if this happened too?" or "What about a character who could do that?" From talking to other writers, it seems like most of us are always thinking one or two books ahead of whatever they're actually writing.

There's a roundup of all the Q and A's here.

My review of the first book in the series is here. I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to reading Mermaid.

Congrats to my friend Kristen, who just won a herd of goats and a barn to put them in. And thanks to anyone on my flist who threw her a vote, it's appreciated!

Went to the Tunbridge Fair. I now have a temporary tattoo of Storm on my ankle.

You only wish you were as awesome as I am.