me n' connie

spending the day reading in bed

then in the bath

and then back in bed

Lights please!

Did some freshening up of my web site, added some more content. I sent out 7 queries tonight, and query-sending always makes me think about my web site.

Not to mention... I like playing with blogs and web sites. Satisfies some part of my brain... the part that likes to sort and organize things I guess. It's like reorganizing a collection into a new formation, but without the mess.

You see why this scene from High Fidelity speaks to me.


The question remains... am I ready to buy a domain yet?


By the way, if you want to see another example of how a weebly site can look, this is my brother's.


His main page is a blog, and then he has tabs for his various artistic endeavors.

My vair vair creative brother has never been able to settle on one preferred art form to express himself because his soul needs to be heard IN SONG! IN COMIC STRIP! IN BOOK! IN SCRIPT! IN FLASH CARTOON! IN MUSICAL INSTRUMENT! IN HUMOUR! IN MOVIE! IN ACTING! It just cannot be contained by one measly medium.

Luckily the internet--that specialist at multi-tasking--has come along to free him from the confines of having to be One Thing. Every day he comes closer to that Perfect Form... like a flash humorous cartoon movie ukulele video with voice acting. (Okay he hasn't combined voice acting and song yet. But he will. ... ... RUSHTY!)

Zoos? Evils?

The internets... such a strange place.

I was researching the next agency to send a query to, which means I was looking at the authored represented, and recognized one book--Monkey Love by Brenda Scott Royce--which I bought but haven't yet read. So I read the first chapters, and then went to look up her web site, and discovered she's done primate conservation work, and she writes articles on animal issues for the Huffington Post, which led me to a debate between animal activists and a zoo over an elephant, and her interesting argument for zoos.

As she's worked both for sanctuaries and zoos I think her arguments are interesting. That (a) when activists talk about "Free the elephant!" we have to investigate what they mean by free. And (b) free usually means a sanctuary rather than a zoo, but sanctuaries receive less income/funding than zoos and don't have to go through the same strict accreditation process, so animal treatment can be worse than at a zoo. And (c) that while anyone who loves animals would prefer them to be free in the wild, there are fewer and fewer safe wilds left for animals to live in. Which is just depressing.

I'm queery for queries!

I've been slowly putting together and sending out queries this evening, in between bits of cooking, bathing the cat, reading Connie, listening to music, and internetsing.

I've sent out three. Want to do about... 8. Then if they're all rejected I should take a look at my query letter before continuing with the next batch. Or so someone somewhere in something I read suggested.

"If you start me up--if you start me up I'll never stop!"

And once that's done I'll be set free to follow Henry V with a clear conscience. Weee!

I'm using Query Tracker, a free web site for keeping track of who and when you've queried. Nice site.

Diane Birch "Fire Escape"

Heard her on Q one day this winter. Apparently Prince once saw her performing and invited her to come and jam with him.

Research--one of the funnest parts of writing

In my new book my heroine is reading her great-grandmother's diaries, and I'd like to incorporate some of them into the book. So I needed to find some writing by women at the turn of the century, to capture a bit of the tone. I was having trouble finding good online sources, so wasn't I pleased when this book turned up in the bargain section of my store! 700 pages of historical women's letters.

I've been reading them over breakfast each morning, and they're so interesting.

Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters - looks interessant

The author of this book was interviewed on The Daily Show this week, and the book looks vair vair interessant. He proposes that mental illness are often specific to a culture, or a period of history.

Reminds me of Fanon, who stopped practicing psychiatry in Algeria because he decided he was just treating the symptoms, when it was the disease that needed to be faced--that disease being colonialism. People were going crazy for a good reason, and he didn't want to just help them get better at tolerating it.

The book is timely since the psychs will soon be on their way to Haiti to *help.* Here's an excerpt from the book:

There is now a remarkable body of research that suggests that mental illnesses are not, as sometimes assumed, spread evenly around the globe. They have appeared in different cultures in endlessly complex and unique forms. Indonesian men have been known to experience amok, in which a minor social insult launches an extended period of brooding punctuated by an episode of murderous rage. Southeastern Asian males sometimes suffer from koro, the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their body. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a mental illness related to spirit possession that brings forth dissociative episodes of crying, laughing, shouting, and singing.

The diversity that can be found across cultures can be seen across time as well. Because the troubled mind has been perceived in terms of diverse religious, scientific, and social beliefs of discrete cultures, the forms of madness from one place and time in history often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another. These differing forms of mental illness can sometimes appear and disappear within a generation. In his book Mad Travelers Ian Hacking documents the fleeting appearance in Victorian Europe of a fugue state in which young men would walk in a trance for hundreds of miles. Symptoms of mental illnesses are the lightning in the zeitgeist, the product of culture and belief in specific times and specific places. That thousands of upper-class women in the mid-nineteenth century couldn't get out of bed due to the onset of hysterical leg paralysis gives us a visceral understanding of the restrictions set on women's social roles at the time.

But with the increasing speed of globalization, something has changed. The remarkable diversity once seen among different cultures' conceptions of madness is rapidly disappearing. A few mental illnesses identified and popularized in the United States — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultural boundaries and around the world with the speed of contagious diseases. Indigenous forms of mental illness and healing are being bulldozed by disease categories and treatments made in the USA.