A cheesy romantic comedy plot ensues!

I had the same pen! Mine was giant, purple, and if if you twisted it, vibrated. My parents gave my brother and I each a pen, when I was about that age... and shockingly enough, I never figured it out.

For me, it has to do with whether the scene brings something to the story or not. A bad scene would be one thrown in because the story needs sex, and this is how one writes sex (waves washing over people and all that). Good scenes are more often than not awkward/bad/weird sex, because they are actually showing…

Exactly. This is given to people that we would write well overall but who write sex badly... and the judges aren't going to consider the possibility that people writing anything but "literary" fiction in the most limited and formulaic sense of the term, and who seem and behave like literary authors in the most…

I think that the awards only look at books that are "literary", but that fall into painful clichés when sex is written about - so they probably haven't looked at romance novels at all.

That's the impression I get. Yeah, her thighs are bigger than her hips. I'm pretty sure that even without a mirror, it's impossible for her not to be aware of it. It's cool that she has the guts not to stick to safe shapes (1950s wide round skirts/empire waists) that hide half of her body all the time. Why shouldn't…

I actually like the fact that there is so much laundering going on - it's the sort of practical thing that people would (I think?) spend a ton of time on during that kind of event. I kind of wish that they spent more time foraging for food, setting up tents, etc.

Carol is one of the characters that could become awesome (though that would surprise me given the writers) because she is becoming free in ways that she wasn't before, and because she has a particular set of skills that are, well, different from most other characters. She's still seriously undervalued by most of the…

I think that the environmental impact of children is greatly exaggerated. People's impacts on the environment are terribly uneven, and have a lot to do with lifestyle (including one's diet, but also a ton of other things*) - I've met multi-children families who probably had smaller ecological footprints than childless…

Very well said. Sexism becomes engrained because we disrespect and impose artificial limits on both boys and girls. The more these attitudes prevail - be they against one gender or the other - the more everyone suffers.

I could understand wanting a child whose life is easier because they are privileged, but I really don't think that boys have it all that great in our society.

Oh god that is creepy!

Agreed - it's possible to some extent, but not beyond a point. I spend months getting up a five am for a job, and the pattern was always the same: go to bed at midnight or slightly thereafter, wake up at five, get delayed by nausea/vomiting (which is pretty much guaranteed every time that I get up before six),…

Exactly. And while I do "feel sleepy earlier", it's not twenty minutes before my usual bedtime - it's at inappropriate moments in the middle of the day.

Nope -I set three alarms and sleep through the three of them. :(

People's reactions to night owls perplex me. Although I've recently been trying to move into a more diurnal schedule (sleeping in/staying up late feeds my naturally misanthropic tendencies, and it would do me good to be more sociable), I'm a natural night owl, and I always get so much more done in the lovely, still,…

Hm. It could be that I'm more incoherent when wronged; my reaction usually involves a long string of loosely connected swears intermingled with the different parties' names.

And get her to stop shaming ugly women, whether they are fat or thin.

Exactly! Hopefully she'll eventually learn that the attitude is more offensive than the term, but as it stands, that apology is terribly hollow - "transgeder people and ugly people, who are inherently less worthy of love than I am, I'm so sorry for using bad words to describe you!"

But while most people might privately insult the person their partner had left them for, the terms that they would use to do depend on what they think is insulting. I don't think that someone who wasn't trans-phobic would insult the person for being trans, any more than they would insult them for having blue eyes or…