1) That England is not just America but with funny accents. The culture goes beyond the Queen.
2) Nor does everyone speak like either a cockney or Errol Flynn doing an impression of a Lord (though people from Somerset DO talk like 1940’s film pirates - seriously, I cannot speak to my Grandmother-in-law without cracking…

Clan of the Cave Bear (literary atrocity though it was) taught 9-year-old Bethany how to made and use a sling and how to knap knives out of flint. Seriously. It took trial and error, but I did it.

Five years ago I few into Heathrow to visit my boyfriend. We went to the British Museum to look at some Michelangelo sketches and I proposed while we were standing in front of a drawing of the Sybil. I bought him a chunky silver ring engraved with ‘I am my beloveds and she is mine’ in Hebrew. He cried and said yes. We…

The hyena-in-petticoats thing is actually beautifully apt and we need to reclaim that for her. Fierce, predatory, highly intelligent matriarichal clans where the phallus-having females regularly beat up the scavenging lions that try to steal their prey? What’s not to like?

I would just like to point out that since this awful situation surfaced I have been unable to call my grandparents because I know, for a fact, that if I did I’d have to listen to an hour’s worth of Dugger-defense and I just can’t handle it - especially since I was raped as a 12/13 year old by another 13 year old girl.…

There’s also a wide-spread idea among conservative ‘Christians’ that rape is a kind of theft; not from the victim, but from the victim’s father or future husband. Of course, a lot of these people believe that men CANT be raped, and that women are incapable of rape at all, so there are a bunch of problems with this…

It is unspeakably frustrating that, in a visual medium (where quality is largely subject to taste) the genitals of the artists are more influential on the reception of the pieces than the actual contents of the piece. You see a bit of this in the poetry world (I submitted the same manuscript to a big 6 publisher, one…

It was an alternative Charter school. So, funded by public money. It was supposed to have higher academic standards... NOPE!

I would say, ‘I wonder how the hell she became principal of anything, much less a school’ but then I remember attending middle school in Florida, having an anxiety attack, and being given an exorcism by the principal, the librarian, and the ‘science’ teacher. I put scients in quotes because the book he taught from was…

On it.

So... your husband’s still chasing that whale? Well, I’ve got a fresh-corked tincture of opium. Why don’t we go drug this child to stillness, get you out of that uncomfortable horsehair crinoline, and go explore our sexuality together?

Gwencrawler! Ha! She really is a BAMF!

Ha! My husband ADORES the musical. He watches it in London at least once a year, with or without me. The novel is called Masque. Look for it June, 2016.

Well, it made it through marketing. The novel sold. So I guess there is a demand for it. There is always an interest in telling the same story from a different perspective. Wide Sargasso Sea is a literary retelling of Jane Eyre. Just because one writer uses a plot doesn’t mean that another writer cant use it and make…

That’s why my version is a retelling. I didn’t have the same goals as Leroux. I went in and very consciously viewed the story through a feminist/Jungian lens. Christine, in Leroux’s version, is not a real human being. She seemed, when I read and reread the novel (and in a lot of her later depictions) to be a symbol,…

I just sold my retelling of this to a major UK publisher. The contract’s signed and everything. It’s out June 2016. The way that I saw it, there were three egotistical monsters in that story. Two of them (Erik and Christine) were ‘likeable’ because they use their egotism to create something beautiful. The third…

My mom took me with her to a Huey Lewis and the News concert. At the time she was a professional model (narried to a minister) and I was two. She was carrying me in one of those snuggie things that look like an external womb. After the show, one of the security guards pulled her aside and said, ‘Hiey wants to see…

I was just going to say that. I could see the 13-week skull coated in silver and strung on a chain around some goth kid’s neck. Though, honestly, they all look a little alienesque thanks to those fontanelles. I also like how they all appear to be smiling.
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On the way to the gym, I was stopped at a red light when a bankish-looking member of the Lycra brigade pulled up beside me, looked me over, and said, ‘You do know that’s a man’s bike?’ I smiled at him and said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intimidate you.’ After thirty seconds of silence that probably felt very…

You aren't kidding about Unsounded. It's probably the best webcomic on the internet; well-written, atmospheric, and remarkably beautifully executed. And it is remarkably touching.