In the wake of a bunch of recent posts, I’ve been thinking about women’s characterisation in fiction a lot. My next fiction purchase will be Grimspace by Ann Aguirre, and I’m sending an Open Call for guest Friday Hoyden post pitches featuring female protagonists, because I need recommendations for the gifts I’m going to give everybody this year.
The often reliable Leigh Sales has a piece in The Drum listing “The ten questions Labor MPs are asking themselves”. Sadly, yet unsurprisingly, all ten pertain to the leadership of the party. Sales doesn’t seem to consider it even a possibility that anyone is allocating any brain space to policy or governing the country. Now, as much as it is a depressing thought, I acknowledge that there is every chance she is right. But as a reporter with a substantial platform, she has a choice about where to direct the conversation. She could, for instance, be inviting responses to these, alternative, questions, that Labor MPs have every reason to be asking themselves.
It’s a new blog! Full of secular women!
From the (Onion-like) The Beaverton:
After being magically trapped inside his latest novel, author Kyle Rapoport maligned his inability to properly write and develop female characters.
The heavy panting from the press gallery over the possibility of another Labor leadership spill has been quite repellent, but maybe it isn’t just a blip in the news-cycle. Maybe the gallery really is onto something.
The world needs a social justice version of John Baez’ classic simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics AKA The Crackpot Index, to rate our never-ending “feedback” from troglodytes of assorted stripes who are convinced that not only are we Doin It Rong but that we deserve to be threatened into silence for daring to have an opinion in the first place.
Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
Three days ago marked 100 years since the day Emily Wilding Davison, carrying out a suffragist political protest, was trampled by racehorses at the Epsom Derby and later died. I always heard it told as “threw herself under the King’s horse”, but informed discussion around the incident suggests that I shouldn’t make such a simple, firm statement about what happened. What we must not forget is how brutal the response was to all forms of activism by women demanding something as basic as the vote.
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Because thehorrorthehorror of what some other people are speculating!
Hoyden About Town 