*Gasp* Hooray!

Well, I've been lurking for a while at this blog, wondering if I might work up the courage to participate in one of the Secret Agent contests. It's a really excellent idea: an anonymous agent volunteers to critique 50 entries, consisting of the first 250 words of the participants' novels. The main question: is the agent hooked enough to want to keep reading? At the end of the contest the agent chooses the winners and runners-up, and the prizes usually involve a request for full manuscripts, partials, or queries. Other participants are encouraged to critique as well, of course, so there's the added bonus of a kind of writer's group. This contest is pretty darn popular, as you might imagine, so this time the administrator decided to choose the participants by lottery rather than by whoever sent the first 50 entries. (With the latter method she had to close submissions about a minute after opening them!) I thought I might stand a slightly better chance of getting chosen randomly than by attempting to squeeze my entry into that tiny minute window, and the current Secret Agent is accepting fantasy among other genres, so I figured, why not? I'm taking a break from querying right now anyway. I cast my lot and crossed my fingers.

And I'm one of the fifty! Hooray! And, eep! Now I'm going to have dozens of people reading my tender little first 250 words, and possibly/probably cutting me deeply with their critiques, not to mention that the Secret Agent is usually pretty blunt in saying, "No, not hooked, sorry." And what if the Agent is one of the five who already rejected me? Eep! My first 250 words aren't awful, but they're probably not the greatest part of my novel. Eep! All right, I need to just settle back and be glad my number got picked. Deep breath.

How feminism has become chauvanism

While I'm biting my nails over what will happen in that writing contest ;) I'm going to wax long-winded about something I've been mulling over for a while, but which was sparked particularly by this book. I found a reference to it somewhere, checked out the amazon.com link and thought, "Yes, I would probably agree with about 75% of this book, and I will never read it." Because where we differ is in our view of sexuality, and I'm pretty certain the book would be far too explicit for me. However, I can believe her thesis that women have gotten the bizarre and unfortunate idea that it's liberating and empowering to treat others of their gender and even themselves in the same way that a piggish man would treat them. I have a particular hate for the references to male anatomy as a metaphor for courage or strength. No, I do not need to grow a pair, thank you. My two X chromosomes serve me quite nicely; I don't need a stinking Y. The implication is profoundly insulting - that a woman must essentially become a man to develop any strong qualities. I spit in the face of that argument. (Perhaps I also kick it in its crotch, although that may be taking it a bit far.)

Is this where the women's movement has brought us? Blech. I'm fairly certain that wasn't the intent of any of the original group of women who fought for better rights.

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