“Increasingly, romance fiction is for women who move their hips when they read,” joked a Canadian journalist.

This is too scary…

A woman’s history of vaginal orgasm is discernible from her walk….. CONCLUSIONS: The discerning observer may infer women’s experience of vaginal orgasm from a gait that comprises fluidity, energy, sensuality, freedom, and absence of both flaccid and locked muscles. Results are discussed with regard to previous research on gait, the effect of the musculature on sexual function, the special nature of vaginal orgasm, and implications for sexual therapy.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18637995

But in practice…sigh.

I once had a girl, a vague online pal, send me the novel she was writing. It was hideous. Really, honestly hideous. The hero was obviously based on Mark Darcy from Bridget Jones but was a horrible, stupid stalker. Exclamation points littered the ms like spikes outside Vlad Tepes’ place. It was all tell. The Meet Cute was based on a misunderstanding no one above the age of four would make.

But what did I do? I asked if she was considering publication. She said no, she was just playing, so I told her she’d made a cute start and she should keep having fun, and let her get on with it. Had her goal been publication my answer might have been different. But it might not have been. To do a full critique would have cost me hours of time, and it would probably have just hurt her feelings anyway.

Maybe I did the wrong thing. I still wonder. But every day I see bad writing samples and have to bite my tongue because I just don’t know what to say.

To make matters worse, this guy (and his girlfriend) had begged me to be honest with him. He was frustrated by the responses he'd gotten from friends, because he felt they were going easy on him, and he wanted real criticism. They never do, of course. What they want is a few tough notes to give the illusion of honesty, and then some pats on the head. What they want-always-is encouragement, even when they shouldn't get any.

I’ve run into this same thing with a friend of mine. He gave me his book to read asking for real criticism, but I know he just wants confirmation that it’s good. The problem is that it needs a LOT of work. It’s an urban fantasy without any fantasy. . . or conflict or plot or even much dialogue, really. I’m now in the difficult situation of trying to give him my honest feedback without crushing him too hard.

Google sucks. Now they want to LICENSE on top of grabbing all our rights too? Argh.

Of course, whenever someone tells me that they always wanted to go to law school, I encourage them because frick, if I had to suffer through that hideous experience why shouldn't they?

When I met my husband’s cousin, I’d just graduated from law school and he was about to start. I laughed and laughed at him all through that Thanksgiving and then he spent the next three years telling my husband “oh shit! she’s not just crazy!”

(The rest of his family thinks he avoided them for three years because he’s mean. He loves me now, I’m the only one who didn’t hold the obsessive studying against him).

My husband's been so horrified by law school + twenty years of being a lawyer, he tells lawyer-wanna-bees to run far, far away from law school and never look back.

They never believe you when you say that. They just think you don’t want the competition. *snort*

“Increasingly, romance fiction is for women who move their hips when they read,” joked a Canadian journalist.

Yes, because I am on an elliptical, you idiot.

We were deprived of Turing's genius because of his sexual orientation.

I know it’s nitpicking, but I’d very much like to see you rephrase that to read, “We were deprived of Turing’s genius because of society’s reaction to his sexual orientation.”

Of course, whenever someone tells me that they always wanted to go to law school, I encourage them because frick, if I had to suffer through that hideous experience why shouldn't they?

LOL… My husband’s been so horrified by law school + twenty years of being a lawyer, he tells lawyer-wanna-bees to run far, far away from law school and never look back.

(Turing is also known as the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.)