Lynne Murray and Debbie say: Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, blogs about her struggle with the creeping princess contagion: When I first started writing about the Disney Princesses, people assumed my beef was with the girl waiting around to be rescued by [...]

Lynne Murray says: The Greeks had a word for it–deus ex machina. Playwrights who got their characters into an unsolvable predicament would trundle out a piece of stage equipment, a crane or mekhane, to lower actors playing gods onto the stage. The god characters would then solve the mortals’ problems. Fat characters in fiction often [...]

Lynne Murray says: I heard a lot about the TV series, Huge, before I found out it was based on a book by the same name. I watched the  clip of the scene that opens the series where the incandescently subversive Nikki Blonsky turns a fat camp weigh-in into a rebellious (and hot) striptease act. [...]

Debbie says: Lori Selke is a friend of mine and a regular commenter on this blog, so this is not an “objective” review (of course, there is no such thing as an objective review). I have been reading science fiction for over fifty years (!). I have been hanging out in the science fiction/speculative fiction [...]

Lynne Murray says: A zombie character popped up among the vampires and ghosts in a book I’m writing so I have been looking into their lore. Paranormal creatures obey the rules of the story they live in. As a non-fan of gore, I’m creating a zombie with better table manners than the mindless, chewing-on-the-general-public zombies–more [...]

Lynne Murray says: I am so happy to see the cover of my new book, The Falstaff Vampire Files, right over there on the right-hand column of Body Impolitic! Part of the inspiration for the book was a Bay Area activist for fat men, who liked my mysteries featuring, Josephine Fuller, sleuth of size, but [...]

Debbie says: We’re delighted to host guest blogger Mary Anne Mohanraj. I was thinking about why I write erotica. It’s a different answer now than it was when I first started writing, twenty years ago. I was twenty years old; I had recently discovered sex, and was still kind of blown away. Hormones were running [...]

Laurie says: This blog started out to be about a post BarbaraNeely wrote for the AARP at 70 about becoming 65. It really impressed me the first time I read it, but when I read it again before writing this, I realized that while it was a good post, it  caught me because of who [...]

Lynne Murray says: I spent a long time crafting a sentence that would introduce the heroine of my mystery series to the world. When I started reading it out loud at signings, people gasped on more than one occasion. Sadly, all these years later, I know it still shocks some people. Larger Than Death begins: [...]

Laurie says: This month is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Harriet Beecher Stowe, a major figure in the abolitionist and other social change movements of her day. .. .. Harriet Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was a American Abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin(1852) depicted life for [...]