cacakerbamakhlukpolitik

There were a couple of fascinating posts and follow-up discussions on Dear Author in the last couple of weeks. The first was a post by Robin on Loving the Unlikeable Heroine , particularly interesting to me as I love to write and read about characters who are at least potentially unlikable. Especially heroines, I think because I love characters who are rule-breakers and heroines, at least in historical fiction, tend to face many more rules than heroes. Which leads to the follow-up post Jane wrote after Robin’s piece about whether there’s a double standard in the romance genre for what readers consider “allowable” behavior in heroines versus heroes and why. Both of these posts took me back to a blog I wrote a a couple of years ago on my own website about anti-heroines. I got the idea for the blog when Sarah, a poster on my website, wrote to me because she was reading The Three Musketeers and getting to know the fascinating Milady de Winter. Sarah wrote, “I know I tend to prefer heroi...

I spent most of Sunday happily curled up in front of the tv watching the Academy Awards--the preshow, the red carpet, the awards themselves, the post show. (I did work on various projects while watching, though not during the actual awards). From the time I was a preteen, I’ve been glued to the television for the Oscars. When I first started watching, the awards were on a weeknight and often coincided with the end of March Madness. My father would kindly surrender the television to me when the awards started, but not too long after he gave me my own tv for my birthday. Now that the awards on a Sunday, there’s practically a whole day of fashion details and movie clips to revel in. How could I not love an event that combines movies and fashion, two of my favorite things? But watching the awards this year, I realized there's something else I love about them. History. There's movie history that's made each year with the awards themselves. There are the montages (like this year...