Links! Choosing, Chastity, and more!

This book is about how our culture influences how we perceive the role of personal choice in our lives looks utterly fascinating. In her interview, the author talks about how Americans program their children from birth to be independent. Then she says:

By contrast, in Japan, you don’t sleep alone until maybe 8 or 9 or 10. You often take a bath with your mom until elementary school, and, as for asking a child what they want to be when they grow up, you wouldn’t think a child would be equipped to answer that question. 

Amy, at Fumbling Towards Grace, has a post up about chastity being at odds with consumer culture, because chastity is an exercise in denying your desires (for sex) and consumer culture constantly urges you to give into your desires (for stuff). The idea is that chaste people are used to viewing their desires with suspicion, and not assuming automatically that desires exist to be fulfilled. Since we are in the habit of examining our desires, rather than merely giving into them, we're less susceptible to advertisement. Or so the theory goes. (I think it's probably right.) Anyway, go on over and add your opinion to the conversation at Amy's place!

I like this list of ten rules for writers. I think my husband would like her Rule 4 best:

4. It's doubtful that any fiction worth reading has been produced on a computer running Windows Vista.

Speaking of writers: Susan Wise Bauer has a blog! Why did I not know this? And for posts like this (not to mention her significant body of work), she is quickly becoming one of my literary heroines (up there with Bujold and Mathewes-Green).

This looks like a great opportunity for any other romance writer out there who might read this. Someone's actually publishing short (800 word) romances. For money, no less!  If nothing else, working on one of these would be a GREAT way to practice cutting the fluff from your writing. With 800 words to work with, you've got to trim ALLLL the fat.

I'm a bit late to do this this year, but this is the coolest Easter craft I've ever seen. Bookmarking it for next year.

The folks over at NPR's media blog are doing a group read of Twilight. Yes. NPR and Twilight. Cognitive dissonance much? It leads to conversations like this:

Marc: ... Also, in an incident that damns both Meyer and her editor, there is a line about "dust moats" floating in the light. ...Moats. Of dust. 

Ah, here it is: "I ate breakfast cheerily, watching the dust moats stirring in the sunlight that streamed in the back window." I think she was going for "mote": "a small particle; speck."

Linda: Dust moats! Dusty moats! Moaty dust!

Marc: Keeping out the dust barbarians!

Linda: "If you want my daughter, the princess, you shall have to cross this MOAT OF DUST!"

Marc: "Lower the lint drawbridge!"

Linda: "Sic the bunnies!" Hee hee, "moats."

Marc: RIGHT?

Linda: "Stay outta the castle!"

Marc: "Or fear the wrath of my poor housekeeping!"

Linda: And like I said, I don't understand why parts of it are written like Ye Olde Magick Tale, like it's written by an ancient professor. But the content is still very immature. It's like, "Nigh on two weeks ago, yea did I have pizza." There's no distance from teenagerhood in perspective, but there is in tone.

Marc: Maybe it's meant to be a direct analog with Edward. Maybe the only way it wouldn't be creepy for him to have a century-old mind in a teenager's body, she has to have the same.

Linda: Wow, that is ... a good observation. If she talked like any kind of credible teenager, it would seem way weirder that he's a hundred years old.

Marc: Holy [bleep], did I just stumble into actual analysis of this thing?

And, finally, from the Onion, an article on the increasing number of parents who are School-Homing their children:

According to a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education, an increasing number of American parents are choosing to have their children raised at school rather than at home.

Deputy Education Secretary Anthony W. Miller said that many parents who school-home find U.S. households to be frightening, overwhelming environments for their children, and feel that they are just not conducive to producing well-rounded members of society.

Hmmm . . .