The Tripods were the GREATEST and I read them UMPTY TIMES. Although there was a dire shortage of girls doing stuff as I recall, being still back in the days when girls got Done To in most SF books instead (Eloooiiiiisssseeeee!).

I made oven-baked chicken thighs tonight and I took the skin off before breading them (she said, her head hung low in shame). I thought skin was supposed to be horribly fatty and non-nutritious and bad for you! I was trying to be responsible!

What drives me insane right now, though, is that thighs in my local (small town Ontario) supermarket are the same price as breasts much of the time, and that half the time you cannot buy skin-on bone-in pieces of meat even if you want to. What I'd really like is to buy a whole chicken cut up in pieces to save me wrangling with the carcass, but weirdly a) none of the nearby supermarkets seem to offer this option and b) it is actually just as cheap or cheaper to buy one of those pre-cooked family-size rotisserie chickens from Sobey's deli than to buy an uncooked whole (tiny) chicken at my local No Frills. I don't understand it at all.

One of the most depressing features of the criticism reserved for Female Authors Who Say Things On The Internet get is that, like the tweet linked on the first page of this post, a surprising amount of the nastiness comes from women. Over the past twenty years online I've learned to expect, depressing though it is, that whenever a lively and articulate woman speaks her mind in a public space, some men with fragile egos and ossified minds will feel threatened and try to prove their superiority by cutting her down. But when women gang up and start calling names, spreading rumours and making snap judgments about fellow women, apparently just for the sheer malicious sport of the thing, I just can't wrap my head around it. Yet fandom in particular (and I say that as a fannish person myself) positively seethes with this kind of misogyny -- and YA lit fandom is, sadly, no exception.

I don't know what the solution is, but I'm glad we're talking about it. Great article, Sarah.

And now she writes Supernatural fanfic. No lie. Google it.