I’ve been seeing a lot of articles lately about whether men do or don’t “read women”. Seriously? This is enough of a thing to warrant people thoughtfully writing about it? First of all, I guess there is some confusion about whether the question up for discussion is books by women or books about women (and of course, that whole “about” thing is fuzzier than some people would like it to be). So first of all, it seems there are some poor souls out there who think women only write books with female characters and men only write books about male characters. But assuming we’re talking about female authors, are there really a non-trivial number of people out there who filter their reading experience like that?
Based on the article linked above, it seems that Noah Berlatsky, at least, thinks this pathology has something to do with readers wanting to more easily identify with the main character of a book. That’s kind of sad on its own, in my opinion – why would I want to spend all my time reading about people like me? I’m like me already, so I don’t need a book to get another big helping of me. But whatever the reason, it just seems pathetic to cut out huge swaths of authors and their books for no good reason. I mean, should all the men in the reading public deny themselves the pleasure of reading China Mieville just because she …
Okay, I’ve just been told that China Mieville is, in fact, a large, strapping bald man. But that sort of goes to my point. The only logical reason for men not to “read women” is that they write “differently”, but I’ll bet that anyone who only reads authors of one gender only manages that feat because they know the gender ahead of time. I’m not saying most people couldn’t make an educated guess, deprived of the author’s name and any prior information, but I rather doubt the odds would be good enough for 2-1 money. But then, presumably the sort of person who would refuse to read books by women is also the kind of person who does the research to know what he’s going to think of a book before he reads it. I just hope there aren’t really enough of them to worry about.
So the good folks at Miller-Coors brewing recently came out with a few new fake craft beers – Batch 19 and Third Shift. What I’m curious about is how I immediately knew that neither one was what you could actually call a craft beer, despite the rustic labels and so on. I guess I’m sort of a beer snob, but not the kind who hangs around 
So let us explore “bootstrap”, in case any managers happen to be reading this. It’s a word that probably wouldn’t get much use these days, since boots that have them are less common. But in brief, it is that little strap at the top rear of, say, a combat boot, or on either side of the top of a cowboy boot. In a non-metaphoric sense, they are used to help a person pull on their boots, possibly using a boot hook. The primary metaphor involving bootstraps is “to pull yourself up by your bootstraps” – in other words to get into or out of a situation using only the resources at hand, with no outside help. This, of course, led to all sorts of secondary metaphors, such as “bootstrap loading” (or “booting”) where hardware kicks off the initial software being loaded onto a computer, and “bootstrapping” a set of data by resampling from it over and over to obtain better estimates of summary statistics.
Generally speaking, I like Clarkesworld’s submission tracker, because it sends me a friendly acknowledgement of receipt and lets me keep an eye on how things are going, and it is nice that it has been made available to other markets. Granted, one rarely gets more information than “open” (and eventually “closed”), but that beats some markets who go with the old “If you don’t hear back in like, oh, 6, 8, maybe 14 months, you can probably assume we didn’t want it” technique. However, it seems that somewhere in there is a place for filling out a magazine name, and some markets that aren’t Clarkesworld don’t get around to filling it out when they set the thing up, which can be a bit troubling. I don’t need anyone glancing at my email and seeing subject lines that say “XXXX Magazine Submission”, is what I’m trying to say here. I get enough looks as it is, 
Amazon may seem like an unstoppable juggernaut, and many partisans for their rival, the (comparatively) scrappy Barnes and Noble have no doubt despaired of late, given Amazon’s willingness to forgo profits in order to deny them to others. But the latest action by a merry band called “Morality in Media” should give them a leg up. This group has declared 
There are whole websites dedicated to bad book covers, because it is so easy to make wretched cover. But it isn’t really all that fair to make fun of some poor self-published author who had to make do with Microsoft Paintbrush and some public domain art. But 
I’ve