How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

That I stole from Sarah Miller : The instructions: Look at the list and (1) Bold those you have read. (2) Italicize those you intend to read. (3) Underline the books you LOVE. 1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (made it to book four, and bailed.) 5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6. The Bible 7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8. 1984 - George Orwell 9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (most of them, anyway. The comedies make my eyes gloss over, though). 15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks 18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger 19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 20. Middlemarch - George Eliot 21. ...

Moonrat, still at Editorial Ass, is making me think a lot lately. She did a recent post here about sexualized violence in print ads, and connected the dots to sexualized violence in books and other media, which got me thinking about how I treat girls and women in my books. To be clear--I'm a feminist. I believe in equal pay for equal work and reproductive choice, and the whole ball of wax. I'm not going to go into detail about all that here because, frankly, there are people out there whose blogs are dedicated to that kind of thing (like Jezebel *) and they do it way better than I ever could. But that's my political orientation, in case you care. So when I was writing The Book, it was very important to me that my female protagonist S did not fall into any of those "heroine needs saving by the hero" tropes that so many books for teenage girls do. Sure, there's something very "romantic" about the hero swooping in and rescuing the heroine, right? ...

A couple weeks ago, I went to see Peter Murphy live. You probably don't know who that is, unless you (a) were alive in the 80s and (b) cared about moody modern rock like Bauhaus, in which case you know that Peter Murphy was Bauhaus' lead singer and has had a fairly successful, if underground, career of his own after the band broke up. Anyway, the concert was awesome. But the relevant part of all this background is that quite a bit of Peter Murphy's material is on the soundtrack I made up for The Book. I don't know when The Book and Peter Murphy became inexorably intertwined in my mind, but it happened a long long time ago, and it's irrevocable now. They're so connected that, if certain Peter Murphy songs come on my iPod when I can't write, I have to skip them. They've become evocative of The Book for me, which made it particularly weird and cool to go and see those songs performed live. I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this (in fact, S...