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Don't mess with Smart Bitch Candy unless your logic and reasoning is rock solid. Because if you make narrow-minded, discrimnatory, moronic statements and follow them up with more moronic statements in defence of the original asshattery, she will take you apart. And she doesn't pull punches.
The internet is my friend.
It saves me a great deal of time and trouble when it comes to research, to finding references, quotations, books. It has relieved me of the onerous need to go clothes shopping. It has introduced me to like-minded women who have become good friends. It provides me with news that I can trust (if I look hard enough, and carefully enough, and compare). When the newscasters and politicians are lying through their teeth, somebody on the internet will be providing a different perspective and hopefully, at least some part of the truth. Or at least a laugh. The internet shows me movie previews and clips from broadcasts I missed, but wished I hadn't. It lets me find a good, cheap hotel room (again, if I know how to look) and tickets to Spamalot for my daughter. It shows me photographs of places I have never been and probably will never go, taken by people who are more adventurous than I am. It distracts me when I'm edge and unsettled. It brings me notes from friends who are far away, from relatives I rarely see, and a way to respond without the pressure of an open phone line. It is the way I talk to the people who buy and/or read my books, to my editor and agent, even to my husband, two floors away in his own office.
The internet is not my friend.
Procrastination is a binary proposition. Will I work, yes or no? The internet provides a thousand ways and reasons to step away. Link by link, inch by inch, it draws me further away. It introduces me to people who write beautifully about things that are important to me, who provide perspective on what is going on in the world. These people are far more interesting to me than working, or cleaning up the kitchen.
It is very hard to resist the temptations of the internet. I try to restrict myself to reading the feeds I have setup on Bloglines, but sometimes I am weak. Just recently I added Teach Me Tonight, "Musings on Romance Fiction from an Academic Perspective". Six academics talking seriously about romance fiction; a sinkhole of interesting, relevant posts on matters of professional importance, written by a group of six academics.
The internet is merciless. What would I do without it?
There are a couple of new things in the right hand column. The most interesting, to my mind, is a new LibraryThing widget that searches my whole library. Try it, it's fun to watch the way it transforms.
At one point I had a list of five random titles from the 'favorite novels' list -- is that of any interest?
And now I have to get back to Greenbriar, where it's almost Halloween and Dodge is has painted himself into a corner.
and very funny.
Have a look at highlights from a disturbing clipart collection. Do not, under any circumstances, skip part two.
I had dreams about this stuff. Very odd.
As I can't remember where in the heck I first saw this link some time ago, I can't credit that person, for which I apologize.