Darlene's Digest

Image via Wikipedia Not Just Another Pretty Face "Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women's contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognized. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements." I took the pledge to blog today about women in technology, so I'm going to write about Hedy Lamarr . Most of the world knows of Lamarr as a movie actress of the 20th Century, but few are aware of her accomplishments as a scientist, accomplishments that were largely unacknowledged during her lifetime. Lamarr is credited for her work with George Anteill on "frequency hopping", which, according to Wikipedia, "serves as ...

Cover via Amazon I'm reading an entertaining and intriguing book: Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes? Bodies, Behavior and Brains--The Science Behind Sex. Love & Attraction by Jena Pincott. Pincott talks about body language, symmetry, voice pitch, odor, height and all the various factors that come into play when scoping out potential partners. Some of it I knew, but some of it is new and fascinating, like how gay men may emit a different scent than straight men (and no, it's not about the products they're using). As a romance writer I'm constantly trying to use body language, scent, sound and small things like whether or not the heroine is touching her hair to help set the scene. It's all part of showing without telling. But it's nice to have Pincott telling me why so much of this matters when people are making their choices to mate or not to mate.

News reports today that Barnes and Noble purchased Fictionwise. We do indeed live in interesting times.

Image via Wikipedia One of my favorite shirts from the recent presidential campaign said “Change in Which We Can Believe”. You can find it at CafePress under writers, editors and grammarians for Obama. Of course, the slogan heard nationally was “Change We Can Believe In”. Catchy, but not grammatically correct. I mention this because today, March 4, is National Grammar Day, so proclaimed by the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar . I do not like to call myself a grammar snob, because I make mistakes. I sometimes (but seldom) misuse “who” and “whom”. I find my Southern heritage creeping in with “towards” rather than “toward”. But I am educated enough that grammatical errors in others’ work tend to leap out at me, and this can be a problem. I was reading a historical last week by a well-respected author, and the sentence “He wanted to lie her down...” hit me like the sight of the proverbial turd in a punch bowl, taking me so far out of the moment I was tempted to not finis...

I'm still here. I've just been busy writing, got a 24 hour bug, recovered, got on with life. Tomorrow I'm blogging at the HEA Cafe, so I'll post something here.