Last year I did this little experiment on my myspace blog and I found the Gender Guesser website in my bookmarks today–So I thought I would share it here. This is a link to Gender Guesser, where you can paste something you’ve written and the site will evaluate whether it was written by a man …Read More
Horror in the news: Child neglect in the extreme. (Not for the faint of heart.) This could happen to anyone–not just the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland.
Everything I know about baseball, I learned from the radio. I don’t think I even saw a baseball game in person until I was eight or nine years old–it was the Cincinnati Reds playing, of course, and I remember that the players seemed so far away there in the stadium. A radio broadcast is such …Read More
This past weekend it was extra-toasty in Southern by-God Illinois, and so it was a perfect time to stay indoors and shamelessly indulge in movie-watching. TCM had some beautiful prints of several Charlie Chaplin films, plus a good documentary. (Though nothing beats Robert Downey Jr. in Chaplin!) I also should mention (she says in a …Read More
So today I’m engaging in that enormous ego exercise, the author pic photo shoot. It must be done every two years. Wish me luck! I’m hoping for something between this… and this… I’m glad I’m not doing it myself because it would look something like this: Or even this. (I’m always complicating things!) And how …Read More
I’m so excited to introduce Julie Kramer to you all. I devoured her debut novel, STALKING SUSAN, just hours after the ARC of it arrived here at chez Benedict. STALKING SUSAN introduces Minnesota’s own Riley Spartz, a–and I just have to say this–girl reporter who discovers that a serial killer has been targeting women named …Read More
Finally! I sent the copy edits of CALLING MR. LONELY HEARTS back to Ballantine today. I feel like celebrating! Alas, it may not be the last time I see CMLH in manuscript form if I wasn’t clear enough on corrections. Then come the bound galleys, aka ARCS. As soon as I get my hands on …Read More
For many months I saved the spam in my laurabenedict.com email account because I was getting so many interesting character names from it. But I would dump them after I got three or four hundred because I got paranoid about keeping all that trash around. Mostly I get Viagra offers and other opportunities to “enhance …Read More
(Amazing image by Amaroo.) I’m a little jealous of my poet friends–not just because they work magic with so few words, but because their work is so, well, portable. More than portable. It’s pithy as well. Prose writers have a tougher time expressing complete themes and ideas on a single manuscript page. If we’re doing …Read More
One of Bengal’s favorite books in our house is his sister’s battered copy of Seymour Simon’s STRANGE MYSTERIES FROM AROUND THE WORLD. He loves to read to us from it, never tiring of the tales of The Crystal Skull, the Tunguska Explosion, the ghost ship Mary Celeste and details about mysterious lights in the night …Read More