Even Google Bard has read One Bad Cat!

I asked Google’s new artificial intelligence (AI) platform, Bard, if it had read my latest book, One Bad Cat, and it turns out it has! Not only that, but Bard gave it a glowing review. Here’s what it had to say:

“Yes, I have read One Bad Cat by Mandy Webster. It is a humorous fantasy novel about a psychology professor who is turned into a cat by his female coven members. The novel follows Stephen as he tries to adjust to his new life as a cat, while also plotting revenge on his coven members.

The apocalypse may be here, but it’s fine

I feel like I should be documenting this since I guess it’s kind of historic—even though I personally am not experiencing the level anxiety one might expect at the end of the world.

The thing is, the climate change apocalypse scientists have been warning us about for the past decade or so (or longer) is upon us, but I feel fine. Well, my asthmatic lungs don’t feel fine what with the thick smoke that has been hanging in the air all week from the wildfires in Canada—Canada! So far away from my home in central Illinois in the United States, but the fires are just that bad.

These kids ain’t stupid

TicTok. YouTube. Snapchat. Day in and day out, our children are rotting their brains staring at these stupid-making apps. What is the world coming to? Is it as bad as their grandparents might think? I would argue no.

The other day I was hanging out with my 16-year-old in his bedroom because – well, he’s 16: if I want to spend time with him, I go to him. I don’t wait for him to feel like coming to hang out with me. I would never see him. My son likes to play video games on his tv while simultaneously watching YouTube videos. On this day, I asked him what he was watching. He said, “Oh, it’s just some video about Satan.”

Wut?

Hi, my name is Mandy Webster, and I survived domestic violence.

My sister survived domestic violence too, as have several of my aunts and cousins, whether they care to admit it or not. I have a vivid memory of visiting an aunt when I was child, of one of my cousins showing me a hole in the wall and telling me, “My dad did that.” I am currently watching a niece grapple with a coercive control situation that will likely become violent, if it hasn’t already. If we don’t find a way to help her escape, she might end up like our cousin who didn’t survive domestic violence. In 2019, that cousin’s ex-husband murdered her in cold blood, shooting her in the back and head multiple times while their five-year-old played in the next room.

Yes, I am quite familiar with domestic violence. But I don’t let my experiences with domestic violence define me. Instead, I have worked hard to define it. I’ve talked to lots of survivors, read books on the subject, and even took a criminal justice studies course on intimate partner violence to try to understand how this could have happened to me. I watched The Perfect Victim and consumed Maid (both the book and the Netflix series), and read countless memoirs written by my fellow survivors. I want to understand and expose family violence in the hopes that I can help someone else save themselves the same way I saved me.

I saved me.

I’ve often considered writing a memoir about my experiences and might still do so. The problem is, like many PTSD suffers, I struggle to pin down the memories of what happened through those ten years of trauma. Sometimes it feels like my body remembers more than my brain does. The memories often come in disjointed flashes when I care to think about them the least.

The Annotated Bib: Amazons and Mothers?

Have you ever had to write an annotated bibliography? I have, once, and I hated it! Well, guess what I get to do for the Studies in Women’s Writing course I am taking this semester. You guessed it: an annotated bibliography! This assignment requires that I read and analyze a minimum of ten scholarly secondary sources on the subject of “women’s writing.” The annotated bib will be almost as long as my final paper!

After all these years of blogging, it seems like a waste of time to me to put so much effort into writing something that will result in nothing more than a grade. As with much of my other school writing, I am adapting this assignment to generate content for my blog. Over the coming weeks, I will be posting my individual annotated bibliography entries as blog posts.

So, without further ado, I present to you the very first entry in my annotated bibliography!

Amazons and Mothers? Monique Wittig, Helène Cixous and Theories of Women’s Writing

Griffin Crowder, Diane. “Amazons and Mothers? Monique Wittig, Helène Cixous and Theories of Women’s Writing.” Contemporary Literature L’Écriture Féminine 24.2 (1983): 117-44. JSTOR. Web. 23 Feb. 2015.


http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/103007438


This article explores the modern feminist notion that the oppression of women is a changeable social construct that does not depend on the fact that women are born with the potential to bear children. The article discusses the women’s writing theories of French feminists Monique Wittig and Helene Cixous. While “Cixous views motherhood as a primary trait of women” (132), Wittig views the tendency of women to identify primarily with the role of mother as oppressive.

National Poetry Month Collaborative Twitter Poem

Poetry (Photo credit: V. H. Hammer)

Well, here we are. It’s April 1^st, and once again time to celebrate National Poetry Month. I haven’t really been writing much poetry lately, so I thought it might be fun to do a collaborative Twitter poem challenge.

For this challenge, I am going to give you a one-word prompt/Twitter handle. Next, you come up with a poem – either one short poem that will fit into one 140-character Tweet, or a longer poem that you can split up, posting one verse per Tweet – and share it on Twitter using the provided hashtag. I am starting the challenge here today, and then I would love it if some of you would volunteer to host one or a few additional prompts on your blogs throughout the month of April.

Books are full of treasures

I found this hundred dollar bill bookmark in a library book last night.

I love it when people leave surprises in library books. Last night, I opened a recently checked-out library book and found this cute little hundred dollar bill bookmark that someone had left in its middle. Did someone leave it there on accident, or was it a gift? I wonder how many treasures I have accidentally left in my library books when I’ve returned them?

Once in a while, I will purposely leave a real dollar bill in a book before I return it. Imagine the look on the next reader’s face when she finds money in her library book! I think that moment of excitement you feel when you find money, even if it’s only a dollar, is worth so much more than the dollar itself. I don’t mind investing in someone else’s moment of happiness once in a while.

Tell me about your new book

Some days, an outside job filling pot holes sounds more appealing than an inside job filling plot holes. | Le Festival des Pot Holes…. (Photo credit: caribb)

I don’t know about you, but I sure haven’t been blogging much since the start of the new year. What I have been doing is plugging away at two novels in progress, both of which seem to grow farther from completion with each new plot hole I fill. It’s funny how that works, isn’t it?

You know, sometimes revising a novel is kinda like when you think you’re just going to quickly replace a bathtub in your 100-year-old house only to realize that by removing the old bathtub, you have now exposed a whole host of other problems you didn’t know existed, including rotten floor boards and termite ravished support beams. Yeah, revision can be a lot like remodeling a bathroom in a house that maybe should have been condemned a long time ago…

Needless to say, blogging hasn’t been as much on my mind lately as it once was.

Do all writers have iron stomachs when they’re writing?

This is an adult version of a corn rootworm. I decided not to share any larva images in case you are eating while reading my blog. | English: Western corn rootworm (Diabrotica virgifera virgifera LeConte) on corn (Zea mays) Italiano: Diabrotica su foglia di mais (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am so glad I decided to go for a walk this morning. For some reason, I always get my best ideas while I’m out for a walk. Today, my walk ended in a jog, as I was in such a hurry to get home to scribble out this new scene.

I grabbed my notebook and pen, then turned on the coffee maker and threw a slice of whole grain bread in the toaster. I wrote while making my breakfast because I knew I would lose steam if I didn’t get some food in my stomach and caffeine coursing through my veins.

At one point, I realized I needed to know what a corn rootworm looks like so I could show it in the scene. I ran from the kitchen table to my computer with a piece of toast dangling between my teeth. A quick Google search produced a plethora of gloriously disgusting images of corn rootworms in every stage of life, from egg to larva to beetle.

Why is young adult dystopia classified as “Romance?”

Do you consider The Hunger Games a romance novel? | The Hunger Games (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have been a member of GoodReads for two years but have only recently started using the app on my phone. A few weeks ago, I began adding books I have read to my profile. A lot of them have been dystopian novels, as I have been reading a lot of that genre as part of my research for my own novel projects. When I went to check out my recommendations to determine what to read next, I was surprised to find that GoodReads was mostly recommending that I read romance novels.

I don’t get it. It’s been a while since I have read any romance novels, and I hadn’t added any to my “read” shelf. Why would this app suggest I mostly read romance novels if I hadn’t indicated that I had any interest in them?

It’s not that I never read romance. Don’t tell anyone, but I have a secret stash of Harlequins in my bedroom closet. I pull one out whenever I am in need of a quick escape that requires little to no thinking. I suppose the fact that I haven’t read one recently says good things about my current life. At my worst, I would lay in bed and read an entire romance novel in one night. But I won’t get into my dysfunctional ex-marriage here today.