Elayne Riggs' Journal (for Leah)

Thursday, March 10, 2005

Estrogen Month - Day 10

Welcome back to our month-long efforts to subvert the dominant link hierarchy! All you need to know is in this post. Sorry to be getting to this so late, but today was another busy work day, and Blogger's been, well, bloggered for much of the day. First I'd like to pass along a couple of e-mails:

Elisa Camahort of Worker Bees Blog writes to let me know she's Lisa Stone's partner-in-crime for BlogHerCon: "I have been the official blogger for the Santa Clara County Democratic Party blog for the last year. In that time I have helped them quadruple their traffic to their site, been plugged by David Weinberger on JOHO and been nominated for a Koufax Award. Still, I toil in relative obscurity. Sometimes I wonder if the only 'acceptable' female political blogger is the kind who focuses on the sex lives of the politicos? Sigh." Elisa invites folks to visit her and Lisa regarding this proposed gathering and "let us know a) if you're interested, b) if you'd like to help and c) what you'd like to get out of Bloghercon." Oh, and of course Elisa has also been added to my Bloglines bookmarked Gals in Waiting sections, which are open for you to peruse and vote on which Gals should "move up" to my (and your) permanent sidebar blogroll. Voting continues in the comments section below.

Glovefox (she of the password-protected blog so I won't plug it here) passes along this Guardian article about the annual Orange Prize for Fiction. While the explanation of how the prize came to be seems pretty cut and dried to me ("The founders of the prize were concerned that many of the biggest literary prizes often appeared to over look wonderful writing by women. And, since prizes are so instrumental in telling potential readers about writers, we did think that many novels by women were possibly not being brought to the attention of male and female readers who'd appreciate them."), apparently "some critics deride it as a prize for people who can't hack it in the rough, tough world of competitions that can also be entered by men." Sounds pretty familiar to me; I've often heard the same whine regarding various comic book awards, and yet year after year women are virtually absent from them, particularly in the fan-voted awards, which is why the Lulu Awards exist. Why can't people just accept that consciousness-raising things like this exist to supplement what's already out there, not replace it? Update: Jessica Crispin at Bookslut has the longlist.

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