Me and others around the ‘nets:
My latest post for GayYA.org is up—this week I write about intersectionality for better storytelling.
I Fry Mine in Butter ascended into heaven with the rapture last weekend. Fourteen months and 850 posts, we contributors are pretty proud of ourselves. The archives will be up for the forseeable future, folks, so go back and read anytime!
At Bitch, Jarrah Hodge looks at the proliferation of colonizing board games.
Finally, someone who’s not afraid of raising taxes. Of course, it’s Mother Jones.
Bill Peschel takes a refreshingly real look at lessons for writers. Apparently, we need to have more realistic egos.
The Nation wants to know why Black Americans are worse off than before President Obama took office.
This originally ran over at 
Walla Walla suffered its first homicide of the year with 
Harold Camping wants us all to know that Doomsday is coming soon. Specifically, later this week. More specifically, on May 21. It should be a bummer of a weekend, according to Harold Camping, who has presumably spent his life savings to broadcast his message so that as many of us as possible can be saved before the rapture. Excuse me. The Actual Rapture. Not like the last apocalypse that Camping asserted would happen, which was in 1994. Oh those bible verses! They can be so confusing to interpret! 
Dear Detective Show Writers:
Our unborn dragon is now at 23 weeks and counting, and as Babycenter.com tells me, can hear sounds pretty well, so I broke out my iPod and played a little Billie Holiday the other day, thanks be to Susanne’s unending patience. One book I found suggests that I should play loud sounds in proximity to her uterus so that they won’t bother the dragon as much once it’s out in the world with us. I’m not sure I can pass off needing to vacuum our bedroom, as we have hardwood floors in there. Maybe I’ll blame it on the dust bunnies that have huddled under our bed. Protection in numbers won’t save those buggers from the Electrolux, after all. 
I’ve said it before, and I suppose I’m saying it again; I don’t think there’s a progressive movement. I mean, of course, there’s a progressive movement, in that there are causes on the liberal and radical left that push specific interests. But the idea that a broad left wing will show up to march through the Mall in Washington, D.C. on a single issue, with no major fracture points on display, or that we’re beholden to a single figure who is speaks for even a majority of us, is dead on the vine. 
Despite the many apocalyptic presumptions made regarding zombifying infection of the human species, there are worthwhile approaches for isolating and managing zombie individuals that should be considered for specific jurisdictions and communities. Agencies including the CDC and WHO have already implemented zombie response protocols and are on the lookout for outbreaks when containment is still an option. Quarantining zombie individuals can serve to protect uninfected people and provide an opportunity for future treatment should one be discovered. Further considerations include the following: 
It’s an oft-discussed problem of writer’s workshops that first chapters get lots of attention to detail and craft, and then fall off like a continental shelf at the edge of a deep ocean. First sentences are even more the focus of early workshop experiences. While I try to pay at least as much attention to the last third of my work as the first third, I do think an opening can sink or swim a book in all kinds of ways—agents who’ve requested the manuscript will stop reading, readers thumbing through books in stores will put it back down and move to the next novel, and readers will get frustrated or have a hard time pressing on into chapter 2. In my aim to write a fantastic opening, I look to avoid certain things: 
We received an audience with Sarah Palin again today (read, the family practitioner who looks like Sarah Palin), and after waiting only 45 minutes, she joined us for Susanne’s latest exam. After a string of additional symptoms, like sudden, cataclysmic leg cramps, stubborn heartburn, and the mucous that accompanies late spring pollen bursts, Sarah Palin grabbed her fetal heartbeat monitor and pushed around searching for sound.
Trans/plant/portation 