My review of Writing Skin by Adriana Kraft is up at Kissed by Venus (www.kissedbyvenus.ca), which posted here.

My review of Love Notes (theme antho on sex and music), edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel, is up here: www.eroticarevealed.com

My latest opinion piece, "The Distracting Smirk," went live today in my column, "Sex Is All Metaphors," on the Erotic Readers & Writers Association site here: www.erotica-readers.com. (Look in the Smutters Lounge gallery.)

I've already been told that I misquoted U.S. Supreme Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Very likely.  I heard responses to her original statement - but not the statement itself - before I wrote my piece.  She's not the focus of my piece anyway, so it doesn't make a huge difference. I still don't know the full context of her controversial statement. And Google is not helpful today.

Does anyone here remember a vintage song often featured on bubblegum-rock stations, "High on a Mountain of Love"?

I sometimes feel I'm standing on a mountain of paper much taller than I am - & it's all non-fiction, some typed on a manual typewriter and faded with time.

I've always liked writing articles, reviews, essays - heck, I just like to play with words. From time to time, I'm recruited by an editor (or volunteer my services) to write a regular column or series of fillers. For awhile in the 1980s, I wrote at least one review per issue for a short-lived general-interest newspaper-style publication for residents of the small city/large town I live in. For 2 years, I had at least one review in every issue of a monthly leftist magazine, Briarpatch. At about that time, I was hired for a 6-month project to write a series of articles for a federally-funded feminist org, and the articles were run in the monthly journal.

About 10 years ago, the Saskatchewan Writers Guild (to which I belong) wanted a list of my writing, including non-fiction, to add to my page on the website. I realized that no one could list all the long & short pieces of published non-fic I've written, including me. Many of them pre-date my acquaintance with any computer, & some that I vaguely remember couldn't be found at all - prob. lost in a move or a purge.

I'm now within sight of what my employer, the local university, calls "normal retirement age" (i.e. 65). What have I accomplished?

Contributed muchly to the glut of printed words in the world.

I've often blamed myself for not writing enough, not writing Real Literature, not spending enough time on one genre or another, but I've been writing fairly steadily all my adult life. Thank the relevant Muse, I've never had a form of writers' block that could shut me up completely. When I felt too self-conscious to write poetry, I could write fiction (to use the word broadly). When I couldn't find enough time to finish a story, I could always write a review or a news item. And a surprising quantity of the stuff has been published, at least in labor-of-love grassroots rags.

By the time I die or become too dysfunctional to write anything, my imaginary mountain of paper will be the size of a town dump.

I sometimes wonder what's the point of it. I enjoy writing, paid or not, so maybe that's the only reason to keep going. 

Will anyone ever try collecting my complete ouevre of non-fiction and analyzing it? I can't see it. What has become of the various journals that contain snippets of my writing - such as The Credit Union Way (for which I wrote a legal column - digested & pared-down articles by a local lawyer - at age 20)? Or Span, journal of the Canadian steelworkers union, for which I wrote an article on the new (at that time) mezzanine in the public library, after interviewing the architect who designed it?

Since I don't get paid for my reviews, I try to circulate them as widely as possible. When I get word that some editor somewhere is looking for reviews, I send on any of mine that might be suitable. In the last few weeks, I've prob. sent 2 dozen reviews to paranormal/fantasy/sci-fi venues. I haven't heard back, & I might never know if or when any of my reviews will appear in/on any of these sites.

I sometimes wonder how many other writers, like me, are building a mountain that will prob. be treated as waste material after their deaths, if not sooner.