Gar, no idea what Teppy's take on it is, but at that length, I'd probably be inclined toward blogging it in my journal, providing a link, and adding a note upfront that this is not a drabble, it's short fiction, don't read if that's an issue, thank you, etc.

Right. Guess it's time to sign up for livejournal.

It's a good thing to have, Gar - even if you never use it for anything beyond short pieces of fiction or journalism, it's a useful tool.

Ok - on subject, but a short story not a drabble>

[link]

The thing is public. Comment is open. You can judge this persons character by the content of his ..... well if you read it you can see soon enough.

The thread isn't just for drabbles, is it? I love the challenge, and stick to 100 words like my krav depended on it. But any sort of fiction can be posted here for people to read and comment on, on challenge topics or of challenge length. Or neither.

Right?

ita, yep, that's the way I take it, as well.

But for longer pieces - much longer, something that's well beyond the drabble and even past flash fiction, all the way into basic short fiction - I'd probably link it, rather than post it.

For one thing, the b.org interface doesn't allow for long posts, so I find posting up in chunks is problematic. You risk losing the fkow if the layout is inherently choppy.

The b.org interface will do its own splitting, so you can fill the posting box with as much as you like. But I can see you might not want to post it--just wanted to restate that it's allowed just fine.

And see, for the drabble form, my challenge is always getting to 100 words.

I know the conversational moment has passed, but I want to go back and elucidate what I meant about unapologizingness being more of a problem for me in relationships with women, and see if other people have had the same or contrary experiences. I am even going to link it to writing, because I tend to write in a male POV more easily than in a female POV (for some things, not all), and I think this relates to that.

I certainly noticed the environmental pressure for girls to be cute/pretty and not smart (and especially not smart-ass), but since that wasn't expected of me at home (quite the opposite) and since it just wasn't who I was, I never went that route.

I think men sort themselves socially along the Y axis, while women sort themselves socially along the X axis, to shorthand it. When I'm with a group of women (in general, not all women) I feel a great pressure to reinforce the similarities. In school it was dressing the same, liking the same music, thinking the same boys were cute. Being too far outside allowed parameters was a problem. Girls avoided being friends with me, starting in about 5th grade, because I was the smartest kid in the class.

Boys, on the other hand, seemed to be more comfortable that they could slot me into a ranking and didn't have to worry about what I wasn't advertising. And I never had a problem dating because I was smart (I had a problem dating in my hometown because I was weird, but that was different...and I still got some anyway), in part because I never tried to date guys less intelligent than me.

OK, there was that one time, but it only lasted 2 weeks.

College was different - I had a big group of female friends, and we were all smart, so I wasn't out of bounds. And for the most part we were feverishly establishing ourselves as individuals, so dressing different, having a different major, was not a problem.

The work world is back to high school, though. I've spent my adult life working for extremely gender-biased organizations, and it has seemed to me that other women have been more threatened by smart women than the men have.

I've also noticed, and this is going on right now, that the Good Ol' Boys have started to learn that when you want to say you like working with a woman, you can no longer say "She's got great legs" or "She's got great tits" but you can say "She's really smart." Cause, seriously, unless my new boss looked up my IQ test in my personnel record, he's got no grounds to describe me as "really smart" my second day on the job.

I probably apologise more to women than men too, Raq. Now that you mention it.

A friend recently yelled at me for saying I'd like to have a more defined waist. "Big boobs, big ass! You want more?" I apologise for wanting to gain weight, for not needing to shave, for all sorts of silly stuff.

Guys don't give a fuck, or at the very least tune out. I mean, they think I'm weird, but nothing to apologise for. I don't ever apologise when I'm smarter than they are, or when I hit harder, or take their blows--going toe to toe with a smile on my face might lose me a few dates, but that's about it.

Oh man, martial arts. I can't stand working with women who apologize constantly for throwing a punch at me, or throwing me. I've told more than one, "Look, you paid money to come here and do this. Why apologize? Besides, I told you to try to hit me."

Weird thing though - when I was teaching the self-defense course for rape victims at the Y, very few of them apologized constantly. Of course, mostly they didn't talk at all.