This article from The Independent (UK) reports on research that indicates the future possibility of using stem cells from women to create sperm that would only produce daughters.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/artic...

I'll bet Aardvark would like to have had this when writing Sappho. What kind of new sci-fi stories can be based on this?

Amelia

The title of Janet's blog post reminds me of another occasional role that editors/proofreaders may enjoy -- touting their authors' forthcoming stories. ;-)

From the mouths of babes. This gem was found on a blog post elsewhere.

Me: "It's about a DVD"

Child #1: "What gender is it?"

I've just posted Julie O's entry in Bob's Stardust Contest over at Stardust.

I'm sorry. The best laid plans and all that... Reality got a little too up close and personal today (not traumatic in any way, just very busy). I have Julie's finished story, and just need to finish formatting it for posting.

When I posted Julie O's latest earlier today, using the Fiction entry, I did not check any boxes (and do not remember even seeing any) to deliberately disable comments. Julie *wants* comments.

Yet, this is the third consecutive story I posted where comments were disabled without my doing anything. Something is definately wrong here.

Here we go again!

I'll swear that when I first posted this story this morning, that comments were enabled. Now, when I go into the edit mode, there isn't even an option to enable or disable comments.

I'm not sure what happened. I did not deliberately turn off comments when I posted Julie's latest story, but there doesn't seem to be any way to change that when I put the story in Edit mode.

I was wondering why I received a few comments in PMs and there were no comments posted for everyone to see -- very strange for a JulieO story!

In Erin's thread about use of tenses, the writing of explicit thoughts (expressing what a character is thinking at a specific moment in a story) came up.

I'd like to advocate a specific style for indicating that text in a story represents explicit thought. I think I first saw this used in some of Bek Corbin's stories, but Angela and I used it in "Peaches," and I've convinced Itinerant and a couple others to use it.

With Erin's recent forays into the Dragnet style of narrative, I couldn't help but think of Top Shelf when I found this recent blog entry:

http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2006...

I'm recovering from a viral pneumonia, so perhaps I can blame this on the fever I endured.

Too many of you have heard/read my exhortations on homophones and the fact that Word's spell checker won't pick up on homophone errors. I just happened across this little gem, which illustrates the problem perfectly.

... I've been reading fewer stories here than on other sites.

On other sites my main way of choosing which stories to read is by reading the short synopsis that authors provide. Very few authors do so here, and I'm thus provided little incentive to read unless I'm familiar with the author. Categories alone are not enough.