Cardyn Brooks's Blog, page 41

Multitasking

Image copyright 2012 R.D. Banks
All rights reserved

Confession: The treadmill and stationary bike are my favorite pieces of gym equipment because I can indulge myself with reading while working out. Sadly, it's impossible to read while playing baseball, softball, tennis, golf, football, soccer, American football, basketball, badminton or volleyball. Although reading an entire short novel while watching a professional American football game is easy--especially during the Super Bowl.

BATAF: Being competitive is not feminine. 

Read. Swim. Repeat.

Image copyright 2011 P.W. Banks
All rights reserved

Confession: On vacation, it's normal for me to read at least one full-length novel per day.
Sandra Kitt, Crystal Hubbard, Carol Taylor, David Handler, Dana Stabenow, and Frankie Y. Bailey can't write fast enough to keep pace with my reading habit. So I read other authors' fiction and skip all the descriptions of main female characters with blonde hair, blue/green/grey eyes, thin noses, skinny thighs, pale white skin, and single-digit dress sizes.

BATAF: All fat women want to be skinny.

Diversity

image from joinafrica.com  Confession: I love Zane for expanding the presence and raising the profile of Black characters as complicated, multifaceted imperfect human beings in the spotlight in sexy escapist fiction. BATAF: Africa is a country, not a continent with 50+ countries that are as different from each other as Mexico is from Canada. 

Priorities

Confession: I've stayed up all night to read one of my favorite author's new releases on a weeknight, then gone to work functionally comatose the next day. (No heavy equipment, dangerous machinery operation, volatile materials or classified information involved.)

BATAF (Bogus Assumption Treated As Fact): The pursuit of excellence is not the cultural standard for African-American, Hispanic-Latino and Native North American cultures; only Asian and Caucasian people routinely train their children to work hard to earn their success.

Temptation

Today's Confession: Sometimes during church service, I'm not always reading scriptures on my tablet. Yes, there's probably a special level of purgatory to torment the souls of binge reader sinners: They're chained in the center of the stacks in the Library of Congress, where they can see all their favorite kinds of books, but are unable to read any of them while other visibly giddy souls read one book after another without pause. The virtuous readers never need to sleep, work, cook, exercise, eat or clean.

Today's BATAF (Bogus Assumption Treated As Fact in mainstream fiction:
All Black people who aren't thugs or 'ho's are very religious, and sprinkle "Praise the Lord. God is good." throughout their everyday conversation.