Fred Phelps, Sr., former leader of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, is dead. He died on Wednesday night in hospice care. Phelps hit the international news scene when he and his church protested Matthew Shepherd's funeral in 1998 bearing signs that reflect their website's URL: God Hates Fags.

 I live in Kansas City. I had never heard of Fred Phelps until I went to a Lipizzaner horse show in Topeka with a friend and was shocked to see a group of people holding up signs saying in ten or twelve different ways that God, and they, hate homosexual people. What that had to do with horses, I have no idea. I asked my friend what was going on, and she sighed and explained who they were, what they stood for, what they'd been doing, what they continued to do and still continue to do on and on for years after I drove past them, my mouth hanging open in shock and my skin tingling with rage.

Please read the rest on BlogHer.

If you'll be at BlogHer '14 in San Jose, please come visit the Writing Lab. On Friday, July 24 from 2:30-4 pm, you'll find the following people there:

Writing Lab | Be Your Own Editor

Writing is hard. This lab will help make it a little easier for you by making those rough drafts a little smoother, that copy a bit tighter, and those headlines a little more zingy. Like any good cook will tell you, it's much easier at the end if you clean as you go. Tidy up your work as you write it with these tips for catchy and inspiring headlines, insights into how an *editor* approaches a writer's first draft differently than the *writer* does, and the grammar refreshers we all know we can use, even if we don't want to admit it! 

Instructors:

• Arnebya Herdon and Rita Arens (grammar clinic)
• Julie Ross Godar (headline bootcamp)
• Meiko Patton and Susan Goldberg (what to do with your first draft)

I like nothing better than to sit around geeking out over "that" versus "which," so it's a guaranteed good time! In all seriousness, understanding the rules of grammar and punctuation give you confidence -- and that confidence translates not only into better writing but also into the promotion of said writing. No one wants to be the guy on ESPN whose tweet gets picked up saying "your the best!" (seen recently, no lie)

NO ONE WANTS TO BE THAT GUY.

If you want a badge of your own (even if you're not speaking, you totally don't have to be, that's just what MY badge says), go here for badge code.

Also -- if you have any grammar quandaries you'd like us to address, leave them here in the comments!

I have uninstalled this program and can find no evidence of it in my Google Chrome. But every morning, there it is! Again! Like the cat that came back and couldn't stay away!

Also with the annoying text ads everywhere. What is this stupid thing and how do I get rid of it? Has this happened to any of you?

A week ago, my fourth-grader asked me about getting an Instagram account. I demanded she produce other fourth-graders who had one so I could ask their mothers about it. That ended the conversation.

Today, school was cancelled due to ice. She mused as I ignored her while working that she wished she could text with her friends.

I told her she's too young then went back to ignoring her while working. 

Then I sort of felt bad, so I started to suggest she call them and had to hold my tongue. Of course the friends she wants to talk to moved here from Iowa and their mother has a long-distance cell phone number, and our home phone doesn't get long distance, and I refuse to let her use my cell because I need it for work. So she can't call them. They live within walking distance and she can't call them. She could probably Skype with them, but that is now making my head hurt.

The world of 2013 is so complicated. 

She's not getting a cell phone. Not yet. She's not. 

Or Instagram. 

Or, OMG, SnapChat, that devil's tool all the kids like.

So far I've muddled along whistling in the dark about my daughter and technology. She has an iPod Touch and has had one for about a year now, but so far she only uses it to play games and FaceTime with relatives.

She's not getting a phone.

She's not texting.

She's going to talk. Or for God's sake, pass a note. Or be bored.

*headdesk*

(I just peeked. She found a new app and is now writing a story. THANK YOU, JESUS. Back to work.)

This week my friend Pauline Campos approached me about participating in her #BodyThanks Twitter party on Monday night at 8 pm CT and donating a copy of THE OBVIOUS GAME, since Diana struggles mightily with body image and anorexia in my novel. I said yes, and I'm excited for the conversation. 

Later this week, someone passed along to me a post a guy wrote about why you should date a girl with eating disorder. Chief among the reasons: Hot and a cheap date because she doesn't eat much.

You know I wrote something, right?

Here's the beginning: 

[Editor's Note: ED trigger alert]

Last week, the misogynist-troll website Return of Kings published 5 Reasons to Date a Girl with an Eating Disorder, by a writer named Tuthmosis. When I first read the post, I thought surely it was written ironically. (Of course, I also thought that the first time I heard the lyrics to Blurred Lines.) The “reasons” included hot thinness, cheapness to date, and wildness in the sack. Ugh. Understandably, the Internet freaked out. Then the site’s publisher posted a response to the freakout, including this paragraph:

I want to make it clear that we at ROK are not promoting eating disorders. These are devastating illnesses on those whom they afflict, and we wish sufferers are able to receive the treatment they need. It is unfortunate that sufferers continue to be stigmatized by society, so it surprises me that Tuthmosis’ article has been angrily received when it attempts to reduce stigma by encouraging our male readership to give women with anorexia and bulimia an opportunity for real intimacy.

I had boyfriends when I had anorexia. And they may have thought they were benefiting from some of the items on Tuthmosis' list. Yes, I was thin in a fashionable way … before I got thin in a starving-person way. Yes, I was an extremely cheap date – for dinner in high school, of course, but also for drinks in college. Someone who ate six hundred calories all day before going out gets wasted on one cocktail. Sweet, right?

Please to read the rest on BlogHer. When I finished writing it, my hands were shaking with anger. 

All I can do, though, is keep repeating that eating disorders aren't cute, they're not just for white girls and they aren't vain or a cry for attention. Eating disorders are serious psycho-social-biological maladies that can be a matter of life and death. Please join us on Twitter on Monday night with the hashtag #BodyThanks as we move into the week of Thanksgiving -- a week very triggering for some -- being thankful for our families, our friends, our lives and the bodies that carry us through them.

Tomorrow the little angel has a ceremony to go to for school. She has been bugging me to iron the flounces of her skirt to make them stand out prettily, and of course I keep forgetting. This morning, she left me a note on my laptop. Mommy, please iron my skirt. I wrote it down on my work list: Iron skirt.  And I remembered! I ironed it.

I got to the second row of flounces before I started crying.

There I stood in my basement, holding an iron in my hand, thinking about how proud I am of my girl who tries so hard in school. I also thought about the worry list she wrote on her playroom whiteboard, how she's been counting down the days to know if her team won, how the combination of that looming childhood worry combined with a school spelling bee this week has her seriously spinning.

She will be fine, of course. Competition is healthy. She doesn't play sports, so this is her opportunity to learn to be a good winner or loser, to look forward to things, to be rewarded for a job well done, to celebrate or mourn with a team. Sports are great and all, but they aren't the only teams in schools. 

So I stood there, trying to get all the wrinkles out and knowing because of the way the flounces were gathered I would fail, trying to keep Kizzy from burning his little black paws on the steam he so desperately wanted to touch, thinking how fast it is going and it will be like a roller coaster that took forever and only thirty seconds between now and when I'm steaming her high school graduation gown. 

I'm doing all I can do. She was so wound up she had a lot of trouble getting to sleep last night. I know tonight will be worse. We've scheduled some worry time for after ballet (not sure I wrote about how she decided two weeks into September that she can't handle the step-up to two nights during the school week, she still hates ballet, quitting at the end of the semester, and I will be very happy not hear a daily litany of how much she hates ballet after that). I'll work on PARKER CLEAVES while she's in class so I won't be sitting there at bedtime thinking how every minute ticking by is a minute I'm not writing before the 11 pm mental shutdown. I'll be fresh. I'll remind her what a good coper she is. We'll breathe deeply. And tomorrow, win or lose, we'll celebrate, of course after the ceremony and school and my trip to the blonde fairy that has already been rescheduled twice. I'd like to clear my calendar for her, but Beloved is traveling till Thursday and, well, dammit, I need my hair cut.

I'm not writing this for you all, I'm writing this for me, you see that right? I just realized it myself.

I can do this. I can stand by her through this excitement and anxiety all by myself sandwiched between two ballet sessions she hates and amidst taking out the garbage and carpooling and scheduling things ahead for Thanksgiving at work and laundry and cooking and writing. I will not let my own anxiety about managing my job and my kid and the house alone affect my ability to teach her to cope, because the better I cope, the better she will cope. 

Fucking hell, being a good example is SO HARD. 

The leaves haven't even turned yet, but last night I found myself lying on my daughter's bed with a frowny face.

My husband walked in. "You look upset."

Me: "Yes."

Him: "Should we move out?"

Me: "No. I mean, maybe. But I think it's just me. You moving out might not help, so you should stay."

Him: "Gotcha."

I proceeded to try to explain that it's October and October means cold weather is coming, and I'm at the first revision stage of THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES, which feels like getting all your syllabi on one day and wondering how the fuck you're going to get all that work done in one semester. And maybe I was having a There's No Point to Any of It day, the kind of day where you realize you're just going to have to make the bed again tomorrow and you can be a totally awesome worker and then you'll retire and three years later the entire department will have turned over and someone will ask who the hell made the decision for the border to be goddamn orange and if you do publish books, they'll eventually go out of print, even the ebooks will find a way to go out of print. One of those days.

I felt like when Louis CK tells Conan about that time when you're in traffic and you have the forever empty feeling because it's all for nothing and you're alone, and Conan looks at him like, I'm not sure I want to admit in public that I know exactly what you're talking about. Can someone please hand me a smartphone? I need to check Twitter.

Yeah. I had one of those days yesterday. I'm still trying to shake off that feeling that really nothing I do is important or worth doing and really, I'm pretty sure that's just my fear talking and I should just revise anyway, because that's what you do in order to occupy yourself until you die.

KIDDING.

Sort of. Because even if that's what it is, maybe that's still something worth doing. 

Today I wrote a post I've been mulling for weeks over at BlogHer. Here's a teaser -- click the link at the end for the full post!

A few weeks ago, I drove down to The Writers Place in Kansas City, Miss., (full disclosure: I serve on the board of directors) to talk to a group of around twenty upper middle-school kids about writing fiction. We ended up talking about race.

I didn't start there. I started with writing process. I talked aboout how I wrote my first novel in ever-lengthening Word documents saved by date and how the novel I'm working on now is coming together thanks to software called StoryMill. How this time I'm writing in scenes, not chapters, because it's totally easier for me that way. Their eyes glazed. I passed around my scene list and long outline for my new novel. They shuffled the paper around the room. I was losing them fast, and I still had the better part of an hour to go.

The group of kids was diverse. There were black kids and white kids and Asian kids and biracial kids. So I threw out a question that has been nagging at me ever since I learned that children's book publishing hasn't kept pace with census data regarding racial demographics. How did the kids feel about a white author writing nonwhite characters?

Read the rest on BlogHer!

Hey, there. I'm leaving tomorrow for BlogHer '13. If you are there, I'm speaking on Friday and Saturday on turning your blog post into publishable essays -- if you come to either session, please come up and say hi and be patient with me if I look at you all glassy-eyed because presenting takes a lot out of me but I really like to meet people. Also, I may have met you thirty-five times before but will still ask you your name or your blog because I have the recall of a tree frog.

If you're not there (or you are there and seriously have time to read blogs) and you want to enter for a chance to win a copy of THE OBVIOUS GAME, my latest Goodreads giveaway has another two-ish weeks on it.

And my daughter has pneumonia and I have to leave her, so send good vibes toward Kansas City, okay? And also me, because I went to test the thermometer by taking my own temperature and either there is something wrong with the thermometer or I have a low-grade fever, too. I bought three bottles of Purell yesterday and will not touch anyone without disinfecting them afterward.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Obvious Game

by Rita Arens

Giveaway ends August 06, 2013.

See the giveaway detailsat Goodreads.

Enter to win

Next week, the girl (who will hopefully be better) and I are headed to Iowa to hang out with my original nuclear, so posting may be light. I'll try to get some fun pictures from BlogHer for those who can't make it -- it's always a little surreal.

More soon!