Gothamist interview with Jennifer Shahade, author of Chess Bitch and former U.S. Women's World Chess Champion

Today I did my final Gothamist interview of 2006, with Jennifer Shahade, author of Chess Bitch and former U.S. Women's World Chess Champion.

I stopped playing chess long before Jennifer got really into it, but I'd read about her and found her very intriguing, and was lucky enough to meet her earlier this year at Tom Zoellner's book party for The Heartless Stone and was thrilled when she knew who I was too. Since then we've played Boggle several times and I'm always interested in what she's up to. There was more fracas this year over the use (or non-use) of the word "bitch" in the New York Times, and I wrote a letter to the editor on October 10th (below) that they didn't run.

And on a personal note in terms of what I want to work on in myself, not even starting in 2007, but now, I had this interview basically done for months and months and for some reason couldn't get it together to proof it, write the intro, and put it up. I will say that takes way more time than it may seem like it does, but I have to start getting over myself and just getting the work out there. That's been my stumbling block, oh, forever, and has killed much larger projects than this, where I get 90% of the way done and just totally freeze up and freak out and hate myself, and when I think about those books that could've/should've been, and the many things I've flaked on, I hate that person I see. I don't want to wake up hating or berating myself anymore. That is one of my goals for 2007, but that will only come by actually pulling back, not going out, and buckling in for the long haul. I don't want to be a talker and not a doer, so I will just say that I hope I have it in me to do everything I set out to and commit to in 2007. It's a tricky thing because only I know what those goals and commitments are and I am doing everything I can to say goodbye to old bad habits and embrace new, mature, adult ones.

To the Editors:

You insult the intelligence of your readers when you fail to include the title of a blog that you're quoting, as was the case in "That
Which Simmers Is Not to Be Dissed," about the Washington, D.C. subway ad disparaging romance novels. You quote from "a blog whose very name - not printable in most newspapers - refers to the genre as 'trashy.'" That blog is called Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels (smartbitchestrashybooks.com). A search of your online archives on October 10th, 2006, shows 773 uses of the word "bitch" since 1981, most recently on October 8th, 5th, and 1st, 2006. The word may not be printable in "most" newspapers, but it certainly is in yours, but only selectively, which brings to mind your refusal to publish the title of Jennifer Shahade's book Chess Bitch when she penned an Op-Ed piece in 2005. You need to make up your mind as to whether or not "bitch" belongs in your pages and stick to that decision across the board, rather than treated the word in such an arbitrary, haphazard fashion.