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Authors Behaving Badly: One of my favourite topics.

19-Apr-09

There’s a little unscientific info here on how online behavior affects buyers/readers: http://reviewsbyjessewave.blogspot.com/2009/04/mini-poll-buying-decisions-does-authors.html

I believe those results completely. I’ve stopped reading various authors because of their public behaviour on- or off-line. It’s not vindictiveness, it’s a lack of desire to expose myself to embedded messages in their writing, among other things. As an illustration of that mechanism: I don’t want to read the books of someone who thinks women are ‘icky’ because I don’t want my enjoyment of a novel to be polluted by the subtext, whenever a woman appears or is mentioned, that women are disgusting. It’s the same thing with any form of poor behaviour. I don’t need mean-spiritedness and unpleasantness in my head (unless I’m getting something out of it, as noted later).

Online behaviour is almost more affecting than other transgressions because it’s text-based. How can you continue to enjoy someone whose ‘voice’ is contaminated with their personal contribution of ugliness? The authorial voice is far too delicate a creature to expect it to be differentiated into two entities by the simple information that one collection of words is ‘for real’ and another collection of words is ‘pretend’. Which collection is for real, anyway? Is it the tantrum thrown in a reviewer’s blog? Or is it the prose gathered into novel format? It’s all text. How do we tell?

Online behaviour is also more affecting because it’s not reported, it’s witnessed. It’s something we see for ourselves and we draw conclusions from it based on our own understanding. Many of us have to rely on second-hand information to determine other kinds of behaviour. Unless we witness someone’s behaviour at a reading or a convention (why does it seem to me that this is a more acceptable reason to stop buying someone’s books than witnessing their online actions?), we are restricted to second-hand reporting. Most of us are discerning enough to understand that all second-hand reports are skewed. We give people the benefit of the doubt. But when someone flings themselves at their keyboard will-he-nill-he and full of bile, even taking time to nurse the baby, walk the dog, wash the car between sentences, and then presses the ’submit’ key, that’s action we can’t ignore. We’re looking at it first-hand.

Bad online behaviour also abrogates the assumption of good-will. I have cheerfully read the books of people with whom I hold strong differences in philosophy, politics, and theology, all because I have some base assumption of decency and good will on their part. I have read the books of people of good-will, good heart, and good action, people who I think are off their fucking rockers, and not begrudged them the time, money, mental processing, or space in my memory banks. Why? They’re decent people, good writers, interesting people, and so on. I’m willing to waste a lot of time and money on decent people. Take yourself out of that category, and, well… you’re out! Can’t help you at that point. It’s not hard to get back in, but most people ignore that in favour of digging their hole.

This isn’t counting, of course, the genuinely dreadful people I read because they have something else to offer. I’ve read the books of serial killers, rapists, child molesters, wife-beaters, fascists, homophobes, conservatives, and worse, and I did it because they had value to me. There’s nothing wrong with that. But the truth is that most of us are not in that category. If you’re writing erotic romance e-books, which is my genre, you’re gonna have to be fucking awesome to make me pick up your book if you’re out there behaving badly. I am not the only person out there with this level of discernment.

I am also not assuming that I am that writer. I don’t think you should either. Fake it, if you have to, or keep it in your own blog. I think that screaming Nazi-inspired epithets in your own living room is a far lesser sin than screaming them in someone else’s living room, in the street, or in the synagogue. (To use a hyperbole-laced example. Not to scale.) It is easy to determine what is personal opinion and what is bad behaviour. There are guides out there. If you want to use the tool (the internet), it’s incumbent upon you to read the instructions.

Sadly, self-defense laws do not apply on the internets. I hate to break it to people, but what you do in “self-defense” is more commonly known as “foot-huntin’” wherein the only targets are your own two feet. The best self-defense on the internet falls into a few categories:

* absence — just don’t get into the situation; this is one of my favourites, fueled by my conviction that I do not have a place in the relationship between a reader and my work. I cannot recommend this one highly enough.
* distance — make your awareness of the situation known, but distance yourself from it. It’s not about you. Act like you believe it and it won’t be about you.
* graciousness — I come from genuine, 100% eccentricity-infused, Texan stock and graciousness is a hell of a weapon in the right hands. Be gracious, especially to your supporters, and it won’t much matter what’s said about you elsewhere. The best thing about this is that you can steal actual points that your detractors are making and use them to improve your online persona.
* responsiveness — respond in your own space; we all learned about personal space back in kindergarten. If you want to draw, draw on your own paper. This is not as light a thing as it seems. People are very space-sensitive. It’s part of the whole having the right to say what you think business.
* networking & diversion — rely on your network to create a positive buzz about you while encouraging them not to engage in any conflicts that touch on you or your work; this one combines well with absence. The absence technique is used in marketing. Silence is powerful. It’s also calming. The lack of wind and current leads to calm water. When it’s quiet, that’s the time to speak…and when you do, say something else. Say something more interesting, more important. Someone can jam you up all they want over at their blog; it’s hard to come running to bad-mouth you when your latest post is about your work with the Big Sisters program.
* writing — this is my very favourite; go do your work. This builds on everything else. Just go do your work. It’ll keep you out of trouble and you’ll get more published.

In the end, though, I find that the most powerful motivation to behave better online is me, not my sales. It wasn’t good for me, personally, to get into things online and I didn’t like the way I felt afterward. The fact that people wouldn’t buy my work because of it was a factor, but not enough to discourage me if I were actually doing something that mattered to me and making a difference. I don’t think behaving badly makes a positive difference, and it leaves an impression of me that isn’t who I am.

I can’t make that judgment for anyone else. But if the point of writing is to connect, to communicate, and to sell books, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to undo so much of your work offline with what you do online. Even if only 46% are making a conscious choice not to buy the books of people who act badly online, how many other people are making an unconscious choice, or enjoying our books less? And can any of us afford to lose nearly half our potential market?

#1-31DBBB

07-Apr-09

Take some time out today to develop an elevator pitch for your blog. If you’ve already got one take a few minutes to review and refine it.

My blog is unique because of its intersectionality and because it’s written by me (and this is something I’m good at). This blog is not just here to promote my writing, it’s here because writing and the genres in which I write matter to me on a visceral level. In terms of communication, entertainment, education, the shaping of social norms, and so much more, writing is hugely important. Text continues to be significant in the 21st Century. The craft of writing both fiction and non-fiction, sorely neglected in many areas, matters to me as well. To say that I’m passionate about the craft of writing, of using words to make things happen, would be an understatement. Then there’s the issue of queerness; what it is to be queer, as a writer and a person in this culture, what it is to try and communicate the queer experience, what it is to keep my writing in line with my politics, that’s all things I want to discuss here. Sex/erotica/sexuality sells, but I want to do more than sell it, I want to express it in a way that makes people feel like they have seen themselves and I want to express it in a way that makes people feel things they never imagined they could feel. The reality of disability and mental health concerns are more than a meta-theme here as well; my (dis)ability informs and restricts not just my craft but this blog. My politics are personal and they dictate not only what I blog about but what manifests in my fiction. This blog is also an exploration of me and my relationship with my genre: why have I never, since I could write, written about heterosexual relationships? On the most meta level, the blog comes back to text again; it’s text about text and all the layers in between make the result unique.

Okay, hardly an elevator pitch*.  To trim it down, this blog is about writing: writing sex, writing well, writing queer, writing consciously, writing conscientiously, writing any way possible, writing things other people don’t write, and writing about writing.  I think it’s a unique and necessary blog, in spite of the thousands of blogs on writing out there, because I want to use it to serve the craft of writing and I want to use it as a document of my process and my education as a writer. At the very least, it’s necessary to me, but I want to craft it so that it will be meaningful to others.

*I’m not keen on the ’selling’ idea.  To me, that abrogates independence.  But I need to blog better.  So, off I go.

Still here, and a repost.

29-Mar-09

*claws out of pit* I’ve been so ridiculously ill. I’m finally getting well enough to get through the backlog of my to-do list. I already had ‘infection of vital internal organs’ checked off on my ‘let’s not do that again’ list, but apparently I’m going for doubles. Looking back, I was really kind of sick there. But, better now!

Anyway, until I do anything else, have a repost of a comment I just made over at Angela Benedetti’s LJ in her “Sticking the Landing” post(http://angelabenedetti.livejournal.com/22455.html):

I’ve written nearly 2 million unpublished words in the last 20 years. (Mostly over 10 years with 10 years of being too ill to write in the middle and the first five years just writing for fun, not publication.) Someone once wisely said that the first million words you write will be crap — and he wasn’t far wrong. Even if you don’t write crap, knowing why you don’t is something else all together.

I think it takes a certain amount of study and writing to reach a level of maturity so that not only do you finish novels but you know what makes a novel a success AND you can do it on demand. The writers you see who are ‘one novel’ writers have learned to write THAT novel really well, and they’re lucky if it’s a novel that sells, but they may not know how to write a good novel, period (not the end of the world if what you know sells!).

What kind of writer you want to be, where you’re satisfied with stopping in your progress, is an individual thing. I respect people who master a certain kind of novel and continue to produce saleable novels of that kind indefinitely. They get more done than I do and they make a lot of people happy. It’s not in my nature to stop banging my head on the craft.

I’ll note also that the first thing I wrote that anyone else saw was a (very long) novel. It was actually quite respectable and an editor could have done something with it. I regret now that I didn’t take it, and the next two major things I wrote, seriously enough to seek out an agent or editor before I fell ill. I just couldn’t do it, even with encouragement from professional writers. I didn’t know WHY what I did was working and until I did, I couldn’t come to terms with it being any good.

More…

Please stand by.

22-Mar-09

After ages of technical difficulties (which may have been caused by my inability to do basic web maintenance), I have FTP access to this site.

1) I need to upgrade WordPress.

2) I need to upgrade the sidebar.

3) I need to install some more widgets.

So, please stand by.  The website will be up and down and updated soon.

trufax: things dogs really do

24-Feb-09

i always roll my eyes when pets (dogs, cats, whatever) are used as props in a story.  that’s not to say that i don’t love magically endowed animals or speaking animals or what have you.  i just find it annoying when “ordinary” pets, like children, only ever show up to act in a (very unnatural) way that advances the plot.  because pets, like children, have their own agendas and their own agency and can advance plots just fine without being given a script that says, “okay, Lassie, run in and pull the bell cord, then while Swooning Hero is looking the other way, take the letter to Twu Wuv from the garbage can and run it across five counties in a rain storm without getting it wet.  you’ll have to dodge the rain drops, we don’t have the budget for a dog-brella.  because all dogs know when their owners are upset and can smell true love!”  it’s a pet peeve of mine.  no pun intended, i swear.

so here are a few trufax about things our smallest dogs really did, inspired by my older dog, C, picking a fight with the baby, S, because i wouldn’t come downstairs the other night and no one else was playing with him (and fighting is a good way to get attention).

small dog tails tales:

  • my first dog, N, when she was a puppy, hated that i moved out for the summer.  when i dropped in at the house, she would bring me food from her food bowl — carrying a few bits of kibble in her mouth at a time — and pile it up beside me in case i was leaving because i was hungry.  then she would paw the pile and bark at me so i would notice it.
  • N used to try and type, sitting on my lap and pawing the keyboard; i kept doing it so it must have been important.  she would crane her head to look up at me to see if she was doing it right.
  • N (who was very tiny) was once trapped in the corner of the (dog-proofed) balcony by a soda tin that the wind was pushing around.  i heard her crying and went out to find her huddled at the furthest point from the door while the tin rolled around in front of her with every gust.
  • N had a love/hate relationship with laundry.  she would sleep in it when it was dirty, then bark at it when it was clean and piled on the bed waiting to be folded.
  • whenever i was sick, N would sit on me when i was in bed and ‘defend’ me from my partner when he brought me things.  she would stand on the highest point of my body with her wee hackles puffed up and growl and bark.
  • N hated homework and school books.  she would attack them with a vengeance.  she never attacked leisure reading — i swear she could smell the university book store — but she would try and eat texts and novels from our courses.  given that most texts weighed more than she did, this was a mighty undertaking.
  • she also hid under the couch while my partner did homework on the floor, lying in wait.  when his attention was elsewhere, she would shoot out from under the couch and tear off any page or paper she could bite, ripping it out of the book, and then she would race off with her prey.
  • my family’s first dog, D, would make you play with him.  he would bring a toy up on the couch and wedge it under your hand.  then he would pounce the top of your hand with his forepaws and make you squeak the toy.
  • D also is the only dog i have known who liked sweaters.  my mother made him sweaters and he would run around and show people that he had one on the minute she got it on him.  she made him some to match my father’s sweaters and they were his favourites; he would pick them out of the sweater box.
  • D would put his toys in my father’s briefcase when dad was getting ready for work.  Dad would get to work and reach into his briefcase and SQUEEKA!
  • D also would attempt to pack himself in Dad’s briefcase.  packing the toys came after he realized that packing himself in the briefcase was futile.  it’s hard to miss a poodle in with your books.  (he was also bad at hiding; he’d get so excited that he was going to work with his daddy that he’d wiggle around and wuff and try to lick dad’s hand.)
  • when D was a puppy, he would sleep in my father’s shoe.  he was, literally, the size of a muffin — we put him in a muffin tin to check and only his head stuck out over the top.
  • we had to hide D’s presents at Christmas.  he always knew which ones were his and would unwrap them and hide them on us if we put them under the tree before Christmas day.
  • D taught himself to walk on his back legs, holding a toy in his paws.  that way he could stand up waaaay tall and bark at you to take the toy and throw it.  barking when you have something in your mouth doesn’t work, and when you’re that short, you need every inch you can get so people notice you.

you can get all kinds of awesome in a story while writing pets realistically.  hilarity abounds when you add pets to romance.  like my friend’s cat who, if not locked out of the bedroom when she and her man were getting busy, would defend her from her boyfriend with a screaming ninja leap from the top of the tall bookcase that ended with the cat landing — all claws out — on the poor man’s back.  the first time, the cat stuck and the guy ran, naked and screaming, from the room with a yowling cat clinging to his bare back.  that totally beats Lassie stopping at the 7-11 to get directions to Twu Wuv castle.

The kids ARE all right.

07-Feb-09


High School Students counter-protesting Westboro Baptist Church
Originally uploaded by Mandrake25

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/2/6/04054/00028/769/693836

When I was a child, I got a fleeting glimpse… Out of the corner of my eye… I turned to look but it was gone.

This right here? That’s what I saw when I got that little glimpse. That first tiny glimmer was five girls sitting in the dandelions in front of the high school and four of them saying in turn to the fifth, “It doesn’t bother me. It’s okay.” From those little glimpses to that big picture, like the author of the article says, 25 years.

New site page.

04-Feb-09

Editing: thoughts on the process doubling as an open letter to writers working with me.

And now, to do some writing and then to update the whole website in general. I know I have broken links and my ‘latest releases’ section is very behind. I haven’t quite got this down as a habit. Sometimes I forget I even have a site. Not okay. >.-;;; This is my scrunchy face.

Book Review: The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly

03-Feb-09

This is a quick and dirty review of a book I read today and really enjoyed. First, this book is quite a good book, period. It’s an excellent read in terms of the language and the message about the richness and vividness of life and the resilience of the human mind. So, all around worth reading. It’s a small investment of your time, being only about 130 pages or so, packed with good words and images.

Now, on to what makes this book unique. In December of 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, age 43, (editor-in-chief of Elle France) suffered a catastrophic cardiovascular event — a stroke — centered in his brainstem. Bauby survived as a victim of locked-in syndrome, able to control no part of his body but his left eye. Before his accident, Bauby had contracted to write a very different book. He leveraged that contract to be able to write this one. Bauby wrote this book over (if I remember correctly) two months using a system by which his transcriber would read out the alphabet (ordered by most frequent occurrence in the French language) and he would blink when the correct letter was reached. This book is the story of the diving-bell, his body, and the butterfly, his mind.

Bauby died, unexpectedly, in 1997. His book had been published only two days earlier. At the time, his prognosis, while grim, was surprisingly optimistic for a locked-in person. His heart failed, without any warning that it might, and he was gone.

Since I’m a writer, writing mostly to other writers, I don’t think I have to expound on all the layered meanings of this book. But, it is on the merit of those layers, in addition to the quality of the book itself, that I recommend it. The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Domenique Bauby is available through Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, or your local bookstore; it was also transformed into a critically acclaimed film.

Book Review: Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction by Adilifu Nama

31-Jan-09

Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film by Adilifu Nama can be found on Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, or through most other booksellers.

Black Space isn’t a writing book, per se, it’s a 2008 Film and Media/African American Studies book from U of Texas Press. I picked it up since film and SF are what I’ve invested in lately, in terms of self-teaching, and I was looking for a recent book that addressed race in those areas. I think this book is fabulous; I wish I knew more about the intersection of race and SF/F so that I could critique the content better.

However. In terms of writing style this is a really engaging book, which makes it a win right there. The fact that I didn’t feel like I was reading a textbook or being forcibly educated is something I look for, because I think that books produced by academia, for academic purposes, can be useful for anyone, as long as the writing is accessible*. Black Space is a fantastic look through the great SF classics, and it pulls apart the problematic representation of race (whether that be presented through POC or Other, in terms of, say, the Replicants in Blade Runner, or “aliens”) systematically. I was looking at a way to improve how I approach SF/F writing or film (and my own writing) with a critical eye for the subject of race, so I think this is a winner. It’s a book that makes me feel a little bit smarter in terms of giving me language and framework with which to view SF/F stories.

And, this is why I put this book review here, especially in light of the cultural appropriation/writing the other discussions (well, while they were discussions and not a great big “WHAT YOU SAY? SOMEONE SET US UP THE BOMB?”-fest) that have been going recently on LJ. I will give you a little story that illustrates why I think books like this (on all kinds of subjects) are important. Years ago, I was at a writing workshop with <Famous SF Writer> and when he finished reading part of a novel I’d given him, he handed it back with two comments**. Finish this. Watch the misogyny.

Now, on further review of that novel, I realize that while there were highly misogynist elements, the whole thing wasn’t a disaster. Also, most of those elements were deliberately included because it was a book about women. So, I was all justified and stuff, right? Enh, no. While that book was created with some juvenile degree of deliberate awareness, other books that had “nothing to do with feminist issues”TM that I’d written were thick with my collapse into the very negative social framework about women I thought I’d been learning to overturn, and it happened the moment I wasn’t deliberately working at saying something feminist. Ten years after that, I finally was at a point where I was mostly turning out writing that didn’t fall down the rabbit hole back into things I didn’t think I believed anymore — about women.

Awareness in writing, like awareness in life, comes with practice. And if you don’t practice, making yourself a guide to staying out of the traps, you fall in. It’s like that old metaphor about someone walking down the street and falling in the same hole every day, then slowly progressing to knowing the hole is there but falling in, knowing the hole is there but walking around it, and then finally taking a different street. I fall in a lot of holes. It’s frustrating because I know they’re there now. Gaining more tools to create that guide is important to me, personally.

Chapters
1. Structured Absence and Token Presence
2. Bad Blood: Fear of Racial Contamination
3. The Black Body: Figures of Distortion
4. Humans Unite! Race, Class, and Post-Industrial Aliens
5. White Narratives, Black Allegories
6. Subverting the Genre: The Mothership Connection

*obviously, accessibility is a matter of personal capacity and patience, and books build on the assumption of prior knowledge, but a certain number of books coming out of academia are accessible in a general sense (for the writing community) and could provide a foundation for moving on to the books that assume that prior knowledge.

**this is a classic “omg, yay” critique from someone doing a writer-in-residence or something similar. And, it’s a frustrating critique if you don’t know how you got everything else right. There was further discussion*** but those were the big points.

***I was just getting sick around the time (10 years ago) I took the workshop that spawned that critique and I feel like I’m only now getting back to near where I was in my writing at that point in time. I understand what was said to me then — amazingly, I remember it — and use it now. Writing is hard sometimes. :p

2009MHB: The 3 A.M. Epiphany

30-Jan-09

I have to say that as I’ve read more and more books on writing I’ve come to believe that the best books on writing are not those written by writers (necessarily), but are those written by people of a particular sort of intelligence — a seemingly rare combination of observation and pattern-recognition matched with an ability for expressing their discoveries — who are associated in some way with the craft. It seems to be a reasonable expectation that the majority of these people would be writers, even great writers. Yet, the more I write, the more I discover that those who write fiction well do not necessarily know why they do so or how. Further, fiction writers are not necessarily great writers in other areas of written communication. So, I’ve long-since abandoned the following myths:

- good writers can teach good writing
- teachers are failed writers (or they’d be writing, of course)
- teachers are only good if they have produced great writing (I prefer to look at their students, if they’re willing to share that information)
- authors of wise books on writing make good teachers
- brilliant teachers write good books on writing.

Now, on to the review. This book is at the opposite end of the basic ‘usefulness’ spectrum from The Portable MFA. Over the years, I’ve come to accept (with some puzzlement) that not every writer desires to be a student of writing. For those of you for whom this is true, I envy you. You probably get far more done than I do. Still, I think that this particular book is one that every writer can own and find useful. It is, and I believe it will remain, one of the five books I would recommend that every writer own to keep hold of the reins of their creativity.

The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon writing exercises that transform your fiction by Brian Kiteley

Kiteley has done something particularly interesting in this book. He has partitioned both writing and life into categories and then into even smaller subjects in each category. (See the chapter listing after the jump.) Instead of telling you all about how to write or why to write or what to look for in life to make you a good writer, he’s included a little discussion of each subject at the beginning of each chapter and then leapt into the business at hand: assigning carefully scripted writing prompts in association with further discussion of why this particular prompt works and what it’s meant to develop in your writing.

I find The 3 A.M. Epiphany particularly useful because, with my attention-deficit issues, I struggle at times to focus on both writing and reading. This book is one I use with a handful of RPG dice that I roll to pick the exercise I’m going to do when I’m feeling scattered. They’re helpfully numbered, making it even easier. Even if you don’t read the whole thing — ever — each little exercise is a foray into understanding your own writing process and learning to draw out certain tools deliberately instead of hoping for them to come to hand as you write.

If you are going to use The 3 A.M. Epiphany as a larger resource, the chapters are divided so as to address issues that I’ve often found as common flaws in otherwise competent fiction. To me, this is another reason to buy this book. It’s so hard to identify what area of a piece of fiction is weak in a way that one can effectively communicate, and sometimes harder still to know how to make repairs or how to guide them. Issues like handling the passage of time, building a sense of history, or the art of description by omission are abstract and teaching them can be elusive. Kiteley’s blend of explanation, example, and exercise makes grasping — and learning to feel — those concepts a possibility.

I have to emphasize how effective and engaging and challenging I find Kiteley’s exercises. They are not long, with the suggested word-count being under 1000 words and sometimes under 500 words, but they are pointed. The 3 A.M. Epiphany is an excellent way not to waste your time if you are writing in addition to maintaining your alter-egos as SuperParent and Employee-of-the-Month. Learning to complete the task in the words allotted is just another way that using this book will improve your writing.

My sole complaint about this book is that it’s heteronormative. Well, Anah, you can’t have everything. To which I say, this is hardly EVERYTHING, and I demand it: not just as a queer writer but as a student of writing raised in a normative Western culture. For anyone striving to capture the scope of the human condition — not just those of us in this genre — the heteronormative, binary paradigm of human sexuality and relating is a stifling girdle on the imagination. Queerness is not some sparkling new concept. I bring up the heteronormativity because there is a chapter boldly titled Women and Men, which made my teeth hurt in its singular perspective.

I confess that I did not discover this little gem. The honor of that falls to my dear Dianne, who mentioned it a couple years ago, after she’d wisely purchased it. I bought it (she admitted sheepishly) because I was taken by the cover and the name. Aesthetically, this is a lovely little book with a matte indigo cover stamped with silver and smooth white pages printed in an attractive typeface. There is something about it that feels a bit like a modern spellbook, and that suits the magic of it perfectly.

You can purchase The 3 A.M. Epiphany through Amazon or order it through your local bookstore.

ETA: I have JUST discovered that Kiteley has a second book, The 4 A.M. Breakthrough out as of January 12, 2009. I’ve just ordered it and will be reviewing it later this year. *insert flappy-hands glee here*

More…