anahcrow.com

from TSN.ca:

The youngest son of Toronto Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke has died in a car crash.

The team said 21-year-old Brendan Burke was fatally injured in an accident Friday in Wayne County, Indiana.

Police told a Daytona, Ohio television station a black jeep lost control in poor weather and slid into oncoming traffic, hitting another vehicle head on and killing Burke as well as another passenger.

Brendan Burke made headlines in November after he discussed being gay in an ESPN.com story.

Brian Burke, who is also the general manager of the U.S. Olympic team, told ESPN, “I simply could not be more proud of Brendan than I am, and I love him as much as I admire him.”

I am so sad for the Burke family’s loss, and I am reminded at the the same time how blessed we are to live in a time when Brendan Burke could be out at all, and when his father could be forthright about his pride in his son.  Because that’s not the world where I grew up. What Brendan accomplished just by being who he was has the opportunity to make life a little better for other people in a sphere where being openly queer is still less acceptable than it is in the mainstream (which is still not nearly accepting enough).

Thank you, Brendan, for being yourself.  And thank you, Mr. Burke, for whatever contribution you made to that and for your public support of your son.  I hope that some little good comes of this in time, whatever can be gleaned from it.  But right now, I’m just sad and angry that we have so horribly much to lose when we lose even one of us who has made some progress in the world, and I am sad and angry that bad things have to happen to good people.

Dianne and I just got the news that Runaway Star, the first of the Pandora Stories, has been selected as a finalist in its category (E7) Science Fiction/Erotic Romance. Unlike other awards, the Eppies handle all eligible books in each category equally, whether the characters are queer or straight. We especially appreciate EPIC’s decision to try this way of doing the awards.

The finalists are listed here; our category is the very last on the page. We’re up against some books that have received very positive reviews this year, which is a huge compliment in and of itself. If you haven’t read Runaway Star, now’s your chance! Just click the cover icon to go straight to the purchase page at Torquere.

Also, check Pandora Stories.com on the last Monday of November to enjoy the Blue Monday offering, a new Space Trash story that brings the relationship between Tal and Ceb to a happy ending and new beginning.

You can also find Runaway Star at Fictionwise and All Romance Ebooks.

blah blah blah fishcakes

First impressions of Brian Kiteley’s The 4 A.M. Breakthrough: Nice follow up to The 3 A.M. Epiphany (reviewed here), which remains the sole (until now) book of writing exercises to get any use at my house. A more involved set of exercises, very interesting. It’s a book that assumes a greater degree of investment in the craft and process of writing. In some ways, it’s a ’smarter’ book. I’m a fairly intelligent person and, sometimes, I found myself challenged in terms of grasping the entire concept of each exercise, but only in a good way. That’s an excellent thing because it means that my conceptualization of my writing as a whole is being pushed in new directions.

I also found more exercises to which I was resistant, my brain shying away from them for fear of failure. Again a very good thing. This is precisely the kind of thing books like this should do. The exercises in them should force me down the dark alleys in the city of my mind, into the places I scurry past for fear of what I might find there. It’s too easy for me to stick to the routes I know, because they’ve worked for me for so long and writing is hard. When a book gets down to making me do things I’m bad at (or just think I am), it’s worth my money.

You’ll pay around $20Cdn each (more or less for you depending on your exchange rate) for The 3 A.M. Epiphany and The 4 A.M. Breakthrough at your local bookstore. Both books are published through Writer’s Digest, so you should be able to order them in anywhere. 3 A.M. will give you 201 exercises with commentary on each, and some excellent advice on writing and critiquing, 4 A.M. will give you 200 exercises with commentary on each, heaps of references, and some interesting discussion on teaching writing that is also useful to the solitary student.

(Still heteronormative, just like almost every other book on writing out there — in most parts, though I did notice some exceptions to that. I know it may be weird to harp on, to some, but having to make constant alterations of available material to suit the world as it really is becomes really frickin’ wearing. One of these days, maybe I’ll write “Writing Exercises just for Queers, Fags, Trannies, Swingers, Pervs, and other Normal People”.)

Okay, so I’ve completely slacked off on these postings, for complex reasons that — surprisingly — did not involve being lazy or running out of books. However, now is as good a time as any to review this book, as it is the antithesis of NNWM. The full title of the book is: The Clockwork Muse: a practical guide to writing theses, dissertations, and books. This book is inspiring and radical in a way that will become obvious when I share a little bit from the first chapter.

Yes, there it is. A proposed solution to writer’s block and writer’s resistance that does not involve intoxicants, self-flagellation, or expensive psychotherapy. Surprisingly, I have found his assessment to be quite correct. Of course, that means that one can apply paralytic anxiety to the organizational process itself, thereby thwarting one’s progress once more, but I think it is easier to numb the nattering mind monkeys with regard to making colour-coded charts and graphs than it is when facing word one of 100,000.

Further endearing himself and his book to me, Zerubavel is not in the least an organization fetishist. His approach to scheduling is simple and works for anyone, with a nod going to those in the author’s position of parent and spouse. Priorities first, progress second. It is possible to write successfully without imploding one’s family or career or grade-point average. Zerubavel provides references from his own life in which his priority-based scheduling allowed him to balance work, commuting, parenting, supporting his spouse’s goals, and producing a book. This gives him a certain amount of believability that knocked my inner skeptic back into the corner. I’ll quote one of the pieces of advice on scheduling that was most useful to me:

Seriously, that’s pure genius. I’m one of those people whose time spent not writing is infused with guilt over not writing. By refusing to see "all time when I am breathing" as "time I could be writing, if only…", I found that a lot of pressure came off of me.  Humans are poor multitaskers.  By disengaging my mind from writing as much as possible, I become better able to make progress on knitting, sewing, cooking, housework, and parenting.  I’m sure that this would extend to schoolwork and any job I might have, were I physically capable.

From here, Zerubavel goes on to tackle the process of writing a specific novel or book or any long piece of work with the same generous pragmatism.  Zerubavel is an academic who personally knows the trials of being a post-graduate or graduate student, and whose work has given him an opportunity to observe hundreds of students attempting to achieve that holy grail: the completed thesis.  Everything that is applicable to this process is also applicable to writing a novel, from conception through the editing process.  As Zerubavel has also written books, and this book on writing documents his process through developing one of his books, the jump from academic writing to fiction writing is tiny.  There are hundreds of books on how to plot a novel, and very few books on how to survive one.  The Clockwork Muse is the latter.

At a very modest 98 pages + notes/index, with a conversational narrative voice, The Clockwork Muse is an easy read delivering some big ideas.  Even if one doesn’t stop and take notes, or implement each suggestion, simply reading the book will help most writers re-imagine the writing process so that they are less bogged down in their internalized mythology about why they write when they write and why they don’t when they don’t.  If one is looking for a practical way to complete novels in a timely manner while maintaining one’s obligations outside the writing room, this is definitely worth reading.

The Clockwork Muse by Eviatar Zerubavel is published by Harvard University Press (http://hup.harvard.edu) and cost me $15.75Cdn at my local bookstore.

Whaddya mean, I'm endangered?!

I was going to make a NNWM post, but then I saw this on Animal Planet… MARMOT!

Look at this face! I *heart* marmots.

Saving the endangered Vancouver Island Marmot and completing Nanowrimo have a lot in common. Honestly. It’s not just the lack of coffee talking. The basic premise is to do everything, discount nothing, and then do it again, better. After years of completing Nanowrimo, I can say that the only thing that works for sure is anything you can think of doing. Every time I’ve written a novel in a short period of time or completed NNWM, it feels like I’ve done it differently. But, looking back over time, constants remain.

Concept:
* NNWM is not the same as writing a novel in a month; if you’re not in the habit of writing novels, trying to conflate the two will sink you
*** never confuse word count with ‘progress on a novel’; in NNWM, you are trying to get your word count out and worrying about the novel aspect later (the only times I have failed @ NNWM was when I conflated these things)

Read the rest of this entry »

Elisa has undertaken a fairly monumental task in organizing and moderating these awards — begun partly in response to LLF changing its entry requirements and also fulfilling a void in the awards available to all writers of gay romance novels — and I wish her the best with them going forward.

UNEVEN is now available in print, softcover. Uneven is a BDSM romance which was first released in August 2008. You can find links to the reviews, an article I was invited to write about the book, and an excerpt not included on the Torquere website right HERE. The Torquere in-house review and excerpt can be found on the product page. If you’d like to purchase the e-book instead, you can find that e-HERE.

If you’d like to review it, you can come by an e-copy by the usual way if you’re on Torquere’s distribution list. It’s never too late. *g*

This post is in response to the recent ‘kerfluffle’ about lending. Some information on it can be found here: http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2009/10/22/readers-have-copyright-rights-too/

I have no mixed feelings about lending, though I’ll admit that my present opinion took some time to mature, and it has to do in part with framing each book’s potential not just in terms of the return on the sale but in terms of that book as advertisement or ambassador for the rest of my work.  I think people can work out the difference between sharing and piracy.  It’s not a thin line.  If you wouldn’t lend someone a book — you need it for a course, you need it for reference, you’re going to read it again right now — it’s easier to get around that with an e-book, but those are small cases.

Book lending was a part of life when I was in university, because we couldn’t afford to buy them all the time.  Borrowing books made us bigger book buyers in the end, because we wanted that influx of new entertainment.  Reading was part of our lives and buying the books ourselves allowed us to shape our available pool of books to our satisfaction.

This is where it comes back to ensuring optimal e-book pricing and convenient access.  The same people who would lend a book would have fewer reasons not to just give instructions as to how to get it, and the borrower would have fewer barriers to purchasing it.  At that point, the question of whether a book lent is a sale lost becomes nil, for me.  If the barriers to the borrower are eliminated from our end and theirs (they decide they like it, pay day comes around), they’d then buy the book, or they’d buy the next one, which may be even more significant.

I think we always have to assume that our readership is on our side.  So, if someone’s borrowing a book I’ve written, it’s up to me and my publisher to make sure that if and when they want to purchase any of my books, they can.  I think it’s detrimental to fall into the trap of seeing “readers” as “sales”.  I admit to catching that particular habit and I’ve made myself quit. I think that lending and borrowing is an essential bonding function in a community, as is trading.  I don’t think that those things can be policed or supervised without breaking down the intangible web that creates a community.  And community is part of what keeps people engaged and reading.

Lending and piracy are two sociologically and functionally diverse concepts.  They just can’t be conflated.  I don’t consider people who pirate my books to be part of my readership, and I am totally not okay with piracy.  But I have no trouble seeing the difference between the person who emails a friend a copy of my book and the person who posts my book on 5 different file sharing sites less than 24-hrs after its release.

If we label borrowers as pirates then we push more and more people outside the legitimate system without good reason, and give the entire community reason to migrate across that line.  People who borrow my books from someone who’s purchased them are part of my readership.  It’s in my best interest that lenders and borrowers not be labeled negatively.

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?

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.