Racheline Maltese's Blog, page 46

Starling cover reveal!

Starling now has a cover.  Of course, a whole bunch of you knew that, either because you saw Erin and I flipping out about it on Twitter or you’re paying very close attention to the bio at the end of my Penny Dreadful recaps over at Romance @ Random and saw the tiny, tiny icon version.

At any rate, we’re super delighted with our cover, even if the Alex in my head is muttering about how it looks like the porno version of his life (it is honey, it is).

Eventually, we’ll talk a little bit about why this cover works just so hard for us (beyond hot dudes and Hollywood), but right now that would be telling regarding some of the weirder things we’ve snuck into the multi-book story.

 

Love is a strangeness. Not romance or the women who write it.

Earlier today, a fellow creative-professional friend pointed me to Michael Kozlowski’s assertion that Female Authors Depend on their Husbands to Write Romance and asked if I had any comment. The implication of that query was, of course, Release the Kraken! and rightfully so. You’ll note the URL for Kozlowski’s article actually says, “How Female Authors Take Advantage of their Husbands to Write Romance.”

Taking apart people with words is one of those things I admittedly enjoy. I don’t always use this power for good, but I try. Increasingly, however, I try not to use it at all. Too often, Internet outrage only brings attention to vicious viewpoints that deserve no notice, and get us all riled up to no good use. After all, time is at a premium, especially for creative professionals. We all work long hours, even if we only work one job — and few of us do.

I did comment, briefly, on the appalling text. I noted that my partner is female, not male. And that I am the main earner in my household. I also work full-time, a lot of overtime, and then write 40 hours a week. I mentioned that I do get paid to do this, and to write essays, and to blog for various sites, including Romance @ Random. I knew, I was only fighting anecdata with anecdata, although at least mine was my own. The anecdata Kozlowski cited in his piece was apparently lifted from a comments thread on another site.

Misogyny is rife on the Internet, like everywhere else. And there’s massive amounts of it in the creative fields. We could talk about How Not to Review Women’s Writing regarding Patricia Lockwood’s latest book. Or we could pay a visit to CastingCallWoe. You could also look at the statics for women on screen, behind the camera and in writers rooms for film and TV. Or do research on the history of blind auditions and the gender composition of orchestras.

But in wanting to oppose the idea that female creators are dilettantes and/or unable to earn money at their chosen professions, I cited my credentials and my ferocity. I’m proud of both. But in the big argument, they don’t matter. In the biggest argument, they can actually do a certain degree of harm, because they imply that I’m “Not Like the Other Girls” and set up certain activities, which are gender-neutral but often perceived as masculine as more valuable than similar gender-neutral activities often associated with the feminine.

To be blunt, who cares if a woman is able to write because their partner supports them?

If you are ever given the time to create because of the financial security of a household you are glad to be a part of, regardless of your gender, you take it, and you take it without shame. You don’t justify it with how much your art earns, or how much some man somewhere respects it, because all stories matter, even romances.

I can tell you why romances matter. I can write a long justification about how the genre matters because it is about pleasure and desire and about how these books matter because they are a ground on which readers explore their fears and their hopes. Through them we may heal wounds, learn negotiation, or find a way to be more present with ourselves and others.

This is not different from any other type of story except for two simple facts: Romances make scads of money (Romance fiction generated $1,438 billion in sales in 2012, outperforming every other category in the U.S. consumer book market according to Business of Consumer Book Publishing 2013) and romances are predominantly written by women.

Ultimately, Kozlowski’s anti-romance genre misogyny (which strikes me as an odd choice for a man who positions himself as a leader in the e-reader field; what does he think people are reading on their e-readers?) isn’t just the old tired arguments that seek to divide the stories men tell from the stories women tell.

Because no matter what anyone says, it’s simply not true that men write about ideas and women write about feelings. Rather, people tell stories, arguably as Clive Barker says in Sacrament “to tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.”

So here, as writers of LGBTQ fiction, Erin and I are offended particularly because of the degree to which Kozlowski’s article seeks to police relationship styles between people of any and all genders and any and all sexual orientations. How we choose to divide work and currency and authority and creativity in our homes with one partner or many partners simply isn’t his domain to criticize. His arguments are not just poor, but over-reaching. They are not just anti-woman, but anti-creativity. And they fly in the face of possibility, opportunity, and entrepreneurship.

Love is a strangeness. That goes both for who graces our beds and what infects our hearts. And the chance to remind ourselves or others of that, is sometimes actually worth giving one more troll on the Internet far more attention than they deserve.

Romance @ Random: Penny Dreadful Episode 4 Recap

This week’s recap is up!

Dorian Gray has an orgy. Vanessa meets a creepy child. Sir Malcolm is a horrible person who says shitty colonialist things. Victor makes the most impatient monsters ever. Brona and Ethan go on a reaaaaaaaally awkward date.  Basement Boy eats a cat; a dog kills a lot of rats; and in recompense for having to watch both of those things, the episode ends where it began: With loads of bisexual awesome.

Spider level: 1.

Do the Thing! – Are you addicted to yes?

If your Thing is a competitive thing, you, like me, may have an addiction to yes.

Now sure, I write to tell stories. But I also write, frequently, from a place of anger. So often when I tried to tell stories as a young person, people met them with, But why would anyone care about a story about that? Sometimes, it was worse: Why would someone care about a story from someone like you? or even Why would someone care about a story from you?

In many ways, Do the Thing! is about helping people find, if not their anger, their unwillingness to be told by others what they are and are not capable of. If this fuel can work for me, it can work for you too. And if this fuel can work for all of us, and we create things and put them out in the world, people will, eventually, stop trying to convince each other and themselves that it’s just too hard or that they’re not good enough.  And then there will be more things for all of us to enjoy.

But if you compete in this world at anything from any type of wound, yes feels a certain way. It’s not just exciting, it’s victory. And it’s not just victory, but vindication.

Which means the days that you hear No or This isn’t the right fit for us or It’s not there yet or Try again next time can really suck. They can, because people remember negatives more than positives, make you feel like all your victories — including that most basic one where you get up every day and face the world — don’t mean anything.

This, of course, isn’t true. But if you’ve had this experience, you know it’s a big obstacle to Doing the Thing! After all, what endeavor can even bring with it a new yes every single day?

An addiction to yes can also lead you to pursue low-hanging fruit when you need to take the risk to advance to the next stage of your ambition.

So how do you break away from that addiction to yes? How do you refrain from over-weighting the negative so that you can listen to critique and continue to improve you work? And what are you doing to give yourself a daily yes when the world isn’t necessarily inclined to cooperate?

While we’re all working on figuring that out, we’ve got a lot of yes to give out in comments today, so if you need some approval and encouragement with a little side dish of supportive ass-kicking, hit the comments! As always, anonymous commenting is on.

Sneak Peek Sunday: Ski Lodge

It’s Sneak Peek Sunday! Follow the link back to see what other authors are working on this week (please note that participating authors write in all genres and at all heat levels).

Racheline and I have a rule that, if you have an idea, you write it, no matter what story it’s for or what we’re “supposed” to be working on. It’s a way to use energy to its maximum efficiency, and also makes sure we don’t lose our bursts of awesome ideas while we’re trying to be disciplined on something else.

So while we typically write chronologically within a story, and focus on a project until it’s complete, we have a few pages here and there of scenes that belong later in longer projects, or to things that are on the back burner for one reason or another.

The story we’ve working-titled “Ski Lodge” because it takes place, well, at a ski lodge in Vermont, is one of these. But it’s a winter-themed story (I mean, ski lodge) and not only was it starting to roll over into spring here on the East Coast, but we’d just finished two other winter stories: Snare begins with a blizzard, and many of the critical events in Starling happen between December and January. It was time to let the snow rest.

But we had the idea for the first couple of pages, so we wrote those before we tucked it in a drawer.

Once winter comes the lodge and the slopes this place will be packed with too-rich families and their boring, irritating progeny. But for now it’s the peak of autumn and the place is essentially abandoned. His mother worries that it’s too lonely for him or unsafe, but Nate revels in the emptiness and the solitude. And protecting the property is actually his job. Ski lodge caretaker may not have been what his dad had in mind for him when Nate started looking for a job halfway through last semester, but it’s pretty much the perfect gig for someone needing a year off from the pressures and uncertainty — financial and academic — of college.

The sun had been rising over the treetops when Nate set off on the walk, but the day’s gone cloudy and misty with the threat of rain as he and Skip make the rounds on one of their favorite trails. They’re maybe a mile from the lodge when there’s the sound of an engine drifting through the trees. Nate glances in the direction of the sound and then ducks off the trail and heads into the brush. Skip wags his tail at the change of course and keeps trotting along happily at his side.

The four-wheeler, with the shield of the local force emblazoned on the side of it, takes about five minutes to catch up to where they left the trail. When the cop on it starts shouting over the noise of the engine in their direction, Nate sighs and turns around. Dealing with the local cops, who never have enough to do especially in the off-season, is one of his least favorite things ever. “Not a trespasser!” he yells back.

“What?” The guy, who obviously drew the short straw for forest patrol today, shouts. “Come on, kid, get back on the trail and get out, this is private land.”

“Yeah, which is why I brought the giant loud dog. Not trespassing!” Skip barks, as if to prove his point, and then trots closer to the cop, tail swishing and already looking to make a friend.

“Who the hell are you?” The cop finally turns the bike off, and the woods go quiet again except for the rustle of wind in the leaves above. Nate starts trudging back to the trail, because if he’s not going to come any closer and is going to have to use more words to explain why he is right and the cop is wrong, Nate really doesn’t feel like shouting and scaring the wildlife any more.

Did the Thing! – May edition

New last Friday of the month tradition: Report back on your Do the thing! activities.

Lately, I’ve been getting some awesome messages on Tumblr where this Do the thing! started.  People have gone on job interviews, gotten new gigs, started books, improved their self-care and just pushed themselves a little bit harder to get more of what they want.  You can see some of that in the Do the Thing! tag at my very silly and fannish Tumblr.

But let’s make this a formal request.  Tell us what you’ve achieved, whether that’s better sleep habits, more positive self-talk, finishing that draft, or scoring a new gig  Nothing is too big or too small.  If it’s important to you, it’s important.

Anonymous posting is always on.  When you tell us what you’ve achieved and why you’re awesome that’s a reminder that you have fantastic building blocks for the next stuff you’re gonna do and it helps other people realize they can Do the Thing! too. Also, you deserve some praise.

Meanwhile, our regularly scheduled Do the Thing! post will be up on Monday.

The (un)reality of awards shows

Last week, I got to go to the Billboard Music Awards.  I’d actually never been to a broadcast awards ceremony before, and even though our Love in Los Angeles books aren’t about the music scene (although there’s a guy in a band you’ll meet eventually), texting with Erin during the commercial breaks as some poor radio DJ worked hard to keep the audience enthusiasm up was an experience both a little weird and a little spooky.

One of the things Starling and the whole series really talks about is how fame doesn’t look the same from the inside as it does from the outside.  With that in mind, if you’ve ever watched an awards show on TV, here’s some stuff about their not so glamorous reality:

1. If you’re not important, the date of someone important, or someone helping to manage traffic flow and get everyone to their seats on time, you don’t get to walk the red (or otherwise colored, but still special) carpet.

2. Seat fillers run around sitting in empty seats when people get up to go to the bathroom or get a drink.  It’s a cool way to see the show, but those people work hard.

3. You know who else works hard?  The audience in the pit by the stage (a staple of music awards shows, it seems).  There aren’t that many of them, and they have to look enthusiastic and in awe for every performance, while not being weirded out by the cameras right on top of them or their proximity to the crotches of many performers.  You think I’m joking. Never.

4. Meanwhile, the TV broadcast has the highest priority, so cameras, cranes, and other equipment may block your view.

5. During commercial breaks, every thing is dead quiet, unless there’s someone on stage trying to keep the audience’s energy up.

6. But if you’ve ever been a stage manager, you will be in awe at the skills and efficiency of the technical and production crew.  If you haven’t, the evening can get long, quickly.

7. No matter who you are and what you do, there’s something about that countdown to airtime that will leave you breathless with excitement and maybe even a little bit emotional.

8. You know those announcements of the other awards that were handed out prior to air time?  Well they don’t do that at the live show before it goes on TV so it really is just a scroll of names.  For some awards shows (such as many technical awards at the Academy Awards), there’s a separate ceremony and event, but it sure seems like sometimes people must just get a trophy in the mail!

As a culture, when we talk about fame, there seem to be two arguments.  One, is that it’s the best thing ever.  The other, generally, is about how it’s a deeply destructive force.  In some ways, both those things are true, but as far as I can tell neither accounts for the hours of being shouted at during awards ceremonies to clap harder, as if you’re the only thing real in a world made of  Tinker Bells.

Romance @ Random: Penny Dreadful Episode 3 Recap

This week’s recap is up!

While the episode was low on action, it was high on information and bad CGI wolves. Everything about the Frankenstein plot continues to be fascinating, miraculous, and troubling, and I keep hoping to find time to write about it in-depth through a disability lens (or, even better, to find someone else who has). Meanwhile, Ethan has hooked up with Brona and pledged himself to Vanessa, who seems super chill with the whole thing and is about a millimeter away from giving an awesome speech about responsible non-monogamy.

Spider level: 0.

Romance @ Random: Penny Dreadful Episode 3

This week’s recap is up!

While the episode was low on action, it was high on information and bad CGI wolves. Everything about the Frankenstein plot continues to be fascinating, miraculous, and troubling, and I keep hoping to find time to write about it in-depth through a disability lens (or, even better, to find someone else who has). Meanwhile, Ethan has hooked up with Brona and pledged himself to Vanessa, who seems super chill with the whole thing and is about a millimeter away from giving an awesome speech about responsible non-monogamy.

Spider level: 0.

When Doing the Thing! means not doing the thing

Sometimes, doing the thing means not doing the thing. Sometimes, that’s one of the hardest things.

I don’t mean, give up on the thing (No, no, never give up on the thing! As long as you want the thing, keep doing the thing!) I mean the just as hard and vital tasks of taking breaks and doing self-care.

This weekend (thanks to the miracle of advance post-scheduling) I am actually on vacation, away from keys and major writing, for three whole days. Which is probably going to be a little bit crazymaking because OH GOD THINGS TO DO.)

Without interference, I would probably work 20+ hours a day, between my day job and my writing. Certainly it’s what I did when I was in college and lived alone. Now, my partner, Ben, does his best to keep me on track. In between doing his own things he makes sure I sleep and that I eat dinner not in front of the computer screen and (usually) involving more than three-day-old pasta.

It can be really hard to take those breaks. There are so many Things to Do, and so little time, that I feel guilty spending minutes where I could be doing the thing, not doing the thing. (One of our characters in Starling, Paul, has definite workaholic tendencies. There’s a little bit of both Racheline and I in him.) But working, or trying to work, 20+ hours a day every day isn’t sustainable, and nobody can do the thing! when they haven’t eaten or slept or seen the sun in a week.

One of the worst things my brain does is guilt, and one of my ongoing challenges is giving myself permission to take those break and not beat myself up for it.

A decent way I’ve found to cope, at least on some days, is to make sure I give myself rewards for finishing things, whether that’s making myself a cup of tea and taking a walk after we hit submit on something, or like the BDSM piece we wrote this past week for fun in between massive edits slogs on the novels. Sometimes it’s reminding myself that if I take 20 minutes now to eat I’ll actually be way less cranky and will be able to finish this chapter. Sometimes none of it works.

But what I most have to remind myself is that — as obsessed as I am with using all time to its maximum efficiency — spending time and emotional energy to beat myself up is not actually an efficient use of resources. It’s the “work hard, play hard” thing, where play sometimes just means taking a goddamned nap. Which doesn’t always make it easy, but it’s a start.

So, what things do you need help taking a break from? How do you do self-care? How can we help with stopping the self-flagellation, even if it’s only an “No really, today’s thing is just gonna be taking a nap and eating food?”