Lilith Saintcrow's Blog, page 151

Too Close To See

Revisions on the first Gallow book are back with the editor. It will probably need another pass, since I’m too close to the book to see it clearly. This is part of the reason editors are critical to quality control–no matter how good a writer you are, you’re still too close to the bloody book to see the holes and pitfalls properly.

Of course, there are revenge edits, where an editor savages your work to get back at you for a personal slight or something. Thankfully, those are far more rare than you’d think. In all my time writing I’ve only been revenge edited once or twice, and though it hurt, it was clear that it was egregious and I needed to pull on my big-gurl panties and JUST DEAL. When you consider the sheer number of editors I’ve worked with, this is fricking amazing. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, the editor’s right, and that hundredth time they’re probably right too, but I dig in my heels anyway. Revenge edits are incredibly rare, and it shouldn’t be the first thing you suspect when an edit makes you angry.

Which they inevitably will. It’s a natural law or something. Writing is an incredibly personal art, and having someone else edit it naturally feels like a judgment on you, when it’s not. Just one of many things about this career that will smash at one’s self-esteem.

The ankle is still tender, and I can’t run yet. Which is driving both Miss B and me to new heights of itchy irritation. Walking just doesn’t cut it anymore. Once more I have to go back to the beginning and steadily work up to 5K, not putting a huge amount of stress on the ankle until it’s fully recovered. As a lesson in patience, it’s good for me…but not terribly soothing.

Well. Back to the salt mines. A short story to revise, and some editing to do…

*wanders off muttering*

photo by:


Moyan_Brenn

Being Blonde

I hear they’ve discovered the gene that makes one blonde.

I was a towhead as a child. As a baby, my hair was so light and fine I looked bald for a very long time. It darkened as I grew, and now my natural color can be called honey by the charitable and dishwater by the not-so-charitable.

Though you’d never know it to look at me. I henna now, but as soon as I could I started dyeing my hair, preferably black as sin. Occasionally I’d liven it up with a black that had red undertones, but I despised my natural color.

Why? people would ask. Everyone wants to be blonde, right?

No, they don’t.

The comments started when I was young. Oh, she’s blonde! So pretty, she’ll never have to worry about finding a boyfriend. Often, when I did something kid-stupid or silly, my haircolor was blamed. That’s so blonde of you. It was a low hum, something I was foggily aware of. I was busy with other things–surviving, mostly.

Then came adolescence. I gained weight in self-defense–food didn’t yell at me, judge, or hit me. I could always depend on food. Also, if I was heavier, men and boys stopped doing certain things. They only insulted me instead of insulting and sexualising, molesting and harassing me, which wasn’t much of an improvement but constituted some progress. Unfortunately, those were the years that “blonde jokes” had a resurgence. Sitcoms, songs, commercials, all got in the act. It was everywhere.

My stepfather latched onto the zeitgeist with unseemly lipsmacking glee. There was a constant barrage of blonde jokes, even outshining his favourite fat-girl and slut-jokes. I don’t mean occasionally, or just at holidays. I mean every day there were at least a dozen. Old favourites were repeated, and he brought home more from his buddies on base. Maybe they thought he was a connoisseur of such things, I don’t know. Mostly he deployed them during dinner, where I was also told clean your plate, we worked hard to get you that food and, in the next breath, if you just lost some weight you’d be such a pretty girl.

I didn’t want to be a pretty girl. I wanted to be left alone.

My mother took her cue from my stepfather, and it became a family maxim that I was book-smart, maybe, and I got fantastic grades but I was blonde, and that meant stupid. I’d never be street-smart. I wasn’t practical. If I just lost some weight, well, I was blonde and I’d find someone to take care of me, since I was so flighty and dipsy and head-in-the-clouds.

Black hair dye changed that. I looked in the mirror after rinsing it out, breathing in the chemical reek, and I saw someone different. Instead of blonde jokes, my infrequent family visits now meant I was told just that I was too fat and stupid, but without the constant “How do you confuse a blonde?” or “A blonde walks into a bar,” or “There was this blonde, you see…” The prevailing narrative was still that I was a mistake, but it felt marginally better.

A few times, over the years, I’ve had my natural color–mostly while growing my hair out after shaving my head in mourning. Each time, the jokes started again, the random comments from men. My response has become simple: I turn around and walk away, often in the middle of the joke. No discussion, it just makes me too tired. Often, the man in question will try to follow me, shouting. As if they cannot believe I don’t find them entertaining. My female friends say “I had a blonde moment!” or something similar only once or twice before they cotton on that such a thing makes me fierce. Don’t say that about yourself, I will fume. Don’t put yourself down at all, but especially like that. I can’t stand it. Please don’t do it.

The worst was having to listen to that sort of bullshit in an office environment. Nowadays I have the great luxury of not having to put up with that shit during my daily job, and I recognize it’s a luxury not many women share. I’m sorry. I wish I had some good advice, but I never learned a foolproof way of making a group of men you work with stop once they’ve discovered misogynistic crap irritates you.

I still don’t find blonde jokes funny. At all. In the absence of a gene treatment to give me a less awful color (seriously, I want GREY, dammit, with my eyes I could really rock long grey hair) the henna will have to do.

It’s a practical solution, after all. You could even say it’s smart.

photo by:


Beverly & Pack

Lucky Me

I was thinking about revisions.

Heading down the deck stairs on Friday, I missed a step and fell. My right ankle rolled, and I fetched up really hard against a lath on the landing. To be more precise, my head hit the lath, which broke.

What you can barely see is that I hit the one vertical that had a knot in it, at precisely the right angle, with precisely the best spot on my head. Because it broke, it didn’t even ring my chimes, the force was all transferred out without any of it snapping back to bounce my brain around and concuss me. My ankle was in far worse shape than anything else–it’s still swollen and tender, and the bruising has risen to the surface now. Interesting colors all over it.

I am incredibly lucky. For one thing, I fell on the landing, instead of missing a step on the bottom half and ending up on concrete. For another, I had my phone in a zippered pocket, so if anything had ended up broken I could have called for help. As it was, I took stock, hobbled back up the stairs (figuring out that nothing was broken because my ankle would bear weight and its range-of-motion was good in every direction) and into the house. Miss B, who had been looking forward to a morning walk, was Quite Put Out, but when I settled on the couch with an icepack and my phone, the adrenaline crested and I began shaking, and she started whining softly as she licked whatever she could reach of me. I think it took her that long to figure out something was wrong.

My writing partner came by later that day to make sure I didn’t have a concussion, and found me just as lucid as usual. (Well, that’s hardly praise, but at least my pupils were the same size and I wasn’t slurring any syllables.) I still can’t run, which is irritating the hell out of me, but all things considered, if it had to happen, it happened in the best way possible. I’m lucky.

Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket…

Underimpressed Tortie

The Mad Tortie is unimpressed. She thinks everything would be so much better if I just stopped trying to read and skritched her ears instead.

Save Some Trouble

Hachette vs Amazon continues apace. With luminaries such as CE Murphy, Harry Connolly, Scott Turow, James Patterson, and Charlie Stross weighing in, I feel rather as if there’s not much left for me to say. I do want to note a few ancillary things, though.

If my opinions on Amazon enrage you, and you express that rage by threatening not to buy my books, it merely puzzles me slightly. (I’m going to quote from a Twitter thread I posted last night here.) If you don’t like my politics, my feminism, my comment policy, or my opinions on Amazon, my books will probably just upset you more. Your threat to “not read” me just makes me think, well, this person’s saving themselves some grief and ulcer medication, so…good luck? And that’s about it. It doesn’t hurt my feelings or upset me, nor does it change my mind about anything. If you want to change my mind or make me feel bad, first you have to earn my respect. Threats are not a good way to do so.

I also wanted to note something curious I’ve seen in the comments here. Several commenters seem to have landed not understanding that I am also self-pubbed, and that Hachette is not my only publisher. They’re not even my only trad publisher. I have multiple books out with trad presses as well as multiple small presses and my own self-pub LLC. Choosing to lecture me in an ill-tempered and incoherent manner on the publishing industry and book distribution when you do not have a commensurate level of experience stands little to no chance of impressing me, especially if such lecture is full of fuzzy, also-incoherent talking points from people who likewise do not possess much experience. It’s normal to have opinions on things one doesn’t know much about–believe me, I have plenty myself–but trolling on such things is bad form indeed.

Another curious thing I noted was a flood of traffic from a site run by a (quite popular, I suppose?) demagogue of self-publishing whose stock-in-trade seems to be such trolling. While I welcome the new readers–come in, have a drink, tell me about yourselves!–I most emphatically do not welcome trolling (concern or otherwise), rhetorical bad form (strawmen, canards, misrepresentation), personal insults or mansplaining. Consider this a gentle warning, mostly because I don’t have time to engage with such nonsense. I do, however, often screencap and save such things, even if I don’t keep them in the mod queue.

Now, many new commenters behaved themselves, and I welcomed (and still do welcome) their comments. There were a few bad apples, however, who wore out said welcome and are now banned after clear warnings. Banning does not have to be permanent–a good place to start with getting un-banned is an apology, should you have a burning desire to keep playing in this particular internet sandbox.

I am also a little amazed and puzzled by the attitude that I am somehow a huge tentacled Goliath picking on the plucky David of Amazon.

Quite a few of those leaping to defend poor, helpless Amazon against mighty incredible me focused on the same talking points and rhetorical strategies. It is frankly incredible–the most bizarre thing was the familiar pattern of typos. I don’t think it’s a coordinated effort, but I do think there is an echo chamber or five, some run by people who profit financially or (more prosaically) emotionally by feeding an air of publishing grievance, where there is a certain lingua franca that includes said typos and also includes the perception that somehow Amazon is an underdog altruistically doing battle on behalf of geniuses the gatekeepers of trad publishing have snubbed. If that’s your cuppa tea, fine, but don’t expect me to concur or give much shrift to the notion.

The mod queue remains a bit tighter than usual, for all the above reasons and others. If you find yourself about to grab comment threads from previous (closed) posts or about to tell me how if I just self-published (more than I already have, I guess?) I would see Amazon as the underdog, or about to tell me just how much my criticism of Amazon or my comment policy means you’ll never read my books now, please take a deep breath and find another subject.

Thank you.

photo by:


Dusty J

Eau de Trundles

Odd Trundles is not taking his morning nap on my bed. Instead, he’s snoring right under my chair, occasionally letting loose a wall of eye-watering stench. I’d ask what the hell he’s eaten, but I don’t think I’d like the answer, and it’s academic anyway. I’ll just note that this morning he scuttled all over the yard in Miss B’s wake as she did her best to herd Squirrel!Josephine. For once, I was wearing shoes, and I didn’t feel any need to scream. Mostly because Josephine, unlike Squirrel!Napoleon, is very capable of taking care of herself, and looks FUCKING FABULOUS DOING IT, THANK YOU, as she so often reminds us all, twitching her tail and screeching at Odd’s bumbling, blustery self from a safe height.

I should write the last half of the squirrel Amourous Interrupte, I really should.

Anyway, the world goes on much as it ever has. I’m hip-deep in Gallow revisions, and nursing some muscle soreness from slowly stretching my run mileage. Stretching and fluids are called for today. Also, maybe, opening a window so I don’t pass out. Bulldogs swallow a lot of air. Right now I’m just thanking my stars Odd has a cast-iron digestive system. In other words, he may be foul, but at least he’s not…dribbling.

I also have audiobook auditions to go through, and more Storium correspondence, and and and, so I’d better get back to work. See you around.

photo by:


AlicePopkorn

Onward, Again

Comments have been closed on the previous post. The mod queue has been tightened up, for obvious reasons. It will relax again when the current storm blows over. So if you make a comment and it doesn’t immediately appear, don’t despair, it just means I haven’t swung by the site at brekkie, lunchtime, or after dinner to clear the queue.

It was interesting and comforting to see Charles Stross’s take on the whole Hachette-Amazon thing, especially where he points out the relative sizes of the players.

One thing that surprised me in the response to my last post was how people didn’t seem to realize I’m a self-pubber too. Also, the number of people trying to tell me how the industry works and yet unable to answer even simple questions an industry professional will ask as a matter of course was thought-provoking. Over and over again I found myself asking very basic questions of people who just didn’t seem to understand how books are: made by any publisher, small or large or self; quality-controlled; and/or currently distributed, and why. I don’t know everything about publishing, I’ll be the first to admit that, but after the years I’ve spent in the field, I at least can guess at the dimensions of what I don’t know, and some of those lecturing me did not appear to be able to do the same. Those who don’t know what they don’t know tend to not understand. (Very meta, I’m sure.)

I will say that the flouncing by those who find the Amway Demagogue of Self-Pubbing more congenial was pretty hilarious, though I’m sure my amusement was not the intended effect. Slightly less amusing was the inability of people to parse “yes, they’re both corporations, but one is acting like a toxic asshole right now and the other isn’t.” Not to mention misquoting me, and then mocking the misquote. Which would be singularly un-amusing, but it’s the internet, so as a result it’s only mildly interesting and puzzling.

Anyway, time to get back to work. The books, they will not write themselves. There’s revisions on the first Gallow book, and some Storium work to do.

Over and out.

How “Amazon” Means “LESS BOOKS FOR YOU”

ETA: I know that grammatically, it should be “Fewer Books For You.” I didn’t do that, partly because “Less” fits better in social-networking headline space, and partly because I’m a contrarian. Also, it makes me think of the soup guy on Seinfeld. “LESS BOOKS FOR YOU!”

Dear Readers, let me tell you about my editor.

I have been with my editor at Orbit–Devi Pillai, who Anya Devi in the Kismet books was loosely based on–for over a decade now. She shepherded me through the Valentine series, consoled me through the end of Heaven’s Spite, took a chance on the Damnation Affair, and loved a certain hedgewitch Queen so much she kept asking about it for years until she could finally buy it. She remains an editor I trust implicitly. When she sticks to her guns and insists, I generally rethink my position and trust she’s right, and (far less often, because I rarely dig my heels in unless it’s Important) vice versa. She understands my working style, leaves me the freedom I need while ensuring I get the support I often don’t know I need to turn in my best work.

Not only that, but she advocates for me tirelessly in editorial and marketing meetings. She fights for my books, she fights to bring my books to you. She is everything an editor should be, and it’s largely because of her faith in me that I can write full-time and pay my mortgage.

She works for Orbit. Orbit is a part of Hachette. Amazon, the behemoth that undercut its competitors and has become not the only, but the biggest game in town, wants more money out of Hachette. So, Amazon has removed the preorder buttons on Hachette books.

Including the last Bannon & Clare book, The Ripper Affair. Here’s a screenshot of the Amazon page for the Ripper Affair this morning:

Preorders are largely how publishers forecast how well a certain book will do. Those forecasts create numbers that are used when, for example, Devi makes the case to buy another series from me while I’m finishing up writing the current one. It’s not fair, but it’s the only metric the publishers have in some cases, for all sorts of reasons–frex, it can take over six months for the contracts department to get all situated. (Contracts people are by their nature picky and detail-oriented, and that’s fine, it’s just frustrating sometimes.)

All of this is backstory (hello, exposition!) to what I am about to tell you.

The full, nasty effect of Amazon removing buy buttons (like they did when squeezing Macmillan for more cash a few years ago) and removing the ability to preorder a publisher’s upcoming books doesn’t hit the publisher. Sure, the publisher is who Amazon can blackmail most directly–Amazon’s a huge distributor, and if they decide not to distribute, that’s lost revenue, since ease of buying is a component of consumer activity. (Translation: every time you make a consumer go somewhere else, they are fractionally less willing to buy the damn item that’s costing them time and headache.) There’s also lost revenue from people who buy only through Amazon (they have their reasons, natch) and that means a publisher can’t afford to take a chance on certain authors. The publisher takes the visible hit, but the ripples spread out and hit midlist authors, or debut authors. And while I am not the latter, I am most certainly the former.

In other words, Amazon’s behavior right now is impacting my ability to sell more books to Orbit, since when preorder numbers take this kind of hit it’s harder for Devi to fight for me in acquisition meetings. The numbers for B&C were already not good enough for me to do the “B&C travel to different countries” books we were all looking forward to. Amazon’s blackmail of my publisher makes it harder for my editor to justify taking a chance on me next time I’m up for a contract with them. (It isn’t fair, but it’s a business decision, and I understand as much.) This impacts my ability to write full-time, to continue producing those stories you love (or love to hate) at my accustomed rate. Because I have to pay my mortgage and feed my kids, and if this won’t do it, I will have to spend my time doing something else that will.

Amazon is obeying the natural behaviour of corporations. Corporations are not people, but once they reach a certain size they start behaving like any greedy organism. They metastasize. The effect of this is passed down through the ecosystem to yours truly–and also to you. Less time for me to write those stories means less Lili books for you to read. It means less books from other authors you may like or love, as well. If Hachette has to cave and agree to Amazon’s predatory terms, I will feel that directly, because that money will come out of budgets that take a chance on me, the midlist author.

As Elizabeth Bear said this morning, Amazon is hoping customers will turn on the publishers and force them to do Amazon’s bidding. If you’re fine with that, and with the effects I’ve described above, okay. I naturally don’t agree with you, but okay. I have Amazon links, affiliate and otherwise, on this very site for your convenience, not mine.

If you’re not fine with Amazon’s behavior, you can preorder The Ripper Affair (and order other books of mine) through Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, or Indiebound. You can even preorder and order signed copies through Cover to Cover Books with a simple stock inquiry, they ship worldwide. You can preorder for other authors you like, too, at Barnes & Noble, at Indiebound, and at C2C though they may not be signed if they’re not mine–you get the idea.

Hachette has been keeping its authors apprised of developments in this situation. They’re doing their best to take care of us, because we are, after all, their bread and butter. Hachette isn’t the bad guy here. (I should hope that my regular Readers know that I’d tell you if they were, srsly, mortgage be damned.) Please think about buying somewhere other than Amazon, even if it is a little inconvenient.

In the end, dear Reader, it’s all up to you.

‘Nuff said.

ETA: Courtesy of Reader Scott Drummond:

I seriously have the best Readers.

Pliny’s Moon

Pliny’s Lunacy

We’ve been chugging along slowly here aboard the Pliny Train, for various reasons. Sorry about that.

Just like we’ve built a lot of our culture on Rome, Hebrew holy books, and Shakespeare, the Romans built a lot of theirs on Etruscan and (more to the point) Greek culture. I was reminded of this during Pliny’s passages on the Moon, where he asserts Endymion was the first human being to observe facts about her and further remarks this accounts for Endymion’s “traditional love of Her.”

…quae singula in ea deprehendit hominum primus Endymion, ob id amor eius fama traditor.p194

The translator, as an aside, notes that an eclipse, whether of sun or moon, was often called labor.

Pliny goes on to list the things the Moon taught humanity, like dividing the year into twelve spaces (months, or more properly, moonths) and, most intriguing, that she is “governed by the sun’s radiance.” He notes that she is full “only when opposite to the Sun.” Furthermore:

VIII. quippe manifestum est solem intervenu lunae occultari lunamque terrae obiectu…p196

Which translates out to: “It is in fact obvious that the sun is hidden by the passage of it across the moon, and the moon by the interposition of the earth.”p197 Later, when Copernicus and Galileo advocated heliocentrism, I like to think Pliny’s shade was nodding thoughtfully and saying “Well, okay, that makes sense.” Yes, Pliny ascribed to geocentrism, but he does so for lack of a better option, and one rather thinks the Romans wouldn’t have burned anyone at the stake for advocating for Helios instead. I often think polytheism is better for science than monotheism, but that’s (say it with me) another blog post.

Pliny notes that the earth’s shadow, when it passes across the moon, is conical; he goes on further to state that shadows are “made to disappear by distance,” as a bird’s shadow disappears when it flies high enough. The conclusion he draws from this is that the Moon resides where the “air” ends and the “aether” begins and that all the space beyond the Moon is “clear and filled with continual light.” His explanation of the waning and waxing is interesting:

And these are the reasons why the moon wanes in the night-time; but both if her wanings are irregular and not monthly, because the slant of the zodiac and the widely varying curves of the moon’s course, as has been stated, the motion of the heavenly bodies not always tallying in minute fractional quantities.p199

I love that bit– “flexus, non semper in scripulis partium congruente siderum motu.” Not always tallying in minute fractional quantities is as good an observation about the world as any I’ve ever come across. Roman education and native common sense both allowed for slippage–in other words, things not proceeding in exact clockwork. Not only the observation of daily life but also Roman military doctrine allowed for fog; one could also make a case for the idea of gods with petty human foibles relieving the psychological pressure of noting that the world is big, dangerous, and doesn’t obey easy and simple laws 100% of the damn time. There’s a lot of flexibility and curiousity about the world on display in both Roman and Greek philosophy and science.

The Moon naturally leads one to the Sun–in Latin, you put what you want to accent most at the end of a sentence, which explains a lot. (Carthago delenda est, anyone?) Pliny’s saved the Sun for last among the heavenly bodies, and that will be where we pause next. Please keep your all your limbs inside the train, it’s cold and depressurised out there…

Audiobook Auditions open!

LET THE READINGS BEGIN!

I’m looking for someone to narrate Selene. I’m also open to male-female recording duos, etc. Glossary terms and pronunciation help available as well, if you’re into that sort of thing. The audition links and script are here.

Sadly, my chosen narrator for SquirrelTerror ended up with medical problems, and was unable to finish the work. I’m reopening auditions for that book too. Comedic timing and the ability to sound reasonably cultured one moment and obscene the next highly recommended. The audition link and scripts can be found here.

I’m offering a royalty split because both books come with built-in audiences, and it seems to me that’s much fairer to the voice artist than a lump sum, albeit fairer in the long run. Hopefully a producer or two agrees.

And with that, I’m heading back into the writing cave. Over and out…