Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 136
June 19, 2018
So How’s That Self-Publishing Thing Working Out For You?
Below the cut, I’ve written some things about self-publishing in general, along with my own experience with it, including how much money I make.
Revealing one’s income is generally considered to be bad and something you should feel bad about, especially if you’re female. But “can you earn a living doing this?” is a pretty basic question about a career, and the black box around it tends to make people swing between “No, never, it’s impossible” and “I’ll publish one novel and it’ll be made into a movie and I’ll be RICH!” So I’ll show you mine to prove that it is not impossible. (“One novel = movie = RICH!” isn’t impossible either because at least one person’s done it, but it’s not the way to bet.)
I’ve had a very good experience self-publishing. It suits me. This post reflects that. If you think it might suit you, or are just curious about it, click. If reading about other people’s money or anything mostly talking up the positives of self-publishing is going to annoy, anger, upset, or otherwise be bad for you, don’t click.
( Read more... )
comments
Revealing one’s income is generally considered to be bad and something you should feel bad about, especially if you’re female. But “can you earn a living doing this?” is a pretty basic question about a career, and the black box around it tends to make people swing between “No, never, it’s impossible” and “I’ll publish one novel and it’ll be made into a movie and I’ll be RICH!” So I’ll show you mine to prove that it is not impossible. (“One novel = movie = RICH!” isn’t impossible either because at least one person’s done it, but it’s not the way to bet.)
I’ve had a very good experience self-publishing. It suits me. This post reflects that. If you think it might suit you, or are just curious about it, click. If reading about other people’s money or anything mostly talking up the positives of self-publishing is going to annoy, anger, upset, or otherwise be bad for you, don’t click.
( Read more... )
comments
June 18, 2018
Revival, by Stephen King
I think Revival[image error] benefits from not knowing much going in, so I’ll be vague about the plot over the cut. It’s an uneven book, extremely gripping and with some interesting themes, with a fantastic beginning and an ending that would have really worked for me if it had made some choices other than the ones it actually made.
For most of the book, the horror elements are backgrounded rather than foregrounded. The first third, which begins with the narrator’s childhood meeting with the new young preacher, who has an interest in electricity and departs under a cloud, is absolutely riveting even though for most of it, nothing particularly dramatic is happening. It’s beautifully written, vivid, and has a masterful use of foreshadowing. (The “cloud” does not involve child abuse. However, there is child death.)
The middle of the book, which follows Jamie into adulthood, is also compelling reading, with some genuinely scary moments. The climax went in a direction that didn’t work for me.
It’s hard to either rec or anti-rec this without spoilers. It’s extremely gripping, has some great moments of subtle horror, and is very beautifully written for the most part. For much of its length, it could be a mainstream novel with magic realist touches, about the inexorable passage of time and age, what we gain and what we lose and what we only realize in retrospect, and whether there’s anybody out there but us. The fantastical elements have one strand that really worked for me but I suspect comes across as totally ridiculous to some readers, and another that did not work for me at all but I suspect really worked for some readers. So, caveat emptor. I really enjoyed reading it but I wouldn’t rank it as a favorite King; I’d suggest reading the first chapter and seeing if it grabs you.
Huge spoilers. ( Read more... )
[image error] [image error]
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For most of the book, the horror elements are backgrounded rather than foregrounded. The first third, which begins with the narrator’s childhood meeting with the new young preacher, who has an interest in electricity and departs under a cloud, is absolutely riveting even though for most of it, nothing particularly dramatic is happening. It’s beautifully written, vivid, and has a masterful use of foreshadowing. (The “cloud” does not involve child abuse. However, there is child death.)
The middle of the book, which follows Jamie into adulthood, is also compelling reading, with some genuinely scary moments. The climax went in a direction that didn’t work for me.
It’s hard to either rec or anti-rec this without spoilers. It’s extremely gripping, has some great moments of subtle horror, and is very beautifully written for the most part. For much of its length, it could be a mainstream novel with magic realist touches, about the inexorable passage of time and age, what we gain and what we lose and what we only realize in retrospect, and whether there’s anybody out there but us. The fantastical elements have one strand that really worked for me but I suspect comes across as totally ridiculous to some readers, and another that did not work for me at all but I suspect really worked for some readers. So, caveat emptor. I really enjoyed reading it but I wouldn’t rank it as a favorite King; I’d suggest reading the first chapter and seeing if it grabs you.
Huge spoilers. ( Read more... )
[image error] [image error]
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June 15, 2018
Today I tried the Impossible Burger
If you haven't heard of this, it's a new soy-based burger that supposedly cooks, looks, tastes, and feels exactly like a meat burger. I saw it at Fatburger, which I figured was a good place to try it -I already know I like their regular burgers so I have a good basis for comparison, and it's pretty cheap so if I hated it at least I wasn't out a tragic amount of money.
I asked the guy at the counter if people were liking it. With slight evasiveness, he said, "Yeah, lots of people are ordering it!"
If my experience was typical, I suspect that lots of people will not be ordering it twice.
On the one hand, it was by far the best non-meat burger I've ever had, and I ate almost the entire thing. (I was hungry.) However, it does not look like meat. It looks similar to meat. But it was visibly a veggie burger. I actually don't care much about appearance, but just sayin'. Similarly, the texture isn't quite right. It's close. But it has a noticeably vegetal soft homogeneity, which is different from that of ground meat. Most importantly, it doesn't taste quite like meat. Or rather, it doesn't taste like a Fatburger burger. It has a slight spiciness that I didn't care for, which is probably there to mask the non-meat flavors. If the texture and appearance had been perfect, I might have believed it as a meat burger that was overspiced to make up for the meat not being the best.
In short, disappointing. I would have preferred their real burger. I also would have preferred going home and making myself a salad. I keep hoping for a perfect meat substitute, but in the meantime I'll stick to eating less meat and mostly from identifiably good-practice sources.
Have any of you tried this? What did you think?
comments
I asked the guy at the counter if people were liking it. With slight evasiveness, he said, "Yeah, lots of people are ordering it!"
If my experience was typical, I suspect that lots of people will not be ordering it twice.
On the one hand, it was by far the best non-meat burger I've ever had, and I ate almost the entire thing. (I was hungry.) However, it does not look like meat. It looks similar to meat. But it was visibly a veggie burger. I actually don't care much about appearance, but just sayin'. Similarly, the texture isn't quite right. It's close. But it has a noticeably vegetal soft homogeneity, which is different from that of ground meat. Most importantly, it doesn't taste quite like meat. Or rather, it doesn't taste like a Fatburger burger. It has a slight spiciness that I didn't care for, which is probably there to mask the non-meat flavors. If the texture and appearance had been perfect, I might have believed it as a meat burger that was overspiced to make up for the meat not being the best.
In short, disappointing. I would have preferred their real burger. I also would have preferred going home and making myself a salad. I keep hoping for a perfect meat substitute, but in the meantime I'll stick to eating less meat and mostly from identifiably good-practice sources.
Have any of you tried this? What did you think?
comments
FF Friday: Set the Stage, by Karis Walsh
Set the Stage[image error] is an adorable fluffy romance between Emilie, an aspiring actress who just got cast at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and Arden, a gardener working at the Ashland park. It's full of very accurate details about theatre (and seems very accurate about OSF in particular, at least as far as the layout of their theatres is concerned) and plants, and has a hilarious running joke about how every business in town attempts to get in on the theatre tourist business by slapping on random Shakespeare references. (Shockingly, no one ever makes a joke about "the Garden of Arden.")
In fact, this novel distinctly resembles a sort of FF Zoe Chant, minus the shifters. But it has lots of loving details of a setting, cozy togetherness, good food, shared activities, instant attraction, constant sexual awareness/tension between the characters, and a general air of comfort reading. It also has a lot of quirky details and problems that one encounters in real life but rarely in fiction, like the genuinely sweet boss at Emilie's crappy fast-food job, a geocaching date, and the horrible dilemma of what to say to your crush when you go see the play she's in and she's just not very good in the role.
It's a very charming book and I am now seriously considering a visit to the OSF. I was last there in high school and it was very formative. They have a super fun-looking play up this year about Shakespeare's buddies trying to reconstruct Hamlet from memory after his death. (i.e., the First Folio.)
[image error] [image error]
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In fact, this novel distinctly resembles a sort of FF Zoe Chant, minus the shifters. But it has lots of loving details of a setting, cozy togetherness, good food, shared activities, instant attraction, constant sexual awareness/tension between the characters, and a general air of comfort reading. It also has a lot of quirky details and problems that one encounters in real life but rarely in fiction, like the genuinely sweet boss at Emilie's crappy fast-food job, a geocaching date, and the horrible dilemma of what to say to your crush when you go see the play she's in and she's just not very good in the role.
It's a very charming book and I am now seriously considering a visit to the OSF. I was last there in high school and it was very formative. They have a super fun-looking play up this year about Shakespeare's buddies trying to reconstruct Hamlet from memory after his death. (i.e., the First Folio.)
[image error] [image error]
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June 13, 2018
Mystery of the Witches’ Bridge, by Barbee Oliver Carleton
I recently got to meet Layla (Sholio), which was just as awesome as I’d imagined. While we were on a long drive, we somehow managed to figure out that we’d loved the same book as kids, which was some kind of miracle as I couldn’t remember the title or most identifying details, she had gotten it with a missing first chapter, and it has editions with different titles and extremely different covers. However, we somehow did identify it, probably by the extremely memorable setting, Layla remembered the title, and I ordered it off Amazon and re-read it for the first time since I was about ten.
Unlike some childhood favorites, it was just as good as I recalled. What I’d mostly been drawn in by was the atmosphere and setting, and that was just as vivid and unique, reading it as an adult, as it had seemed when I was nine. What I had not remembered, but was impressed by as an adult, was the neat plotting, thematic coherence, and the fact that it’s a classic Gothic – a genre I did not identify as a thing until I was much older, and which does not generally star twelve-year-old boys.
Twelve-year-old orphan Dan Pride comes to live with his uncle in York, MA, 37 miles from Boston. It’s a land of salt marshes, constant wind, bridges over rivers, marsh fowl, tiny islands, and deathtrap black ponds created when the salt hay is left to rot. This unique landscape, which has got to be real – it 100% reads like it was written by someone who lived there – is one I’ve never again encountered in fiction, or nonfiction for that matter. It’s eerie and beautiful. You can smell the salt and hear the whistling wind.
Dan arrives with little more than a few clothes and his violin, and meets his forbidding uncle, a friendly hired man and housekeeper, and an alarming dog named Caliban. He’s told the creepy, tragic history of the area, centering around a death, a curse, a missing briefcase, accusations of witchcraft, and a feud between two families, the Prides and the Bishops, which continues to this day. That night he sits alone in his room, listening to the wailing wind and looking out the window into the darkness of the salt marshes, he sees flashes of light in Morse code, which he knows from camp. They spell out DAN PRIDE…
To say more about the plot would give too much away; some plot twists are probably more surprising if you’re ten, but it’s all very well-crafted, with neatly orchestrated set-ups and satisfying payoffs. But mostly this is memorable for the atmosphere, which stuck with me for thirty-five years. Re-reading it, I can see why.
( Read more... )
Mystery of the witches' bridge[image error]
She has another book, The Secret of Saturday Cove[image error], which also sounds atmospheric though more bright and cheery, and is available on Kindle for 99 cents. I snapped it up.
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Unlike some childhood favorites, it was just as good as I recalled. What I’d mostly been drawn in by was the atmosphere and setting, and that was just as vivid and unique, reading it as an adult, as it had seemed when I was nine. What I had not remembered, but was impressed by as an adult, was the neat plotting, thematic coherence, and the fact that it’s a classic Gothic – a genre I did not identify as a thing until I was much older, and which does not generally star twelve-year-old boys.
Twelve-year-old orphan Dan Pride comes to live with his uncle in York, MA, 37 miles from Boston. It’s a land of salt marshes, constant wind, bridges over rivers, marsh fowl, tiny islands, and deathtrap black ponds created when the salt hay is left to rot. This unique landscape, which has got to be real – it 100% reads like it was written by someone who lived there – is one I’ve never again encountered in fiction, or nonfiction for that matter. It’s eerie and beautiful. You can smell the salt and hear the whistling wind.
Dan arrives with little more than a few clothes and his violin, and meets his forbidding uncle, a friendly hired man and housekeeper, and an alarming dog named Caliban. He’s told the creepy, tragic history of the area, centering around a death, a curse, a missing briefcase, accusations of witchcraft, and a feud between two families, the Prides and the Bishops, which continues to this day. That night he sits alone in his room, listening to the wailing wind and looking out the window into the darkness of the salt marshes, he sees flashes of light in Morse code, which he knows from camp. They spell out DAN PRIDE…
To say more about the plot would give too much away; some plot twists are probably more surprising if you’re ten, but it’s all very well-crafted, with neatly orchestrated set-ups and satisfying payoffs. But mostly this is memorable for the atmosphere, which stuck with me for thirty-five years. Re-reading it, I can see why.
( Read more... )
Mystery of the witches' bridge[image error]
She has another book, The Secret of Saturday Cove[image error], which also sounds atmospheric though more bright and cheery, and is available on Kindle for 99 cents. I snapped it up.
comments
June 11, 2018
Metal Wolf, by Lauren Esker
A science fiction romance by Sholio! If you enjoyed her Lauren Esker books, you will enjoy this. To me it reads closer to the style/content of her fanfic than her other pro work, so if you like her fic....
Metal Wolf [image error] throws space opera, shifter romance, black helicopter government conspiracy thrillers, 80s movies about alien refugees discovering Earth, and a couple more genres into a blender.
Enslaved blue alien werewolf fighter pilot Rei gets an unexpected chance at escape when his single-occupancy fighter pod gets hit, knocking out the communications systems; he makes a run for it, and crash-lands in a pond in Wisconsin. He's fished out by Sarah Metzger, who lives with her disabled veteran father on a small farm, struggling to make ends meet while attending community college classes in the almost-certainly-hopeless attempt to fulfill her dream of becoming an astrophysicist. As it turns out, the stars are closer than she thinks.
This is not an insta-love romance. Both love and story take their time as the characters get to know each other (it's a while before they even work out how to communicate) and explore their new worlds, with a gradual build to an action climax. The characters are really likable (one of my favorite relationships is between Rei and Sarah's dad), and the worldbuilding is secondary to the relationships but intriguing and thought-through. Metal Wolf is fun, often funny, touching, and extremely readable, with a very satisfying ending.
[image error] [image error]
comments
Metal Wolf [image error] throws space opera, shifter romance, black helicopter government conspiracy thrillers, 80s movies about alien refugees discovering Earth, and a couple more genres into a blender.
Enslaved blue alien werewolf fighter pilot Rei gets an unexpected chance at escape when his single-occupancy fighter pod gets hit, knocking out the communications systems; he makes a run for it, and crash-lands in a pond in Wisconsin. He's fished out by Sarah Metzger, who lives with her disabled veteran father on a small farm, struggling to make ends meet while attending community college classes in the almost-certainly-hopeless attempt to fulfill her dream of becoming an astrophysicist. As it turns out, the stars are closer than she thinks.
This is not an insta-love romance. Both love and story take their time as the characters get to know each other (it's a while before they even work out how to communicate) and explore their new worlds, with a gradual build to an action climax. The characters are really likable (one of my favorite relationships is between Rei and Sarah's dad), and the worldbuilding is secondary to the relationships but intriguing and thought-through. Metal Wolf is fun, often funny, touching, and extremely readable, with a very satisfying ending.
[image error] [image error]
comments
June 9, 2018
That tour of Thai Town
The mangosteen is my holy grail of untasted tropical fruit. They don't grow in the US. When I've traveled, I've missed the season. I have been looking for mangosteens for something like 20 years, with no luck.
Today, in honor of Anthony Bourdain, I had the morning glory stems and ground pork with olives at Ruen Pair, then walked across the way to my favorite Thai sweet shop, Bhan Kanom Thai. It was their 20th anniversary, and I got a free tote bag. And there, for the first time in my life, I found mangosteens.
Thanks, Tony.
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Today, in honor of Anthony Bourdain, I had the morning glory stems and ground pork with olives at Ruen Pair, then walked across the way to my favorite Thai sweet shop, Bhan Kanom Thai. It was their 20th anniversary, and I got a free tote bag. And there, for the first time in my life, I found mangosteens.
Thanks, Tony.
comments
His White Hause-Bane
I wrote His White Hause-Bane, based on the Steeleye Span version of the eerie traditional ballad Twa Corbies, for Jukebox.
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June 8, 2018
Anthony Bourdain
Death doesn't discriminate
Between the sinners and the saints
It takes and it takes and it takes
I always hoped some day I'd get to meet Tony Bourdain. I daydreamed about taking him to places in LA he wouldn't have already been tipped off about - not Plan Check or Chego's, good as they are, but to Ruen Pair followed by a grab bag from the Thai dessert places on either side of it or maybe to the izakaya Furaibo or the food court in Mitsuwa if he was missing Tokyo.
I found a surprising reason this last year to like him even more than I already did. He was one of the very few men who spoke out for the women spearheading #MeToo, straightforwardly supporting people who had been sexually harassed and coming out against the ones doing the harassing. This seems like a low bar, but I can count on the fingers of one hand the male celebrities who reached it. He also wrote about his own part in creating a society where harassment is acceptable, not to excuse himself but to say it was wrong and he's not doing it any more. This is not an easy thing to acknowledge - again, hardly anyone has - and even fewer put their efforts into making things right. He did.
Sometimes if you really love life, if you appreciate all the wonderful things in it - the egg salad sandwiches at Lawson's in Tokyo, a bowl of pho by a roadside in Vietnam, a raw oyster in France - when those moments stop making you happy, it can feel like there's nothing left, like you're a ghost unable to touch and taste this beautiful world, and that nothing is all the more bitter because of the memory of what it was like when all of those moments could make you incandescent with joy.
I'm talking about myself, of course. I can't know if I'm talking about him too. All any of us can do now is guess.
I hope he had as much joy in his life as sorrow. I hope all the moments when he seemed happy, he was. I hope my daydreams were wrong and someone else took him to Ruen Pair and ordered him the crumbled pork with black olives and the sautéed morning glory stems.
Tom Colicchio wrote, RIP doubtful. Tony’s restless spirit will roam the earth in search of justice, truth and a great bowl of noodles.
comments
Between the sinners and the saints
It takes and it takes and it takes
I always hoped some day I'd get to meet Tony Bourdain. I daydreamed about taking him to places in LA he wouldn't have already been tipped off about - not Plan Check or Chego's, good as they are, but to Ruen Pair followed by a grab bag from the Thai dessert places on either side of it or maybe to the izakaya Furaibo or the food court in Mitsuwa if he was missing Tokyo.
I found a surprising reason this last year to like him even more than I already did. He was one of the very few men who spoke out for the women spearheading #MeToo, straightforwardly supporting people who had been sexually harassed and coming out against the ones doing the harassing. This seems like a low bar, but I can count on the fingers of one hand the male celebrities who reached it. He also wrote about his own part in creating a society where harassment is acceptable, not to excuse himself but to say it was wrong and he's not doing it any more. This is not an easy thing to acknowledge - again, hardly anyone has - and even fewer put their efforts into making things right. He did.
Sometimes if you really love life, if you appreciate all the wonderful things in it - the egg salad sandwiches at Lawson's in Tokyo, a bowl of pho by a roadside in Vietnam, a raw oyster in France - when those moments stop making you happy, it can feel like there's nothing left, like you're a ghost unable to touch and taste this beautiful world, and that nothing is all the more bitter because of the memory of what it was like when all of those moments could make you incandescent with joy.
I'm talking about myself, of course. I can't know if I'm talking about him too. All any of us can do now is guess.
I hope he had as much joy in his life as sorrow. I hope all the moments when he seemed happy, he was. I hope my daydreams were wrong and someone else took him to Ruen Pair and ordered him the crumbled pork with black olives and the sautéed morning glory stems.
Tom Colicchio wrote, RIP doubtful. Tony’s restless spirit will roam the earth in search of justice, truth and a great bowl of noodles.
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June 6, 2018
California Primaries
I have been doing a lot of activism with Swing Left geared toward flipping Republican districts in my area to Democrats. Yesterday we had the primaries. Cut for stuff about California elections. ( Read more... )
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