MultiMind's Blog, page 12

The Magical Ice Cream Store – Borrowed from Dean Wesley Smith

I am borrowing this from Dean Wesley Smith. He talks about “The Magical Bakery” as it pertains to putting out your work, copyrights and licensing. It’s super informative and I strongly recommend everyone read it but some parts can get a little confusing for someone super brand new. So instead of a pie shop, how about ice cream?

Imagine you have an ice cream store, each title you have is a flavor. Most folks are none too interested in going to an ice cream store that has one flavor, unless that one flavor is super special & unique somehow. Most do not have that “one unique, groundbreaking flavor” so we’re going with the average, run-of-the-mill ice cream store, where people prefer more than one flavor.

You have one title/one flavor, some will waft in but for the most part, a lot might not. You might get crowds once in a while, or pretty small clusters, or a random individual, or no one. Doesn’t mean something is wrong with your store, there’s just no variety. Why go to your ice cream store when there’s already Baskin Robbins and their famed 31 flavors, or Cold Stone, who also has a bevy of flavors? Some will give you a try – it is ice cream, after all – but if they want more, they have to go elsewhere.

 If there are two flavors, that’s a little better. There’s a little bit of variety, you might even have comeback if there’s posted up on a wall somewhere “Coming Soon: Flavor Three, The Snackening” because they know you’re building a stable of flavors. If people like the ice cream they got, they’re more willing to come back. To be honest, if the ice cream doesn’t give them food poisoning (the work is terrible beyond compare), they’ll at least not hate it and may come back. Baskin Robbins doesn’t get the same customers every day, remember.

And there’s the different ways the flavor/title can be put out: Waffle (print), cup (audiobook), or cone (ebook). People, on average, are not going to just plain walk out your store with your ice cream sitting bare in their hands, there has to be a way to carry it. Some people like cups, some people prefer waffle cones, some prefer regular cake cones. Some may not really have a preference one way or another as long as the ice cream gets into their hands. Some are “cup only” or “waffle only”, you don’t have it, they’re gone. That’s fine. Yes, you could get even more things to put the ice cream in, such as chocolate casted cups (braille), but that can be for down the road, whenever you choose (braille is a great idea, by the way). But having more than one way to carry out the ice cream helps improve sales. Remember, diversity is great. It reaches more people.

People usually like to try before they buy so samples are important. Some places will provide those ice cream samples (sample 10-30 page/chapter.pdf snippet or 5-15 clip of audiobook) for you but you can always do it yourself. People can taste test and find out if they actually like the ice cream or only prefer the way it looks. Just have a special section for it, preferably near the cash register (book sample in a place where people can buy the book itself).

You can have the ice cream in different ways, such as in the form of gelato (translations), you can have it in different formats, such as in bing soo (film), you can do all the things –

As long as you don’t give away the recipe. You’re perfectly free to tell people important, helpful facts about the flavor so they can make a proper choice, like saying “this one has lemons (content warnings)” – some people do have food allergies, after all – but that’s not the same as giving away your entire recipe that you worked really hard on (the copyright).

The recipe is what you use to make the ice cream over and over, all the different flavors. You can’t run out of the recipe itself, that’s yours. If you give away the recipe or, worse, hand over your entire shop and the recipe, then you’re going to be pretty screwed. Yes, some people are going to have the same or similar flavors you do, Baskin Robbins does not get mad at Cold Stone because both have vanilla and chocolate flavors. Some people prefer cookie dough ice cream only from Breyers but like rocky road only from Good Humor. People like ice cream, duh.

What you’re selling as a flavor is a license of that title. The recipe is the very title and story itself, all the forms it comes in – the flavors, the ways it can be carried, etc, – is the license of the work. It has the license to be in print, so says you, the rights/recipe-holder and shop owner. It has the license to be in e-book, so says you, the rights/recipe-holder and shop owner. So on and so forth.

With effort and work, you could even have pints of your flavors in markets wherever ice cream is sold (bookstores, libraries, (distribution, basically)). Your flavors right next to the Breyers and the Baskin Robbins and etc, sitting in the freezer for a random person who may never have even been to your store or heard of it, to buy a pint. People like ice cream, if it doesn’t look like it is going to poison them (made/designed poorly), they are willing to give it a go.

You’re not giving someone the whole bucket when they are asking for ice cream, usually. You’re serving it in scoops, so that everyone can have some. And this bucket will not run out unless you say it does (goes out-of-print). Don’t do that unless you learned that this ice cream flavor has cause serious public hazard (has horrible content that’s on par with The Clansman). In case of the easily confused, some flavors may be hard to choke down but they’re not a public hazard (such as The Black KKKlansman (most know it as a film but it was a book, too)). As long as you have the recipe and you can get the ingredients (have a means and a way to put the work in print, audiobook, ebook, etc), you’ll be golden.  

Does this mean your shop will be rich in a week? No. Maybe in a few years, when you get enough flavors in and eventually become the brand that the fans trust but overnight? Nah. Even then, you might not be actually rich, you’ll just make enough to keep the store afloat or at least justify it being not-closed (just because a flavor isn’t selling well now doesn’t mean it won’t sell well later). You don’t have to physically be there handing out the scoops, just let people be able to buy their flavors. All of this is fine. At the end of the day, it takes work, time and you’ll sometimes get hit with a set-back since life happens.

But definitely make sure you actually like making ice cream and have some studied know-how on how to run an ice cream store. Otherwise, you’re going to be really upset a lot.

SFWA – I Now Can Join, But Why?”

I learned I hit all the pins to join SFWA (by the way, thank you everyone who has bought a copy of Dreamer (and In Search of Amika!)) … and I’m really not sure why I would want to.

SFWA stands for Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, a long-standing organization for spec fic (sci fi & fantasy) writers since the 60s. And, wowser, does their membership-base seems like a lot joined only in the 60s: kinda old, pretty White, speckles of diversity that feel more like tokenization than something legit. When I visit the SFWA site or see anything SFWA, I hardly see anyone different from some random White person. Sometimes they have colored hair. Sometimes they’re queer. Usually they’re White. Not very promising to me. I would like to join SFWA because it sounds like a good idea but I’m really just on the fence because of SFWA itself.

There are other “rival SFWA” options, if you will, but they don’t seem much better. There’s IASFA, which stands for the “Independent Alliance of Science Fiction & Fantasy Authors” but they seem borne from the 20Booksto50k group, which basically just seem to focus on military Sci Fi and show even less reason for me to know their existence as a Black, demi/ace spec fic author. They’re related to the whole Sad Puppies thing if I’m not mistaken, as well. At least SFWA has some marks of handling industry problems, such as #DisneyMustPay and Writer’s Beware (I may not care much for SFWA but I definitely like Writer’s Beware, so SFWA has that one hook to hang their hat on). IASFA plain doesn’t. It doesn’t offer anything in regards to actual diversity either – again, the Sad Puppies thing – so that makes it double pointless for me. If anything, IASFA kind of just serves as an unwitting advertisement for SFWA. That’s not what you ever want to be for your rival: their billboard.

SFWA does have Griefcom, which helps writers stuck in bad contracts, writers who are not getting paid as per contract, and other bad situations that can befall even the bigger writers. There’s also the SFWA emergency medical fund for writers who fall ill and it interrupts their writing. There’s even the Legal Fund, which is for issues that have to go to court. And there’s the NetGalley co-op discount (which is indeed useful to me). These are very useful things but right now, I don’t know for myself. My current situation is, thankfully (and surprisingly) well, but that never means things can’t turn south in a moment’s notice. But I also have been part of organizations where you pay dues and then are in need of their help … only to find nothing really is there. This isn’t to say that’s how SFWA is – remember, I’ve never joined – but I’ve had not-great experiences before with orgs. I’ll always be supportive of anything that even sniffs of a union but I also know sometimes things don’t always go great.

I’m already part of ALLi, the Alliance of Independent Authors, which is beneficial to me, as far as their Ingram codes are concerned. Free uploads and revisions up to five times in a month pays for itself, immensely! But the nanosecond that’s gone from ALLi, so am I. ALLi, like SFWA, also has a great background in affecting the publishing industry, such as also participating with AudibleGate, pointing out suspect business practices and scams, and other initiatives for independent authors. These are really nice things but the part that’s keeping me paying dues are the Ingram codes. I don’t really feel any support whatsoever as a Black, queer author. They have the same tokenization problem that SFWA has. They mean well but … good intentions don’t really mean much for me.

When it comes to interacting with the writing community, I’m very much in the “BIPoC* heavy/BIPoC only” crowd. If I need to hear random White people talk about their feelings in the writing world, there’s almost nowhere I can’t turn to for that. As it pertains to other historically marginalized authors, I already am part of a few groups that are for BIPoC or Black only author groups for free. I think I get the most out of the QPoC** groups. I get more comradery, fruitful interactions, and emotional support there. I don’t have to worry about code switching, I can be frank, and if there’s a problem as it pertains to anti-Blackness or anti-Asian sentiment or Islamophobia, or acephobia, etc, it gets dealt with, no waffling, no bullsh*t. That’s important.

I think the issue for me here is, in my experience, when you’re a PoC/minority in majority White spaces, groups and organizations, you’re basically going to be their social-structure guinea pig. Horrible things have to happen to you first (and usually a lot) before any movement is done – or believed. It’s like, as a crude example, instead of someone researching gunshot wounds to figure out if getting shot hurts or already guessing “getting shot hurts” because of the general reality about being harmed with a firearm, when a PoC is in the room, all that reasonable logic magically drops away and they go “nope, I have to shoot you to figure out if it hurts. Preferably, a lot.” Usually, the White folks in these spaces want to automatically believe “I’m a good person, I wouldn’t harm anyone”, which is fine and natural for people of all stripes to think. But the problem is when that thinking interrupt literal reality: “I’m a good person, I wouldn’t harm anyone – that’s why I think you’re automatically lying when you say I’m hurting you. The world did say you’re mendacious, after all.” Been there, dealt with that, there’s a reason why the horror genre comes easy to me despite the fact I have hardly ever consumed any horror media whatsoever in my life. It’s also part of why “Get Out” was noted correctly as a horror and Black audiences definitely saw it that way but White audiences thought that it should have been considered a “comedy” instead … which I’m sure, for Black movie goers, that added to the chill of the horror experience. I’m sure a lot felt like they were in a room sitting with a bunch of Charles Mansons. Or, as I like to call it, “Get Out: The 4D Experience”

It insanely creepy to deal with this incredibly normalized behavior. It’s the reason, I believe, why there are usually fireworks when a White person is accused of being racist … but they don’t mind doing racist acts. That cognitive dissonance of “Being called racist is bad because racists are bad … I am not bad. I do things but that doesn’t make me racist because racists are bad and I am Not Bad. I do not strive to be Bad therefore I can never be considered racist, who are Bad.” It is understandable that almost everyone wants to be considered a good person, it’s natural even! But, good grief, it isn’t true if the actions don’t add up. I personally am not exactly willing to shell out money (especially $100 a year) just to put up with that behavior. I rather be in environs where the people already know, through and through, “this is genuinely okay behavior and that is genuinely not-okay behavior”. Not “I want to think we’re all angels. No matter what.” SFWA is way too White and says way too many familiar wonky things (“This place is the most loving and supportive place ever”) that makes me go “Am I going to waste my money?” I’ll pay to participate in the Net Galley because that directly benefits me, I get to use Net Galley at a majorly reduced price (it goes from $400+ to $40, that’s pretty decent) but putting up with White nonsense paraded as “innocence” or “it’s just an opinion, everyone has one” for an extra $100 isn’t exactly an experience I would prefer to pay for – especially since I get to experience it for free, including when I don’t want to (which is literally “always”).

SFWA means well, and even has a DEI*** … but who doesn’t nowadays? Plus, DEI’s are moreso pandering & virtue signaling to other White people, as far as I’m concerned. They’re written really well and crafted strongly … and barely applied where its actually useful. Its like “these rules exist for when we feel like using them.” As a Black person, it basically is just fancy text that’s going to be ignored, window dressing. Or touted when the accused are, well, accused. (“This can’t happen here! Look at our pretty DEI!”) Guess how I know DEIs get used like that in majority White spaces.

Yeah, some may say “but you can join the Inclusion committee” – but why? SFWA has been around since the 60s, I was born in the late 80s, and we’re currently two decades into the new millennium/new century … are you freakin’ kiddin’ me? They should have sorted this nonsense out back in the 60s. End of story. No “we just learned about racism”, no “we didn’t know”, no “it was normalized”, none of that. Literally impossible. It was the 1960s. There are zero excuses. That Inclusion committee should have been existing, since the 60s. The very same people who can imagine galactic and fantastical beings from distant worlds – and do it for literal hundreds of pages – can’t wrap their heads around literal reality? Now, that’s what I call fiction and fantasy.

And I don’t feel like putting up with it, especially not paying money for it.

Look, I have many memories of being at the Baltimore Book Festival (because, woo, I’m a Baltimorean – and it was way better when it was in Mt. Vernon, not in the Inner Harbor) from being a teenager to growing up and SFWA never really did any effort to make me feel like I wanted to join, that I should join, that I would be wanted, all of that. The opposite, oh, sure, but that was it. I still remember the white tent (everyone had white tarp tents, they were exciting to me for some reason), the White people, and the cockamamie bullsh*t I regularly heard year after year by whoever sat behind the table. Regularly. Bring up anything about noting how non-diverse things appear on the SFWA table and they’ll get really sniffy & defiant in tone and bring up some random Token du Jour, like Ellen Oh, for example. Or their primary favorite: Octavia Butler, ugh.**** Or try to name some super obscure Nigerian author that I, a teenager/young adult, wouldn’t know about (and neither would the majority of the festival goers unless the author’s name was in big letters somewhere) to basically go “See! You don’t know what all the other 2 billion Black people on this planet is doing, I just now proved to you that it is you who is creating this mythical thing called ‘racism’ and I who am in the right. How dare you stir up trouble because we regularly show White people almost exclusively?” Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaah, I’m not sure if that behavior is deserving of my money in particular.

Some were nice and went “you should join” but it also was when SFWA was traditionally published authors only so the nice “you should join” kind of had the “assuming traditional publishers would even look at you. Who wants to read Black sci-fi anyways?” sitting behind it. Like saying “hey, we’re not keeping you out. That’s somebody else. Somebody we can literally pull up on their behavior but we’re gonna ignore that part. That’s somebody else, don’t go crying to us.” These were the people the SFWA thought should be tabling at the Baltimore Book Festival (in case people didn’t somehow know, Baltimore is a majority Black city) and be the mouthpiece of SFWA. I don’t think in all the years I have gone to the Baltimore Book Festival, I ever walked home with any SFWA material in my bags. I usually collect loads of stuff from the Baltimore Book Festival and socialize but SFWA did a really good job solidifying me not really wanting to join. I mean, they kinda told me from when I was a teenager, a kid. I’m literally in my 30s now. What else am I supposed to think? That I should pay $100/year for more of that? I can get insulted and dissuaded from spec fic literature for free, no need to pay for it.

I mean, at least SFWA isn’t Baltimore Science Fiction Society-level bad. BSFS (I never saw a more appropriate use of the term “bs” in a name, at least they’re honest) easily could make SFWA look like the bastion of diversity and inclusion … that’s how trash BSFS is. SFWA has problems out the wazoo and have done lots to pretend those problems don’t exist or just go “ehhhhhh, not a big deal” but BSFS really lives up to the “BS” in their acronym. I remember they would always mention the one (1) token Black dude in all of BSFS, Alexander. I knew Alex … and the fact that he basically went Get Out/Othello level nuts because of all the White people that surrounded him. He basically reserved that for the Black folks I suppose, he seemed to know how to keep it together for the White folks (because of the whole hyper-visibility, double consciousness thing, which can literally drive you mad – as it did him). He had massive internalized anti-Blackness problems that clearly were messing with him because, welp, he’s Black and he’s experiencing anti-Blackness in the fields he really wants to be in and didn’t want to acknowledge it. That’s really common for a lot of Black folks (and other PoC but definitely Black) in White spaces. The BSFS always touted his name as their One And Only (which is sad, you are celebrating that you have one Black person and not scratching your head “How are we the Baltimore Sci Fi Society and we only have one Black member in a majority Black city?”). Alex didn’t always know that, which means he didn’t sign up to be the Jesus of their organization. Oh, and it also affected how people treated Alex (y’know, because of the reputation he had no idea about that was thrown upon him). And Alex was about my age then, so really young (late teens, early 20s) … and this was how the folks surrounding him, who were way older (remember, these sci-fi/fantasy communities are usually piled full of silver ponytails, potbellies and living memories of when Kennedy was shot) acted. Yeah, no wonder Alex went bonkers.

Seeing that meltdown was not enjoyable. Nor was seeing how the White folks that would parade him so much would either pretend nothing was happening and that Alex was “just fine” or “well, it’s because of the Black people who tell him things, it has zero to do with us and the insane amount of pressure we literally put him in and he didn’t ask for.” They just wanted more Black people to join so they could treat those Black folks the same … and mainly so people could stop saying “BSFS is racist”, “BSFS doesn’t like diversity”. They didn’t care what happened to the Black member, just what the visibility of that Black member could get them – which were to make them human shields against rightful accusations. Instead of trying to actually create an environment that would naturally attract Black writers, any BIPoC writer really, and make them comfortable enough to stay there, BSFS basically did whatever they could to just keep the status quo the way it was but put on some window dressing. In other words, BSFS became a joke to Black spec fic writers in Baltimore: “Ey, you know the folks who always talk about Alex? You can tell they don’t have anyone there. It’s an entire klan meeting.” (“Anyone” meant “anyone Black” in this context.) They’re not even referred as “BSFS”, just “the folks who talk about Alex”. Well, that was then. I don’t think the BSFS really gets noted by the Black spec fic writers of Baltimore because of how the BSFS acted for literal years. I’ve been around loads of Baltimore writers and even Balticon is treated as a “White sci-fi convention”. I feel bad for any Black member they managed to rope in. That person probably is in severe need of deep therapy treatment.

Generally, White majority orgs do the usual, “we bring you in just so we can kick you back out and say we’re not prejudiced while being entirely prejudiced”. Anyone who tends to survive in that environment tends to be lauded by the White folks (“look, we treat that one like literal trash and they’re okay with it! You should be also! Say we’re good people, dangit!”) and that surviving one also tend to be pretty nuts. As in, if Negro Neurosis (to borrow a term from the Very Smart Brothas) was a DSM-V listed condition, that person would be checking almost all the boxes, if not every box. They know how to keep it together in front of the White folks, due to a lifetime of strict (and occasionally life-threatening) teaching from literal infancy, but when they’re around everyone else, they become a walking time bomb. Which is bad for them and all the BIPoC folks around them. Like someone installed a bomb in their head and said, “Go on and play with the other darkies, they’ll always think it’s you. We’re just good people trying to correct the balance, that’s all. Go explode over there.” Because the meltdown is never pretty. 

I already have mental problems, I don’t want those mental problems tho. So, yeah. SFWA has its trash moments, they have some compost. BSFS is just straight traaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaash. Both aren’t held in glowing regard for the reasons they themselves have created.

And, like I said earlier, I’m not sure if I want to pay for that. I’m not interested in the community, they made sure of that I wouldn’t want to, hands down. I just want the resources and to be left alone. I like Writers’ Beware and the Net Galley co-op but that’s about it. Maybe once I run into more contracts that ALLi can’t help for (I’ve been handling contracts really well so far by myself, thankfully (yay, having experience I never asked for in the music industry)) or become in super dire need of the Emergency Medical Fund (I will always be in need of mental health care but it’s so trash in this nation that, to be very obscenely frank, the mental healthcare in the USA might as well be renamed: “You’re better off killing yourself”), perhaps I’ll join. I mean, I would like to join, and I hit on all the pins to join, and it sounds like a good idea to join – but I don’t know if it is worth joining because all of the other issues that are really glaring.

I could spend that $100 on my editor, my artist, or my narrator – which would be way more beneficial to me than hearing “Oh noes! The PC police! Why can’t I be repugnant in peace? My bland story of tired stereotypes is interesting! It even was featured on the SFWA sidebar! Even netted a couple Nebulas!” on some random SFWA Slack channel or Discord or forum.

That simply isn’t worth money. Like I said, I would like to join and I have hit on all pins to join at any time if I wanted and there are some bits that sound alluring – but there are a lot more bits that do not. Maybe I will but I don’t really know for sure.

*BIPoC: Black, Indigenous, People of Color (PoC can also be used just fine)

**QPoC: Queer People of Color

*** Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

**** It isn’t Butler herself who deserves the “ugh” but the “ugh” goes to the fact that it’s usually how you can tell you’re talking to someone who knows next to zero diverse spec fic. They only keep about three to five in mind and call it a day, mainly to “prove [random Black person who has a valid point] wrong” about the issues of the Spec Fic community. Or just the “why should I shell out money to you guys?” part.

Reviewing My Choices

I’m looking at potential reviewers to approach for future works and one thing I have noticed about myself (that I already knew all along):

I prefer to seek out BIPoC reviewers only.

Reason? I want my works to have a fair review, be it positive or negative. I personally do not believe that is really something I can expect from White reviewers, who usually have next to zero background in reading, studying or understanding any diverse literature, let alone Black literature. (Trust me, I’m a Black kid with a degree in English literature from a White university, I’m in the field of library science and I have been around Whiteness in literary settings – if it isn’t obsessing or waxing poetic about Shakespearean or Vonnegut literature, their opinions are pretty pointless).

Any piece of literature in the world is going to have its own themes, ideas, literary styles, concepts, etc. If all you know is of the European diaspora literature … and you were told that only the European diaspora literature is “actual” literature and should be the yardstick of “what is literature?” – especially “what is good/actual literature” – you can’t fairly judge a book that falls outside of the European diaspora. At all.

I have already heard many White readers take a whack at looking at and critiquing literature that’s on the rest of the planet. It’s really, really bad. A lot are not taught much at all the idea of “there are different perspectives on this planet and not everything was made for your personal consumption. You might have to broaden your viewpoints and think a little.” They’re just patted on the head and coddled … and then these folks cry blood when they’re informed even politely, “You read Joe Turner: Come & Gone incorrectly.” Guess how I know?

It takes time, skill and study to learn literature, there’s a reason why it is a degree. Especially if you want to critique it, then it takes more time, study and skill. If all a White reviewer knows about Black literature is “Murdering Black people for existing is wrong apparently (we literally have to be slow-walked about it at adult ages but are somehow not called ‘potentially homicidal sociopaths’)” and “Black people suffer a lot”, then no, please do not touch or review my work. Not all Black created work is Suffera literature. Black works do not and should not exist to primarily slow-walk White people things they should have learned as children nor should it cater to White ideas, opinions or feelings. Problem is, the average White literary reviewer does not get that. They may say they do but, trust me, they don’t. Guess how I know?

I try to be pretty well versed in my literature. I took classes studying Asian literature from various nations (as well as their language classes), Black literature, etc. I had gender study courses, crit race theory courses, literature courses that had diverse picks (when I had BIPoC* professors or White professors that actually knew how to do their jobs). Actually, I received more diverse learning in high school than I did in college. (That’s pathetic. Especially since college costed money, high school didn’t)). I also personally consume diverse media around the world (I know 5+ languages, I might as well use them) very regularly. It’s a life long education course, in a way. Good thing I actually like learning new things and being exposed to new ideas. Even if I don’t understand them, I want to see them anyways. If I have to speak on it, I always frontload the best I can, “My perspective can be very wrong af, I recommend looking for an informed person from that cultural background. I learned a lot but I could always miss something” because it’s true. For example, I can talk about the trans identity from a scholarly and academic perspective, from a well-read perspective – but that doesn’t change the major fact that A ) I’m very much a cis person and B ) I must frontload that I’m cis and that I should center other, way more informed (and actually trans!) people. Yeah, I’m well read about the trans experience and know trans people but that doesn’t make me a trans person nor does it mean my opinion on the trans experience matters at all. (It doesn’t. I’m cis.)

I want someone who is well versed in Black literature – or just plain not “White is automatically right, we will only allow supportive disagreement if there is any” type of reviewer. I don’t cater my books to the White gaze so I’m not interested in getting a bad review because a White reviewer goes “I didn’t understand anything that was happening in the book. I don’t know how to sympathize for a Black character ever and I only like to read about ones that are graphically suffering from state violence and goads my White guilt. And what is a satin wrap?” or “I took one (1) class of Black literature (I hardly paid attention in and debated with the teacher every chance I got) therefore, I am very well qualified to say this book has [name every incorrect theme evaaaar]. I read ‘1619 Project’, I know about the Negro condition – I mean the whatever-they-call-themselves-now-Is-it-Black(?) people condition.” And these are people with degrees loftier than mine. But always makes me wonder “what Cracker Jack box did you get your degree out of?” Back in college, it really super showed me that “college” definitely does not mean “smart”. I knew it prior but it was definitely nailed down by the time my university experience was over.

While I do plan to have my works in front of major review publications, such as Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal, I don’t expect much of the world out of them. I personally put more weight behind BIPoC reviewers and suggesters because the reviews seem more thorough and well, understanding of the work, even if the work didn’t receive a glowing review. It’s not that I think my works are more likely to get a positive review from a BIPoC reviewer, just a fairer review. Which is all I want. Fair review from a hopefully knowledgeable reviewer.

It would be nice to hope that I get a knowledgeable White reviewer (a lot of the reviewers of the major publications are indeed White. I think they would rather drink poison than actually diversify outside of blatant tokenization) but from my experiences, I don’t count on it. I’ve seen snide reviews, demoralizing reviews, all sorts of reviews that were supposed to be professional but basically went “This is why we think only White people should write everything, including PoC stories. No one (White) can understand this sh*t.” This thinking is even taught in college! It would be nice to get a BIPoC reviewer in a major publication (who is hopefully not the self-hating, “It would be nice to be White” type, which is commonly sought out in academic, STEM and literature circles), at least I can hope that my work would get some kind of a fair shake. At minimum, I don’t have to think, “They hated it because they had to read two words of Spanish or Chinese and no one was beaten or murdered by a cop so they saw no value in the work.”

If anyone thinks I’m being too negative or separatist, imagine what it might feel like to know your creative endeavors can be dismissed as nonsense simply because of someone else’s unchecked bias.  Not because your work sucks. Not because you didn’t put in enough effort. Simply because they were taught, “When you see this, automatically consider it ‘bad’. If they’re not White, they can’t write” since pre-school to university – and then shoved into decision-making jobs and/or taste-making decisions. I have to navigate that, which is not fun. I’m simply trying to duck that unchecked and coddled bias as much as possible. I’m reacting to that behavior, in other words. I bet if that behavior disappeared overnight, so would my apt avoidance. Again, all I want is a fair shot.

Besides, since my primary audience is BIPoC (and QPoC**, by extension), shouldn’t they be the ones I go to first? They’re the readers who will best understand – and hopefully enjoy – the work, it makes sense to me.  If some random White kid can’t understand Dreamer (which would baffle me a little, it isn’t James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, geez), that would be 100% not my problem. I didn’t get slow walked or coddled when I didn’t understand Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, no one. I was just declared “predictably stupid” until I picked it up. And that was when I was a child. I got the same treatment in college. So, yeah, at least I’m not calling the kid “predictably stupid” (and then blocking them out of life changing job opportunities, resources, etc), I’m just saying their difficulty of understanding is 100% not my problem. They’re free to, y’know, learn with all the kid-glove level of resources available. If they can enjoy it, even if they don’t understand it, then that’s marvelous! It’s the least I can ask for as an author. Like I said, BIPoC and QPoC are my primary audience – thus the audience I care most about and make my works for – but not my only audience. I look at media not made for me all the time but I don’t treat that media as if it should cater to me or thus be considered “poor quality/pointless”.

Then there’s the fact I grew up with, well, street writers. People who wrote and sold books on street corners out of their backpacks or from small wire stalls. Sometimes they sold at literary events (occasionally, when not scoffed at) and they still managed to get some success. No, they were not highlighted by big name review publications (who would also probably rather drink poison than read it because “not (our) literature”) but they were extremely popular with actual readers. That means I had the chance to see that it isn’t impossible to build a reader-base without the boosts of bigger publications.

Because guess what? Just because my works will be submitted to these bigger review publications, that doesn’t mean they’ll be read or reviewed. These big publications admittedly get a lot of books, tens of thousands of them, so that means they won’t review every single one. And given what kind of books I usually see featured, I don’t hold much breath. Even when standing in a cranberry bog of books, they still figure out how to cherry pick.

Thus, it is better I look for more accessible reviewers who at least I don’t have to worry will give me a bad review because they had to read a story about someone with a “hood” name or some other ridiculous, pointless reason. That way, I have my bases covered. If my works are not ever touched by the bigger review pubs, that’s fine. I mainly am going the “big publication route” to show bookstores and libraries that my works exists to put in their bookstores and libraries, but I can do that with other ways that are more laborious but still fairly successful.

I just want my work reviewed by someone who hopefully knows what they’re talking about.

*BIPoC: Black, Indigenous, People of Color (PoC can also be used just fine)

*QPoC: Queer People of Color

Pen Test, Test 1 2 3

I have been amassing an insane amount of inks recently. I think I’m done with my ink kick, I have more ink than I think I’ll probably be writing with … well, I come up with ideas regularly so I doubt that, but I definitely have a lot of ink to last me for the next few years, regardless of the length of what I write.

When I get a new thing of ink, I squwee that I have it. I stare at it for a while because it’s so pretty. Then I swatch it. When I first learned how to swatch my ink, it looked so haphazard because I 1000% didn’t know what I was doing.

See? Very haphazard.

I swatch so that I have a small personal library of ink samples so I have a handy dandy reference guide of which ink to choose for whatever work I write with. Every ink I have has a swatch and a one page story written as a sampler of how the ink looks in written word (basically “will I feel like staring at this ink color on page 100+?”). The only story that does not have one page because I was writing to test how much ink I can get out of my then new pen is a small novella that I’m really enchanted and proud of, titled Will of the Wisp: Snow & Storm (that work won’t come out for a very long time, sorry everybody). I write on Strathmore paper, which is never tested in ink swatch vids (as far as I have seen) so that means it’s sometimes a bit of a (disappointing) surprise when I swatch them on my paper.

Back to swatchin’. I take a q-tip and swab down a marked-out box so that I can see how the ink looks from dark to light (if there is sheen, color change, how it lays on the page, etc). I also do a tweezer swatch, where I take a pair of tweezers (I got the idea from GadgetStop321’s channel), dip it in the ink, press the tweezer togethers and smear it across the page in a straight line. It shows me more detail in the ink that the box swatch may not show, such as pooling color change, sheen, etc. I also write down the ink manufacturer and color in the ink itself (I sometimes wonder if I should get a dip pen but I just got an ultrasonic cleaner so it’s not needed). And with the remaining ink in my pen (I dip it only for swatches/ink tests), I write a one-page sample ink story. It shows me how the ink acts on the page when written down long form and how it looks when the ink is running out in the pen.

I’ve gotten better at it.

See? Not so haphazard.

The inks I have:

Ferris Wheel Press Inks:
Lady Rose– Light colored
Storied Blue – Light colored, gave away
Dusk in Bloom– Light colored
Blue Cotton Candy – Very light colored, gave away
Cream of Earl – Very light colored, gave away
Strawberry Macaron – Very light colored, gave away
Stroke of Midnight – Has shimmer but no sheen to be seen on my paper, promised both
Jelly Bean Blue – Surprise sheen! Sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, sometimes not

Dominant Industry
Dominant Blue – Sheens! Is close to Jelly Bean Blue in base color
Periwinkle Blue – Light colored, pretty

Colorverse
CMa (Sirus Star) – Light colored, the color of a sea-faring sky, gave away

Sailor
Manyo line, Sakura – Bright colored and orange. Sakura is pink in my head, not orange, gave away

Diamine
Shimmering Seas – Shimma’. That’s what I wanted, that’s what it gave. Clogged my pen a couple times. Worth it.
Writer’s Blood – Gaaaaaaaaaaawth. Does indeed look like blood. Very goth.
Midnight Hour – I love this ink! From the name to the fact it sheens! Dries out in the pen a little fast, tho, due to the heavy sheening property. Still pretty.

Birmingham Ink Co.
Voltaic Arc – Promised sheen, never really delivered on my paper. It’s more of a bleen teal than blue, gave away

Kaweco
Midnight Blue – dusky blue-black. What Dusk in Bloom would be if it were darker

Kiwi Inks
Custom ink (blue with red sheen and rainbow shimmer) – Tons of shimmer but my paper sops up the sheen, darn.

Higgins
Higgins Fountain Pen India Ink – It’s plain black ink I never intended to buy but I have it

Told you I got a lot of ink. Not all of it is the same size, some are in a small amount (smallest, 3ml), some are in a big amount (biggest, 85ml). Maybe one day I will get a scented ink but I don’t know. I really want to make sure I stay focused on my writing when I write.

I wanted to get, well, not black. When I was writing with a plain Bic Atlantis, plain black was fine, no fuss, no nothing. But since buying a fountain pen that can take a myriad of colors? I want variety. It is definitely going to be one ink color per written work (unless I run out mid-work, then I’ll just switch to another ink color) but I want to have different colors. I wanted to have blue family colors because blue is easy to read (and my favorite color). But I also wanted Not Normal colors, like Lady Rose and Cream of Earl. I always get dark blue or black in something, I wanted to mix things up a little. Without killing my eyes, of course. I have to remember that whatever ink I get, I need to be okay with staring at for 100+ pages. I used to write my stories in colored gel pens so I’m used to typing a story I wrote in “Gah my eyes! Neon Orange”. But I don’t like to do it often. I wanted a translucent ink so that’s why I got Sakura & Strawberry Macaron. Hopefully they won’t kill my eyes.

Update: I got Sakura and Strawberry Macaron. Sakura isn’t the “correct” color and Strawberry Macaron hardly shows up on the page. I gave both away to an artist friend who then told me, “These inks are violence. You hate me don’t you?” Friendship is magical, I tell ya.

I write the ink the work was penned in at the end of the work, so that I know what I wrote it in exactly. Just in case I pick up the work and go “wow, that ink was super pretty” or “what possessed me to get this one?”

Ink is not that pricy – depending on what you get. My cheapest ink is Higgins’ Fountain Pen Ink India ($5, 73ml). My most expensive ink is Ferris Wheel Press’ Dusk in Bloom ($36, 85ml). Ferris Wheel Press inks are pretty pricy (their cheapest single bottle is $22, 38ml). Everyone else is in the $10 or less (Diamine) or $10-$20 range (Colorverse, Sailor, Dominant Industry). And one bottle will last you a while so it isn’t a waste of money. I write over a hundred pages in roughly half a week so I need a lot of ink but the average writer will do just fine with a single bottle. I also write with an extra fine nib (it’s literally like a needle tip) so that stretches the ink use out also. So, no, you will not run out of ink massive fast. Unless you are writing the entire series of Lord of the Rings and all other accompanying books at breakneck speed, you sincerely do not need more than one bottle. A little will go a super long way.

Cleaning my fountain pen is not difficult, thankfully. It can be taken completely apart so I can clean every single component. I don’t do that, running it under water and drying it with a paper towel is just fine. I leave my pen alone for super long stretches of time so I like it as cleaned out as possible so it is ready to go on the next story. For that, I got an ultrasonic cleaner, a small one. It really cleans out all the old ink! I found a couple colors bleeding from my nib when I gave it a second clean. Black, my first color, and blue from Midnight Hour. The ultrasonic is 10000000% not necessary but I like it a lot. If something is super affordable and can save me time, I’m doing it. I have a small desiccant bag in my pen holder so my pen can dry out faster in the carrier after cleaning.

Historically, the average writer would have just one bottle of ink and hardly clean their pen. If there was a problem with it, they would troubleshoot and then take the pen to the pen shop if the troubleshooting didn’t work. Fountain pens have not been around for that long, roughly since the mid 1800s. Everything else prior to that were quills and reeds and brushes dipped into some container of ink. All the stuff I’m doing is really modern, perhaps overkill, but I want to make sure my pen lasts a super long while – especially for the price I paid. I got a limited edition pen with a fancy color, even on the nib, I want it around as long as possible.

A filled chamber of ink in my pen, the TWSBI 700VacR, is almost 3ml of ink – I learned this from writing with a sample of Diamine’s Shimmering Seas, which is 3ml. Only a couple big drops of ink were left in the sample vial so that means my pen can do basically 3ml on a full charge.

I can write two signatures – which is 60 pages for my handstitched journals – on a single filled-to-the-gills chamber. The average work I create is about 3-5 signatures. One future work is about 8 signatures but basically has 256 pages in it (remember, I stitch my own journals so I don’t have to standardize anything. Trololololololo). So, for the average work, which is 30 pages per signature, my pen basically takes up about 4.5 – 7.5 ml ink per work. The ink bottle that holds the most is my Ferris Wheel Press orb bottles (Dusk in Bloom, Jelly Bean Blue), which are 85ml. This means (assuming my math is correct, I never have been much of a numbers person) I can write roughly 11 – 19 novels with just one 85ml bottle of Ferris Wheel Press ink.

Good thing I have over 40+ works planned as of this posting, not counting series.

I am coming for Gary Paulsen’s crown, bwahahaha. (Corín Tellado can keep the throne, tho. I don’t know if I have over 5,000+ books in me.)

So now, I have a crapton of ink. I like my small collection. I hope I can use it all.

I may have a page for “inks I have written works in” for those who may be interested and so I personally have a one-stop shop of knowing what ink was used for what work. These are all for works that are most likely not out yet so it’s just title names of the future.

So far, some of the titles/inks

The Omake – Ferris Wheel Press’ Jelly Bean Blue & Diamine’s Shimmering Seas
Will of the Wisp: Snow and Storm – Higgins’ Fountain Pen India Ink & Diamine’s Writer’s Blood
Midnight Hour – Diamine’s Midnight Hour
Crystal Lung – Diamine’s Writer’s Blood

Yes, it does seem I write with Diamine a lot. They make pretty colors, what can I say? I may get an “indecisive” ink, the ink that I’ll just use when I can’t choose what color to pick. But I already have enough ink.

Some future works have already been slated for ink picks. Soaring, for example, is already slated for Kaweco’s Midnight Blue, because of the color and how small the bottle is for such an expectantly long work. Midnight Hour was slated for, well, Diamine’s Midnight Hour. It’s good that I have a lot of ink. I don’t have to think about running out anytime soon, nor plinking down more money on pens to take apart when I can just refill the pen that I have.

“Dreamer” is on NetGalley!

Better late than never but Dreamer is available for reviewers, librarians and booksellers to get a free for review on NetGalley via SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America).

So far, Dreamer is one of the most requested books so get yourself a copy now! Dreamer will only be available on NetGalley for the month of May.

Gave Google Books’ Publisher service for AI Audiobooks a Try – It has Pros and Cons

I got an email inviting me to try the beta testing of the Google AI audiobook service. It basically converts your ebooks you have uploaded on Google Books as a Publisher into an audiobook. They have many different voices to chose from, women and men, different accents/nationalities, etc. By the way, through the nature of metadata, Google themselves will probably see this so: Screw You, Google. Learn how to tell the difference between a dialect and a disability. (For everyone else: I’m Baltimorean, this is why I said that)

Admittedly, some of the voices sound really, really human-like, such as “Madison”. As long as there’s no character dialogue, I would most likely believe at a glance that it was a human being – a bit of a bored one but a human being all the same. With character dialog, it becomes really obvious.

Now, I have actual human narrators for my works. All my works that are in audio are all by living people. I like tech (tho I should probably like it a little less because I spent so much time trying to edit out the breaths of my poor narrator, Soraya Butler, on Dreamer … because I was used to AI voices and thought “Oh, noes, is it okay if people can hear a narrator breathe normally?” Yes, yes it is. It very is.) but human narration is not going away any time soon. The thing about human narrators is that they can inflect, have tone and express emotion that an AI simply can’t grasp. I’ve worked with AI, human emotions are hard to replicate, especially emotional tone. (And the AI doesn’t get emotion much either, especially when the emotion play a role in decision making.) And it showed that here in my samplings of the audiobook Ais. The AI got the narration down fantastically … as long as you want a calm, mostly unfeeling voice.

This audiobook idea might be good for people who are putting up literary works that don’t really require much emotion and inflection, like a non-fiction work perhaps. For fiction, especially in speculative fiction, which is what I do, it might not really be too helpful, outside of helping catch remaining sneaky typos as you read your book along with the spoken word. Self interruptions, multi-character interruptions, trailing off, things like that are not really caught well in the AI. If a character is winding up from anger, the AI will 1000% not convey that. Everything is pretty, welp, flat for the most part. If you have calm prose, this AI route is the route for you.

Unless you use Findaway Voices for distro. Findaway Voices explicitly says in its contract that it will not distribute any AI narrated works whatsoever, and that they do indeed check. So that means the AI audiobook would only live on Google Audiobooks … which Findaway already distributes to. That’s for Findaway and Google to sort out.

Speaking of contracts, Google’s AI contract isn’t 100% “free and clear”. I would have to read it more but basically, they own the voice while you own the words. So, if there is any dispute going, they can snatch the voice, pretty much taking down your book. What if Google wants to censor the book somehow? AI uses deep machine learning to say the correct words correctly, it therefore “knows” what it’s saying. What if you write a book and there’s a passage about Uighur people? Even if it is just a plain ol’ Uighur character sitting in a park eating ice cream, no mention whatsoever of genocide or oppression. Google already has been caught with being sneaky about this stuff. The example that stands out in my mind is when Hong Kong was taken over by China, if you put into Google Translate “I’m sad for Hong Kong” to translate into Chinese, it will literally say “I’m happy for Hong Kong”. The two words “happy”/”sad” are not similar in Pinyin (English written Chinese) or in neither traditional or simplified Chinese characters. But there would have been no way for a person to spot that unless they also knew both English & Chinese. Someone at Google had put into the coding, “when someone types in this, put out that”. It only was changed back to the accurate Chinese phrase once people pointed that out en masse.

All AI, algorithms, deep machine learning, all code everywhere is just plain 1s and 0s. All they do is execute orders, no independent thinking whatsoever. If you type in the code, “every time someone says ‘hello’, jump three times and chirp”, that’s exactly what the code is going to pump out. Unless you made an error in the code somewhere, the tech is going to jump three times and chirp when someone says “hello”. It isn’t because the tech is an English speaker by nature but someone told the tech, “when you hear this particular string of sound, this is how you react”. It could be Japanese, it could be Swahili, whatever, it is up to the person coding, not the technology itself.

This means that if you write a book about Black issues and Google feels like suppressing that because, who knows why, maybe because clearly no one at Google really likes reading the book Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble there or whatever random reason floats across their brain, their AI voice is going to be informed either “don’t say these parts”, “skip these passages/chapters” or “say something else” and, most importantly, “make it look seamless”. The average audiobook listener is not reading along with the book in hand. Just like the English/Chinese example above, it only works if you don’t know you’re being tricked. It wouldn’t be difficult to mod things up from Google’s side. As long as you’re not checking what they’re doing, it flies.

Also, who knows, it could get the account, publisher or author flagged/shadow-banned without knowing it. Or passed over to governments and institutions who are being nosy for really nefarious (and usually oppressive) reasons. Because, remember, the AI “knows” what it is saying. It can be useful so that people don’t try to upload, say, “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” into audiobooks and thus steal royalties, the AI can point it out. But it also can flag the book on the back-end as “Talks about Black issues in a way that makes anti-Black people moody, caution alert”.

AI is very good at deciphering human words but it still kind of screws up when it comes to our inflections, accents (again, screw you Google. Accents are not disabilities (sorry everyone, just gotta throw that in there)), etc etc. It’s not as easy to figure which works could be a “problem” work with human parts, but when you feed a literal text into the AI and let the AI pump out whatever it pumps out? Wow, so much easier, looking at it from a “nefarious coder” perspective.

Will I be using AI for my works? Maybe just to run a last check on the print versions, reading the words along with the book so I can catch remaining typos. But I’m not publishing them and I’m not going to give the AI that much help where I don’t need to. It’s just going to be so that I can give my human narrator a cleaner script and get rid of the last typos that somehow eluded me. A faceless tool that will be replaced the second I find a better alternative, in other words.

“Dreamer” is now carried at Afrori Books in the UK & the audiobook is now available! Get a free audiobook copy

Dreamer is now being physically carried overseas at Afrori Books, a British bookshop! See the listing here! 

I’m very excited! If you are in the UK, please get yourself a copy! Dreamer will also be sold in-store so you can walk down and get yourself a physical copy!

And! The Audiobook is available wherever audiobooks are sold! Please feel free to get a copy 

Anyone fast enough can get a free copy of the audiobook by clicking this link  and putting in this code:

HTZMC1WKC

The code will stay up until someone uses it. Enjoy!

Listen to the preview below:

https://multimindpublishing.files.wordpress.com/2022/04/dreamer-13m-sample.mp3

 

Dreamer is Out! Get a Copy!

Dreamer is finally available for purchase everywhere books & ebooks are sold. The “Published Works” page has been updated to reflect this – and to showcase a 5 min sample of the upcoming audiobook, narrated by Soraya Butler. The audiobook is currently in the edit phase and will be out at the end of this month.

Bookish Brews is doing a Giveaway of “Dreamer”

Get a free copy of “Dreamer” from Bookish Brews, the giveaway is open to everyone around the world. Open until March 19th.

What you have to do:

Retweet and follow @Bookish_Brews on TwitterFollow me on GoodReads (@MultiMindz). (I tried to open it up for folks on StoryGraph but that was a no-can-do)

And there you go. It is open to everyone around the world!

Dreamer comes out on March 18th!

“Spray paint and ink pens, I write in every color I think in”

I got a new pen. I originally used the Bic Atlantis fine point for the longest time (mainly because it flowed well and I had the squishy grip version) – but then the supply chain shake-up occurred. I know that the pandemic has definitely struck the supply chain in all sorts of odd ways but I never thought it would affect my pens. Right now, I can only find the Bic Atlantis in medium point, not fine or extra fine. And when I get these pens, I basically would tear them apart for their cartridge so that I can shove it in my squishy pen. That’s a lot of plastic and springs laying around. I keep the springs for my tech projects but the plastic goes in the trash. Some turtle is going to eventually choke on that and it’s wholly unnecessary.

It also wasn’t great writing The Harlequin and running through four pens – four pens I only could find by tearing my apartment apart while trying not to forget the story or scene I was writing. I have shown this on Twitter, I run through several pens when I write one work. I’m really proud when I do that because it tells me that I’m doing something, getting something done. But the “hunting for a new pen because you forgot you ran out” thing is not great. And double suck with the fact that the pen I write with, they don’t really make any more. And even if so, it’s a lot of plastic and metal I’m discarding.

So, while looking for replacement pen cartridges, I found fountain pens. I have been writing with fountain pens since I was a teenager but I always had cartridges fountain pens. I wanted an inkwell fountain pen. Because, fancy.

And I got one!

It’s a Twisbi Vac700R, Limited Edition Iris, extra fine nib

Please don’t look up the price. I try to focus on the pretty, myself.

No more plastic! Just shove it in an inkwell, have it slurp up some ink and start writing. This introduces a new problem – color. I don’t want to write in plain black since I have a vibrant option not to. The pen is almost entirely see-through, why not? But I also don’t want to get caught up in just selecting colors for a work because I make my system as plain and systemic as possible. Nothing to distract, nothing to deviate.

But, but, ink colors. And it doesn’t help that ink bottles are very pretty.

See? Pretty.

I like pretty.

This means I now have a crapton of ink. I learned from the fountain pen community – mainly watching them swatch random inks on various paper for hours – how there were different kinds of inks and styles. And that my paper & pen are haters. No glitter, it will clog my extra fine nib. No sheen, my paper will sop it all up and turn the color plain (It made my Birmingham Pen Co. ink turn dark teal, it’s supposed to be dark blue and with a sheen whenever it catches the light). All my works are penned on Southworth paper. Wait! No. Diamine will sheen on my paper but Birmingham Pen Co. ink won’t.

Now, in exchange for this hateration, I get the same writing experience I had prior, if not better. I don’t have bleed through, the words lay down fine on the page, etc. The primary purpose of the ink is to be legible and get the story on the page, not glitter and sheen (tho the second anyone make a glitter ink for extra fine nibs, I’m nabbin’ it). I also don’t have to dissect and tear apart pens just to get the cartridge and when I run out, I just have to fill up my pen again, not hunt for another pen to destroy for its ink. Just refill and go. And since I use a special filler designed for my pen, I get no ink anywhere. Not even on my hands. Even when it comes to cleaning, I just have to run the ink chamber and the nib itself under water and let it dry. Because I’m sadiddy, I use a small ultrasonic cleanser (literally not necessary, I’m just extra, and the pen stays in storage for a long time between works so it’s useful to me.) So, yes, there is tear down but it’s for sensible upkeep, nothing is getting chucked into the trash.

The inks I have so far, at the time of this posting:

Higgin’s Fountain Pen Ink India (wasn’t intentional, just needed ink and Birmingham was slow to ship)

Diamine’s Writer’s Blood (Because gaaaaawth, very goth.)

Birmingham Pen Company’s Voltaic Arc (which my paper turns dark teal and removes all the sheen)

Diamine’s Midnight Hour (Makes me think of the song “Midnight Hour” by Talib Kweli and Estelle. The prettiest ink I own so far – and it has sheen! Birmingham made me think sheen inks don’t work on my paper, Diamine proved them wrong.)

Inks I plan to get:

Ferris Wheel Press InkDominant IndustryColorverse

Now, I would love to get Montegrappa’s Harry Potter Inks in Ravensclaw, buuuuuuuuuut Rowling really has shown her whole derriere, hasn’t she? From the blatant transphobia to the fiddling she is even doing with her own stories* (wizards don’t poop? Then what about the prefect bathroom?! Moaning Myrtle!) And then there’s the race switcheroo they did with Lavender in the movies. How shady. So I’mma pass. I really, really want the ink – but then I forgot that Ferris Wheel Press literally exists. I love their whimsy and magicalness of their ink and presentation.

I haven’t been able to find a Black-owned ink maker, there’s gotta be one somewhere. I would love to try their inks if I ever come across one.

J. Herbin inks are nice … but they’re a French ink company that’s clocking 350+ years. Yay, Voltaire wrote Les Miserables with their ink … and so did Louis XIV and Napoleon. Y’know, people who created or super created institutions and structures that definitely owe my family tree reparations, both my American side and my Jamaican side (I’m half Jamaican, half Black American) lol. Not at all J. Herbin’s fault whatsoever. They been around for 350 years and they’re ink makers, they didn’t create the historical harm. But I can’t help but remember my grandmother’s words “A Black man robs with a gun but a White man robs with a pen” when I look at J. Herbin’s history and the notables in it. Again, not their personal fault, it’s just my personal thing. Diamine started in 1864, the British still were acting stupid around the world but had some (and I mean some, imagine a gnat’s wing) of its act together. And they, y’know, specifically made the ink used by Obama (& President Medvedev of Russia) for the nuclear arms treaty in Prague, Royal Blue, a very partial save to me. Extremely partial. Imagine half a fly’s wing.

Diamine also started during one of my favorite historical eras: The Victorian Era. The Victorian Era is also one of my favorite – if not my only favorite – eras in Western literary history. I personally think Victorian literature is the apex of Western literature**, especially dark romanticism – which I read a lot of. (Dark romanticism is a subset of Victorian literature, meant to reply to Romanticism). In other words, Diamine pulled ahead of J. Herbin for me because the person who made Diamine just so happened to do so during one of my personal favorite eras of both history and literature … and in the very country that created that defining literature and historical era. Whereas J. Herbin still has “Orient” in one of their ink color names (Rouge d’Orient = English: Oriental Red). I jokingly call them “Oppression in a bottle”, because it’s funny and silly. So, I shall stare at the J. Herbin ink because they’re pretty – some are even scented! Buuuuuut I’ll buy a couple bottles from Diamine. And ‘das it. Two. Ya got lucky, Diamine.

I’m in love with Dominant Industry and Ferris Wheel Press. Both are way newer than Diamine and J. Herbin. They both started within the last 20 years, if not less. Dominant Industry is in South Korea (who, like Britain, I have a bit of a soft spot for. And who, unlike Britain, doesn’t have a history that make me stare lopsided, going, “wow, sooooo, you’re trash. Pretty trash. Partial compost. But still trash.” Especially as it pertains to my family tree). Now, there are other S. Korean brands, such as Colorverse and 3 Oysters, but the bottles for Dominant Industry are pretty and so are the inks. They make me think of lightbulbs.

Ferris Wheel Press is so … fanciful! Gah, the whimsy. They capture whimsical perfectly from the box to the bottle to the ink. Makes me think of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Fanciful carnival in the sky” level whimsical and fantastical. They’re Canadian, meh (Canada is a mix of British and French wtf history – but they like to pretend they’re nice & open minded, borrowed from Britain). As long as Ferris Wheel keeps up the whimsy, I’ll keep staring. And buying. And that’s saying something, their bottles are not cheap. Fancy ink, fancy bottle, fancy price.

As for the pen itself. It writes well. I want the thinnest nib evaaaaar. I should be able to draw blood with it nearly. Thin lines are nice lines and that’s what I like. It writes beautifully to me. One fill of the ink chamber (I call it “the vial” since that’s what it reminds me of) can go for 60 skeleton journal pages, which is basically 8.5”x5.5”. It’s literally a plain piece of paper folded in half so perhaps a single fill can do 30 full pages but for my journals, it’s 60 on a single fill. That’s about 2 signatures (bundles of folded sheets of paper) for my skeleton journals. I write over 100 pages regularly and my journals are usually about 3-5 signatures long. The journals for predicted super long works are about 8 signatures long.

That means I need a lot of ink and a very reliable pen, in other words.

This really does need to be said – any pen and any paper can be used for creative writing. Any recording medium can be used for creative writing. Whether you’re using a free copy of Libre office on a cheap laptop, whether you’re using a plain Bic pen nabbed from the post office and some regular printer paper lifted from work, whether you’re typing it into the Notes of your $35 phone. If it can retain words, it can work. Do not think you need to start sinking mega money into hoity toity writing instruments just because a random person on the internet did. Don’t do it. Not worth it. If it isn’t for you, it is definitely a waste of money just to do the total basics of writing down a story. You can write down a story anywhere that can hold onto words.

If anyone wants to use a fountain pen, they don’t have to be as expensive as mine. There are $3 inkwell refillable fountain pens that still look really nice (Pilot Petit1, take out the cartridge when you’re done and it’s inkwell refillable). There is $5 ink (Higgin’s Fountain Pen Ink India) that will last you a long while. Still looks nice, still does the fancy thing, all of that.

I feel like I needed to include that because I have definitely seen in some writing circles “I want to write a book, what computer should I get?” – any that has a functional keyboard, screen and word processor, bare minimum. “I want to write a book, what pen should I get?” – any that has ink in it, bare minimum. It doesn’t require fancies to write at all. I personally love fountain pens and ink and all sorts but I still wrote with a Bic Atlantis for the longest time until they stopped making it easy to find.

*Yes, she is free to meddle and mix with her own stories. They are hers, she wrote them. I would want the same for my own works. It’s just … the blatant inconsistency! Gah!

** @ the gods, don’t @ me. I said what I said. The refinery, the fashion, the class. (Sans the racial & gender bullsh*t, they could have left that in the trash)