S. Andrew Swann's Blog, page 5
August 9, 2017
An Author’s Nightmare
Imagine you’re a writer, and you’ve finally achieved your dream, your first novel published. Imagine you’ve had the good fortune of landing a number of positive reviews ahead of publication. Everything’s going great, then someone writes a horrible review of your novel, not just calling it bad, but dangerous. Your book is racist in the worst way imaginable. You thought you wrote a book against prejudice and intolerance, and now you’re facing a Twitter crusade against you and your book, people calling on your publisher to pull it, and an avalanche of one-star reviews by readers who have not even read the book but are now certain it is problematic.
This isn’t hypothetical. It happened to debut author Laurie Forest and her novel The Black Witch. From the article @ Vulture:
The Black Witch, a debut young-adult fantasy novel by Laurie Forest, was still seven weeks from its May 1 publication date, but positive buzz was already building, with early reviews calling it “an intoxicating tale of rebellion and star-crossed romance,” “a massive page-turner that leaves readers longing for more,” and “an uncompromising condemnation of prejudice and injustice.”
The hype train was derailed in mid-March, however, by Shauna Sinyard, a bookstore employee and blogger who writes primarily about YA and had a different take: “The Black Witch is the most dangerous, offensive book I have ever read,” she wrote in a nearly 9,000-word review that blasted the novel as an end-to-end mess of unadulterated bigotry. “It was ultimately written for white people. It was written for the type of white person who considers themselves to be not-racist and thinks that they deserve recognition and praise for treating POC like they are actually human.”
The Black Witch centers on a girl named Elloren who has been raised in a stratified society where other races (including selkies, fae, wolfmen, etc.) are considered inferior at best and enemies at worst. But when she goes off to college, she begins to question her beliefs, an ideological transformation she’s still working on when she joins with the rebellion in the last of the novel’s 600 pages. (It’s the first of a series; one hopes that Elloren will be more woke in book two.)
It was this premise that led Sinyard to slam The Black Witch as “racist, ableist, homophobic, and … written with no marginalized people in mind,” in a review that consisted largely of pull quotes featuring the book’s racist characters saying or doing racist things.
If that was all, this wouldn’t be as concerning. Every book is bound to push some reviewer’s buttons. However, it didn’t end there.
In a tweet that would be retweeted nearly 500 times, Sinyard asked people to spread the word about The Black Witch by sharing her review — a clarion call for YA Twitter, which regularly identifies and denounces books for being problematic (an all-purpose umbrella term for describing texts that engage improperly with race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other marginalizations). Led by a group of influential authors who pull no punches when it comes to calling out their colleagues’ work, and amplified by tens of thousands of teen and young-adult followers for whom online activism is second nature, the campaigns to keep offensive books off shelves are a regular feature in a community that’s as passionate about social justice as it is about reading.
The campaigning to “keep books off shelves” is shudder-inducing for anyone who cares about freedom of expression.
At the height of the pushback against The Black Witch, Forest was being derided as a Nazi sympathizer and accused of palling around with white supremacists, while those who questioned the tone of the discourse were rebuked for coded bigotry.
The irony, of course, was that the book was intended to be anti-bigotry. However, it seems human nature that when someone’s beliefs reach a particular furor, their greatest wrath is expended on nominal allies who just aren’t pure enough.
August 3, 2017
Continuing on my trek into the 21st Century
Updated my blog as I mentioned in the last post. Now I’m looking at my career while I wait for a couple of editors to respond to my latest projects. Short term I’m looking at possibly another Choice of Games title. Long term I’m investigating joining the ranks of indie authors. So far what’s held me back is the shear volume of work involved. Marketing has never been my thing, and I’m scattershot at best when it comes to social media (witness my sporadic blogging). But it does seem to be the future of things, so I’m looking seriously at what it would take. Of course I would need a new novel or three, so best case we’re 12-18 months away from even considering pre-launch stuff, without taking other paying gigs into account. Then again, a lot of the groundwork I need for this (e-mail lists, press kit, &c.) can be worked on well in advance and would presumably help out my traditionally published stuff. So, we’ll see…
July 29, 2017
And the Website Changes Again
I finally updated the WordPress theme here to join the current century and play nice with mobile devices. There may be more changes yet in store, but my priority was mobile support. So, aside from my little scripts I pulled from the last version (the bibliography and excerpt pages. Along with the pages for individual books, which, with my backlist, was kind of a big deal.), the theme is pretty much off the rack for right now.
May 5, 2017
“Welcome to Moreytown” is out
The game is out and you can get it here. For a limited time you can get it at a discount, only $2.99.
Claw your way to the top of Moreytown, a furry slum for human-animal hybrids. Will you take down the gangs who rule the town, or take them over instead?
May 3, 2017
CoG Interview
My game is almost here. It will be released this Friday, May 5th. Mark your calendars.
I will post links when it goes live, but to whet your appetite in the meantime, here’s the interview I did about Welcome to Moreytown for the Choice of Games’ blog.
March 29, 2017
Beta Testers Needed
If you’ve been interested in the saga of my game development, good news! You can be part of the saga! Choice of Games needs beta testers for “Welcome to Moreytown.” All you need to do to become one is click on this link and follow the instructions. The beta window will not be open for long, so if you’re interested, sign up today!
March 9, 2017
Concoction
I’m going to be at the Cleveland Concoction convention this coming weekend from March 10th through the 12th. If you’re in the area, directions are here.
You can find the overall schedule here, as for what I’m doing:
Fri. 11pm – Fantasy and Rule 34
Sat. 12pm – Vampires, Werewolves, and Gods—Rewriting Legends
Sat. 2pm – Author Showcase (Session 3) [Wherein I will read a bit]
Sat. 3pm – Autographing (Session 3) – Author Alley
Sat. 9pm – Why Villains Matter
Sat. 11pm – Inter-Species “Relations”
Sun. 1pm – There are no Saints in Fiction
Looking forward to seeing some of my fans there.
March 6, 2017
And Speaking of Worldbuilding…
Since I was talking about world-building earlier, thought I’d follow up with something a little different. Here’s a few ongoing webcomics that I really like that have created truly impressive universes to play in:
1) Girl Genius
Girl Genius has been going on since 2002, so if you’re new to it, bank some time to catch up. (Or buy the print copies.) Phil & Kaja Foglio’s “Gaslamp Fantasy” series has been going continuously from the start, with only a few filler strips here and there during it’s run. The world is correspondingly epic, with a vaguely Victorian Europe overrun by mad scientists and their creations. A lot of it is intentionally goofy and amusing, but as Terry Prachett once said, “Funny is not the opposite of Serious.”
A special child is enrolled in a strange boarding school that seems to exist in its own separate universe. You’d be forgiven if you think of Hogwarts. But if this is Hogwarts, it is Hogwarts filtered through Terry Gilliam and Neil Gaiman. The eponymous Court is a school, but also a city filled with ghosts and automatons, adjacent to a forest where the old spirits live. Including a particular Coyote.
How many post-apocalyptic stories come with a hefty dose of Scandinavian magic and folklore? One that I know of. All the fantastic elements tie back into the setting, as do the characters. This is one of those stories that could not be removed from its locale. It’s a slow burn, but when the monstrosities start showing up, they are absolutely horrifying. (Though a trigger warning for those who have issues with violence to cats and dogs.)
If any webcomic ever had the potential to found its own religion, this is it. The world is deep and strange and somehow vaguely familiar all at the same time. The art is stunning and hallucinatory. It’s a story of gods and angels and devils and a heaven/hell that’s suffering severe infrastructure problems due to neglect.
February 15, 2017
World-building is what you make it. . .
I’ve been reading some Neal Stephenson lately and I’ve been reminded of a point that I often try to make when I do my world-building talks. The point being that the skills used for world-building in science fiction and fantasy are not genre specific. I see writers who assume that if they’re not building the universe from the ground up, the whole world-building toolkit is irrelevant. They fail to realize that every writer has to build a world in the reader’s mind, and even if the facts behind the pages are not the author’s invention, those facts still need to inform the story and make it into the reader’s head. The world of Cryptonomicon is no less full and complex and richly detailed as Snow Crash, despite the former being less science fiction than the average Tom Clancy novel.
I’m currently reading (listening to) Reamde. And I’m reminded a lot of a triptych of John Brunner novels; Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and The Shockwave Rider. Like those three rightly classic novels, Stephenson juggles multiple viewpoints to illuminate an incredibly detailed and complex world— even when that world is much more congruent to the one we live in than Brunner’s.
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February 13, 2017
Still working, still here. . .
Just a little update to let you know I’m still alive, still busy doing game things like revising my final draft for my editor. Now that’s done, we’re on to continuity and beta testing. In the meantime I had to come up with some additional “assets” for the game. One such “asset” is some descriptions of the game.
Fair enough.
No more than 50 characters, suitable for the Subject: line of an email.
Okay, I can do that.
We recommend coming up with 20 of them.
*THUD*
You think that sounds bad? It’s really worse. Especially because, well, I’m a novelist. Pithy ain’t really my thing. When your publisher’s documentation of their needs actually uses the word “grueling,” you know you’re in for a good time. It’s especially grueling because this is no trivial bit of work. One of those 20 lines may be the first glimpse someone has of this game, so it’s kind of important.
No pressure.
PS: I was going to put up a political post instead of this, and then I looked around and told myself, “Yeah, that’s what the Internet needs right now— MORE POLITICS!“
