Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 51

Everything: the rant to end all rants…

Yesterday morning I saw on twitter that Megan Stammers had been found in France, and said on Twitter that I didn’t think it would take long for the victim blaming to begin. I was right. She’d not even been put on a plane back to Britain before people were going into their standard bullshit spewing. So when I said that just before going to the couch for the night Becka sent me this article asking why nobody cared when men in Rochdale were in essence gang-raping a fifteen-year-old, and even though she reported it to the cops, they didn’t care. The cops called her a hooker, and they walked away from her. That’s the cops, the people who are supposedly paid to give a fuck, and they still don’t.

Earlier in the night someone else had gone off on a Twitter rant about Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has let child molesters and rapists get off without an investigation, but because he doesn’t like Mexican immigrants, the racist whites of Maricopa just keep voting for him. Sure, he’s not really protecting his people, but so what? He keeps extra brown people out, and that’s good enough.

Earlier before that, I read the story of how a school teacher heard noises outside his home and went out with his gun, shooting without asking questions when he saw a masked teen. So he’d shot his own son because of his policy of shoot first and ask questions later. I don’t feel sympathy for him. I want to shake him hard and ask him why he couldn’t just ask who was out there before firing his gun. I want to slap him and scream that his love of his gun murdered his own child.

As I lay on the couch, my little inner ranter bounced around about how little people care, how very uneducated and willfully ignorant they’ve become, even the teachers. I thought about how, despite having cell phones and the Internet, they’ve become willfully ignorant. I thought about how people are so hateful, lacking in empathy, while at the same time claiming to be a Christian nation. I thought how it’s a conflict of interests to be Christian, but dedicated to the pursuit of wealth in a rat race with our neighbors.

I thought how people can quote a few lines of Jewish law in Leviticus, but have trouble remembering the ten commandments, or what their own spiritual leader said about the ten commandments: “Those are good, but you really only need to follow two laws; love God, and love your neighbor as you love God.” Lots of people who call themselves Christian can’t even love God. Instead, they fear Him, and they fear their neighbor as they fear God. So in a misguided effort at pleasing this heavenly parent, they have decided to punish everyone around them, making hell on earth for anyone who doesn’t share their views.

I told my inner ranter to just focus on sleep, but she screamed at me that this is all interrelated. It’s because people are so fixated on sex and genitals that they don’t notice that bankers again took over their churches, and Jesus isn’t around to kick them out. It’s because of their fixation on sex as the most evil act in the world that almost every popular movie and TV show is all about the worship of violence and/or guns. It’s because people are fixated on sex that they didn’t care when one president started an illegal war and killed thousands and displaced millions of our foreign neighbors, nor do they care when another president murders people across the planet with drone strikes on the flimsiest of evidence that they might be a terrorist. And if a few women and children are also killed in the strikes? Well it’s just collateral damage, a side effect with our now never ending War on Terror. (A war that, much like the War on Drugs or the War on Poverty, cannot ever be won so long as we continue to frame these issues in such violent terms.)

People have become increasingly hostile to everyone. In my childhood, so-called decent folks hated us queers, but you at least left the normal kids to themselves. But now adults seem to take joy in sneering at teens because they don’t know anything. Um, but you ignorant adult assholes don’t know a whole lot yourselves. Interviews with “man on the street” reporters show over and over that you fail at math, basic science, geography, geology, history; you Christians don’t even know the first thing about the bible, aside from a few cherry-picked lines from the Jewish section of the book. (Which doesn’t apply to anyone outside the faith, and you’d know that if you bothered to read the rest of the book.) One of the presidential candidates is so stupid he’s not even clear on how pressurized cabins work, or why they’re needed to keep everyone breathing in a plane 35,000 feet off the ground, where the air no longer weighs 18 pounds per square inch. (I didn’t even graduate high school, and I know more about this than a man who wants to run our country. That’s fucking pathetic.)

I see people posting meme jokes like “Hey, if the 747 can carry a shuttle, then I call bullshit on them banning my extra luggage.” You think you’re so clever and can understand the basic math of weight, but you won’t think about that weight versus the fuel for thrust versus drag and gravity. You don’t think how extra weight means extra thrust, means extra fuel, and thus requires either higher ticket prices or weight restrictions to haul your fat asses around. The government pays the bill to haul that fat shuttle around with your taxes and you don’t question it, but you will question why airlines can’t let you carry on whatever and just pay for a cheap ticket. In short, you’re too stupid even for basic budgeting. You flunk at economics, the most vital aspect of math in our money obsessed world.

And let’s talk about body image, and how a lot of people are now spitting on skinny people because “you’re harming my body image.” There are some people out there meant to be big. It’s easy to find out because when those people diet, they look terrible skinny. Their skin doesn’t hang right off of their genuinely big bones, and they need some fat to look healthy. But there’s a much larger segment of the population who cling to the plight of these people to hide the fact that you’ve got zero self-control. You’ll suck down sodas and sugared iced lattes with extra whipped cream all day, munch bacon-wrapped-bacon by the pound for lunch, snort back a hot fudge sundae for dessert, and then get online and whine that nobody understands how you’ve got a glandular problem. You don’t have a glandular problem. You’re incapable of living a healthy, informed life. You’re so apathetic, you don’t even care all that much about yourself.

It’s all interrelated. You spend hours in front of a TV worshiping violence and contempt for others, and anything that tries to teach you different, you roll your eyes and change the channel. Anything that tries to point out your obesity is judging you unfairly and you change the channel. You’ll watch people be tortured and murdered on Criminal Minds, but there’d better not be any mention of sex or nudity, because, after all, won’t someone “think of the children?” Yet you never stop to question “What is the effect of all this violence worship in our media on our children?” Sex is the most evil act in the world, and you’ll fight the expression of all sexuality tooth and nail. Love is a thing worthy of contempt. Romance is detestable and best avoided. But killing people violently? Well that’s not so bad. Might makes right, don’t you know?

As a society, people have become well-adjusted to being anti-social in an age of social networking and social engineering. You only care about problems if they can be related back to you. So the fact that Monsanto has poisoned 60% of all rainwater on the planet means nothing to you personally. The fact that a few billion gas engines are warming the planet and poisoning our air doesn’t change your desire to avoid a bicycle. You can’t be made to care because you’re just so busy…with hobbies. We’ve got an impending food shortage because of drought, but people are standing in line for a $600 phone made by slaves in China. So long as you don’t have to see the slaves here in America, you’re morally okay supporting slavery, which you claim America conquered. Only America NEVER conquered this problem. You just changed their name from slaves to prisoners.

It’s all interrelated, my inner ranter insists, and it’s all related to peoples’ lack of empathy. You don’t care about anything, and you don’t care to learn. You don’t care to change your bad habits, and indeed, when the government at last steps in to regulate things that are bad for you, you angrily insist that they should leave you alone because you know what’s best for you. Except, you don’t. You’re too ignorant to look up what would be best for you, or for your kids. And if you read this, roll your eyes and disagree, you won’t even care five minutes after you’ve moved on to something else to fill your time.

You people worships guns, but won’t look up statistics on how many people die per country by gunshot wounds. Some countries have mere double digits worth of victims because only cops own guns. And then there’s America, where thousands die every year to gun violence. Some die from the cops shooting more bullets at one suspect then some police forces fire all year long. Some kids die from improperly stored guns, because parents don’t care enough to be responsible gun owners. Some people die because they are victims of racial bias and their states have written laws giving white people permission to shoot anyone they deem suspicious. But let a black woman fire a gun at an abusive husband, and suddenly, there is no stand your ground law for them and an example must be made of them.

And still more people die because someone just starts firing wildly to try and kill everyone around them. But when a few people suggest that maybe we should limit guns to just what you need for hunting, the gun nuts go on the warpath. They live with this fantasy that one day the government will go too far, and they’ll revolt. They don’t let things like Ruby Ridge or the Koresh compound burst their fantasy bubble. In your minds, you’re all heroes in an action movie that has yet to be made, and guns, murder machines, are just so damned sexy.

It all ties together, people, and it all keeps coming back to that one problem, that you just don’t care. Last night, as I lay awake, hubby came to me, knowing that I was depressed, and he cuddled with me a bit and told me that I get out there every day, and I try to push you to become informed, to care about everything. I’m a transsexual, and yet I rarely talk about trans problems because it’s just one of a million problems created by general apathy and a lack of empathy. Every day, I shout about how we’ve got to care more, and hubby pointed out that I reach a few of you at a time. I have to talk about racism, sexism, ageism, bigotry, and general ignorance. Every day, I have to inform myself and then try to share with you why you should care. But I can’t rant about everything all at once, so I have to pick the worst of the news. Why? Because many of the rest of you have filters set up to avoid this harsher side of our shared reality.

But I have to be honest, and the older I get, the less connected I feel to the rest of the human race. The more I cry that we all need to reject hate and learn how to love again, the more isolated I feel from people who claim to be liberal or progressive, or Christian, but can’t wait to sneer at kids, at teens, anything that doesn’t fit in with their clique. It’s like you people never left that high school mindset. Maybe that’s why I’m so messed up, because I didn’t make it through high school or college, and I never got the last of my societal programming. Maybe if I had, I’d spend all my time looking for reasons not to care.

But my problem is, I never run out of reasons to care. I never stop falling in love with people, and I get my heart broken over and over when I find how little people are able to return those feelings. I never stop feeling sad when I see people sneering at each other for being different. I never stop feeling depressed when the latest round of sexual abuse cases are uncovered and silenced so people can stand on the victims and shame them about “not speaking out.” I never stop feeling upset by peoples’ hypocrisy and double standards that tell me “We’ll only listen to your message if you can frame it as a positive message.” But there is no positive way to say you’re becoming violent and inhuman. And what’s more, I don’t have to cite individual cases because the evidence for this epidemic is all around us.

You don’t care, and you’re all pushing each other to the shared extinction of our whole biosphere because you’d rather make life a singular, self-centric experience than work with your foreign neighbors to improve our relations, restrict our corporations and force them to obey the laws already written, and clean up our world so that our children will have a future. You parrot over and over that you’re all about protecting the children, but you won’t even listen to them when they’ve been telling you about being abused. None of you are so busy that you can justify your inattention to our world’s problems. You just don’t care to try harder.

Which is what makes my job so damned hard. Because I’m trying to make some of you care, and you fight me tooth and nail to remain in a permanent state of meh.

Video game review: Sound Shapes for PS Vita

Sounds Shapes is a music game that was supposed to be a launch title for the PS Vita, but which got delayed until this month. Like Gravity Rush, it was the kind of game premise that made me sit up and take notice of the system. Since Gravity Rush ended up being a huge disappointment for me due to the lousy writing, I had lowered my expectations for Sound Shapes too. But I didn’t need to, because even my originally high expectations have been met and exceeded by this gem of a game.

First of all, there’s no story to get in the way of game play. You play as a sticky rolling ball that collects tokens in one side-scrolling platform after another. Collecting tokens will add notes to the backing track, but everything makes some kind of noise to add to the music. Some enemies hiccup and hot-box, and some shout “come on” in a rhythmic pattern. Some non-harmful character slurp coffee, and kitties rumble purrs and meow. Everything making a sound is on a timer in synch with the main track, and to play most of the levels and survive, you just need to get the timing right. I say most because there’s a glaring set of exception which I’ll get to a bit later.

Before I cover what drove me nuts, I want to talk about the stuff I loved. Yet before I get there, I have to cover the tutorial and Hello World levels. Okay, you need to at least know the basics to play and have a good time, so these levels do accomplish that function of acclimating you you to game’s core concepts. But there’s nothing great that reaches out and grabs you. Had I played the albums in order, I might not have been as impressed.

But the game lets you choose what order to play the levels, and groups of levels are organized by themes into albums, which are stored on “vinyl” records. Being a huge fan of Beck, I chose to play Cities after a few levels from Hello World. WOW. It’s like the difference between night and day. While the Hello World levels are merely adequate, The Cities album is full of great music so inspiring that I frequently set my Vita down and just listened to the song. This is music good enough to put headphones on for, so you don’t miss any of the notes. Merge this with fantastic level design that requires precise timing, and you have something that transcends the definition of a game and pushes into a genuine work of art. I could see playing these levels over both for the challenge of trying to beat my own best times and for the awesome music.

The albums Corporeal and Beyonder are just as good, and each one offers you new concepts to play with, like inverted levels, tractor beams, or a UFO-like submarine to pilot through watery levels. There’s some bubbles that you ride in for other levels, and a lot of cute little additions that should bring a smile to your jaded faces. And what I love is how these level designs are simplistic, yet still detailed enough to distract me from just running through to collect coinage.

I wish I could say there wasn’t a single bad level, but there were many bad levels, all on the same album. I really don’t know how the game makers could put the D-Cade album on this game, because it’s completely “out of character” from the rest of the albums.

The music in D-Cade sucks. I need to clarify: I love most music, and will listen to anything; Rap, Rock, Pop, Blues, Funk, Punk, Techno or even Classical. I think John Denver is cool, and I just got done listening to One Direction and gave them a passing grade. So when I say something sucks, I’m not being a music snob who only listens to one genre and everything else is just crap to me. And seriously, the music on this album sucks hardcore.

Yes, the Deadmau5 tracks still keep a beat, but they’re music in the same way that the old Doxodan jingle about being regular is music. It follows the rules enough to earn the definition, but it’s no more inspired than a twenty second song about not pooping right.

The worst offense isn’t the bad music, or that the design of the levels are butt ugly. They are butt ugly, and they look like someone went to an 80s arcade to rip off a few characters here and there. In every level is this ugly 8-bit mouse to remind you of which godforsaken musician is assaulting your ears with mediocrity, and the levels assault your eyes.

But the worst offense is that timing has nothing to do with beating these levels. In many cases, it’s blind luck that you hit a bounce pad at just the right angle to make it to the token tucked in the back corner. In no other level did I lose my temper over dying. One of the Beck levels, I died on the same sequence something like 20 times in the same way over and over. And when I died the 21st time in a new and novel way, I reacted with deeply amused laughter. But the D-Cade levels had me growling “FUCK YOU!” with every death because the level design feels cheap. I can’t see going back to play these levels, and this album stands out as a sore thumb in what is otherwise a shining example of a great game with a simple premise.

The game is not without other flaws, but the most memorable is a tendency for the game to lock up when you get to a new screen. This makes no sense, frankly, because the game just isn’t that graphically intense. There’s no 3D burning off clock cycles, so the lag is noticeable when you step in it. The music never stutters at least, but for two to three second, nothing on the screen moves. It’s not a frequent problem, but when it happens mid jump, it’s really, really fucking annoying. Also irritating is the very long level load times, but as this is common to a lot of Vita games, I’m willing to let this slide.

This game is already impressive when you consider that you’re only paying 11 euros for what feels like a AAA game. But you also get a music editor to make your own levels, and beating the game unlocks a Beat School to help you learn how to make your own levels. You can upload your musical masterpieces online, and you can play countless new levels from other musically inclined players.

I still haven’t gushed about the retro references to vinyl records, or to the cassette wheels that pop up in the game backgrounds to the beat of the music. The save icon is a floppy disk! I can even see some young’uns asking, “What’s a floppy disk?” It was a royal pain in the ass, kids, and it’s a dinosaur that needed to die. But even saying that, I giggled the first few times that floppy disk icon popped up. The levels start and end on vinyl turntables, and if you look around, you can find cassettes, records, and CDs hidden in the game and game menus. As I said before, the level select screen is a record on a turntable, and it’s all nicely retro.

Once you beat the game, it unlocks Death Mode, which bears the warning “These levels are insanely hard and may melt your face!” You toggle Death Mode with the right shoulder button, which flips the album to the B side. Unfortunately, like the B-sides of old, this is where the less good ideas go to hang out. I imagined the same levels but with more enemies or a faster beat to make progress harder. Instead, Death Modes are single screen levels that all have the same challenge of collecting X number of tokens in X amount of time. They aren’t “insanely hard” so much as inanely stupid. And I doubt any of these challenges is going to melt my face, but they might just meh it off.

Setting aside this snafu and the D-Cade fiasco, what you get for the price of admission is definitely a great bargain. I think Sony may have even doubted themselves and charged too cheaply because this is “just an indie game.” But honestly? If more indies made games this pretty and this fun, the gaming world would be a much more diverse arena.

I give Sound Shapes 4 stars. I really want to give it 5 for the many awesome level found in Corporeal, Beyonder, and Cities. But D-Cade and the lag problems sometimes drag my enjoyment down to RAEG, and that’s going to cost Sound Shapes one star. But 4 is still a good game, and I recommend this to any PS Vita owners looking for something to play after the tracks in Lumines: Electronic Symphony get stale. As an added bonus, Sound Shapes is HALF the price of Lumines, and it offers music fans even more creative options after they’ve played through the levels. So, are you a music fan? Does Lumines make you bop your head and lose track of your tiles? If yes, then you need to look at Sound Shapes and help support an indie gaming company with some original ideas in their portfolio.

Have I gushed enough? No, but I will shut up and leave y’all alone to make up your own minds.

“Free support,” and other things that piss me off

I look through my recent posts, and I say to myself “No, I just haven’t made enough enemies yet.” So in that spirit, I’m going to talk about something I see happening with some folks on Twitter and Facebook. This is strictly based on anecdotal evidence, and as such, I’ll try real hard to refrain from writing “you people” and implying that this is a wide-spread problem. If i slip up and do use “you people” and this rant doesn’t apply to you, know that I didn’t mean you people, I meant those other you people.

So, I see some of my followers posting links to books they “bought” on Amazon. Amazon now has a set of buttons on the page thanking you for a purchase, and in this way you can promote every book you buy. Just click share on Facebook, and a second later, boom, instant promotion. This much is a good thing, and I appreciate Amazon doing this to make it easier to encourage readers to promote authors they like. Nothing of what upsets me has to do with Amazon, and aside from their shit outsourced support departments, I think Amazon is a-okay.

No, what bugs me is a pattern I’m seeing where people promote one free book after another, and it seems like they don’t actually buy any books if they have to pay for them. For authors and publishers, a free book is a “loss leader.” It’s meant to entice someone to buy other books from the same author, and it’s understood that the author and publisher will lose money by handing out a freebie. What they’re gambling on is that of the large number of people who grab a freebie, enough folks will turn around and buy a second book in the same series, or another book from the same writer.

But what happens when you find people who only download the free books, and who never have any intention of buying anything? For starters, the author never makes any money. This requires keeping a day job, which means less time to devote to writing new stories. It can demoralize the author and make it harder for them to be inspired to write in the few moment of free time they can find to write.

I buy a lot of books to support authors. I rarely pick up free stuff, unless it’s like a free short story and isn’t really long enough to charge $2.99 on. I read free fiction on Wattpad, but that’s stuff that hasn’t been published elsewhere. For the stuff that is available for sale, I buy it to support the writer.

I don’t see how this is difficult to grasp, that writers need financial support just like other artists. But there has been this attitude from some folks that making art is not so hard, and that as anybody can do it, there’s no value in the products themselves. It’s not just a problem for writers. I’ve seen people tell musicians that they should give songs away for free and make up the losses with tours and concert merchandise. It’s like they think musicians jam out new songs in a minute or two, and anyone can do it.

I’ve seen webcomic artists talk about how less than 5% of their audience donates funds for server fees and around the same percentage of fans buy merchandise to support the comic.

But authors are in an even worse position because our content is the only thing we have to offer to the public. If we offer all our books for free, we can’t charge for reading tours. Nody is going to pay to see “Zoe E. Whitten Reading LIVE in concert!” We don’t make money off of T-shirt sales, though I have seen some indies start to sell branded merchandise to come up with other streams of revenue. I tried selling shirts. I didn’t even sell one. I sell a LOT more ebooks in year than I ever will shirts. Which is okay, because I’m fiction writer, not a T-shirt vendor.

My point is, if you call yourself a fan of someone, after you get their free book, you should buy another book. Don’t wait until that one is free as well, because that’s not supporting your artist. That’s not being a fan either. It’s being a mooch.

I try damned hard to not be a hypocrite and practice what I preach, which is why I buy as many books as I do. It’s why I post reviews, good or bad, because I want to show my support for all authors, pro or indie. So when I say to you, “Buy books, and review them whether you loved or hated them,” I’m not telling you to do something I won’t do myself. I’m not saying support the indies or support the authors. I’m saying support the artists in every way you can. Start first with financial support, because without financial support, there can be no new material.

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a freebie either. I give out freebies too, because I know that money is tight these days. I know it’s hard to trust a new artist when they might not appeal to you, or they might just suck and have no talent. But after you’ve read a freebie or two, if you still don’t feel like pouring brain bleach into your skull, it would be extremely helpful if you would buy a book and then rate/review it. And even if you never buy my stuff, there’s no reason you can’t do this for the artists you enjoy.

So please, don’t get mad at me and think I mean you have to buy my stuff. My real point here isn’t even about my books. I’m making a broader statement that if you claim to support someone, but you only consume what they give you for free, that’s not a fan. It’s a mooch. A fan is someone who consumes the free sample and says “Damn, that was so good, I gotta buy something to keep this dude in business.”

I’ve recently been blessed by a fan who read a free story and then bought every last book I published in one lump sum. They even included a tip. THAT’S a fan supporting an artist in the best way possible. I don’t expect that of anyone. I’d be happy if you bought one book after reading a freebie. But hell yeah, sending off all those books to the same guy felt really good. It lifted the funk I was trapped under, knowing that someone out there liked my stuff enough to get the whole set.

That’s what I’m talking about. If you love an artist and you want to make them feel good, don’t just wait for free samples to drop. Buy their stuff. Review or rate it, and help them stay in business. If you really like someone, consider writing to them to let them know directly how their work has affected you. Trust me, you’ll tickle them right down to their souls (assuming they didn’t sell it to the devil in exchange for a bestseller) by making the effort.

Be fans, and don’t be mooches. It shouldn’t be so hard to understand why this is important, should it?

Writerly updates and other stuff…

So, first off, I am writing, but I’m not working on the story I thought I would. I started off this week ready to work on Sandy Morrison and the Pixie Prohibition, and I got about 500 words in on a new chapter when fellow author and all around cool chica Katey Hawthorne posted this image to her Tumblr. I was mesmerized by the fallen angel’s intense gaze, and I must have stared at it for half the morning. Two days later, I’m still amazed by how much talent it took to make an image so close to perfect.

Then the muse said “HEY! You’ve read two fallen angel stories, and you know you could come up with something better.” So I said, “Well…maybe, but we were working on Sandy’s book.” And the muse said, “NO! We need to work on this fallen angel story!” I said, “Are you sure I can’t just put it in the queue for later?” She says in a growly and quite frankly scary voice, “NO! WE WILL DO A FALLEN ANGEL STORY NOW!”

So…I’m working on a fallen angel story. And so far, I rather like it. The main character Rosalinda Fernandez is deviating from the cookie-cutter YA heroine early on, and fallen angel Gabriel isn’t a bad boy so much as a good guy who doesn’t have much luck with the law. Like the angel equivalent of a good cop who got kicked off the force for a procedural complaint and became a private investigator instead.

Rosalinda has had sex all of one time, and the guy she trusted told everyone she’s easy. So at the start of the story, she’s turning down yet another drop dead handsome hunk who only wants to get into her pants. So when she meets Gabriel, his angelic looks might make her heart go pitter patter, but she doesn’t trust him any more than the rest of the guys at her school.

As for Gabriel, being a fallen angel on Earth still leaves him subject to angelic law, and angels, fallen or not, are not allowed to mingle with Rosalinda’s people. Failure to follow this law will mean the archangel Michael will kill Gabriel and cast him into hell, where Lucifer will be only too happy to torment him for eternity. So, no pressure on Gabriel not to fall in love with Rosalinda. Pity he already has.

I’m liking the story because it has a great mystery for a central plot, a good romantic subplot, and it’s going to create conflict without Gabriel having to act like a stalking/bullying douche. And so Rosalinda doesn’t have to play the stereotypical YA virgin falling for the first abusive boy she meets. (Some of you might like that, but I’m not so convinced on the hawtness of the trope.)

This leads me to a thought I had after writing the first chapter. I was munching dinner with hubby when I realized that if 10% of my Twitter followers bought one of my books on opening day, that would still be 120 sales. But the trick to getting the desired fraction lies in finding the right book with the right pitch, and many of my stories have been challenging, to say the least. I know my stuff hasn’t appealed to casual readers, and I’ve been pushing my muse for something that had better odds of appealing to mainstream fantasy fans.

So here’s this story that I can get excited by, and that will still fit into mainstream values without making my muse anti-social. The romantic couple is straight. There’s no sex “on camera,” and the story won’t revolve around the couple making googoo eyes all the time. (Fair warning: there will still be a few googoo eyes moments. Cause I likes that.) Lastly, the introduction is much faster than my usual introspective “slow coaster hill,” and all this means the book should be more appealing to casual readers in many genres. So, in theory, this could be my first chance to get that 10% fraction of my followers.

To accomplish this, I’ll begin promoting the book well before launch day, and I really want to drum up some enthusiastic readers who can’t wait to try this. I’d like to find the people who like The Lesser of Two Evils, Blind Rage, and The Sole Survivors’ Club. So if you read and liked those, I’d appreciate it if you would tell your friend that I’ve got a new book coming out next year about angels, and it’s a YA mystery that will break a few rules without getting squicky.

For my final unrelated topic in this update, I need to talk about book prices. Many of you probably know we’re about to go through another shift of prices, and the trend is actually toward bringing up the price. I have not had any complaints about the royalties I get paid at my current prices. I do not need to raise them, but I see some readers saying that they would now avoid a book with a $1.99-$2.99 price tag because it says “cheap and desperate for attention.”

My current price range is $1.99 for novelettes, $2.99 for novellas, $3.99 for older novels, $4.99 for new books, and $5.99-$6.99 for omnibuses. If I opted to raise my prices, my new range would be $3.99-$7.99 with those last two brackets again reserved for multi-title omnibus editions. I’ve been asking on twitter if this feels like a fair range. So far, I’ve only had one answer. I suppose I’ll keep asking for a few days, and based on the feedback, a price increase may be coming. Just FYI.

I’ve got an editing job for the glass web site coming up, so the next two weeks, my writing output is likely to dip. But at least this time, it’s going down because I’m taking paid work, and the pay is FANTASTIC.

So, that’s the writing update. Oh, in other news, I bought Sound Shapes for the Vita, and I’m loving it quite a lot. So expect a positive review sometime soon. And that’s it for me, time to wander off for dinner and then read a book or two by other lovely and creative people.

Cloud Atlas, and why I’m going to watch the movie with lowered expectations…

There’s a double edged sword to being on Twitter, in that sometimes I get information that I simply don’t know how to process it. Such was the case when I first learned that Hugo Weaving would be portraying a Korean, AKA: “doing yellowface” in the film Cloud Atlas.

Before this moment, I was so stoked to see this movie based on the first trailer. It’s the first film where Lana Wachowski will be going under her updated legal name, and we won’t be seeing “directed by the Wachowski brothers” in the credits. (Possibly it will read “directed by the Wachowskis” instead.) It’s a movie about reincarnation. In my spiritual faith, I tend to lean more toward the idea of reincarnation than I do to a castles in the sky afterlife, and the idea that these people all keep meeting over and over is very intriguing. So when I got this one image of Weaving looking a bit Dr. No, I grabbed my head and started going “Nonononono.” I do not want to have my opinion of the film ruined before I’ve ever seen it, but this one photo was a little damning by itself.

Yesterday, a four-pane photo set came out showing that Hugo Weaving is playing four characters, with one being a woman, Nurse Noakes. (And by the way, Hugo does not look at all like a woman in the shot. He looks like a man in bad makeup. So whoever did the makeup didn’t realize you can use pancake makeup and a texture sponge to hide all those male pores.) This doesn’t quite resolve my concern, though. Immediately, I began asking on Twitter, “Is Hugo the only actor whose reincarnating characters cross racial lines?” I asked if the Asian actors in the film would be doing whiteface, or if a white actress would come in for those roles. Several people said “Those are good questions,” but at first, nobody had an answer.

Then along comes a random tweeter to say that yes, one of the Asian actors also plays a white woman, and that Halle Berry does as well. (They also commented that they seemed to be one of the few Asians they knew who was curious to see Weaving do a yellowface role.) So based on their updated information, what we have in this film is the entire cast living multiple lives in various races, and the idea is to say “not much changes in the frame from life to life.”

And for this reason, I’m not taking this in quite the same ways as Fisher Stevens doing brownface in Short Circuit when there are plenty of talented Desi actors who could have played the role of Ben Jabituya. It can be demonstrated that many members of the cast are crossing racial lines, and this makes sense, the idea that a soul might not always reincarnate as the same gender or race. This could still be problematic if only the white actors were playing other races. I’m not saying it still might not have issues, but in the context of the story, this decision to do yellowface kind of makes sense.

Nevertheless, I’m going into this with lower expectations than I had just watching that first trailer. And that’s a bummer because while I was watching the trailer, I was almost brought to tears. Yes, the trailer alone gave me deep and intense feelings. So I’m thinking “Hell yeah, the movie could do even more!”

But that doesn’t mean this movie can’t suck. The two latter Matrix movies were awful, and keeping Hugo Weaving on as Agent Smith is a large part of why those movies sucked a dick. The first movie has this great central theme that makes you stare at your dinner for weeks after going “Am I really tasting this, or is a machine telling me what it tastes like?” But the other two movies are a lot of action sequences with bad dialogue in between. The Wachowskis are not infallible, and just because Lana’s transitioned doesn’t make her enlightened.

So, yeah, I’m very hopeful that this movie will be as good as the first Matrix, and that I’ll come out of the theater with a head full of deep questions. But these days, nothing gets a free pass with me just because it’s got some of my favorite actors and a lot of fancy special effects.

And if it turns out that the racebending is offensive, you can be damned sure I’ll bitch and whine about it here.

The ever so problematic issue of sexualization of children

These days you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a feminist who talks up the sexualization of children, or more specifically of girls. The logic goes that because the bad old media outlets are always selling sex on TV, it’s grooming girls to want to dress slutty. Dressing slutty in turn leads to slutty behavior, or to men taking notice of girls too early.

And, all of this is bullshit. You blame TV in the same way you blame the Internet, without recognizing that the actual issues existed before we had TV or Internet. Before TV, men were noticing little girls and taking advantage of them. Alice In Wonderland is one pedophile’s method of grooming a girl to be photographed nude. And he had no TV to help him out, so he just made up a story that pleased his little victim.

You can’t claim TV is to blame for little girls dressing older. Even if you carefully monitor their TV viewing, you don’t control their eyes or their brains. So they look at how people dress, and they want to emulate the styles that capture their interest. Mommas all over the world have known the joy of walking into their room to find a “dolled up” 3-year-old covered in makeup and dressed in their bra and high-heel shoes. Even boys get caught doing this. It’s not a sign that they’re going trans. It’s their desire to imitate their role models. So if momma likes to dress in curve hugging clothes, that’s a gender cue that the kids are going to pick up.

No, I’m not blaming moms for wanting to dress however they like. I’m saying, you can’t blame TV when every walk through the outside world is teaching children by way of observation. They see the clothing styles that are popular, and that’s how they want to dress. They do not think on it in adult sexual terms, like “If I wear those jeans, I’m picking up a guy for sure.” They think, “Hey, that looks neat. I want to look like that.”

And that’s where the blame game gets ugly, because it is not the children being sexual simply by dressing in form fitting clothes. The act of sexualization occurs in the minds of adults, who react in one of two ways, and neither is healthy. The first is that abusers look and say, “Hey, dressed like that, that girl is putting out cues that she wants to be sexed up.” This is the abuser blaming the victim for liking modern fashions. Then when the poor child’s been abused, along comes the concern trolls, who say “This wouldn’t have happened if TV hadn’t sexualized the child.” But the child did nothing wrong.

Let me repeat that in caps: THE CHILD DID NOTHING WRONG.

There is no crime committed by a girl wearing shorts and a tube top in the summer because it’s freaking hot outside. No crime occurs until an adult looks at that child and says “I could tap that.” You shouldn’t blame the victim for what they wore. You should blame the man who looked at a child and decided his sexual urges were more important that the child’s rights of self-determination.

This kind of attitude wouldn’t be nearly as aggravating if it was only other men victim blaming obliquely by pointing at TV and the Internet. But I see feminists who’ve let men move the goal posts on their discussion of rape culture. I’ve seen feminists ignore history and say that the real reason girls are getting raped or molested is that damn TV teaching them sex too early.

But the blame never reaches the people actually responsible for abusing the kids. Now, I realize that given my previous posts, this is going to come across as a weird double standard, so I need to make this clear. Abusers need some kind of therapy to get them out of their predatory mindsets without drugs or some kind of cruel punishments like rape or castration. Many abusers are actually past victims, and we cannot cure a disease by shaming it away. We cannot stop other abusers by trying to put the fear of prison rape into them. We need better methods of dealing with this problem than violence and fear, because this method NEVER worked. It won’t work if you put more effort into your punishments either, because you’re still missing the point.

We can take responsibility for how we deal with abuse, and one of the ways we could do that is to stop parroting “sexualization of children” as an excuse for why abusers couldn’t keep their hands off of kids. Little girls could dress in the most pure and child-like ways and still be abused. They can dress in baggy sweatshirts and loose jeans to hide their bodies, and they would still be abused. They can dress head to foot in fabric, and do in some countries, and they will still be abused. Mainly because a child dressed in this way is a target, not a form of protection. You don’t dress boys to hide them. So if an abuser is looking for a girl, he knows where to look.

What the girl is wearing is irrelevant to the abuser’s intentions, and talking up a girl’s clothing, even when you’re thinking you’re being helpful, is a form of victim blaming. It says “She wouldn’t have been raped if she didn’t look so damn sexy.” And that’s bullshit. It ignores the reality that all kids face in favor of a lie that adults embrace.

Sorry, people, but I cannot let this lie go on. TV does not lead to raped little girls. Fashion magazines don’t either, nor does the Internet. What leads to raped little girls are abusers (men and women) who can’t control themselves. To point the blame anywhere else is to say “the kids were asking for it.” And if you really believe that, you’re more deluded than you may realize.

Eesh…

Very short post today, mainly cause I’m about to head out for some book shopping and stuff. I just decided randomly to ask myself, “huh, I wonder what search terms people are using to find my site?”

Let me say MOST of y’all find me by using my name, or by looking for a book title and it’s something I’ve reviewed. And I still get a lot of people searching for reviews on Natural Reader, despite that review being three or four versions old from the current iteration. All of these are okay, although the Natural Reader one kinda bugs me because it’s like my most popular post ever. Not any of my human rights posts, nor my rants on racism, sexism, ismism or what not. No, it’s my one shot take on bad software that may or may not have improved in the following years.

Never mind, the point is, a few of you are getting here with search terms that make my skin crawl. No, you will not find the illegal photos you’re looking for here. You won’t find that kind of sex story here. You ended up on my site because my posts contain a combination of the words you put into a search engine, and the combinations you use make it clear that you have some issues.

Now I know you will have trouble finding any help for your mental condition, but if you read this, I want you to think about what you’re looking for: exploited children. You can’t justify this kind of curiosity for any reason. You can’t claim it’s research. You’re looking for something that’s reviled the world over, and with good reason. No child should be forced to grow up too fast. No child should be broken and corrupted for the pleasure of adults.

This is the blog of an abuse survivor and a recovering sexual abuser. You will find no kinship here, nor any material for your perverse private collections. I won’t be hypocritical and tell you “get help.” But I will tell you, what you want is wrong, and the sooner you accept that and grow up, the sooner you can get on the path to recovering some of your humanity.

“Get help” and other privileged declarations of sheltered, lucky people…

I’m just going to riff this post off the last because there’s something I mentioned that I feel needs a post all its own. First, I make no secrets about my past, and I make a lot of people uncomfortable, and they cannot understand why I would talk about such troubling things. Any “good person” would button up and think of the delicate emotional sensitivities of others first. Which is sad; how sexual problems aren’t centered around how I as the victim feel about my past, but how you as the sideline spectator feel when listening to me.

The reason I never think about your feelings and just shut up is that I was blackmailed into a sexual assault based on the things I was doing with other kids. They learned enough about me to use the truth against me, and all their talk about loving me went right out the window. They didn’t love me, they just wanted to abuse me too.

I remember being in a gender support group, and I’d said I was blackmailed. Another woman snidely commented “you were a CHILD. What could you have possibly done to be blackmailed?” It was flippant, and it showed how despite being trans, she was so sheltered, she couldn’t believe I’d done anything worthy of blackmail. I got pissed, and I said “I had sex with a six–” and that’s when the therapist jumped my shit and said “You shouldn’t make yourself so vulnerable.”

It was the second slap in my face in under 30 seconds, and I never went back to group therapy. It became clear that we weren’t meant to talk about the things that upset us. We weren’t supposed to talk about the abuse that made us afraid to transition, or that drove us crazy. We were supposed to talk about how hard life is when you have to shop for high-heeled shoes and can’t find your size. We were supposed to talk about how mean and unfair cisgender people are. But we were not meant to get support for the things that had left us broken and afraid of everyone else.

People who’ve heard my past often react with anger and attempts to silence me. They say dismissive things like “Get help.” And they never once stop to think that for some problems, there is no help. There can be no cure or healing when the “common sense” method of dealing with a problem is widespread denial that the problem exists.

I have sought help, time and time, and time again. Each time that I began talking about what other kids were doing to me, I’ve been stopped and told that my therapist or counselor didn’t believe me. Why? “Because children aren’t capable of such things.” From here, I’ve had therapists and counselors tell me what they “knew really happened.” And after that, I stopped seeking their help. How can you get help from someone saying “Lie to me about your past in a way that I’ll approve of”?

I talk about this stuff because the current methods of dealing with sex abuse are centered not around the victims or their abusers, but around the outrage of the moral majority. If an abuser talks about how they were themselves abused, no one hears that. They see the confessions of an abuser and scream, “YOU’RE NORMALIZING SEXUAL DEVIANCE! IF WE ACCEPT YOU, PEDOPHILES WILL RAPE MORE CHILDREN! RAPE! RAPE CULTURE! SHUT THIS CONVERSATION DOWN BECAUSE IT HURTS MY FEEL-FEELS!”

This is from people who have never been abused, but god damned if they don’t love every chance to scream about how angry abuse makes them. Lost under the din of all this screaming outrage is how this display of anger hurts the victims of abuse. At no time does anyone admit that their outrage is a public shaming of the victims as well as the abusers. At no time does anyone in the moral majority come to terms with their part in the cycle of abuse, which turns many past victims into future abusers.

Victims are separated from their abusers, and if this were the start of a slow therapy process to help the victims, it would be great. But for most people, fixing the problem begins and ends with the act of separation. If the victim does get “lucky enough” to see a therapist, odds are better that the therapist will harm the victim more than help them.

I’ve seen victims try to speak up in public, and then someone else will say things like “Well thank you for sharing. Now it’s best if you never talk about this again, because it makes us uncomfortable.” Helping victims deal with their pain isn’t part of your thought process when you say things like this. The whole thought process is: I don’t feel comfortable dealing with this problem, ergo, I must agree with the sentiment and tell the victim to just get over it.

Sex abuse is not like getting a scar, and eventually, you can’t remember where that white line came from. It’s like developing a limp. You never forget where that limp came from, and you can’t hide that limp from other people. But when people ask why you limp, they also regret asking, and they don’t want to know. They don’t want to help you deal with the limp. They just want to be left out of these “disturbing thoughts.”

Victims end up isolated and alone, and they’re made to feel ashamed for all sexual thoughts. Healthy sexuality versus unhealthy is irrelevant. All that matters is “What happened is all bad, so stop talking about it and upsetting us.”

People who accept this shame internalize their guilt, and they can’t talk about having “shameful thoughts.” And don’t lie to yourselves and say you try to understand, or that you want to help. I’ve had people approach me pretending to want to help, only to turn around and attack me because I wouldn’t indulge their sheltered ideas on treating sex abuse. I’ve been hurt more by people trying to help me than I ever had by my abusers.

If a victim falls and becomes an abuser, there is no way to get help. If they seek help from a therapist, they’ll be drugged to ensure that they have no sexual thoughts at all. This kind of therapy isn’t meant to help. It’s meant to shut a person’s sexuality down and render them incapable of any relationships, even healthy relationships with people their own age.

If an abuser goes to the police? God help them. They have great odds of being arrested, tried, and sent to a prison so they can be raped over and over. No one ever feels bad about that. Here’s this guy, and he was raped from the age of 7. So when he becomes an abuser, society’s answer is to have him raped again. And the people who know nothing CHEER about a rape victim being raped again and again.

The moral majority is sick, and they do more to harm the victims of abuse than the abusers do. By saying this, I’m sure some people will comment “I guess you want to join NAMBLA, sicko.” Yes, because my desire to see better treatment for the victims of sexual abuse is the exact same thing as wanting healthy normal kids to be paired with a pervert. I don’t want to normalize sexual abuse. I want normal people to acknowledge their part in making these problems worse.

I suppose that’s another reason why I can never let this kind of topic go. It’s because the conversation is dictated by people who have not been abused, but who feel the need to tell the victims how to feel. The same churches who protect child abusers are the people who wave the family values flag and tell everyone else how to feel about abuse. Children are told how they “surely must have done something to draw the attention of their abuser.” They are told that their abuser is pure evil, and that it’s best to just never think about what happened. In other words, “Even though you’ve developed this limp, don’t you ever think about where it came from.”

“Well god damn, Zoe,” you say, “You make it sound like there is no way to help, so we might as well not bother.” Actually, there might be positive ways to help us. What I’m saying is, your outrage cannot ever solve the problem. Your outrage is part of what turns victims into abusers. Maybe that’s part of the reason why some of you shout as loudly as you do that someone ought to do something about this growing problem. It’s because in shouting, you never have to hear the victims talk about what they think. In shouting, you relieve yourself of the guilt for failing to protect people from harm. Your outrage may not do anything at all to help, but you do it anyway because it’s easier to be mad than it is to deal with a complex problem.

So, this is why I keep bringing up my past. This is why my books are full of squicky topics. Because in the face of all this useless outrage, someone needed to keep repeating the truth: this isn’t about you and your feel-feels. You can center our abuse around your outrage all you want, and all you do is take attention away from the people who still need help. You can wrap yourself up in your sheltered outrage like a big old security blanket, and by shutting down the discussion before it ever starts, you will make the next generation of abusers. You’ll blame them for not knowing better, but where the hell were they supposed to learn a healthy mentality when none of you people are able to act as positive role models?

I have no doubt that I’ll anger more people by suggesting that your anger is misplaced, and I’m certain that my continued outspoken behavior is harming my chances of becoming a big-time bestselling author. But if I had to choose between telling the truth and pleasing the moral majority, I’d choose telling the truth.

So, I’m getting off my soap box. Feel free to take the box around to your friends and tell them I’m sick and wrong. I am sick, and I have been ever since little boys began beating me with the blessings of the adults. I’ve been sick ever since the moral majority declared me an enemy for being born queer, and everything else I’ve done is a result of the daily, unrelenting torture of sheltered bullies who are praised by the moral majority. So don’t expect me to see your side of this when you’ll never take the time to walk a mile with my limp.

So what’s wrong with you, bitch?

I’d like to preface this ramble by saying that for once, I’m not having a mood swing due to the weather. There ARE weather shifts right now, and my spine feels a bit like a soft pretzel left under the heat lamp all day. But this post is not coming from my usual dark and melancholy mindset. Which is why this may be the best time to explain my issues and why I get all bent out of shape when people say, “You’re a good person, Zoe.”

You would think paying an easy compliment was a good thing, and not something to trigger a person into rage. Well that’s because you didn’t spend ten years with therapists and counselors talking over you with compliments to deny what you were saying. The first step to getting help may be reaching out to others, but nothing is accomplished in this endeavor if the other person denies everything you say, and then tells you how to think about your own life. In fact, after having this happen ten or twenty times with so-called trained professionals, dealing with the same kind of behavior in armchair therapists would very likely send you into a rage too.

I’ve already explained many times that I was abused at 7, and that I for years could not see this as abuse because it didn’t seem so bad compared to being stomped into the ground by older boys. It’s hard to see being cuddled and fondled as a bad thing when the day before, you got beaten bloody for forgetting yourself and skipping because you thought you were alone. Good times. (That was sarcasm. It was sheer hell.)

The result of these months long affairs is that I became conditioned to want a physical connection with people. With all people. Inside me is this scared little kid who needs a reassurance that everything is all right, and the only thing that works is physical contact. It doesn’t have to be sexual. I just need to cuddle to feel right.

And wouldn’t you know it? I live in a world of people who HATE being touched or having their personal space invaded for any reason. I live in a world where people are terribly afraid of intimacy, but love physical violence. Don’t deny this and act like I’m making shit up. I’ve been beaten too many times to believe in your utopian visions of your society. I know how you folks can explode for no reason and attack someone else, so I repress myself because I fear you, and I try to avoid touching people. I feel shame for what I want, so I don’t look people in the eye. I can’t look at other people without enforcing a five second rule. Count to five and look away, because that person doesn’t want a freak like me in their life.

Some of you don’t get my low-self esteem, or you think I’m being too careful. This is because you can’t grasp what happens in this warped head of mine when I look at other people. I can find just about anyone attractive. Gather a group of my past lovers, and you’ll find model-thin skinny chicks and you’ll find just as many large-framed women. You’ll only find two guys, because after being beaten senseless by guys, and being blackmailed and sexually assaulted by my first boyfriend, I have severe trust issues with dudes. But you look at hubby, and he’s no bodybuilder. He’s not taller than me, nor does he have movie star looks. But the first time I saw his picture, I still felt attracted to him. My definition of ugly is so slim, I can be attracted to almost everyone.

And, that’s a major problem. I go out for a walk, and in two blocks, I can be physically attracted to 20 people. If I don’t respect the five second rule, I’ll begin fantasizing about those people right then and there. This thing inside me is so, so very persuasive. What I want isn’t so bad. I just want to touch people, to make a momentary connection, and maybe to make them feel good. The fact that they’re complete strangers isn’t important, and the logic that normal people freak the fuck out at being touched doesn’t matter to this inner voice.

Some people who I try to explain this to say “Hey, that’s no big deal. We’re all attracted to others.” Again, you’re failing to understand the scope of my addiction. Because that’s exactly what this is, an addiction to want physical contact with everyone. When I give in to it, the people I do touch are reduced to objects. I take their feelings for granted, and contact becomes about what I need. I’ve hurt a number of lovers because once I had what I wanted, I felt guilt and became colder to them to prevent myself from becoming addicted to touching them. I seek people out and use them, and then I push them away. That’s not healthy or good, is it? No.

And some of you may still think to say, “But you are a good person because you don’t do that.” No, I’m really not. Simply avoiding my problem by way of isolation doesn’t mean I’m better. It just means I’m avoiding temptation. I can’t get over this and have normal contact with other people without my addiction becoming an issue and making me feel like shit. I break my five second rule, and my imagination is making up a sex scene for everyone. Which is not so evil when I’m imagining hot sex with that buff guy in the subway. Everyone can fantasize like that and see it as no big deal. But I can look at your grandmother and think the same thing. And—this is the part that’s going to offend many of you—I can look at someone way too young and end up having the same thoughts. Gender doesn’t matter to my addiction any more than age does. That’s a major, MAJOR problem. If I let go of my tight control on my mind, I can objectify anyone, anytime, anywhere.

When and if I can get people to understand this, there is no sympathy for me. The fact that I’m like this because I was beaten and molested doesn’t matter. Because I’m at risk of being a predator, people put distance between me and themselves, like I’m going to do something evil to them or their family. It’s an emotional catch-22. I have a need for people to understand me, and I feel hurt that once they dom they think I’m evil and want nothing to do with me. I know I need isolation, but that doesn’t mean I’m always happy with it. In fact, this lonely existence is what leads to my deepest depressions, knowing that I will never be mentally fit enough to join y’all in our modern society without feeling like a monster hiding out among you.

Which is agonizing that there’s no middle ground. If you don’t know me, you compliment me as a good person because I seem so restrained despite years of torture and abuse. If I can make you understand the monster I’m keeping reined in, you hate my guts. And not because of anything I’ve done. You hate me because of the potential harm I can cause. And what’s majorly fucked about that is, I don’t have plans to beat anyone, or to rape them and leave them scarred and broken. I’m a smaller, less significant form of evil, an objectifier who wants to snuggle naked with you.

I remember one of my less kind reviewers of Peter the Wolf said she found it unrealistic that anyone could think about sex all the time with anyone. I suppose that’s what makes fiction frustrating, that even when I base a story off of something real, there’s going to be someone to say “But that couldn’t happen in the real world.” It’s not true. What is true is, they can’t think of anyone suffering under this condition, so they refuse to believe it could be real. They don’t want to think that the end result of abuse and torture might lead to a broken person who can’t be healed with simple placating words.

But there you go. This is my problem, and there is no easy cure for me. It’s why I worked in jobs that isolated me from people. It’s why I keep my reins held tight, why I come across as “refined” to strangers meeting me for the first time. Just like a tobacco addict never truly quits smoking, my addiction is always there, leaving the risk that I could become a monster. I have no delusions about society’s response to a monster like me, because without prompting from me, on any given day people just jump up and say things like “If I knew one of these predators, I’d beat them to death.” Or they say, “I’d just like five minutes alone with that…that thing.” I’ve seen nice people drop their humanity and unleash animal rage over sexual predators of all kinds. And the sad thing (to me, anyway) is that they don’t get nearly as outraged at murderers. You can kill people and be feared. But to be truly hated and loathed, you’ve got to touch someone gently. The softer your methods of abuse are, the more you’re loathed in this world. Nobody wishes a murderer gets raped in prison, but everyone hopes a molester is tortured by the bigger, meaner monsters in prison. Isn’t that fucked up, how sex unleashes the unreasoning monster in everyone, but violence is okay?

I digress. No, I’m not a good person just because I stay in my room. Goodness is not the result of living without temptation. That’s in the Bible, people. You know who said it? If you don’t, you don’t know you so-called savior very well. But I took those words to heart, and I realized I am an addict. I cannot live a normal life, so I have to isolate myself. And on the surface, that may seem like a good thing. But people walk away from me when they realize I’m not really good. I’m just a monster who’s tired of being beaten by other people. So I stay in my little cave, and I make up fake people to pose and play with. And even that offends some people, but they can only “hit me” with insults and unfavorable reviews. That still leaves some emotional bruises, but those tend to heal faster than real bruise or broken bones.

I’m the girl you warn your entire family about, the one you gather the whole family and walk away from FAST. I’m the thing that you fear worse than a serial killer. That’s why I lose my shit when someone who doesn’t know about my addiction says, “Zoe, you’re a good person.”

No, I’m not, not by a long-shot, and I just want you to understand this without pushing you over into hating me.

Book review: The Small Hand by Snoozin…er, Susan Hill

Readers, you may have thought “Hey, Susan Hill! She wrote that Woman in Black, right?” Yes, she did, so you’d think she knows a little something about how to tell a good ghost story. Maybe she does, but she didn’t do a very good job of it here. No, that’s being too nice. The author did a piss poor job on this book.

Adam Snow is an antique book dealer, and after getting lost coming back from a client’s house, Adam finds himself outside a long-abandoned public garden. SUDDENLY, he feels a ghostly cold hand in his, like a small child. This is in chapter one, and it is the ONLY time the book manages to be vaguely exciting. And from this point forward, Adam is so oblivious to his being haunted because he thinks his books are SO FASCINATING. THEY’RE NOT. Susan Hill manages the damned near impossible and makes books EXTREMELY boring.

Look, I’m a book nerd. I’ve got a TBR pile made up of 50 or so print and ebooks, and I love to go book shopping. I love books in all genres, and I love reading so much, I’ve perused the ingredient list on a fucking shampoo bottle. You’d think I could relate to another book nerd, but this guy is SO BORING. Every description of locations, every scene, he’s sure to find the dullest way possible to describe it. And the way the narrator writes is so quaint, I kept getting thrown off by references to email because my mind kept putting the character back in the 1940s.

By chapter 11, the ghost apparently gets tired of waiting for Adam to come back to the garden and investigate like normal characters would, and the ghost tries to kill Adam; first by trying to pull him over the side of a cliff, and then by trying to drown him. Most normal people would be terrified. Most normal people would begin to investigate this and fuck their job. Not our nerdy boy Adam. NO! Mere hours after the second attempt on his life, he’s gleefully gawking at a Shakespeare first folio and admiring the library. The ghost doesn’t matter at all, because BOOKS. No, my suspension of disbelief just plunged off the same cliff that the ghost tried to throw Adam over.

At this point, I gave up. I really can’t recall the last book I read that was so boring, I wanted the main character to drop dead, because then at least something happened. NOTHING happens in this book. This is so boring. I want to kill myself and haunt the publisher, the acquiring editor, the agent, and the author. But if I did that, Susan Hill might find a way to turn it into a story, and I’m sure it would be just as dull as this book

I give The Small Hand one star, and I recommend it to people who’d like to attempt suicide by boredom. I’d rather reread The Hunger Games twice than sit through the rest of this god-awful snooze-fest.