Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 65

German trans child to be abused by the state at father's request

Anybody who wants to argue that we don't still live in a patriarchy needs to look at this story about a trans girl, only 11, who will be institutionalized by the state and forced to conform to a gender she isn't comfortable with. Read the story all the way through. Appreciate that this is in Germany, which has to obey EU laws on respecting trans rights but will choose to ignore them for this case. Note how the child is in school without problems, and has the support of her mother. But, because the father wants a son, the Germans are looking to institutionalize a little girl and force her to be a boy. For the father.

I really can't say anything else on this without becoming hysterical. Just please, read the story, and think about sending it on to someone else. If you can do something more to help, please do so. This girl needs all the help she can get.

Might as well…

Coming Soonish

(But you will hate it. Nothing to see. Move along.)

So what is it like to publish?

Over on the Books of the Dead Press blog is a long post from James Roy Daley about what it's like to be a publisher. I've never dealt with the problems of having other peoples' work on my shoulders, but running a self-published imprint I can tell you, all the rest of this also applies to self-published authors as much as it does to anyone trying to do this as a business with a stable of writers. Give it a read, because it really does explain succinctly why publishing can be stressful for everyone involved. Yeah, it's no fun for us writers, but it's no walk through a garden of money trees for small press publishers either.

What I like is how the path of publishing followed includes everything, right up to "you had a brain fart and said something stupid." I can so relate to that! Although I think at this point, I've just fallen into a rut of one long brain fart, and I stopped caring about damage control. Anywho, also good was "5 more terrible reviews came down the pipe and two of them are from people that haven't read the book; the urge to respond is overwhelming." Yar, it's even more problematic when reading reviews that make me go, "What fucking book were you reading? It sure as hell wasn't mine!"

And don't even get me started on the section on formatting problems, little digital hiccups that take a happy file and turn it into a potential ebook PR nightmare so awful, you do overtime to reformat the whole book overnight and upload it again. And then there's, "Oh, sure, all the ebooks look fine, EXCEPT for the Kindle file." Sure, only the most active book market, where your book is looking so butt ugly, even you, its figurative mother, will not love it. So that's a do-over too. Unless you choose to work with KDP directly, which comes with its own little list of headaches and potential gotchas. And then there's the "joy" of opening your latest print novel and finding a typo on page one despite you going through three proof copies "to be sure." SOB!

So, yes, I can totally, completely relate to the sentiments expressed in the post. While it is long, I think it is totally worth your time, as it gets "better" as it goes along. So if you're wanting something interesting to read while waiting for my next flop to drop, try reading what a publisher has to go through to earn "easy money." It very clearly illustrates the maxim "If the grass seems greener elsewhere, that's because the grass is growing where the septic tank is buried."

Oh, Canada

In this story I want to show you, trans people are banned from boarding airplanes in Canada. You may be stunned to learn this because there was no legislature like this passed through the parliament. Well that's because this was put in place through the Ministry of Transportation, which is currently run by a conservative. So, even though his country has laws about discrimination, he has effectively written a rule that discriminates on every trans person who doesn't conform to the gender designation on their identifying documents.

This is how bad laws get through without a vote. Someone gives a middle manager power in a bureaucracy to make up his own rules without getting upper management to approve the plans, and without checking to see if those rules contradict anything else on the books about, say, human rights or civil liberties. And now that it's in place, it will probably take a lawsuit and court order to get the ruling struck down.

The law just recently went into effect, and as of yet, no reports have surfaced of it being enforced. But it would be great if ya'll Canadian readers might ring up your local MP and ask them to look into why the Ministry of Transportation has chosen to discriminate exclusively against trans people.

A random thought on long-term promotions…

So on Twitter, I was pointed to a game article where Satoru Iwata expressed hope that fans would improve word of mouth ads for Nintendo's games over a few months old using DLC. His theory is that adding new levels and game upgrades will keep fans talkg and making new coverts, because presently, even if gamers really like a game, once they're done with it, they stop talking about it. This is a problem I can relate to.

I hope that using DLC works for Nintendo to rebuild fan loyalty, and my first thought was how on Twitter, I tweet what games I'm playing. Once I'm done with a game, there's no reason to keep promoting it, so digital content adding to the original game is one way to get me to continuously promote old games. It's a case out of sight and out of mind, so the DLC plan helps keep the names popping up n my Twitter stream. As an example, new DLC packs for Forza 4 keep me buying new cars, so I still have new reasons to play the game, and thus to tweet: "I'm playing Forza 4 again." In this way the product stays fresh even after it should be considered stale.

I'm already in the habit of tweeting a list of my top 8 artists as compiled by Last.FM, and as my listening is all done on my phone, pretty much my whole music day is tracked. (Sometimes I shift to the Zune Player on my desktop, or I forget to activate the scrobbler while I'm listening.) So I'm promoting music both on Twitter and through my Last.FM profile every day. It may have been a long time since I reviewed Janelle Monae, but I still promote her albums every day thanks to these listing tweets.

Thinking about that got me thinking about how I promote books, which is not the same thing as WebLit. When a WebLit friend has a series, every chapter or episode is a promotion, and if I'm online and catch it, then sure, I'll retweet that. So the serials have a built-in method of generating word of mouth, if the quality of the serial is good enough to warrant excitement. (Or if the writer has other writer friends willing to help them promote.)

But whether we're talking print or ebooks, I don't tend to bring up a book title after I finish it. This is true of good books and bad, and the only exceptions are the books that were SO GOOD, I had to keep promoting them even months later. There's a few books that spring to memory that qualify for the distinction, and I'm happy to say there's as many indie titles as there are pro titles from big name authors. But if a book is merely good instead of mind blowing, it gets relegated to the same status as the books I despised. Either way, I'm like, "Let us never speak of this again."

So this gets me thinking, how do indie authors find a way to make their product "fresh" past, say, six months? Reviews dry up after the initial rush, and even people who liked a book forget to keep promoting the title after some time goes by. So what's the DLC-like answer to interest people in talking up older titles? This is not so easy a question as "how do you promote a title?" This is more complex, how do you convince someone who read and liked the work to keep mentioning the book even after they're done with the product?

One possible answer is the series, which is to say, each new book gives the old readers a chance to promote over again. But ideally, the idea would be that you'd want readers to be tweeting or posting a Facebook status like: "Man, I cannot wait for this guy's next book to come out! More people should check out the first book." This is easy right after they finish the book, but what would convince them to say the same thing a few months down the road, even though the next release is months away, just to help the writer out?

As a reader, I know I should do more to help the authors I read. I do tweet updates for their books throughout my slow reading periods. So they are getting more than one tweet, for sure. But aside from posting those tweets and my final reviews, I'm much like the next reader in forgetting to keep up the long term marketing efforts, even for my favorite authors. So there has to be some way developed for writers to occasionally remind fans to spread the word without doing regular begathons.

As a writer, I've never found a compelling incentive to get folks to promote my stuff, and as a reader I draw a blank on what method might help remind me to keep pimping a standalone fiction book after I'm done with it. I do not think better incentives or bribes are the answer. It's my opinion that if I have to resort to bribing readers to get them to promote, the title is probably not very good.

This is not to say incentive programs with active fan bases cannot be successful. But this sort of thing works a lot better with a free online serial story than it does for a set of books bought at a vendor. And while I respect a lot of WebLit writers for the amount of work that goes into their free efforts, I find it sad that their readers often hold opinions like, "Even though you're giving me the story free, I still expect you to pay me in some way before I will promote you." The writers give so much, and yet the fans still want a better reason to promote besides helping the artist to find a larger audience. But then this isn't about the artist or their welfare. An incentive program in exchange for promotions always puts the readers in the position of asking "what's in it for me?"

You mean aside from the hours of free entertainment you've been getting? Do writers have to give much more to earn a brief show of support? Do they need to resort to regular bribes to keep your affections?

But again, this is a problem beyond just getting a promotion. This is a question for someone who has already promoted on their own out of the goodness of their own heart and without them knowing the author. That same person who loved the book is highly unlikely to still be talking up the book in six month's time. This is normal. But how can we flip the script and make this abnormal, so that reading fans still promote older titles just to help keep the fan bases growing?

Or put another way, how the hell do book authors keep a fire lit under my ass to promote for them long-term without resorting to some ridiculous method of bribery? Is there a way to keep reminding me to say "I loved Frankie and Formaldehyde by M. Jones," or "Rot by Michele Lee is still one of the best zombie novellas I've ever read, and it still made me cry on a third reading"? And if there is something that can be done, how do we take advantage of it without overusing it and burning out readers with promotion fatigue?

How We Celebrate Freedom

I'm sitting here stunned and gutted by the documentary I've just watched on Kashmir, How We Celebrate Freedom, directed by Sanjay Kak. The film was brought to my attention on Twitter through this article that explains how a religious minority group prevented this from being displayed at a university in Pune.

The thing is, there's a streaming copy of the film online, with endorsement from…interesting sources. Anywho, I RT'ed the link and set aside the url to work on some editing, and then I sat through an hour of the two hour and eighteen minute documentary before I had to pause and take a break. I missed the actual intermission by twenty minutes, so my high limit for shock was met about twenty minutes before the director was ready to give me a rest. This film is an endurance event for all the travesties on display, but during this survey of loss, the director also captures the way people try to cope with life in an ongoing war zone. There's moments of theater, a comedy, even, and many readings from poets. These are also interspersed with the lyrical chants of the resistance fighters, and with the military's continued efforts to try and win the Kashmir people over despite all the harm their occupation continues to cause.

I won't rant at you that you have to see this or you have no soul. This film is very hard to watch. But I really want to help the filmmakers as a show of support for an important film, and to protest religious censorship, in all its ugly forms. I disagree with the critics that this documentary was anti-India. It's a condemnation of solving any social problem with military occupancy. That's a sentiment I very strongly agree with, and so I feel the need to link you to the original article, and to the film itself. Whether you choose to watch the video is up to you, but I'd politely request that you check out the article and see how religious intolerance is able to effectively stifle a film for being "divisive" when what it's really saying is "What's been tried in the past isn't working, so why can't we talk about alternatives yet?" So, even if you can't give the film a viewing, please check out the article. It's like a ten minute read if you're real slow like me, but for you faster folks, that's more like five.

Oh, and I can't offer a star-type score for this film. It's an important story that transcends scores. Is it pleasant? No. But is it important? Yes, and this is going to stay with me for a while.

If it sounds too violent or graphic for you to handle it, it's cool. But I wanted to get this link out and help spread awareness. Standard rants and rambles will return later.

On #Twittercensorship

Today, I am not talking on Twitter because Twitter has decided to voluntarily begin censoring for oppressive countries who do not like free speech. They won't call it censorship directly, because that might offend some lawyers. So instead, when they get a request to censor someone's account, they'll just say "This account is withheld in your country, by request." Like house arrest on the Internet, without a trial, just because Twitter feels like ignoring free speech. This isn't a request from any government yet. Twitter just felt like putting a process in place to strip any user of their right to speak freely, in case any government needed it someday.

No, I'm not really sure why they just gave up all our rights so callously. But I'm angry enough about it that I'm willing to join an an organized protest. So I'm staying off of Twitter for one day as part of #Twitterblackout. It won't change anything, and I'm sure Twitter is seeing no appreciable dip in the flow of scheduled tweets from people hucking their wares, as well as the assortment of people who didn't get the memo that Twitter has embraced censorship on the grounds that "We have to follow the rules."

Twitter did this right after a protest was organized to blackout web sites all over the world in protest of SOPA and PIPA. (You may recall, my sites were all blacked out that day.) The folks at Twitter think that in spite of all these protests for free speech, what's in their best corporate interests is to comply with any take down order from ANY government authority. Trial? No, not needed. Twitter will voluntarily silence dissidents as a fucking courtesy to the evil dictators. Hey, just a side effect of doing business in a global society. Sure, it means embracing censorship wherever a government justifies it, but hey, it's not like Twitter is a global news source of human right violations or anything.

This isn't what pisses me off, because big businesses are always capable of pointing at a rulebook to justify cruel and inhumane policies. No, what pissed me off was watching another blogger comment that she didn't see a reason to be upset, because this isn't about America. It's about other countries. This right after the Occupy protests and your press being forced into "press pens" so they couldn't wander around and actually report on the abuses the police were making on civilians practicing their constitutional rights to protest and practice free speech. And now the company who helped Americans report on all those police abuses when the media did not, JUST VOLUNTEERED TO WITHHOLD TWEETS FOR ANY GOVERNMENT.

Yet, this other blogger is able to practice cognizant disassociation to keep up her deluded views that this isn't something that will affect her in America. It's only foreign countries with dictatorships that will abuse this request system. And besides, this isn't about people being abused by governments. This is about Twitter needing to grow as a corporation. And they can't flourish if they don't agree to help certain governments with voluntary censorship. Therefore, even if she's agreed that censorship is very bad, here it only makes sense for Twitter to make a policy that no one had yet asked for, nor had the right to ask for yet. Because removing any possibility of due process for Twitter's clients is good for business…somehow. Anywho, censorship of this sort could never happen in her country, in her opinion, so there's no reason to feel outrage. Why? BECAUSE IT DOESN'T AFFECT HER.

And this is why I keep losing my shit and asking "What's wrong with you people?" Even when a threat is presented to you in very clear terms, it's not a really real threat unless I can make it about you. So I can tell you how anti-gay countries will request Twitter to shut down the accounts of gay activists a few weeks before they're arrested and killed quietly, their voices voluntarily stripped by a corporation who promises "transparency" in explaining their reasons for censoring. I could tell you about dictators who will shut down political activists and send them to prison for life, simply for asking for the same human rights that Americans piss away day after day with no sense of concern.

But unless I can tell you "This is how Twitter's policy could bite you in the ass," you don't care. I just pointed out how it could still happen in America, probably to shut down the next version of the Occupy movement before it can properly organize on Twitter. But that will not affect you, only a few "malcontents." To make you concerned enough to get off your lazy asses, I have to come up with a reason for you to be worried about yourself. Every problem has to be boiled down to your personal narrative, or it's not worthy of time on the ol' attention radar. "Can't hurt me? Hell, that's not even a blip."

And that's how your governments on both sides of the aisle have been flying under the radar for years, stripping your rights while you were watching TV or surfing on Facebook. Because even as they've taken rights away from people, you can't see how removing these rights from a few folks means we've all lost them. Until it happens to you, it doesn't count as a real travesty. Which means the vast majority of people ignoring these problems are sociopaths who still won't stop calling themselves the good guys.

So turn your head away from the minor protest over nothing, again. Ignore the people who aren't on Twitter today, and just keep pretending that these policies won't be used in your country to silence critics of your abusive class-based society. But of course, those people will be minorities anyway, not real people either. So if they go away, they weren't in your followers, and it doesn't affect you.

It's just another day in paradise, right?

Why people suck…

I'm going to share two stories with you about two seemingly very different topics, but both sharing a common theme. First, imagine that there was a law enshrined in your land as one of the most important tenements of your government, and that someone was violating that rule. Now imagine that everyone except one person was okay with that violation, so they let it stand. If one person pointed out the violation and got the law enforced, what do you suppose the other people ignoring the law would do? Do you think they would stay rational? Like maybe they'd say, "Well huh, I guess we were breaking the law. Okay, fair enough, let's try to be better." You think that's what really happened?

Then you're either naive or in denial. Because what really happened is, people started sending threats to a teenage girl because she's an Atheist and had a prayer taken down out of her school. Separation of church and state? Whatever, hippie chick, there are traditions to be respected! (Traditions made by organized religions after that pesky idea about separation of church and state, and traditions that romanticize conformity and oppression as actually being nurturing and educating.)

(EDIT: The more I think about this, the more this real life event SCREAMS for a YA author to spin it into a courageous tale of a non-believer standing strong against Christian persecution. A 16-year-old protagonist, clearly in the right, being brave in the face of tradition and righteous indignation. You don't even need no romantic angle to make this into a solid book with a great heroine. Come on, writers. I know one of you is bold enough to cover this story and give Atheist teens a book to rave about. Please, make this happen.)

And you say, "Well but that's a few religious fanatics." Nuh-uh, this girl has to be escorted to class by cops because EVERYONE hates her. Forget a "few rotten apples," because this whole place is full of rotten sentiments posing as religious devotion. I find it sad how many people demonstrate their love of God by making threats against other people. It's even worse coming from people who supposedly believe in turning the other cheek. But being honest, the day I see morally incensed Christians actually practice what they preach about turning the other cheek, I'll be flabbergasted and speechless.

But let's move on to story two, where a blogger is attacked as "the worst person in the world." Pretty freaking harsh, so what did they do? Did he advocate genocide or make a case for eating baby seals in front of their sobbing mothers? No, he didn't provide links to the HELLO KITTY items he was blogging about, and the fans of the merchandise are flaming him with comments like: "I don't know how your wife can put up with you. I think it's utterly disgusting and you're not fit to live on earth the way you treat us." (emphasis mine)

REALLY? For not linking to a mass-produced item that you can fucking Google in 3.6 fucking seconds from the search window of your browser? And what the fuck is wrong with people that every day they take first world shit and turn it into a reason to be rancid inhumane shitheads? The first story shows how religious dogma can turn ugly even as people preach about wanting to earn God's love. But the second story is more disturbing because the "religion" that this man ran afoul of is the Hello Kitty fandom. And they're wishing death on him with just as much venom as the people threatening the teenage Atheist. Neither group has a valid excuse, but looking at the second story, how can any fan not cringe and say "Okay, that's taking our fandom too far?" So how come this poor guy is getting comments like this regularly? In short, what the hell is wrong with you people? Why is it that you can turn your first world problems into the worst travesty that ever happened, ever, but you can't recognize when real travesties have occurred?

And really, I don't care if you have a defense. I shut off comments so I don't have to deal with "You don't understand the power of Sanrio, heathen! We are legion, and you will respect our authoritai!"

What I understand is, some of you nerds have taken getting incensed to a whole new level of crazy. I rant and rage all the time, but I never go to any blogger's site and wish death on them. I never tell someone stupid shit like "you're the worst person ever!" Because there's Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and quite a few other competitors who come in my mind before Joe Blow, Hello Kitty blogger who doesn't link items.

And since we're covering threats, an Atheist teenager who doesn't want religion shoved in her face is also not the worst person ever. In fact, that chica ought to be getting the key to the city for her bravery in the face of religious intolerance. (Yeah, you read right. Intolerance to a lack of faith is still religious intolerance just as surely as Christians locking Muslims or Jews out of a community is.)

People, you have got to stop getting pissy with everyone over little shit. And no, don't come to me that my rants are little shit. I speak for a group with depressingly high suicide rates who suffer from physical assault and rapes. In addition to this group, I also speak about racial and gender inequality, and about child abuse. All of these topics are real problems with deep long-term side effects for the victims. People are left emotionally scarred by real discrimination and abuse. You want examples? Well, I can think of one teen girl who may now need therapy, off the top of my head. (Or at the top of this post, for those of you with short term memory loss.)

Before you fly off the handle about someone not respecting you or your cult, stop and ask what the harm of their infraction against you is. Religious people, you REALLY need to adopt this policy, because there is no excuse for your intolerance to disbelief. I believe in God, and I promise you, God has never suffered a broken bone from an Atheist saying "I don't believe." I believe this so much, I married an Atheist, and I never try to convert him or his sister. I can respect their beliefs without making a big deal out of mine. Can you? You may say you can, but the actions of a lot of you make your vows of tolerance hollow, at best.

Some of you may claim that society will fail if we don't respect your views. I disagree. I think you want to exclude everyone from society who does not share your views, and I think your excluding and shunning are much more harmful to the fabric of society than the Atheists who just want to be left alone. They aren't the ones trying to pull away from the weave of society because no one else is good enough to live by your standards. (Standards established by racist and sexist men who thought women were property and people were cattle who needed to be corralled into behaving.)

And as for you Hello Kitty fans…seriously, how can people who love an emblem of fluffy cuteness and sharing and friendship still be as thoroughly toxic and vile as a member of the CCC? If you can find reasons to call other Hello Kitty fans "the worst person ever," then you should seek therapy. Probably look into anger management too.

There's nothing wrong with being angry for a good reason, but some of you sheltered people need a reality check in the worst way.

I don't normally do writing advice…

"Every woman artist has to kill her own grandmother. She perches on our shoulder whispering, 'Don't embarrass the family'."

~Erica Jong

You regular readers know I hate writing advice and writing rules lists. I think of them as make work for writers who've run out of interesting things to say and are instead trying to find something to offer out to cover their awkward silences. So you wouldn't expect me to come up with a list of guidelines for writerly success. But today, I have some advice for women writers: do not be ashamed of your voice, and do not be afraid to say things in public that would offend your mother.

This runs counter to the advice of about a billion social media gurus, most of whom only have one book, and that's a writing advice self-help book. All of these people have a non-fiction book, and they advise fiction authors about how to succeed, as if the methods of marketing in the neurotic world of self-help will work exactly the same in the world of fiction writing. They won't, and if you're a fiction writer, most of their advice will hamper your efforts, not help. But of all their lousy advice, their comments to women may be the most damaging and useless.

Lots of women social gurus will tell you "Don't say anything on social media that you wouldn't want your mother to read." But let me pose a question to you: if you're a romance or erotica writer, and your writing persona is a milquetoast presentation that would make mother so proud, what kind of image are you sending to your readers? "I baked cookies with dear hubby and read to my two dear sweet children, Nathaniel and Thadeus. Please, buy my book Whipping Princes Leia's Cooter!"

Now if you're selling Christian fiction and want to be seen as the female equivalent of Ned Flanders by readers, then okily-didyum-dokily, you go on and be a mealy mouthed good girl and make your momma proud. But if you're a horror author whose last book contained gruesome and gory acts that made your mother queasy, then why would you want your writing persona to be so out of phase with your writing voice?

More to the point, do you think the men in your field are practicing self-censorship like this? No freaking way are they letting momma control their mouths, and neither should you. In fact, if you want to compete with the men, then you've got to get that polite bit out of your mouth and unleash your inner bitch to come close to the audacity and bravado of male authors. If you come to their literary forums talking meek and polite, these guys won't even hear you over the sound of their own gladhanding. You have to speak up to break into the old boys' network. Firmly, and maybe even using some words that would make your mother gasp.

I'm not saying drain a bottle of rum and drunk post a list of things that piss you off. That's my shtick, so you need something to help you stand out. But seriously, this self-censorship isn't helping your creativity, and it isn't helping you to differentiate yourself from all the other women in your field with near identical presentations.

And if you don't think it's a problem to have a voice close to someone else's, just look at what happened with me and that other Zoe. We talked so much alike about all the same topics that when I wrote a bad review on a romance book, the writer's fans attacked the other Zoe, thinking we were the same people. Even when we were BOTH saying publicly "We're not the same people," some folks were still insisting "But look at how similar you are!" And, that's a problem.

We've sorted that out since then, I think. But it's because we no longer talk about the same things, and only the most unobservant reader would mistake my blog for the blog of the other Zoe. And that's what I'm telling you to think about. What makes your author personality different from all the other women writers? Do you try to stand out and be different at all? Or do you follow the social media guidelines and try to fit in? Because if you're fitting in, you're also blending in, and readers are losing you in the crowd. Politeness, then, is not a mask to help you sell more copies, but a camouflage that makes readers lose your unique message. You're just another polite tree in the forest of indies, and instead of looking for new "trees," readers will look for familiar names and voices that stand out.

Which is why you need to do something besides follow the advice of some lady whose only literary success came from exploiting the uncertainty of other authors. That lady is selling to an entirely different market than you are, and her advice probably won't apply to your field. Which is not to say you can't pick up a few of their ideas, but the kind of ideas you want to avoid are any which will stifle your voice in the name of social politeness.

And ladies, there's another facet to this. Look at the writing world, and look at how many fields are dominated by men. Look at how many men make comments that they can't find any women in the field who "really stand out." Part of that is most assuredly gender bias making them deaf to women's voices, but women authors don't need to help that perception by never speaking up or saying anything that risks causing offense. Talking like that will lead you into obscurity as surely as writing a lousy book will.

One more thing. If your mother is on your friends feed and she's commenting that some of your updates are making her feel uncomfortable, tell her to back off. Do it politely if you're on good terms and want to stay that way. But be your own person and ask for your own creative space. If your mother truly respects you, she'll understand and leave you be.

If you're an adult and you still let your mother tell you what to think, then the field of writing is not for you. This is an art field where the whole point is stepping out on your own to find your voice. If your writer voice is always dictated by your mother's wishes, then you're a failure as an artist, no matter how much sales success you find. Just as every man has to step out of the shadow of his father, you women need to let go of your mothers and be your own women. And please, don't worry. You're modern women, so you're plenty strong enough for the task.

Have faith in yourself, and don't be afraid to step on a few toes on your way to greatness. That's my advice to you new women writers, and I think it's a lot more valuable than "Don't embarrass your family."

Writing report

I think it's time for a ramble about where I am creatively. I believe TV tropes would still have me listed in the disillusioned artist category, unhappy both with my previous performances and with the audience reaction. (Or, lack thereof depending on which book we're talking about.) But, even if I totally stopped pushing titles, I've been making sales. I know, I'm as surprised as you, really. I even had a few souls brave enough to read Peter's books who didn't hate my guts forever after finishing it.

But I'm assessing my previous pace and goals, and I don't want to go back to that. Hell, when I have the revved up days of blogging or typing, it hurts my wrists when I'm only going for 2-4 hours instead of my old 8-14 hour schedule.

I really don't know what projects I'm going to work on after completing the current crop of titles, but just what I have on my plate makes contemplating the rest too hard. I can only mentally juggle so much and still have time for casual reading and gaming.

But it seems nothing can kill certain stories in me. Some characters aren't willing to give up, even if I was. They want to tell their stories, and they pick at me worse than my nicotine addiction ever did. I have to write them, even if no one wants to read my crap. But….but, some people do want to read my crap. Some people even open their wallets and pay for that crap. I have no idea how to handle promotion to you folks, and so I still won't. I know this is harder on readers waiting for random releases when there's no hint from me that this or that book dropped. But this is still just my hobby, and with all due respect to my regular buyers, once my previous promotions stirred you to get a copy, everyone else still ignored me. And man, if you six or so regular buyers ever abandon me, I am so, so fucked.

For the record, I have a lot, lot more readers than those six. Sales could always be better, but I'm still getting orders at both Smashwords and Amazon. (Nothing from Lulu, but that's almost always true.) Every quarter, Smashwords sends me some money via PayPal. Not great money, but certainly not bad for a complete nobody. If anything, the continued sales even without my pushing shows that some titles can carry their own weight.

I wish I had more confidence, so I could make some grand proclamation about how my future releases will validate me as a real artist. It isn't that I don't view my stories as art, but I expect around the same level of success for all my future projects. Which I suppose is why I came around to the idea of sometimes writing bad books on purpose, like I did with my NaNoWriMo efforts. (Two of which got favorable reviews. The third is unmarketable, apparently.)

But I'm no good at the whole "I'm the greatest writer ever" spiel. I don't write in any one field, so I can't claim dominance or proficiency in any of them either. I'll never be "the queen of ____," and nothing I've published seems worthy of blockbuster status. I'll tell you a secret: nothing in my head or my trunk is worthy of a mainstream bestseller either. I got no spy novels, no noir mysteries, no timeless romances; there's no mainstream story I'm sitting on that's going to make me a hundred million dollars. Don't think that doesn't frustrate me. And don't think I didn't try over and over to do stuff that was more mainstream. I did, and man, did that shit suck ass. Like Dan Brown, but less interesting.

But maybe writing mainstream is asking for too much from me. There's so many writers covering the tropes that matter to the mainstream. So maybe asking me to also write the same kind of characters to please the market is missing the point of my protest. I want to write the stories that mainstream publishers won't touch. I want stories about people like me, and about other people who feel shut out of the mainstream.

I won't be popular because of what I want to write. Sometimes that will be because people don't want to put up with my trans main characters. Other times it will be because I skip the romantic triangle and go for advanced romantic geometry. I'm planning more gay characters, and that's an instant no for a large percentage of straight readers. Finally, there will be times when I'll be unpopular because I do things with fictional minors that make readers uncomfortable.

But then that's my point all along, to push you out of your comfort zone. If you don't like being challenged and you can only read books that validate your opinions, then I am totally not the artist for you. But if you really mean all of that "rah rah support the little guy" cheering you do, then is there any harm at looking through my less offensive titles? Sure, I probably wrote one or two books that you'll hate, but not everything I wrote has the same tone or message. I've done sci-fi, comedies, fantasy, horror, and even the occasional bit of literary fiction with no genre influences.

And if you still can't find anything in my collection worth reading, well, better luck next year. But if you're turning down EVERYTHING from my collection, odds really aren't good that you'll like my future releases. Cause I'm not going to start covering more palatable characters or topics. In fact, as my writing progresses, I've started poking around in some ugly places that few people want to explore. But somebody has to, because way too much writing is dedicated to the pleasant and banal reinforcement of mainstream beliefs. Even if nobody buys my shit, I believe there is still a need for indie-alternative writing. Someone has to write from the other side of the tracks, even if so few people cross the tracks to visit my rickety digital bookshop. (Right next door to Alice's Internet Café.)

I just…sometimes, I wish someone with mainstream literary clout would say, "I think Zoe is right!" Sure, it wouldn't do much for my sales, or even for my self-esteem. But then I could say, "Well, at least ____ _____ knows where I'm coming from."

And also? I hope they can get my last name right. Cause it would suck if they name dropped the other Zoe, and they were talking about me.