Abigail Barnette's Blog, page 50

True Blood Tuesday S04E01 “She’s Not There”

…what the fuck did I just watch?

The file is here. Hit play when the HBO sound/logo fade-ish.

Dear “Lilly”

Hello, Lilly. I don’t know who you are. I hope very much that we have never and will never meet. I don’t know why you did what you did, but I do know that “your” book, Submitting To My Boss is a word-for-word copy of my book, The Boss. Come to think of it, maybe you should also hope very much that we never meet. Because I don’t take too kindly to frauds and cheats.

The thing is, you didn’t just steal from me. You also stole Ava Violet’s She’s With Me from Wattpad and released it as “your” book. You didn’t even bother to change the title. And in what is perhaps the cruelest move of all, you used another author’s name to create brand confusion as a cover for your crime and to sell the books you stole. You named yourself Lilly Kate, just one letter off from legitimate author Lily Kate. You set her up to take the fall for you when you got caught. You even stole her bio and claimed to be a USA Today bestseller.

You’re not. You didn’t earn it. Lily Kate earned it with her novel, Delivery Girl. I earned it with my first novel. We are USA Today bestselling authors. Not you.

Again, I don’t know who you are. All I know is that you stole from me, you stole from Lily Kate, and you stole from Ava Violet. You took books that Violet and I offered for free and decided that you were entitled to make money off them. You decided that you deserved to profit off intellectual property that you had no claim to and that we weren’t profiting from, ourselves. You’re not a real author. You’re a con artist. You not only stole from all three of us, you charged readers 99¢ for books they didn’t have to pay for.

I hope that one of the companies you published “your” books through will provide me with the information I need to take legal action against you. So, I take it back. I hope very much that we do meet. When I see you in court.

Sincerely,

The wrong author to try this on

Spring Break Blog Hiatus

I completely overestimated my ability to get work done while my eight-year-old, who has just discovered a karaoke app for her tablet, is on Spring Break. True Blood Tuesday, Big Damn Writer Advice Column, and Buffy is suspended until next week. Pray for me. The forecast calls for rain every day this week. I can’t even send the kids outside.

“Abortion: Stories Women Tell”: The Last Word In A Debate We Shouldn’t Even Be Having

CW: Intimate Partner Violence

“I was born a woman. That comes with certain risks,” opines Ami, a single mother of two from Missouri, as she waits for her medical abortion. She, like so many of the women featured in HBO’s Abortion: Stories Women Tell, has driven across the Illinois state line from her home in Missouri, where Republican lawmakers have made obtaining an abortion all but impossible. With a single clinic left within its borders and a seventy-two hour waiting period before an appointment can be scheduled, people in Missouri facing unintended pregnancies rely on places like the Hope Clinic for Women in Granite City, Illinois, where the bulk of the documentary’s action takes place.

Though it’s located near St. Louis, Hope Clinic might as well be a world away for some of the patients who drive for hours for abortion care. And it is its own little world, a welcoming utopia for pregnant people like Ami, whose story is one of the main narrative threads woven through an intense ninety minutes of deeply personal, sometimes painful testimony. Producer and director Tracy Droz Tragos uses Ami’s story to introduce us to Hope Clinic and the women who run it: Chi-chi, the self-described “feisty” security officer who listens day in and day out to the ranting of protestors; Dr. Erin, the OB/GYN who performs abortions at the clinic and who is expecting her first child; Barb, a salt-of-the-earth, God-fearing nurse whose practical views of the world make a better argument for abortion than any politician could. They work with women of all ages, from different backgrounds, all of whom need abortions for different reasons.

Financial concerns are overwhelmingly cited as the impetus to abort. Ami herself works seventy to ninety hours a week just to make ends meet for her small family, while another woman explains that a having a fifth child on top of the financial burden of having two kids in college already would be impossible to afford. Some simply state that they’re not ready to have a baby, while another tearfully confesses, “My son’s father…he was gonna beat the baby out of me, anyways.” One couple turns to Hope Clinic with their pastor’s blessing after learning that their wanted baby couldn’t survive outside of the womb. A woman in a similar situation describes Missouri’s mandatory seventy-two hour waiting period as “heartbreaking.”

The title might suggest that all the women profiled will share stories about abortion, but this is at heart a pro-choice documentary, and all the choices are explored. From a seventeen-year-old who’s looking forward to the birth of her daughter despite the judgment of people in her neighborhood to a former drug addict who chose to give her baby up for adoption, Abortion doesn’t posit that termination is the “easy” way; it shows the viewer that no matter what the circumstance, there is no ideal solution to the problem of an unintended pregnancy. It also reveals how simplistic the thinking of the anti-abortion movement is with regards to adoption and parenthood without drawing attention or lending credence to those arguments. Instead, Tragos gives us a quiet moment with the couple who gave up their baby, illustrating the impact of their decision rather than explaining it to us.

Though the bulk of the film focuses on the women visiting and working at Hope Clinic, Tragos gives the anti-abortion crusaders their say, following a handful of them throughout the film without demonizing them. Sometimes, they demonize themselves, shouting “Be a man and don’t kill your baby!” at a crying couple as they enter the clinic or bringing their apple-cheeked children to sing “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands” on the sidewalk outside. It’s hard to stomach anti-abortion crusader Susan Jaramillo as she talks candidly about the three abortions she had so that she could finish college and focus on her career (which now includes book deals and television appearances) when contrasted with Te’Aundra, a young mother who lost a basketball scholarship to Kentucky State due to an unintended pregnancy. In her small apartment, Te’Aundra rocks her baby and confesses that she regrets not having an abortion, and the viewer can’t help but remember Jaramillo’s sleek highlights and smiling face from her hardcover jacket as she endeavors to save young women from “automatic” shame and regret.

More frustrating are professional protestors like Anne, who saw her name in the center of the world “Planned” on a Planned Parenthood sign and interpreted it as a call from God, or the men who stand outside Hope Clinic every day, grinning as they hold up pictures of fetuses or engage in performative preaching on the sidewalks. They seem to delight in tormenting the patients and escorts as they walk in and out of the clinic, and enjoy hamming it up for the camera. Editors Christopher Roldan, Monique Zavistovski, and Dan Duran deserve a nod here; it’s often these precise, incidental moments more than direct interviews with the protestors that ram home how little concern or sensitivity the anti-abortion side has for pregnant people.

If I were to cite one complaint about the movie, it would be the lack of inclusivity in the language and overall concept of the film. Women aren’t the only people getting abortions, yet it’s still considered a “women’s issue” largely due to our heteronormative and cisnormative cultural perception. While it’s possible that no transgender men or nonbinary people agreed to be filmed for the documentary, the title itself is exclusionary; that none of the ninety-minute run time could have been sacrificed to even acknowledge the existence of these vulnerable people is disheartening and disappointing, and marrs an otherwise flawless take on reproductive justice.

This isn’t HBO’s first take on the subject of abortion. In 1996, their movie If These Walls Could Talk shocked cable audiences with haunting images of violence against doctors and the human cost of illegal abortion. Though that was twenty years ago, when Dr. Erin states firmly, “People will die,” it’s difficult not to be reminded of Demi Moore’s character bleeding to death on her kitchen floor. When a protestor stalks an escort to her car in Abortion, the grisly denouement of Walls‘s third act comes uncomfortably to mind. But while Walls was undeniably moving, the power of Abortion lies in its unadorned fact; during one segment, a fresh-faced young woman named Reagan admits that though she was shown graphic anti-abortion materials as a child, she’d never met anyone who’d had an abortion until she joined Students for Life of America, an anti-abortion organization. “I don’t have a personal experience with abortion,” she explains as she drives cheerfully to a college campus to recruit new members. It’s documentaries like this that aim to correct that disconnect, and that’s where Abortion truly excels. No one who watches this film could claim to have no personal experience by the time the credits roll. Abortion does too thorough a job making it personal while delivering a compelling film that’s impossible to walk away from unchanged.

Abortion: Stories Women Tell premieres Monday, April 3, at 8pm ET/PT on HBO.

The Big Damn Writer Advice Column

It’s that time of the week when I answer your anonymous questions about writing and all that stuff connected to it. Every Thursday, I’ll be answering two questions from the Big Damn Writer Question Box.

Q: Do you have any advice on getting an agent or sending out query letters? It’s very intimidating as a first time author to even think about the process. Thank you in advance!

A: Since advice on “getting an agent” is kind of a broad topic, I’m going to focus specifically on the query letter part here. I do have some advice there. One of the biggest complaints I’ve seen over the years from both agents and editors is that writers send in what basically are form query letters. “Dear Sir/Madame, here is my novel, etc.” Like, they won’t even put the agent or editor’s name on it. They’re asking someone to take the time to read their proposal, but they couldn’t take the time to google the agent’s name before sending it off? That’s also a red flag that they didn’t bother to research whether or not the agent was the right fit. It’s not enough to just go, “Oh, they accept Young Adult, I write Young Adult, here you go.”

In this age of technological wizardry, I assume you’ve already done research into the agents you’re planning to query. You’ve looked at their public social media accounts, you’ve read interviews with them in trade publications or on blogs, that kind of thing. So, you’re not going to do the “Dear Sir/Madame” thing. That’s already out of the way. You’ve already avoided one major mistake. But you’ve done the social media thing, you’ve done your research, so you might also know that the agent you’re querying hates a synopsis longer than three pages. So now you’re going to be able to tailor your submission to that agent. It’s not going to be the same submission you sent out to this other agent who wants a minimum of three pages. If you’re doing this kind of groundwork, you’ve got a better chance of getting a request for a full manuscript.

As for being intimidating, remember that an agent who’s looking for clients wants to pick up your query and be excited about it. They get paid by selling authors to publishing houses, so when they look at your query, they’re really hoping they want to take you on. It’s too easy to send off a query and thinking, “Now they can look at this and tell me I can never be published, ever!” because that’s how our brains works. But that’s not what an agent is actually thinking. Don’t let yourself become intimidated because that’s when you start sliding into “I wrote a thing? Read it, maybe?” qualifiers. You’ll probably think, “I should mention that this is my first query. Oh, and that I know it’s not good. And that I know they’re going to reject it but this one is like, for practice. Yeah. Yeah, I don’t want them to think I’m being serious about this.” And you definitely don’t want to do that.

To sum up, my advice is: Make your query feel personal, tailor the format to not only what the agency requires but what the agent has said they prefer, be confident, and never, ever, ever downplay your skill.

 

Q: Put it in the box!

We Need To Talk About Cis Men As Abortion Allies

When I read about Iowa’s dangerous and restrictive “life at conception” bill back in February, I couldn’t help but share my fury with my equally liberal husband. “Under this law,” I said, “a woman who has a miscarriage could be charged with a homicide.” He was angry, as anyone with a conscience should be. But it was the way he was angry that drove sharply home exactly how cis men misunderstand the panic women, transgender men, and non-binary/gender fluid AFAB people feel when these laws advance.

“Well, it’s [the conservative politician’s] wives who’ll be going to jail. If they want to send them to prison…” he responded, as though the problem would sort itself. Of course, these men couldn’t enact a law that would harm the woman they loved, and once it did affect those women, the situation would somehow…

It was the ellipses, that dying, dismissive pause that spun me into a sputtering rage, not just at the lawmakers seeking to control pregnancy, but at my husband and all cis men who think they’re helping. Because I’d heard that ellipses before, in statements so similar to what my husband had just said. That ellipses revealed the privilege with which cis male allies can view “personhood” laws; it’s all hypothetical. It’s bound to fail, eventually, once cis men understand that the ramifications can affect them. It doesn’t matter that someone like Purvi Patel, who was tried and sentenced under a feticide law, must face criminal charges, media scrutiny, public shaming, and incarceration before legal precedent can be set to protect pregnant people in the future. Lives must be destroyed in the process of exposing the faults with these archaic laws, and the person at the center of the maelstrom will never be a cis man.

How can the assumption that everything will right itself once a cis man is inconvenienced ever be considered a progressive or helpful stance? As I tried to explain to my husband why laws like this are a serious problem when they’re proposed and not just after a pregnant person is led to the sacrificial altar, I found my mind whirling with memories of all the times I’d heard exactly this line from a cis man claiming to be a pro-choice ally. “When it affects their daughters…” “When it affects their wives…” or the more insidious, “When it affects their mistresses.” Two of those arguments suggest that it’s okay for the wife, the daughter of a pro-life man to be destroyed, but the third implies that it’s definitely okay if the person in question is a woman of loose morals. In all of these statements, pro-choice cis men reduce pregnant people to property and assume that dynamic will settle, rather than perpetuate, the problem.

But it does perpetuate the problem. There is a healthy amount of “what about the father’s rights!” arguments presented by pro-lifers, wrestling the concerns and desires of cis men directly into the center of the issue. When pro-choice men do the same, the discourse is taken completely out of the hands of the very people it actually affects. The conversation is no longer about the bodily autonomy of a pregnant person, but about the right of cis men to procure or prohibit abortion for another person.

This also relies on reducing reproductive rights to a “women’s issue”, a narrow label that excludes pregnant people who aren’t women. While the mainstream feminist focus on abortion as a women’s rights issue carries the bulk of the blame for that (sometimes purposeful) exclusion, I have to wonder whose property a pregnant transgender man must become before cis men will include him in their stance.

Cis men cannot and never will grasp the feeling of utter helplessness and violation a person feels at discovering they are carrying an unwanted pregnancy. Therefore, it is not for them to sit back and watch as those of us who can become pregnant shoulder the burden of legal and societal consequences. It’s simply not enough to spout the same tired lines about male politicians being hypocrites and ministers secretly paying for their good Christian daughters’ abortions. Those scenarios center cis men in a conversation that is not, should not, and will never be about them or their needs.

“I don’t care about some politician regretting something because of his wife or daughter,” I sputtered at my husband that night. “I care about the people this will actually harm.” But I don’t know if I got through to him. How can anyone convince a cis man that his view is not superior to that of someone who’s capable of becoming pregnant when that ability itself has defined the unimportance of those people for centuries? No matter how good his intentions, can a cis man truly buck the societal programming that tells him he has critical wisdom to impart on the topic?

I’ll leave it at what I ended up telling my husband that night: if a cis man can’t form views on anti-abortion laws without centering himself in the narrative, he simply cannot be considered an abortion rights ally.

True Blood Tuesday S03E12, “Evil is Going On”

Here’s the file. Press play when the HBO sound and logo fade.

Bill is a completely and total tool and I hope he meets the True Death. Also, there’s a ghost hobbit.

Beauty and The Beast is a terrible movie. I love it.

Where to start with the magnificent mess that is the Bill Condon remake of Disney’s classic Beauty and The Beast? It’s horrible. It’s wonderful. It should never have been made, but it was and now we all have to live with it. But how? How do we cope with a movie that is somehow the worst and best movie Disney has ever made (including the one where they murdered all those lemmings and excluding Song of the South).

Before we go any further, let’s not do so under false pretenses: minus the nonsensical additions, Beauty and The Beast is a faithful, near shot-by-shot remake of the original. During Belle’s eponymous reprise, she announces that she “wants much more than this provincial life” before running dutifully from the village to the pastoral hills beyond to continue, “I want adventure in the great wide somewhere.” The sequence is so similar to the animated movie, I found myself thinking, she’d better hustle if she wants to get to the top of that hill in time for the music cue.

Though the actors try valiantly to bring something new to their parts, it’s impossible. Beauty and The Beast is one of those movies that so thoroughly captures its place in popular culture that future generations will instinctually know at birth every slow blink of Belle’s doe eyes and the growl of Robbie Benson’s beastly snarl. There is no way for the viewer to separate themselves from the original, and the constant comparisons between the two find the new version tragically lacking for what has been touted as the most expensive movie musical ever filmed.

So, why did I like it so much?

Beauty and The Beast somehow hit the sweet spot between my childhood nostalgia and my love of shitting all over bad movies. I careened from being dazzled by the stunning visuals to seething over the seemingly endless stream of gay jokes. I reveled in the Lurhman-esque sensory overload of “Be Our Guest” (complete with a Moulin Rouge-tribute finale) while gleefully asserting that Ewan McGregor was no threat to Jerry Orbach’s legacy. When The Beast transformed into Dan Stevens, I thought well, he’s hot, but he still ruined Downton Abbey. It’s the polar opposite of Condon’s Dreamgirls adaptation, in which he took phenomenal source material and created a masterpiece that can be enjoyed parallel to the original. Here, he’s taken phenomenal source material and produced a staggeringly expensive argument for the superiority of the animated film.

Perhaps the best part of the utterly absurd badness of Beauty and The Beast was the fact that, like the enchanted objects populating the Beast’s crumbling castle, it seemed to have some sort of sentient awareness coupled with a complete lack of shame. “Yes, I know I’m a straight-forward retelling of a movie that had far more charm, but I’m here and you’re going to like me.” I couldn’t feel guilty about watching it when it was so unapologetic.

Not that there isn’t plenty to apologize for. If I weren’t so thoroughly indoctrinated to uncritically enjoy everything that Disney slaps in front of my face (except Cars. Cars can burn for all I care), I would hate the movie far more than I loved it. But it struck a hellish balance; for every big change I despised, there was a smaller change that triumphantly challenged things fans have always wondered about. For example, the matter of the Prince’s age, a hotly debated piece of Disney canon that placed him at twenty-one after the castle dining utensils had spent ten years rusting, as per “Be Our Guest.” Whatever could an eleven-year-old have done to condemn not just himself, but all of his servants, to such a hellish existence? How had it taken an entire village a mere decade to forget the monarchy that lived next door and suddenly vanished overnight?

And yet, some of the changes simply raise more questions. Why, if The Beast had a magical book that could transport him anywhere in the world, did he not use it to escape the mob storming the castle? At the very least, Belle could have used it to reach the village faster when her father was in danger. If the harpsichord emerged from the spell toothless due to loss of keys, why didn’t Chip’s human form manifest with a gory open head wound? And why did anyone on the production staff assume that we were curious about Belle’s mother’s cause of death? Especially when the sequence in which we saw Belle spirited away from Paris to avoid the plague had little to no bearing on the overall plot? And why does The Beast’s insensitivity now damn not just the servants in the castle, but their loved ones in the village, whose minds were violated by the spell’s memory-altering component?

The musical choices are bizarre and inexplicable. The limp “Evermore,” though capably performed by Stevens, might as well have been accompanied by the words “FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION” flashing across the center of the screen. Obviously, a Disney movie musical has to have an entry for the Best Original Song category come awards time, but why cast aside the Broadway version’s “If I Can’t Love Her” for a pale, inferior imitation? The same can be said for the saccharine “How Does A Moment Last Forever”. The syrupy sentiment could have been more capably served with the stage adaptation’s “No Matter What” (and given us a chance to hear Kevin Kline and Emma Watson duet). Beauty and The Beast has never lacked for unreleased tracks and alternate versions. That we didn’t see Luke Evans belting about his perfect thighs in “Me” is nothing short of a tragedy; that Audra McDonald sang fewer bars than Emma Thompson is heresy.

The much vaunted “exclusively gay moment” was a reach-for-your-popcorn-and-you’ll-miss-it flicker. After existing as a walking two-hour gay joke, LeFou is redeemed by an eleventh-hour conversion which occurs only after he becomes the target of Gaston’s treachery. After blithely admitting that he’s changed sides mid-battle to join the winning team, he is rewarded with a male dance partner moments before the credits roll. It was only a split-second, but I vaguely recognized the unnamed man as a character from the mob who, upon finding himself bewigged, be-gowned, and made up beautifully in an attack by McDonald’s Madame Garderobe, doesn’t run but instead grins with delight. For a movie supposedly making strides no other could achieve, Beauty and The Beast spends more time laughing at queerness than with it. Still, I found myself thrilling at the notion of a gay character–a villain’s henchman, no less–getting a romance that didn’t end up with someone dead. That says more about the current state of our creative media than the progressiveness of Beauty and The Beast.

There are some smart choices made in the update. I’ve always rejected the notion that Belle suffered from Stockholm syndrome; if anything, The Beast develops its counterpart, Lima syndrome. But there’s still the desert island issue: sure, Belle falls in love with The Beast, but it’s probably easy to become enamored of someone when they’re the only person around who has a pulse. In an attempt to fix this problem, we see Belle and The Beast bond over their common love of books. In her village, Belle faces derision and destruction of her property for daring to teach a little girl to read, yet the Beast is pleased to learn that Belle is not only literate but well-read. He even grudgingly reads the medieval equivalent of a romance novel after she reforms his thinking on the subject. It’s a wan nod to the very same pop-culture feminism that loves to endlessly dissect the Disney Princess phenomenon, but it does make Belle’s choices clearer. In the animated version, there weren’t many differences between The Beast and the reviled Gaston aside from how the narrative blatantly instructed us to perceive them. Here, the differences are plain. Though The Beast physically imprisons Belle, he wants her mind and her spirit to be free. Gaston doesn’t just want to revoke Belle’s physical autonomy; he wants to keep her from escaping into the world of books, as well. When Belle opines that no one can love if they aren’t free, The Beast lets her go. When Belle refuses Gaston’s advances, he tries to murder her father and have her committed to an asylum. It’s hard to argue that she’s made a poor romantic choice in the only eligible bachelor within fifty miles who doesn’t bemoan her literacy and independence.

At its heart, Beauty and The Beast is what it is. It’s not the pro-gay, rah-rah feminist update to a classic that it was made out to be in the weeks leading up to the premiere, but it is the CGI-and-sequins spectacle we were promised. It’s too ambitious, too lavish, too earnest to feel cheap, but too lazy, too glitzy, and far too obvious to add any value. Yes, it relies solely on nostalgia and hype mistaken for quality, but by the time Celine Dion warbled over the credits (a quarter of a century after she first sang the title theme from the animated film) I just didn’t care. How could I, when I’d just been sent such a gilded and sparkling care package from my childhood?

I resent the fact that Beauty and The Beast expected me to love it; I resent more that I absolutely do.

The Big Damn Writer Advice Column

Q: My fiance is finishing up his first book, which has been kicking around his head for roughly 15 years. He’s into the initial editing phase, before he starts looking for an agent, and has asked for my help editing by reading through it. I enjoy the book and editing, but as I get closer to the end of the book, he gets more and more nervous. He is also hypercritical of his own writing and sometimes doesn’t believe that I actually like the book. What were some helpful ways people supported you during moments you were down on yourself about writing? What were some helpful things people did for you during editing to either help you edit or to take your mind off of freaking out about editing/the future?

A: I hate to be the one to break this to you, but your fiance is a writer. There is nothing you or anyone else will ever be able to tell him that will make him feel less nervous or critical about his work. And that’s partially a blessing; writers who believe they’re super awesome writers are goofy, intolerable people, anyway. Out of every writer I’ve ever met, I think a total of ten of them have really believed that they’re amazing writers. They were all super boring and not great writers. I have the same philosophy on this as I do on parenting: If you think you’re doing amazing, you’re probably not. If you think you’re doing awful, then you’re probably doing okay.

The best way you can be supportive is to give him honest feedback. If you spend too much time going, “No, this is really, really good, you’re not giving yourself enough credit, you’re a great writer, etc.” it’s just going to sound like you’re patronizing him, or that you really don’t like it but you’re pretending to because you love him. Whether or not that’s true, he’s going to think it anyway. The nerves, self-criticism, lack of confidence, and generally fatalistic attitude are all part of the writing process. Being straightforward and direct about the material as you’re reading it will go a lot further than trying to build up his confidence through other means. You sound like you already have passion and enthusiasm for helping him see this through, and even though he has moments of self-doubt, I promise that your willingness to participate in his dream with him is the most helpful thing you can do.

 

Q: Do your stories change a lot due to the conditions of the houses where they were published? I’m concerned that I might have to make unnecessary changes in order to fit into a certain mold, but I don’t know for sure and I’d really like to hear what you have to say about that. Thank you very much.

A: So, this is a question writers hear a lot. How much is a publisher going to change my work? And I don’t really have the answer to that because every writer/publisher relationship is different. But usually, an editor will be upfront about whether or not the book is going to need major changes, and probably won’t buy a book if it doesn’t fit their line already. Publishing houses aren’t going to buy a book they’re not looking for with the intent of making the author change it into something they are. They get enough submissions that if your book won’t fit their mold, they just won’t buy it.

When I originally submitted my first book to Harlequin’s Bombshell line, I got a revision letter saying, hey, this would work better for Harlequin Luna. Here are the changes you need to make for it to fit in with the Luna line. And it was a huge rewrite, so they didn’t want to take a chance and give me a contract with the intent of asking me to rewrite the whole book. I could have walked away at that point and went, “No, that’s too much work, it changes my book too much.” So, there was definitely a stage before a contract was offered where they were upfront that the book would not be picked up in the form I’d shown them and that major changes would have to be made.

But after you sell the book, there are still going to be things they’ll want to change, and that’s where I’m seeing a red flag word in your question. “Unnecessary.” That’s a subjective word. What you believe is necessary and what your publisher believes is necessary might not be the same, and if you’ve signed that contract, you’re not the one who decides what “unnecessary” means. I’ve known writers who’ve lost contracts because they balked at fairly minor revisions, and this is almost always because they’re so enamored with their artistic vision that they convinced themselves any changes would ruin their book. If an editor is asking for a change there’s a reason, and a good editor will be able to articulate that reason. It would be very rare for that reason to be “this makes it more like the other books we publish,” because if your book was so far outside of the style their readers expect, they probably wouldn’t have bought it in the first place. Remember that an editor isn’t there to steal or ruin your work and they don’t want to make it their own or put their own stamp on it. They’re the bridge between your work and your audience, and any changes they make are to facilitate and enhance your readers’ engagement with the story.

 

Bonus question: What software do you use to write your novels? What are the pros and cons of that program?

A: For my drafts, I use a website called Novlr.org. It’s a subscription-based, stripped down version of Scrivener that stores all of your work online (and syncs copies of your drafts to Dropbox and Google Drive daily). This is a super important feature for me because I don’t have to worry about which version of which file is which when going from my desktop to my laptop or vice versa. After the first draft is done, it gets exported to Word for revisions.

SAY GOODBYE TO HOLLYWOOD is out!

Here it is! The elaborate in-joke I wrote for everyone who went on this blogging journey with me. Finally, in all its bitchy glory, Say Goodbye To Hollywood is ready to snark up your Kindle. Or your phone. Or your tablet. Whichever. It’s here, that’s all that matters.

When she’s hired to adapt the blockbuster novel, Beautiful Darkness, for film, screenwriter Jessica Yates sees an opportunity she can’t pass up. The only thing standing between her and a guaranteed hit movie is the author. Lynn Baldwin’s rise from Midwestern housewife to literary superstardom has gone straight to her head, and she’s not willing to see her creation hit the screen without her total approval.

As the entire creative team struggles with the hard-to-please author, Jessica’s personal life spins out of control. When there’s more relationship drama and kinky sex off the page than on, she’s forced to reevaluate what she really wants—before Beautiful Darkness destroys her Hollywood dreams forever.

You can purchase it on Amazon or Smashwords, and the paperback will be available soon! When that happens, I promise it will be the last update you see about it on my blog, because I know some of you must be getting tired of hearing about this book.