Abigail Barnette's Blog, page 66

#LegionXIII Rome Watch Along S02E04 “Testudo et Lepus” or “This whole rivalry thing has gotten out of hand. That goes for all of you.”

CW: Rape (although honestly, CW: rape for the whole show from here out)

Quick rundown of the episode: So, remember when Atia was about to get served some poisoned soup? The kitchen girl helps herself to a little taste as she’s carrying it in, and all that saves Atia is her love of music and her inability to multi-task. Atia is so entranced by the girl’s singing that the spoon doesn’t make it all the way to her mouth before she drops dead. Servilia’s assassin sees that he’s fucked things up, but he doesn’t get away. Octavia and her new friend Jocasta come home to find Timon torturing a confession out of the assassin. Because a confession wasn’t considered legal under Roman law unless torture was involved. He gives up the info quick, and Atia has what she needs to murder Servilia.

Timon is having a rough time at home. His brother is acting like he’s man of the house and laying down edicts like, “don’t come home bathed in blood” and shit. Fuck that guy. But the longer he’s around, the more Timon’s conscience is acting up.

Pullo travels north to get Vorenus, who’s part of Antony’s floundering military campaign against Octavian. He even checks some dead bodies to make sure they’re not Vorenus, because there are dead bodies all over the place. Who should happen to come along but Octavian, played by an entirely different actor who looks absolutely nothing like the old one at all. Either that, or the war was so hard it turned him ginger. He tells Pullo where he can find Antony’s camp, and that they’ll comb through the dead bodies again and see if Vorenus isn’t in there somewhere.

Octavian is doing good, and he wants a party in Rome to welcome him home. He sends Agrippa back to take a letter to Octavia–and not to Atia, a noted mail thief–, and Agrippa is all about going there because he’s got a crush on Octavia. Octavian gives a rousing speech to his men, too, which is surprising given his utter lack of charisma.

Pullo finds Vorenus marching with the losers. Mark Antony is getting some battle embroidery and deciding on the best way to run away. Posca is like, you should probably just surrender, and Antony is like, nah, let’s winter in the Alpines. When Vorenus is like, hey, my dead kids aren’t dead, Antony lets him leave. Probably because he’ll be one less person to feed in the mountains in the winter.

So, Servilia is at some kind of shrine, looking like the Virgin Mary, when Atia’s men kidnap her. Atia is done playing games. She throws that “slow, painful death” thing from season one right back into Servilia’s face. Atia has Servilia gang raped, scourged, and tortured, but Timon balks when he’s commanded to cut off Servilia’s face. He lets her go, then attacks Atia, choking her and telling her he isn’t an animal. Servilia stumbles into the street, her face all bloody, and Atia just sits there like, man, what did I do wrong? Because Bond movies haven’t been invented yet and she didn’t know you weren’t supposed to do the prolonged death scene.

Vorenus and Pullo hit the road to find the children, and Pullo has to be the sense of the operation, planning for things like rest and food and not riding their horses to death. Pullo warns Vorenus that the slave camp the kids are in is going to be rough. Pullo knows, because he’s been to a slave camp; he doesn’t specifically say why, but you get the feeling from the way he almost bursts into tears that it wasn’t for any good reason. He also asks Vorenus to reconsider killing Niobe’s son.

Agrippa arrives in Rome and tells Octavia and Atia that Octavian has actually won, but it’s bittersweet for Atia, because that means Mark Antony lost. Agrippa also goes to Cicero to ask for that triumph thing, and Cicero tells him exactly what he thinks of Octavian. Because Cicero is finished with this whole Rome thing.

As it turns out, the camp is just as bad as Pullo says it’s going to be, with people getting worked to death and crucified and shit. They find Vorena the Younger and the little boy working in a kitchen. Vorenus breaks down and hugs the little boy, so it’s like, okay, he’s not going to murder him anymore. They find that Vorena the Elder is a sex slave. Vorenus puts his knife through the back of the main slave manager dude’s head and he and Pullo take the children out of there.

My favorite part of the episode: This episode is so dark, my favorite moment is the only light-hearted one in it, when Agrippa tries out a line on Octavia and she shoots him down immediately by asking if her brother is eating well.

My least favorite part of the episode: The clumsy way they introduced the new actor playing Octavian by making him act like he and Pullo were BFFs back in Rome.

Favorite costume: Not the best picture, but I loved Atia’s torture dress. It’s so slinky and it has such great flow. 

Team Atia or Team Servilia: This one is tough, because I don’t really want to be like, “Yay, it’s totally cool to have your enemies gang raped,” but I do very much admire the fact that Atia was more hands-on than Servilia was in terms of her attempted murder. Servilia hired someone to poison her, probably so she wouldn’t get found out. Atia, on the other hand, planned what she was going to say at her inevitable murder trial.

Favorite watch-a-long tweet: 

“My soul has burned-“

“Is my brother eating properly?” Good job with that brush off, Octavia. #LegionXIII

— Bronwyn Green (@Bronwyn_Green) March 29, 2016

 What hairdo or costume would Bronwyn steal? I guarantee she loved Octavia’s watercolor/tie dye dress:

Guess Jess’s head canon. The boys are back together, and Jess was definitely thrilled when Pullo’s advice led to a change of heart for Vorenus regarding Niobe’s son.

Now go check out Bronwyn’s and Jess’s posts, and join us Monday at 9 PM EST for season two, episode four, “Testudo et Lepus” . Tweet to #LegionXIII to join us!

Jealous Hater Book Club “Apolonia” chapter 19

Well, here we are again. Let’s get right down to it. I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of lap-sitting and seating arrangements that need sorting out.

They stop the car half a mile from the warehouse, so nobody will hear the engine, and they all get out.

I climbed out of the passenger-side door, and Cy followed, quickly leaning the seat forward for Apolonia and Tsavi to climb out. Benji struggled to help the professor.

“Maybe Dr. Zorba should sit in the front next time?” Benji said.

Told ya there would be seating arrangement discussion.

The warehouse is all lit up, so they don’t know how to get into it without being spotted. While they’re formulating a plan, Dr. Zoidberg continues to be more useless than the real, actual Dr. Zoidberg:

“Rory!” Dr. Z said, almost too loudly. He bend over and put one hand on his forehead. Silver was lying over on her side, wet and muddy. The professor sat her upright and pushed the kickstand down with his boot. “This is unacceptable!”

“Shh!” Cy said, holding out his hands. “I understand you’re upset, but we can’t get caught over a moped.”

“Silver is not just a moped! I saved for months for her. She is garage kept. She’s nearly fifteen and look at her! Perfect condition. That doesn’t just happen, you know.”

Mopeds are usually between three and six hundred dollars. How little is this top scientist, who goes on filed missions to the arctic and who has tenure at a university major enough to have a lab in which super rare space rocks can be studied, making annually that he has to save up for “months” to buy a moped?

Also, remember when I said Dr. Z had outlived his usefulness and should have died a long time ago? This only reinforces my point. Dr. Z has done nothing useful that the others have not been able to figure out for themselves, and now his behavior puts them all at risk of getting caught. Maguire has fallen into the trap that a lot of writers fall into, and that’s assuming that something cute or funny or zany has to happen in every single scene. We’re at 85% into the book; the only things that should be happening right now are things that will advance the story toward its climax. Writing Tip: Don’t keep a character around to provide comic relief once their usefulness to the plot has waned. It usually results in that character slowing the story down as the author attempts to justify the character’s presence with “wacky” behavior incongruous to the plot.

They walk across the field, but before they can get too close to the warehouse, it’s time for another Rory and Cy relationship moment:

He fidgeted. “I need to tell you something.”

“If it’s about Benji–”

“It’s not,” he said, cutting me off. “It’s about you. Thank you. Thank you for everything you’ve done since the day I met you up until this moment. Despite the…circumstances…you’ve been a true friend to me, Rory.”

I’m glad we’ve stopped the forward momentum of the plot yet again, this time to rehash a conversation we’ve seen three times already, at least. I was getting whiplash from the break-neck pace the story was moving at.

Because Benji is with them, and because the author is trying to keep the love triangle alive for as long as possible, this happens:

“If we could go back to the beginning, I’d do it all again. I just…I know you can’t stay. I just know what it feels like to miss someone, and I’m not looking forward to it.”

Cy wiped a speck of mud from my cheek with his thumb and flicked it to the ground. “Part of me wishes I could stay.”

I glanced over to Benji, who was failing at pretending not to be watching us.

Underlines are italics, as per always.

I know what’s happening here. Maguire is best known for pioneering the New Adult genre. It makes sense that if she wanted to try out science fiction, she would genre blend it with New Adult to pull in her existing readership. That’s not unusual for an author to do. But she’s so busy trying to cram in all the things that made her New Adult novels popular that she’s sacrificed all the action and the urgency you’d expect a story about a space parasite and a government conspiracy to have. If we just took the science fiction plot, here’s what we’ve got:

A mysterious rock lands on Earth.
A professor manages to smuggle it back to his lab.
An alien arrives to destroy the space rock.
The government is looking for the space rock.
If the government gets the space rock, a parasite might take over the world, ending life as we know it.
The aliens might attempt to destroy the space rock by blowing up Earth, ending life as we know it.
The protagonist has to get the space rock away from the government and to the aliens before any of that happens.
In doing so, the protagonist will avenge the death of her family by the same government organization that took the rock.

And if we took just the romance plot, here’s what we’ve got:

The protagonist has a dark and tortured past and can’t trust anybody.
A guy likes her, but she’s not sure she likes him back.
She’s also attracted to this other guy, who is engaged.
The engaged guy is unavailable, but the guy who likes her might not be trustworthy.
And the engaged guy seems to like her, too.
Who does she pick?

Those are two separate books. They should have stayed separate, because they don’t all fit into one. I’m not saying there’s no room for subplots in a story, just that the biggest, most complex storyline should be treated as though it’s the biggest, most complex storyline. This entire time, the space rock has just been a thing in the background that moves them around from point A to point B while they work out their love triangle. We’re at the college, having a conversation about our relationship. Oh no, something something space rock! We have to move to this second location, where we will have another, nearly identical conversation about our relationship. Oh no, something something else space rock! We need to go on this space ship, to introduce yet another element of this love triangle and have more conversations.

With all that out of the way, Cy tells Rory the plan. The aliens are going to go into the still occupied warehouse alone and wrap up everything on their own, which basically will end up leaving our protagonist nothing else to do. Which obviously can’t happen, because then the story is over and there’s no resolution. But hark! What is that sound I hear upon the horizon? Could it be…

Before he could speak, a loud rumble echoed from miles away, and after a few seconds, the ground shook. Two pillars of fire and smoke snaked up to the sky, looming over the tree line.

“No,” Cy whispered, staring at the dark columns.

“What is that?” Benji asked, subdued panic in his voice.

That, Benji, is deus ex machina. Hamech has shown up, and his grand entrance results in the government people leaving the warehouse, making it much easier for the aliens to sneak in:

The warehouse transformed from being a glowing beacon of light to a red-and-blue strobe-covered hub of activity. An alarm sounded, and soldiers rushed out to fill every Jeep. They left the property spinning their wheels.

Okay, but surely not every soldier has left, right? Some people are still behind, guarding things, right?

The armed guards who were walking the grounds had disappeared. They’d all probably left in the Jeeps.

This is so convenient! Because now, Tsavi, Apolonia, and Cy are able to go on ahead and leave the humans waiting.

Yup. The protagonist of this novel is going to sit in a muddy field and wait while someone else does the plot stuff. What is she going to do while she waits?

Have another conversation about her relationships, of course!

“You’re not scared for Cy?” Benji gripped his rifle, keeping his mouth tight in an attempt to conceal how it made him feel to ask that question.

I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. “I think there are more important things…”

So do I, but that’s not going to stop you two.

“No. Not really. Not to me. There’s an alien parasite in front of us and an alien invasion behind us. Things are blowing up. People are dying. I’d kind of like to know.”

“What? Is it you or him? You want me to choose out here in the field?”

“No.”

“Then, what do you want me to say?”

“That you don’t want him to stay.”

“You just don’t get it,” I said, shaking my head. He didn’t know what it was like to lose someone. He had no idea how it felt to say good-bye.

Benji knows exactly what it’s like to say goodbye. He’s just turned his back on his father and his family to help you. He’s straight up betrayed his father for you, and you’re going to say that he doesn’t have any idea what it’s like to lose someone?

Oh, that’s right. No one’s pain can even touch yours, Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way. Only you feel things deeply, because you’re. so. dark.

“I see the way he looks at you. I hear the way he talks to you, the things he says. He loves the woman I love. It bothers me,” he said through his teeth.

“He doesn’t love me! I’m different from what he’s used to. I intrigue him. You see how Apolonia behaves. He got confused. But he loves her!”

“And you,” he said, not missing a beat.

Keep in mind that while this is happening, there are explosions in another part of town big enough for them to see, and aliens trying to infiltrate a government black site yards away, we are watching a repeat of the Benji and Rory jealousy hour.

“What about that wouldn’t matter? Because he could decide at any moment to put you on a ship and take you away from here? Away from me? Probably just out of spite because he hates me. He always has. Do you have any idea how that feels? For someone else to have that kind of power…to destroy you?”

“If I left, it would destroy you?” I asked staring at him.

His eyebrows were pulled in, and his entire face was taut with anguish and worry. He did understand, after all, how completely a good-bye could change someone. How it could change everything.

Duh, Rory.

She tells Benji she “kind of” loves him, and then there are more explosions. Dr. Z–because he’s still there, listening to yet another intensely personal conversation about the Rory/Cy/Benji love triangle–notes that the aliens will be at the college soon, and he should head back there to warn everyone. Instead of letting him go and cutting his dead weight from the group, Rory tells him that everyone is home for Thanksgiving, anyway, and they’ll probably hear what’s happening and evacuate on their own. She wants him to see with his own eyes that Brahmberger isn’t in the warehouse. But Dr. Z is adamant, and while even bigger explosions are going off in the city, he leaves.

Benji and Rory decide to go into the warehouse, to help Cy and Apolonia and Tsavi.

It was the same door I’d snuck into when I followed Cy there nearly two days before. I couldn’t believe that only forty-eight hours had passed. It felt as if I’d been running for my life for months.

It’s felt like months for us, too, Rory.

“I feel like we should have gone with Dr. Zorba,” Benji said.

“We can stop this from here.” I touched the knob and pulled open the door, standing rigid when the barrel of a handgun touched my nose.

“Easy,” Benji said. His rifle made a cracking noise as he dropped it to the ground.

The woman holding the gun to my face narrowed her eyes at me and then glared at Benji. “Oh. You are in so much trouble,” she said.

“Shut up, Bryn.”

My face screwed into disgust. “Who is she?”

Benji sighed. “My sister.”

Yes! Absolutely, let’s just introduce a new character 87% into the novel. Why not?

Bryn is, of course, part of the CIA. She pushes her gun into Rory’s temple and says that Benji has ruined his father’s career.

Bryn wore green fatigues and a matching cap, her golden blonde hair shooting out in a short ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her high cheekbones and almond-shaped green eyes made her look more supermodel than soldier. Her perfect teeth reminded me of Benji’s, and I started to wonder if his perfect looks were genetic or if, being second-generation Majestic, they had been engineered.

She has a gun to your head, Rory. Is now really the time for a long description of how hot she is?

Bryn smiled. “You’re nothing. And tonight, it’ll be as if you never were. So, be a good ghost and shut the hell up. You’ve done enough to piss me off today.”

I moved, slapping my hands together and simultaneously grabbing Bryn’s gun and pointing the barrel at her forehead.

“Whoa!” Benji said, barely having time to react. “What was that?”

Selective memory self-defense. It only works when there’s a hot girl in the scene and the reader needs to be reminded that Rory is more tough and special. I’m waiting for the part where Rory manages to disarm Apolonia, because it seems unlikely that such a thing won’t happen.

“What else don’t I know about you?” Benji asked, watching me hold the gun in awe.

You actually already know this. She slammed you into the ground because of her self-defense training, remember?

Bryn tells Benji that their father is being held upstairs, and that she can’t take them to the space rock because she doesn’t have clearance. She thinks Benji has been brainwashed by Rory and the aliens, and they’re just going to kill him when they get what they want.

Bryn’s lips formed a hard line, and she closed her eyes. “You’re going to have to kill me. I’m not taking you to my dad.” She opened her eyes once to look at her brother. “I’ll never forgive you for this, Benji.”

It doesn’t really matter, does it? You’ll be dead. “Never” is a very short amount of time at this point.

He snarled back at her. “You will take us to Dad, so we can get that rock off this planet before it kills us all, or I’m going to kick your ass, you spoiled, close-minded, snotty little bitch!”

Bryn’s eyes popped open, and we both stared at Benji, stunned. I’d never heard him swear or yell, and by Bryn’s expression, she hadn’t either.

I smiled at him. It was kind of sexy.

 

It’s sexy for a guy to call his sister a bitch and threaten violence against her? Granted, these are tense circumstances, but we’re talking about one of the romantic leads in the story seeing his sister with a gun to her forehead and using the opportunity to call her a bitch and threaten to beat her. All of that “sexy” assertive aggression could have been conveyed without tacking on the bitch part.

And is it just me, or does this author, much like E.L. James, have a real issue with blonde women? So far, there have been two in this story, they both been called bitches, and Rory has pulled a gun on both of them.

Oh my god, what if it’s the same blonde that wronged E.L. James?

Just then, Benji blanched, and less than a second later, he dived for his sister and slammed her to the ground.

I didn’t have time to react or ask what was going on before I had my answer. Apolonia’s sword his the wall, just on the other side of where Bryn’s neck would have been.

Rory tells Apolonia that Bryn is Benji’s sister, because it’s only okay for Rory to use violence against her, I assume. They run through the building, which is empty.

“Where is everyone? Did they all leave for Nayara?” Benji asked.

“No, some stayed behind, but we corralled them into the courtyard,” Cy said.

Benji and Bryn traded glances. “Did you kill them?”

“Not all of them,” Tsavi said. “But some didn’t give us a choice.

Bryn freaks out and gets all hysterical about whether or not they killed her dad, and Rory tears off on her own for some reason. Probably because she’s so amazing and confident and brave or whatever.

A boom, this time much closer, shook the building. Without a second thought, I bolted out the door and ran down the hallway, opening doors and trying to find an office with a window. Unable to find one, I ran to an exit door on the east side, which led to a metal railing that spanned the length of the building. Each end turned into stairs that led into the courtyard.

Since when do warehouses have courtyards?

The remaining men, most of them in white lab coats, were standing among lifeless soldiers, facing in the direction of Helena, their faces lit by the glowing annihilation.

How are they staring at Helena? They’re in a courtyard. Aren’t they just seeing another wall?

Hamech’s ship is flying over the city, and fighter jets are shooting at it and all is chaos and fire. I’m still stuck on the part where Rory can somehow see the ground and the city and the ship and everything while she’s in a courtyard.

It was overwhelming to see that much destruction and death. Where the earth wasn’t orange with fire, it was red with glowing embers. Wind whipped through the blaze, making the inferno rise in pillars, as if it were reaching out from the pool of flames, trying to climb back into the ship. Fiery debris fell out of the sky like rain, and the early morning clouds were red, reflecting the devastation below. A quiet college town the day before, Helena now rivaled the bowels of hell.

So I mean, clearly she has an unobstructed view of what’s going on, and the guys on the ground have the same view, I guess, from the way they’re staring, so…I mean, is something partially enclosed on three sides actually a courtyard? And again, why does a warehouse even have a courtyard?

I realize that I’m ignoring the overall important part of the plot here, but if the author is allowed to do that, so am I.

Benji runs through the door after Rory:

“My God,” he whispered. “It’s all gone.”

And that’s the end of the chapter.

 

Guest Post: Gehna Banga

Hey there, Trout Nation! Every now and then I hand the blog over to another author who wants to tell you about their book. Today, Gehna Banga is here to tell you about her book, Run Your Fingers Through My Soul.

I’m Gehna Banga, a final year law student of ICFAI Law School, Hyderabad, India. I aspire to become a corporate, funds, fashion and luxury goods lawyer. I’m a sucker for fresh air with a serious case of wanderlust. I love painting, dancing and high fashion. I am infamous for being too ambitious and assertive. Well, the most important trait that I know about myself today and want others to be aware of is that I love surrounding myself with people who are aspiring and I personally want to be a force or inspiration behind someone’s happiness, success and growth. Inspiring others to achieve their goals exactly how they want it is my new off field job.

Run your fingers through my soul is my autobiography to be precise and not a novel. It is a memoir of a 23 year old whose recent terrible breakup and previous relationships with her friends, boyfriends, classmates and family helps her realize that she genuinely wants to be in love, something she took too casually before, but finds really hard to attain.

In this process she meets someone who changes her life completely and helps her repose her trust back in being able to love again and be loved again. She also realizes who she is truly is in this entire process, how she wants her life to shape up, what sort of a man she wants to marry and how she is going to get each of the things she desires.

None of this comes easy, she learns the Law of the Universe, power of her thoughts, energies and vibes. She also fights depression and the world to break conformity, body image issues, shields herself from negative thoughts and stands up confidently for all her thoughts.

Most importantly she realizes as a repercussion of all her terrible body shaming experiences especially by the man she loved so much and people she thought were her friends that none of us ever owe an explanation to anybody for why we look like whatever we look like and finally begins to love herself exactly for who she is. All of this helps her and teaches her how to maintain a healthy state of mind, why it is so important and that mental health is a taboo in the society she lives in.

The book focusses a lot on the following hastags

‪#‎Romanticmemoir‬ ‪#‎depression‬ ‪#‎bodyimage‬ ‪#‎bodyshaming‬ ‪#‎loveyourself‬ ‪#‎breakconformity‬ ‪#‎womenneedtostandupfortheirthoughtsandrights‬ ‪#‎goodvibes‬ ‪#‎powerofyourthoughts‬ ‪#‎powerofenergies‬ ‪#‎fightnegativeenergies‬

It is my attempt to expose everyone irrespective of what age one belongs to that your thoughts have power, mental health is important, body shaming needs to stop, women need to stand up for their thoughts and society needs to change the mentality of certain men in order to avoid women being discriminated against or raped or sexually harassed and that the success and achievement of all your goals in life is a manifestation of your mindset, thoughts, energies and vibes and not your efforts, background or physical appearance. We control our lives and what happens to us.

You can find out more about Run Your Fingers Through My Soul on Facebook, and you can find the book on Amazon.

State Of The Trout: “Now listen to this!”

Happy Post-Easter Monday, everyone! It’s a glorious time when that smug atheist guy you only follow on Facebook because they’re a friend of a friend and there would be awkwardness if you unfollowed them now stop posting Easter memes about how gullible and duped Christians are, and go back to just posting regular memes about how gullible and duped Christians are. Spring is truly in the air, my friends.

Even though I’m not a Christian, I had a great Easter this year. My great-grandparents are both gone now (my great-grandmother having died very recently at the age of ninety-eight), and my family decided to have one last holiday at their house before we have to sell it. We had an Easter egg hunt in the woods for the kids, had a big family picture taken in front of the house (with two empty chairs in the front for grandma and grandpa), and sat around watching old home movies. It could have been a sad time, but it was really fun and joyous instead. My great-grandfather once pointed to a photo of our entire, huge family and said, “My marriage license cost me two dollars, and I got my money’s worth!” so I think they would have been very proud to host their family one last time.

With that personal sappiness out of the way, onto the news! And there’s a lot of it today,  so I’m breaking it into sections.

News About Jenny’s Books

Bride Of The Wolf is available in audio! If you’re an audio reader, you can now pick up this historical paranormal romance, narrated beautifully by Tatiana Sokolov.

First Time is coming to audio! Tantor Media will release both version of First Time on May 31! I’ve heard both narrators, and they’re awesome. Also, in a hilarious coincidence, Ian will be narrated by a guy named Anthony Ferguson. Ah, serendipity. Keep an eye out at Amazon and Audible for those titles.

Speaking of First Time, after continued requests (and formatting issues with the previous volumes), both books of First Time are available in a single paperback now. It’s pricey and big, but it’s available.

But Jenny, what about Second Chance? Well, friends, you’ll be getting a cover reveal and release date news very soon. Stay tuned.

News About Where You Can Meet Jenny In 2016

Atlanta, April 9th I’ll be at the Sheraton Atlanta, at the multi-author signing for The Novel Experience Event. Doors for the signing open at 11 a.m. for the general public, and they close at 4:30 p.m. Come by and say hi!

Chicago, May 21st Okay, kind of a fudge here, it’s not Chicago proper, but Schaumburg. Still, for the number of authors who are going to be there, it’s worth leaving the city. Come see me between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Both of these events are still accepting registration for the entire conference, so if you’re interested in hearing me talk (I’m on a few panels and doing a reading at The Novel Experience Event and a workshop at Chicago Spring Fling) and have a weekend and some cash to spare, I recommend both of these highly.

News Of Interest To Trout Nation:

Our friends at the Peace Corps are collecting funds again. Last year, I posted about the Peace Corps’s “Bro Camp” in the Philippines. The camp aims to teach boys the importance of gender equality, and how to foster healthy, equal relationships. Or, as the volunteer who contacted me put it, to teach boys “not to be Christian Grey.” If this is something you’d be into donating to, you can get more information here.

My Reading Challenge Progress!

I totally cheated and shoehorned an entire series into the challenge:

A Dystopian Novel: The Selection, by Kiera Cass

A Book And Its Prequel: The Elite and The One, by Kiera Cass

A Book You Can Finish In A Day: The Queen, by Kiera Cass

When I started reading this series, I was skeptical. On the one hand, it was incredibly well-written and grabbed me right away. On the other hand, I had so many people whose opinion I trusted who absolutely hated it. The phrase “anti-feminist trash” was used by one of them. And it definitely could have been, considering the entire plot revolves around a The Hunger Games-esque competition for the hand of a prince and the chance for one girl to claw her way up through an unfair caste system. But while I cringed at the characterization of some of the girls (the ubiquitous slut who makes the heroine’s life hell, the ambiguously Asian girl there for family honor), I was pleasantly surprised by how sensitively Cass portrayed the idea of a group of girls competing for one guy without relying on a plot device wherein all the other girls were bitches. In fact, the girls who seem like the biggest threats are the ones I ended up liking the most.

What I did not care for in this series was the indecisiveness of the heroine. In the grand tradition of YA love triangles, the heroine kept one dude on the back burner–despite the fact that the circumstances of the plot made this super dangerous–while pursuing another guy. Plus, the back burner guy was such a douchebag, I couldn’t see for even a second why the heroine would want to be involved with him at all.

While some parts of the series were frustrating, I really enjoyed it, and while I could see where some of the criticisms were coming from, I think this is one of the few series where those issues did get better as the books went on.

A Graphic Novel: Nimona, by Noelle Stevenson. I really enjoyed this one. I loved the way the story blended science fiction, fantasy, and superhero mythos together. It was also kind of deceptive: when I started it, I thought, “okay, this is cute. Title character is annoyingly precocious, could do without that, but still interesting.” By the time I got to the end, that opinion was totally reversed. I mean, it was still cute in places, but the story was remarkably dark beneath the cute, and presented ages-old moral dilemmas in a totally unexpected way. I would recommend this for everybody, but especially for adult fans of Adventure Time.

Well, that’s all the news that’s fit to cram into this post!

#LegionXIII Rome Watch-Along S02E03: “These Being The Words of Marcus Tullius Cicero” or “This Being An Epic Slam By Marcus Tullius Cicero”

CW: Rape (although honestly, CW: rape for the whole show from here out)

Quick rundown of the episode: Vorenus is still tormented by the fact that he killed his wife and children. Fair enough. The mental strain is making him a bad ass ruler, though. One of his gang captains comes to him for permission to kill a guy who got his dick sucked by twelve-year-old. it’s a thing about family honor, but Vorenus denies his request on the basis that the twelve-year-old was paid, and therefore wasn’t defiled, but working as a prostitute. Pullo puts in his two cents, which Vorenus does not want. he tells Pullo never to question him in front of the other gang members. Pullo doesn’t appreciate this, but he is who he is, and he goes along with it.

Continuing on her journey of self discovery in the realm of not giving a shit, Octavia has brought home her new stoner friend, Jocasta. They are bogging out the house “inhaling hemp”, and Atia isn’t impressed. I mean, she doesn’t seem to have a problem with the hemp, because she takes the pipe and hits it like a champ, but she’s really not happy that Octavia is hanging out with a merchant’s daughter. She tells Octavia that her slumming better not go any lower.

Meanwhile, Timon is still pining for Atia, while his brother is usurping his place with his children.  The brother (Abraham? Avram? I don’t remember the guy’s name.) Is also doing this whole shadowy meeting thing in alleys, which Timon definitely notices. Again, due to the show’s cancellation, the storyline will go nowhere.

Atia has soured on the idea of going to Macedonia. She tries to convince Antony to stay in Rome and keep playing the politics game, and from his frowny concentration face when he rides his horse away, it seems like he might be considering it.

Vorenus and Pullo are having  a perfectly lovely lunch when in comes that asshole who paid a twelve-year-old to have sex with him. Also, he’s missing his penis. Turns out the dudes ignored Vorenus’s ruling and went ahead and got their revenge anyway. Vorenus blames Pullo for this; if Pullo hadn’t questioned his authority, they never would have been bold enough to go against his word. This leads to a huge fight, in which Pullo accidentally slip that he knew about Niobe’s cheating all along and killed Evander for it. This is new information to Vorenus, and as is the theme of this season, Vorenus doesn’t take this well.

Meanwhile, Cicero and Mark Antony are chilling together, the way enemies do, and Cicero heaps praise on Octavian, bragging on the huge army Octavian is raising. Antony expresses his opinion on this by whizzing into a potted plant. He also tells Cicero that he doesn’t plan to go to Macedonia. He’d rather be governor of Gaul. Cicero is like, yeah, that’s not going to work, some other guy is running Gaul right now. Antony tries to intimidate Cicero into making it happen, and that’s exactly why Cicero won’t do it.

Agrippa, a.k.a. Tom Branson, comes to Atia with a message from Octavian, but he meets Octavia first and is “entranced” by her harp playing, which is also accompanied by frustrated swearing. Octavian sends his best wishes to Octavia, and Agrippa informs her that Octavian is a pretty important and powerful guy.

What nobody is worried about, though, is this new asshole, Duro, who works in the kitchen at Atia’s house, because he’s working for Servilia. His job is to poison Atia, but it’s taking a long time; Octavia almost always eats with Atia, and Servilia doesn’t want to kill Octavia. Duro is crude and nasty, and he demands Servilia kiss him before he’ll carry out his job. She wants Atia dead so much, she does it. So like, she’s committed.

Meanwhile, in some other place, Brutus is trying to raise money to crush Antony, but apparently the people he’s trying to win over think Brutus is cowardly for killing Caesar only after everyone else stabbed him about a billion times. They also want to watch some pretty specific bestiality. Things aren’t going great for Brutus, who later has a weird John The Baptist type scene in a pond.

Meanwhile, back at the hellmouth, Vorenus accuses Pullo of sleeping with Niobe, and he’s so out of control, Pullo is like, yeah, you know what, I totally had sex with your wife. Fine. They end up getting into a brawl so big that it breaks furniture and pieces of the building, and Pullo is like, fuck this, let’s go. He and Eirene leave the city.

Antony shows up to the senate to find that Cicero hasn’t bothered to show up at the senate, where he was supposed to propose that Antony’s governorship be transferred to Gaul. Instead, he basically sent a long speech about how much he hates Antony and basically telling him to fuck off. Meanwhile, Cicero has left the city and is going to align himself with Octavian.

Three months later, Octavian is a real threat to the city, and shit isn’t going well. Pullo and Eirene have returned to the city, after traveling like, forever. They find the Aventine all burned up and wrecked, and barricades have been erected to protect the mob house. Vorenus went to Gaul with Mark Antony. All of the nonsense in the Aventine stems from the gelding dispute, and a retaliatory rape. While Pullo and Eirene try to decide what to do next, Lyde stumbles up. At first they don’t recognize her, probably because they expected her to be dead. But she’s escaped from slavery, and come back to tell them that the children are still alive.

We cut back to Atia’s house, where she’s just about to tuck into some delicious poison, because Octavia isn’t home. Just as the servant brings her the food, the episode ends. CLIFF HANGER!

My favorite part of the episode: When Atia acts all outraged by her kid smoking pot, then hits with nary a flinch.

My least favorite part of the episode: In the first season (and I believe early on in this season), passage of time was marked by showing a person climbing a ladder and changing a big public calendar. Out of nowhere, “Three Months Later” is slapped on the screen. It’s so jarring and unnecessary. They trusted the audience to understand the passage of time in the first season, and yeah, people did complain about it being difficult to follow, but a few episodes into the second season is not the time to start introducing title screens.

Favorite costume: Octavia’s casual wear for pot smoking:

I wish we would have seen the whole outfit.

Team Atia or Team Servilia: Atia, all the way. I want to admire Servilia’s dedication, but she’s so desperate at this point that it’s kind of hard.

Favorite watch-a-long tweet: 

Vorenus: *updates Facebook status to Single* #LegionXIII

— Gabe (@gfortin_05) March 22, 2016

What hairdo or costume would Bronwyn steal? Bronwyn is a sucker for drapey, ethereal bullshit:

Guess Jess’s head canon. Jess’s headcanon was dealt a blow in this episode when Pullo and Vorenus fell out, but the fact that Pullo returned to Rome to set things straight only further validates her ship.

Now go check out Bronwyn’s and Jess’s posts, and join us Monday at 9 PM EST for season two, episode four, “Testudo et Lepus” . Tweet to #LegionXIII to join us!

Troutcation Part 4: “Extremely Specific Travel Tips”

For my last post on the subject of Troutcation, I wanted to share with you some travel tips for visiting Secrets St. James or Secrets Wild Orchid.

Which one? So, both Secrets properties in Montego Bay are extremely close together. I snagged this picture off their website so you can see how close they are:

 

On the left, with the blue roofs, is St. James, and on the right, with the brown roofs, is Wild Orchid. They’re different resorts, but they share pretty much everything. Wild Orchid is closer to the restaurants and nightlife, while St. James is closer to the water sports area and the spa. The main difference I found was that due to its proximity to the shopping, restaurants, and bars, Wild Orchid felt busier, like more of a party atmosphere. Wild Orchid also features lower level “swim-out” rooms for Preferred Club guests, which open directly onto a shared private pool.

St. James felt more removed, definitely quieter than Wild Orchid (especially at night, when people converged on the nightlife area). On the other hand, Mr. Jen and I felt that St. James had the “party pool”, since it seemed a lot of the activities and games happened there. It was also the pool we never went to, because we overheard a really douchey young guy say, “Mr. Hastings! What’s up, brah?” to someone (presumably Mr. Hastings) as we walked past and we decided that we needed to never hear such phrases again.

Mr. Jen and I dubbed the Preferred Club area at St. James the “middle-aged people pool,” because it was quieter, people went there to read books, and nobody was very rowdy or particularly younger. That was our favorite pool.

When should you go? What are you there for? Mr. Jen and I arrived on a Thursday, and it was tranquil and beautiful at night. On Friday, things picked up a little bit, but there were still serene spots to visit. Saturday, all hell broke loose. There was a wedding, two corporate receptions, and a big outdoor party over in the nightlife area. It was the only night we actually heard noise from outside, and that noise was from two competing parties. Now, if we were fun people, this wouldn’t have been an issue, but Mr. Jen and I are not fun. While we weren’t put out or annoyed by these things (because we’re pretty easy going people), we could see how others might be. If you’re going for quiet and relaxation, try arriving on a Sunday afternoon.

Plan your excursions before you leave. People were telling me to do a lot of things before I left on this trip. Oh, you have to go to Ocho Rios to the waterfall because something to do with Cocktail. You should visit such and such historical plantation! Go to where Bob Marley is buried. Take a sailboat cruise to Negril. All of this sounded like a lot of fun, and we didn’t do any of it. Partially, because we were only there for three nights and our single excursion plan feel through. Mostly, though, because we didn’t plan ahead. While Apple Vacations have representatives on-site to help you make your plans, by the time we arrived we were so overwhelmed with choices and indecisive about what to do, we just ended up snorkeling the whole time. Which, you know, snorkeling is cool, but we didn’t see much of the country above water.

Don’t get a first floor room. All the rooms have balconies, so the first floor has patios. Unfortunately, the patios were all very public. There was no barrier (at least, not one substantial enough to recall) between the patios and the lawns, so in some rooms you’d be sitting in your private soak tub within a couple hundred feet of the pool where everyone is hanging out. But my strongest argument against ground floor rooms?

These bastards:

There were peacocks all over the resort. Sure, they’re beautiful and majestic, but do you know what else they are? Dumb as hell and lacking personal boundaries. They’re also aggressive and territorial with each other. Combine all of that, and you have a very high probability of waking to the squawks of a peacock fighting his own reflection in your ground-floor room’s sliding glass door. We saw this happening more than once, and always before nine in the morning.

And most importantly, keep in mind Jamaica’s anti-LGBT culture. Marjorie stopped by the last Troutcation post to give me a heads up on LGBT discrimination/criminalization in Jamaica. This wasn’t something I looked into before going, and I really dropped the ball; I never leave the house, let alone the country, so the idea of checking to see if LGBTQA+ people are more hated in the country of my destination didn’t occur to me. After I spent even a small amount of time researching it last night, I was like, “Oh, shit.” If you’re in a same sex relationship, Jamaica isn’t a safe place. Do not go to there.

However, if you can’t visit Jamaica due to the threat of violence or your conscience prohibits you from visiting,  Secrets also has properties in other, less virulently discriminatory countries, such as Mexico, Costa Rica and Panama. And this is a good reminder to always check with your country of origin on this stuff; if I had been a responsible international traveller and checked with the U.S. State Department, I would have seen their incredibly lengthy section on this.

I also would have known I was supposed to get a Typhoid shot. Whoops.

So, that’s about it from the Troutcation Information Station. Mr. Jen and I are super grateful to Apple Vacations for giving us the opportunity to check out their hassle-free, streamlined travel service. The next time we decide to run away to a tropical destination, Apple will definitely be our go-to travel agency.

Troutcation Part 3: “Things I Did Not Expect”

In this installment of my Troutcation report (brought to you by Apple Vacations and Secrets St. James), I want to share with you some of the stuff I did not expect. I don’t know what I expected, but definitely the things on this list were not it.

People really say “Ya, mon.” I always though this was a stereotype or something out of the movies. It’s totally not. “Ya, mon” is, despite the way it sounds, a gender-neutral expression that basically translates to “okay”, and everyone says it. “Irie” is another word we heard a lot (meaning “good” or “everything is all right”) as well as “No problem” (a driver told us “in Jamaica, we don’t have problems. We have situations.”), and “Respect.” That last one is important; if you have a positive interaction with someone, they’ll probably say this and fist bump you. Say it back. Also, if someone asks you to buy something or if you want something, and you say “no thanks. Respect,” it’s a nicer way of turning down whatever they’re offering.

Tattoos are a novelty. Since tattoos are so common in the U.S., I kind of forget that I have them until someone points them out. In Jamaica, tattoos aren’t as common, and as a heavily tattooed person, I attracted a lot of attention. Mostly, Jamaican people wanted to know if my tattoos hurt, or if they could touch them. My favorite tattoo-related interaction happened at check-in; one of the women at the desk asked which one of us was an author, me or Mr. Jen. Another woman in reception replied, “She is. She’s the one that’s got a story on her.”

There’s a haunted house, but it’s difficult to convince people that you really want to go there. One of the things Mr. Jen and I had planned for this trip was to visit Rose Hall Great House, because I saw it on some random cable ghost show once and I was interested. Ultimately, this plan fell through because we were trying to coordinate it with Mr. Jen’s boss, who happened to be staying in Montego Bay at the exact same time, and things just didn’t line up, so we ended up not going. Which, you know, bummer, but there’s always next time. Though it’s a popular tourist destination, expect some locals to think you’re out of your mind to go there; it’s apparently pretty spooky and freaks people out.

An impression of turtle sex. Remember those salt and pepper shakers from Troutcation Part 2?

 

Mr. Jen spotted these and said, “You have to get these. You have to.” The guy in the shop overheard us and said, “Have you ever seen the video on YouTube with the turtles having sex?” And I was like, “Which one?” You might not know this, dear reader, but I love videos of turtles humping things. Not necessarily other turtles, although that’s funny, too. If you’ve never seen a tortoise in the throws of ecstasy, you really need to. It’s adorably lewd. Anyway, the shop guy and I started listing off our favorite videos: “What about the one where the turtle is humping the bag of trash?” “Have you see the one with the shoe?” Mr. Jen stood by, utterly confused by the entire exchange, while the shop guy launched into an impression of what a turtle sounds like during mating. It was a magical moment. When you go on vacation, you usually don’t think, “You know, I might meet someone who finds humping turtles as funny as I do.”

A hotel bill of $44,000.00 While Mr. Jen and I stayed at the resort, we racked up some incidentals. $44,000.00 worth of incidentals.

Because most tourist places accept U.S. dollars, we never exchanged our currency (until the end, when I wanted some to show our kids). So, we didn’t really know what the rate was. Jamaican dollars, like Japanese yen, are like our cents. It didn’t automatically occur to me that this might be the case when I looked at our bill and had momentary cardiac arrest before spotting the USD amount hand written beside the total. I saved the bill so I can show everyone how rich and carefree with money I am, that I spent $5,848.91 on a bottle of wine, and $2,610.00 on Red Bull.

Stay tuned for the conclusion to my Troutcation spectacular, in which I’ll share my tips for having a good time at Secrets St. James and Secrets Wild Orchid.

 

Troutcation Part 2: “Let’s Just Get This Part Out Of The Way Because I Know You’re All Waiting For It”

Weed tourism and Jamaica have been synonymous for a long time, but cannabis has been decriminalized for less than a year. Really think about that. Less than a year. You could legally smoke weed in Washington before you could legally smoke in Jamaica. Last year, laws went into effect allowing for religious and medical exemptions, and personal use under two ounces was decriminalized, resulting in a ticket and fine. Which, by the way, is awesome, since Rastafarians use cannabis in religious worship and have been trying to get it legalized for years. It was shitty that American tourists could go down to Jamaica and smoke weed on resorts and have no legal repercussions, but Rastafarians who lived there faced religious persecution over it.

Before we went, people were telling us, “Yeah, you’re going to find it everywhere, people on the street will ask you if you want to buy. People at the airport are selling it.” I doubted that highly, but within two hours of arriving, I was rolling a j in my hotel room. Here’s exactly how it happened:

Me: *walking down the beach*

Random guy: “Hello, my friend! Do you have everything you need?”

Me: “Actually…”

Random guy: “Okay, how much do you want to spend?”

And that was it. I just had to go down and dip my feet in the ocean. Be real, real, real sure that you and the person you’re buying from are on the same page, though, because I accidentally almost bought blow. Keep your purchase low-key; it’s still illegal to sell it, and it’s just good weed etiquette to not get someone busted. Also, not everyone selling marijuana is selling other stuff (for example, the aforementioned coke), so don’t make dickish assumptions.

Now, about the price. You’re going to find people on the internet claiming to have bought four pounds of weed for thirty dollars or some shit. Do not expect this. Pot is definitely cheaper in Jamaica, but if you’re buying on a resort beach, you’re going to get charged resort prices. My personal thought on this is that they’re doing you a service by coming to you. Don’t barter. And for god’s sake, tip your dealer. You’d tip a pizza delivery person, right?

“But Jenny,” some of you seasoned stoners might be saying, “the weed in Jamaica just isn’t as good as it is in the U.S.!” This is totally not true. Beach weed in Jamaica doesn’t give you as powerful a high as something named “shark wreck” that you get from a pot shop in Denver, but that doesn’t make it of lower quality. The nameless green I bought had a beautiful, mild high without paranoia. Just a blissful sense of well-being. And my body didn’t feel sluggish; I smoked a joint about as long as my hand before I went snorkeling and never felt tired or like I was going to get in trouble swimming (though I’m a pretty strong swimmer in the first place).

Let’s go find Nemo!

Of course, snorkeling while high is probably not the best idea, so don’t take this as a recommendation. On our second swim out, I saw a fucking huge barracuda and thought, “right on,” instead of, “this is not good and I should leave this part of the reef.” But I also saw a sting ray gliding majestically through the water and thought, “That should be called a sea pancake,” so it was probably worth the danger.

Not everyone in Jamaica is a total stoner, and not everybody is cool with weed. Don’t go into a restaurant and spark up. Don’t be that tourist. I mostly smoked on the beach at night, and on our balcony during the day. And don’t worry, housekeeping is savvy:

That is a clean ashtray. The housekeeper took the old one, but left our roaches in the clean one. A++ service.

Staying at an all-inclusive resort meant there was never a lack of food for when the munchies came calling. The buffet at the World Café was amazing for this. Smoke up, get hungry, wander into a paradise untold where you could get all sorts of fruits and fruit juices. Which, by the way, is what you’ll probably get the munchies for while you’re there; the combination of the heat and the cotton mouth is going to drive you straight into a pile of fresh pineapple, papaya, and otaheiti apple (which has the consistency of a pear and tastes the way roses smell). Mid-afternoon a guy with a little cart full of coconuts and straws would walk around, if you’re into coconut water. You will, however, give yourself away if you sit down with a plate heaped with pineapple and six or seven glasses of juice.

Basically, smoking weed in Jamaica isn’t all that different than smoking it in the States. It’s just easier to get, a little bit cheaper, and the high is a lot more mellow. I took my own rolling papers and a new, sealed roller in my suitcase. When I returned home, all of that stuff stayed behind. Do not try to bring home any “souvenirs” you’ve smoked out of or rolled with, because customs can give you a big hassle, and you can be busted if residue is found on those items. To be honest, I wouldn’t even chance bringing clean paraphernalia back to the U.S. Get something better. Something classy. Like I did:

Don’t Do This Ever: “Ego-Induced Amnesia” edition

Ros Barber will never self-publish. It is beneath her. It should be beneath any “serious novelist” (a title Barber seems to self-apply), and she has taken to The Guardian to tell us why.

Now, I understand that “indie publishing” is all the rage, but you might as well be telling Luke Skywalker to go to the dark side. Despite royalty rates of 70%, I think self-publishing is a terrible idea for serious novelists (by which I mean, novelists who take writing seriously, and love to write). Here’s why.

I should warn you that any time someone uses the term “serious novelist” without irony, whatever follows will be an orgy of public masturbation. Barber’s piece is practically NSFW in this respect.

If you self-publish your book, you are not going to be writing for a living. You are going to be marketing for a living. Self-published authors should expect to spend only 10% of their time writing and 90% of their time marketing.

Wait, I thought this article was about why Barber won’t self-publish. I won’t go downhill skiing, but it’s a comfort to know that my inexperience won’t hold me back when I want to write an article for a major media outlet about why downhill skiing is terrible and no cross-country skiers should do it. Somehow, Barber is the expert on how self-published authors divide up their time, despite her reluctance to do it in the first place.

But if your passion is creating worlds and characters, telling great stories, and/or revelling in language, you might want to aim for traditional publication.

I’m not sure it’s possible to be more insulting than Barber is here. Only traditionally published, serious authors can create worlds and characters, because clearly self-published authors draw words out of a hat and hurriedly type them up so as to return to their mindless, repetitive social media presence. Only traditionally published authors can tell great stories.

Barber goes on to describe the very marketing behavior many successful self-published authors already advise against, and assumes that all self-published authors are equally guilty:

Imagine we have just met. I invite you into my house and the first thing you do is show me the advertising blurb for your book and press me to check it out on Amazon. Then you read me the blurb for someone else whose book you’ve agreed to promote if they’ll do the same with yours. Then you tell me how many friends you’ve lost today, and that I can find out how many friends I’ve lost by using this app. Then you poke a reader review of your book under my nose. All within the first 10 minutes. Does this lead me to conclude you are a successful author, whose books I might like to buy? Or a desperate egomaniac with no thought for other people? One who may not be able to string a decent sentence together, since your sentences come out as semi-literate strings of hashtags:

#Bestseller: ARRANGED MARRIAGE https://t.co/GYO5Sxgwa2 #IAN1 #amreading #ASMSG #romance #IARTG #BYNR #PDf1 #readers

— Aditi Chopra (@atchopra) March 16, 2016

The tweet Barber uses to illustrate her point once again raises an often overlooked component of self-publishing, which is access for authors of color. Does Chopra’s tweet include a number of hashtag sins? Certainly. But one has to wonder whether Barber realized that by choosing Chopra’s tweet as an example of the “semi-literate” over-saturation of social media promotion, she was betraying the narrow scope of her own advantage with the publishers of “serious novelists”. A highly educated white woman (a “scholar”, as described by a dedicated section on Barber’s website) has a much better chance of skating by the gatekeepers Barber later lauds in her piece. Perhaps some unserious writers come off as “desperate” because they have to work ten times as hard to get their books noticed by readers, let alone publishers.

One also has to wonder when, exactly, Twitter became Barber’s private living space.

In another section, Barber compares self-published books to wobbly cabinets constructed by inexperienced carpenters using shoddy materials. The subtitle for this section?

Gatekeepers are saving you from your own ego

It doesn’t seem to have worked for Barber, but, as Kermit the Frog says in his popular meme, that’s none of my business.

My first novel was my fourth novel. It was accomplished on the back of three complete novels (plus two half novels) that didn’t quite make the grade (even though two of them were represented by well-respected agents). Yes, it can be frustrating, having your beloved book (months or years of hard work) rejected by traditional publishers. But if you are serious about writing, you will simply raise your game. You will put in another few thousand hours and complete your apprenticeship. And when you do, you will be very glad that the first novel you wrote was not the first novel you published, because it will now feel embarrassing and amateurish.

Amateurish is exactly the word I would use to describe an author who truly believes that talent and hard work will eventually result in a published book. Willfully ignorant is what I would call an author who sees traditional publishing as the inevitable end result of finely honed craft. If this were true, a certain world-wide record-smashing blockbuster series of novels based off an equally record-smashing blockbuster series of novels wouldn’t have slipped past those gatekeepers’ quality control. The Instagram filter Barber has chosen for her view of traditional publishing washes out the reality of commercial fiction and market trends.

You can only be a debutante once. First novels are all about making a splash. You’ll find it hard to make a good impression if the first thing anyone saw from you was that wonky cabinet with sticky drawers.

Again, I would refer Barber to some of the wonky cabinets built by first-time carpenters and haphazardly installed by the very quality control gatekeepers she lauds.

With genre fiction, self-publishing can turn you into a successful author (if you can build a platform, if you enjoy marketing and are good at it, if you are lucky). But an author who writes literary fiction is dependent on critical acclaim and literary prizes to build their reputation and following. If genre fiction is chart music, literary fiction is opera: the audience is small, and there are limited ways to reach it. Self-published books are not eligible for major prizes like the Baileys, the Costa and the Man Booker, and getting shortlisted for major prizes is the only way a literary novel will become a bestseller.

Here, I agree with Barber. Though some may take the comparisons of genre fiction to “chart music” and literary fiction to “opera”, I would agree with that assessment. That said, pop music is my favorite music, so I don’t see it as an insult. And it is rare for a self-published novel to win a major award. In 2013, Sergio de la Pava made headlines when he won the PEN/Robert W Bingham award for his novel A Naked Singularity. What made De La Pava’s success so notable was the fact that his novel was self-published, and only became an eligible, “serious” novel once a publisher picked it up after the book had generated positive reviews under De La Pava’s own steam. In other words, this book that was dismissed by Barber’s precious gatekeepers was better than other traditionally published novels, even when it didn’t have traditional publishing’s stamp of approval. Instead of pointing out that self-publishing excludes authors from prestigious festivals and prizes, why not question why that’s the case?

Barber continues to explain the higher quality of editors at traditional publishing houses, and the advantage of not having to pay for those services. She also shares an anecdote from a one-time self-published author who turned to traditional publishing and is much happier.

She has just sold Korean translation rights to her children’s books, which illustrates another benefit of traditional publishing. Publishers and agents have reach.

Publishers and agents do have reach. I’m lucky to have a very good agent who uses her reach to sell foreign rights to my self-published books. So far, my self-published series has been translated into Italian, French, and Portuguese, and these foreign editions have been very popular with readers. Though finding representation for foreign rights isn’t a guarantee for self-published authors, neither does traditional publishing guarantee that your book will reach international markets.

For those who prefer orchestrated backing to blowing their own trumpet, who’d privilege running a narrative scenario over running a small business, who’d rather write adventures than adverts, self-publishing is not the answer.

A single look at Barber’s modest website will give you a clue as to what her “orchestral backing” sounds like. Take an hour or two to peruse and digest the bounty of self-aggrandizement there. Barber is an author, a scholar, a “conscientious creator” who “has been helping writers and other creative women to achieve their dreams since 2009″. Barber’s own self-promotion is a Wagnerian opera as composed by Gwyneth Paltrow. And if you manage to make it through the blaring sonic obstacle course of Barber’s instrumental soundtrack far enough, you can even find links… to her self-published books.

I’m not sure anything else needs to be said, except “don’t do this, ever.”

Troutcation, Part One: “I went on vacation and that thing in my neck stopped happening.”

Hey there, friends! As I mentioned last week, Apple Vacations gave me and Mr. Jen the fantastic opportunity to visit the Secrets St. James resort in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Mr. Jen and I don’t get a chance to go on many vacations together. Oh sure, I travel a lot for work, so I can get out and see as many of you guys as are willing to travel to a hotel ballroom to get an awkwardly over-enthusiastic welcome from me. But those trips are actually kind of exhausting, because every day of a conference you have to be “on.” So it was nice to get away from it all, not have to be “on”, and also not be at Disney World (a vacation we took late last year as a family, and which required a recovery period of its own). However, when explaining the concept of an all-inclusive, adults-only resort to our children, that’s exactly the frame of reference we used: “Imagine everything you find boring, but that adults love. Then put all of that together in a place like Disney World, but a Disney World you would immediately want to come home from.”

It didn’t hurt that everything was free, so we didn’t have to work that out. Yes, if you couldn’t already tell, this is a sponsored post. I don’t do many of those, because I like to keep this as add-free a space as possible. But come on. It was a trip to Jamaica.

We were sent as Preferred Club guests. That meant getting some extra perks, like a private lobby with private check-in, a bar, and an all day buffet of little gourmet treats. They don’t care if you take those little gourmet treats back to your room, either; two staff members watched me with amused, knowing looks as I stumbled toward them, glassy-eyed, a plate of multiple bowls of salmon tartar and some kind of ceviche on one arm, an almost Seussian stack of deserts on the other, and called out, “Hey, you don’t mind if I take this and hit the road, do you?”

You could buy it on the beach guys. And it was so cheap and green and so, so good.

The staff of this resort wants you to relax and have a good time–and to have a good time with you–from the moment you touch down at the airport. As we stepped off the plane, we were greeted by a uniformed Apple Vacations representative, who whisked us through immigrations and customs, bypassing lines like big shots. I don’t know if this is a service I got because I was going to write blog posts about the trip, or if it’s just something that comes with the Preferred Club service. On our return trip we decided to independently investigate something called Club Mobay, which is essentially the same thing. It costs $30.00 USD, and you just breeze in and out of the airport like you went to the post office and there was no line. We didn’t use the arrival service, as Apple had us set up, but the departure service was awesome. You wait in their lobby full of complimentary beverages and food (like an actual buffet; you could plan to have your lunch or breakfast there) until it’s time to go. I highly recommend that for everybody.

Anyway, as we took our private transport (thanks for that, too, Apple!), the driver told us all sorts of facts about Jamaica–which I’ll talk about in Troutcation, Part Two: “Things That Surprised Me About Jamaica”. At the hotel, we were whisked to the private Preferred Club check-in, where they greeted us with glasses of ice cold champagne and cold towels. “You’re just like Obama,” a bellman joked.  This is also where we elected to independently investigate the resort’s credit voucher system. You pay $200.00 USD and get a book of vouchers for $10.00 off bottles of wine (4), $60 off a romantic candlelight dinner (1), and some other random amount off spa services that I can’t remember. Basically, it totaled $200.00, anyway. It’s the Disney Dollar of the resort: got ‘em, so you might as well spend ‘em . If you’re not planning on getting spa treatments, now maybe you are, because you don’t want to lose money on the coupons. Getting a bottle of wine with dinner? Now you are! You want to use up those credits. Even if you were planning to do all that stuff, anyway, why not just keep the $200.00? Verdict: nah.

We did, however, opt for the candlelight dinner. It was pricey (somewhere around $250.00 USD), but we considered it an early tenth anniversary present. We did this on the last day of our trip, and enjoyed a dinner on the beach in the moonlight, with the gorgeous mountains in the distance. The dinner was amazing, with a shrimp tempura appetizer course, caprese salad, filet mignon and lobster tail entree, and a dessert that was like a red velvet cake with fruit and chocolate on top.

I highly recommend this option, which comes with various package levels. We did the very basic one. And after dinner:

Really cool, right? It was totally romantic. I mean, Mr. Jen and I aren’t romantic, so we ended up watching CNN and taking turns in the tub so we could both see the TV. But it was still a wonderful evening.

However, do you notice something about the placement of the bathtub? This is pretty key. See, Mr. Jen and I have been together for fourteen years, married for ten. So a bathroom set up like this:

isn’t going to phase us. We have no boundaries anymore. Well…almost no boundaries. One morning, the copious amount of alcohol consumed and the unlimited amount of complimentary gourmet food took its toll. “Hey, Jenny? You mind, uh…spending some time on the balcony?” he asked plaintively. “And turn the shower on? For some noise?”

I’m just saying that if your relationship is in the “bashful flower” phase, you might want to have a talk about the bathroom arrangement up front before you book this vacation. I do, however, know that this is something Apple Vacations takes into consideration for its customers at the other, equally exciting vacation destination properties they can book you at, so if you call and talk to an agent, maybe that’s something they can help you with.

Another perk of the Preferred Club was that we got butlers. Plural. Two butlers handle the arrangements for anything you’d like to do while you’re at the resort. Want that romantic dinner? They’ll help you. Excursions? No problem. Tarje and Patrick have you covered. You even get a little phone you carry around with you so you can call them if you need something, and they’ll be there in a moment’s notice. This was, of course, a service we barely used. They called everyday asking, “Are you sure there’s nothing we can do?” I tried to explain that we are but simple country folk and are used to doing for ourselves, but it was too late. I was already Obama.

We had a fantastic time at Secrets, and a big part of that was what I considered our “Apple safety net.” One of the things I dislike the most about traveling is having to know where to be, when, how much time to budget to get stuff done, etc. The night before we left, an Apple representative contacted us about when our flight would leave, what time our transport would take us to the airport, and what time to check out in the morning. When we had questions, we just went down to the lobby to ask her for clarification, because Apple has representatives on the property. Every day, they were there if we needed their help with setting up outside tours or handling travel arrangements. That was a really cool piece of mind to have.

We stayed for three nights, and honestly, that was just about the right amount of time. Sure, people go down there and stay longer, but three nights was just long enough to feel like we’d gotten away from it all, without getting sunburned or missing the kids too much. And when we did get home, we felt like we’d been gone for weeks. On our first night back, snuggled in our own bed, I leaned over to Mr. Jen and said, “Hey. Feel my neck. It’s not doing that thing anymore.”

All of us have neck things, right? Well, for a few glorious days, I did not. And it was magical.

I know this post comes off as quite commercial-ish, but I honestly can’t say enough about how well the whole thing was set up, both on Apple Vacation’s end and at the resort. Mr. Jen and I are already talking about booking a trip with them for another vacation some time. I creeped their website and it looks like for the exact vacation we had, you’d be spending under $4,000.00 total (this is leaving out some stuff I’ll talk about in another post, I’m just talking hotel/flight/Preferred Club upgrade). So, if you’ve got that kind of vacation cash and you’re looking for something short and tropical, this is definitely a good option. For us in the midwest, it’s actually a shorter flight than going to Vegas.

Also, you get to see Cuba!

Wave hi to Cuba everybody! Yes, even the Americans. Waving at Cuba is legal now. 

So anyway, I’ll be making more posts this week about some other stuff that happened on vacation, like stuff that surprised me about Jamaica and funny stuff that happened there, including why you should never book a ground floor room at Secrets Wild Orchid, and why every Jamaican person we met wanted to talk about tattoos. Stick around.