Claire Ryan's Blog, page 6

December Giveaway – and an Interview!

Well! Nanowrimo is done, and now Christmas is fast approaching. And I have been busy as hell!

The Goodreads giveaway is now over, and three lucky winners in the UK and the States now each have a copy of The Meldling on its way to them. I did run my usual mailing list giveaway, and I’ve contacted the person who won, but I still haven’t heard back from them. This gives me a sad, but all I can do is wait.

In other news! I am on Youtube! And my camera is AWFUL. Just awful. But thanks so much to The Blargh Factory for doing an interview with me, and allowing me to waffle at length about websites and other random crap. (Memo to self: get a better camera for the next interview.)

I talk so fast. SO FAST, YOU GUYS. This is a side effect of being Irish. It’s not contagious, I promise. But daaaaaaaamn, I need to work on slowing down so that I can be understood! I feel a little silly now, not gonna lie. Giving an interview is such a straightforward promotional thing, and boy do I need to work on my game.

Roll on 2016… I’m aiming to get The Nameless Knight ready to go by the end of January. Busy busy!

Related Posts:

October Giveaway Winner!
The Meldling is on Sale!
Did you know that I have a mailing list?
How I Make My Books
Giveaway Madness

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Preventing E-Book Piracy

I’ve noticed, through the metrics that I get through Google, that some people are coming to my site to find out about ebook piracy, since I wrote about it here. I do tend to waffle on a bit about piracy in general, so grab your parrot and peg leg, kids! Let’s talk about how you can prevent those nasty pirates from uploading your treasured works to the torrent site du jour.

In short…

YOU CAN’T PREVENT IT.

That’s right, dear friends! It is quite literally impossible, and I will happily stake my professional reputation as a web developer on that. Your ebooks cannot be protected from someone truly determined, if they are available for sale in any electronic format, anywhere online, and sometimes if they’re only available in dead tree format as well.

Let me explain.

Let’s say you have a book. That book has been uploaded to Amazon, and it’s available for sale through Amazon to all and sundry. Let’s also say that Amazon, through dint of some magic I’ve never heard of that likely breaks the laws of physics, has a system in place that guarantees 100% that no one will be able to copy that book once they buy it. The book can be read through their Kindle device, but that’s it. The file is encrypted or protected or something, so any copies are unreadable. It’s digitally watermarked so that every file delivered to every customer is unique, and, if they allow their copy to be pirated, they’re guaranteed to be traced, arrested, and charged.

Do you think that your book wouldn’t turn up on a torrent site, in these circumstances?

You’d be absolutely, completely, 100% wrong. If you had a bestseller, and people wanted it enough, it’d hit every torrent site from here to Sweden inside a few days of release. All it would take is one individual with time on their hands to buy a copy, open it on their Kindle, and type the text out into their word processor of choice. From there, it’s a few hours work at most to compile it into any desired digital format, with no encryption, no protection, and no restrictions on copying. That watermarking, or tracking? All gone, unless there’s a modification to the actual text of your work.

Let’s say there IS a modification to the text of your work. There would have to be a unique modification – a different word, or a typo, or a miss-spelling, for example – for EVERY copy sold. (You’d also have to be okay with a computer program changing words, grammar and punctuation at random in your book.) This system would work for the very short time that pirates are unaware that such a tracking system is in place, because all they’d have to do is figure out the algorithm that generates the modifications, and reverse it. This kind of textual analysis has been done by programmers for years, and it’s almost trivial.

I am really not kidding about this. The most well known example is Harry Potter, obviously -Rowling was famously unwilling to allow her books to be made available in digital format for years, so ebook copies of Harry Potter were all pirated, and all available freely. The fans literally bought the paper books, typed them by hand or scanned them through OCR, and turned them into the ebooks that everyone wanted.

That’s what I mean when I say that ebook piracy can’t be prevented. Asking for it to be stopped is asking for the impossible, from a technical standpoint. Now, all this said, if you DO discover your books have been made available on pirate websites (and this honestly bothers you), then a DMCA takedown notice for sites within the US is still the only real way you’ll get satisfaction. For sites outside the US, such as The Pirate Bay, you might as well shout down the drainpipe in your kitchen sink. You can email and ask them to remove it, and that’s about all.

Then you’ll likely get to rage a little bit more when some other user uploads a fresh copy a day later. Such is the price of popularity.

Anyway, I don’t want you to fret too much. Mostly I want to impress upon you that it’s just not worth getting angry about. To use a rather silly analogy – it’s like rain. You can use an umbrella to keep yourself somewhat dry, but the only real way to avoid getting wet at all is to stay indoors and never go outside.

And asking someone to make the rain stop because you’re tired of getting wet is just bonkers.

For more of my opinions on piracy, check out a few other articles here.

Related Posts:

Has my Book been Pirated?
The Great Erotica Ebook Purge
Cunable by the Numbers
What You Need to Know about Book Piracy
The DRM Endgame – What Authors Can Learn From Video Games

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Nanowrimo is done

I’m exhausted and I’ve written about ten thousand words in, oh, two and a half days.

But the first raw draft of The Nameless Knight is done. It’s DONE, it’s done done done DONEDONEDONEDONEDONE AAAAAHHHHH!

Don’t be scared, this is a completely natural side-effect of doing Nanowrimo – the National Novel Writer’s Month. Fifty Thousand Words in one month, should you be brave enough to do it and have a sufficient amount of caffeine to keep you going. If I were really under pressure, I could produce a novel like this every month, but I’m pretty sure that every other aspect of my life would suffer.

I’ve done Nanowrimo almost every year. To my eternal shame, I’ve only finished it once before. I’ve promised myself that I’ll do it every year from now on, and I WILL finish. I’ve waited around too long to write books like, you know, an actual author and all that. I owe it to myself, at this point.

Fun fact – the one time I finished it before, I wrote the first draft of The Meldling! So it’s oddly appropriate that the second time should be for its sequel.

Here’s to the Nanowrimo madness, and the break I’m taking for the next day or so. If you’re waiting for The Nameless Knight, have no fear – it’ll be published in the New Year!

Related Posts:

NaNoWriMo
What does boredom feel like?
The Importance of Tea
Mailing List Shenanigans
Cover Reveal: The Meldling

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Morally Complicated Y.A.

Behold, my friends, the latest storm of idiocy striking the heart of the traditional publishing industry. I present to you Exhibit A, the announcement of a new YA novel called The Cruelty bought for six figures and sold in umpteen territories and a movie deal and… yeah. Good times indeed. This book was self-published first, so this should be a feel-good success story, right?

Normally this would pass without comment, and I’d be happy for the author. But this, this is more than just a book announcement. The interview with the author on Publishers Weekly is the stuff of drama llama hell.

Look, here’s a convenient summary. Go read it for more info. TL;DR – the author, Scott Bergstrom, decided that the best way of boosting his book was to take a shit all over the YA genre, implying that most YA books are simplistic and, I quote, ‘a metaphor for high school’. And he decided that HIS book was morally complicated YA, and not like those other YA books with heroines that are into pink and princesses.

Like… Dude. DUDE.

Dude.

Your ass, okay? That one right there? You need to sit it down and stop pretending that you’re God’s gift to YA literature. Let’s be clear about this, man – your book, of which I have read a few excerpts, got you a six figure book deal because you’re a former ad executive who knows the right people, not because it’s going to light the YA genre on fire.

Newsflash: it’s only okay, as far as I can see. It’s about what you’d expect for a first novel. Not bad, but there’s room for improvement, and your fourth or fifth book will be pretty slick. The plot’s been done before and by better authors than you. ‘Morally complicated’ stories have been done before by nearly every author in YA, many of whom are better than you (and if you knew anything about YA works past and present, you’d know this). It is the height of absolute arrogance to barge into a space that was built and maintained by other authors, and throw shade on their work in order to talk up yours.

But that’s not the worst part. The real stupidity of this whole thing comes from the publishers’ side. They threw money at this guy, and one offer was based on nothing but a description of the book, for a work that is problematic on its face (really? the protagonist has to get thin to realize her destiny?!), that is not original nor groundbreaking, and that implicitly trashes the entire YA genre in its own pages.

Here’s a quote from the excerpt above that Diana Urban posted on Twitter, where the protagonist is reading while on the subway:

“It’s a novel with a teenage heroine set in a dystopian future. Which novel in particular doesn’t matter because they’re all the same. Poor teenage heroine, having to go to war when all you want to do is write in your diary about how you’re in love with two different guys and can’t decide between them. These novels are cheesy, I know, and I suck them down as easily as milk.”

I mean… I don’t read YA, okay? But I was a teenage girl, and I know teenage girls, and this right here was written by a dude pretending to be a teenage girl, and he’s decided that The Hunger Games is more like Sweet Valley High than Battle Royale. I’m not sure what exactly you can say to that.

Also relevant: the author is a white man. Don’t think for a minute that a black woman who handed the same manuscript to a publisher would be given the same consideration, even if she did have the same connections. The publishing industry – yes, even the large swathes of it run by white women – has a streak of racism and sexism a mile wide.

This is a white man come stomping into a genre that was built and made popular by books mostly written by women, for girls and women. He thinks it’s fine to throw shade on all that work and insult all those authors who’ve spent years growing the very audience whose money he’s chasing now. And the publishers read his book, read the paragraph above, and said ‘yep, let’s go with this! And let’s do an interview where he doubles down on that shade! No one could possibly have a problem with it!’

This is either the worst viral marketing campaign in history, or it’s weapons-grade stupidity. I’m leaning towards the latter if only because it increases the chance that the next big breakout YA novel will be self-published. Why try the traditional publishing lottery when it’s based on who you know and not the quality of your work, right? Why throw your YA novel at an industry that seems to be 100% okay with one of their authors trashing your genre for funsies?

Either way, I know this for sure – the next big novel isn’t going to be this book, and Scott Bergstrom has a lot of work to do to gain back the goodwill he tossed in the trash today.

(Usual disclaimer about this being my opinion etc etc.)

Related Posts:

Further Adventures in Book Binding
Adventures in Bookbinding
Who You Write For
More about Pay to Play Publishers
Exotic Ebook Formatting

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Goodreads shenanigans

I have a Goodreads profile that I jump into occasionally to see what readers are up to. I honestly thought that I’d never be able to do a giveaway for my handbound books there, because how exactly do you do that for books with no ISBN or ASIN number? (ISBN = obvious, ASIN = Amazon’s identifier)

Well, after a few emails to the Goodreads support staff, I have a giveaway for three of my books!

This is pretty important because there are so many readers on Goodreads, and I’m sure at least a few of them will really like The Meldling. The giveaways there are limited to physical books only, so I really need to keep the number of copies limited.

Bonus fact: I’m out of toner again. Guess who has two thumbs and managed to cover her entire kitchen sink in black toner powder? Eyyyyyyyyyy! *points thumbs at self, a la The Fonz, and if you don’t get that reference, TO GOOGLE WITH YOU right this minute*

It’s okay. I have the toner on order, and I’ll have it before the giveaway ends. I do have a few nice copies made as well, so I’m not going to have that much of a problem with it. My biggest cost in doing all this bookbinding is toner and postage, believe it or not.

So the Goodreads profile started today, and I’ve gotten a few friend requests and like eighty people added The Meldling to their to-read pile. It completely threw me for a moment, like… dayum, people want to read it! How about that! This is because writers are a neurotic bunch, and somehow it always comes as a surprise that people actually want to read our stuff.

So there you have it. Check out my profile if you do the Goodreads thing, and be sure to leave a review of The Meldling if you haven’t done so already.

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The Importance of Tea

This has nothing to do with bookbinding or swordfighting or writing, I know, but frankly I like to indulge myself sometimes. It’s 9am, I’m sleep-deprived, and right now the cause of that is only seven months old, and snoozing in bed and getting the shut-eye that I so desperately need, so ya know what – I’m going to write about tea.

Because tea is important, people. Especially if you’re Irish.

Needless to say, this is a very Irish view on tea.

I like my tea a certain way. Everyone does. You know you’re good friends with someone when you can make a cuppa for them how they like it without asking first. You know you’re married to someone when you automatically make them a cuppa when they need it, before they even ask for it or know it themselves.

For the record, here is my way:

Take mug from cupboard, place in front of kettle.
Fill kettle, boil kettle.
Place Barry’s teabag in mug.
Place one spoon of sugar in mug.
Add boiling water to mug, leaving space for enough milk to cool it down and make it drinkable immediately.
Stir everything in mug for ten seconds.
Remove teabag, place teabag in bin.
Stir mug again, ensuring all sugar has dissolved, and get a nice little whirlpool going.
Pour milk in the center of the whirlpool, letting the action mix the milk into the tea.
Serve.

I’ve done this so often that it’s muscle memory at this point.

Tea is a constant in my life. I’ve drunk more of it than alcohol, and likely more of it than actual water. After I gave birth, the first thing I wanted was a cup of tea (and may the gods shine on my better half, he knew this and made that a priority when I was in recovery; I had a cuppa in my hands not half an hour after my daughter was born).

As I write this, cranky as I am, I have a cup of tea beside me.

I was told, if I recall correctly, that pregnant women shouldn’t drink coffee because the caffeine could be a problem for the baby. I scoffed at that pretty quickly. The average Irish woman drinks four to five cups of strong black tea a day, if not more, and has done since tea became a thing in Ireland. We drink more tea than England. If caffeine had any effect on fertility, the Irish wouldn’t be known for multiplying faster than rabbits. Needless to say, I didn’t stop drinking tea while I was pregnant.

Sitting down to have tea with someone is not like getting coffee with them. Tea is a bonding experience. You go out to Starbucks to grab a coffee with someone; you stay in and make someone a cup of tea. Coffee is impersonal. Tea is intimate.

You drink tea to celebrate, to commiserate, to chat, to do nothing. You drink tea on your own as an accompaniment to whatever you’re doing alone. Tea goes with every occasion. Irish pubs, those temples to the art of getting intoxicated, might have every possible liquor behind the bar – but they will also serve Irish breakfast tea.

I drink tea while watching Netflix, or while writing, or even while bookbinding. I’ve drunk tea while rebuilding computers. (I have never spilled my tea on my electronics.) Tea is a constant. It’s always the same tea, as well – Barry’s Gold Blend, sent to me in bulk from Ireland. I sometimes think about getting the water from Ireland bottled and sent over as well, so that I can have the same cup of tea I would have while sitting in my parent’s living room, with my mother, on Christmas morning.

Yes, the kind of water matters. I’ve been drinking tea my whole goddamn life, I can tell the difference.

Tea is home. It’s the thing you have when you come home, or when you want to be reminded of home, or when you want to make a home. It’s an anchor, a point of reference. It’s stability. The act of making it and drinking it somehow makes the world better. It’s a pause, a chance to breathe and think and reflect and, for a minute, simply be.

Basically, what I’m saying is that tea is important.

It is now an hour later. I’ve finished my cup of tea, and everyone else is awake, and I’m ready to go do whatever.

Have a good day, wherever you are.

Related Posts:

Cover Reveal: The Meldling
Defeating Procrastination
Better Writing Through Tabletop RPGs
Who You Write For
Lying Down with Dogs

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Mailing List Shenanigans

Okay, I’ll be honest – I have almost no mailing list subscribers yet. That bums me out somewhat, but I’m still trying to figure this stuff out, so I won’t beat myself up too much.

And then my mailing list plugin went kablooey. As in, not working anymore. Screwed up. No longer fit for purpose.

This kind of thing is always a pain in the ass because I need to be writing, dammit! So I’ve spent something like five hours swapping out a new plugin, moving the subscriber list, and trying to get everything back online again. It’s maddening!

If anyone on my list got any odd emails over the last day or so, I am profoundly sorry! It’s a bit of a mess right now, and I’m still trying to get it all sorted out. I’ll work on it, I promise. If you want to unsubscribe for a while, I totally understand.

Back to work for me… and wish me luck, I think I’ll need it. Of course this had to happen during Nanowrimo.

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Did you know that I have a mailing list?
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The post Mailing List Shenanigans appeared first on Raynfall.

October Giveaway Winner!

You didn’t think I’d forget about this just because I’m doing NanoWrimo, did you?

The Nameless Knight is now in progress, and I’m sure that I’ll be deviating wildly from my outline in no time. Until the 30th, when I return from my bunker with the first draft, take a look at this nice book!

This giveaway copy of The Meldling is on its way to Brian, in Ireland, courtesy of the lovely Canadian postal service. It’ll take a while to get there, but hopefully it’ll be there in time for Christmas! The cover is a reclaimed art print, with blue endpapers and a blue bookmark. This one came out very chunky in the binding, but it’s a good solid hardback, and I have no doubt that it’d make an excellent impromptu weapon if need be.

So, last weekend I got to Wayzgoose, the book arts fair in the Vancouver Public Library. I talked to many different bookbinder people, and I got some great tips, so you can expect the next handbound copies I make will be even better than ever.

Remember, if you want to be in with a chance to get a handbound book, sign up to the mailing list!

Related Posts:

The Meldling is on Sale!
Did you know that I have a mailing list?
How I Make My Books
Giveaway Madness
The Evolution of the Cover

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The Meldling is on Sale!

So, just a quick update – The Meldling is currently on sale for 99c, as part of a promotion I ran with My Book Cave. It’s almost finished now, so I’m giving y’all one last chance to get it for almost nothing. Tomorrow morning, I put the price back up to $2.99! Until then, you can snap up the first in the series if you haven’t gotten it already.

I’ve gotten the first sketches of the cover art for The Nameless Knight, which is Book 2 in the Daemonva Trilogy, and it is EPIC, you guys. You can’t see it yet but you are gonna love it, I swear.

The October mailing list giveaway ends in two days, so make sure you’re subscribed to the mailing list to have a chance to win one of my handbound books! I’ve rigged up a sewing frame, so I’m capable of better binds now, and I might be doing one or two with proper leather covers.

Busy busy and all that… onwards to Nanowrimo in November, and don’t be surprised if I don’t update much!

Related Posts:

Did you know that I have a mailing list?
How I Make My Books
Giveaway Madness
The Evolution of the Cover
Cover Reveal: The Meldling

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Pride and Prejudice and Hollywood

Okay, I love Jane Austen. I especially love Pride and Prejudice. I absolutely adore the 1995 BBC version with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. Today, I decided to watch the 2005 movie version with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen.

And now I need to blog, because otherwise I will explode into incoherent spluttering. AGAIN.

I’m not really against any adaptations of Pride and Prejudice that are not 100% true to the book. I still hold a great love of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries on Youtube, which I consider to be one of the only good modern retellings. But this, my friends… this movie. THIS MOVIE. It took the heart and soul of one of the greatest works of English literature and ripped it out, and replaced it with Hollywood asshattery. It has tainted me, and now I must purge it by ranting at length.

(I’ve already spent a while swearing at Netflix. My husband thinks I’m ridiculous.)

Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen

WHY. JUST WHY.

The whole problem, and this is just one of many here, is that Knightley can look the part but she can’t fucking well ACT the part. She’s not Lizzie Bennet. She can’t hold a candle to Jennifer Ehle in the same role. She’s got this amazing tendency to simper all the damn time and I kept wanting to shout at her that LIZZIE DOES NOT SIMPER, YOU TWIT. Lizzie Bennet is smart, witty, loyal as hell, and sensible as a rock.

Matthew Macfadyen is not Colin Firth, basically. Colin Firth brought this… intensity to Darcy. Fitzwilliam Darcy is proud, but he’s not a robot. Macfadyen played Darcy as if he had no feelings at all for at least two thirds of this stupid movie, and then gave us the most INDIFFERENT anguished declaration of love I have ever bloody well heard.

The two of them together equals a wooden performance that would only be more wooden if both of them were actually carved out of a block of wood.

Taking Liberties with the Plot

So… adaptations mean changes. But what really bugged the shit out of me is that the liberties taken with the plot added nothing and made everything worse. There was screen time wasted on gratuitous butt shots of marble statues – I WISH I was kidding. Gratuitous. Butt. Shots.

Netflix screenshot of marble butts

The hell is this?! Who decided this was a good idea?

The movie literally skips over some important parts, and then uses shit like this to beat it over the audience’s head that HEY THIS DUDE IS RICH AND SEXY.

I just – I can’t. My ability to can is gone.

Compression and Dumbing It Down

My major, MAJOR issue with the movie is this: some goddamn idiot executive decided that taking a complex, nuanced and immensely rich work of literature and squashing it down to a two hour movie was a good idea. And then, that same idiot decided that whatever nuance or richness that survived should be also be squashed because Americans Might Not Get It.

Result: Lizzie Bennet is reactionary and stupid, Darcy is a non-entity, their relationship has all the tension of a wet noodle, and the sparkling wit and life that Jane Austen brought to the original book has been shredded. The actual lines of dialogue from the book that remain actually sound out of place, if you can imagine that.

I’ll give Knightley and Macfadyen this much – if they’d had longer than two hours, maybe they’d have given the roles what they deserved. As it stands, this movie is going to be compared to the 1995 BBC version constantly and unfavorably.

The only highlights: Dame Judi Dench does an amazing job as Lady Catherine for the minute or so she’s onscreen, and there were some nice moments between Lizzie and Darcy where you could sort of see the real Pride and Prejudice underneath all the terrible acting and rushed storylines.

In short, watch this if you’re a real Austen fan, but be warned you’ll want to watch the 1995 version immediately afterwards just to get the taste of Hollywood out of your mouth.

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