Claire Ryan's Blog, page 9

Has my Book been Pirated?

Piracy is still a big issue for ebooks, in spite of the fact that DRM has been optional for a while now on Amazon (the only platform that counts*). I’m still of the opinion that it’s basically irrelevant – you can’t control it, can’t prevent it, and worrying about it is a waste of your time and money.

That said, though, how do you know that your book has been pirated at all? It occurred to me that, although I could find out in a heartbeat whether my book has been pirated and from what source, it takes a level of technical knowledge that not everyone has access to. So, without further ado, here’s a primer on figuring out whether people are getting your book for free, and what you can do about it.

1: Time for Google!

Do a google search for “my awesome book title torrent”. This is always the first port of call – checking the most popular torrent sites for a torrent of your book. If a listing shows up, it’ll likely have the title, author name, and ISBN or ASIN. Even pirates like to know they’re getting the right book!

The torrent listing can tell you some very interesting things: the current number of seeders, the current number of leachers, and the number of times the file was downloaded. (Seeders are the people who have a complete copy of the ebook file, and they’re collectively providing bits of that file to the seeders, who only have an incomplete copy.) It’ll also tell you when the listing was added.

Google doesn’t index the Pirate Bay site any more, as far as I know, so you may have to go to it directly to search it.

Next thing to do is run another search for “my awesome book title free download”. This will cover non-torrent sources like sites that get people to sign up before they can download free ebooks. Ebook files are much smaller than movies or music, remember, so there are many more methods for transferring them about the internet.

2: Try to get a copy of it

This seems obvious, but if free copies of your book are being made available somewhere, you should try to get one! Looking at the file itself can be interesting. It should tell you which service the original file came from, if it was pirated from one of them. It might also be a scanned, OCR-read copy of a print book.

Some authors are irritated by the quality of the pirated copies. The sixth Harry Potter book was bought, scanned using OCR, proofread and turned into an ebook only 12 hours after the print copy was released; most pirates are nowhere near as diligent, and can leave in spelling and grammar mistakes. It’s also possible to get a broken copy, where bad formatting and code errors make the book itself unreadable. Not really a good advertisement for an author!

3: Decide what to do next

Okay, so you know your book has been pirated. You know where the copy came from, and you know what it looks like. What now?

Well, it depends. Is it worth your while to try to take down the listing? Torrents are very easily replicated, unfortunately – if you take it down, it can be restored in a matter of minutes, if another pirate decides to make it available. There are too many torrent sites, and too many people with a lot of technical knowledge. It really comes down to whether you think the time it’ll take to remove the listing constantly is worth it for the number of readers who’ll get free copies.

If you want to get rid of it, you have a couple of options. Check the site to see if they have a contact form or some other method of getting in touch. See if they have a policy about pirated content, and if they’re willing to remove the listing willingly for you. This is the easiest and quickest option – simply contact the site, inform them that they’re hosting your copyrighted material, and ask that they remove it.

If this doesn’t work, you’ll need to figure out where the site is based, and then decide what legal measures to take from there.

First of all, you’ll need to do a WHOIS lookup to get more information about the domain. Take the domain name,  www.eviltorrentsite.com (or whatever it is) and do a search on whois.domaintools.com. You should see that it’s already registered; scroll down and you’ll see a list of domain information. Look through this to get an email address for the owner of the website and, again, contact them and ask that your books be removed.

If the site is being hosted in the US, then a DMCA notice is the next port of call. Use this form to automatically generate a DMCA notice using the URL of the listing. This has some legal clout because it means the host, not the website owner, must take down the listing to avoid liability. The actual process varies from host to host, but it means the listing will be removed within 14 days. (If it’s not taken down, then the host becomes liable for damages as if they infringed on your copyright, and no hosting company wants to get dragged into a lawsuit.)

Outside of the US, you may be out of luck, unfortunately. Your best bet is to go to an intellectual property lawyer and get some advice. You may have no other options apart from having them create a cease and desist letter to send to the owner of the site, or the host, and hope that they comply.

Filing a lawsuit against a website owner in another country is, I’m afraid, a complete waste of your time and money. If the MPAA and RIAA couldn’t take down the Pirate Bay after years of litigation, it’s very unlikely that an author who doesn’t have access to millions of dollars and teams of attack lawyers is going to do it.

Have you got any other questions? Feel free to ask in the comments. I’m not a lawyer, and I can’t give you legal advice, but I do a lot of reading on copyright law and I might be able to point you in the right direction.

* Restrain your caps-lock, I’m only kidding

This far, and no further

This was originally posted on Facebook, seeing as it’s a personal thing, but I’m going to post it here as well for the sake of completeness.

There is a speech by Picard from Star Trek: First Contact that’s stayed with me ever since I saw the movie, years ago, in the cinema. It goes like this:

“We’ve made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn HERE! This far, no further!”

Since the start of the Irish marriage referendum drama, I’ve been thinking about the line. Every time someone says “they’re entitled to their opinion”, I think about the line. Every time equal space is given to the Yes and the No sides, I think about the line. Every time a clergyman preaches barely veiled homophobia, I think about the line.

And I feel the most incandescent, irrational rage, that this – this utter LUNACY – is where my country has fallen.

This referendum is already an insult to the LGBT community, who should not have to go begging, cap in hand, to the population at large for their rights. The No side has used every possible argument to demean Irish families who don’t fit their nice little Catholic-approved mould of one mother, one father, and their many children; their homophobia runs so deep that they’d throw single parents under a bus to keep LGBT people out of marriage. The Church is guilty of the most rank hypocrisy by saying anything at all about marriage, morals, and “think of the children!” Its history proves beyond a doubt that it cares nothing for Irish children, and it’d ruin every family in the country for the sake of power.

I say… we have made too many compromises, by allowing evil to have a voice equal to that of good. Letting LGBT people marry is good, for them, for their children, and for Ireland. Denying them this is yet another evil fuelled, at its core, by religious bigotry.

We do not have to entertain the opinions, arguments and feelings of those who would treat Irish men and women so shamefully. We do not have to give homophobes a platform in the name of fairness. There IS NO FAIRNESS here. The No campaign has used lies, trickery and appeals to emotion to protect their central belief; that LGBT people are the alien Other. The worst that will happen to them, if the referendum passes, is that they will finally have their belief challenged. Giving LGBT people’s relationships the validation and protection of the law on equal footing to that of heterosexual people is far more important than their pitiful existential crises.

On Friday, the line will be drawn again. It must be drawn here – this far, and NO FURTHER. If we can’t do this much, this one small gesture of good, then we have to admit that Ireland is indeed rotten to the core – rotten with corruption, gombeen tribalism, creeping religious conservatism, and hypocrisy, that chews up lives and spits them out wholesale, and our only hope is to emigrate and escape.

I am begging you, get out there and vote Yes. Vote even if you think it’ll make no difference. Vote even if you’ve lost hope. Vote for all of us who’ve already left with broken hearts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jln3m...

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The Power of Stories

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Archery at Burnaby!

I went out to the Burnaby Range with Taylore (a friend and archery instructor) to see if I could get any better at putting holes in poor defenseless targets. I also brought along a camera to record my bumbling foolishness for posterity, and posted the evidence on Youtube.

Enjoy!

As you can see, I am not photogenic in any way, and it seems that being in front of a camera causes me to have a goofy grin all the time. (In fairness, it was really sunny, and that is half-grin, half-grimace behind my sunglasses.)

The Burnaby range is members only, and it only costs $80 a year for membership. Members can come and shoot at any time – all you do is open up the gate on whatever archery butt you’re using, pin up your target, and go nuts. Like I said in the video, though, there are lots of rules about safety. Archery is great, but it still involves shooting pointy things at high speed towards squishy targets. For reference, here’s the field tip on my practice arrows:

At this range, there’s a long list of rules for safety. One person out of whoever is shooting that day acts as the rangemaster, who calls out whether the range is clear or whether it’s ‘hot’. You can’t step across the firing line when the range is hot. If you misfire or drop an arrow, you can’t pick it up. You can’t retrieve your arrows until the rangemaster calls out that it’s clear. If anyone wanders onto the range while it’s hot, you have to shout to stop shooting. There’s more, and you do have to take it all seriously, because even a weedy little bow like mine could put an arrow into someone’s head!

Every member has to undergo an orientation and show they can land three arrows into the target, then we get a membership badge that has to be on display at all times. You can see mine hanging off my jeans pocket.

All in all, I didn’t do too badly, in spite of the fact that my groupings were never all that tight. It was lots of fun, even though it was blisteringly hot. I managed not to get burned either due to a significant amount of sunscreen which thankfully doesn’t show up on the video!

Related Posts:

Beginning Archery
Strength Versus Dexterity in Roleplaying Games
Being a Swordfighter
Lars Anderson – not a revolutionary in archery
Archery Level: Godlike

The post Archery at Burnaby! appeared first on Raynfall.

It’s the Superhero Series I’ve Been Waiting For

Ohhhhhhhhhhhh SHIT, you guys!

I have spent several months bitching about the fact that Daredevil is all about an angsty white guy with brown hair, and Gotham is all about an angsty white guy with brown hair, and Flash is all about an angsty white guy with brown hair, and Arrow is all about an angsty white guy with brown hair – do you get where I’m going with this?

I’ve mentally checked out of the last few superhero movies because I cannot, CANNOT, get excited about white guys with brown hair angsting it up anymore. I have absolutely no interest. My boredom with the parade of white guys with brown hair and tortured pasts knows no bounds. I’ve been hanging on, only because Captain Marvel is going to be a thing at some point.

But then – THEN! – the clouds parted, the veil was lifted, and down from on high was delivered almost everything my poor heart has cried out for.

My exact response can best be summarized as

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

I have not been this excited about a TV show in FOREVER. I haven’t been this excited about ANYTHING related to superheroes in forever! So many good moments! So many awesome lines! Such ridiculous music!

I am not kidding, I wanted to start cheering halfway through the video. A TV series about a powerful woman saving the world, with other women around her having meaningful relationships with her, and it’s got this profound sense of joy about it, with minimal levels of angst?

SIGN ME UP! Take all my money! This is the one I’ve been waiting and hoping for! I don’t care that it looks campy as hell and probably has cliches out the ass. It looks like fun, the kind of fun and silly and over-the-top that I know I’m going to enjoy, especially if I get more of Calista Flockhart snarking it up.

I don’t read the comics, and something tells me that the comic fans are going to hate this one. I really, really don’t care. This looks like a superhero series that’s being honestly aimed at women for a change and I am so on board with that I’m already driving the boat.

 

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Better Writing Through Tabletop RPGs

Everyone asks, how can I become a better writer?

The answers are usually something like: read more books in the genre you’re writing, write as much as you can, get feedback from other writers and readers. Yes, you should do all those things, and they will make you a better writer in general. But something that’s often overlooked (perhaps because it’s incredibly nerdy) is tabletop roleplaying.

RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons are amazing tools for focusing the mind on the process of storytelling. By running and playing in an RPG, you’ll develop skills and habits that will make your writing better – or at least easier!

Worldbuilding

Being a GM, or gamesmaster, for an RPG is an interesting experience, and it has a steep learning curve to it. It starts with the setting of the game, which could be D&D, the various White Wolf games, Call of Cthulhu, or oldies like Rolemaster. You’ll get to grips with a setting and run games within it, but eventually, once you’ve got some experience and confidence, you’ll want to make your own setting.

This is where things get crazy – and useful. Worldbuilding for a novel and worldbuilding for an RPG setting are exactly the same thing. You create the setting from the top down, laying out the land, races, magic or technology, and politics at a macro scale before you ever get to cities, groups, and individuals. As a GM, you never need to make the characters – those are your PCs – but you’ll have everything surrounding them locked down and ready to go long before the story ever begins.

In a novel, this gives the story a vast, solid foundation to work on. The characters and plot you create, as an author, will be informed by the setting you’ve already figured out. You might think this is restrictive, because it places some constraints on the kind of characters you can make and the story you want to tell, but the benefit of working with a setting on a very wide level is that you can have the big, general themes, ideas and rules set down as your guidelines, and then you can follow or subvert them as needed on the scale of single characters.

Character Arcs

Playing in an RPG is a lot like improv acting, but it’s also a lot like having a basic character profile and then telling a story about that character. Tabletop RPGs are collaborative storytelling, after all. But the real power of becoming a character in the game is that you’re forced to create a character from a handful of numbers and traits, and then improvise how that character would react over the course of several hours. The more games you play, and the more characters you play, the more you learn about how to create interesting characters with their own back stories, motivations, and possible narrative arcs.

Problem Solving

Every author will know the feeling of coming up against continuity errors. Whether it’s characters out of place, or missing objects, or clashing motivations, or plain out-of-character actions, those errors are the bane of a storyteller’s existence because the readers will notice them.

You might wonder how RPGs can help with this, but here it is: if any one thing defines tabletop roleplaying, it’s the way you have to think on your feet constantly. Both GMs and players have to react, and quickly, to the changing story, regardless of what situation the GM places the players in, and regardless of how the players handle the situation. You have to problem-solve all the time and you never know when the next action is going to break the setting.

GMs get this a lot. When faced with infinite possibilities for where a game could go, due to the players, you learn to adapt the story and add fast workarounds to the setting in order to keep the players in line. This is a great, high-pressure method of making sure your setting and story are solid and plausible. Players, on the other side, learn the limits of the setting by what the GM allows them to do, and work out ways to fit their characters to it as effectively as possible.

If you run or play enough games like this, fixing continuity issues in a novel becomes trivial. RPG players and gamesmasters all learn how to think fast and roll with the punches, and that gets you into the right mindset to handle continuity problems in a novel.

The source of all this? Myself, and my years of experience on both sides of the table. I’ve played and run all manner of RPGs, but my favorites are D&D 3rd Edition, most White Wolf settings except for Vampire: The Masquerade, Call of Cthulhu, Traveler, Pathfinder, and Fate Core. I’ve found RPGs to be one of the most rewarding hobbies I’ve ever had, second only to swordfighting, and I wish I had more time to do it. Authors, if you’re looking for some brain-stimulation for writing in your favorite genre, please look at RPGs and try them out! You, and your writing, will be glad you did.

Related Posts:

Lying Down with Dogs
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Who You Write For
Strength Versus Dexterity in Roleplaying Games
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The post Better Writing Through Tabletop RPGs appeared first on Raynfall.

The Power of Stories

In Ireland, we have an expression for when we meet someone: “What’s the story?” I’ve always liked this. It’s as if the Irish have always known that what we’re told by other people about their lives is a story, which may or may not match up with reality.

Reality has always been subjective, after all.

Stories have power. Stories have more power when they’re retold over and over. It doesn’t just apply to fiction, however. Stories that are told to convince others of a particular point of view are called propaganda, and propaganda is insidious stuff. Thankfully, the worst of it falls apart under scrutiny. I bring this up now because of the Irish referendum on marriage that’ll be voted for or against on May 22nd.

(Background: The Irish constitution was largely written by the Catholic Church back in the day, and it’s full of mindless waffle about what marriage is, what family means, and all kinds of other silliness that should have been left to the government. What this boils down to is that things like who can get married can’t be changed by the government; it HAS to be put to a popular vote, because it means changing the constitution to allow it. Hence, we have to have a referendum and convince at least half of a conservative country that gay marriage is a good thing.)

Let’s talk about the No Vote posters.

Stories, tropes, idioms, stereotypes… The No side is getting desperate, or they wouldn’t pull out stuff like this. The referendum isn’t about kids. It’s only about whether two men or two women can get married, just as a man and a woman can. They want you to believe a particular narrative, that having two men or two women instead of a man and a woman is parents is somehow worse for kids. Ask yourself this, though – do you see them campaigning against single parents? Have they made any mention of kids raised by a mother and grandmother, or a father and brother? Have they done any advocacy for children in foster care, who have neither a mother or a father?

No?

Kids having a mother and a father only mattered to the No side when gay people wanted to get married.

What I really love about this one is that it’s mostly heterosexual couples with fertility issues that use surrogacy. It’s also doubly insulting to single fathers, whether separated, divorced, or widowed, who do their best to raise their kids right. They’re telling you a story with a particularly sexist bent, where men cannot parent as well as women. Again, they’re not advocating for anything to do with single parents – no support, advice, anything. They’re not advocating for surrogate rights.

They don’t care that heterosexual couples use surrogacy – they didn’t care about it at all until it could be used as a talking point to deny gay people the right to get married.

The last poster, for which I can’t get a decent photo, says “We already have civil partnerships. Don’t Redefine Marriage.”

The story of marriage is a long, stupid and messy one. They’d have you believe that it’s always been a man and a woman, everywhere, across the world. It hasn’t. They’d have you believe that it’s always religious, a sanctified ritualistic joining of families. It’s not. But even if it was – why should that be a reason not to rewrite the story now, in the 21st century?

There is one overarching narrative going on here, if you look closely enough.

The No Vote campaigners, and anyone who would vote with them, are telling themselves a convenient little story about gay people. It’s a story where gay people don’t really exist. They don’t have relationships – not real relationships, at least. They don’t have kids, because you need a man and a woman to make babies. Gay people are invisible, because they’ve always been invisible. Nobody saw them. Nobody acknowledged them.

“Gay people are not like us.”

It’s the same bigotry writ large on posters all over Ireland. The No vote side cannot accept that gay people really are just like them, with kids and relationships and complicated lives. Letting them get married would be an admission of equality that no homophobe could allow to pass. It doesn’t really matter that marriage could make those lives a little easier, and a little more secure. So they’ll throw any plausible story at the Irish public in the hope that it will never come to pass, all while knowing that the real reason for their resistance is their repulsion at the fact that gay people are just like them.

Hopefully, the story of the referendum will end on a happy note on May 22nd. I know Ireland is ready for this, we’ve come so far in the last few decades. We could be the first country whose citizens declared, with one voice, that love is love regardless of biology.

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Who You Write For

I watched a video on Youtube today from the PBS Game/Show channel about crowdfunding, and the obligations of creators to the consumers of what they create.

Crowdfunding causes users to be invested in the successful creation of media. The rise of Patreon.com and other crowdfunding venues changes everything, in that it reverses the normal order of how media is made, from: {creator makes media -> consumer pays for media} to {consumer pays for media -> creator makes media}. Being invested ahead of time, before the media is made, inserts the consumers into the act of creation.

Here’s the video that got me thinking.

Neil Gaiman said, to a fan who complained about George R.R. Martin:

“…when you see other people complaining that George R.R. Martin has been spotted doing something other than writing the book they are waiting for, explain to them, more politely than I did the first time, the simple and unanswerable truth: George R. R. Martin is not working for you.”

Fans, even before crowdfunding became a thing, were invested in the creation of new media. Consumers have always made demands of creators in how that new media was made. Crowdfunding has simply brought this to the foreground. In video games, things are different – less control in the hands of any single individual, for a start – but for books, the creation of new media comes from one mind. There is only one person responsible for the raw material of narrative.

So I find myself disagreeing with Neil on this one.

Authors strive, every day, to get fans invested in their stories. Consider how many words and dollars have been spent on marketing for their books. We are told, over and over again, that getting true, dedicated fans is paramount – and it is. It is. Fans that are invested in our work will buy it, and support us, and let us keep telling stories.

Investment creates an obligation between us.

I ask: who do I work for? Who do I write for? Any author who’s being honest will say, I write for my fans. Those who buy our books and share our posts on Facebook and get excited about new releases. Those are the only ones in the equation who really matter, because their enthusiasm makes everything else possible. So Neil Gaiman and George R. R. Martin may have the luxury of saying that they don’t work for their fans, but authors without their level of fame and success would never admit anything like it, not after spending months of blood and sweat to build a dedicated audience. The very idea that they “don’t write for you” is preposterous; why else are they writing, if not to share their stories with readers? It’s more than a little obnoxious to suggest that we pour all our efforts into engaging readers, and then demean that engagement by trivializing it.

You don’t sell people a dream that fires their imagination, and then neglect it and let them pine for it. You have an obligation to tell the story, and tell it well. You need to be accountable. Otherwise, you’re just telling yourself a story at your own leisure, for your own amusement. Crowdfunding does change things, but it doesn’t change them that much, and the obligation existed long before Kickstarter was ever a thing. The only real difference between then and now is that now fans can communicate their feelings on that obligation directly, in a way that wasn’t really visible before.

Let’s be honest here – this isn’t a bad thing. It’s just different. It used to be that authors needed to be accountable to publishers and agents before their readers. Now, it’s just the readers, if we choose. That’s something to be happy about at least.

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An Author’s Life, or Why I will Never Do a Kickstarter
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Lying Down with Dogs
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The post Who You Write For appeared first on Raynfall.

Beginning Archery

Yesterday, I went shooting with my own bow for the first time. My bow is a Rakim Wildcat, an 18lb recurve that I can’t help thinking of as being only for complete archery beginners, but it’s a very nice, serviceable weapon to get trained up.

For my pains, I got a giant, red, already-turning-weird-colors bruise on the inside of my forearm. I slapped my arm with the bowstring twice, and the bracer I was wearing just happened to not cover that part of it. So mistakes were made, more or less.

I attempted to pull a friend’s 40lb bow, and immediately regretted it. I am shocked – SHOCKED I TELL YOU – at how much muscle I’ve lost in just a few months of being pregnant and not being able to exercise. But I managed over an hour of straight shooting with the Wildcat, and today I don’t feel like my shoulders are about to fall off! In fact, I feel more or less okay!

It was fun, oh man. Lots and lots of fun. It’s tricky and somewhat technical and safety is a HUGE part of it, but it’s excellent fun. I’m lucky enough that the friend I shoot with is an archery instructor who constantly corrects my form (and if I’d been paying more attention, perhaps I wouldn’t have a giant bruise now!) but even if you’re shooting alone, it’s quite hard to shake the feeling that you should be wearing an elvish cloak and nailing orcs through the head while Aragorn hacks their heads off. I really can’t recommend it enough if you want to feel like a total badass and swinging a sword is a little too tough.

One thing that really stands out for me is the way I could actually see the archer’s paradox in action. The paradox, simply speaking, is when the arrow seems like it shouldn’t fly straight at full draw, but it does because it flexes in flight around the bow. It really messed with my head because it seemed to make aiming the arrow impossible. On the last few shots, I started to figure out that I should be aiming from the bow, not along the arrow – does that make sense? That might not make sense.

I also picked up a quiver and a couple of arrows, and a stringer, and some wax for the bow stringer itself. Although I’ve been drooling over various traditional horse bows that I can shoot with either hand, they start at about 30lbs and I don’t think I can pull that yet. I have to stick to the Wildcat until I get serious.

So, on top of being a swordfighter, I can now work up to calling myself an archer as well. As soon as I can nail three bullseyes in a row, I’ll buy myself a T-shirt saying ‘Legolas is my homie’.

Related Posts:

Strength Versus Dexterity in Roleplaying Games
Lars Anderson – not a revolutionary in archery
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The post Beginning Archery appeared first on Raynfall.

Lying Down with Dogs

It is now 8am in Vancouver, and I think I’ve rewritten chunks of this post at least three times.

Who’s been keeping up with the shenanigans going on in the Hugos? The five second summary is as follows: a couple of straight white dudes took umbrage at the fact that, recently, Hugo awards were being won by stories/books/etc that were not all about straight white dudes, and they took this to mean that Hugos were being handed out based on ideology and diversity rather than merit. So, these white dudes pushed a new slate of stories to be nominated that they felt were more worthy.

These white dudes included a guy who called a respected author a ‘half-savage’, because this author is a woman of color.

Long story short, most of the Hugo nominations this year in various categories are from these slates, either the Sad Puppies list or the Rabid Puppies list. Understandably, everyone else who’s interested in the Hugos is rather upset about the fact that the awards are being gamed by people with an agenda. (The irony inherent in the whole situation is so thick you could cut it with a broadsword.)

As far as I’m concerned, the Puppy factions are entirely wrong, as proven by George R. R. Martin who was helpful enough to run the actual numbers. But I think the other side is wrong as well.

I think the Hugos are broken.

Look, there isn’t any way around this. If the Hugos can be gamed so easily, then they’re broken. It throws every nomination into doubt, for me, now and in the future. I always thought that most writing awards were, well, a popularity contest, to be honest. The Hugos and Nebulas are popularity contests for authors who had chosen the mainstream path and signed up with a publisher in New York. Now I know that the Hugos are a popularity contest that can be bought and sold. They’re not fixable, as far as I’m concerned, and anyone who thinks a few rules tweaks are going to make a difference is only kidding themselves.

I accepted that I’d never be competing in those contests if I chose to self-publish. That’s sort of how it is, if you look at the nominations and winners list for Best Novel, for example. I’ve never heard of any self-published novel ever getting a shot at a Hugo award. After hearing about this complete fiasco with the Puppy campaigns, I’m not sure any author should want one.

You’d never know if you were nominated because someone wanted to tick a box, not because people truly believed you earned it. But more than that, the Puppies campaigns have made me realize that, ultimately, it’s the approval of the old guard of science-fiction and fantasy. It’s the approval of a very small number of people who care about bestowing a Hugo on who they feel is deserving. That’s all well and good, of course, but authors have to decide whether that approval is really important to them, and for me… it’s not. I’m not indifferent, more or less. I don’t think I’d want that approval even if it were offered. I’d choose to get a few more readers instead.

It’s part of the old system of publishing and fandom. It’s maybe a little of the old way of doing things. It definitely echoes the recent shenanigans with the SFWA, an organization for which I’ve developed a healthy level of suspicion. Racism and sexism run deep in the pathways of sci-fi and fantasy cons, even though things have been getting better recently. There are hidden stories of harassment and marginalization and insults and politics everywhere. Right now, I’m still an outsider looking in, and what I see isn’t really encouraging.

There’s good things too. But I’ve been wondering if the good things are really worth it, to swim in circles that are alien to me. I identify far more strongly with the giant contingent of romance writers who live and breathe online, and whose life-blood are ebooks.

I guess we all need to choose who we’re going to associate with, which groups we want to be a part of. I don’t want any part of the ugliness that’s been brought to light by the Puppies fiasco. I don’t want any part of the Puppies factions themselves; especially the Rabid Puppies, seeing as the contempt I feel for its leader, Theodore Beale a.k.a. Vox Day, is as deep and unfathomable as the Marianas Trench. (I have absolutely no time for anyone who thinks that straight white guys are the persecuted minority whose work is being ignored.) But I also don’t want to be a part of the old guard. I don’t want to be part of the chorus asking for changes to the Hugo voting rules. I don’t want to have to choose a side in a dispute I never asked for.

This is a fight within the old way of doing things, and I feel like it’s distant from me and any other indie author. I’d really rather it stay that way. It’s politics, and tribalism, and if you lie down with dogs, sooner or later you’ll get up with fleas. The only way out is to keep it all at arm’s length.

So that’s where I stand, over here with the other authors who really just want to answer to their readers, and no one else. That’s all that really ever matters. Everything else is just window dressing.

Related Posts:

Write Like a Girl
Fire Eyes, Shadowblade
It’s Valentine’s Day and I Can’t Even
Take Sword, Add Protrusions
Exotic Ebook Formatting

The post Lying Down with Dogs appeared first on Raynfall.

Longswords and James Bond

Let’s have another movie swordfight breakdown! One of my faves is from, I kid you not, the Bond movie Die Another Day. Really! Swordfights show up in odd places sometimes. Now, all things considered, Die Another Day was a pretty terrible movie in most other respects – all flashy action shenanigans – but hey, it was a good waste of a few hours and the set pieces were fun to watch. Plus, no one ever said that a Bond movie had to be high thinking entertainment!

I’ll always think fondly of it because of the duel between Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, and Toby Stephens as Gustav Graves.

You may be asking, “Claire, why do you like this mad flailing masquerading as a fight? Surely there are other, more worthy swordfights you can talk about?”

Sure, there are. But this one is just enjoyable on so many levels. The juxtaposition of the refined, gentlemanly social club with the balls-to-the-wall bashing of steel weapons! The visceral thumps and whacks as Bond and Graves punch and shove each other and destroy parts of the scenery! And yes, the mad flailing!

See, mad flailing isn’t bad. Mad flailing in Star Wars is just there for… hell, I don’t even know, because stunt people need to be paid. It’s there for the sake of the flailing, and it serves no purpose. Mad flailing between Bond and Graves is because both men are trying, really hard, to beat each other to death by way of metal sticks. The actual swordplay is close to irrelevant; it’s not logical, or sensible, or tactically sound, and it would look very weird if it were accurate. So it’s not! It’s two dudes hacking at each other out of ego, mutual hatred, and the need for oneupmanship.

The point is that mad flailing is a good thing when it means something in the scene, and conveys something about the characters or the plot. Mad flailing for the sake of mad flailing is… mad flailing. That gets pretty boring fast. (Again, see the Star Wars prequels that I love to bring up all the time as an example of awful swordplay.)

The lesson here, kids, is that it’s all about context. You can get away with all manner of silliness in movies as long as you make it relevant to the context – especially in stupid action movies.

Related Posts:


Take Sword, Add Protrusions
The Problem With Lightsabers
The Best Movie Swordfights – The Princess Bride
Strength Versus Dexterity in Roleplaying Games

The post Longswords and James Bond appeared first on Raynfall.