Chelsea Gaither's Blog, page 50
March 6, 2013
Loyal Book Readers: Need Imput
SO.
Both Exiles and Starbleached are kind of going into the end run of their respective story arcs. This arc of Exiles is going to wrap up in May, and Starbleached will have its "season finale" so to speak, in June.
I have decided that I will be releasing a thoroughly edited omnibus at the same time, and that the omnibus (AKA a real, normal, 350 page book) will be available in print.
The big question is...what are you guys willing to pay for this?
I have three good options: Lulu, Createspace and Lightning Source.
The specs are as follows: Perfect bound, 6by9 paperback, 350 pages (
This is the estimated cost of a POD print book with those specs:
Lulu--19.50--I get one dollar. I am not a fan of Lulu
Createspace--14.99--I get $3, $6 or less than a dollar, depending on where the book sells from.
Lightning Source--14.99--no retail discount I get 9 bucks. Industry standard discount, however, is 55%. I would get 1.30
I have not done enough research on the subject to say, for example, that 15 bucks is the hard price or that Lightning Source is the best choice (I am pretty sure there are a couple buried land mines that I need to dig up) But I DO want to know what the most you book-buying people would be willing to put up with would be.
So: Imput, folks. If I go through the hoops it'll take to get a book in print, would you be willing to pay fifteen to twenty bucks for it? Would you even be interested in a print book?
NOTE: I know several of you are reading my book-publishing blogs with an eye towards educating yourself. I have ranted LOUDLY about not signing with publishers that charge you money, and if you look closely at Lightning Source's website you will notice that they charge you twelve dollars per book per year to have your book listed in their service.
The difference between Lightening Source and, say, Author Solutions or one of their many fronts, is Lightning Source is not a publisher. Lightning Source is a printer, and it is a distributor (...kind of. It's complicated.) Publishers list their book with Lightning Source. CREATESPACE lists its books with Lightning Source. If I understand their process right, in fact, when they do "extended distribution" they do it through Lightning Source. It does not provide a cover, artists, editors, book packagers or swag. All they will do is print the book and ship it to bookstores and individuals that order it. They are not dealing with authors. They are dealing with publishers, which is the role the author assumes when they begin self-publishing their own book.
I'm going to do as much research as I can to do it right, and we probably wouldn't see an actual print book for several months after the current story arcs wrap up. Right now I am gathering preliminary 'fo so I know what decisions I have to make when the time comes.
Both Exiles and Starbleached are kind of going into the end run of their respective story arcs. This arc of Exiles is going to wrap up in May, and Starbleached will have its "season finale" so to speak, in June.
I have decided that I will be releasing a thoroughly edited omnibus at the same time, and that the omnibus (AKA a real, normal, 350 page book) will be available in print.
The big question is...what are you guys willing to pay for this?
I have three good options: Lulu, Createspace and Lightning Source.
The specs are as follows: Perfect bound, 6by9 paperback, 350 pages (
This is the estimated cost of a POD print book with those specs:
Lulu--19.50--I get one dollar. I am not a fan of Lulu
Createspace--14.99--I get $3, $6 or less than a dollar, depending on where the book sells from.
Lightning Source--14.99--no retail discount I get 9 bucks. Industry standard discount, however, is 55%. I would get 1.30
I have not done enough research on the subject to say, for example, that 15 bucks is the hard price or that Lightning Source is the best choice (I am pretty sure there are a couple buried land mines that I need to dig up) But I DO want to know what the most you book-buying people would be willing to put up with would be.
So: Imput, folks. If I go through the hoops it'll take to get a book in print, would you be willing to pay fifteen to twenty bucks for it? Would you even be interested in a print book?
NOTE: I know several of you are reading my book-publishing blogs with an eye towards educating yourself. I have ranted LOUDLY about not signing with publishers that charge you money, and if you look closely at Lightning Source's website you will notice that they charge you twelve dollars per book per year to have your book listed in their service.
The difference between Lightening Source and, say, Author Solutions or one of their many fronts, is Lightning Source is not a publisher. Lightning Source is a printer, and it is a distributor (...kind of. It's complicated.) Publishers list their book with Lightning Source. CREATESPACE lists its books with Lightning Source. If I understand their process right, in fact, when they do "extended distribution" they do it through Lightning Source. It does not provide a cover, artists, editors, book packagers or swag. All they will do is print the book and ship it to bookstores and individuals that order it. They are not dealing with authors. They are dealing with publishers, which is the role the author assumes when they begin self-publishing their own book.
I'm going to do as much research as I can to do it right, and we probably wouldn't see an actual print book for several months after the current story arcs wrap up. Right now I am gathering preliminary 'fo so I know what decisions I have to make when the time comes.
More on the Random Penguin
As previously established, I don't like Penguin/Random House.
Apparently, neither does John Scalzi
If you are interested in writing as a business GO READ THAT POST. He is right on every single count.
It's official in my book, boys and girls. Unless and until Hydra posts a copy of its contract in a public form and/or sends a copy to the watchdogs, INCLUDING Victoria Strauss AKA Writer Beware, INCLUDING the folks behind Predators and Editors (WHICH YOU HAVE BOOKMARKED BY NOW, RIGHT?) they and anybody affiliated with them (Yes. I'm throwing the entire Random Penguin under the bus with this) are the LAST people you should be signing with.
The only thing I have to add here is a paraphrase of something I just said earlier today reguarding another, much smaller publisher who still thinks dicking around with its authors is the best idea in the universe:
AUTHORS DESERVE TO BE PAID.
A publisher IS NOT DOING YOU A FAVOR BY PUBLISHING YOUR WORK. Do I have enough emphasis on that? No?
A PUBLISHER IS NOT DOING YOU A FAVOR BY PUBLISHING YOUR WORK.
They are gaining an item that they can sell. If YOU had not written what they are putting on the pages then they would be selling blank journal books. People aren't buying Twilight because of the shiny, special paper. They're buying it because Stephenie Meyer wrote about sparkling vampires.
IF A PUBLISHER CANNOT AFFORD TO BE PAYING YOU A PERCENTAGE OF PROFITS WITH EVERY SALE, THIS PUBLISHER CANNOT AFFORD TO BE IN BUSINESS.
If you are selling macaroni, HEB does not charge you for floor space. HEB buys its product from you and gives you money, and then turns around and sells its product to its customer for more money. If you are renting space in a craft show, the craft show owners do not get to tell you "We get to keep the cash from the first 100 items you sell."
IF THE PUBLISHER IS MAKING A DOLLAR FROM SELLING YOUR BOOK, YOU FUCKING DESERVE A PERCENTAGE OF THAT DOLLAR. THEY DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO MAKE MONEY OFF YOUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND NOT BE PAYING YOU.
THEY DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO PUSH THEIR OPERATING COSTS OFF ONTO YOU. THEY ARE THE ONES CHOOSING TO PUBLISH YOUR BOOK. THEY ARE THE ONES INCURRING THE COSTS OF DOING BUSINESS. THEY ARE THE ONES WHO HAVE TO PAY FOR IT.
THEY DO NOT GET TO ASK YOU TO PAY THEM MONEY AND THEN KEEP YOUR CUT OF THE SALES.
And if you can't get a publisher to do your book for you without having to pay them money? Bite the bullet and publish the goddamned thing on your own. No. You won't make a lot of money (I think I will FINALLY have broken $100 in sales when I get my next report from KDP, but it's taken me six months and six books to do so) No. Your books won't be of the best quality. But you won't be a couple thousand dollars in the hole, either.
YOG'S LAW. MONEY FLOWS TO THE WRITER. TATTOO THIS TO YOUR FUCKING EYEBALLS.
Apparently, neither does John Scalzi
If you are interested in writing as a business GO READ THAT POST. He is right on every single count.
It's official in my book, boys and girls. Unless and until Hydra posts a copy of its contract in a public form and/or sends a copy to the watchdogs, INCLUDING Victoria Strauss AKA Writer Beware, INCLUDING the folks behind Predators and Editors (WHICH YOU HAVE BOOKMARKED BY NOW, RIGHT?) they and anybody affiliated with them (Yes. I'm throwing the entire Random Penguin under the bus with this) are the LAST people you should be signing with.
The only thing I have to add here is a paraphrase of something I just said earlier today reguarding another, much smaller publisher who still thinks dicking around with its authors is the best idea in the universe:
AUTHORS DESERVE TO BE PAID.
A publisher IS NOT DOING YOU A FAVOR BY PUBLISHING YOUR WORK. Do I have enough emphasis on that? No?
A PUBLISHER IS NOT DOING YOU A FAVOR BY PUBLISHING YOUR WORK.
They are gaining an item that they can sell. If YOU had not written what they are putting on the pages then they would be selling blank journal books. People aren't buying Twilight because of the shiny, special paper. They're buying it because Stephenie Meyer wrote about sparkling vampires.
IF A PUBLISHER CANNOT AFFORD TO BE PAYING YOU A PERCENTAGE OF PROFITS WITH EVERY SALE, THIS PUBLISHER CANNOT AFFORD TO BE IN BUSINESS.
If you are selling macaroni, HEB does not charge you for floor space. HEB buys its product from you and gives you money, and then turns around and sells its product to its customer for more money. If you are renting space in a craft show, the craft show owners do not get to tell you "We get to keep the cash from the first 100 items you sell."
IF THE PUBLISHER IS MAKING A DOLLAR FROM SELLING YOUR BOOK, YOU FUCKING DESERVE A PERCENTAGE OF THAT DOLLAR. THEY DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO MAKE MONEY OFF YOUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND NOT BE PAYING YOU.
THEY DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO PUSH THEIR OPERATING COSTS OFF ONTO YOU. THEY ARE THE ONES CHOOSING TO PUBLISH YOUR BOOK. THEY ARE THE ONES INCURRING THE COSTS OF DOING BUSINESS. THEY ARE THE ONES WHO HAVE TO PAY FOR IT.
THEY DO NOT GET TO ASK YOU TO PAY THEM MONEY AND THEN KEEP YOUR CUT OF THE SALES.
And if you can't get a publisher to do your book for you without having to pay them money? Bite the bullet and publish the goddamned thing on your own. No. You won't make a lot of money (I think I will FINALLY have broken $100 in sales when I get my next report from KDP, but it's taken me six months and six books to do so) No. Your books won't be of the best quality. But you won't be a couple thousand dollars in the hole, either.
YOG'S LAW. MONEY FLOWS TO THE WRITER. TATTOO THIS TO YOUR FUCKING EYEBALLS.
March 5, 2013
Caress of Twilight--chapter 30
And we hit the halfway point for the next Exiles book. I'm going to see if I can't hammer out another K or two of words (4k so far today). But even better news is...THE FIRE. IS. ON.
Good writing always makes me feel this awesome. And sexy.Yes, folks. I am finally excited about what I'm writing at the halfway point. This is usually a signal that the editing job is going to be an ungodly mess but I do not care, it is heating up and thus will be done soon. Ish. And then we get to start editing the next Starbleached book and/or the next Gray Prince book too.
All in all...I have accomplished Things today, my loyal blog readers. Things.
...
And now I'm telling myself "It can't get any worse. It can't get any worse. She's already fucked Kitto." Because I don't remember this part of the book very well. And then...oh, fuck I can't remember if she screws sage or not, and...and the sooner I read a couple chapters, the sooner I can get the next part of the story done. Right.
And she's hiding behind her wards.
Folks, one of the sad truths to western writing (IDK about other cultures) is heroes are by their very nature reactive. Something has to happen to make your good guy character move. If your character is active, as in they move first, they are at best an anti-hero. At worst, they're a villian protaagonist, which is always fun when intentional (Jaqueline Cary's Banewrecker does such a fantastic job of villian protagonists; she basically turns Sauron et al into misunderstood, sympathetic characters. She also turns Gandalf into an ass, but that's not all that hard to do. It's like making Sherlock a misogynist. It's right there in the text.)
(And speaking of Mr. Holmes, Mary Russel, anyone? Also that squee sound you heard about midnight? That was me realizing there is a Mary Russel novel that I haven't gotten to read yet. SQUEE!)
Laurel K. Hamilton is at no risk of making her protagonists into villian characters. Oh yes, they are horrible, horrible people, but they are not constructed that way. BOTH Merry Gentry and Antia Blake are constructed to appear as heroines. They react to what somebody else does. Often to the point of being the last person on earth to react at all. The fact that their behavior has no chance of living up to the title doesn't change it. Laurel is trying desperately to convince you that Anita and Merry are the good guys. And because their behavior can't live up to it and LKH for whatever reason is not willing to curtail the rape, sexism, bigotry and not-child fucking (Kitto is unforgivable) that makes her protagonists into terrible wastes of tree (...whole forests have died for Merry Gentry. FORESTS.) she's falling back on the psychological cues to convince us.
Which is why Merry Gentry never does jack shit.
Seriously. In a better novel Merry would be trying to track the Nameless, or the Elder Gods ghosts, or trying to fix it so that Maeve Reed can have her child safely. What is she doing instead? Hiding behind her fucking wards. Because heroes don't act, they react, and to make up for Merry being a horrible person in every imaginable way, LKH only has her react when the bad guy is literally on her fucking doorstep.
In short? LKH's attempt at psychological manipulation re: active/reactive characters? It's not working.
So instead of us getting an actual account of actual events, we get an account of what Merry Gentry did when her boyfriends confined her to the house.
Somehow this does not involve fucking.
Instead, Merry gets another invite from the important Seelie secretary, which she also declines because the Unseelie court is having a ball on the same night. Oh, don't you just hate that. Hey, wasn't there a murder going on a few pages back?
Now, it's time for me to admit that I garbled the spelling of a cop's name a couple reviews back, because I am not perfect and I am usually writing these things after work and/or after a couple of beers or a mixed drink (...I like booze, and it's hard to maintain not drinking when my boss has a habit of shoving liquor in my face. As a side note, if you ever get a chance to try jalapino-laced tequila, do it, it is the best thing ever.). I transcribed "Peterson's" name as "Pearson". (Also note: The font in this e-book more than sucks)
Now, with my fuck-up admitted, let's see how well he comes off this time:
Meanwhile, we get an accounting of Galen and Sage being sterotypical male, and I mean that male-ness that doesn't actually exist outside of reality TV. At one point Galen almost causally kills Sage, and there is a confrontation that doesn't go anywhere.
This is like reading about somebody being home sick with the flu. Only it's not like that because I've read a lot of books that make confinement to quarters actually work. Anybody here read Catching Fire? Anybody remember the couple of chapters after Katniss broke her ankle? Confined to bedrest? Remember how Collins not only made that interesting, but also relivant to the plot (because that's when she figures out about Important Plot Point that I'm not spoiling for those of you who HAVEN'T read Hunger Games, AND WHY HAVEN'T YOU?!?)? This isn't even Merry being out of comission because she's hurt. It's her being confined to quarters because something might try to hurt her. IT WOULD NOT BE HARD TO MAKE THIS INTERESTING.
That's not what I meant.
And yes. Merry acts all shocked and shamed, as if this were not explicitly stated last chapter.
And then we get a debate about if a blow job counts as intercourse. I think. It's not really clear.
Merry calls Niceven via the mirror (...do mirrors come with a good long distance deal? If you break the contract to go to a better carrier does it come with seven years bad luck?) and rouses her out of bed. She demands a cure for Galen that doesn't involve having sex with a barbie doll. Niceven says why, he's a wonderful lover, and Merry is all like "Sex with ME is a privelage".
He means all the words, Laurel. All of themAnd then, probably because that "hotdog down a hallway" metaphore would be literal for Sage, Sage turns into a real, full sized man, and Merry objects because he could get her with child and could become king, and I STILL do not understand why nobody understands the concept of condoms in this universe. Spermicidal lube, at least. It's like we're allowed cars and planes and forensic science, but not reproductive medicine. THIS ENTIRE PLOT COULD BE RESOLVED BY PATIENCE AND A PETRI DISH.
Finally, and you have no idea how long it takes for them to agree, Sage and Merry agree on a kiss. Which they do, and Sage's lips are like, you guessed it, eating fruit.
It's too much to hope for lip gloss, isn't it?
Also? the word "Heat" no longer looks like a word. No. You don't want to know.
Merry has the cure and she kisses Galen, and oh my fucking god, here we go again:
I swear to god LKH writes by throwing a cookbook, a thesaurs and a list of synonyms for genitals into a blender and pushing "stiff whip". It's the only possible explination for this. Either that, or all of her novels are being ghost written by Pat Monahan.
If I see the words "hefty bag" in any of these books, I have only one recommendation:
It's not that I hate Train. I just have a low tolerance for whiny bullshit.Niceven assures Merry that Galen will be healed, Merry and Galen are all kids in a candy store over the looming return of the penis, and Frost is staring on in envy because he loves Merry and wants her all to himself.
Remind me again why these circumstances are supposed to be romantic?
And then the chapter ends.
Good writing always makes me feel this awesome. And sexy.Yes, folks. I am finally excited about what I'm writing at the halfway point. This is usually a signal that the editing job is going to be an ungodly mess but I do not care, it is heating up and thus will be done soon. Ish. And then we get to start editing the next Starbleached book and/or the next Gray Prince book too.All in all...I have accomplished Things today, my loyal blog readers. Things.
...
And now I'm telling myself "It can't get any worse. It can't get any worse. She's already fucked Kitto." Because I don't remember this part of the book very well. And then...oh, fuck I can't remember if she screws sage or not, and...and the sooner I read a couple chapters, the sooner I can get the next part of the story done. Right.
ON THE FIRST DAY OF MY BEING RESTRICTED TO THE APARTMENT,Wait. WHAT? When did THIS happen? When...no. No. It is not worth my time and energy to re-read this thing and try to figure out if LKH fucked up or if my reading comprehension is that bad. But I don't remember anybody saying "Merry has to stay home indefinately".
And she's hiding behind her wards.
Folks, one of the sad truths to western writing (IDK about other cultures) is heroes are by their very nature reactive. Something has to happen to make your good guy character move. If your character is active, as in they move first, they are at best an anti-hero. At worst, they're a villian protaagonist, which is always fun when intentional (Jaqueline Cary's Banewrecker does such a fantastic job of villian protagonists; she basically turns Sauron et al into misunderstood, sympathetic characters. She also turns Gandalf into an ass, but that's not all that hard to do. It's like making Sherlock a misogynist. It's right there in the text.)
(And speaking of Mr. Holmes, Mary Russel, anyone? Also that squee sound you heard about midnight? That was me realizing there is a Mary Russel novel that I haven't gotten to read yet. SQUEE!)
Laurel K. Hamilton is at no risk of making her protagonists into villian characters. Oh yes, they are horrible, horrible people, but they are not constructed that way. BOTH Merry Gentry and Antia Blake are constructed to appear as heroines. They react to what somebody else does. Often to the point of being the last person on earth to react at all. The fact that their behavior has no chance of living up to the title doesn't change it. Laurel is trying desperately to convince you that Anita and Merry are the good guys. And because their behavior can't live up to it and LKH for whatever reason is not willing to curtail the rape, sexism, bigotry and not-child fucking (Kitto is unforgivable) that makes her protagonists into terrible wastes of tree (...whole forests have died for Merry Gentry. FORESTS.) she's falling back on the psychological cues to convince us.
Which is why Merry Gentry never does jack shit.
Seriously. In a better novel Merry would be trying to track the Nameless, or the Elder Gods ghosts, or trying to fix it so that Maeve Reed can have her child safely. What is she doing instead? Hiding behind her fucking wards. Because heroes don't act, they react, and to make up for Merry being a horrible person in every imaginable way, LKH only has her react when the bad guy is literally on her fucking doorstep.
In short? LKH's attempt at psychological manipulation re: active/reactive characters? It's not working.
So instead of us getting an actual account of actual events, we get an account of what Merry Gentry did when her boyfriends confined her to the house.
Somehow this does not involve fucking.
Instead, Merry gets another invite from the important Seelie secretary, which she also declines because the Unseelie court is having a ball on the same night. Oh, don't you just hate that. Hey, wasn't there a murder going on a few pages back?
Jeremy had been pissed enough [About the Gray agency being barred from the crime scene--CW]that he told Teresa not to tell them what she’d seen, but Teresa is all about helping her fellow man. She went dutifully from the hospital to the police station and finally found a detective who would take her report.And that puts Jeremy on my shit-list too. Mass murder in the double digits kind of makes any personal grudges you happen to hold petty and irrelivant. Just saying. I also like how Theresa is kind of shit on in this passage for doing the right thing and talking to the cops.
Now, it's time for me to admit that I garbled the spelling of a cop's name a couple reviews back, because I am not perfect and I am usually writing these things after work and/or after a couple of beers or a mixed drink (...I like booze, and it's hard to maintain not drinking when my boss has a habit of shoving liquor in my face. As a side note, if you ever get a chance to try jalapino-laced tequila, do it, it is the best thing ever.). I transcribed "Peterson's" name as "Pearson". (Also note: The font in this e-book more than sucks)
Now, with my fuck-up admitted, let's see how well he comes off this time:
Peterson had come in about then and thrown the report in the trash can in front of Teresa. Usually the police wait until someone’s left the room before doing that.You know, there's always this thin veneer of "Cops are so awesome" in most of these books. I'm not getting that here. This "Peterson is an idiot" thing is getting old.
Meanwhile, we get an accounting of Galen and Sage being sterotypical male, and I mean that male-ness that doesn't actually exist outside of reality TV. At one point Galen almost causally kills Sage, and there is a confrontation that doesn't go anywhere.
This is like reading about somebody being home sick with the flu. Only it's not like that because I've read a lot of books that make confinement to quarters actually work. Anybody here read Catching Fire? Anybody remember the couple of chapters after Katniss broke her ankle? Confined to bedrest? Remember how Collins not only made that interesting, but also relivant to the plot (because that's when she figures out about Important Plot Point that I'm not spoiling for those of you who HAVEN'T read Hunger Games, AND WHY HAVEN'T YOU?!?)? This isn't even Merry being out of comission because she's hurt. It's her being confined to quarters because something might try to hurt her. IT WOULD NOT BE HARD TO MAKE THIS INTERESTING.
He smiled, obviously happy. “Since you asked nicely.” He grabbed his tiny crotch through the filmy skirt he wore. “The cure is trapped here, where Queen Niceven laid it.”
That's not what I meant.And yes. Merry acts all shocked and shamed, as if this were not explicitly stated last chapter.
And then we get a debate about if a blow job counts as intercourse. I think. It's not really clear.
Merry calls Niceven via the mirror (...do mirrors come with a good long distance deal? If you break the contract to go to a better carrier does it come with seven years bad luck?) and rouses her out of bed. She demands a cure for Galen that doesn't involve having sex with a barbie doll. Niceven says why, he's a wonderful lover, and Merry is all like "Sex with ME is a privelage".
He means all the words, Laurel. All of themAnd then, probably because that "hotdog down a hallway" metaphore would be literal for Sage, Sage turns into a real, full sized man, and Merry objects because he could get her with child and could become king, and I STILL do not understand why nobody understands the concept of condoms in this universe. Spermicidal lube, at least. It's like we're allowed cars and planes and forensic science, but not reproductive medicine. THIS ENTIRE PLOT COULD BE RESOLVED BY PATIENCE AND A PETRI DISH. Finally, and you have no idea how long it takes for them to agree, Sage and Merry agree on a kiss. Which they do, and Sage's lips are like, you guessed it, eating fruit.
It's too much to hope for lip gloss, isn't it?
Also? the word "Heat" no longer looks like a word. No. You don't want to know.
Merry has the cure and she kisses Galen, and oh my fucking god, here we go again:
Our lips touched and it was as if the heat were hungry for him. Our lips sealed together, so that no drop of heat would be lost. Lips, tongue, even teeth fed at each other’s mouths. The heat filled my mouth almost like liquid. I could feel the warm, sweet thickness of it like warm honey, warm syrup that filled my mouth and spilled into Galen. He drank at my mouth, drank the magic down.
I swear to god LKH writes by throwing a cookbook, a thesaurs and a list of synonyms for genitals into a blender and pushing "stiff whip". It's the only possible explination for this. Either that, or all of her novels are being ghost written by Pat Monahan.
If I see the words "hefty bag" in any of these books, I have only one recommendation:
It's not that I hate Train. I just have a low tolerance for whiny bullshit.Niceven assures Merry that Galen will be healed, Merry and Galen are all kids in a candy store over the looming return of the penis, and Frost is staring on in envy because he loves Merry and wants her all to himself.Remind me again why these circumstances are supposed to be romantic?
And then the chapter ends.
A note to anybody who writes: Authors deserve to get paid
I spent today alternating between writing fight scenes involving Faeries and dead people and reading Bewares and Background Checks on Absolute Write. Specifically These threads.
I don't like bullies, I don't like liars, I don't like con artists and I don't like people who take advantage of other people's ignorance. If you own a business and you are bringing sellers into said business (and authors are sellers, goddamn it) you have a fucking responsibility to be honest and forthright in your dealings and transparent in your practices. So suffice to say I feel rather miffy right now.
I have two points, kids. First off, this is why vetting presses and agents are a good thing. Publishers and agents come in three flavors, good, clueless and actively conning. Sometimes they come in combinations of the latter two. The ONLY way to tell the difference is to apply that old Bible adage, "By their fruits you shall know them". If you see questionable practices, if they are asking you to pay money for ANYTHING, PERIOD, DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING. The ONLY exception would be if you've fully vetted the publisher in question, you are satisfied with their track record and you can afford to pay what they're asking. DO NOT SIGN WITH ANY AGENT WHO IS CHARGING YOU MONEY. THIS IS NOT NEGOTIABLE.
Second: You, the author, should be compensated for your writing. You wrote the thing they are making money off of. You deserve to be paid. If books are selling people are making money and if your writing is in said book you by God should be making money. If it doesn't say "Free" on the amazon page this is not a favor they are doing you, it is a fucking underhanded ploy to get money without having to pay anything out. Even if it's a promotional book. If it's not free, you should be getting something for contributing to it. Any publisher that can't afford to pay you money for your writing is a publisher that can't afford to publish anything, at all, ever, and signing with them puts you at risk for an awful, awful lot of unpleasantness.
Bookmark Bewares and Background Checks and freaking CAMP there. Tack "Absolute Write" onto the end of your search strings re: potential publishers and agents.
Yog's law is "Money flows to the writer".
Tattoo this to your freaking eyeballs.
I don't like bullies, I don't like liars, I don't like con artists and I don't like people who take advantage of other people's ignorance. If you own a business and you are bringing sellers into said business (and authors are sellers, goddamn it) you have a fucking responsibility to be honest and forthright in your dealings and transparent in your practices. So suffice to say I feel rather miffy right now.
I have two points, kids. First off, this is why vetting presses and agents are a good thing. Publishers and agents come in three flavors, good, clueless and actively conning. Sometimes they come in combinations of the latter two. The ONLY way to tell the difference is to apply that old Bible adage, "By their fruits you shall know them". If you see questionable practices, if they are asking you to pay money for ANYTHING, PERIOD, DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING. The ONLY exception would be if you've fully vetted the publisher in question, you are satisfied with their track record and you can afford to pay what they're asking. DO NOT SIGN WITH ANY AGENT WHO IS CHARGING YOU MONEY. THIS IS NOT NEGOTIABLE.
Second: You, the author, should be compensated for your writing. You wrote the thing they are making money off of. You deserve to be paid. If books are selling people are making money and if your writing is in said book you by God should be making money. If it doesn't say "Free" on the amazon page this is not a favor they are doing you, it is a fucking underhanded ploy to get money without having to pay anything out. Even if it's a promotional book. If it's not free, you should be getting something for contributing to it. Any publisher that can't afford to pay you money for your writing is a publisher that can't afford to publish anything, at all, ever, and signing with them puts you at risk for an awful, awful lot of unpleasantness.
Bookmark Bewares and Background Checks and freaking CAMP there. Tack "Absolute Write" onto the end of your search strings re: potential publishers and agents.
Yog's law is "Money flows to the writer".
Tattoo this to your freaking eyeballs.
Smashwords is having a sale!
Smashwords, which functions as a store AND as a distributor for other things like Kobo, Diesel, Apple iTunes store and a couple others, is having a site-wide book sale. I've opted into it.
Blue Ghosts is free and both Planet Bob and Gray Fox are on sale. It's a great chance to pick up a copy for cheap.
The sale is only going on until the 9th, so if you're interested in either book, now's the time to go. What are you waiting for? GO! GO!
Blue Ghosts is free and both Planet Bob and Gray Fox are on sale. It's a great chance to pick up a copy for cheap.
The sale is only going on until the 9th, so if you're interested in either book, now's the time to go. What are you waiting for? GO! GO!
March 4, 2013
Caress of Twilight chapter 27-29
I think the best part of being a writer is also the worst part: Working when you know where you're going, and you have absolutely no desire to get there. That's where I'm at with the next Exiles book. I kind of view the three released so far (Silver Bullet, Blue Ghosts, Gray Fox) as being three-quarters of a complete book, with the finale being the thing that I'm working on now.
Which means the "rules" for this book are an ungodly bitch. I can't introduce any new major characters, or new Mcguffins, or anything that I haven't been toying with through the other three books, because when I put it all together I don't want it to look like I just pulled the final bit out of my ass, so to speak. Which means if I decide the plot is lacking in a certain something, I get to go back through the other three books and find what I need there. Meanwhile I have this instinct, or whatever (I call it the energy-o-meter, except when I don't) that tells me if things are exciting enough up to this point or not. This has caused me to seriously revise my plans for this book twice already (Once because no, it wasn't exciting enough, and once again because it gave me a chance to do a "wheels within wheels" kind of plot, which is easy when your main character hasn't fucking slept in three days. Casey's smart, but she's not at the top of her game right now. When this is over she will gladly kill for bed and a pot roast.)
It's also fun setting this thing in my general area. I've spent most of my life here, so the research for it is less intensive and more spot-checking to make sure, for example, that the county lines are where I think they are. Small town coastal Texas is very, very strange.
In short: Things are moving, but slowly, and I'm frustrated. I guess this is the part of writing that makes it work.
And I'm going to review things until SOMETHING happens, goddamn it. Even if it kills me.
Chapter 27 opens with Merry snuggling Kitto, and her other men fighting over who else gets to sleep with her.
You know, I might step on somebody's toes here, and if I do I am very sorry, but living with all these men fighting over you all the time only sounds fun if you are a sociopath without a guilt complex. Seriously. These guys are warriors and they are fighting like teenage frat boys fighting over who gets to fuck that technically old-enough cheerleader. That is what Merry Gentry and this lifestyle has reduced them to.
Also? Merry's positive side to Kitto almost dying (I guess that's a "other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" kind of moment.) is that she gets to sleep. So these arrangements are miserable all around and there's nothing romantic about it. The men are fussy because they're not getting enough, and Merry's fussy because she's getting too much.
Then we find out that:
1. Jeremy Gray lets his employees get away with murder. Seriously. If I called in sick because my SO was sick? I probably would not have a job the next day.
2. Fading is serious business AND
3. Jeremy Gray has no idea that letting a human psychic scramble her brains at a crime scene isn't something you are supposed to do. The psychic's husband apparently wants to kill Jeremy for putting his wife at risk, and I can't say I blame him.
And then Merry offers to cuddle Jeremy and this happens:
This makes me want to take a shower. And it's not because they're talking about offering non-sexual physical comfort. It's that they are specifically calling attention to it. "OH YOU WILL THINK THIS IS SEXUAL BUT IT IS NOT HEE HEE HOO HOO".
There's a "tell" that I look for in my own writing, that's also common to lying. It's when you find yourself either 1. putting "swear to god" or "honestly" in front of a sentence explaining a character's reactions OR 2. overselling what a character is doing. A good example of number one would be "She honestly had no clue what he was doing". A good example of number two is that shit right up there. I look for it because it's an indication that my brain knows goddamn well my characters don't think that and never would, and it's trying desperately to convince me that yes, they really, really would. It's usually an indicator that something is severely wrong with the passage and that I need to revise, NOW.
How does that apply here? I think you can do the math.
(BTW for those of you NOT frequenting LKH Lashouts, LKH has apparently just turned in the first draft for the 21st Anita Blake book. As if it were her actual manuscript. As if she had gone through it and polished it and made sure all the ts were crossed and the Is were dotted and the characters were doing what they were supposed to. Which she hasn't done because she just turned it in like two or three days ago. And the release date is in fucking JUNE. I MIGHT be able to push editing right up until two days before a release date, but that is because I am doing EVERYTHING myself and I don't have to deal with physical distrubution of my books. That's not how professional publishing works. In short: NOBODY IS EDITING LKH'S BOOKS AND THAT INCLUDES LKH HERSELF.)
Then Galen shows up and tells Merry that Niceven's representative is here to cure Galen's ailing penis.
Describing a man as "Barbie doll sized" is not now and never will be sexy. He and Merry fight over him dropping his glamour, and then he and Doyle fight, because apparently he was Niceven's lover until Niceven slept with somebody else and got knocked up, and due to the "Children are precious and we need to have more of them" rule Niceven and her baby-daddy have to confine their genetic contributions to just each other (THIS IS NOT HOW YOU SOLVE A FERTILITY CRISIS) and so she ruled that Sage would never be allowed to screw anybody who was not Niceven. Who can't screw anybody who isn't her baby-daddy. But back when Sage was Niceven's lover, he made fun of Doyle for not being allowed to screw anybody who wasn't Andais ect ect ect. This is the height of our story-telling prowness.
A literal dick-measuring contest would be more entertaining at this point.
And of course we're not going to get out of a chapter involving Galen without "The Green Knight" being thrown everywhere. Sage reminds us that Merry has traded a drink of her blood for the cure for Galen. Because Merry is Bella Swan? Or maybe being a Mary Sue is a blood borne disease?
...that would actually explain a lot.
He asks that they be left alone. Merry refuses to be left alone. This repeats for several pages until they settle on Kitto being the only witness.
So to recap this: Merry is going to be alone in bed with her fake child-lover and a man the size of a doll. And there will be blood drinking, which is the only way Victorians could ever write about sex (that's why we have Dracula. In fact, you could argue that the same attitude that invented light/dark meat is why we have to deal with Twilight. Thank you, Victorians. Thank you.)
Things continue in chapter 28, only now we're negotiating how Merry will get bitten and if Sage is allowed to use Glamour.
We just did this.
And somehow it migrates into a debate about wheither or not killing butterflies to pass a college course is wrong. I am not making this up:
That's the end of the chapter.
in Chapter 29 Sage glamours Merry so that she doesn't hurt anymore.
So the Faerie have magic that can instantly kill pain, that can leave you feeling good, that will not kill you if you take too much of it and that (probably) has no physiological side-effects. That the Faerie are not offering to the general public because Worldbuilding Sucks. When "anesthesiologist" could be their profession until infinity. Seriously. DO YOU KNOW HOW VALUABLE AN INSTANT PAINKILLER WOULD BE?
But hey, so far things aren't bad at all. We might just--
And then Sage bites Merry. And I have to ask:
Merry orgasms. OF COURSE SHE DOES. But at least we got all the stuff with Kitto done last chapter adn we can breathe easy because she's definately not going to...wait. WAIT. WAIT A SECOND. DON'T--
They're doing it. They're doing it. MERRY GENTRY IS HAVING SEX WITH THE NOT-A-TWELVE-YEAR-OLD WHILE BOTH OF THEM ARE UNDER THE INFLUIENCE OF A FAIRY'S MAGIC LSD.
And of fucking course Kitto gets magical powers through the healing power of sex. Anita Blake's ladybits might be a soul-sucking black hole from which there is no escape, but Merry Gentry's va-jay-jay is a magical bag of holding, only it's for magical powers and people's "godhead". And of course once again they are both dripping blood when they "Come to", so to speak, except that this is with somebody who looks exactly like a fucking child.
And then Sage, who was watching the entire time, gets miffy because he caught a "glimpse of heaven" and he won't give Merry the cure for Galen. Because he got to watch somebody else have a good time.
Have I made it clear how fucked up this book is yet?
Sage demands sex in return for Galen's cure, everybody decides not to worry about it because Kitto has come into his own (...oh blue Jesus that means that getting magic is the metaphore in this book for losing your virginity. I FEEL SO DIRTY) and LKH decides that she hasn't fucked with our heads enough this chapter:
HE HE HE HE MERRY GENTRY COMES SO HARD SHE STARTS AN EARTHQUAKE THAT ALMOST DEMOLISHES A CITY AND COSTS THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE THIER LIVELIHOODS AND HOMES TE HEE HEE HEE
I'm going to bed now. Have some brain bleach. It's good for the soul.
Which means the "rules" for this book are an ungodly bitch. I can't introduce any new major characters, or new Mcguffins, or anything that I haven't been toying with through the other three books, because when I put it all together I don't want it to look like I just pulled the final bit out of my ass, so to speak. Which means if I decide the plot is lacking in a certain something, I get to go back through the other three books and find what I need there. Meanwhile I have this instinct, or whatever (I call it the energy-o-meter, except when I don't) that tells me if things are exciting enough up to this point or not. This has caused me to seriously revise my plans for this book twice already (Once because no, it wasn't exciting enough, and once again because it gave me a chance to do a "wheels within wheels" kind of plot, which is easy when your main character hasn't fucking slept in three days. Casey's smart, but she's not at the top of her game right now. When this is over she will gladly kill for bed and a pot roast.)
It's also fun setting this thing in my general area. I've spent most of my life here, so the research for it is less intensive and more spot-checking to make sure, for example, that the county lines are where I think they are. Small town coastal Texas is very, very strange.
In short: Things are moving, but slowly, and I'm frustrated. I guess this is the part of writing that makes it work.
And I'm going to review things until SOMETHING happens, goddamn it. Even if it kills me.
Chapter 27 opens with Merry snuggling Kitto, and her other men fighting over who else gets to sleep with her.
You know, I might step on somebody's toes here, and if I do I am very sorry, but living with all these men fighting over you all the time only sounds fun if you are a sociopath without a guilt complex. Seriously. These guys are warriors and they are fighting like teenage frat boys fighting over who gets to fuck that technically old-enough cheerleader. That is what Merry Gentry and this lifestyle has reduced them to.
Also? Merry's positive side to Kitto almost dying (I guess that's a "other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" kind of moment.) is that she gets to sleep. So these arrangements are miserable all around and there's nothing romantic about it. The men are fussy because they're not getting enough, and Merry's fussy because she's getting too much.
Then we find out that:
1. Jeremy Gray lets his employees get away with murder. Seriously. If I called in sick because my SO was sick? I probably would not have a job the next day.
2. Fading is serious business AND
3. Jeremy Gray has no idea that letting a human psychic scramble her brains at a crime scene isn't something you are supposed to do. The psychic's husband apparently wants to kill Jeremy for putting his wife at risk, and I can't say I blame him.
And then Merry offers to cuddle Jeremy and this happens:
He was quiet for a moment. “I’d almost forgotten that.” “Forgotten what?” “That it’s okay to be held by your friends in ways that humans consider sexual. That it would be all right for me to come and cuddle close to you while we slept.”
This makes me want to take a shower. And it's not because they're talking about offering non-sexual physical comfort. It's that they are specifically calling attention to it. "OH YOU WILL THINK THIS IS SEXUAL BUT IT IS NOT HEE HEE HOO HOO".
There's a "tell" that I look for in my own writing, that's also common to lying. It's when you find yourself either 1. putting "swear to god" or "honestly" in front of a sentence explaining a character's reactions OR 2. overselling what a character is doing. A good example of number one would be "She honestly had no clue what he was doing". A good example of number two is that shit right up there. I look for it because it's an indication that my brain knows goddamn well my characters don't think that and never would, and it's trying desperately to convince me that yes, they really, really would. It's usually an indicator that something is severely wrong with the passage and that I need to revise, NOW.
How does that apply here? I think you can do the math.
(BTW for those of you NOT frequenting LKH Lashouts, LKH has apparently just turned in the first draft for the 21st Anita Blake book. As if it were her actual manuscript. As if she had gone through it and polished it and made sure all the ts were crossed and the Is were dotted and the characters were doing what they were supposed to. Which she hasn't done because she just turned it in like two or three days ago. And the release date is in fucking JUNE. I MIGHT be able to push editing right up until two days before a release date, but that is because I am doing EVERYTHING myself and I don't have to deal with physical distrubution of my books. That's not how professional publishing works. In short: NOBODY IS EDITING LKH'S BOOKS AND THAT INCLUDES LKH HERSELF.)
Then Galen shows up and tells Merry that Niceven's representative is here to cure Galen's ailing penis.
Describing a man as "Barbie doll sized" is not now and never will be sexy. He and Merry fight over him dropping his glamour, and then he and Doyle fight, because apparently he was Niceven's lover until Niceven slept with somebody else and got knocked up, and due to the "Children are precious and we need to have more of them" rule Niceven and her baby-daddy have to confine their genetic contributions to just each other (THIS IS NOT HOW YOU SOLVE A FERTILITY CRISIS) and so she ruled that Sage would never be allowed to screw anybody who was not Niceven. Who can't screw anybody who isn't her baby-daddy. But back when Sage was Niceven's lover, he made fun of Doyle for not being allowed to screw anybody who wasn't Andais ect ect ect. This is the height of our story-telling prowness.
A literal dick-measuring contest would be more entertaining at this point.
And of course we're not going to get out of a chapter involving Galen without "The Green Knight" being thrown everywhere. Sage reminds us that Merry has traded a drink of her blood for the cure for Galen. Because Merry is Bella Swan? Or maybe being a Mary Sue is a blood borne disease?
...that would actually explain a lot.
He asks that they be left alone. Merry refuses to be left alone. This repeats for several pages until they settle on Kitto being the only witness.
So to recap this: Merry is going to be alone in bed with her fake child-lover and a man the size of a doll. And there will be blood drinking, which is the only way Victorians could ever write about sex (that's why we have Dracula. In fact, you could argue that the same attitude that invented light/dark meat is why we have to deal with Twilight. Thank you, Victorians. Thank you.)
Things continue in chapter 28, only now we're negotiating how Merry will get bitten and if Sage is allowed to use Glamour.
We just did this.
And somehow it migrates into a debate about wheither or not killing butterflies to pass a college course is wrong. I am not making this up:
Alive they were magical; dead they were like tissue paper and sticks. I’d finally asked how many insects I had to collect for a D, and I’d collected that many and no more. There had been no point to collecting the insects when the college had a complete collection of almost everything the class was killing. It was the last biology class I took where you had to collect anything...I wouldn’t kill someone for collecting butterflies, but if I had butterfly wings on my back and spent most of my life out among them fluttering from flower to flower, maybe I’d see the death of one butterfly on a different scale. Maybe, if you were the size of a Barbie doll, killing the small creatures was every bit as horrible as killing people. Maybe. Maybe not. But I didn’t feel sure enough of my ground to argue.And the best part?
That's the end of the chapter.
in Chapter 29 Sage glamours Merry so that she doesn't hurt anymore.
So the Faerie have magic that can instantly kill pain, that can leave you feeling good, that will not kill you if you take too much of it and that (probably) has no physiological side-effects. That the Faerie are not offering to the general public because Worldbuilding Sucks. When "anesthesiologist" could be their profession until infinity. Seriously. DO YOU KNOW HOW VALUABLE AN INSTANT PAINKILLER WOULD BE?
But hey, so far things aren't bad at all. We might just--
Kitto entwined his leg over mine, and I felt him growing firm against my leg.
And then Sage bites Merry. And I have to ask:
He bit me like he was biting into an apple, sharp, but the pain floated away, and when he began to suck at the wound, it was like he had a thin, red thread from my fingertip to my groin.Is it just me? Or does LKH have a serious thing with food? We had the things with Doyle earlier, we had the fuck-tastic garbage in Narcissus in Chains...it seems like every time somebody screws in these books, we get food-based similes.
Merry orgasms. OF COURSE SHE DOES. But at least we got all the stuff with Kitto done last chapter adn we can breathe easy because she's definately not going to...wait. WAIT. WAIT A SECOND. DON'T--
I cried out again, and when Kitto slid his body over the edge of my thigh, pressed himself against me, not entering but lying across me, both of us nude, both of us eager, I didn’t protest.
They're doing it. They're doing it. MERRY GENTRY IS HAVING SEX WITH THE NOT-A-TWELVE-YEAR-OLD WHILE BOTH OF THEM ARE UNDER THE INFLUIENCE OF A FAIRY'S MAGIC LSD. And of fucking course Kitto gets magical powers through the healing power of sex. Anita Blake's ladybits might be a soul-sucking black hole from which there is no escape, but Merry Gentry's va-jay-jay is a magical bag of holding, only it's for magical powers and people's "godhead". And of course once again they are both dripping blood when they "Come to", so to speak, except that this is with somebody who looks exactly like a fucking child.
And then Sage, who was watching the entire time, gets miffy because he caught a "glimpse of heaven" and he won't give Merry the cure for Galen. Because he got to watch somebody else have a good time.
Have I made it clear how fucked up this book is yet?
Sage demands sex in return for Galen's cure, everybody decides not to worry about it because Kitto has come into his own (...oh blue Jesus that means that getting magic is the metaphore in this book for losing your virginity. I FEEL SO DIRTY) and LKH decides that she hasn't fucked with our heads enough this chapter:
As celebration of the faerie court went it was modest. We ordered out, Kitto’s choice, bought some very fine wine, and partied until dawn.
It was a little after dawn when the earthquake hit, a 4.4 on the Richter scale, centered in El Segundo. There is no major fault underneath El Segundo. It’s probably all that saved us from demolishing the entire city. It lasted for only about a minute, really not that much damage overall; no one was killed, though there were injuries. But it added an entirely new twist on the idea of safe sex.
HE HE HE HE MERRY GENTRY COMES SO HARD SHE STARTS AN EARTHQUAKE THAT ALMOST DEMOLISHES A CITY AND COSTS THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE THIER LIVELIHOODS AND HOMES TE HEE HEE HEE
I'm going to bed now. Have some brain bleach. It's good for the soul.
March 3, 2013
Caress of Twilight--chapter 26
Ah, another weekend survived. I hate sunday mornings. I have to cook, which I enjoy, but it's eggs benedict and nothing BUT eggs benedict. Hollandaise sauce, FYI, is the tempremental princess of the cooking world. I am not yet at that "If I never see another stick of melted butter I'll die happy" stage...mostly because hollandaise sauce, IMHO, is probably better than sex, and being able to make it at the drop of a hat is a skill I am glad I have because it means I can have steamed artichokes and hollandaise sauce whenever I want...but when it is twelve fifty, and we close at one, and ten people have just arrived and that is one more order of eggs benedict than I have Hollandaise sauce for, and the fucking sauce won't "take"? It's a parade of egg yolk and butter and more egg yolk and more butter and an awful lot of heaven-sauce going into the trash because there's only so much of it you can eat with a spoon.
If I work at this job much longer, I'm probably going to die of cholesterol poisoning, but it will be a very happy death.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch...there is no way this chapter can be as bad as threatened sex with Kitto.
Merry is getting "called" by Taranis's glorified social secretary to go to a ball.
IDK about you, but I get an invite that I don't want from someone I don't want to piss off? If I am honest I say "Thanks but no," and prostrate myself until the refusal is accepted. If I'm feeling passive aggressive, or I know honesty won't work, or both, I'll accept the invite and then have a spontaneous emergency that prevents me from attending, I'm so sorry, here's a dish set to make up for it (I do passive aggressive really well)
How does Merry deal with an unwanted invite from an insane meglomanical king?
2. The bolded part. STOP. DOING. THIS. IT IS NOT SEXY OR AMUSING OR FUN. THE FAKE CHILD SHOULD NOT BE 'WRITHING" ANYWHERE.
The secretary, on the other hand, reacts very well.
And just in case you think that he's overreacting:
Also? Merry is still being stitched up from Kitto's bite, and...uh...yeah, if you have to keep a first aid kit on hand because of how your lovers bite? That doesn't sound too much fun. (It probably could be fun for the right people, but IMHO it's a little too much for my taste)
Things quickly escilate into a pissing contest between Merry and Hedwick, and Merry insults his intelligance for being too slow to argue with her. Because Hedwick couldn't be afraid of actual repercussions from his boss due to Merry rejecting his invite. That'd be giving him too much dignity.
FYI that look the waitresses give you when you order something off the menu? that's not "I don't know if the chefs can cook that". That's "I don't know if the chef will kill me for asking for this, or simply scream at me for a while."
The pissing contest quickly devolves into a long conversation about what title ranks where, and it's too boring to blog about here. The gist of it is, if Merry accepted the invite from Hedwick instead of Taranis's other secretary, she'd be agreeing to acknowledge Taranis as King of the Unseelie court as well as the Seelie, and this would be a bad thing.
Well, it would be a bad thing because Taranis makes Andais look stable:
Boys and girls, if your leader accidentally kills people when he gets miffed, you need a new one. Now.
After talking about possible political reprocussions, somebody FINALLY points out that it's really convienent Taranis wants to see Merry after Merry's met with Maeve Reed. Maeve Reed could get Taranis killed. Of course he wants to know what Merry knows now.
Merry tells the boys that Taranis is probably sterile. They do not take it well. Then they discuss more things about the Unseelie court, including Merry's ally Barinthus, who is some kind of sea god. And then there is talk about war between the two courts because Plot, and even Merry isn't buying this.
Have I mentioned LKH's repitious writing yet? Because she repeats herself. A lot. This sentence:
has appaeared in this book three fucking times. And it's in every book in this series. Every. Single. Book. There are three or four other phrases that LKH reuses like they're her favorite pair of socks. It gets old.
They're talking about the murder scene now. Then they start talking about the Nameless and how its summoner could be Seelie Sidhe, and it's probably Taranis.
The chapter ends with Kitto and Merry snuggling.
I will lend you my mind-bleach for the rest of the afternoon.
If I work at this job much longer, I'm probably going to die of cholesterol poisoning, but it will be a very happy death.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch...there is no way this chapter can be as bad as threatened sex with Kitto.
Merry is getting "called" by Taranis's glorified social secretary to go to a ball.
IDK about you, but I get an invite that I don't want from someone I don't want to piss off? If I am honest I say "Thanks but no," and prostrate myself until the refusal is accepted. If I'm feeling passive aggressive, or I know honesty won't work, or both, I'll accept the invite and then have a spontaneous emergency that prevents me from attending, I'm so sorry, here's a dish set to make up for it (I do passive aggressive really well)
How does Merry deal with an unwanted invite from an insane meglomanical king?
I said the one word he probably didn’t expect to hear. “No.”
His hand went down, and he looked up into the room with a cross look on his face. The look gave way to astonishment, then disgust. Maybe it was watching Kitto writhe on the bed.1. Yes. Let's be impolite to the insane monarch's secretary. I am SURE this has nothing to do with you potentially knowing about his infertility and that being rude and flippant to his staff will have no reprocussions whatsoever.
2. The bolded part. STOP. DOING. THIS. IT IS NOT SEXY OR AMUSING OR FUN. THE FAKE CHILD SHOULD NOT BE 'WRITHING" ANYWHERE.
The secretary, on the other hand, reacts very well.
He lowered his hand and scowled at me. “I have quite a few invitations to make today, Princess, so I do not have time for histrionics.”
And just in case you think that he's overreacting:Hedwick had always been an officious little bootlicker, and I knew that he gave the invitations to all the lesser fey, lesser people. Another sidhe handled all the important social contacts. That Hedwick had extended the invitation was an insult; the way he’d given it was a double insult.Yeah. Merry's issue isn't that Taranis is the crazy-as-fuck King that nearly beat her to death. It's that the guy extending the invitation isn't important enough to be inviting her. He's only used to invite lesser people, you see, whereas she is Merry Gentry in all her Mary Sue Goodness and she deserves to have the shiny invitation, thank you.
Also? Merry is still being stitched up from Kitto's bite, and...uh...yeah, if you have to keep a first aid kit on hand because of how your lovers bite? That doesn't sound too much fun. (It probably could be fun for the right people, but IMHO it's a little too much for my taste)
Things quickly escilate into a pissing contest between Merry and Hedwick, and Merry insults his intelligance for being too slow to argue with her. Because Hedwick couldn't be afraid of actual repercussions from his boss due to Merry rejecting his invite. That'd be giving him too much dignity.
FYI that look the waitresses give you when you order something off the menu? that's not "I don't know if the chefs can cook that". That's "I don't know if the chef will kill me for asking for this, or simply scream at me for a while."
The pissing contest quickly devolves into a long conversation about what title ranks where, and it's too boring to blog about here. The gist of it is, if Merry accepted the invite from Hedwick instead of Taranis's other secretary, she'd be agreeing to acknowledge Taranis as King of the Unseelie court as well as the Seelie, and this would be a bad thing.
Well, it would be a bad thing because Taranis makes Andais look stable:
“He’s like a big spoiled child who’s had his own way for far too long. If he doesn’t get what he wants, he throws tantrums. The servants and lackeys live in fear of those tantrums. He’s been known to accidentally kill in one of his rages. Sometimes he’s sorry, sometimes he’s not.”
Boys and girls, if your leader accidentally kills people when he gets miffed, you need a new one. Now.
After talking about possible political reprocussions, somebody FINALLY points out that it's really convienent Taranis wants to see Merry after Merry's met with Maeve Reed. Maeve Reed could get Taranis killed. Of course he wants to know what Merry knows now.
Merry tells the boys that Taranis is probably sterile. They do not take it well. Then they discuss more things about the Unseelie court, including Merry's ally Barinthus, who is some kind of sea god. And then there is talk about war between the two courts because Plot, and even Merry isn't buying this.
Have I mentioned LKH's repitious writing yet? Because she repeats herself. A lot. This sentence:
the queen had said, “Where is my Darkness, send me my Darkness,” and someone had bled or died,
has appaeared in this book three fucking times. And it's in every book in this series. Every. Single. Book. There are three or four other phrases that LKH reuses like they're her favorite pair of socks. It gets old.
They're talking about the murder scene now. Then they start talking about the Nameless and how its summoner could be Seelie Sidhe, and it's probably Taranis.
The chapter ends with Kitto and Merry snuggling.
I will lend you my mind-bleach for the rest of the afternoon.
March 2, 2013
Why there is no review today
1. I work on the weekends. Specifically from seven AM until noon, and then six until ten on Saturdays, and then seven until two or sometimes THREE on Sunday.
2. I got a late birthday present yesterday. Something I have missed a great deal this past year or so.
PHOTOSHOP!
I HAVE PHOTOSHOP AGAIN! I CAN PAINT THINGS! AND THEN I CAN GO BACK IN AND FIX THINGS!
Yeah, I'm going to probably need a new stylus tip LONG before this week is over. OMG THE NEW TOYS THAT ARE IN PHOTOSHOP I am a very happy girl right now. If it's a choice between review how much Merry Gentry sucks or make pretty pictures I am making with the pretty.
(and she's going to have clothes on. Probably. Don't get your hopes up too much.)
2. I got a late birthday present yesterday. Something I have missed a great deal this past year or so.
PHOTOSHOP!
I HAVE PHOTOSHOP AGAIN! I CAN PAINT THINGS! AND THEN I CAN GO BACK IN AND FIX THINGS!
Yeah, I'm going to probably need a new stylus tip LONG before this week is over. OMG THE NEW TOYS THAT ARE IN PHOTOSHOP I am a very happy girl right now. If it's a choice between review how much Merry Gentry sucks or make pretty pictures I am making with the pretty.
(and she's going to have clothes on. Probably. Don't get your hopes up too much.)
March 1, 2013
March 1st SI/SH Awareness Day!
No review tonight. We'll see about it in the morning. Instead, I'm going to do something I've wanted to do since I started the blog.
I'm going to talk about Self Injury. Because today (...well, by the time you read this, yesterday) is Self Injury/Self Harm awareness day.
I'm not going to talk about my cutting episodes. They are all in the past, and I don't need to revisit the thoughts and feelings I was dealing with at the time. Instead, we're going to talk about why talking is important.
My upbringing was...interesting and pretty contradictory. Christian, but we sure did pile on the fantasy novels. Strict, but we were just as likely to do our math lessons on the sidewalk with chalk as we were in the house with pencils and paper. My mother had misgivings about Harry Potter. She let me bring the Gap series home and read it when I was thirteen.
I'd say "She had no idea" but she'd read Lord Foul's Bane, and she really ought to have known better.
And the one thing we were really good at? Talking. Anything I wanted to know about, my parents would explain it to me. Or they'd find a good book on the subject. Or they'd introduce me to somebody who knew about it. Or they'd do all three. And because they ran a foster home for teenaged boys who were also recovering addicts, most of my questions at a very young age were about a great deal of fucked up things.
At thirteen, I knew what drugs were and what they did. As in I could explain how an addictive cycle works and what "baseline" means in terms of chemical brain function. I knew why some people are genetically predisposed to alcoholism and some aren't. I knew what anorexia and bulemia were. I knew what depression was. I knew what honest, true insanity was. We talked openly about these things, and it wasn't like some great mysterious shame. These were things that people had to live with. She's anorexic, he's got a problem with heroin, person X has to go back to detox. This was normal talk over dinner.
But we never talked about cutting.
Cutting was "that thing". It was something so bizzare, so crazy, that we never needed to bring it up. The resource websites on the subject call it "the secret shame" and that's exactly what it was. It was the secret, the subject discussed in whispers so the kids wouldn't hear. It's still that way. You can, for example, go up to your dad, or your boss, or your partner and say "I'm an alcoholic" and receive a smile, a nod, and (if the person you are talking to is a good human) a few words of encouragement (and if they are a better human, they won't order drinks around you). You can't do that if you're a cutter, because you know damn well they'll look at you and say, "are you crazy?"
The result of this openness in my family was, when my family fell apart and my head became a truely scary place to be, I had a defense against alcohol, because I'd talked about it. I had a defense against drugs. I knew better than to become anorexic. I didn't use sex as a drug, I didn't latch onto another human being and fall into a co-dependant cycle. I had walls against them. The discussions I'd had with my family became moats and barbed wire and a 24/7 patrol guard against me doing something stupid.
Except there was that one thing that nobody talked about, that I'd only ever read about once. If my psyche was Helm's Deep, and its defenses were the conversations I'd had with Mom and Dad during dinner, Self Injury was that sewage grate the orcs blew up. I had no defense for it, and for the better part of a year that became my go-to crutch when things got bad. And things were bad. My ankle is still pretty marked up. I remember once I scraped most of the skin off my neck, and another time I put so many shallow cuts on my knee it looked like I'd given myself a concrete burn. I remember the night I realized I had a problem, because it was the first night in a while that I hadn't had a fight with my relatives or overheard them talking about how stupid/ungreatful/emotional/awful I was as a person, and so it was the first night in a while that I hadn't cut. And I wanted to cut. The compulsion was so strong that I had to get up, go into the bathroom and spend ten minutes hurting myself before I could fall asleep.
I believe that's the definition of "fucked up". It's probably in a dictionary somewhere.
There is a big worry that talking about SI will normalize it. It will. The problem is that we say "normalization" like it's a bad thing. Alcoholism is normalized. And because it's a part of our vocabulary, we know how to ask for help, and where to go to get that help. Drug addiction is normalized. Anorexia is becoming normalized. Gambling addictions, behavioral issues...hell, we've turned depression into a multimillion dollar industry, and managed to give ourselves tools for beating it in the process. Normalization is not making the bad thing okay to do. Normalization is making the bad thing okay to talk about. Normalization is making it okay to ask for help, because you know nobody is going to call you crazy and that people are actually going to help you.
The best thing we can do to fight self injury and self harm is to talk about it.
When I was in the middle of self injury, I didn't really know what it was. I knew that there were jokes about it, but it was that thing that weird gothy kids did, and I felt like I was too old and too normal to justify what I was doing to my ankle almost every night. I didn't have a language for what was going on inside my head. I couldn't ask for help. I didn't know how. I had to watch a TV show on the subject (and GOD BLESS MY MOTHER for letting me watch it, instead of trying to shelter me) just to figure out what the hell was going on inside me. My mother had no one to ask for help, either, and she more or less stumbled into the one method that really does help people with SI (Like I said. God bless my Mom).
We need to talk about it. We need to talk loud about it. No matter how stupid it sounds, no matter how silly or ugly your story is, you need to tell it. Not to be special or to be understood, but so that it becomes something normal and familiar. So that it's something that parents can talk to kids about over dinner like it's no big deal.
So that when the next generation comes around, we've plugged up that hole in the wall.
I'm going to talk about Self Injury. Because today (...well, by the time you read this, yesterday) is Self Injury/Self Harm awareness day.
I'm not going to talk about my cutting episodes. They are all in the past, and I don't need to revisit the thoughts and feelings I was dealing with at the time. Instead, we're going to talk about why talking is important.
My upbringing was...interesting and pretty contradictory. Christian, but we sure did pile on the fantasy novels. Strict, but we were just as likely to do our math lessons on the sidewalk with chalk as we were in the house with pencils and paper. My mother had misgivings about Harry Potter. She let me bring the Gap series home and read it when I was thirteen.
I'd say "She had no idea" but she'd read Lord Foul's Bane, and she really ought to have known better.
And the one thing we were really good at? Talking. Anything I wanted to know about, my parents would explain it to me. Or they'd find a good book on the subject. Or they'd introduce me to somebody who knew about it. Or they'd do all three. And because they ran a foster home for teenaged boys who were also recovering addicts, most of my questions at a very young age were about a great deal of fucked up things.
At thirteen, I knew what drugs were and what they did. As in I could explain how an addictive cycle works and what "baseline" means in terms of chemical brain function. I knew why some people are genetically predisposed to alcoholism and some aren't. I knew what anorexia and bulemia were. I knew what depression was. I knew what honest, true insanity was. We talked openly about these things, and it wasn't like some great mysterious shame. These were things that people had to live with. She's anorexic, he's got a problem with heroin, person X has to go back to detox. This was normal talk over dinner.
But we never talked about cutting.
Cutting was "that thing". It was something so bizzare, so crazy, that we never needed to bring it up. The resource websites on the subject call it "the secret shame" and that's exactly what it was. It was the secret, the subject discussed in whispers so the kids wouldn't hear. It's still that way. You can, for example, go up to your dad, or your boss, or your partner and say "I'm an alcoholic" and receive a smile, a nod, and (if the person you are talking to is a good human) a few words of encouragement (and if they are a better human, they won't order drinks around you). You can't do that if you're a cutter, because you know damn well they'll look at you and say, "are you crazy?"
The result of this openness in my family was, when my family fell apart and my head became a truely scary place to be, I had a defense against alcohol, because I'd talked about it. I had a defense against drugs. I knew better than to become anorexic. I didn't use sex as a drug, I didn't latch onto another human being and fall into a co-dependant cycle. I had walls against them. The discussions I'd had with my family became moats and barbed wire and a 24/7 patrol guard against me doing something stupid.
Except there was that one thing that nobody talked about, that I'd only ever read about once. If my psyche was Helm's Deep, and its defenses were the conversations I'd had with Mom and Dad during dinner, Self Injury was that sewage grate the orcs blew up. I had no defense for it, and for the better part of a year that became my go-to crutch when things got bad. And things were bad. My ankle is still pretty marked up. I remember once I scraped most of the skin off my neck, and another time I put so many shallow cuts on my knee it looked like I'd given myself a concrete burn. I remember the night I realized I had a problem, because it was the first night in a while that I hadn't had a fight with my relatives or overheard them talking about how stupid/ungreatful/emotional/awful I was as a person, and so it was the first night in a while that I hadn't cut. And I wanted to cut. The compulsion was so strong that I had to get up, go into the bathroom and spend ten minutes hurting myself before I could fall asleep.
I believe that's the definition of "fucked up". It's probably in a dictionary somewhere.
There is a big worry that talking about SI will normalize it. It will. The problem is that we say "normalization" like it's a bad thing. Alcoholism is normalized. And because it's a part of our vocabulary, we know how to ask for help, and where to go to get that help. Drug addiction is normalized. Anorexia is becoming normalized. Gambling addictions, behavioral issues...hell, we've turned depression into a multimillion dollar industry, and managed to give ourselves tools for beating it in the process. Normalization is not making the bad thing okay to do. Normalization is making the bad thing okay to talk about. Normalization is making it okay to ask for help, because you know nobody is going to call you crazy and that people are actually going to help you.
The best thing we can do to fight self injury and self harm is to talk about it.
When I was in the middle of self injury, I didn't really know what it was. I knew that there were jokes about it, but it was that thing that weird gothy kids did, and I felt like I was too old and too normal to justify what I was doing to my ankle almost every night. I didn't have a language for what was going on inside my head. I couldn't ask for help. I didn't know how. I had to watch a TV show on the subject (and GOD BLESS MY MOTHER for letting me watch it, instead of trying to shelter me) just to figure out what the hell was going on inside me. My mother had no one to ask for help, either, and she more or less stumbled into the one method that really does help people with SI (Like I said. God bless my Mom).
We need to talk about it. We need to talk loud about it. No matter how stupid it sounds, no matter how silly or ugly your story is, you need to tell it. Not to be special or to be understood, but so that it becomes something normal and familiar. So that it's something that parents can talk to kids about over dinner like it's no big deal.
So that when the next generation comes around, we've plugged up that hole in the wall.
Why I am developing a hate-on for Penguin House
I don't like Penguin Random House.
In case you don't know, Penguin, who is a big name publisher of everything, and Random House, who is also a big name publisher of everything, merged last year. I blogged about it.
And then I found out that Penguin's parent company bought Author Solutions not too long before the merger, and has done fuck-all to clean it up as a company. And then they started using Author Solutions to have the other big name companies (Harlequin, Simon and Schuster, couple others) start yet another Author Solutions front, only with the big name company's name as the hat. I blogged about how STUPID that is here.
But up until today I didn't have a good reason not to like Random House. Because...they weren't really talking, I guess. Welp, let's take care of that.
And in case you want the teal deer version, that link states that Random House now has an e-book only division, and that they offer you a lot of nice shiny objects like editors and artists and training in using social media tools, and they don't mind if your work is short or if it has been published before. Basically, this is a bright and shinier version of KDP, Amazon's self publishing arm.
The difference? Amazon expects you to do most of the work yourself, they take a set percentage of fees (65% in one price bracket, 30% in the other) they don't market your book for shit unless it's incredibly popular (nor should they be expected to) they're not back-charging their expenses by taking their costs out of YOUR cut, and oh, yeah, THEIR CONTRACT ISN'T FOR LIFE OF COPYRIGHT.
LIFE. OF. COPYRIGHT.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.
Alright. To explain why that is the most MIND NUMBLY AWFUL thing I have read today INCLUDING the book I'm reviewing? Copyright is the thing that you sell to a publisher. It's not the actual book, it's just the right to print it for a set time. Most contracts are for X number of years OR for however long it takes for the book to run out of print, whichever is faster. Ebooks and POD (Print on demand) publishing made the game really complicated because technically the book is never out of print, which is why most good contracts these days are for X number of years plus a revision clause (usually if the book doesn't sell Y number of copies, you get the rights back and you can take it elsewhere. There ought to be another "in case of bankruptcy" clause as well, but that doesn't always hold up in bankruptcy court.).
Life of copyright, however, is exactly that. You sign a contract with Hydra-Random House (which you should not be dumb enough to do ever without serious, SERIOUS revisions, which if I'm reading this right would basically amount to them rewriting the entire contract), your book has to STAY at Hydra-Random House. Period. If an issue comes up with them that you don't like? Sucks to be you, your book is theirs for your lifetime plus another 70 years.
This is why research is important, and why you need to treat your writing like a business and not a dream. Five years ago if I had sent my stuff in to Hydra and gotten accepted, I would have signed that contract in a second and I would have been SCREWED. That is a bad contract. That is a very bad contract.
The more I pay attention to the publishing world, the happier I am with self publishing. Yes, I don't have big advances or a huge audience, but I don't have to deal with this shit, either. And that sucks because trade publishing is still something I believe in. Books that are trade published are better than books that aren't. But for FUCK'S SAKE, this is the kind of bullshit little bitty baby publishers get dogpiled for. This is NOT what a big publisher should be doing.
Then again, these are the people who are letting Author Solutions continue to be the suckiest mistake in the history of suck. Maybe "not dicking authors around" is a little too much to expect.
And yes, folks. I really do get that Penguin House needs to compete with Amazon because Amazon is on the verge of owning all the things. But the reason why Amazon's KDP program is coming out on top of the great self publishing competition is that it's one third of the best option (the other two-thirds being Pubit and Smashwords). And also? As a self publisher myself? I'm really offended that Random House/Penguin/Hydra/Pearson Group thinks that I've got an IQ low enough to settle for a life of copyright rights grab buried under the thin veneer of "real" publication.
In case you don't know, Penguin, who is a big name publisher of everything, and Random House, who is also a big name publisher of everything, merged last year. I blogged about it.
And then I found out that Penguin's parent company bought Author Solutions not too long before the merger, and has done fuck-all to clean it up as a company. And then they started using Author Solutions to have the other big name companies (Harlequin, Simon and Schuster, couple others) start yet another Author Solutions front, only with the big name company's name as the hat. I blogged about how STUPID that is here.
But up until today I didn't have a good reason not to like Random House. Because...they weren't really talking, I guess. Welp, let's take care of that.
And in case you want the teal deer version, that link states that Random House now has an e-book only division, and that they offer you a lot of nice shiny objects like editors and artists and training in using social media tools, and they don't mind if your work is short or if it has been published before. Basically, this is a bright and shinier version of KDP, Amazon's self publishing arm.
The difference? Amazon expects you to do most of the work yourself, they take a set percentage of fees (65% in one price bracket, 30% in the other) they don't market your book for shit unless it's incredibly popular (nor should they be expected to) they're not back-charging their expenses by taking their costs out of YOUR cut, and oh, yeah, THEIR CONTRACT ISN'T FOR LIFE OF COPYRIGHT.
LIFE. OF. COPYRIGHT.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.
Alright. To explain why that is the most MIND NUMBLY AWFUL thing I have read today INCLUDING the book I'm reviewing? Copyright is the thing that you sell to a publisher. It's not the actual book, it's just the right to print it for a set time. Most contracts are for X number of years OR for however long it takes for the book to run out of print, whichever is faster. Ebooks and POD (Print on demand) publishing made the game really complicated because technically the book is never out of print, which is why most good contracts these days are for X number of years plus a revision clause (usually if the book doesn't sell Y number of copies, you get the rights back and you can take it elsewhere. There ought to be another "in case of bankruptcy" clause as well, but that doesn't always hold up in bankruptcy court.).
Life of copyright, however, is exactly that. You sign a contract with Hydra-Random House (which you should not be dumb enough to do ever without serious, SERIOUS revisions, which if I'm reading this right would basically amount to them rewriting the entire contract), your book has to STAY at Hydra-Random House. Period. If an issue comes up with them that you don't like? Sucks to be you, your book is theirs for your lifetime plus another 70 years.
This is why research is important, and why you need to treat your writing like a business and not a dream. Five years ago if I had sent my stuff in to Hydra and gotten accepted, I would have signed that contract in a second and I would have been SCREWED. That is a bad contract. That is a very bad contract.
The more I pay attention to the publishing world, the happier I am with self publishing. Yes, I don't have big advances or a huge audience, but I don't have to deal with this shit, either. And that sucks because trade publishing is still something I believe in. Books that are trade published are better than books that aren't. But for FUCK'S SAKE, this is the kind of bullshit little bitty baby publishers get dogpiled for. This is NOT what a big publisher should be doing.
Then again, these are the people who are letting Author Solutions continue to be the suckiest mistake in the history of suck. Maybe "not dicking authors around" is a little too much to expect.
And yes, folks. I really do get that Penguin House needs to compete with Amazon because Amazon is on the verge of owning all the things. But the reason why Amazon's KDP program is coming out on top of the great self publishing competition is that it's one third of the best option (the other two-thirds being Pubit and Smashwords). And also? As a self publisher myself? I'm really offended that Random House/Penguin/Hydra/Pearson Group thinks that I've got an IQ low enough to settle for a life of copyright rights grab buried under the thin veneer of "real" publication.
