Laila Blake's Blog, page 14

Cultural Change through Crowd-Funding

One of my favorite developments on the internet is the advent and stunning success of crowd-funding as a means to create and share people’s work and ideas. Kickstarter and Indigogo have become staples for many of us and now we can add Patreon and Subbable (still in beta), in which you can support ongoing content, to that list. As a long-time lover of youtube channels and independent music, I couldn’t be happier – in fact, I constantly get a little teary over it. It’s just such a bright spot against all the things I want to hide from on the internet.

There’s a comment though that I keep stumbling over. I think the first time I grew consciously aware of it was during the kickstarter campaign for the Veronica Mars movie, but the backlash against Feminist Frequency’s campaign definitely falls into a similar category.

“Don’t you have a more worthwhile charity/cause to support?”

Now, personally, I am very much in two minds about charity. While it is obviously wonderful in principle, it also is very easily corrupted, people are duped and many, many charities support issues that I feel like the government should be supporting but can rest a little easier while charities pick up the slack (which doesn’t sit well with me and makes me uneasy about donating with a good feeling).

But crowd-funding isn’t charity. That’s like saying, buying a cd or a book or going to the movies, all that is charity. Now, there are definitely projects in which crowd-funding and charity share a certain area in a Venn diagram – for example when money is collected to build a specific school or well in a developing country – but in most cases there are some distinct differences.

1. I give money to crowd-funding campaigns so that good things can be created – be that music or movies or a product and I personally enjoy those things. (That isn’t to say that charity where you don’t personally get to enjoy it is bad or that I don’t donate – I do, although usually more to advocacy groups than other charities – but it’s just a difference.)

2. I also give money to crowd-funding campaigns because this way, I can be reasonably sure that the good thing won’t be diluted or misappropriated by advertisers or market concerns, so that creators can fulfil their visions without having to cow-tow to banks or regular investors.

3. I support crowd-funding because it makes me happy. It makes me ridiculously happy that something as huge as a movie that fans have been begging to see being made for years, just completed shooting and that it was a project that involved fans, that everybody was all the more passionate about because of it.

We live in a world where too often, the people who are the first concern of many mass media projects are neither the audience nor the artist – but the company’s share-holders. This leads to dilution of quality, of a millionth remake of something that will surely get an audience just so they can snark about it, and a general feeling of disconnect between audience and creators.

The internet is changing that forever.

In the case of Subbable and Patreon, you can subscribe to video or music content – and you choose your monthly contribution, from 0$ to whatever you want to help them cover production costs and to keep channels alive.

This, too is something I am very passionate about and just one of the reasons why I have been a fan of bandcamp for so long: pay what you can, if you can. In her explanation video, Julia Nunes said it so well: “Piracy is not going away and I think that’s good. If you can’t afford to buy my music… I still want you to hear my music.”

It is important to me that artists are paid, that that they can pay their bills and survive, because believe me, I know what it’s like to be so broke you kind of don’t know how to buy your next meal for a week because that’s how long it is until your next paycheck. And yeah, I get angry every time an author agrees to terrible conditions because “they just wanted to get published.”

Not everything will be a success, that’s how art works – but if people love it and enjoy it, the artist should be able to make a living. If I love someone’s music or content – I WANT them to have my money. And I want them to have it, not some big company. But I don’t believe art should be restricted. Because yes, if you genuinely can’t afford my books and still want to read them – I want you to read my books. So if that’s the case, I want you to shoot me an email and I’ll send it to you. Because that’s what I believe in (and I wouldn’t want you to try those piracy sites where you get duped into downloading viruses).

Books still follow an older model and our industry is usually a little more sluggish in terms of change, but I love that this exists for music and vloggers now. It makes me so, so happy.

Lilt Podcast Episode 4

A new week and a new episode of Lilt, the chatty lit podcast with me and L.C. Spoering. Lilt is a short, weekly show about our experience of reading, writing and the publishing industry. We’ll discuss books we like, writing concepts that interest us, and the ever-puzzling publishing game. We’ll also give tips on all things writing, editing and promotion.

 

Lilt — Episode 4

in which Laila and Lorrie discuss beta readers and beta reading – what to expect, how to facilitate the process and how to read the results.

Lilt Episode 4 – Laila Blake / Lorrie Spoeringmap :: {skin:’red’, animate:true, width:’500′, volume:0.4, autoplay:false, loop:false, showVolumeLevel:true, showTime:true, showRew:true, downloadable:true, downloadablesecurity:false, id3: false}

(If the application doesn’t work for, please click here for the audio-file!)

What about you? Have you had any good experiences beta-reading?

Or would you like to try and don’t quite know how to get involved in it? 

Our intro music was taken from the Free Music Archive:
GeeNerve - Pink Fish Signs (Take Two).

What am I working on Wednesday! 7/17/2013

What am I working on Wednesday is a new bi-monthly meme of snippets and excerpts that should keep you updated on my current projects. To listen to a recording, please click on the application below.

http://www.lailablake.com/Podcast/waiwow/waiwow1.mp3

Today: Where the Wind Settles, a high concept lgbt YA novel

Excerpt of Chapter 12:

“Is… this how you’re supposed to do it?” Ingrid asked Pablo. Before she’d run off again to get one last thing, Chinook left the sweet dough to rest in the fridge and turned on some music. It sounded a little bit like what Pablo been playing in the park that day and Ingrid liked the sudden, unexpected pang of familiarity. She looked down at her sugar skull again, carefully holding the flimsy little icing dispenser.

“I don’t think there’s much of a rule to it,” Pablo replied mildly. He held the cigarette behind him and away from her face when he leaned over to look at her handiwork, at the crooked yellow teeth and the sun-flower eyes. “You have steady hands,” he commented, then leaned back again before he turned his head away and exhaled a breath of smoke. Ingrid watched the way his lips puckered out for a suspended moment and then slipped back into place.

“How would you do it?” she asked and Pablo looked down at the table in front of him, empty except for the coffee mug he kept refilling.

“Can’t say I ever tried.”

“Oh.” Ingrid looked away and at her own little sugar skull. It was such a strange idea, bizarre even – sweet on the tongue and to look at, not anything she had ever associated with death before.

“Can I ask you something?” Pablo said, slightly cross-eyed as he seemed to mediate over the tiny glimmer at the end of his cigarette butt before he quenched it in a kitchy glittering ash-tray.

“Uh, sure.”

He smiled, got up from his chair and emptied the ash-tray into the trash. There was a thoughtful expression on his face while he ran water over it and took a few haphazard wipes at it with an old sponge.

“Do you want to be here?”

He wasn’t looking at her yet and something about that fact made the question feel less startling. She wet her lips. Her cheeks were still a little flushed but she wasn’t afraid – just not used being spoken to, asked things like a normal person.

“Yeah…” she offered, then pulled her shoulders up to her ears but quickly dropped them when Pablo looked back at her with his dark eyes. In the light of the kitchen lamp above him, his lashes looked huge – dark, long wings that framed his bottomless eyes. She felt her heart beat a little quicker.

“I’m just asking,” he said quietly, tilting his head, “because I love Nook, she’s a wonderful and caring person. But sometimes she forgets to ask. And you have a choice – you can stay with us, or you can mourn in your own way, or not at all… it’s up to you, okay?”

It took Ingrid a few heartbeats to drag her eyes away from his. Nook. Nook. Nook. They were kissing again in front of her mind’s eye and his lashes were brushing against Chinook’s porcelain cheeks.

“I do… want to be here,” she finally whispered. She picked up the red icing, staring at the tiny nozzle and pressed a drop onto her index-finger. It looked like that time, years ago, in the hospital. They had poked her finger until a small droplet of blood blossomed on her skin, then they had smeared it onto glass plate and told her to sit down again. Hours later, and only after she asked, her father told her that her blood hadn’t been the kind to help her mother and Ingrid had stood by a window, searching her finger for the tiny hole for hours. That was the first time she’d ever thought people had stopped seeing her but it would be years until it became a stable skill. And now she was loosing it.

“Are you okay?” Pablo asked. He was squatting by her side looking up at her, but Ingrid had no idea how he’d got there so fast. She didn’t jump, just felt her eyes sting. Then she brought the finger to her mouth and sucked the sugary paste onto her tongue. Was that was blood tasted to the dead?

She remembered to nod and Pablo awkwardly patted her knee, then stood up again and found his chair. He didn’t light another cigarette. The lack made it look as though he didn’t know what to do with his hands anymore.

 

The big, scary F-word

Trigger warning: sexual violence

“Of course I believe that women should be equal to men… but I’m not a feminist. We just don’t need a woman’s movement anymore.”

                                                           many people, everywhere.

 

I am a feminist, and was raised in that spirit — thanks to the conscious and loving values my single-parent mother had the foresight to instil in me. However, for most of my teenage years, I argued fervently against the idea that this term could ever be applied to me. Feminists were those hard and bitter women who hated men, weren’t they? They were unreasonable and uncomfortable and they seemed to make it more difficult for me to be a decisive and successful woman rather than easier – they gave us all a bad name, because clearly they weren’t respected by men. And that was the important thing.

But then at that time, I had also been convinced that I just had never been affected by sexism in my life. I had been viciously groped by strangers in the subway and at concerts, I had countless men stare at my breasts followed by the occasional “Wow, what size are those?” or “I want to see those naked.” I had started into a slowly progressing cycle of eating disorder and hatred of my body; I didn’t believe I was good enough for almost anything, and that the best job for me would be something I could do from home so I didn’t have to be seen all the time. I had already figured out that I wasn’t ever going to be authoritative and strong enough to compete with men and I had learned to shut up when they talked, to listen.

But and let me repeat this: I was convinced that I had never been affected by sexism. So what were those feminists complaining about?

In fact, I was convinced I was the evolved state of women, had taken in any values feminism had fought for in the past and outgrown them. Which was why I lost my virginity in on the floor between bathroom and bedroom a mere couple of hours after meeting my “boyfriend” for the first time face to face, why even though I asked him to wait, his insistence to do it right then and there seemed just what an evolved and sex-positive woman was supposed to want. It was why for most of my teens, every date I had ended in a blow-job, however little I liked the guy – I was being a good sport, not prude or annoying, not a tease who let a guy buy me a drink and then sent him home. Feminism? That was whining and moping and I wanted to have fun.

Except, I didn’t have fun at all.

It is easy to deny any affiliations to feminism – the media show us how, in painting feminism in shrill colours and unreasonable and hateful tropes. We are taught everything about feminism except for the truth: the simple idea that men and women are equal (no, not the same but equal) and should be treated as such in politics, business and society. We are not, but every day that we are taught to denigrate feminism as a thing of the past or as laughable or as a thing for ugly women or lesbians with a grudge on men — we fuck ourselves over, again and again.

Once, when I told my strong single-parent mother about my feminist attitudes, she sighed and said this wouldn’t make it easier to get a man.  My grandmother agrees. Everybody agrees — my former teenage self does, too. And she’s right, I was more successful with men while I accepted the idea that the world of women owes them sex and attention and respect without them having to do anything in return.

And I don’t want to be jaded or angry. I don’t have all the energy necessary for it and so every couple of days I stumble onto the next horrible thing online and I want to go back to bed and pull the blanket over my head. Because people like Anita Sarkeesian are vilified as “the worst of feminism” — and not just by the trolls, also by so-called informed people, who want to inform the poor women public of the mistakes, misconceptions or misinterpretations Anita might have made about little details in her videos. Shock-horror, someone isn’t 100% correct? On the internet? You don’t say!

But she’s a woman, and a feminist and so she’s called “worse than the westboro church” for her stance — by reasonable men who hope to engage in a reasonable discussion with me. Seriously? Her pages are hacked, her wikipedia page filled with porn and racist remarks, people threaten to rape and murder her every day, a game is created in which you can literally beat up her face — but hey, that’s game culture, we just have to accept that. To complain about that and to make it public is just trying to make all the nice men out there feel guilty, and of course, to scam more money. The point is that she’s wrong!

At the same time, some fox news contributor tells women to go buy coat-angers after an abortion bill passes. There is outrage, a little bit, for a day or two – but nobody makes a game where I can beat up his face. He doesn’t have to walk to his car at night afraid that someone will jump and rape him. He doesn’t have his websites defaced or his privacy violated. He doesn’t even have to worry about loosing his job.

He’s just a conservative guy being a guy. And we have to accept that, that’s how the world works, free speech and all that.

Like I just have to accept when some guy won’t stop talking to me in the subway, when he’ll try to grab my boobs or push his hands between my legs. I probably just looked hot that day, hey, that’s a compliment isn’t it? That’s just men being men — accept it or you’ll sound like an angry feminist. And there’s nothing worse.

The thing with privilege – racial, gender, sexuality etc. – is that it’s a daily effort to make yourself aware of it. And if you don’t, just like that, people end up denying it with every fibre of their being – they have to denigrate and humiliate anyone who talks about this, have to find ways to discredit them without actually having to engage the real arguments. And suddenly, the very notion of equality poses a threat not only to their life-style but to the very construct of their word and their identity. There is little middle ground, and it’s so easy to slip up. But we have to keep trying – we all have to keep trying to understand each other and to put ourselves into other people’s shoes just for a little bit. It’s not that hard and not that scary.

Lilt Podcast Episode 3

A new week and a new episode of Lilt, the chatty lit podcast with me and L.C. Spoering. Lilt is a short, weekly show about our experience of reading, writing and the publishing industry. We’ll discuss books we like, writing concepts that interest us, and the ever-puzzling publishing game. We’ll also give tips on all things writing, editing and promotion.

 

Lilt — Episode 3

in which Laila and Lorrie discuss professional editors – what to expect from them, what they are like and how they fit into the puzzle of publishing a beautiful book.

Lilt Episode 3 – Laila Blake / Lorrie Spoeringmap :: {skin:’red’, animate:true, width:’500′, volume:0.4, autoplay:false, loop:false, showVolumeLevel:true, showTime:true, showRew:true, downloadable:true, downloadablesecurity:false, id3: false}

(If the application doesn’t work for, please click here for the audio-file!)

What about you? Have you had any experiences with editors worth sharing?

And remember, next week we’ll talk about beta readers, so please comment and ask away about those as well!

Our intro music was taken from the Free Music Archive:
GeeNerve - Pink Fish Signs (Take Two).

Polishing the Precious

– no, what you think. This is about my editing process and a kind of companion piece to the second Lilt episode for those of you who’d rather read. Remember that this is just my own process and any other are equally as valid – in fact, I’d love to hear what you do in the comments!

1. Writing the first draft.

I have two basic methods here. Preferably, I plan everything out and write it down with as little editing in between as possible. I often don’t even read through the chapters once I’ve finished. This

is only possible, however, when I already know where it’s going AND if I am reasonably sure of what I am doing. I wrote the Lakeside sequel this way, straight through and it went really well. But sometimes that’s not the case. I’m currently writing a YA piece – I’ve never written YA before and from the original idea, the story actually took quite a turn that I had to accommodate by changing some plot points in the beginning.

However, I still feel like editing has very little to do in the writing process. It slows me down too much. And while I might indulge it sometimes (especially when I feel off about my writing) the idea is to write straight through as much as possible.

2. Resting period

After I finish a manuscript, it goes to rest in a file somewhere. It has been worked very hard and it can go to sleep for a while. I’d say at least a month and so far I have been lucky (unlucky?) not to have had pressing deadlines that would make this impossible.

The idea of rest, by the way, only applies to the manuscript. I go right on writing, although I have a certain preference to write a few shorter pieces (novellas or short-stories) after finishing a whole novel. Continued writing and reading is important because concentrating on new projects multiplies the effect you want to achieve (forgetting a bit about your story and gaining distance) and it also keeps you working, keeps you learning and in the end you may even be able to improve upon the manuscript later based on what you learned in that time.

3. The read-through

After waiting a couple of weeks, I convert my manuscript to .mobi and read it on my kindle. This helps me get further distance from the work, enabling me to read it as much as possible like I would read any other book.

This is mainly to test pacing and the flow of the story, to see if I get excited by it. If not, there’s a bigger problem than I know how to fix right now, but then you have to go deeper, far far deeper. So let’s assume that it reads like an interesting story with stuff to fix.

What I look out for here is:

- Where does my attention slump?

- Which chapters feel repetitive or aren’t actually needed in the big picture.

- Does the story actually begin at the beginning or is there a chapter before the beginning that has to go? Is the beginning engaging enough?

- Does the beginning and the ending form a satisfying frame? Can this be improved upon?

- Is the climax exciting enough?

- Are there any plot holes?

And I also use the highlighting function for other things that catch my eye, like typos and awkward sentences. I don’t fix anything at that stage, I just mark it because it’s hard to read on without doing anything.

4. The Quick Fix

At this stage, I cut out what needs to be cut and go through everything I highlighted. I do another spell-check and I try to fix the issues I had in my read-through. If I am not too sure about certain things I leave them for now, but keep the notes on them.

5. Off to the beta-readers.

This far more readable version is what I send to my first beta readers. This is where my gut feeling comes in, if I feel like I really need help and advice on this, I just send it to my writing companion so that she can help me out. That’s what I did with my very first novel – and then came another editing stage and then some people who were primary readers. These days I don’t usually feel like that second stage is necessary and if I have other people interested this is when I send it to them for advice.

It helps to let beta readers know what you are looking for – especially if they don’t routinely do this. I usually come up with a list of questions that follows them through the reading process.

The rest, of course, partly depends on what the beta readers say. If their advice coincides with some of my doubts or if their advice spawns awareness of certain issues, this where rewrites come in and I will look again at whether something needs cutting or more explanation etc.

6. The last polish

This is when I look over everything one last time for issues of style and language. I eliminate writing crutches and sentence level repetitions (like describing the protags feelings over something that is obvious etc.). I check over every piece of dialogue, read it out loud, consider whether this is exactly what each individual would say and whether it’s the best version of it. I delete a lot of “suddenlies” and “finalies” and “moments” and “justs”. I look over metaphors and similes, and I smooth out the style across the whole novel.

At this stage, it depends on my mind-set. I am usually impatient, so unless I have some major doubts, I’ll go on to writing a synopsis and a cover letter and see who I can try to sell it to.

Thoughts too long for Twitter

On Wimbledon, sports and misogyny.

I wasn’t sure I wanted this on my blog but here it is. I know that organised sports can bring out the racists, nationalists and all those other ugly off-shoots of an over-encouraged sense of patriotism but the reactions to Wimbledon kind of shocked me. (And yes, I only knew it was going on because of twitter). I was annoyed when Murray was called “the first brit to win for 77 years” when there were several British women who won in that time-span. I guess they don’t count. But whatever, aren’t we used to that?

But this next part is something I am so sick of and done with, I never ever want to get used to that. We have the internet, once called a truly free medium (we dared to dream, but it’s still pretty damn free) and what do people do with it? Call women too fat and ugly to deserve to win Wimbledon, call them slags, whores, bitches just for the audacity of being good at something. Oh but I forgot, women’s tennis only exists so that men can see women’s panties when the skirt flies up or can wank off to the noises they make when they hit the ball.

[Click on your own discretion, it kind of ruined my day: The twitter-shaming of Marion Bartoli]

Lilt Podcast Episode 2

It’s Friday again and as such, time fore a new episode of Lilt, the chatty lit podcast L.C. Spoering and cooked up. Lilt will be a short, weekly show about our experience of reading, writing and the publishing industry. We’ll discuss books we like, writing concepts that interest us, and the ever-puzzling publishing game. We’ll also give tips on all things writing, editing and promotion.

 

Lilt — Episode 2

in which Laila and Lorrie discuss editing manuscripts from the writer’s side. How much do we do to our writing before we give it into the able hands of other people?

Lilt Episode 2 – Laila Blake / Lorrie Spoeringmap :: {skin:’red’, animate:true, width:’500′, volume:0.4, autoplay:false, loop:false, showVolumeLevel:true, showTime:true, showRew:true, downloadable:true, downloadablesecurity:false, id3: false}

(If the application doesn’t work for, please click here for the audio-file!)

How do you edit? Do you have writing crutches that you always have to take out?

Or do you have any questions about our two upcoming podcasts about professional editors and about beta readers?

Our intro music was taken from the Free Music Archive:
GeeNerve - Pink Fish Signs (Take Two).

Another Spanking Saturday Snippet

Three weeks ago, I shared a little snippet of my latest erotic novella Driftwood Daughter (currently in the submitting phase) and as it it is Saturday Spankings time again, here’s another little bit to wet your appetite.

     

Driftwood Daughter

by Laila Blake

-extract-

     The first had been shock, the second a sense of helplessness – the third was real pain that made me tense up my entire body so hard he had to hold me against his stomach to keep me in position. But even as I was still trying to catch my breath, his hand was brushing over the tender spot and he rubbed and kneaded it, spread the heat out in waves of something that I couldn’t rightly call pain anymore.

     It was something else, something like fire. Like swallowing tequila without the orange juice, like the raw feeling of straining muscles against an exercise machine, harsh but oddly pleasant in its sting.

     ”Shhhh,” he whispered then and I realized that I hadn’t stopped a keening moan for what felt like minutes. I had to breathe. And he kept massaging the fire away.

Lilt Podcast Episode 1

After much deliberation, planning and hesitation, L.C. Spoering and I are finally jumping into the podcast arena. Lilt will be a short, weekly show about our experience of reading, writing and the publishing industry. We’ll discuss books we like, writing concepts that interest us, and the ever-puzzling publishing game. We’ll also give tips on all things writing, editing and promotion.

 

Lilt — Episode 1

in which Laila and Lorrie discuss their favourite books in the last year  and then branch off into the difference between slice-of-life and high-concept books and the writing of both.

Lilt Episode 1 – Laila Blake / Lorrie Spoeringmap :: {skin:’red’, animate:true, width:’500′, volume:0.4, autoplay:false, loop:false, showVolumeLevel:true, showTime:true, showRew:true, downloadable:true, downloadablesecurity:false, id3: false}

(If the application doesn’t work for, please click here for the audio-file!)

What were your favourite books in the last year?

What do you prefer – slice of life or concept? Let us know in the comments!

The books mentioned and discussed in this episode were:
The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides;
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami;
Life of Pi - Yann Martell;
Exactly Where They'd Fall - Laura Amos Rae.

Our intro music was taken from the Free Music Archive:
GeeNerve - Pink Fish Signs (Take Two).