Cyndy Aleo's Blog, page 2

The real writing life (or true confessions of a not-rich writer)

This post, I think, has been a long time coming, and what finally provoked me into writing it was a conversation on Twitter today with Alison Tyler. But that was probably the proverbial straw.

The common perception is that authors make a lot of money. And that authors who have a book contract have it made.

The reality is that a very few authors -- even those who publish traditionally with big publishing houses -- make a lot of money, and most authors have "day jobs." For those of us who self-publish? It may be several day jobs.

I have three jobs at the moment: freelance (which I'm behind on as I adjust to my new work scheduling) editing, marketing assistant at a romance publisher, and I also work in a grocery store bakery.

Note that nowhere in that list do I consider "author" one of my jobs. For me to consider it a job, I'd have to not lose money at it.

I have two books out. The first made a very modest sum that covered the cost of the cover art for the second book. That second book not only hasn't covered the cost of its own cover art, but hasn't covered the cost of the pizza I got my kids in celebration of publishing the book.

That's the reality for a lot of us.

It's very humbling to admit publicly that I am what is known as "working poor." I'm lucky in that I have a house, but I work three part-time jobs, none of which come with benefits. My struggle to pay mortgage payments is on a house that's too small for my family and needs constant upkeep, much of which goes undone. I wear clothes that are older than half my kids to struggle to pay my share of their activities, because I want more for them than what they currently have.

I am someone who grew up white, solidly middle class, and with a college degree. And yet writing -- the one place I consider "mine" -- has slowly had to take a backseat as I became a statistic: the woman who suddenly found herself dumped out of the middle class after a divorce.

My attitude toward publishing, toward piracy, toward ebook pricing, has slowly eroded over the years. The idea that readers have that people who publish a book are suddenly wealthy is frustrating. The idea that sharing books among friends without paying or downloading them from a torrent site or that a box set of 12 books should be priced at 99 cents or even free for "exposure" is galling now. Because it seems to be expected that your work have no value.

For many -- dare I even say MOST -- of us, writing is something we spend hours and hours on, taking time away from family, trying to carve out free time from schedules that have none. We aren't sitting in garrets with rich patrons funding us.

It is hard enough to make your own definition of success. Mine has always been to have at least one person who doesn't know me read my words and enjoy them. And in most cases, I've done that. But it becomes more difficult to keep at it, to keep going when the prevailing message seems to be that creating isn't valued, that there is an ever-growing group of people who believe you should offer your creations for free. And when writers aren't in a financial position to spend the money it takes to put out a quality book and then lose money on it, it becomes very easy for even the most talented writers to stop writing because they simply can't afford to.

It says a lot about the state of affairs that people are willing to pay more for a cup of coffee -- or the slices of brownie I frost at work in a job that pays more than writing does at the near-minimum-wage I am paid -- than a book. I can tell you it takes me a lot longer, and takes a lot more out of me, to write a book.

We should be rewarding talent and quality and effort rather than accepting whatever is shoved in front of us because it's free or nearly free. And we simply aren't.

Available today! THE FOREST'S SON - complete

First, your obligatory buy link: THE FOREST'S SON at Amazon.

Secondly, a little about the title. When I started writing this book way back during NaNoWriMo, it was called Dziwozony. That... is not a title that would sell in any English-speaking country. And I tossed around a whole bunch of titles, but nothing felt right.

And then one day, the adorable Emma Trevayne, whose musical tastes are superseded only by her incredible writing, was tweeting lyrics from The Decemberists' "The Hazards of Love 4 (The Drowned)": "A forest's son, a river's daughter." And I had the title, and the scene in the stream and everything came together.

Of course, it never made the playlist, because it didn't fit the scene, which I wrote to repeated plays of Mia Maestros' "Llovera" from the Twilight: Breaking Dawn soundtrack (and might be one of the best songs to ever come off those soundtracks).

THE FOREST'S SON: Finally complete!

This book started out as a young adult sci-fi novel back in late 2009. By 2010, it had morphed into a paranormal new adult romance, and I wrote the majority of it during NaNoWriMo that year.

And then I poked at it and poked at it and poked at it. For over four years.

THE FOREST'S SON wasn't anything like UNDYING. Where with UNDYING, the whole book sort of poured out and the opening scene stayed the same no matter how much of the rest of the book changed, nothing about THE FOREST'S SON, from the title to the opening to the character names, to what Vance even was, has stayed the same.

I thought researching cancer and the legalities of coming back from the dead was complicated, but it was nothing compared to figuring out language issues and deciding on locations and trying to find the differences between paganism in Eastern Europe vs. the U.S.

I wrote it as a serial -- and it will always be a serial in my heart -- but I know there are a lot of people who dislike serials, and want a single, finished book, so come 21 June, that's how you can buy it. In the meantime, you can enter to win a paperback copy on Goodreads

Goodreads Book Giveaway








The Forest's Son


by Cyndy Aleo

Giveaway ends July 09, 2015.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to Win

Or, you can pre-order for Kindle on Amazon (a paperback version will join it on the 21st).

What it means to work hard and be a team

I will be the first one to tell you that two of my kids doing competitive dance is Not My Thing. I am the furthest thing from a dance mom you can imagine, even if I do a hell of a lot of sacrificing to pay my share of their dance costs. They are at a great school that is NOTHING like you see on TV, and I drive a 40+-minute round trip to take them there.

And they love it. Well, Petey loves it. Jay tolerates the competition aspect in order to take more types of dance. Petey wants to teach dance, and lives for this whole thing.

So I go without a lot of stuff and the kids sacrifice a lot to make this work. And there's a lot of time involved and work involved, and a frightening amount of money no matter how hard you try to cut corners. 

So imagine doing all that work and all that sacrifice and something goes wrong. 

One of the other studios had the same dresses in another color as my oldest's class. We noticed that morning in the dressing rooms. And then they came out and started their number... 

And the music glitched. The organizers sent them off to hopefully sort out the music, did a couple more dances, and started them again.

The music skipped and stopped.

You hear the saying "The show must go on" and the kids are trained from toddlerhood to keep going no matter what, but what on EARTH do you do when you have no music?

They kept going.

They started counting out loud (if you've ever heard a dance class, you know it's an 8-count). Some girls ran out of breath, and other girls who had taken a breather would pick up the count. For over two minutes, we heard nothing but voices in unison counting to 8 over and over, and they STAYED TOGETHER.

I cried as it was happening. I'm crying again typing it up. 

Because that class has given up a lot to get there as well. They've given up other activities. Time with their friends. Time sitting around the house watching TV like a lot of teens do. They'd worked hard and they knew if they stuck together and helped each other out, they were absolutely going to get through it. It was truly amazing to watch.

P.S. They won several awards, including a special award for professionalism from one of the judges. And the lesson of that class is going to stick with ma a long, long time.

Yes, the electroshock machine is real...

And I found it on eBay via Wired. (screenshot of the original article above)

Back in 2007, before I'd even started writing THE FOREST'S SON, Boing Boing found a listing for an Edwardian home-grown electroshock machine. 

Because I'm weird, I saved the link. When I was looking for some odd ways Vance/Jakub could be erasing his memories, I went right back to this. (Then bugged Lauren of Christina Lauren for her science knowledge when it came to drugs that might be available on the street to go along with it.) Obviously, it's pseudo-science, but at least it's a close approximation of something that might be theoretically possible.

Part II of THE FOREST'S SON is available now!

As always, there's music...

Playlist: Dziwozony

I can't write -- or really edit well -- without music. 

The one thing I wish I could do with client books is take the time to make playlists for their books when I edit, because it's so much more helpful to have that mood playing in the background. It helps you know when a character has gotten off track, or the plot got a little wandery.

I create my playlist for books while I'm writing the first draft. I'll hear a song I think might fit something in my outline, or as I'm writing, I'll think of a song that's perfect for the scene. THE FOREST'S SON was a little bit different in that I wanted to find music that fit perfectly -- and my familiarity with Polish pop music isn't the best. For most of us in the States, our Polish music begins and ends with classical composers and Basia -- and her last name was too difficult to deal with for Americans.

So I sought some out. Mixed in some Jacaszek with some alt-country. I think it works, and the playlist has kept me perfectly in the mood as I edit. 

One song isn't available on Spotify: the acoustic version of Wise Children's "When Your Love Is Safe" from the Daytrotter set. It's worth the few bucks to go get this song. I promise. The original doesn't come close.

Note: my working title for at least a couple of years was Dziwozony. But I recognize that, like Basia's last name, that's a rough one for non-Poles. :)

Download the first part -- FREE! -- here: THE FOREST'S SON.

So where did they come from?

The female tribe in my book wasn't original to the story. Like most of my stuff, it seems, it started out as YA. Jakub and Donovan were there, but there were aliens and a sort of men-in-black thing and then I realized they really needed to be able to have sex.

And beyond that, I wasn't into writing a slightly older E.T. I wanted a new adult Dune: a Kwisatz Haderach with a romantic storyline. No Chani dying in childbirth, no blinding and a destiny that can't be altered. And definitely no worm children.

At around the same time, I stumbled onto the legend of the Dziwozony, a mythical tribe of Amazonian-like women who lived in the forests of Poland. I never did find why they have no men, but if I grafted the story of the Bene Gesserit to theirs, it dovetailed so nicely, and gave me a hero with a lot to lose, but even more to gain. 

And then I started looking at the forests of Poland, and fell in love. Here are some pictures of the area Grażyna's tribe is from: 

Obligatory buy link: (part I is still free!)

So I have this new book out...

I KNOW! I owe you all the second part of my visit to Princeton, but I've been working so hard to get this thing out, and... well....

Why so serial? 

Serials are interesting things. I've seen them work really, really well, and I've seen them NOT work well at all. And I will be releasing this as a single book at the end, if that's more your thing, but I realized when I started editing it that I'd WRITTEN it as a serial and crammed it all into one Scrivener file. The titles for each section? There from the very first outline.

I was still regularly (instead of sporadically) writing fanfic when I first drafted this book, and I'm not sure if that mentality was what led to drafting this story in pieces. Each section has its own logical beginning and ending. 

At any rate, I hope you enjoy it! Part I, UNKNOWING, is currently free on Amazon Kindle. (I hope to keep it that way to give you at least a taste of the story... a try-before-you-buy).

In which I talked about ejaculate at Princeton

This is going to be a post in two parts.

Part I ---

I was invited to speak with Anne Jamison's ENG 222 class on fan fiction at Princeton.

Yes, that Princeton. Yes, fan fiction.

Now, don't get me wrong; I loved my college experience. I loved my college and I loved my professors and I got to meet Gwendolyn Brooks. But when I went there it wasn't nationally ranked and it's a small liberal arts private school and, well, it wasn't PRINCETON.

And there I was, on a campus that smelled of Catholic church (Tiffany Reisz said marble and incense, but I always think "old stone, old wood, and fear") talking about why I found it necessary to use fan fiction to accurately describe a first experience of oral sex.

But we talked about what fan fiction is and isn't. I explained my very complicated distaste for Fifty Shades, not solely because of how it happened or that the writing is meh, but how much of it was cribbed from other fics. Fics that belonged to my friends. Fics that were better written. And that the irony of E.L. James so fiercely protecting something that was derivative in the first place -- not just of Twilight but of other fan fictions -- was forever a source of frustration.

The coolest thing about it is that I honestly feel like I learned more from the students than they learned from me. Two students interviewed me after class and asked some of the most insightful questions I've ever been asked about fan fiction. They were smart and asked things that were thoughtful, that showed an almost preternatural understanding of a publishing industry outside of fan fic that I struggle to grasp. What did I feel my responsibilities were as a fanfic author? What was it like being in fandom with a teen who was also in fandom? What did that bring to our parent/child relationship that isn't all that common? 

What did it mean that the proliferation of published fanfic was het, when so much of the whole is slash? Where is the femmeslash? Most of the questions they asked had much larger ramifications in the larger world of media and what we consume and what we create. I hope they know these are conversations held at bars during cons and in DMs on Twitter. We want to know where the femmeslash is, too. We worry about who's reading our sex scenes and how much responsibility we have for those readers to be safe.

I know the intent was for me to share my experiences and my knowledge, but as many times as I've talked about and to the subject of fan fiction, this is the most visible it's felt. The most signifcant. And left me with the most to think about afterward.

I don't think it was just that I had a Guinness at a hotel bar where photos hang of alums like Justice Sotomayor and Michelle Obama. I think it was that people are taking us seriously. They're taking transformative works seriously. We're moving from the stereotype of angsty teens and repressed middle-aged moms into the real place in history. Shakespeare would not have existed without Marlowe. The New Testament would not exist without the Old. And whether you like it or not, the current state of the book industry would not be what it is -- for better or worse -- without Twilight fan fiction.

It's a very strange, and wonderful, place to be in.

So apparently, it's still not clear why these fan fiction panels are BAD IDEA JEANS

Last night, I saw this fantastic programming item for WonderCon:

Oh, look! Let's have comedians reading fan fiction? 

Let's ask Caitlin Moran, shall we? The TOP GOOGLE SEARCH FOR HER NAME (try typing "Caitlin Moran" plus a space and you'll see what I mean) has to do with her shaming a fan out of the Sherlock fandom by forcing the cast to read "Johnlock" fan fiction (That's when you write Watson and Sherlock in a relationship.)

Moran is a pretty successful woman, right? So why is an incident that happened over a year ago still such a thing? Why are we riled over a panel alleged to be all in good fun?

Apparently, this needs to be explained in short, simple words yet again.

Let's change the situations. Let's use fanart, shall we?

Oh wait. We don't. We never do this for fan art, because, while there are a lot of fan artists who are women, the fan art game is still mostly owned by men. So we get fawning things like this Cracked piece on fan art being better than the original. And sponsored forums from companies like Blizzard. And contests to go to premieres!

Fandom has a sexist divide, and it's clearest in the way fanfic authors are treated. We are predominantly women. The stereotype is that we focus on sex, and while that's certainly a part of it (hey, why aren't we looking at those RIDICULOUS boobs on women in the fan art???), in no way is that the entirety of fan fiction.

Yet that's what these "comedians" choose to focus on. 

It's low-hanging fruit. Snark on the teen girls or middle aged women writing bad sex; never mind that for a lot of teen girls, this may be the ONLY way they hear about sex. Let's forget that it's a great training ground for writers, many of whom go on to publish REAL LIVE BOOKS. That are not fandom-related at all.

We focus on women writing sex, but the males who write fan fiction get nice, licensed payments. Women? We're just the free marketing force used by creators. Watch the Teen Wolf marketing team mobilize when there's a slash ship tourney (that's a same-gender pairing, usually not canon, that's dreamt up by fans, but sometimes hinted at by creators to encourage the fandom).

Last night, I got to explain to a friend -- who's a fantastic feminist deeply involved in fan culture, but not fan works -- why this is problematic. Simple: IT FOCUSES MOCKERY ON FEMALE FANS.

For creators, this is a move I frankly don't get. You are MOCKING THE PEOPLE WHO PAY YOU. It's no surprise that after his initial stream of "who cares? why are you bothering me? just don't go to the panel?" brushoff, Chris Gore deleted his tweets. Could it be due to the fact that he has a Kickstarter he'd like you to fund? (No, I'm not linking it. Go back and read to this point again.)

We've seen what happens when we get our girl cooties on gaming, and we're getting our girl cooties all over their cons, and we need to be kept in our place. Mocking our fandom participation is one way to make sure we stay here.

Ha, ha! See how uncomfortable the things you write make the cast? And other people?  You can't even fan right.

What they forget is how much we control where money goes. That we were forecasted (back in 2009) to be controlling $28 trillion in annual spending by now. That we got our girl cooties all over your Avengers and it's selling better. That's a lot of fan dollars available, folks. Maybe it's time to stop making fun of those of us who might spend them.