Cyndy Aleo's Blog, page 3

Face it: we are all problematic in our own way

My Twitter stream is a megastorm of offended people today. And the main reason that is so is because of an unwillingness of people to acknowledge they are problematic themselves. 

Let me be the first to tell you: I am problematic. I say problematic things. The key difference is that when I realize I've said something completely asinine and someone calls me on it, I take the time to analyze what I've said and why another person might have a problem with it.

Let me give you a great example. I found this photo in my Twitter stream this afternoon:

I've lived in New York my whole life. I saw this picture and before I read the caption, realized it was in response to the proposed legislation regarding which bathroom facilities transgender individuals use, and thought -- due to that big black hat -- "this is a good ol' boy saying it's not okay for men to be in the women's bathroom.

And yeah, that's exactly what he was saying, but not in the way I interpreted it. I approach things with my own biases: hat = Conservative; Conservative = transphobic; man = possibly violent toward women, more potentially violent toward transwomen. 

My viewpoint is that of a woman. One who grew up with a really wide variety of people in my life in an era in which we "weren't supposed" to talk about things like sexuallity or gender or race. 

MY REACTION WAS PROBLEMATIC. I made assumptions. Probably not the assumptions Mr. Hughes intended when he took the photo, but assumptions all the same. Based on my beliefs and point of view.

Where are the problems, you're probably wondering. I'm a woman. I erred on the side of women, right? 

No. I responded with a knee-jerk cis-normative viewpoint. A knee-jerk political viewpoint. A knee-jerk regional viewpoint. All bad. All wrong. 

The thing is, I'm self-aware enough that I knew immediately what I'd done. I had to sit and think about it. Now I'm writing about it so I can process it further. So I can think about how I react to things, because even when I react to things in a way that tends to favor a known marginalized segment of society, it might be the WRONG segment. As it was here. 

So why am I blatting on about this? Because we need to acknowledge that we are ALL problematic. All of us. In some way. We all stereotype. We all forget to be inclusive at times. We all revert to instinctive biases without thinking.

And it's not enough to say "Yeah, I don't know any Conservatives/trans people/black people/women/red pandas" and keep doing things and saying things and creating things. It has to be a concerted effort to DO and not say. To FIX and not proselytize. To acknowledge and take actual steps. No one gets a pass for helping in one place but not another.

So no, it's not enough to use hashtags on social media and not follow through in execution. 

I'm problematic. And next time, I'll read more closely and think more inclusively. And then maybe I won't have to confess my inner prejudice about men in cowboy hats in a public way.

Who's going to pay for these words?

I cringe as I write this, because I'm having to stop typing every few words to knock on my wood shelves. 

If you look at my LinkedIn profile, you'll see something pretty horrifying: every company for which I've had a regular writing and/or editing job or gig in the past is no more. 

I ghostwrote for a celebrity gossip site. For a couple of shopping sites. For a how-to site. I wrote for several tech blogs. 

And behind me is nothing. A blank space of shuttered sites, of clips grabbed hastily before online archives were deleted, or worse, from other sites that scraped the content when I couldn't grab my clips in time.

I feel like I'm the curse; hire me and kill your site, but in talking with another friend who's been through these ebbs and flows in tech, she noted: "I bet a lot of writers have CVs like that."

I've been freelancing a long time now: 15 years. And if I could find a full-time job in an office at this point, I probably would, and never look back.

There is an expectation that content should be free, or at least close to free. We want 99-cent books and free online news and yet no one seems to be willing to pay for it.  Content farms and the dirt-cheap e-book writers made money in the short term, but failed to look at what it would do to an industry. Want to know why that book you're reading has a whole bunch of typos? Because there are people with little to no experience editing for pennies -- literally. 

We pay CEOs millions of dollars. We think nothing of spending $8 on a cup of coffee. We see movies for $15 a ticket where the stars make millions as well. But when it comes to words -- those things that scroll across your phone or on your Kindle or in that magazine you pick up and leaf through at the WiFi-less dinosaur of a doctor's office, where do you expect them to come from if no one is willing to pay?

We utter words like "sea change" and "keeping up with the marketplace" but the reality is -- if people and companies can no longer make money from creating those words you're reading, will the written word eventually die out? Will all movies and television become reality programming? Will writers cease to exist as we know them? Will books and blogs and greeting cards disappear?

How much are you willing to pay to be able to keep reading?

And they broke the mold. Farewell, GigaOM.

I usually talk about book things and publishing things on my blog. I don't talk about most of my past gigs, because that's not where my head's at these days. 

Before I moved into closer-to-full-time freelance editing, I was a tech journalist, and then a copy editor for tech sites. As a former programmer, it was a logical fit for me; I understood the stuff I was writing about.

Tech journalism is an exhausting job. I often worked 16+ hour days, because the news never stops, and trying to be first, be best is the name of the game. 

I applied at GigaOM no fewer than three times, and just when I was about to go bankrupt, landed there as a copy editor.

It was the happiest I've ever been getting a job.

There isn't a single person out there covering tech who doesn't owe something to Om Malik. He taught every single one of us what it means to do quality journalism, to stop and think without knee-jerk reactions to news, to be classy even when everything tells you to come out swinging.

I don't think there's a single one of us alumni who view today's news with anything less than utter heartbreak. This is the one gig where I still watch former colleagues to see what they're doing. The one site I routinely went to for balanced and intelligent coverage of news when -- if it had been any other place where my job was eliminated -- I'd probably have pretended it no longer existed.

It was the last tech job I ever had. I sent in half-hearted applications to a few places when my job there was eliminated, but eventually shifted gears. I was tired. My kids were tired. And I couldn't see any point in working somewhere else when I'd already worked for the best. 

My first and last published erotica is...

... in THE BIG BOOK OF DOMINATION, edited by the fabulous D.L. King.

I'd never planned on blogging about this story, or this book, or the fact that I wrote erotica at all. Those of you who know me know that I've had about six years too many of dealing with certain individuals invading my privacy online. At times, it's made me maybe MORE out there than a lot of people are, but I still try to protect my kids as much as I can.

So I created Alison, and she had a decent run. She made it nearly down to the wire in Alison Tyler's Smut Marathon last year. She had a story published in probably the prettiest erotica anthology ever put out there: GEEK LOVE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF FULL FRONTAL NERDITY.

Not going to lie; Alison had some plans. She sold the story for this book to D.L. King, and there were other stories in the works.

Only then, a very classy internet troll decided to reveal my real name, and that was the end of Alison.

The story in this book is a couple that has been in my head a long time. I tried them once as fan fiction, shoehorning them into someone else's universe, but they never did fit. A few of you might recognize the hallway in the beginning of the story; now that I've revealed who I am, I can tell you that yes, it is the basement hallway that connects Kilbourn Hall to the main building at the Eastman School of Music. I traveled that hallway on many a Saturday morning with my kids, and always wondered what sort of antics could be gotten up to in those practice rooms.

This is a pretty tame story by my standards, but the book as a whole offers something for everyone.

I'm so glad that my first and last foray into the pro world was with D.L.; we have a mutual friend who'd been trying to get us hooked up for years, and this was a pleasant coincidence. I hope you enjoy "Sight Reading" and the rest of the fantastic writing by my fellow authors. It's been a huge fangirl moment for me to appear in a book with some of these names, and my short journey into the erotica world will always be a pleasant memory.

You can buy THE BIG BOOK OF DOMINATION at these and other fine retailers: 

Amazon Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Big-Book-Domination-Erotic-Fantasies-ebook/dp/B00NE6QWUE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420758856&sr=1-1&keywords=big+book+of+domination
Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-big-book-of-domination-d-l-king/1118762468?ean=9781627780681
Powell's:  

And check out the rest of the stops on the blog tour for the book and hear more from the amazing authors:

1/17  D. L. King  http://dlkingerotica.blogspot.com
1/19  Valerie Alexander  http://www.valeriealexander.org
1/21  David Wraith  http://www.davidwraith.com
1/23  Giselle Renarde  http://donutsdesires.blogspot.com
1/25  Amanda Earl  http://amandaearl.blogspot.ca
1/27  Evan Mora  http://dlkingerotica.blogspot.com
1/28  Angela Sargenti  http://www.angiesargenti.blogspot.com
1/30  Athena Marie  http://www.athenamarie.net
2/1   Anna Mitcham  http://dlkingerotica.blogspot.com
2/3   Rachel Kramer Bussel  http://lustylady.blogspot.com
2/5   Zoe Amos  http://www.lesbian.com/blogs
2/7   Olivia Summersweet  http://www.oliviasummersweet.wordpress.com
2/9   Katya Harris  http://dlkingerotica.blogspot.com
2/11  Alison Winchester  http://www.fourlittlebees.com/news
2/12  Malin James  Http://malinjames.com
2/14  Laura Antoniou  http://lantoniou.com

Now for the good stuff: Want to win the only signed copy of anything erotica I'll ever do? Enter below. NOTE: Signed paperback available only for U.S. residents, but if you're out of the U.S. and want to enter (and you win), I'll send you the ebook version on the platform of your choice; just LMK in the comments.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

And we were doing SO WELL in the ongoing author/reviewer peace talks!

Ugh. There is nothing like having an absolutely shitty day in which your doctor reminds you that you're fat (YES, I KNOW THIS) and your kid's teacher craps all over them and then you log into Twitter to ask friends to turn their cats into tacos and blow off some steam when this:

Oh, man. So much to say here, so little room on this page.

So from an author and friends-of-authors perspective: yeah, some of this drives people insane. Like, why one star a book you're never going to read other than to pick a fight? And why bitch about a book that's outside your interests or squick level in the first place? We don't get it. No one gets it, really. Except the people who do it. And that's really the point. I'm sure no one would understand my spreadsheet things but I don't post them either, so there's that.

But from a reviewer standpoint? Dude, just... [This is where I make my deep WHYYYYY sigh noise]

Some of this is WHAT GOOD REVIEWERS DO. I review up to 12 books a month. Sometimes even more than that. And when I'm reviewing a book, I'm not reviewing it for me. If I was, why bother? I could write in my diary. I GET PAID MONEY TO TELL PEOPLE WHAT I THINK OF BOOKS. That means I have to think of what I like and what my mom likes and what Jane Conservative in Wichita who is horrified when they add a new vitamin to Wonder Bread likes. So when I'm doing that, I'm trying to review it from all angles. There are some things I like in books: "OMG, this blood play scene in this menage erotica was SO HOT!" But my mom is going to look askance, and I bet Jane Conservative is going to schedule a book burning. So yes, "I really liked the blood play, but SOME READERS MAY NOT."

Also, when I'm talking about relatability of characters, I'm trying to put myself in the place of readers. I don't review a whole lot of YA books, but you'd better believe when I do, I've let my actual teens have a shot at the book as well. I'm trying to read from THEIR perspective as well as that of adults who enjoy YA. If the parents are more relatable to me? I've found odds are the teen character isn't coming across well, and it's possible that's because an adult author didn't quite come across the way they intended. Or the ending might be one that makes adult YA readers happy, but puts my teens (and or their friends) off because they'd want a different ending.

Reviews are going to be subjective. It's the nature of the game, and I can't think of a single school of thought in critical theory that allows for a 100% purely objective review, because it's impossible to review in a vacuum. I've read books friends have loved that borrowed so much from books before them that they felt piecemealed together, but the other person hadn't read those other books. I've read books I thought were absolute trash when compared to others in the genre that readers loved precisely because they were new to the genre.

That happens. 

And while stuff like this can be lighthearted and funny and something I think all authors totally identify with, at the same time, it isn't going to feel like that to a lot of readers and reviewers, who spend time and often money of their own to try to read those books critically. I can't say it enough times... I want NOTHING MORE when I open each new book to give it the top rating and sing its praises from the mountaintop. There is NOTHING that thrills me more than seeing a book I reviewed start picking up awards and having friends read it and love it as well. That is the ONLY reason I review, because I'm never going to get rich doing it.

And no one is perfect. NO ONE. We all, in our individual corners, snark about the bad parts of the job. it's stressful and it's frustrating and we all lose it at times with the crap that comes along with it. When you've read the 16th iteration of an author trying to capitalize on the success of a certain book and it's so cliched and copycat that you feel like it's someone writing Mad Libs of the popular book, you want to pull your hair out as a reviewer. And when you're an author seeing yet another 1-star review (My faves is on Amazon... when it's not a verified purchase) and you're fairly sure they didn't even read the book, and if they did, it's because they grabbed it off a torrent site, you want to burn down the world.

But that's maybe the time you highlight a particularly cliched section of a page and strip the identifying book info and snicker to your friends. Or when you screencap the reviewer's favorite books (really? they gave every single one of those dinosaur porn books five stars?) and laugh about it to your fellow authors.

But the second that gets posted on social media, everyone is compelled to take sides. it costs authors good will with readers, and reviewers good will with authors. I mean, shoot... I'm banned from a multi-NYT bestselling author's Facebook page because she got mad I was trying to point her to relevant information. She called reviewers a whole slew of names. She lost me as a lifelong fan and I'm sure I'm not the only one. 

As a reviewer? I laugh it off. As an author? Odds are I laugh even harder, because I know some of those reviewers are people who probably weren't the right audience, and bitching me out for not ending something the way "this other book here did" doesn't make any sense. I didn't want to write that book. That book is already there. And maybe if one reviewer had said "Hey, I liked this, but if you liked this other thing, you probably won't" that person could have saved their torrent bandwidth and six hours reading it and found something else.

In which you, as an author, are essentially a sweatshop worker

I'm not sure which I should be more horrified by: this article or the comments that follow it.

It's click-bait, pure and simple, so please bear that in mind.

In this, a "book reviewer" (and sorry, but that's getting air quotes from me) argues that books are a buyer's market and only big names are going to get a living wage. Because they're big names.

Gee, where have we heard this before? Oh wait... the part where 1% of the populations has the majority of the world's wealth. You don't DESERVE to be paid for your book.

Where the author gets it all wrong is how this happened. It had to do with two self-published authors who led the pack in devaluing their own books in order to make money on a slim margin. Amanda Hocking and J.A. Konrath got rich with this, and left the rest of the industry to the "well, why would I pay more?" consumers.

By this argument, Starbucks shouldn't be more than 99 cents, because I can get coffee anywhere, including in my own house! And for WAY less than what their coffee costs, so how dare they? I have tons of other places I can go for less money.

Worse still is the commenters, some who work in publishing, SOME WHO ARE LIBRARIANS, decrying the full-price book.

I wish you could see my face.

According to the author of this article, and the commenters, there is no difference between the shoddily made, won't-last-long, probably lead-contaminated crap you buy at the dollar store and a book that has been professionally edited. Because only a few select authors deserve to make money.

By that mentality, Big Five publishers should skip on the editing--I mean, why bother when there are thousands of books out there for free with no editing, and apparently readers would rather a book be free than be good?

Self-publishers? Forget bothering with editing or cover design, because apparently "reviewers" like this one just don't care! It's not important, so long as you understand it's a buyers' market!

The overall impact on publishing, and on book quality, is completely lost on this blogger and the commenters. And that's a shame, when you can't see the worth of a professionally put-together book. 

Then again, with the overabundance of book blogs and review sites out there, you have your choice of those as well, especially when you're sending those ARCs for your overpriced books. I know where my reading will go, and from the looks of it, Book Riot is okay with telling authors they are worth the same as waxy chocolate and super-thin dish towels.

On being a book reviewer

It's insane that I'm writing this post.

Insane because I have 12 books to review this month and while it's doable, you need to understand that as a book reviewer, you often don't get a full month to read that many books. My deadline is the 29th, and I just received some books on the 20th. 

But a couple of things have bothered me a bit that I've seen on Twitter. One was a person expressing a wish to "have a career" as a book reviewer. The other was an author or two complaining about the books they were assigned to read and judge for RWA's RITA awards.

Both are things I want to address.

The first is being a "career" reviewer. I don't think there is such a thing.

Oh sure, there are some book people at major publications, but they also do reporting and contribute in other ways. And to be honest, if most of you knew how much even pro reviewers are paid? You'd sob in empathy. 

No one is getting rich reviewing books.

The second is the kvetching I've seen about not getting books in a category or having too many books to read for the RITAs.

Guess what, authors? We get that every month. And most of us don't get the option of putting a book down if we hate it. We have to keep going.

There's only one reason anyone should even contemplate becoming a book reviewer, whether it's professionally or as a hobby: because you love books and you want to share them with people.

Part of that responsibility means you keep going when a book sucks in case it improves. Part of it means you read books you might not normally pick up at the bookstore. And part of that means it's a pretty thankless task most of the time.

There are months I'm literally in tears looking at the pile of ARCs that arrive. Moments when I hate my life because I don't have enough room to cover a promising-looking debut novel. Times when a book is so terrible I despair that humanity as a whole is falling into the abyss, especially when people claim to love it.

But then there are those moments when you find an amazing book that most people will probably overlook and realize you were given the opportunity to tell other people about it. And hopefully help sell more copies. And hopefully get more publishers to take risks on those kinds of books. 

It's like kissing frogs to find a prince: You have to weed through an awful lot of frogs to find the really good one. And if you aren't going to be happy with THAT as your top priority in reviewing (or entering your book in a contest for awards)? Then don't do it. Because that's really the only great thing about this gig.

First lines and the biggest book lies - why reviewing can be frustrating

I have some serious question for all of you:

What makes you buy a book? The cover? The brief blurb of a synopsis? The blurbs by other authors?If you buy dead-tree books or even electronic books, how much of a sample do you read? A line? A paragraph? A page? The entire e-book sample?How much of a book do you read before you quit reading, if you are one of those people who can DNF (do-not-finish) a book? 10%? 20% 50%? How long do you give a book to get better?What is the first line of the book you're currently reading? No, don't flip back there. Tell me now. From memory. What is it? 

I ask because -- in my attempt at being more positive in 2015, I did become immensely frustrated with something I've seen on Twitter for years: publishing professionals doling out "advice" in pithy, 140-characters-or-less doses.

The problem with much of this advice is that the format of Twitter limits the advice to things that are often untrue when read at face value. And are discouraging.

First, let me reiterate: I self-publish because a) I write what I want and b) I am a walking, talking, tweeting PR disaster waiting to happen. I own that. And I'd rather be poor and self-publishing than rich and toeing a corporate line. I think. Maybe I could give being rich a whirl before I decide? ;)

My frustration is in being a reader and a reviewer and a friend to a lot of authors. Some published, some not. The best writers I know are the ones plagued with self-doubt, who think they suck, who think no one wants to read their books. The worst I've ever met? Are delusional, care nothing for advice, and have no desire to get better.

Guess which ones are the ones who press on until they find representation and a publishing contract? 

There is a huge difference between being an agent or acquiring editor and a reviewer. Agents (and even some editors) are allowed to make a decision based on a sample: a first line, a first page, a first chapter.

Now imagine reviewers went around reviewing books like that. Can you imagine the outrage? My review of Harry Potter would have been something along the lines of:

This take on Oliver Twist plays out strangely in its modern setting. This reviewer finds it unbelievable that no teacher or other adult would have reported the Dursleys for abuse and neglect. A miss.

There are books I've been sure would be amazing that conk out at the end, and ones I wasn't sure of that became page-turners about 1/3 of the way in. Some stories need more world building, and I get bored easily when we don't start out with a lot of action.

Same with those first lines everyone says are so important. Let's face it; it's a rare person who's writing the next TALE OF TWO CITIES here. I can honestly remember ONE first line in the past ten years: "The circus arrives without warning."

Now THAT'S a first line. 

But the reality is that there are a lot of really unimpressive first lines out there. Let's take FIFTY SHADES, for example. The first line?

"I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror."

Holy carp. It's boring. It's useless. It takes the "in the mirror" trope and turns it into a cliche. Name me one agent who would have signed that out of the slush pile.

Zero.

Now, what does that tell you? 

I have a friend who refers to that type of advice that's well meant but useless as "assvice."

FIFTY SHADES is one of the best-selling books of all time and it violated every single one of those pithy tweets about abusing tropes and writing well and "writing another book," didn't it?

Make those tropes your own. Don't worry about writing a first sentence people are going to want to tattoo on themselves. And actually, don't worry about what all those pros say online when it comes to things like tropes. Think about every one of those books that breaks every single one of those rules and sells well. Write well. Be gracious. Be unique.

Write a good story. Make it emotional. And please, make it unique. We reviewers will be eternally grateful. 

Diverse Books in 2015

The good people over at We Need Diverse Books have asked people to make a pledge to reading diverse books in 2015.

Problem for me is that I'm a book reviewer, and I never know how many diverse books I'm going to be able to get my grubby little mitts on during the year, nor how much time I'll have for pleasure reading.

So today I spent a couple of hours going over my TBR and Already Read piles on Goodreads, and I created a bookshelf I'm just calling "diverse." I've marked the books I have to read yet as well as the ones I've already read. For those, they've already been reviewed. Some I thought were great; others not so much.

I had to make some really tough choices on what I was going to include on there. I read a lot of romance and erotica as part of the whole "book reviewer" thing, but I included no romance or erotica that wasn't written by a LGBTQ+ author. Tough call, but I was trying to separate diverse from possible fetishization even though some of the books I've read are PHENOMENAL, don't even come close to fetishizing, and might be even better than some by queer authors. 

When it comes to diverse characters, I went with "has to be a main character the plot can't live without." It's why you'll see some books you KNOW have diverse characters (for example, James Dashner's Maze Runner series) not on there. 

A few non-fiction books appear as well, and those are books I think everyone should read. 

Lastly, I did not even attempt to venture into the area of the non-neurotypical when it comes to diversity. I'd like to find some really great books that specify what they're about, but I found some books others loved to be caricature and borderline offensive, so I just ignored this category altogether.

It's an imperfect shelf, but I'm trying, and I do pledge to continue reviewing all the diverse books I can in 2015. For a couple of books that fall under this category coming out this month, check out my "Best Things I Read This Year" post. 

The world's biggest THE NIGHT CIRCUS fangirl

A few years back, I was looking at the "new posts" tab in the forums at Absolute Write when I saw a post from an author whose child had a perforated eardrum. Being my usual self, I wandered into the thread and shared my experience with Sassa, who has a permanent perforation at this point we'll need to fix at some point.

I had no idea when I wandered into that room I'd end up making friends with some pretty cool authors. A lot of them were already published: Lisa Brackman, Alice Loweecey, and Cindy Pon (whose post was the one I answered) among them. Others have been published since: S.A. Meade, Tracey Martin,  Rick Campbell, Maryn Blackburn, and Lyndee Walker, to name a few. Some you'll see book from this year, like Amy Bai and Bryn Greenwood.

And there was one author who was already getting a little scarce when I started posting in that thread on a regular basis. She was gearing up for her upcoming release, and didn't have a lot of time for posting. We knew her as Evie, but even before you all knew her name, I think I was the biggest fan of the mere IDEA of her book.

I have threatened to sit on people who have not read her book (offer still stands). I took the day off on its release day so I could read it straight through after downloading it at midnight. I coerced a coworker to get me a copy in the UK and send it to me so I could one with the UK cover. 

You could say I'm a little bit obsessed.

The unfortunate person who gets to listen to the bulk of my obsession is author Clovia Shaw, who is also good friends with Evie. So when I went to the PO this morning and found this in my box:

You can imagine the scene I created in the post office. Others might have been secondhand embarrassed for me. 

Of course, I open the box, and this is what's inside:

I may have had a little mini-breakdown. There's a note from Erin. There's a tarot card of the clock. There are enough tickets (designed by Clovia) to get me and the kids into the actual Night Circus when it comes to down (ssshhh.... let me believe). There's a business card for Chandresh. And a bookmark. And when I looked underneath...

I found this.

I'm a book reviewer. I count several NYT bestsellers among my closest friends. But some authors will forever leave me a babbling fangirl, and Erin Morgenstern is one of them. I keep opening the box and unpacking things and touching them and putting them away. 

So this is a very public (and very shrieky) thank you to both Erin Morgenstern and Clovia Shaw for making my year. It's only a day and a half into 2015, and it's already AMAZING.