A ramble and two ranty rants for the price of one…

Yesterday was mostly a lost cause, and involved a nearly day-long Twitter rant that probably ended another two friendships. One was my fault, as I called someone a bitch, and when they asked for an apology, I said "I'd rather add a shallow to my original statement and be done with you." They'd rubbed me the wrong way by implying that SOPA and PIPA happened because of the minority of people who were pirates. So the corporations are justified for dealing with a minor problem that THEY STARTED (Go back and look at the release of dual tape decks. Yes, their paranoia came before there was an internet, much less internet piracy.) by punishing their entire audience of legitimate customers with legal sanctions? If you can really believe that, then yeah, you're shallow. But I probably did go too far with the bitch comment.

Anywho, this rant led to an editor of a small press lecturing me like I was advocating stealing books and movies just to stick it to Teh Man. Even after I clarified that my only download in all of last year was Teen Wolf, she still went on and on about her small press and how her authors needed my money. So I blocked her, and I'm never going to look at her press, much less risk taking one of her author's books. I guess she won that argument.

But somewhere near the end of said rant, I'd commented that if people were pirating my stuff, even one book, I'd be happy because someone wanted me. About an hour later, I finally smoked enough pot to calm down, and I joked, "I've searched every torrent site, and no one is pirating me. Goddamn it." This inspired someone else to actually look, and it seems that The Campaign Trilogy is in fact being pirated on torrent sites. None of my newer titles from 2009-2010 shows up, but my first completed series is on a few sites.

This pleases me more than you might expect, because even if it's only one book series, people are curious enough about the plot to want to crib the books. I could choose to bitch how my prices are dirt cheap and that these people are cheapskates. Actually, these people are cheapskates either way, but I'm choosing to be happy about this because someone at least wants my books enough to look for them.

Thing is, it's the performance of later books that influenced my decision to quit, and I'm still not seeing any interest in those books. Since then, I've had all kinds of desperate thoughts as my writing addiction seeks ways to make me feel empowered again. Maybe if I put up a poll and let you guys make decisions, you'll suddenly speak up. Maybe if I write a new story about ___, it will convince you to be a fan and help with promotions. Maybe if I revise one of the older stories, it will have more success on the second release.

But I've heard all of this before, and none of it is true. I can put up a poll, and one person will click it. I can write a new book, and it will get one or two sales in the first week, and then it will go away and sit quietly with the rest of my flops. I can revise a book and re-release it, but sales won't improve even if the revision includes a better cover.

And yet, I don't know what else I want to do. Don't think I haven't spent a lot of time obsessing over alternatives, but all of them require a large initial investment that I don't have. And no, don't point to my new gaming hobby as the problem. One of my plans involved buying 3D Studio Max licenses for all of my PCs to make a render farm for a cartoon project. Total cost to start? Roughly $10,000. By comparison, getting into gaming cost me just under $1,000 for the TV and console. (Roughly my whole earnings for the summer editing job, minus the money I gave to hubby. (Which was half after taxes) Which was 40% of my original fee.))) My first year costs for writing were $1,500. My costs for hiring a cover band and studio time are almost as high as they are for the 3D plan, so yeah, my other creative alternatives are exponentially more expensive than my current hobbies.

With the gaming hobby, I never expect it to pay back my investment, and that's the problem I got into with my writing. To be fair, I had a lot of writers telling me how good my stuff was, and how original and different my books were. Somewhere along the way, I started to believe them, and to think that maybe my stuff was worth something more than free. Low sales have shaken my faith, and being attacked by friends pushed me right out of the advertising side of things too.

So, what am I doing? I don't know. Part of me still wants to write and release books on Smashwords, even if no one knows they exist. It may even be better this way, because then I can't be accused of promoting filth. I'm not promoting anything. I'm just a little loser hack sitting in my play sandbox, quietly cranking out obscure stories that nobody wants.

I want to talk about someone else's book for a bit. I'm reading Maurice Broaddus' King's Justice. This is book two in a King Arthur reboot series set in the ghetto of Indianapolis. I started to add it to my currently-reading list on Goodreads, and I noticed how many white women gave the book low stars for being "too ghetto." Say what? Cracker bitch did not just reveal what a racist she was, did she? Actually, a LOT of white women used the term "too ghetto" when talking about a book with nearly an all black cast, in a black inner city neighborhood, and talking mostly about inner city problems in much the same way that the original King Arthur's knights spoke of unrest in their land. But apparently, these white chicks still expected this book to talk white because they thought this was urban romance, not urban fantasy.

This pisses me off not for the open racism, but for the readers basically saying, "This isn't the book I thought it would be, so it isn't very good." The book may actually be the most challenging thing your privileged white ass will read all year, but instead of setting aside your sheltered views, you kept your white blinders on and never set aside your views to read the book honestly. If you are white and your main complaint is "I was put off by the blackness," congratulations, you're a racist. From here you can own your shit and try to be a better person, or you can attack me, the transsexual bisexual, for pointing out your prejudice. Maybe you can even make an attack convincing enough to let you go back to believing your own hype when you say, "I'm a good person." But that won't make it any more true than if you stood in your garage and said, "I'm a car."

A lot of readers are like this, incapable of actual critical thinking or thinking outside their own clique or tribe. You just read stuff that agrees with your views and move on. If questioned about it later, you'll be like "I liked it." But when actual problems or flaws are pointed out, you go, "Oh, I didn't notice. I was just zoning on the words." You don't look for symbolism or allegory. You don't read between the lines, and if you do, you read a message that isn't there. You're piss poor readers, and you're terrible fans.

You praise whites-only shite that elevates colonialist values and racial superiority as false morality, and yet, you claim to support diversity. Please, crackers. Supporting all white straight writers from mainstream publishers is not supporting diversity. That's supporting Teh Man. If you read a book set in a ghetto and complain that it's too ghetto, then you aren't supporting diversity. You're supporting Teh Man. And if you're getting hot under the collar and want to boycott all my titles now, you're actively contemplating oppressing actual diversity in favor of supporting Teh Man.

And, because I love pissing you off, I'll close this rant by pointing out that I'm a bisexual transsexual. If I were like most white writers, all my characters would be white and queer, and my idea of diversity would be writing a white man instead of a woman for a change of pace. In fact, I've written about a straight Hispanic teenage boy and a straight Hispanic man, a straight black man, a gay white man who has a relationship with a bisexual black man, and a bisexual Eurasian (biracial, half Italian and half Chinese) who joins a romantic transgender polyamory. This among the straight white men and women. I'm all kinds of diverse, bitches.

But then that's not surprising. Being an outsider to every social group, I'm not so stuck in my POV that I'm unwilling to swap views as a creative exercise. More surprising would be finding a white male writer who don't have 30 white main characters and maybe one black dude or Asian chick as a token book when people complained about their lack of diversity. But despite searching for a few years, I've yet to be surprised in this way.

Okay, I lied. I need to add one more rant. I wrote a book about a gay man who preached tolerance for all people, and no one accused me of supporting the gay agenda. I wrote a book about a teen scam artist Hispanic who smokes, but no one accused me of promoting negative stereotypes about people of color. I wrote a book about a black man working in an ethical porn house and no one accused me of endorsing porn as a career, or of stereotyping black men. But wouldn't you know it? I wrote a book about a little girl getting molested, and I got accused of promoting what happened in the book. That's not what's ironic. What's ironic is, the people attacking me are from a community of writing whose main complaint is "Don't make assumptions about what kind of people we are based on what we write." Yes, they don't want anyone to judge them for what they write, but they still reserve the right to be judgmental to others. Hypocritical much?

And if you think it's just me, go into any horror board and casually drop "Oh, you read vampires too? I LOVED Twilight." Oops, look at all the hypocrites passing judgment now. And note how many horror people suddenly posses spiritual morality, and "just don't want girls reading the wrong kind of fiction." Oh, so they shouldn't read your filth either, right? Yeah, sputter for a new excuse. You're still a hypocrite.

"Oh Zoe, are you ever going to let this go?" Yep, right after certain people admit, publicly, that they were hypocrites for using an inaccurate hateful slur and several other personal attacks against me for the contents of one book, even though they co-published a book with a book "promoting" much worse values. They may never admit that they pulled some male privilege bullshit by belittling me in public while we were arguing about a completely unrelated topic, but no, I will not let this go and walk away.

When Scott called me a bitch out of nowhere at TODP, I cried three days and closed all my forum accounts. I stopped talking to anyone, and I stopped trying to make points about civil rights in forums. Why bother talking when there's always a man to tell you "Bitch, shut up cause you're up in my man space"?

But the dude I'm waiting for an apology from attacked me on Twitter, while we were talking about trans-gay politics. He is a straight man who jumped in to assist his gay friend, and in the process, he accused me of "abandoning my people." When I warned him that he was going too far and risking our friendship, he DIDN'T EVEN WAIT TEN SECONDS before adding, "And you're a pedophile."

This coming from a man who sold a book in which a girl is seduced by her father, in which a homeless man eats a dumpster baby, in which a white supremacist serial killer murders ethnic kids while molesting a white girl and forcing her to watch him torture and kill other kids. This is the man who published under the label "Publishers of whatever the fuck we want," coming to me and calling me names in public because he couldn't just back down in a debate and admit that he, a straight man, had no business mediating in a discussion of gay and trans lobbies. Instead, he took his straight white male privilege and stabbed a friend of several years with a verbal attack. Being "right" was more important than the discussion itself, more important than our friendship.

That's a major fucking hypocrite. I'll let Scott go, and I'll let go of my anger at anyone else, forgive everything else that happened as a result of this "row." But I'm not going to forgive a personal attack from someone who had written to me privately that it was okay to trust him, only to have him violate my trust in the most ugly and abusive way possible.

So yeah, anybody else knowing who this is, please, stay silent about their behavior and remain embarrassed by my outlandish behavior. Don't call out the abuser in your midst and make him apologize. But the fight is public information. You can still look it up and see how he brings the attack out of nowhere if you think I'm making this up. If you know he attacked me out of nowhere with a tangent and choose to say nothing, you're comfortable with oppression. Period. And no, maybe "I don't know you." But I know that a lot of you talk shit about supporting diversity and respecting tolerance.

Well you're in the corner of the straight white guy who attacked me, and you can't be bothered to at least tell him, "Uh, actually, that was kind of a douche move, man. Would an apology kill you?" I'm calling you on this, and if you still can't be bothered to speak up, then fuck you, you ain't "good people." You're a person of privilege who let a privileged attack happen and chose to support the white guy's right to be an abuser. Again. Which is par for the course for your community, sheltering abusers and then lamenting "Why are all the women leaving? We're such nice guys." No, you aren't. You're not even in the same zip code as nice.

Please, take your time guys. After all, your silence doesn't make you look like major hypocrites.