Okay, this is seriously cool. 
A guy named Jay Silver invented a computer interface called MaKey MaKey that you can hook up to just about anything with alligator clamps, and the thing(s) will act like a mouse or a keyboard. Bananas, playdoh, buckets of water — it’s wild. Some people are just fooling around with it for fun, but others are using it to create custom interfaces to work for someone with a disability. Check it out:
Angie
Thanks to Tobias Buckell for linking to Chuck Wendig’s post, 25 Ways to Be a Happy Writer, or at Least Happier. One of my favorite bits:
20. See Failure as an Instruction Manual
Failure is illuminating. It reveals every broken board beneath our feet, every crack in the wall, every pothole in the road. Do not shun failure. High-five it. Hug it. Engage in lusty pawing with it. Failure means you’re doing. Everybody fails before they succeed. Failure is how we learn. Failure is part of the grand tradition of figuring out how to be awesome.
Totally correct. About anything, really, but in particular anything having to do with the creative arts. It takes a lot of practice, a lot of experimentation, a lot of try-fail-try-fail-try-fail, and did I mention a lot of practice? to make it up the Creative Arts Mountain. If you can’t learn from your mistakes, you’ll never make it to the top of that mountain, and if you’re afraid of making mistakes, you’ll be so paralyzed you’ll never make it past the foothills.
Read them all, noting that most of them are delightfully profane.
Angie
This guy needs to get a huge trophy for being a completely fantastic dad.
He runs a triathlon every year and brings his daughter with him. She’s thirteen and has cerebral palsy. She’s not watching — she’s in the race with him. Massive awesome, click through for a pic.
Angie
I hope everyone had a great holiday and is humming along back at work. I’m doing well — could hardly be worse after 2012 — and have a couple of major goals for this year. One is to write at least 250K words of fiction. I’ve done that before, should be able to do it again, and have joined a challenge through one of the mailing lists I’m on to help encourage me along the way. On track so far, yay.
The other is to get into indie publishing this year. I have backlist stories that are sitting on my hard drive, unavailable to anyone who doesn’t hang out on pirate sites, and I need to get those back up and available. I also have stories that’ve collected multiple positive rejections — the kind that say, essentially, “Good story, well written, not buying it, enjoyed reading it, looking forward to reading more from you.” If you have to be rejected, that’s the kind of rejection you want to get, but it’s still a rejection. I have some stories that’ve gotten multiples of these, from multiple professional editors. I figure any story that multiple pro editors thought was well written and enjoyed reading would probably be enjoyed by readers too, so I’m going to start putting them up myself.
To help me along with that, I downloaded and printed out the Smashwords formatting guide, figuring that was a good place to start. Then, in a great piece of serendipity, I heard that Adobe is giving away free copies of a lot of its older-version software, stuff that it’s been using phone-home DRM on for a number of years while newer versions have been released. It’s no longer cost effective for them to maintain the validation servers for their older packages, so rather than cut off all the customers who’ve handed them money for their software packages, they’ve released free, non-DRMed copies of this stuff, and it’s open for anyone to grab. The list includes both Photoshop and InDesign, and I’ve grabbed copies of both. If you’re thinking of indie pubbing, or if you’re doing it already but have been saving up for expensive high-level software, I highly suggest you grab it too: Free Adobe Software. I have no idea how long this is going to last, so get it while you can.
And major props to Adobe for being cool about this. Plenty of companies in the same position just say, “Too bad, buy the new version, here’s a percent-off coupon,” and leave it at that. Making sure that the honest customers who’ve handed them money in the past can keep using the software they’ve paid for is a class act. Letting other people (like me) try these older versions for free is also very classy, and might make them some money in the future, if I like these tools and decide to upgrade.
Angie
Fantasy writer Jim Hines did a blog post asking fans to donate to the Aicardi Syndrome Foundation, an organization that raises research money for Aicardi Syndrome, a disease that affects 1 in 105,000 little girls. He says, “It causes brain malformation, visual problems, seizures, developmental delays, and other medical complications. Most research puts the life expectancy for people with Aicardi between 8 and 16 years.”
The Aicardi Syndrome Foundation is the only source of funding for research into this disease. It also helps families with daughters who’ve been hit with it. It’s a great cause, and I urge everyone reading this to throw some money their way, even if it’s only a few dollars.
If you do donate, and report your donations to Jim, he’ll do another set of book cover poses at each milestone. If you haven’t seen this post before, check it out — Jim demonstrates the ridiculousness of the positions SF/Fantasy/Paranormal female characters are twisted into on book covers by attempting to get into those positions himself, and having his picture taken. It’s hilarious, and also underscores some serious shenanigans on the part of the big publishers, ’cause seriously dudes, this is stupid, and it’s all based on the idea that the men who buy these books just want to see boobs and butts, and the women who buy these books will go along with stupidly impossible objectification on the covers, because women will sigh and shrug and buy whatever makes the men happy. [cough]
[If you're still going, "Wait, what--?" then check out this pic, parodying one of the Avengers movie posters. In the real poster, Black Widow is doing the boobs-and-butt pose, but all the men are in normal, tough-guy-ready-for-combat poses. This artist turned it around, giving Black Widow a normal pose and putting Captain America into the standard female boobs-and-butt pose. The other men are just displaying their butts. It's awesome. 
]
And as if that weren’t enough, Jim is challenging John Scalzi to a pose-off at two of the milestone points, $1000 and $2500. I really hope they make the $2500, because the pose-off should be great.
Aside from which, Aicardi Syndrome sucks, and deserves support. Please help out.
Angie
This is a great collection of photos on Buzzfeed of people in wheelchairs in costumnes — Halloween costumes or SF convention costumes or Renn Faire costumes or whatever all — and they’re pretty amazing. Check them out!
Angie
You know, if anyone wrote a book about this girl, it’d be labelled pure genre — fantastical, unrealistic, a popcorn sort of story. But it’s real. Angela Zhang won a $100,000 prize in a science competition for her project, “Design of Image-guided, Photo-thermal Controlled Drug Releasing Multifunctional Nanosystem for the Treatment of Cancer Stem Cells.” Wow. Check out the article on TheMarySue.
As someone in comments over there said, this is potential Nobel Prize stuff. Not bad for someone who’s not old enough to vote yet. Heck, I’d let her vote!
What’s weirdly cool about this is that she goes to my little brother’s old high school — Monta Vista in Cupertino. (Not mine, though — we moved right after I graduated, and he’s seven years younger than I am.)
Anyway, I’ll just get back to, umm, writing my urban fantasy novel. Yeah.
Seriously, though, massive kudos to Angela Zhang, from another Angela who’ll never make half as much of an impact on the world. Props, hon.
Angie
This is great fun to watch — a song-and-dance type flash mob in the Dubai Airport.
You know, we in the US think of Saudi Arabia as being this horribly oppressive culture, and it definitely has its issues, but can you imagine something like this happening in an American airport? o_O Just thinking of how Homeland Security would likely react — OMG it might be a DIVERSION for a TERRORIST attack!!! — just turns my stomach. Good on Dubai for being mellow and able to enjoy it.
Angie
Wow, I haven’t blogged about GayRomLit yet — I should probably do that before I forget what-all happened.
The conference was a lot of fun, more than I expected, actually. I’ve always loved meeting internet friends in realspace, and I got to meet one of my very best online friends, plus a bunch of other people I knew, people I sort of knew, people whose names I’d seen around, and people I ran into for the first time while I was there. One thing a lot of people have commented about is how awesome it was to hang out with a bunch of people who are all into m/m romance. I’ve never been to one of the big romance conventions, but people who have talk about been sneered at, snubbed and otherwise marginalized, on a ratio of four or five to one versus people who say everyone was great and they had no problems. Gay romance is the redheaded (bastard, drug addict) stepchild of romance, and it seems to be very stressful, to say the least, to be an m/m romance reader or writer at a general romance convention. This one was for us, everyone was in the same group, and no one was asked, “But why do you read/write that stuff?” with even curiosity, much less hostility or distaste. Good stuff.
I got majorly fangirled a couple of times, which was pretty darned cool. [beam] I even had about half a dozen people ask for my autograph, which was ??? because I don’t have any paper books out and wasn’t expecting it at all. The first four or five I was trying to actually SIGN a name I’d never signed before, and I’m sure no two were alike, LOL! My usual mode of writing is a rather weird printing style I’ve developed since I was like eleven, though, so for the last couple I ditched the whole cursive-signature thing and just printed my name. It’s still very curvy and doesn’t look like anyone else’s printing, so that should work fine. Also, it’s readable, which my cursive most definitely isn’t. [cough] Also-also, this matters less with a pseudonym, but in general you don’t want your “autograph” to be the same signature you use on checks and credit card slips, so that’s another good thing, just on general principles.
It wasn’t all wonderful, of course. I had some tote bags made up with the title and author name (same fonts and all) from A Hidden Magic to give away, and had my vendor send the box directly to the hotel. They lost it. [headdesk] They found it eventually, but it took about a day and a half, and the first couple of people I talked to (two separate occasions) seemed pretty convinced it’d never arrived, despite UPS’s web site showing that it had been delivered to the front desk. The third time there were three people hunting for a while, and the bell captain finally found it and brought it to my room, yay! I gave him a nice tip and was very happy to have my stuff.
The day after I arrived, I went out with three friends to Cafe du Monde, where the coffee’s great and you have to excavate through the mountain of powdered sugar to find your beignets. That part was good, but there was an older guy right outside the fence, like twelve feet away from us, who was alternating between trumpet music and very loud singing the whole time we were there, such that we had to shout at each other to have a conversation. [sigh] I know the street performers have to make a living too, but the whole captive-audience thing sucks. It’s one thing to do your performance on a street corner, or around the perimeter of Jackson Square where a bunch of performers and artists and fortune tellers hang out, so that people passing by can stop and watch/listen if they want. But when we’re in a cafe having coffee and beignets and want to talk, it’s very unpleasant having music blaring in our ear the whole time. And courtesy dictates that you stop what you’re doing to applaud whenever a song finishes, whether you enjoyed it or not, and that got old as well. The guy was all “Thank you for your thunderous applause” whenever there wasn’t much, going passive-agressive on people who hadn’t chosen to hang out and listen to him in the first place — so that kind of sucked. He’s the one who chose to foist his very loud music on people who just wanted to sit down with coffee and beignets and conversation; if his audience wasn’t universally delighted with his offering, that was his doing and nobody else’s. If I ever go back, I’ll definitely look for a table inside, or way in the back of the patio.
After that, we took a carriage ride around the French Quarter, which was fun. Our driver knew a lot about the history of the area (I’m assuming they all do, but still) and it was nice to see things while sitting down. The carriages are pulled by mules these days. The driver said it was because mules are stronger and can take the heat better than horses. They used to use horses, but there was trouble with the horses being overworked and generally in bad shape, so the city passed a law saying that the carriages had to use mules, which is good. They all seemed to be healthy so far as I could tell — no hip bones sticking out, no limps, nothing I recognized as abused animals, which isn’t always the case with animals who work this way, so that was cool.
I had some “lightly” blackened red snapper later on which was way too spicy for me (I have pretty much zero appreciation for capsaicin type heat in food) so I only ate half of it, although the rice and veggies were good. And on the last evening before I left I had a fried oyster poboy with sweet potato fries, both of which were very yummy. And I had breakfast a couple of times at the hotel restaurant, including my first try at grits. I expected to like them — I’m Italian and grew up eating polenta — and I did. Grits have a lighter taste, less corny, if that makes sense. I imagine it’s something to do with the chemical processing that turns them white. They’re still good to eat with butter, just like polenta, and I’d definitely have them again.
I didn’t do any of the walking tours the con had set up — they did cemetary walks and vampire tours — and from what I heard I was glad I didn’t. It sounded like they were too long and with too much standing around for someone with my mobility issues. I have to be careful what I commit to, and I had a feeling these wouldn’t work out for me.
A lot of the planned events of the conference were based on alcohol — hurricane party, wine and cheese party, pub crawl, that kind of thing — and I didn’t sign up for them because I don’t drink. Various authors and/or publishers were sponsoring all these events, and they had to pay so much per head based on how many people signed up. I could’ve gone just to be sociable, but I didn’t think it was right to make someone pay for booze for me that I wasn’t going to drink.
I haven’t mentioned any panels because… well, I can’t quite say there weren’t any, but there weren’t supposed to be. The organizing committee decided not to hold panels because they, as individuals, don’t care for panels at conferences. All right, it’s their show, they can do what they want. But there were panels anyway — two that I ran into, and I didn’t try to get to everything — so it seems at least some of the attendees and sponsors want them enough to go impromptu if none are organized. This would be fine, except that the rooms weren’t set up for panels. The idea with the smaller events was that authors or publishers or whoever was hosting a social or signing or whatever would be sitting behind tables around the perimeter of the room, and people would walk in, chat a bit, pick up swag and/or autographs, and leave. The first panel I encountered was in a small room intended for a meet-the-authors social sort of event. A friend was in there and I wanted to go say hi and see how things were going with her, but I found a panel going — people were asking questions, writers behind the tables were answering them, and everyone was listening to the answers. That’s a panel. The room had about six chairs in it, aside from the chairs behind the tables for the authors, and they were all full. There were people standing along the walls, packed into the corners, standing here and there in the middle of the room, and packed very tightly in the doorway and in the hallway right outside the door. I couldn’t even get close enough to the door to peer in and see my friend, and I could only hear every fourth or fifth word. I stood around for a few minutes, but then my knees and back started griping so I left.
The second one was a publisher’s reception. They were supposed to be hosting a hurricane party on the patio around the pool, but the hotel was going through some rennovation and fumes from the paint had drifted out the windows and made the pool patio uninhabitable most of the afternoon, so events that were supposed to be near there were hurriedly moved. I hadn’t signed up for the hurricane party, but I wandered past their relocation room (which was way too small for a party, but they were moved back to the pool patio a bit later, after the painters had gone home and the fumes dissipated) and saw that the publisher was holding a panel. The room was packed again — there were eight or so chairs that were full, people lining the walls and packing the corners and standing in all the free space, plus people sitting on tables and assorted other things that weren’t meant to be sat on. The publisher had been invitation-only up until recently, and one of the bigwigs (I didn’t catch her name so I don’t know exactly who) was speaking about their preferences in submissions, what they’re looking for, how they deal with covers and promo, and generally the sort of thing an author who might consider writing for a publishing house would want to know. I’m happy where I am, but I wanted to hear what the publisher had to say anyway and there was a spot on a table near the door, so I perched for a while, along with a number of other people. Seriously, though, if this sort of thing continues, one of these times someone or a group of someones is going to sit on something that isn’t meant to be sat on and break it, and the hotel is going to bill the conference. I get that the organizers don’t care for panels, but if they’re going to happen anyway, they’d best be organized and scheduled and put into rooms that are set for panels, with plenty of chairs. Otherwise the committee should start setting aside money for a surprise on the hotel bill, because it’s going to happen.
I got to meet my own publishers in person for the first time, which was pretty cool. Shawn and Lorna of Torquere Press had a table at the big signing event — which was on a riverboat — and invited me to sit with them for a while. That’s where I got asked for most of the autographs. A lot of writers in this genre don’t have paper books, so readers were going around with notebooks and such, using them as autograph albums. One lady was having people sign her e-reader cover, and one of the mods of the M/M Romance group on Goodreads was having people sign her Don’t Read In The Closet knapsack, which was pretty cool. That’ll be an awesome souvenir.
Later some of us Torquere people gathered in the hotel bar — which was around a corner and down a long hall and pretty dead unless there was a conference event in it, which sort of surprised me — with Torquere hosting. Shawn ran a tab, which I’ve never seen anyone do in real life, and which amused me beyond reason. Okay, I don’t go to bars, I’m sure everyone else is eyerolling right now, but it was pretty cool from my point of view. I had a couple of sodas and we talked about stuff. One thing that sticks out was confirmation that when the second Hidden Magic novel comes out, they’ll bring both it and the first out in paperback, yay! Seriously, that was awesome to hear; I’d suspected they might, just because it makes no sense to bring out Book 2 of a series in paperback but not Book 1, but it’s great to hear it officially. I know paperbacks don’t sell terribly well in this genre, but I’ve been wanting a paperback book with my name on it that I could autograph and give my mother for ages, and now I know I’m going to get one. Even if sales are lousy — which I hope they aren’t! — just being able to give her that will be worth it.
Oh, one of the street performers I saw while walking around the Quarter was excellent!! I was on the way to a nearby drugstore and was passing by Jackson Square, and there was a guy who was a police car transformer, and it actually worked!! He walked around with pieces of police car hanging off him like armor — I think a lot of it was sturdy cardboard or light wood, it certainly wasn’t plastic or metal, but still — and then he’d sort of squat and fall forward and the car assembled itself around him with the four tires on the ground and his feet tucked up out of the way. He must’ve had an electric motor in there somewhere because he could drive around!! Then he’d stop, then put his feet down and stand up, and the car disassembled back into an armor-y thing again! I definitely dropped some money in his bucket, ’cause that was freaking awesome. [beam]
On the whole I had a great time, and I’m looking forward to going to next year’s conference, which will be in Albuquerque. Hot and dry instead of hot and humid, so a bit better to this California native who’s not at all used to humidity. It’s the people who make it a great time, though, and I expect that to be just the same, only maybe a little bigger with any luck. I can hardly wait!
Angie
So for quite a while now I’ve been clicking on the “Share” button on my Google blog reader whenever I came across something there that I thought other people would enjoy, but they don’t make it clear how to follow someone’s shared posts, and in fact I don’t remember what I did to sign up to follow the two people whose shares I’m following, nor did poking around the reader window enlighten me, nor have I heard anyone else mention following someone else’s shared posts — mine or anyone’s — in the last couple of years. I’m therefore assuming that’s not something any great number of folks are doing. (Please let me know if I’m wrong.) I’ve been posting with commentary about things I wanted to comment on extensively, or occasionally things I ran across outside of the blog reader where sharing wasn’t an option, and just sharing the rest, but earlier this month I started bookmarking links in a special folder so I could do linkspam posts with greater or lesser amounts of commentary on each item, with the idea that some people might actually, you know, see them that way. Then of course I was sick for a while (again [sigh] but luckily just a stomach flu) and a few more things have piled up than I’d planned to let accumulate, so I’m going to try to get through all of them in a somewhat orderly way. After this, I’ll try to keep these shorter.
Things specifically of interest to writers first:
Mike Lombardo brilliantly refutes some gentleman who thinks people shouldn’t ever get paid for their IP — thanks to Colleen Doran for posting this. I don’t watch many videos online, but I’m glad I watched this one. It’s a point-by-point refutation of a blog post that’s basically a regurgitation of every whiny excuse you ever heard a pirate give for why it’s right and proper for them to steal whatever they want, and why you’re a greedy bastard (blogger’s words, quoted by Mike) for wanting to be paid for your work. About ten minutes, entertaining, lots of snickers.
That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars — Another video, just to be all organized. This is Jason Scott, who runs Textfiles.com, among other things. (He’s also the guy who founded the Archive Team, the group that goes around rescuing terabytes of user-uploaded content (basically the internet’s history) from sites like Geocities when they got shut down, and whatever all Yahoo is deleting this week. He gets legal harassment mail pretty regularly, and this is a talk he gave at the DefCon 17 conference about one of those times, when a guy who decided that anyone who might’ve downloaded a free copy of his book (which he’d originally given away for free himself, and which he was stell giving away for free from his web site even as he was suing people who had free copies — seriously, you have to hear the story) took it all the way to a court case. Writers get sued sometimes, and so do bloggers, so I figured this might be interesting. At the very least, it’s entertaining. (Note that I’m assuming nobody who reads me regularly has to be told not to act like this particular writer. [cough])
Important Versus Urgent — novelist Camille Laguire talks about setting priorities, and the difference between important and urgent. A lot of common sense, with clear examples.
A Word or Two to Aspiring Writers — Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff uses examples from an unnamed book by a “Nationally Bestselling Author” (I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds like someone who should know better) to discuss the ever-popular What Not To Do. Even if you’re not an aspiring writer, this is worth a read, if only for the bogglement factor.
I knew the book had problems when I found myself reading the same dialogue over and over . . . at different locations and in different scenes.
There was a repeated dream sequence that, at each recap consumed at least half a page, often more. If that had been the only repeated element, I’d have been fine with it, but it wasn’t. The hero and heroine literally fled from place to place and re-enacted the same “push-me-pull-you” dialogue at each new stop. Sometimes a new piece of information would be brought forth or an epiphany would occur (to be promptly forgotten), but most often, the dialogue was simply repeated in its essentials.
It went something like this (broadly paraphrased):
“Trust me,” he says. “I’m here. I won’t leave you.”
“I can’t trust you,” she says. “I can’t let anyone in. I’m crazy!”
“No, your sister’s crazy. You’re wonderful. And I’m going to help you.”
“Really?” Can I trust him? I want to trust him. I don’t want to trust him. I …
“Trust me! I’ll protect you!”
“Okay.”
“Good. Let’s get out of here.”
“No! I can’t trust you!”
(Repeat as needed, with varying degrees of mild physical violence.)
Ooookay…. [blink] You know, if I knew you could do that and still be a bestseller, I could’ve saved myself a whole lot of work trying to hit wordcount targets. [Angie macros COPY and PASTE commands]
My favorite piece of advice is the last one, though:
No matter what genre you’re writing, strive to make your characters self-consistent. Don’t make a brilliant cryptographer suddenly unable to crack the Sunday Crypto-Quote. Don’t have your Oxford don talking like Eliza Doolittle pre-‘enry ‘iggins. And don’t have to women who’ve shown Darth Vader-like abilities when threatened, suddenly helpless in the face of a confrontation they’ve been prepping for throughout your whole book.
Hallelujah! Seriously, if the only way you can create tension is to give your character(s) a lobotomy, you’re doing it wrong. Really. I’ve seen this a lot and it’s always good for a few eyerolls. And why aren’t editors catching this? [sigh]
FROM PASSIVE VOICE:
What Happens When an Author Dies? — this is an excellent planning on death, wills and writers. Definitely read this if you’re a writer, or any other creative producer.
Indie Author Goes Traditional – A Cautionary Tale — in case you haven’t heard, Kiana Davenport was a writer who signed with a Big Six publisher back in January of last year for a novel, after having what sounds to me like considerable success publishing short stories. She had the rights to the stories, after they’d appeared in various places, so she e-pubbed a couple of collections of these previously published shorts. Then:
In January, 2010, I signed a contract with one of the Big 6 publishers in New York for my next novel. I understood then that I, like every writer in the business, was being coerced into giving up more than 75% of the profits from electronic sales of that novel, for the life of the novel. But I was debt-ridden and needed upfront money that an advance would provide. The book was scheduled for hardback publication in August, 2012, and paperback publication a year later. Recently that publisher discovered I had self-published two of my story collections as electronic books. To coin the Fanboys, they went ballistic. The editor shouted at me repeatedly on the phone. I was accused of breaching my contract (which I did not) but worse, of ‘blatantly betraying them with Amazon,’ their biggest and most intimidating competitor. I was not trustworthy. I was sleeping with the enemy.
Wow. Everyone else is figuring out that having more product available in the marketplace stirs up more interest in one’s work. If anything, Kiana’s publication of those two anthologies would generate more interest in the novel, not less. And the stories were already out there — “Most of the stories in both collections had each been published several times before, first in Story Magazine, then again in The O’HENRY AWARDS PRIZE STORIES anthologies, the PUSHCART PRIZE stories anthologies, and THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, 2000, anthology” — so chances are it wouldn’t be too hard to get most of those stories from libraries anyway, right? All the publisher could see was that they were competition, and apparently the fact that they were competing on Amazon made a rather large difference.
So, here is what the publisher demanded. That I immediately and totally delete CANNIBAL NIGHTS from Amazon, iNook, iPad, and all other e-platforms. Plus, that I delete all Google hits mentioning me and CANNIBAL NIGHTS. Currently, that’s about 600,000 hits. (How does one even do that?) Plus that I guarantee in writing I would not self-publish another ebook of any of my backlog of works until my novel with them was published in hardback and paperback.
Not only is that outrageous, it’s impossible. And seriously, do you want a publisher that thinks it’s even possible for an individual to delete “all Google hits mentioning” her and a book from the internet to be responsible for doing your marketing? Because I wouldn’t have any faith at all in the ability of a publisher with that little understanding of the internet and of Google to do any kind of effective marketing online, where a lot of the current book buzz resides.
The publisher declared Kiana to be in breach of her contract — although Kiana says she wasn’t; it depends on the exact phrasing of the noncompete clause — and demanded their advance back. Kiana has decided that it’s worth $20,000 to be out of that mess, and to know who the enemy actually is. I have to agree. Wow. And as Passive Guy comments, this situation is a great example of why a writer might need a lawyer, even if she has an agent. Click through to Kiana’s blog for more details.
And a follow-up to the previous post, with PG commenting on comments from Brian DeFiore, a publishing insider, on why Kiana “obviously” made a huge mistake in publishing her anthologies, and how if they were print books, “we would understand in a flash that publishing two books prior to a contracted-for work would constitute a breach of contract.” Really? You know, unless Mr. DeFiore has seen Kiana’s publishing contract, and knows the exact wording of her noncompete clause, I have no clue where he’s getting this. PG can’t figure it out either.
The reason an author understands publishing competitive books is a breach of contract is if it’s actually written in the contract. Passive Guy knows this is a shocking idea in the publishing business, but, alas, that’s the law.
Exactly. You know something is contractually required or forbidden because it’s in the contract. If it’s not, then it’s just a publisher (or whatever party to any given contract) using hand-waving and intimidation and scary-sounding language to try to bully the other party into compliance.
Passive Guy is brilliantly snarky (and informative in his point-by-point demolition) in response to Mr. DeFiore’s rather condescending comments. Definitely click through and read the whole thing.
Jutoh — TPG linked to this software product that’s supposed to help you format your manuscript for various e-book file types. I haven’t tried it myself, but if it does what it says it does, it should be a great help to anyone self-pubbing electronically. There’s a free demo, too.
What’s going on with #yesGayYA — as is often the case when a major issue goes nuclear, Cleolinda has a great summary and set of links. In case you haven’t heard, Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith guest posted on the Genreville blog on Publisher’s Weekly.
Our novel, Stranger, has five viewpoint characters; one, Yuki Nakamura, is gay and has a boyfriend. Yuki’s romance, like the heterosexual ones in the novel, involves nothing more explicit than kissing.
An agent from a major agency, one which represents a bestselling YA novel in the same genre as ours, called us.
The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation.
Rachel replied, “Making a gay character straight is a line in the sand which I will not cross. That is a moral issue. I work with teenagers, and some of them are gay. They never get to read fantasy novels where people like them are the heroes, and that’s not right.”
The agent suggested that perhaps, if the book was very popular and sequels were demanded, Yuki could be revealed to be gay in later books, when readers were already invested in the series.
You can guess how well that went over. There were discussions, mostly pretty angry, on various blogs and sites.
A few days later, Joanna Stampfel-Volpe, an agent who works for the same agency as the agent referred to above (who was not named by Brown and Smith, nor was the agency named) posted a refutation on another blog, essentially calling Brown and Smith liars, only slightly more diplomatically. More fireworks, including a bunch of people who decided that Brown and Smith must have lied since Stampfel-Volpe said they did, and anyone who took Brown and Smith’s word was stupid because clearly Stempfel-Volpe’s word was… wait, what?
What it seems to come down to is that there are people who are outraged and offended that Brown and Smith called them or their friends or their coworkers evil homophobes, even though Brown and Smith didn’t do that. They went public not to talk abou their specific case — which couldn’t be done anyway, since they hadn’t said which agent had made them the straightwashing offer, so there was no one specific for anyone to be angry with until Stempfel-Volpe outed her agency by responding — but rather to discuss the institutional barriers to GLBT characters, or characters with other diversity characteristics, in YA fiction.
I’ve seen the same thing happen in race discussions, where someone says, “You know, this particular statement/action is kind of racist,” and twelve people slam them with variations of “OMG how dare you call me/my friend a racist, you evil #$%&@!” and it’s all mushroom clouds from there on. People don’t get that an action is not a person. A statement is not a person. That it’s possible for an action or a statement to be homophobic or racist without the person who did or said it being deliberately or even knowingly racist. That’s not the point. If you take a step backward and land on someone’s bare foot with your bootheel, you’ve hurt them; the fact that you didn’t mean to doesn’t make their broken toes hurt any less. When they say “Ouch!” the proper response is “Oh, I’m so sorry!” not “How dare you say I assaulted you!” There’s a too-common disconnect between what’s said and what’s heard when it comes to bigotry issues; too many people assume that they always must be personal attacks, when often they’re not.
Brown and Smith said in the PW post:
This isn’t about one agent’s personal feelings about gay people. We don’t know their feelings; they may well be sympathetic in their private life, but regard the removal of gay characters as a marketing issue. The conversation made it clear that the agent thought our book would be an easy sale if we just made that change. [bolding mine] But it doesn’t matter if the agent rejected the character because of personal feelings or because of assumptions about the market. What matters is that a gay character would be quite literally written out of his own story.
We are avoiding names because we don’t want this story to be about one agent who spoke more bluntly than others whose objections were more indirectly expressed. Naming names can make it too easy to target a lone “villain,” who can be blamed and scolded until everyone feels that the matter has been satisfactorily dealt with.
Colleen Lindsay, who hosted Stempfel-Volpe’s response post, said, “I later discovered that not only did I know the agent in question, but that this person was actually a dear friend of mine, someone who most certainly wasn’t homophobic.” She’s clearly taking this personally on behalf of her friend. The bolded passage above shows that Brown and Smith weren’t attacking the agent for homophobia; they were addressing an issue with the YA fiction business as a whole, wherein there’s a perception — whether true or not — that books with GLBT characters are harder to sell. Because that’s all it takes, some number of agents or editors saying “No” because they think a book might not sell, or might be more difficult to sell, or might sell in lesser numbers. No one in the business has to be personally homophobic for that behavior to exist.
Some people came out and insisted that this never happened, that they’d be shocked if it happened, that nobody in the YA fiction business would ever ask for something like that and they should know because they know a lot of people in the business, or that they published a YA book with a GLBT character and no one had a problem with it therefore there isn’t a problem. Uh huh. (That’s like saying “But we have a black president now, so there can’t be any racism in the US.” [sigh] One person, or even a bunch of people succeeding, doesn’t mean there aren’t barriers. If there’s a twenty-foot wall around the supermarket, some people will still get groceries. That won’t stop me and my arthritis — and a whole lot of other people who just don’t happen to own grappling hooks or really long ladders — from going hungry.)
Does it happen? Apparently so. A lot of people commented on the Publisher’s Weekly article with their own experiences, and quite a few of them said the same thing happened to them. Cleolinda quotes quite a few of them, toward the end of her post.
Malinda Lo has numbers on GLBT characters in YA since 1969. The good news is that the numbers have gone up quite a lot. The bad news is that “up quite a lot” means that 0.2% of YA books published in 2010 had GLBT characters. Some generous estimates put the 2011 figure at about 1%, which is better, but still ridiculously low for a group of people who comprise 10-15% of the general population.
John Scalzi is wonderfully succinct, which is obviously not one of my skills:
My particular take on it is that the authors did the right thing by saying “thanks, no,” and that in general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a).
I hadn’t meant to write quite so much about this issue, but this is important. There’s more in Cleolinda’s post, and I encourage you to click through.
Segueing into a Couple More GLBT Interest Links:
Why Can’t You Just Butch Up? — an article by Bret Hartinger about effeminate men and why they can’t (or shouldn’t have to) just behave more like macho dudes.
Gotta Love Clint Eastwood — Clint’s not the most liberal of guys, but I was mentally applauding while reading this article. In a nutshell:
“These people who are making a big deal out of gay marriage?” Eastwood opined. “I don’t give a fuck about who wants to get married to anybody else! Why not?! We’re making a big deal out of things we shouldn’t be making a deal out of.”
Go Clint!
The first chunk of comments is actually sane and rational, which is pretty amazing. Soon enough the homophobes and trolls show up, though. You have to love the people who can say with a straight typeface that if we legalize gay marriage, everyone will marry someone of the same sex, no more babies will be born, and the human race will die out. Wow. Logic — get yourself some.
Angie
