And seriously, this was two teenagers having sex. We’re not talking about some creepy forty-year-old luring little girls with candy. :/ The whole point of designating people under a certain age as minors is to indicate that our culture believes they’re not yet old enough to take full responsibility for their actions — that’s what “minor” means, after all. So this sixteen-year-old minor was lied to by a younger girl, and did something he had no reason to believe was wrong. Maybe he should have stood back and coldly analyzed the situation and… what? Asked to see her ID? What if she’d had fake ID? Grown men have been convicted of statutory rape when the young woman they were with had fake ID saying she was over eighteen. So what should he have done?

The moralists would say he shouldn’t have been having sex at all. That’s not realistic, though, nor helpful, nor is it any kind of justice to put a minor on the sex offender registry for succumbing to his hormones with a willing young woman he believed was old enough. Punish him, sure — some sort of education, community service, anything like that would’ve been appropriate. But even the young woman’s parents weren’t interested in prosecuting Ricky, given the circumstances. And yet the DA decided that it’s justice to ruin a young man’s life for having consensual sex with a young woman only three years younger, whom he thought was only one year younger.

In Ricky’s case, justice was eventually served and his name was taken off the registry through his mother’s diligent efforts. This kind of crap happens regularly, though, and there are plenty of people still on the list who should never have been put there. The value of the registry as a list of truly dangerous sexual predators is compromised to worthlessness when young people like Ricky are added.

Thanks to Free-Range Kids for linking to this.

Angie

Funny, smart commentary about burqa bans — the idea of a government body dictating what people can wear, short of the really riciculous exception examples cited in this piece, is ludicrous. If Moslem women want to wear a burqa then they should be able to. Anyone who wants to wear a burqua, or a veil, or a T-shirt saying “Our Government Is Full of Idiots!” should be able to do so. Banning a traditional item of clothing which causes no harm to anyone is an outrageous infringement of freedom, and racist to boot.

Period Speech — this xkcd comic pretty much says it all about various writers’ attempts at period speech. (It also applies to various kinds of accents and dialects used by writers who apparently have never been exposed to same.) It’s easy to see how silly it looks when our era is one of the ones being mangled, but plenty of writers trying to write “medieval” or “Southern” or whatever sound pretty much like this.

Jane Austen’s Fight Club — this is a really wonderful video. I’m not usually one for videos, but my husband e-mailed me this one and I was LOLing. Watch and enjoy.

Provenance: this was originally posted to Craigslist in Lansing, MI. Some people didn’t like it, for no specific reason, and flagged it for removal; it’s gone now, and I don’t know who originally wrote it. Truth Wins Out reposted it in its entirety, because it’s just that awesome and needs to be preserved and shared. I agree.

Read it and laugh.

Angie

Fictionwise is having one of its 40% rebate on everything sales, for purchases made with a credit card. The link takes you to the two of my books they sell, but the rebate applies to everything. The way this works is when you purchase a book with a rebate, the rebated amount is credited to your “micropay” account, which can be spent later like cash. I like their rebate-on-everything sales because usually their rebates only apply to DRMed books, and I don’t buy those. You don’t have to join a club or anything; just create the usual online buyer’s account and your rebate amount will be stored there for whenever you want to use it.

All Romance eBooks is having a promotion where authors and/or publishers are donating their royalties for the month of May to the National Center for Lesbian Rights — which supports the rights of all LGBT people now, not just lesbians. The NCLR is representing Clay Greene in his attempt to get justice from Sonoma County for the horrible way they treated him and his partner, Harold Scull.

From NCLR’s info page on Greene v. County of Sonoma et al.:

Clay and his partner of 25 years, Harold, lived in California. Clay and Harold made diligent efforts to protect their legal rights, and had their legal paperwork in place, including wills and powers of attorney, naming each other. Harold was 88 years old and in frail medical condition, but still living at home with Clay, 77, who was in good health.

County workers also removed Clay from his and Harold’s home and placed Clay in an assisted living facility against his will. Three months after he was hospitalized, Harold died in a nursing home. Because of the County’s actions, Clay missed the final months he should have had with his partner of 25 years, and he has been unable to recover his possessions.

That’s really despicable. The county claimed Harold and Clay were only roommates when it came to visitation rights or the authority to make medical and financial decisions, despite Clay having a legal power of attorney (which was ignored). But it seems the county was treating them as legal partners who owned property in common when it sold the entire contents of their home to pay for Harold’s medical costs. They couldn’t even be consistent in their gross mistreatment of this couple.

All my stand-alone short stories up on ARe are part of the fund raising effort. I’ll donate all my royalties from ARe to Clay Greene’s legal fund at NCLR, to help him get some sort of justice out of this mess, and give Sonoma County officials the slap they clearly need to jar a few brain cells loose. If you’ve been thinking of trying some of my work, this’d be a good time to do it — some good stories and helping out with a worthy cause. (And in actuality, I’m donating all my royalties for the quarter — through the end of June — since my statement doesn’t break it down any farther than that.) Here’s ARe’s info page about the fund raiser, which includes a list of all the authors and publishers participating, with links to their books.

Angie

New Animals Discovered in Borneo — I think my favorite is the stick insect, like a walking stick only a bit over half a meter long, pictured walking up the side of a guy’s head. Oh, and props to the guy, too, for having guts. The flame-colored snake is gorgeous, and the lungless frog makes me think about aliens for an SF story.

Why Content Is a Public Good — this is a guest post by Milena Popova on Charlie Stross’s blog. She talks about public and private goods, and rival and excludable goods, and the various combinations and how the market works (or doesn’t) to distribute or control the distribution of the various types. I’ve never seen the subject (primarily e-books and music, but also applies to movies and such) discussed from this point of view before. She starts at the beginning and explains the vocabulary for people who don’t have econ degrees. Definitely worth a read.

Chimerical Avatars and Other Identity Experiments from Prof. Fox Harrell — Prof. Harrell talks about avatars in computer games and the lack of variety available in avatar types, particularly for players of color who’d like their avatar to represent them as they are, particularly if they want a decent range of options beyond skin color. This is a familiar issue in gaming, but it also applies to books.

How often can a reader of color find a character who’s like them in mainstream genre fiction? Or a female reader in an adventure-oriented genre? Sure, we can appreciate and empathize with characters who aren’t like us, but white readers don’t have to do that very often, and never at all if they don’t want to. A series of characters who are all basically alike can give readers who are different the impression that this author or series or genre isn’t for them, and can give a writer who is different the impression that a genre doesn’t welcome their viewpoint. It benefits all of us to encourage a variety of character types in the media we consume, which (for those of us who are creators) means including a variety of character types in the media we create.

I Has a Sweet Potato by Littera-Abactor on LJ — I’m pretty sure I haven’t linked this here before, but it’s hilarious so even if I have, there’s no harm done.

Dog: I am starving.
Me: Actually, no. You aren’t starving. You get two very good meals a day. And treats. And Best Beloved fed you extra food while I was gone.
Dog: STARVING.
Me: I saw you get fed not four hours ago! You are not starving.
Dog: Pity me, a sad and tragic creature, for I can barely walk, I am so starving. WOE.
Me: I am now ignoring you.
Dog: STARVING.
Dog: Did you hear me? I am starving.
Dog: Are you seriously ignoring me? Fine.

[There is a pause, during which the dog exits the room in a pointed manner.]

[From the kitchen, there comes a noise like someone is eating a baseball bat.]

Me, yelling: What the hell are you doing?
Me: *makes haste for the kitchen and finds dog there*
Dog: *picks up entire raw sweet potato, which is what was causing the baseball bat noise, and flees for the bedroom*
Me: *chases dog, retrieves most of sweet potato, less the portion which has disappeared into dog’s gullet*
Dog: See? STARVING.
Me: …That can’t be good for you. It’s a RAW SWEET POTATO.
Dog: I had to do it. I haven’t been fed. Ever.
Me: You realize you aren’t normal. Normal dogs don’t steal raw sweet potatoes.
Dog, sadly: I was badly brought up.
Me: Yes. Yes, you were.
Dog: By people who starved me.
Me: Oh, no. I am not doing this again.
Me: *exits the room, bearing sweet potato*

There’s more. Definitely more. Click through and read the whole thing.

Oh, and I got an acceptance on a story called “Unfinished Business,” which is a sequel to A Hidden Magic, yay! It’s short and funny and is basically erotica, picking up on something a couple of supporting characters were doing about two-thirds of the way through the book. It’s scheduled for release on 26 June, just a month after HM, which is great timing.

Angie

Angie

Second, it seems there hasn’t yet been enough negative, condemnatory publicity about authors who pitch fits on the internet, whining about critical commentary and getting all defensive about bad reviews on Amazon, so Rob Thurman is giving us more material. I think she’s a great sport for sacrificing her professional reputation to give us an excellent negative example. Let’s all give her a hand, shall we? Thanks to Writtenwyrdd for linking to this.

And third, I’m sure everyone’s heard about Constance McMillen, the high school student in Mississippi who wanted to bring her girlfriend to the prom only to have the school cancel the event rather than let a couple of lesbians show up holding hands or something. Wow, overreacting much? The case went to court and the judge decided that the school was in the wrong, but (if I’m remembering correctly) refrained from ordering the school to hold the prom anyway because at the time there was a private prom being organized by parents and it was understood that Constance and her girlfriend would be welcome there. Well, someone decided that their town hadn’t gotten enough bad press (maybe that’s where Rob Thurman lives?) so Constance and her girlfriend, along with a few other students, were given time/place information for… a fake prom. No, seriously. They showed up at a country club to find seven people there, plus the principal and some teachers from their high school acting as chaperones, not that there was much to chaperone.

Two students with learning difficulties were among the seven people at the country club event, McMillen recalls. “They had the time of their lives,” McMillen says. “That’s the one good thing that come out of this, [these kids] didn’t have to worry about people making fun of them [at their prom].”

The more I hear from this young woman, the more I like her. Unfortunately she lives in an area with more than its fair share of folks who indulge in master-level gluteal haberdashery. I mean, seriously, did they hold a meeting of the Cool People and decide which students were the unclean undesirables who’d be shunted to the fake event? I can just imagine their delight in realizing that by coming up with a plan to shuffle the lesbians off to the fake dance, they could do it to those other weird, uncool kids too! Score! :/

I’m sure Constance is counting the days until graduation. I hope she has a wonderful time in college and has an awesome life, because she absolutely deserves it for the way she’s handled this whole outrageous situation with grace and dignity. And I hope the people — students and parents and school staff alike — who participated in turning what should’ve been a simple, fun prom into an ever-growing mound of hate and bigotry all get what they deserve as well.

Angie

Predictably, Will is being harassed for his stance, first by a substitute teacher and (of course) by some of the more nasty and ignorant students at his school. (Although to be fair, this is only elementary school and I’d bet cookies that the students who are taunting and harassing him are just reflecting the views and behavior of their parents, so the shame is on them for not setting a better example.)

Will’s parents support him, though, and got the school administration to admit that he’s not required to stand for the Pledge, that he does have the right to sit through it.

And what about the substitute teacher who tried to bully him into participating, even threatening to get his mother and grandmother (whom she knew, although obviously not very well) on his case? Since he hadn’t broken any rules in refusing to stand for the Pledge, Will’s mother asked when they could expect an apology from that teacher. Well, the principal didn’t see that as “necessary.” Of course not. [eyeroll]

Will has an excellent sense of right and wrong, though, and I applaud his stand, and also his parents for supporting him in doing what’s right. Read more about Will and the Pledge incident in this Arkansas Times article, and more commentary by John Brummett, a columnist with the Arkansas News. If nothing else, Mr. Brummett’s suggested alternate Pledge is entertaining, and unfortunately apt.

Thanks to Indigene on The Phade for the original link.

Angie

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones, a twenty-year-old employee of KBR — at the time a subsidiary of Halliburton, and hey look, they’re hiring — was working in Iraq. Her co-workers drugged her, gang-raped her, abused her so badly her breasts were disfigured permanently, then locked her in a shipping container for twenty-four hours without food or water. She was told by her employer that if she left Iraq to get medical attention, she’d be fired.

According to an ABC News post:

Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.

Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones’ camp, where they rescued her from the container.

Also:

Jones told ABCNews.com that an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped “both vaginally and anally,” but that the rape kit disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers.

Wow, what a shocking misfortune.

Her assailants were never brought to trial, either, neither criminally nor civilly. Why? Because Ms. Jones’s employment contract with KBR states that a victim of sexual assault surrenders the right to prosecute their rapists; all such matters must be taken before a private arbitrator, where there’s no transcript kept and the proceedings are not public record.

And this is by no means an isolated incident. See the links below for more cases, more women who’ve been raped and brutalized and threatened while working abroad for defense contractors, coming forward.

So essentially, if you work for one of these companies overseas, your co-workers can gang rape you, leaving you permanently injured, the company you work for can threaten you with the loss of your job if you try to go home for medical help, their security people will “lose” key evidence of the crime against you, and your only recourse is private arbitration. Your assailants will never see prison time, and there’ll be no official record of what happened.

Or rather, this was the case until last Tuesday. According to a story in MinnPost.com:

In one of the most public tests of his political skills since taking office in July, Sen. Al Franken pushed through an amendment Tuesday that would withhold defense contracts from companies like Halliburton if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.

So essentially, if a company tries to create an atmosphere encouraging rape and assault among their employees by preventing victims from seeking prosecution, they’re cut off from defense contracts. That’s kind of minimal, but since the only thing these people understand is money, it might just work. Note also that the author of the amendment has only been on the job for three months — way to go, Senator Franken!

But now we get to the part which is relevant to the title of this post. One would think that every person with two brain cells to rub together for mutual warmth would be in favor of this change, but unfortunately that’s not the case. Thirty senators — all Republican, coincidentally I’m sure — voted against the amendment. Is your senator among them? If so, please write or call and tell them what you think of how they voted.

There’s a complete list of how everyone voted on the U.S. Senate web site. This is official, a dot-gov web site; it’s not some unofficial nose-count by a partisan press. Is your senator on the “Nay” list?

Also, props to the ten Republican senators who voted for the amendment:

Bennett (R-UT), Collins (R-ME), Grassley (R-IA), Hatch (R-UT), Hutchison (R-TX), LeMieux (R-FL), Lugar (R-IN), Murkowski (R-AK), Snowe (R-ME), and Voinovich (R-OH).

It’s pretty sad that voting in favor of punishing gang-rape is something worth particular praise, but still, I applaud these senators for voting for what’s right, rather than going along with the Boys-Will-Be-Boys Club.

Thanks to a friend of mine on LJ for giving me a heads-up to this.

More sources:

Celluloid Blonde
Firedog Lake — Ms. Jones says eleven more women have contacted her about similar incidents
Huffington Post
The Minnesota Independent
The Nation — and another KBR rape case.
Politico
Think Progress — this one has an embedded video of Sen. Franken’s speech.
Think Progress — this one talks about three other women who’ve come forward

Angie

Of course someone figured out what was going on — ’cause there are fanfic readers who also read original m/m books, who knew?! — and after some incredibly lame excuse-making, the plagiarist took the story down. But check out this screencap and read through the comments. :/

I love the part where Gwendolynflight assures a commenter that “it is completely and fully beta’d.” Umm, right, because the real writer polished it, then sent it to a publisher where a line editor and a proofreader went over it. [eyeroll]

And then lower down where she actually admits that the story is a “fusion” with Price’s PsyCops series. o_O This is where I get the idea that she’s actually just that stupid, rather than a bold-faced thief. Not that being a moron is an excuse, but you know, it’s something different to smack her for.

Then a few comments later where she’s talking to a reader about how dark the story is, and mentions that Book Two is particularly dark, and she’s glad that isn’t turning the reader off. So she fully intended to go on doing this, through the whole series? Once she’d ripped off all the available novels, since she seems to think she’s doing absolutely nothing wrong, I wonder whether she’d have had the balls to, like, write to Jordan and nudge her about hurrying up on the next installment.

Finally, about 2/3 of the way down, LJ user Throwawayreview calls it what it is and clues poor Gwendolynflight that this isn’t a “fusion,” it’s not fanfic, it’s plagiarism. And of course Ms. Gwen has all sorts of excuses, because plagiarism is “a social concept” and not absolute. And later on she says that “plagiarism isn’t an inherent moral wrong – it’s an issue firmly bound up in economic and patriarchal issues.” Umm, right. It’s a weapon of the Patriarchy. So her stealing the actual words of another woman writer and posting them as her own and accepting praise and credit for writing the words another woman actually wrote, is actually Ms. Gwen sticking it to the Patriarchy. Wow, good to know. [eyeroll]

Note that Jordan has no problem with fanfic. She said, in her reaction to this situation:

I’d also like to say that fanfic is an entirely different thing. If a reader said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Victor and Jacob got a flat tire…?” and wrote that story, using my characters and storyverse but their own plot and words, that would be fanfic. I’ve written half a million words of fanfic; it’s how I learned to write, for good or ill. This re-tooling of Among the Living was not fanfic.

So this isn’t a case of one of the uptight pro writers trying to stomp on the poor fanficcers. Actual fanfic would’ve been fine. Copying a whole freaking novel (with plans for the second one) and swapping out the names and places and a few police procedure details, but keeping the other ninety-some percent of the original author’s verbage is not fanfic, in any way, shape or form. Gwendolynflight is one of the people who gives all fanfic writers a bad name. She’s one of the people whose actions convince the New York publishers and the Hollywood producers, and their writers and their lawyers, that we’re all a bunch of pathetic, talentless thieves who are too lame to write our own stories and get credit and praise and e-cookies for our own work, so we steal from them and pretend their work is ours and claim credit for the wonderful writing we didn’t do. That’s what they think of all of us, and one of the reasons they think that is because there are people who do it in exactly that way. Because that’s pretty much what’s going on with Gwendolynflight.

She’s gone into hiding now — her journal’s been completely locked down, although it hasn’t been deleted. I’m kind of disappointed by that, because it means she might slink back out from under her rock at some point. I’m sure she has her own little group of friends who are all rallying ’round her now, giving her pets and hugs and feeding her chocolate and assuring her that she did Absolutely Nothing At All Wrong, and that all those evil mean people are just being so meeeeeean to her, isn’t it just terrible?! Those bitches!!

But you know, this isn’t the sort of person fanfic fandom needs, any fandom. And if she were eventually to pick up her dolls and flounce away and find a new hobby, I’d be just as happy.

Angie, who’s in no mood to give this idiot any slack whatsoever

ETA: LJ User Pecos pointed this out, from Gwendolynflight’s LJ profile:

This journal is primarily for whinging about school and/or teaching, and for posting the fanfic and fanvids which i occasionally, sometimes, rarely produce. You know, every once in a while.

This woman is a teacher. O_O