Sullivan Wheeler

No Homo

2011-03-24T09:39:00.000-07:00

Last night, I went out for dinner with a good friend. She and I probably get together at least once a month, usually for a meal which we usually have at a restaurant somewhere. Men are definitely not invited. That's not because she doesn't like my husband or because I don't like her husband, but because this time is set aside specifically to spend as friends, talking about the stuff that we want to talk about. Having boys around gets in the way.

About an hour into our meal (our little dates usually last two to three hours), I got a phone call from my husband. "When are you coming home?" he wanted to know. "I'm bored."

After I'd gotten off the phone, my friend said, "Oh, my god, men are all alike, aren't they?" Ten minutes later, her boyfriend called to say much the same thing.

As much as I hate it when my husband calls just to tell me he's bored while I'm out with a friend, the more I think about it, the more I think it's actually emblematic of a more worrying trend. I have a good half dozen friends that I see on a regular basis, whether for lunch or dinner dates, or just stopping by the house to say hello. My husband probably has as many friends, but his contact with them tends to be limited to group settings where a bunch of guys go out together or in occasional Facebooking. Time spent together one on one, without wives or girlfriends or children seems to be severely limited.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize that it maybe isn't just boys being boys. After all, my friend and I can have a lovely meal together, spend the whole evening laughing and talking intensely, and no one looks at us and says, "Look at those two lesbians over there." The assumption (unless we held hands or something) would be that we are just friends hanging out together. But if my husband and his best friend went out to eat together, especially at a sit down restaurant, there would likely be more people who assumed that they were gay. Having your sexuality casually misinterpreted is oddly disturbing, even for those who are fairly secure in their masculinity/femininity.

It might be easy to dismiss this as just, "Well, the ladies are more social, the men aren't." But I don't really think it's that. As the phone calls from our respective fellas demonstrate, the guys get lonely too when they're left alone. But while my friend or I can easily russel up a girlfriend to go out with, the men have a much harder time with this. And I think it's because of these rigid gender roles. Research shows that women are generally better off after they leave a bad marriage, but men are better off staying in a bad marriage. In fact, if a man divorces a woman he's unhappy with, he will be right back to where he would be if he had never married in terms of health, life expectancy and wealth. Additionally, men are at a higher risk for depression, drug use, alcoholism and suicide, all starting from late teens.

That seems to be the key: in their late teens, boys seem to distance themselves from other boys, jettisoning long term friendships, or at least letting them cool off. Girls, meanwhile, are ramping their friendships up (if you've ever been part of an early-twenties female friendship, you know that it is like being in a completely non-sexual love affair). Boys who remain emotionally close to their male friends get labeled gay. Instead, boys begin binding themselves to their female love interests, and then later to their wives.

This might not be a huge problem, but divorce is on the rise in suburban and rural areas, meaning that there are going to be a lot more men living out lonely middle and old ages. Our fairly rigid idea of maleness and what constitutes straight masculinity is in some was strangling the social life of the men, and, I have to say, putting a lot of pressure on women to be their husbands and boyfriends primary social outlet. This isn't healthy for anybody.

So, tonight, I'm going to suggest that my husband think about calling his best friend and seeing if they can go out for pizza together. Alone. Without me. I could use a solitary bubble bath.

In leiu of donations, please send flowers

2011-03-17T14:16:00.000-07:00

In a few minutes, I'm going to a wake. The deceased was a wonderful man who passed away suddenly a few days ago. Though I hadn't seen him in a couple of years, it is a shock to know that he is gone, and the world is poorer for having lost him.

But because there is no situation too profound that I can't trivialize it with overthought, there's one thing that's bugging me. In the obituary, the family wrote what every family now writes: "In leiu of flowers, please make a donation to [cause]."

I understand the arguments against flowers, and they're good arguments: Flowers die, and the deceased would rather that you support the cause he was interested in while he was alive. Please help us keep our loved one alive through the good works that this organization does. In cases where the deceased died as a result of an illness (not the case in this situation), it seems especially important to honor those wishes and help make sure that others don't have to suffer the same fate.

And yet, it still rankles. In this case, the family asked that mourners make a donation to the deceased's church. But this man and his family were members of a religion whose policies, frankly, I have some pretty big problems with. I'm sure that this man found solace and comfort in this church, and as a rule I'm not against religion. But in the past few years, this church has been particularly active in politics, and has supported a lot of things that I really don't. The idea of giving them my money, even as the dying wish of a wonderful man... well, it kind of eats my lunch.

Which is why I would like to go back to the days when the default action was to send flowers. Flowers are pretty. Flowers are inoffensive. Flowers don't require you to make a quasi-political statement in opposition to your own beliefs. Flowers are just flowers. Sending a floral arrangment is good for the local economy (even when you order through a company like 1-800-Florists, the order is filled by a local florist), and it doesn't have to make anyone uncomfortable.

And I know what you're saying: Sully, seriously, the guy is dead. Send flowers if you want, but just shut up already. And you're right: I should just shut up. But if I ever turn up dead, do me a favor: tell people to send flowers. I really like lilies.

Knight Rider slash fiction. I will never be the same again.

2011-03-16T16:40:00.000-07:00

This morning, I posted my interview with Tinnean, in which she mentioned her start in fan fiction. In general, I like fan fiction a lot. She's right: it's like a kind of shorthand. You can skip the building up of the characters and get straight to the good stuff: the sexytime.

However, there is such a thing as just plain old wrong, and I'm pretty sure that getting Michael Knight and KITT... do what they're doing in this piece of fan fiction is probably a crime. Exhibit A:

"OK." Feeling just a little self-conscious, Michael unzipped his jeans and wriggled them down past his hips as KITT began his film again.

"Forget the movie, KITT. Just talk to me. Tell me some of the things you read about, what you'd like to see me do."

Umm... eww? Exhibit B:

Two days later, KITT showed him a new addition to his gadgetry. He had asked for it to be fitted, though the reasons were fabricated. It was lucky that Michael had been teaching him to lie convincingly. Now, Michael took the item that KITT had requested he bring out of his bag and a flexible arm extended from under KITT's dashboard, taking it from him.

"Will you allow me to do this, Michael?"

Michael nodded and stripped off his shirt and jeans, tossing them into the passenger seat.

Michael closed his eyes as his head fell back against the headrest, his naked skin against KITT's leather seats.

His feet were up on the dashboard, spreading him wide, and he bit back a gasp as the thick cock breeched his ass. It eased into his already-slicked channel slowly, filling him completely before eventually stilling.

Aaaaand I'm going to need some brain bleach. No. Just no. Your car should not fuck you. Not ever.

This piece contains what might be the funniest analysis of said fan fiction:

WAIT A SECOND. KITT has a built-in dildo now? Now, that's sadly pretty standard for FFF, but the author just wrote this a few paragraphs ago: "He had asked for it to be fitted, though the reasons were fabricated."

So KITT asked whoever at the Knight Foundation -- Dr. Bonnie, I presume -- to give him a penis. A penis that he could move about inside himself... but lied about its use? What the fuck did KITT say it was for? "Well, sometimes, bees fly into my cab, and I would really prefer it I could swat them with an enormous penis. Yes, instead of just rolling down my window and letting them out. No, I definitely want a penis, not a swatter of some kind. LOOK, LADY, JUST GIVE ME A GODDAMNED COCK."

2011-03-16T03:21:00.000-07:00

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with author Tinnean over email. The author of two published novels and dozens of short stories, Tinnean shared a little about her writing process, her interests, and what she's got coming up in the future!

Sullivan Wheeler: Tinnean, you have published two novels, Bless Us With Content and Friends & Lovers, but you started out in fan fiction. Why fanfic and why the source material you started with?

Tinnean: I always loved to write. Raising a family left me little time to devote to it. Once the kids had all graduated, and with the advent of a computer that connected to the Net, that changed.

Why fanfiction? It’s fun. And it’s a shortcut. You write the characters’ names, and fans immediately know who they are and what they look like: Jim Ellison and Blair Sandburg (The Sentinel), John Sheppard and Rodney McKay (Stargate: Atlantis), Horatio Caine and Tim Speedle (CSI: Miami), Harmon Rabb and A. J. Chegwidden (JAG), and of course the daddies of them all, Kirk and Spock – no need to mention the show. Staying within canon is very important, and it’s a very handy learning tool. Heaven help the hapless writer who strays, because the fans can be extremely unforgiving. Of course you can always take the characters to an alternate reality or an alternate universe, and in that case, pretty much anything goes… I always found the main characters in TV shows less interesting than secondary ones – they were usually given so little backstory I could take them wherever I chose.

So I always loved to write. I just never thought I’d get published. Honing my craft through fanfiction eventually made that possible.

SW: That is really interesting. Especially the part about being attracted to the more minor characters. That seems to be fairly common. When you said that, I immediately thought of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, so you're in good company.

T: Thanks, Sully. I’ve actually read some good Hamlet slash, one done by a friend of mine.

SW: Looking at the source material you mentioned (The Sentinel, Stargate: Atlantis, CSI: Miami, JAG), it looks like you find inspiration in the sort of military/law enforcement genres. Do you think that's an accurate assessment and is there a reason for that?

T: Oddly enough, the military/law enforcement aspect of the television shows and movies I chose never struck me, but you’re right... I think I gravitated toward those genres because the men were capable, well-trained, always in control, and could take care of themselves and the people they cared about. Of course there were times when they fell on their faces, but they would be too perfect otherwise, and as I had a character mention in Bless Us With Content, perfection can be very boring. (And aside from that, I wouldn’t want them to come across as Mary Sue-ish.)

Having said this, what occurs to me now is that neither BUWC nor my other published novel, Friends and Lovers, have anything to do with the military or law enforcement.

SW: Well, that gives me an excellent opportunity to ask you about Bless Us With Content, because there were a few things that I thought were very interesting. BUWC takes place in the 19th century and you use quite a bit of period words and phrases. One of them was the phrase "pull rope" to mean "tattle". I had never heard that term before. Also, there are a lot of little details, like a lead chess piece that becomes part of a cruel children's game, that really felt real to the time period. How much research did you do in preparing to write this book?

T: I do copious amounts of research, and on a flash drive I carry from the desktop to the laptop I have a timeline with births, deaths, marriages, and physical descriptions listed on it, as well as files that contain pictures of how I imagined Laytham Hall and its rooms and their furnishing appeared, and what the various horses looked like. I wasn’t able to find as much information as I would have liked on the clothing the men wore, and truthfully, I didn’t care for the women’s fashions of the day. I also made sure there were jigsaw puzzles and toy lead soldiers at that time.

Although it dealt with a period 20 years earlier, I fell back on Georgette Heyer’s Regency World for much of the cant. The term that Robert Hood used was actually ‘cry rope.’ I felt some slang words used by Ash and the Hoods would linger, and what they used as boys they would be inclined to use as young men.

On the days when the writing doesn’t go smoothly, that’s when I go researching, but it all comes in handy.

SW: I'm going to have to write the name of that book down! It sounds very informative.

T: It’s an interesting book, Sully. I had to order it from the UK, but I’ve been a Georgette Heyer fan from way back, and if there’s one thing I love more than my computers, it’s books. One of my favorite pastimes is going to estate sales to see if I can find anything that might come in handy

SW: Your bio is a little bit oblique about your age (which is, of course, a lady's prerogative), but I get the feeling that your education took place before an Internet connection was a household norm. How would you say that your research habits have changed now that you're as wired as we all are? Or haven't they changed? Do you still find yourself relying mostly on books?

T: Prior to the Net, research was difficult. Of course, at that time I wrote het, but trying to learn about locales – There was that tenet: write what you know. What I knew was a small suburb of Queens, NY. I actually wrote to the Chamber of Commerce of a western city once, but what they very kindly sent me didn’t help in any way…

We got our first computer in the early 90s, and we had no clue what we were buying. That good friend of mine kept asking me to email her, but at that time I had no clue what an ISP was or how to connect to the Net, much less send an email. (my, how times have changed!) We had more luck with our second computer, or maybe I should say I had more luck with it, since it became virtually mine. I actually learned how to get it to work.

In spite of that, for quite some time afterwards, I collected thesauri, and relied on them heavily. And then I realized there were amazing things available on the Net; I discovered Jeeves. From there I went to Google and Wiki.

At any rate, while I have stacks of books that I’ll still check out from time to time, for the most part I rely very heavily on the Web. Everything is just a keystroke away.

SW: Do you find that the research you do sometimes affects the stories that you write? Do you sometimes find yourself changing the story because of research that you do, or does the research mainly just color in the margins?

T: For the most part, the research colors in the margins… With BUWC, once I’d decided to have Ash try other crops, I looked into the crops that were actually grown in Surrey and checked out the diseases and insects that would attack them. Even though it was just a throwaway line, I felt including that was necessary.

Much of what I research is fortuitous. I needed a reason for Geo to go to the Continent and was able to use the death of the Emperor Francis II as the reason. It may not be that anyone else would really care, but if someone did decide to look into it, they would find it’s factual.

As for having research changing the story, it’s happened. I’m working on what I call the gay vampire story (no title yet), and I thought as a little nod to my older son, I’d have the [main character] study mortuary science. I found a college syllabus online, and thought I could use the Anatomy and Physiology class for an inside joke… My son told me that wasn’t one of the classes he’s required to take – that would be Anatomy for Embalmers. I had to do a lot of tap dancing to work around that. I still planned to use what happened in my Anat and Phys class, only I’d have it happen to my MC’s best friend.

And now I need to go back and put that in the story, because I’d forgotten about it and only now remembered. *facepalm*

SW: Well, you're welcome.

T: I wrote 550 words about that, so I thank you again. (It blows my mind when I hear people can write thousands of words in a day!)

SW: Switching gears entirely, we touched briefly on your LiveJournal earlier. You're a pretty prolific LiveJournaler (LiveJournalist?). When I looked at it a few days ago, you had close to a thousand entries.

T: I have almost 1,000 entries on Live Journal? Really?

SW: Yes, it was in the mid 800's if I remember correctly.

T: Wow. Come to think of it, I’ve been on LJ for almost 9 years!

SW: I didn't have time to read them all, but I did sort of randomly sample and there were a lot of entries where you seemed to be crowd sourcing some kind of problem that you were working on. When you write a post about whether a character's actions are believable, what kind of response do you usually get?

T: One of the reasons why I’ll ask a question on LJ is because I know the woman who used to beta for me will be more likely to answer than if I send her an email. Too often Comcast or Embarqmail play games with us, and our emails go missing. I trust her above everyone else, and if she says, ‘Um, Tinn, going a little overboard there,’ I know I need to do some reworking.

I’m not one of those writers who’ll say “Tell me where I should go with this story!” This is my story to tell. If someone has a suggestion and it fits in with how I’d planned for the story to go, I’ll consider it. For instance, in The Light in Your Eyes, a reader thought it would be interesting to see what happened when Theo took Wills home to meet his family. I’d originally planned to go that route, but had decided against it, only because I was a little tired at that point. By the time he wrote, I was willing to go back and revisit. Keep in mind this story runs almost 150k words. If it ever was to be published, it would need to be seriously revised.

SW: So it sounds like you've always got a project in the works. Care to tell us anything about what you're working on right now?

T: There’s always something.

Right now I’m working on what I call my gay vampire story. (I only call it that because I still don’t have a title for it, although it will probably be Come By Night.)… [I]t’s set in a universe where after the Black Plague nearly wiped out mankind, the vampires fell back on another food source, humans who were untouched by the Plague and who had something in their blood that enabled the vampires to survive. (I’m thinking a variation of hemochromatosis) The two species became symbiotic. This is the novel where the MC decides to take mortuary science in college. (Oh, and just as an aside, it really took off last night. I love when that happens.)

I’m also working on a Sidebar, which is an offshoot of the Mann of My Dreams universe. Two of the characters (one a former rent boy and the other someone who does wet work from time to time) will be getting married (okay, it’s more like a commitment ceremony, but they consider themselves married) and then bringing a baby into their household. So many of my readers ask if I’ll be publishing Mann, but I don’t see how I can. It’s all over the Net, and is up on the Best of Nifty on the Net. There’s also the fact that I use music for inspiration a good deal of the time, and in order to get permission to use the lines from the various songs, it would cost at a minimum $250 per song.

One of the ezines I contribute to has an anniversary issue coming out this summer, and I’d like to give them at least one story, although I have two in mind. I tell myself, ‘I’ll do a short. How difficult can that be?’ But they seem to run away with me. The last one was 33k words. *wry grin*

And then there’s the story that takes place in Great Britain between the late 40s and the mid 70s. And the one about the shapeshifter and the alien/terran. And...

So I’m going to be very busy. I keep thinking that if I just finish this next story, I’ll be able to slow down a bit, but it doesn’t seem to happen.

SW: Well, those sound really fun. I'll be looking forward to the vampire story. I have a special place in my heart for geeky, science-based fantasy.

T: Thank you! There should be about one or two more stories/chapters to the vampire novel, and then it’s off to the betas. I hope once that’s done it will find a good home.

SW: Do you have any rituals when you're writing? Any particular habits that make the words come easier?

T: I like background music, so I have the radio on almost all day.There’s an easy listening station down here, and we recently switched to DirecTV, which has a music station connected to it. It plays the songs I grew up with. Once I have the music going, I start writing.

I wish I could say I sit down at the computer everyday and deathless prose flows from my fingertips, but frankly it can be a slog. I have a title, a first line I’m happy with, and a place where I know I can end it. But getting the words to come easier? They do that when they want to. I mentioned earlier that the vampire story suddenly began moving, but for the longest time it was a sentence or two at a time if I was lucky, or else I’d have to leave it completely alone and work on something else.

The things is, I do finish what I start. It might take a while, and like Bless Us With Content, it might have to sit on the backburner for a couple of years, but I never give up on anything.

SW: Well, Tinnean, it's been such a pleasure talking with you. I am so looking forward to reading the great stuff you're working on!

T: Thanks very much, Sully!

Tinnean can be contacted at tinneantoo@gmail.com, and can be found on Live Journal and on Facebook. If you'd like to sample her earlier works, they can be found at http://www.angelfire.com/fl5/tinnssinns/Welcome1.html

Why did he let his daughter play with his Oscar?

2011-03-14T11:05:00.000-07:00

Whoops.

It's New Fiction Friday!

2011-03-11T04:14:00.000-08:00

Every Friday, we'll be featuring another piece of fiction, sometimes a complete work, sometimes just an exerpt, sometimes by me, sometimes buy a guest writer. We've got some great guests lined up for the next couple of months, but to kick off the first New Fiction Friday, here's an exerpt of another of my works in progress. It's called...

The Ledges

As he sat next to his mother on the rail station bench, Howard thought that perhaps this trip was a mistake. The afternoon was hot and sunny, as August afternoons in Maine frequently are, and they had already spent nearly three hours on a humid, miserable train ride. Howard’s suit was sticking to his back and he was certain that the waistband of his pants must be sodden with sweat in the back. He could feel himself becoming nearly desperate for a chance to wash, a change of clothing, and a glass of good scotch. None of that could happen until their promised ride to their hotel arrived, and it was late. Or perhaps it wasn’t coming at all.

Howard’s mother, sensing his impatience, patted his knee with a gloved hand. She was a lady, and never travelled without gloves and a hat, today a pair of small white gloves and a large cloth hat with a satin flower in the front. “Don’t worry, darling,” she said gently. “They said they would send someone to pick us up. I’m sure they’re just running behind.”

Or they’ve forgotten us, Howard thought. He stood up and walked to the edge of the platform, facing the street and the center of the tiny town of Freedom Beach. He looked around, as though merely doing something, anything, would bring their ride more quickly.

Their train had huffed into town nearly an hour ago, at least according to the clock on the steeple of the church across the street. The stores around the church – in fact, the entire town – struck Howard’s modern eyes as hopelessly Victorian. It’s 1953, he thought. They really ought to update this place. Worse, although everything seemed neat and tidy, there was something distinctly second-rate about the place, something worn and a little too lived-in about it. It was true that Howard and his mother were no longer as well off as they had once been – had fairly recently been – but surely they could afford something nicer than this little second-class vacation spot. Or maybe, he worried, they couldn’t.

Five minutes had passed and there was still no sign of their ride to the hotel. His mother had made the reservation for two nights – Friday to Sunday – at The Ledges, a hotel Howard had never heard of. So far, The Ledges was not exactly making a great impression. He looked around again. Perhaps he should go find a telephone to call the hotel, or perhaps they could hire a car to take them to where they needed to go. Howard turned to his mother, who was still seated primly, patiently on the bench. “I’m going to go across to the shop over there” – he pointed across the street to a store called Miller’s Sweets – “and see if I can’t find us a ride to the hotel.”

His mother smiled a little, the way she always did. It was less a smile than a sort of inert warmth spreading across her face. “Whatever you think, dear.” He left the bags with her at the station and crossed to the store.

A bell tinkled when he opened the door, and the sweet smell of pulled taffy greeted him. The man behind the counter – middle aged and wearing a blue, striped apron over shirtsleeves and a red tie – gave him a friendly smile. “Welcome to Miller’s Sweets,” he said, placing both his hands on the glass counter above the chocolate covered oranges. “We’ve got six types of homemade taffy today. Care to try a piece? Hand pulled this morning.”

“Maybe some other time,” Howard said. “Actually, I was hoping to find a telephone.”

The man furrowed his brow but his face retained its good humor. “I’m sorry, sir. We haven’t got a phone here at Miller’s. I think Sara Watkins at the book store might have one.”

Howard sighed. He’d seen the book shop as the train was pulling into town. It was a couple of blocks away, much farther than he wanted to walk in this heat. “Is there any chance you know someone who could give my mother and me a ride? We were supposed to get picked up, but it appears we’ve been forgotten. We’d pay, of course.”

The man nodded. “My nephew has a car. Where do you need to go?”

“The Ledges. Do you know it?”

At the mention of the name, the shop keeper’s expression darkened. He took a step back and folded his arms. “Yes, I do know it, sir,” he said, his voice clipped and his lips tight. “And I will thank you to leave my store now. We don’t serve your kind here.”

“My… kind?”

The man started to become agitated. “Sir, you are currently trespassing in this store. I’d prefer not to get the police involved in this matter…”

Howard took a step back. “I’m sorry… I didn’t –“

The man began to shout. “Get out of here now, do you hear! You’re not welcome! Don’t make me get my gun!!”

Howard didn’t need to be threatened twice. He stumbled out into the harsh heat and sunlight of the street, nearly getting run over by a big Studebaker sedan as he started to cross back to the rail station. When he glanced back, he could see the man standing in the store window glaring at him. Shaken, Howard hurried back to his mother.

“What did they say, dear?” she asked.

“I believe… I believe he threatened to… shoot me!” Howard removed a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed it on his brow. It came away moist.

“Oh, dear. That wasn’t very nice.” His mother pursed her lips. “I’m sure our ride will be along shortly.” She folded her hands in her lap and proceeded to stare into middle distance, the way she often did when waiting patiently for something.

The man from Miller’s Sweets was now standing outside his store, speaking to a man and a woman, occasionally gesturing toward Howard. The woman cast a horrified glance in Howard’s direction, and the men frowned. The Miller’s shopkeeper folded his arms tightly across his chest. When another woman approached down the street, the shopkeeper stopped her, too, and apparently told her the same story; over the course of a few minutes, the shopkeeper managed to assemble a small but not insignificant group of people who seemed to share his baffling rage at Howard. Howard didn’t know what to do, and he could feel his heart rate quickening. It didn’t do anything for the amount of sweat his body was producing, even in the shade of the awning over the rail platform.

Just as Howard was beginning to contemplate the possibility that they might have to flee a mob, a dusty, red pickup truck pulled up in front of the train station, skidding to a stop on the gravel. The driver’s side door opened and out stepped a slender young man. He was younger than Howard – maybe twenty or twenty-one – and he had a sleek, muscled physique under a pair of jeans and a tight white T-shirt. His hair was dark, slicked back into a pompadour, and his skin seemed to have been turned a pleasant golden-brown by the summer sun. His nose was straight and broad, and his mouth was wide and sensuous, the lips full and surprisingly red.

But it was the young man’s eyes that really caught Howard’s attention. They were an icy blue, a color rarely found anywhere in nature, and set out by a pair of thick, dark eyebrows. Howard knew he was staring, but was powerless to stop. The young man, though, didn’t seem to notice.

“You folks the Morgans?” the young man asked, leaning against the truck. He lit a cigarette.

Howard’s mother stood up. “Yes,” she said and stepped forward, offering her hand to the young man to help her down off the platform. “I’m Mrs. Morgan, and this is my son, Howard.”

The young man ignored Howard’s mother, flicking some ash from his cigarette onto the ground. “I’m Marco,” he said. “I’m your ride to The Ledges.” He remained where he was, leaning against the truck. He didn’t offer any explanation or apology for his tardiness.

It was suddenly all too much for Howard to bear. The boy may be beautiful, but he was inexcusably rude. “Now look here,” Howard blurted, “you’re being very rude. My mother and I are tired and have had a long day of travelling, and you are very late. And the mere mention of the name of your establishment caused the man at Miller’s Sweets to threaten to shoot me!”

Slowly, unconcernedly, Marco turned to look at the small group in front of Miller’s, which had now grown to include well over a dozen people. Marco smiled, an almost cruel upturn of the lips, then stepped around the truck, faced the group, and made a vulgar gesture with his hand and his crotch. The group scattered as though he had fired a weapon in its direction. When he turned back, he was laughing. “Stupid yokels,” he said, mostly to himself.

Marco stubbed his cigarette out on the ground. “Gonna be a tight ride,” he said, opening the door of the truck for Howard’s mother. “I’m afraid there’s not much room in the cab.” He helped Mrs. Morgan climb in. “Get the bags, will you, Howard?” Marco climbed back behind the wheel of the truck and shut the door, leaving Howard alone on the train station platform.

Not for the first time, Howard wondered why his mother had chosen The Ledges. Surely, they could have afforded on e of the hotels in town. They all seemed agreeable, if a little fussy, and would have afforded them the same access to the ocean his mother said The Ledges provided. And it was unlikely that mentioning the name of one of the hotels here in town would get a person run out of the shop. Besides, their fellow travelers had been picked up on time by their lodgings, and in busses and comfortable sedans. Howard did not relish being wedged into the pickup truck with his mother and a surly – if attractive – adolescent.

From inside the truck, Howard’s mother gave him an expectant look. He loaded the bags into the bed of the truck and climbed in next to his mother. Marco, with little concern for their comfort, sped away down the road and out of town.

Readers Unite!

2011-03-10T15:50:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, some folks came up with The Reader's Bill of Rights for Digital Books, and it's prettty awesome. It's a bit of a failure on my part that I haven't written about this until now. Here's a sample:

The Readers' Bill of Rights for Digital Books:
1. Ability to retain, archive and transfer purchased materials
2. Ability to create a paper copy of the item in its entirety
3. Digital Books should be in an open format (e.g. you could read on a computer, not just a device)
4. Choice of hardware to access books (e.g. in 3 years when your device has broken, you can still read your book on other hardware)
5. Reader information will remain private (what, when and how we read will not be stored, sold or marketed)

There's more, but that's the meat of it. And I completely agree. Look, if I buy a physical book, it's mine to do with as I please. I can photocopy the whole damn thing. I can loan it to everybody I know. And I'm never not going to be able to read it (assuming I retain the ability to read - more on that some other time). You should really go read the whole thing. The same thing should be true with the digital copy I buy for my e-reader.

Anyway, they now have a logo! And it's all reader-power-y! How awesome is that? Mild mannered reader types like us never get to be the millitant, fist-pumping types. Now we can. And lefties, check it out - Lefty Power!

Rainy days and Mondays...

2011-03-10T07:42:00.001-08:00

Today is an exceptionally gray day, which makes the fact that I'm stuck in an office even worse than usual. What do you usually do on days that are just too gray to handle?

Your dream of becoming more like your cat...

2011-03-09T17:47:00.001-08:00

...could come true!

Yeah, that's not great. Here's the deal a study in the journal Nature notes that our genome is only a couple of molecules away from giving us sensory whiskers (like cats have). And, a drug could potentially make that happen! Exciting, right?

Right now, I'm trying to imagine what I would look like with whiskers. I'm not sure this would be a good thing.

So, without further ado, a glimpse of your future:

Absolutely Cuckoo Cats from SINLOGO on Vimeo.

New Feature: New Fiction Friday

2011-03-09T04:28:00.000-08:00

It's been fun to be back in the writing and blogging mode, and I'm hoping to really make this blog somewhere fun to visit. To that end, I'm instituting a new feature: New Fiction Friday.

I'm starting it out with my own fiction, but I also want to feature other writers. Professional writers, amateur writers, good writers, terrible writers: if you've got writing you want to share, I'd love to post it. It doesn't have to be m/m romance; it can be sci-fi, contemporary, literary, whatever! My readers are invited to comment (please be polite - remember high school English class rules: constructive criticism only! Trolls will be booted), and writers can post a comment about what specifically they'd like readers to be looking for.

Hopefully this will be a fun exercise for everyone, and I'm really looking forward to digging into this with both hands!

Happy Hump Day everybody!

Bennett for Congress, cont'd

2011-03-06T16:23:00.000-08:00

More fiction-y goodness from my work-in-progess to end the weekend. If you'd like to read what comes immediataely before this, click here.

Six months earlier

“Parker!” The sound of the foreman shouting my name only barely reached me over the din from forty-seven massive printing machines. He was standing only a few yards away, a skinny, stoop-shouldered kid named Terry with a cigarette constantly dangling from between his lips. He had to shout again before I looked up. When I did, he nodded to me once, a little bit of ash dropping from the cigarette in his mouth to the poured cement floor.

I stepped away from the machine and towards Terry, but it was only marginally quieter. “What?” I shouted back.

He met me halfway, and had to yell practically into my ear. “You got a visitor!”

A visitor. Who would be visiting me at work? “Who is it?”

He shrugged and shouted again. “Somebody named Augur.”

I furrowed my brow. “Who?”

He shook his head. “How the fuck should I know? He’s out front.” With that, his duty discharged, Terry wandered away, towards his tiny, makeshift office at the front of the printing room, where he no doubt had some porn that needed looking at. He wasn’t a young man possessed of a natural work ethic; instead, he seemed to be having a contest with himself over how little he could do and still collect a paycheck. That he had bothered to tell me I had a visitor was a minor miracle.

I shut my machine down, letting it whir to a stop before I leave it. They’re temperamental, these machines. They have to be watched constantly to make sure that paper jams, ink bleeding, and misalignments don’t happen. Leave it running alone for two minutes while you take a leak and you’ll come back to three hours worth of unspooling, unbinding, and unclenching.

I headed towards the front office, passing by Terry’s little room, his face screwed up into a mask of concentration and lit by his computer screen. I turned the handle of the office door, leaving a wide smear of black ink. It seemed like my hands were always covered in ink, a different color or combination of colors depending on what machine I was working that day. My nails seemed to be permanently stained a deep blue, as though I had smashed each of them with a hammer. I was getting used to it. As I opened the door into the office, I took a moment to wipe the sweat off my upper lip with the sleeve of my shirt.

Who do I know named Augur? I wondered again.

Darlene, the big haired, long nailed receptionist, looked up when I walked in. She smiled at me. “You got a visitor,” she said. After all that time on the factory floor, it sounded strange to hear someone speaking at a normal volume. After the din of the machines, though, everything seemed slightly muffled and I wondered – not for the first time – if my time on the factory floor could be giving me permanent hearing loss.

I looked around the reception area. In one of the three chairs in the makeshift waiting-room, situated around a glass coffee table scratched opaque from a decade or two of coaster-less coffee cups and briefcase hinges, sat a fat man in a business suit. I had no idea who this guy was. I looked at Darlene.

She shook her head. “No, silly,” she said, her Texas twang drawing the word silly out to ridiculous lengths. “He said he’d wait outside.”

It was nearly noon in early May in central Texas. And it was shaping up to be a hot spring. While the nights still got a little cool, the days were easily in the high eighties. Who would want to sit outside when he could be indoors, in the air conditioning? As I walked out the front door, careful not to get any ink where customers might see it, I couldn’t think of who possibly could be looking for me.

All the cars in the parking lot were familiar – the Lexus that Mr. Redding, the president of Redding Printing, drove; Darlene’s bright yellow Rav-4; the beat up pickup trucks and ancient sedans the guys on the printing floor drove – except for one: a big, black, American-made rental car at the back of the lot. Leaning against it was a tall, muscular man with close-cropped black hair. He was wearing a pair of aviator glasses and had his mouth set in a grim line.

Sensing that this was my rendezvous, I walked across the sweltering parking lot towards the car. When I was halfway there, the man by the car smiled, stood up, and took off his glasses. Recognition hit me like a wall. Of course: Lieutenant John Augur, United States Army, "LT" to the men who served under him. He extended a hand to me as I approached and I took it, feeling a familiar pleasure at seeing the man who had been my commanding officer.

“Goddamn, boy,” he said to me as he pumped my hand once and slapped me on the shoulder with his left, “you are a hard man to find.”

“Good to see you, sir,” I said. Almost unconsciously, I stepped back, placed my hands behind me, head up, shoulders back, chest out. The position of waiting for instructions from a superior officer.

He shook his head, looking me up and down as though he couldn’t quite believe that he had found me. “Sergeant Parker. You know, it is my greatest regret that I couldn’t save your career. If you’d stayed in the army, you’d easily have made Major by now. Probably you’d’ve outpaced my sorry ass by the time you were my age.” LT has always seemed somewhat ageless, and even now I was having trouble guessing how old he might be. He had seemed to be in his late thirties or early forties when I met him ten years ago. Somehow, though, he didn’t seem to have aged at all, and I wondered, again, why he is here.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

He looked up at the giant, square building behind me, squinting into the sunlight. “I’d’ve thought you’d be working for some security company or private contractor in Iraq or Afghanistan. The experience you’ve got, your record, your brains? I figured you’d have some big fat job with some big fat paycheck.” He looked down at me. “Instead, I find you working at a…well, what the fuck is this place? A paper company?”

“Printing company, sir. We print napkins, menus, placemats for major chain restaurants.”

LT stared at me for a long moment, his expression bordering on incredulous. “You are wasted here, Parker,” he said. “I guarantee it. Why the fuck are you here in Texas?”

“It’s a long story, sir.”

“I’m sure it is.” He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “You feel like leaving Texas?”

“Sir?”

“I’m here to offer you a job, kid. A good job. One that pays way more than this piece of shit J.O.B.” He paused to let me think about it for a second. “And you might be able to do something more interesting than” – he looked skeptically at my inky hands – “finger painting.”

I couldn’t help but smile at his joke, but I wasn’t sure what to say. After a moment, I decided I might as well find out what the job was. “What’s the job, sir?”

“You follow politics, Parker?”

“No, sir.” It might’ve been the fact that I came from a military family, but I have never been able to muster any real interest in the political machinations that seemed to swirl around the country like ether. Despite the fact that, as a soldier, my fate could’ve been determined by those political dealings, I still couldn’t bring myself to follow it. It all seemed like a colossal waste of time.

LT shifted his weight, and leaned back further against the car. “You ever hear of a guy called Roy Ruttgarde?” he asked. When I furrowed my brow and shook my head, he said, “No, of course not. Why would you have? He’s a member of congress, but not from around here.” He named the state and I had visions of mountains and cool air. “Well, he was a member of congress for thirty-seven years until about four months ago when he dropped dead on a golf course.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry to say I never met the man, but he was a big supporter of the armed forces. He was a good man, a patriot, and he served his country well.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you, sir.”

“After the congressman passed, the governor appointed an interim senator, a guy named Arthur Newsome.” Again, the name fell on my ears like a foreign language. “He had served in congress before,” LT continued, “but had retired and only came out to fill the position. So, he’s not interested in the seat, which means it’s up for grabs. There are two guys running for the seat, and one of them is named Stephen Bennett. You heard of him?”

I shook my head.

“Right, well, I work for him. We’ve been campaigning for a couple of months now, making pretty good headway. There’s a smart, young girl running his campaign. A real political mind on her. And Bennett’s a good man with a lot of good ideas for the state and the country. I’m proud to be working for him.” He gave that little speech with a charming sincerity, like the Boy Scout I was sure he once was. “It’s been a little lean up until now, though, and we haven’t been able to hire the staff we really need. But a couple weeks ago, the national party remembered that they’d like us to win this thing and gave us a pretty big infusion of cash, enough to hire some real people. How would you like to be one of those people?”

I thought about the cool air and the mountains. Then I said, “Sir, I don’t know anything about politics. Why does a candidate for congress in a state I’ve never even been to want me to come work for him?”

“Lots of reasons. You’re young, you’re handsome, you’ve got a strong military record, you’re Asian, and you’re gay.”

I furrowed my brow. “He wants me because I’m gay, sir?”

LT rolled his eyes. “Well, not just because you’re gay, but because of the whole thing. The campaign thinks that you represent the whole package: minority, military friendly, photogenic. The whole shebang.”

There was something not quite convincing about the way he said it, as though he was reciting a script or reading from some kind of internal teleprompter. And, anyway, there was a ring of untruth about the whole thing. What congressman from a western district needed the gay vote? There had to be plenty of handsome, minority soldiers that could be paid to support the Bennett campaign; why add the often divisive issue of sexuality?

“Okay,” I said. “Why do you want to hire me, sir?”

He didn’t hesitate with an answer. “Because I’ve never worked with any soldier who had your instincts. I’ve worked with a lot of interrogators in my time, but you were in a class of your own.” He sounded almost wistful talking about my service. “Some guys have trouble reading people through an interpreter. They let race and custom get in the way. But you… you’re something else, kid. I gotta tell you, Parker, the Army made a mistake when they discharged you. Homo or no, for the good of the forces, they should have kept you.”

He was telling the truth, and it was a truth I already knew. LT was there the day our Major called me in to tell me that it had been reported that I was engaged in a homosexual relationship. I could easily remember the expression on LT’s face that day, as though he was half ashamed to be part of this and half trying to figure out how he could fix it. Of course, there was nothing that he or anyone else could do, and it wasn’t long afterwards that I found myself and all my possessions on a military flight back to Texas.

“Look,” he said, perhaps sensing some reluctance on my part, “I don’t need an answer right now. I’ll be around for another couple of days.” He pulled out a pen and a business card. He flipped the card over and, cradling it in his left hand, wrote something on it. “Think about it and give me a call.” He held the card out for me and I took it. “We’ll be in touch, Parker.” Without another word, he turned, got into the car, and shut the door. The engine started up with a roar and he waved once before pulling away, leaving me standing on the hot asphalt of the parking lot.

It was only after he had pulled out of the lot and was headed away, down the street, that I looked at the card in my hand. On the front, there was his name, and underneath that, Head of Security, Stephen Bennett for Congress. There was a phone number and an email address below it and I found myself wondering if LT was capable of checking an email account. He had always seemed resistant to technology, and I couldn’t remember him once using a computer, instead delegating duties that required computers to lower officers.

I flipped the card over and saw that on the back he had written, Salary now-November. Underneath that, in his clear, precise handwriting, he had written a number that was nearly three times the yearly salary I was making at the factory. I looked down the road in the direction he had departed, although I’m not sure what answers I expected to find there. Finally, I put the card back in my pocket and returned to my machine.

Chinese Boob Clamp Bra

2011-03-06T15:00:00.000-08:00

This is my favorite thing ever. (NSFW - you've been warned)

The Little Death

2011-03-06T14:12:00.000-08:00

I hate the word orgasm. Not the thing - just the word. Maybe because it sounds too clinical? Or maybe because it sounds like organism and that makes me think of icky bugs?

Regardless, I've decided I like the English term crisis better. There's the sense that it's something important and slightly dangerous. There's the way the word sounds - that lovely kuh sound at the beginning with the repetitive ess sounds after it. Contrast that with the terrible org and then the s bumping up against the m. Bleck.

What do you think about that? Think one woman can improve American English?

Bennett for Congress Exerpt

2011-03-04T14:30:00.000-08:00

Here's an exerpt of one of the things I've been working on these days. Let me know what you think:

First Tuesday in November: Election Day

When I arrive in the morning, the campaign office is in a slow burn of panic. That is, of course, not unexpected; after all, today is the big day. But seeing all these people, all of these campaign volunteers, people who want to see Stephen Bennett represent them in congress, is a bit of a surprise. I suppose I hadn’t realized that there were actual people who would be voting today.

The campaign office is just a formerly empty storefront, and in a week or so – however long it takes everybody to clear out – it’ll be empty again. Along the left hand wall, there are a set of desks, the kind you find in libraries, like little cubbies for privacy, and each one has a phone on it: our phone bank for drumming up support. On the right hand side of the room, there are a few desks like the kind I remember my teachers sitting behind in school. The chairs behind the desks were donated by a lawyer’s office that was replacing them; they are universally broken. In the back, there is a false wall, hastily constructed a few days after the office opened; it doesn’t go all the way to the ceiling. Behind the wall, there are four offices, one for Bennett himself, one for his campaign manager, one that LT and I share (although it’s mostly his), and an empty office that gets used by whatever muckitymuck is visiting from out of town to offer an endorsement or to campaign alongside the candidate. Though the front room is normally rather sparsely populated, today it is crawling with senior citizens, stay-at-home moms and college students skipping their Tuesday morning classes.

Jeremy the Intern, dressed in a suit and tie as always, sees me first. He grins at me and says, “Morning, Hanoi,” his charming nickname for me, which I think he believes is a joke. It is only funny, though, if you believe there is something inherently funny about my being Vietnamese-American. “They’re looking for you.” He doesn’t wait for me to ask who they are or why they might be looking for me – he knows that I know – but goes back to explaining the use of door knockers to a couple of women with strollers.

I start to make my way through the throng of people towards the door in the false wall at the back. The phone in my pocket beeps, indicating a text message. A moment later, it beeps again and I pull it out of my pocket. Before I can even get it open, there is another message, and by the time I’ve opened the first message, there is a fourth. They are all from the same, now familiar number, and they read, in order of receipt:

You’re going down.
Prepare to be overtaken from behind.
I’m coming for you.
That’s all the double entendres I can think of before I’ve had my coffee. See you tonight. XO

I smile and replace the phone in my pocket.

Before I make it to the door, it opens and LT is standing there. Like me, he’s dressed conservatively in slacks and a jacket with a polo shirt. Bennett wants us to look professional and in charge, but also approachable and like one of the people. For the first time, though, I notice how tired LT looks. He’s not a young man anymore – he’s probably in his mid-fifties, though it’s hard to say for sure – but he has always been a fit and athletic guy. The last few months seem to have exhausted him, though. There are bags under his eyes and his skin has a slackness I don’t remember from before. His clothes seem a little loose on him, as though perhaps he has been losing weight.

He takes me by the arm and turns me around towards the front of the room. “We’ve got a situation,” he says quietly and ushers me out the door. “You and me, we need to take a ride.”

To continue reading, click here.

Writers and Depression

2010-12-12T13:15:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has ever received a rejection letter (so, pretty much everyone who has ever tried to write professionally) will see this as not particularly newsworthy:

Artists, entertainers, writers

These jobs can bring irregular paychecks, uncertain hours, and isolation.

Creative people may also have higher rates of mood disorders; about 9% reported an episode of major depression in the previous year.

Granted, this article is from Health.com, a fairly commercial site and therefore not the deepest source of news. But many of these jobs seem important and worthy but difficult (health care workers, teachers, social workers), and many seem difficult but menial (food service worker, support staff, retail staff).

I'm wondering which group to put artists/writers into. It feels like important work, especially while you're doing it, but is it really? Sometimes (especially now when I'm waist deep in depressing revisions), I wonder if the world really needs another mediocre novel. If I just put it away in my desk, deleted the file from my computer, and walked away from the whole thing, would anybody really notice. Someone would notice if their doctor walked away, but a writer?

Of course I'm not going to do that (I'm waaaaay too in love with my own thoughts). We can all agree that great writers are necessary, but how necessary are mediocre ones?

How The New York Times on Kindle is Changing My Life

2010-12-04T07:51:00.000-08:00

Okay, the title is a little hyperbolic. But subscribing to The New York Times through my Kindle has been one of the best decisions I ever made. Here's why:

There is no more convenient way to receive the paper. I currently work in the circulation department for a local newspaper. Part of my job means receiving and dealing with complaints from customers about the delivery service. Our drivers are pretty good, but if you're unlucky enough to live on the route of one of our sub-par drivers, your paper may wind up in the bushes, underneath the car, or in a puddle. Even when the driver does it correctly and manages to get it onto your porch or into the tube by your mailbox, that's no guarantee that inclement weather won't leave your paper wet or ruined. And even if everything goes well, you're still leaving the comfort of your house in the rain and the snow and the heat and the cold to retrieve your paper.

Me, my paper arrives by magic. Or, at least, that's the way it feels. Every morning, I turn my Kindle on, it finds the Wi-Fi network within a few seconds, the screen blinks once, and there's today's New York Times. Magic. No wires, nothing. I turn it on and when I get out of the shower, there it is. Shit, I don't even have to get out of bed to receive the paper. Now if I could only train my husband to make me breakfast in bed, I would be living the life of Reilly.

The experience of reading the paper on the Kindle is better than reading it online or even in print. I have never actually subscribed to the New York Times (partially because of price and partially because of the reason listed above). But I have occasionally purchased copies of the paper from a grocery store or gas station. And I will admit that there are few more pleasant ways to pass a Sunday morning than sitting at the dining room table with a cup of good coffee and slowly flipping through the Sunday New York Times. The thing is, though, I don't always have time to do that on a Sunday, and I definitely don't have time to do that the other six days of the week.

As a result, because I like The New York Times and want to read their reporting, I have always read the website. Don't get me wrong, the New York Times website is one of the best and easisest to use news websites available. For years, this was a decent way to get news. However, it's not a particularly pleasant way to read the news. If you have sensitive eyes like I do, staring at a glowing computer screen eventually makes it difficult to focus. The moving ads on the side and top of articles is distracting. And studies have shown that the links embedded in articles and blogs (yes, I use links, I know) actually slows reading and hurts comprehension.

Reading the New York Times on the Kindle gives all the bennies of reading the print version without the drawbacks. The screen, as anyone who has used a Kindle knows, doesn't glow and so is not at all stressful to read. The size of the Kindle is almost perfect, small enough that it fits comfortably in my fairly small purse. It can be turned on anywhere (lines at the grocery store, traffic jams, while my husband pumps gas), and therefore I can read the paper anywhere and any time. I don't get newsprint on my fingers (which I, being me, would inevitably smear on my forehead and walk around with for the rest of the day). I don't have to noisily fold it up before putting it away.

Because it's better than the free, online version, I'm reading more of it. As those who frequent the Times website know, the top of the site features pictures and small descriptions of the articles, but most of the paper is accessible through links. That's fine, but it means that that hyperlinked headline has to catch your interest, or you're not going to read the article. Mostly, I just didn't read the article. Sections I knew I was interested in (books, style, movies, etc.) I would pay more attention to, but the national section or the New York state section got passed up. It just wasn't information that I was looking for.

With the Kindle version, you can go straight to articles you're looking for (there's a table of contets for the sections and one within each section), but it is easy and extremely pleasant to simply scroll through the newspaper with the movement buttons. The experience is like a faster, more portable version of flipping through the paper on a Sunday morning. As a result, more articles catch my eye and I wind up reading at least the first few paragraphs of most of the articles (even in the sports section which is my least favorite section). I'm reading a lot more about foreign politics, and rather than just hearing about things I already know about (books, health care, education, etc), I'm learning about things I never would have learned about if I were still reading the website.

It's reminding me why in the age of blogs and 24-hour news networks, newspapers are still essential. It's easy and fun to talk about why newspapers are dying. The conclusion most people come to is that people want to read today's news today, not tomorrow. And that's true to a degree; old news is just that. But there's something to be said for slow news in the way that there's something to be said for slow food.

Look, I love sites like Gawker, and I read my fair share of blogs. They're great. But they're also the news equivalent of fast food. You get one paragraph of facts about what happened and then four paragraphs of snarky comments and opnion. There's something to be said for the depths that newspapers -- with their staffs of professionally trained and ethically bound jounralists -- can provide to a story. There are lengthly quotes from all sorts of different people connected with the story. There is analysis from people who know what they're talking about (experts). It's a factual smorgasboard.

And let's not discount the fact that the New York Times is more likely to have the facts right. How often do you read something on a blog, only to have another post three hours later saying, "Whoops, sorry guys, we got that one wrong"? And how glad are you that you actually saw that second post. If you hadn't, you'd be walking around spreading false information. The Times, again with those professional reporters whose job it is to make sure that they have things right, is more likely to get there.

We need institutions like this. We need to have more objective points of view. I realize that the Times has a point of view -- news organizations ought to have a point of view -- but there is a very definite break between the opinion section of the paper and the news section. They are first and foremost about providing accurate information. Blogs are generally about pushing a point of view. News networks are about filling hours. We need to slow down every now and then, read yesterday's news today, and get a better idea of what it all means.

The price is right and I'm going to have to pay for it anyway. Newspapers can't keep giving away content for free. In an example of stunning collective naivite, newspapers decided to put their content online for free, believing that it would draw people in towards buying the home delivery. Of course, as we all know, it had the opposite effect (cow, milk, free). But this model is killing them. Next year, the New York Times and the Boston Globe will be going behind a paywall next year. All of the Murdoch owned papers, the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, the Daily Mail and a stunning number of local papers, are either already behind a paywall or are in the process of going there. Eventually, most newspaper content will be behind some kind of paywall. If you want access to this quality journalism, you're going to have to pay for it.

Believe me, I've already heard all of the arguments against going behind the paywall (and to that one lady who wrote to my paper and said she was going to call the attorney general on us, Freedom of the Press does not mean what you think it means). So, why not start paying for the format you want. I won't be paying for access to the website -- it's not the best way to get it and I just don't think it's worth it. I won't be paying for home delivery because, well, I don't have $700 a year to blow on a newspaper. But I do have $20 a month. At less than a dollar a day, a quality newspaper arrives in my house by magic, in a format that is easy to use and easy to carry. That seems like a pretty good deal. And learning how good a newspaper is in the balance? Well that's just priceless.

2010-12-03T17:48:00.001-08:00

No, I will not be watching this show at it's regularly scheduled time. I mean, my DVR is getting a little crowded as it is, and with Doctor Who and Top Gear coming back soon, there isn't going to be a spare byte on the drive. I will, however, get sucked into a marathon of Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys some Saturday afternoon and wile away nearly an entire day before I've realized it. That, I am looking forward to.

In some ways, I appreciate this show. "Fag hags" are always portrayed as a ridiculous stereotype: fat, unloveable by straight men, posessed of a crippling fear of abandonment, and shallow as hell. They are, universally, single, their only relationship being that with their "fag".

But I know plenty of women whose most important relationships are with gay men, and they're not that stereotype at all. Many of them are lovely, intelligent women, who have no problem finding a straight man who will love them (note: yeah, yeah, I know, finding a straight man to love you is not the definition of successful heterosexual womanhood, being single is not a black mark, blah blah yes yes I know). The relationships that these women have with their gay, male friends is simply a friendship with a man that lacks uncomfortable sexual objectification. She gets that little bit of sexual zing that comes from spending time with a man she finds attractive, without the worry that he will become creepy or over-assertive or otherwise ruin the friendship (yes, I'm fairly certain that the reason straight men and straight women have a hard time being friends is straight men).

Does the stereotype exist? Of course she does. Look hard enough and you will find the stereotype to confirm your prejudice. You can also find lazy fat people, dumb Polish people, and truckers who visit prostitutes. That does not mean that most of those groups confirm to their stereotypes. And "fag hags" (God, I hate that term) don't generally confirm to that stereotype either.

I wish that reality television could show the, well, reality. But, of course it can't. Instead this show will confirm all the things everyone believes about women who want to be friends with gay men: that they treat their "gay boyfriends" (another term I hate) like poodles, that they're shallow and materialistic, yadda yadda yadda.

It will annoy me the way that women (like me, I suppose) are portrayed as being horrible stereotypes.

It doesn't mean I won't enjoy that Saturday afternoon marathon.

2010-12-03T17:36:00.000-08:00

Come visit me on Amazon!

Do you like me? Do you really like me?

2010-12-03T04:28:00.000-08:00

Have you "liked" Billionaire's Row yet? If you've just been waiting for a reason, here it is: this weekend, I'll be posting exerpts of things I've been working on but you will only see it if you have "liked" Billionaire's Row.

It's easy to do. You can click on the link above, or you can click on the box on the right towards the top of the blog. In the future, I'll be running contests through the page and giving away some cool stuff. So if you want to see what all the cool kids are seeing, you'd best get clicking away!

Proof

2010-12-02T16:57:00.000-08:00

A little bit ago, I mentioned that getting a little bit famous means getting a book contract. Case in point: Here's the Situation

I highly suggest reaading the linked article above for a dissection of The Situation, the ghost-written celebrity book, and the cheaper elements of pop culture.

I Can't Think of a Pithy Title

2010-12-02T15:26:00.000-08:00

So, Christine O'Donnell has a contract to write a book. This is probably the least surprising information ever. I mean, if you get to be even moderately famous, you get a contract to write a book. (Keep that in mind, kids)

Said O'Donnell: "The 2010 midterm elections were just the beginning—the first rumblings of a revolution that has not fully erupted. I plan on making my book one of the revolution’s catalysts."

So, we have that to look forward to.

Not cool, Amazon

2010-11-30T16:50:00.000-08:00

Not cool.

Gutenberg contributor Linda M. Everhart complained in an e-mail in late October that Amazon was selling a title she'd contributed to Gutenberg, Arthur Robert Harding's 1906 opus "Fox Trapping," for $4.

"They took the text version, stripped off the headers and footer containing the license, re-wrapped the sentences, and made the chapter titles bold," wrote Everhart, a Blairstown, Mo., trapper. She added that "their version had all my caption lines, in exactly the same place where I had put them."

In follow-up messages, Everhart pointed to such other instances of Kindle cloning as Eldred Nathaniel Woodcock's "Fifty Years a Hunter and Trapper" (free on Gutenberg, 99 cents on Amazon), John R. Lockard's "Bee Hunting" ($3.69 as a Kindle edition) and Martin Hunter's "Canadian Wilds" ($3.16 from Amazon). These titles appear to be sold with Amazon's standard digital-rights-management restrictions, a limit absent from Gutenberg downloads.

Project Gutenberg's books are free; that's sort of their whole thing. And apparently what Amazon is doing - taking free content, making minimal changes, and then charging for it - is legal.

I want to like Amazon. I really, really do. I want to see them as being fundamentally better than a retailer like Walmart. But then they do crap like this and it becomes just a little bit harder.

On Reviews and Obsession

2010-11-29T16:00:00.000-08:00

It is very easy to obsess about bad reviews. In the less-than-six-months since Billionaire's Row has been out, I have received enough not-great reviews to know this. My favorite, in a very weird way, is this one (still the only review on AllRomanceEBooks.com):

Billionaire's Row is a book that wants to be a murder mystery, wrapped inside film noir, wrapped inside a love story. Unfortunately, it fails at all three. Mystery, what mystery? The killer is apparent early on in the story, not one single character is likable or sympathetic, and the love story portion seems forced and unrealistic. Truthfully told, the relationship part of the story is peripheral to the not so big 'murder mystery'. Unless you like being bored to tears, skip this one!

Pretty harsh.

This appears to be a thing: as this Daily Mail article lays out, harsh reviews are a reality for small time authors (and, for the record, I barely qualify as small-time; I'm more like itsy-bitsy time):

By yesterday [The Very Thought of You by Rosie Allison] had attracted 119 reviews on Amazon – 50 per cent more than the book which won the prize, The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver...One compares Miss Alison’s writing to Mills and Boon novels, while another claims she ‘has no feel for fiction at all, no sense of what makes a plot tick along, no flair for language’.

Ouch.

The article goes on to mention that Ms. Allison has hired a company called Kwikchex, which specializes in cleaning up online reputations. She also suggests that some of the reviews may be from rival publishing companies looking to slander her.

I highly doubt that that hard review from All Romance Ebooks, or any of the ones on Goodreads, are the product of other writers trying to sabotage me (I'm just not convinced that I am capable of ruffling anybody's feathers like that). And although I have no idea whether or not this is true, I have a hard time believing that any publishers are out there sabotaging Ms. Allison's book, either.

Mostly, I'm pretty sure that this is just the internet at work. People love a good pile-on. About 60% of the internet just seems to be increasingly nasty comment threads. Sure there are plenty of people who use the web to look at porn (c'mon, who doesn't?), but we also use it to say things about other people we would never say aloud.

It seems perfectly normal to obsess a little when people say nasty things about your novel (or artwork, or article, or whatever). But the healthy thing to do is spend a few giddy minutes fantasizing about tracking down the offender and smacking them down with your obviously superior wit, and then move on and (mostly) forget about it. It's not my place to tell Ms. Allison what to do with her money and time, but maybe she should consider not reading her Amazon reviews.

And she should probably know that bad reviews don't really have as much of an effect as you might think. Some people even court bad reviews.

Autographing E-Books

2010-11-19T16:59:00.000-08:00

I am all over this:

Authors sign a temporary signature page until the customer has completed the online (or in store) purchase. The retailer's online store merges the autograph page into the ebook and transmits to the customer's eReader device. The author is not restricted to a single title or publisher - all of his or her books can be chosen from a selection menu at the customer's request for autographing.

New Project

2010-11-07T15:17:00.000-08:00

Hey, everybody! My new project is nearing completion. I am currently, tenatively, calling it The Ledges, but who knows if that title will stick (Billionaire's Row was originally called Unnatural Acts).

Anyway, my bigger problem is that I don't exactly know what it is? Is it a novel? Is it a collection of short stories? Who can say?

Think of it this way: structurally, it is somewhere between The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman and A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (and, I will say right now, I came up with the concept for the book long before I read either one).

With my project nearing completion, I am really looking forward to posting more details as well as exerpts. Stay tuned!

Love you, Anderson

2010-10-30T18:23:00.001-07:00

More and more, I don't just think Anderson Cooper is dreamy -- I think he's a pretty good journalist, too. Case in point:

Also: people, please teach your children to speak English correctly. When you say things like "he don't" when you mean "he didn't", you sound stupid, even if you're not.

2010-10-22T16:55:00.000-07:00

As the proud new owner of a Kindle, this is very exciting:

"Amazon will allow Kindle users to lend books to each other for 14-day periods, the company announced this afternoon."

It's about damn time. Maybe this will mean that we'll be able to check Kindle books out of the library, so that I don't have to spend a fortune on e-books.

In other Amazon news, check out my new Amazon Author Profile! It's a work in progress, so make sure to check back regularly for cool news stuff.

I'm back!!

2010-10-17T18:18:00.001-07:00

It's been a crazy few weeks over in Sully Personal Life Land, which is why I've been maintaining radio silence (real life job woes, a dog with Lyme disease, some family stuff, blah blah blah). Anyway, I'm back to blogging and I know I've missed a bunch of news worth blogging about (DADT declared illegal! The It Gets Better Project!!) and I'm sorry. I know how you were all waiting with bated breath to hear what I think about it all (har har).

Oh, also, I'm going to have an Amazon Author Profile going live in the next week, so stay tuned for that.

Good to be back, kids. I've missed you!!

Turning Their Backs on "Teh Gays"

2010-09-16T13:36:00.000-07:00

I might've mentioned that I grew up in a conservative Christian home, and that I went to a conservative Christian college, where people said (completely without irony), "Well, obviously you can't be both a Democrat and a Christian." Now, I have since left the Church behind and live my life as a happy agnostic. But, probably because of my upbringing, many things that others find shocking about modern American Christianity, I find completely unsurprising.

Take, for instance, Christine O'Donnell. For those who don't know, she was just nominated by the Republican party (or, more accurately, by the Tea Party wing of the Republican party) as their candidate for United States Senate in Delaware. In the days since the primary, we have all learned that she holds some extremely conservative views. She is anti-abortion even in cases of rape and incest, she believes in abstinance until marriage, abstinance-only education, and no contraception. She also believes that masturbation is wrong (everybody else seems to think that that is shocking, but it's not something I haven't heard before). She also has misled voters about her education, has a messy financial history, seems to have a vindictive streak, and has engaged in some not-so-subtle gay bashing.

And now news comes today that a former staffer is an ex-ex-gay and that when he came out of the closet, she turned her back on him. People seem to find that shocking. Oh, god, she just abandoned him when he decided that he couldn't not be gay! What a horrible person. To me, though, doesn't seem surprising at all. In fact, for the culture she belongs to, this seems about right.

When I was in college, I had a good friend whose older sister had a long-term boyfriend that she wanted to marry. However, there was a problem. The boyfriend's sister was a lesbian. The older sister felt that her boyfriend should be willing to "condemn" his sister's lifestyle and agree that, if they had children, those children would not be able to see their aunt. She also felt that they should raise these hypothetical children with the clear directive that being gay is wrong. The boyfriend's inability to promise to lop off a piece of his family from his life caused serious problems and called into question whether or not a marriage would take place.

The worst part? At the time, I remember sitting around with my friend and all of us agreeing that he was being unreasonable and unChristian for refusing to make this concession. What was wrong with him? Didn't he realize that that was what God wanted him to do? Didn't he realize that, unless everyone shunned his sinner sister, she would continue to live in this sinful way? We were all rational and loving; he and his sister were clearly not worthy of my friend's older sister's love.

I have since (obviously) seen the error of my ways (and I offer a psychic apology to all the gays and lesbians I may have hurt with my ignorance). But I often think of this when I hear stories like this. People say, "Can you believe...?" and I think, "Well, duh." Ms. O'Donnell believes that her religion calls on her to abandon people when they decide to live in sin (of course, this is fairly selective -- it really only applies to gay people), and she did it. I'm sure she told herself at the time that this was very painful for her and that she was doing the right thing. BUT THIS IS IN NO WAY SURPRISING

Nor is the masturbation thing.

So can we please all get over it and start talking about all the other reasons she'd make a terrible senator?

Politics and Research

2010-09-10T06:36:00.001-07:00

My current work-in-progress (WIP), tentatively titled Bennett for Congress, concerns both the military and politics. I have gotten some great help with the military research (thanks, Rami!), but now it's time to turn my attention to the political research. Here I was at a little bit of a loss. I do know some people who have run for political office, but mostly they've run as conservatives and they haven't expressed a lot of interest in helping when I asked (I understand). I was beginning to wonder if I was going to have to just make it all up.

Yesterday, though, as I was driving home from work, my cell phone rang with a number I didn't recognize. Normally, I don't pick up the phone if I don't know the number (leave a message and I'll decide if I'll call you back later), but for whatever reason I did. The woman identified herself as "Elizabeth" from the Paul Hodes campaign and wanted to know if I would be able to work a shift at their phone bank. "Sorry," I said, almost without thinking about it, "I'm working that day" (which is true, but I probably would have said the same thing if I wasn't working). She reminded me that New Hampshire's primary is this coming Tuesday and said she'd call later assuming that Paul Hodes won the primary (he probably will).

It wasn't until after I hung up that I realized I had just passed up an opportunity to get up close and personal with a campaign. Duh, Sully, we're only in the political season (and it's set to ramp up in the next couple of weeks). What better way to research the political process than to get involved in a campaign? But then I thought Do I really want to help someone get elected? I mean, do I feel strong enough about any political candidate to help him/her get elected to congress? I don't really know. Looks like I'm going to have to do some research into my local candidates.

Unless someone out there in blog land has political experience and would like to talk about it.

Anyone?

Anyone?

Bueller?

Globe Genie

2010-09-09T18:05:00.000-07:00

In my junior year of college, one of my neighbors brought her car back with her from home. Once she got the car, I saw comparatively little of her, not because she had a boyfriend or because she had a job, but because she just spent a lot of time driving. Suddenly, she knew everything about the area surrounding Taylor University, where everything was, where all the interesting stuff was to be found (and in Upland, Indiana, there was precious little of that). I didn't have a car, but even if I did, I'm not sure I would have done the same. After all, how does one justify the gratuitous use of fuel? Then again, she did find some cool stuff.

I think that I kind of understand it, now. Thanks to Globe Genie, a website and corresponding algorithim created by an MIT student which, using Google Street View deposits you somewhere in the world. You hit the "Shuffle" button and it takes you off somewhere else. I started out in the Australian Outback, driving down a completely deserted stretch of road. When I got bored with that, it was off to an Arizona desert. Then, I wound up in an English suburb before getting lost in a West Virginia suburb. Now, I'm in Domerat, France, which appears to be a small, farming village.

It's really brought into sharp focus the appeal of just driving around. You come to an intersection and, not knowing where you're going or where anything is, you make a completely arbitrary choice. Am I going towards civilization or away from it? If I had taken a left instead of a right would I have found something wonderful? I must be in a wealthy neighborhood -- look at all these three-car garages. I wonder if they sell Fresca in that little shop. And on and on, never knowing what's up over the next hill or around the next corner. Sometimes it's incredibly boring (see: Charleston, West Virginia). But even when it's boring, there's the anticipation of what could be coming up next. And bonus: I can do it in my pajamas and Google has already paid for the gas!

No Boys Allowed

2010-09-09T12:06:00.000-07:00

In my real life, I am a massage therapist (no, I don't do "happy endings"; no, I don't have any celebrity clients; yes, people [men] occasionally proposition me but it's rare and pretty easy to shut down; no, I don't mind working on fat people; no, my husband doesn't mind that I touch guys for a living). As my sociology professor was fond of saying, in nearly every industry women are on average paid less than their male counterparts. The only exception he gave was modelling, where women vastly outearn men (even when controlling for the few women who make enormous salaries). I would like to add massage therapy as another industry where women make more than men. This is simply a function of demand: when asked if they have a gender preference for their therapist, most clients will say they would prefer a female therapist (there was a whole episode of Seinfeld about this very phenomenon). As a result, women get more appointments and wind up making more money. I also have some anecdotal evidence to suggest that women make more money in tips, although I haven't confirmed it.

So, seeing as how I wound up in a female-centric industry, I wonder what it says about me that I have wound up in a female-centric publishing genre. Although on the surface it may seem that male/male romances ought to be a more male-centric genre (what with all the penises and lack of vaginas and all), as all fans of the genre can tell you, the writers are overwhelmingly female and so are the readers. Did I subconsciously seek this out (keeping in mind that I knew nothing about the m/m romance genre when I started writing Billionaire's Row)? Do I try to insulate myself in worlds that are friendlier to women? Are these worlds actually friendlier to women? And by doing so have I accidentally ghettoized myself?

I bring this up after reading a post on the XX Blog about the Jodi Picoult-Jonathan Franzen-New York Times kerfuffle (there's a pretty good summary of it in the blog post for those who haven't been keeping up). Essentially, the more you look at the numbers, the more it seems that the publishing industry and its adjuncts (reviews, awards, etc.) go disproportionately to men. Female writers are hardly ever mentioned on top ten (or twenty or 50 or 100 or whatever) lists, and although "chick lit" books sell in huge numbers, they are treated as drivel and fluff rather than "serious" books). I am inclined to agree with this. While I'm not a fan of Ms. Picoult's work, I am currently reading Look at Me by Jennifer Egan; judging from Ms. Egan's writing, it is evident that she doesn't get the credit she's due, and I fear that it's likely because her name is Jennifer and not John. Additionally, Louise Erdrich and Margaret Atwood are still writing books that are more interesting than anything Jonathan Franzen have ever dreamed of, and yet it is his books that get praise that seems to mark him as a shoe-in for the Pulitzer (full disclosure: I hated The Corrections and, by extension, Jonathan Franzen). It seems, sadly, that women can't win.

Which, I suppose, makes it only natural that some of us might (however unwittingly) wind up in a subgenre that welcomes and celebrates women, like the m/m romance genre. And what you find here is not just women who are hot for gay dudes (although there is plenty of that), but women who are interested in this genre because it shows romantic partners on equal footing. Whereas traditional romances require that the woman be beneath the man (and a shocking number of them include some rapey, rapey sex), male/male romances have the characters on more equal footing -- they are, after all, both men, subject to roughly the same rules.

And this, I suppose, leads to on conclusion: women know we're behind and we'd rather not be behind any longer. Women are graduating from college in higher numbers than men, increasingly out-earning them, out-performing them even when we're not out-earning them, and making headway into politics and religion. Hanna Rosin of The Atlantic recently wondered (fairly convincingly) whether we were seeing "the end of men". And it's for this reason -- and because of the progress we've made even since I entered adulthood not that long ago -- that I am hopeful about the future of women in publishing. Yes, it has required clawing our way into being treated like people. But if we can continue to have this conversation about quality, equality and the ability of women to write as well as men, eventually we may not have lady-ghettos, and maybe those of us who are wary of competing in the big leagues now won't be soon.

2010-09-03T18:44:00.000-07:00

I got my first real review! And it's mostly positive! My thanks to Whipped Cream Reviews.

Jane Austen

2010-08-30T16:36:00.000-07:00

Because my summer daily commute to work takes the better part of an hour, I usually listen to audio books on my way (usually obtained from the local public library). Last time it was New England White. And now, despite my last blog post, I'm listening to Pride & Prejudice & Zombies because so many people recommended it. And I am enjoying it, but not for the reasons you'd think.

For those who don't know, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith is literally Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with with the Bennett girls changed into zombie slayers and all kinds of ultraviolent mayhem interspersed. It really has to be seen to be believed.

Honestly, the whole zombie thing (despite my love for zombie media) is kind of a one note joke (oh, ha ha, we're writing about zombies in the language of Jane Austen). But what I am really enjoying is Jane Austen's original writing. I've never read the novel before (although I did see the BBC miniseries based on the novel when a roommate developed a raging crush on Colin Firth). But now, listening to the wonderful story of the Bennett sisters and their romantic fates, I find myself thinking, I wish this zombie stuff would go away so that we could hear more about the girls.

Because, the thing is, it really is a wonderful proto-romantic comedy. And despite the fact that we've all seen this movie before a million times (girl meets boy, boy is vaguely rude to girl, girl misunderstands boy but is annoyingly attracted to him anyway, boy proves he's not who the girl thought he was, boy and girl live happily ever after), it's remarkably satsifying. Based on the fact that I would rather hear about Darcy and Elizabeth than zombies, I'm pretty sure that the next audiobook I listen to is going to have to be another Jane Austen.

Judging a Book by Its Cover

2010-08-27T08:31:00.001-07:00

I went to the library today to look for a new book (yes, I have decided to stop reading The Bourne Identity -- once I got to the part where Bourne starts slapping Marie around because she objects to having a gun pressed to her back, I started to lose sympathy for him. And if the movie followed the book at all, they would later have to fall in love, and I have no patience for books where a woman takes abuse from a man and then later realizes that she loves him. Gah). Anyhow, I spent a few minutes walking around the new book section of my local library, looking for a familiar title. And then, when I had passed through a couple of times and not seen any, I wondered why exactly I was doing that.

I tend to read books that I've already heard of, whether it's because someone has recommended it, or because I've read a positive review of it, or because it is simply floating around the zeitgeist. But I'm starting to wonder if that is really an effective way of finding good, new books. After all, I'm not sure about the usefulness of book reviews; so often, the reviewer seems to be looking for and valuing something in the book that I actively avoid. For instance, I have realized that if Michiko Kakutani likes a book in the New York Times, odds are better than even that I will hate it. Then, there's the tricky issue of bias in reviewing; Jodi Picoult recently (and not incorrectly) charged the critical establishment with favoring books written by men for no reason other than that they're written by men.

Taking a suggestion from a friend is also a fraught idea. Sometimes you get a great or engaging book (thank you, Aunt Cindy, for suggesting The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Sometimes you get a book that makes you question why you're friends with someone who could like this terrible dreck.

And then there are the books that come because they're just in the ether, like Infinite Jest or anything by Thomas Pynchon. It's not because anyone specifically comes out and says, "This is a great book," it's just implied every time someone talks about it. So, you read it because you feel like you need to, in order to be part of the educated elite.

But what I felt when I was standing in the library, with all these books written by people I've never heard of, was that I want a purer reading experience. So often I go into a book knowing that there's a "great twist ending" or it is "so beautiful I just wanted to die" or there is "this one character that I just fell in love with." But that takes some of the excitement out of the whole thing, takes the breath catching joy out of discovering that twist or that beauty or that wonderful character. On the other hand, reading a novel requires committing a lot of time, and time is at a premium. Why should I waste my time reading something that I'm not going to enjoy?

Anyway, I decided to take a chance. I picked up a book I have never heard of A Vein of Deceit by Susanna Gregory. We'll see how it goes -- I read the first two pages and found them engaging and interesting, but perhaps I'll be annoyed with the book after a few minutes. Perhaps, though, I'll find something that I absolutely love. One can always hope.

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

2010-08-26T10:38:00.000-07:00

If you check my Goodreads profile, you will see that I am currently reading The Bourne Identity. I am also, as I write this, watching The Bourne Identity.

I love the Bourne movies. For those who don't know (and, seriously, what rock have you been hiding under), Jason Bourne, played in the movies by Matt Damon, first turns up floating unconscious in the ocean and is hauled on board by a fishing vessel. The doctor on board removes a couple of bullets from his back and discovers a small device in his hip which gives a bank account number at a German bank. When Bourne comes to, he doesn't know who he is, why he speaks several languages, or how he wound up in the ocean. Later, when he is accosted by a couple of police officers, he discovers that he has an extraordinary ability to quickly and effectively disarm, well, just about anybody. And from there we're off on an exciting journey across Europe to figure out who this Bourne character is.

Not quite so in the book, I am discovering. What happens quickly and with an economy of story telling in the movie feels slow and laborous in the book. There is an alcoholic doctor who has Bourne do a few ridiculous exercises to help him figure out who he is. Then Bourne goes on the run, headed for Switzerland. While in France, he robs a man currently en flagrante delecto and makes off in the man's clothing. Bourne, at least so far, is not a particularly likeable character in the book.

Contrast that to the Jason Bourne in the film, who, when he first appears, has an instinctual, almost animal-like approach to solving problems. Just like us, he seems astonished by his ability to disable trained police officers and security guards. Like us, he is disturbed by the ease with which he is able to inflict pain.

Don't worry: I"m getting to my point. Now, perhaps my opinion of the book Bourne will change as I get farther into it (assuming that I continue reading -- that is not at all clear yet), but it's gotten me thinking about book-to-movie adaptations and how there is always some snob (often me) ready to proclaim the movie nowhere near as good as the book. But here's the thing: more and more, I don't think that that's about which one is actually better. I think it's about which one you see first.

For instance, I saw the Bourne movie before reading the book; I like the movie better. I read The Lovely Bones before seeing the movie; I like the book better. I saw High Fidelity before I read the book; I like the movie better. A Scanner Darkly: movie first, prefer the movie. The Time Traveller's Wife: book first, greatly prefer the book. Watchmen: book first, prefer the book. Children of Men: book first, prefer the book. And on and on.

Even though I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule (I just can't think of any off the top of my head), it makes a certain amount of sense, doesn't it? When you read the book first, you fall in love with all the little parts that can't be included in the movie. Probably, if I had read the Bourne books first, I would have been frustrated with Damon's performance; I would be thinking, Jeez, this Jason Bourne is an incompetent idiot. Where's the bit where he robs the guy with the prostitute? But when you see the movie first, those extra parts feel bloated and unnecessary. Christ, what the fuck are we wasting time with this guy and a hooker in France for? Get to the good part!.

Back in the day, when John Cusack was promoting High Fidelity, for which he also co-wrote the script, I think it was David Letterman who asked him about the difficulty of adapting a novel into a movie, and I liked Cusack's answer. He said (I'm paraphrasing), that you start out with the story that's in the book, but eventually you have to start thinking about the movie as its own separate thing. It's no longer something that came out of the book -- it now has to stand on its own (is it any wonder that High Fidelity was such an excellent book adaptation?).

Maybe that's how we, the viewers, should be thinking about book-to-movie adaptations: as pieces of art in their own rights. Good, bad, or indifferent, we should stop thinking about how much we liked the book better or how the movie completely missed the point of the book and start thinking about what point the movie did manage to make. After all, you've already read the book, right? Why do you need to go spend two hours listening to the movie say exactly the same thing?

2010-08-24T10:31:00.000-07:00

Some good news: AMC has released the trailer for their upcoming The Walking Dead TV show! And it looks awesome! Way more awesome than Rubicon (which, frankly, was boring and slow and has been removed from my DVR). Now, for your viewing pleasure:

If anyone needs me, I'll be off slitting my wrists

2010-08-23T05:47:00.000-07:00

Tinsley Mortimer has a contract with Simon & Schuster to write a novel. Tinsley Mortimer. Tinsley fucking Mortimer. Happy Monday.

The Highest Paid Writers...Suck

2010-08-20T15:15:00.001-07:00

Are you a writer? Do you hate your life? Do you want to? Then check out the list of the highest paid authors for 2009-2010.

Yup, that's James Patterson atop the list. He signed a deal to write 17 books between now and 2012. I mean, the guy doesn't even write his own books anymore -- can you really call him an "author"?

I am not a Twilight fan (I am neither a teenage girl nor am I the mother of one, which are apparently the requirements for liking that particular piece of cultural dreck), but the fact that Stephenie Meyer made $40 million despite not actually -- y'know -- publishing anything is disheartening. Annoying, isn't it.

Note: sorry about the snarky tone of this post. I am waist deep in my new novel and it's not going...particularly well, let's say.

Product Placement in Books

2010-08-17T06:19:00.000-07:00

Bookends Blog has a recent post about the possibility of product placement in books. The post is flawed (it refers to "regular talk about 'enchanced ebooks'", but provides no links, etc.), but it's an interesting idea. Also, it's one that probably won't come to much.

The "enhanced ebooks" the post refers to apparently aren't just characters enjoying a particular brand of beer, or driving a particular car. No, there would also be a link to an ad for the product. The problem is that hyperlinks -- while convenient and a sort of shorthand citation -- interrupt the flow of reading. You have to stop and think for a second Do I want to follow that link? Enjoyable novel reading, though, is all about flow. My favorite books are the ones where I started reading and got completely lost, only looking up to discover that it is hours later. I can't do that if I have to stop and think Hmmm, do I want to see an ad for Toyota.

Then again, I am more than happy to change my position if Coors would like to pay me to make my characters drink their fine beverage.

Interviews

2010-08-10T20:03:00.000-07:00

I've done one voice interview, and I can tell you from personal experience that it's not fun. It is, however, apparently a necessary part of selling a novel.

The Stranger's Slog pointed me to this Salon article about authors who don't like to give interviews (and the way they exact revenge on the interviewer through their writing).

I can sympathize with the interviewers, especially when it comes to quotes like these:

"I no longer do interviews. Too many problems. The tape broke when Stanley Elkin was talking. I got lost trying to find Joseph McElroy's house in rural New Hampshire. DeLillo gave a thoughtful and mysterious interview, but the Paris Review decided that, after only six novels, he wasn't sufficiently famous. William Gass took a year to rewrite the transcript. William Gaddis refused to edit the transcript. After I'd flown from Ohio to New York, Toni Morrison's secretary said I was not on her schedule and let me in only after I produced a letter promising the interview on that date at that time. I loved the novelists' unreliable narrators, but not the novelists who proved unreliable."
And I should say here that Erin, my interviewer on The Daisy Chain interview, was excellent. But I would like to suggest another reason why authors hate being interviewed.

We're used to writing and rewriting and rewriting again until it's perfect. It's all about control and presenting the best, most professional picture possible. But when you're answering questions out loud, there is no going back. And I will tell you that, when I was doing my interview, I spent the whole time thinking, Do I sound as stupid as I think I sound? Am I making any sense? I still have no idea if I made any sense. It's a horrifying feeling, that lack of control. And I can't imagine that there are too many writers who are any more comfortable with it than I was.

Because the last thing we want is integrity...

2010-08-10T17:42:00.000-07:00

Meet West Point cadet Katie Miller. She's 9th in her class, has a stellar physical fitness record, and is a lesbian. And because she's a lesbian, we apparently don't want her to fight for her country. You can find her resignation letter at the link above, but here's an excerpt:

"I have created a heterosexual dating history to recite to fellow cadets when they inquire. I have endured unwanted approaches by male cadets for fear of being accused as a lesbian by rejecting or reporting these events. I have been coerced into ignoring derogatory comments towards homosexuals for fear of being alienated for my viewpoint. In short, I have lied to my classmates and compromised my integrity and my identity by adhering to existing military policy.

While at the academy, I have made a deliberate effort to develop myself academically, physically, and militarily, but in terms of holistic personal growth I have reached a plateau. I am unwilling to suppress an entire portion of my identity any longer because it has taken a significant personal, mental, and social toll on me and detrimentally affected my professional development. I have experienced a relentless cognitive dissonance by attempting to adhere to §654 [colloquially known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"] and retain my integrity, and I am retrospectively convinced that I am unable to live up to the Army Values as long as the policy remains in place."

Jesus fucking Christ. Fighting for our country is one of the most important jobs we've got, right? That's why we subsidize school for veterans, give them oodles of respect, and spend tons of money on defense. Therefore, shouldn't we want the best? This woman sounds like the best. And here we find ourselves in a catch-22: her integrity leads her to feel she cannot hide who she is, but telling who she is will mean that she loses a job that demands...integrity.

I give up.

Horns by Joe Hill

2010-08-09T06:41:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Horns and would highly recommend it. You can find my Goodreads review below.

I suppose I should explain a little why I bother posting these. This blog is more and more becoming about writing -- specifically my writing. In order to understand how someone writes, it seems important to understand what they read and what they think about their reading. To that end, I post what I think about the books I read. Please feel free to disagree violently.

Horns by Joe Hill

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A creative and fun read, with some interesting ideas about God, good and evil, as well as love and friendship. The plot reminded me of the modern-day story in The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. I definitely recommend it.

View all my reviews >>

??

2010-08-07T06:04:00.000-07:00

Ummm, why is someone selling used copies of Billionaire's Row for $47.98 plus shipping? I see no mention of it being signed (and, really, could my signature possibly be worth an additional $29.99?). Plus, it's coming from Florida and I don't think I've signed any copies for someone from Florida. Hmmm.

Creative Writing Education

2010-08-07T05:43:00.001-07:00

Sorry about my absence from the blog; it's been a busy week in my real life. But while I was away, HuffPo ran a slideshow of the best MFA writing programs. It's an interesting look, and some of the schools were a little surprising (Cornell wasn't really a surprise, and neither was BU, and of course the Iowa Writing Workshop is world famous, but for some reason Florida State University has never really struck me as a serious place, or a place where good writing happens. It's probably just my northern bias).

The thing is, though, while these programs are most likely excellent, I remain unconvinced about the value of a writing education. With the exception of those who want to teach writing (and, really, who sets out to be a writing teacher?), a writing education just seems like a piece of paper. After all, the only real way to improve your writing is to continue to do it (over and over and over again). Input from others can be helpful, but there are writing workshops all over the country, many of which are fairly inexpensive (certainly less that the tens of thousands a Cornell writing degree would set you back).

I was a writing major in college, but I didn't finish, mostly because I looked around after my junior year and realized that a degree wasn't going to get me any closer to my goal of becoming a published writer. All it would do is put me another $12,000 into debt, put my parents further into debt, and waste another year of my life. Since then, I have written and written and obsessively written and in the end it paid off in a pretty big way.

How people choose to spend their own money is mostly their own business, but when it comes to writing (as opposed to medicine or history or music), I just don't see that there is much value to an expensive education.

Self-publishing E-books

2010-07-31T18:30:00.001-07:00

C-Net has a great article about e-publishing. It's definitely worth a full read, but I wanted to point out a couple of things about self publishing.

"It's gotta be good: The same rule applies to self-published e-books as it does to print books. You have to start with a good product if you have any hope of selling it."

This sounds pretty obvious, right? Of course you want your book to be good. And of course you think it is good. It probably is good. The thing is, there are a lot of people who can write good prose. But people want to read great prose.

For that, you need an editor. If you're going to self publish (and I'm still not sure if I recommend it -- obviously, that's not the path I chose), spring for the editor. And encourage them to be brutal. Because here's the thing about writers: we all think we're super clever... at least, we think we are. And, since many of us weren't exactly the cool kids in high school (and are maybe still a little bit sensitive about that fact), we're generally eager to prove that fact. So we throw in clever little flourishes, "brilliant" socio-economic observations, and the like. We are geniuses and we are determined to prove it to everyone. But what is best for us is often not what's best for our prose. It is often helpful to have someone say, "Yes, you're very clever. Now get rid of that sentence. It's not helpful." Your reader doesn't care how clever you are; they care about what you have to say.

Going Global

2010-07-31T07:17:00.000-07:00

Billionaire's Row has gone international!

You can now buy the book in the UK for just under thirteen British pounds, which is a little over $20, plus shipping. Spendy!

Yes, Virginia, there are stupid questions

2010-07-31T06:42:00.000-07:00

From The Stranger's "Overheard" series:

"Does this thing make me look gay"?

"No, but that question makes you sound stupid."

Reading and Writing

2010-07-29T10:21:00.000-07:00

I've posted a couple of negative book reviews on Goodreads recently, one about Bret Easton Ellis's Imperial Bedrooms and one about Steig Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Having also written about the difficulty of accepting criticism, I have felt a little guilty lately about dealing out criticism, even to big time best selling authors who make millions off their writing.

So, I was very interested to read Nathan Bransford's post from Tuesday: The One Question Writers Should Never Ask (while reading). That question? "Do I like this?" Bransford writes:

Here's the thing about the question "Do I like this?" Who is that question about? Well, it's about you. It's about your taste, and whether the book fit in with your likes and dislikes. It's not about the book. It's about you and whether the book spoke to you.

In other words, all you're learning about when you ask "Do I like this?" as you read a book is yourself.

Now, don't get me wrong. Knowing what you like is important. But by the time we're an adult we pretty much know our likes and dislikes. Sure, some things can take us by surprise (like my inexplicable and deep-seated love of The Bachelor), but plumbing the depths of our likes and dislikes is about entertainment, it's not knowledge that is overly helpful as a writer. Knowing your likes and dislikes will help you imitate, but it won't help you learn tools you can really use.

This makes a fair amount of sense. "Do I like this?" is lazy and unhelpful. I would like to think that my reviews of Larsson's and Ellis's books, while maybe not helpful to Larsson and Ellis, do display a little more thought than Bransford's reviled "this sucks" or "this is trash". I knew what I didn't like about these books; whether or not they mattered is another question.

And I think this brings up why writers should read, and read obsessively. In fact, the more books you read that you don't like, the more you'll learn. Being able to figure out what's wrong with the book -- and figure out how you would fix it -- will make the writer stronger.

Bret Easton Ellis and I are through

2010-07-29T06:50:00.001-07:00

Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Dear Bret Easton Ellis: we're through. Imperial Bedrooms was the last of your books that I will be reading. It's the last time I'm going to be fooled into thinking that maybe you've moved beyond your forty-year-old adolescent, violent misogynistic buillshit. Because now I realize: it's all you know how to do. You've got nothing else to say except, "Check it out -- this guy's a rich, white douchebag who's dead inside!" It's not interesting, it's not cute, and as a writer you're not maturing. And the tragedy is that you are actually a talented writer. With the exception of Glamorama, your prose always keeps me reading (and, full disclosure, I actually ejoyed a lot of Lunar Park; maybe that's why I thought maybe you were capable of growing up). But since you insist on writing practically the same book over and over again, I'm afraid that I see no point in coninuing to read your books.

View all my reviews >>

Interview

2010-07-29T05:31:00.000-07:00

Want to know why I write? When I write? What fictional character I would ask on a date? Then check out my interview with blogger Raine Delight!

Samuel Steward, "Secret Historian"

2010-07-27T16:45:00.000-07:00

Well, put Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade in my to-read list. After reading this slideshow from the New York Times about Mr. Steward, my interest is officially peaked.

Looking through the slideshow, though, which admittedly is fairly brief, I was struck by the following quote:

"Ultimately Steward abandoned university life and entered the tattoo artist's demimonde full time, but his determination to indulge his sexual identity fully came with enormous physical, professional and psychological costs.

"In Mr. Spring's telling, the frustrations of living in this closeted era combined with his obsession drove Steward to alcoholism and prevented him from living up to the early promise he showed as a novelist."

What a shame to relegate -- however unintentionally -- a promising talent to second (or third or twelfth or one hundred and seventy-seventh) tier status simply because of the people he's attracted to. I hope that other promising artists whose sexual orientation kept them from achieving the renown they deserved will get the same airing, and my post-humous apologies to them.

C'mon ride the train...

2010-07-26T19:23:00.000-07:00

Via Sullivan

Welcome Back

2010-07-26T09:08:00.000-07:00

What'd you do this weekend? I finished a 766 page book called The Passage. Here's my Goodreads review:

The Passage by Justin Cronin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's refreshing to meet vampires who aren't sexy or chivalrous or want to have sex with humans. The vampires in this book are phosphorescent and much more interested in ripping humans in half. The writing was sharp and the characters well drawn, if occasionally a little cliched. Some of the plot twists are familiar, but only because they work so well in this genre, and none of it felt like it was rushed (at 766 pages, how could it?). I definitely recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of post-apocalyptic wastelands or a fan of road novels. Terrific book.

View all my reviews >>

2010-07-24T09:18:00.000-07:00

I have been Twittered. That is all.

Don't fear the e-book

2010-07-23T15:01:00.000-07:00

Ebooks. Should we fear them? Welcome them? Are they going to ruin our lives? Are they going to make people stop reading? Read too much? Read the wrong things?

On his blog today, Nathan Bransford posted a list of common myths regarding ebooks, and accompanying debunkments (that's a word now). While you should read the whole thing, a couple of them deserve highlighting:

2. Publishers are going to disappear

There's more to making a book than uploading it to Amazon. Even in the e-book era publishers offer a range of services that are not easy to duplicate. While they will no longer be the iron-clad necessity that they used to be in the print era, publishers will still be around.

Truer words have never been spoken. A good editor is worth her weight in titanium. Did you know, for instance, that the word Dumpster is a trademark and therefore must be capitalized? Did you know that the word castle did not enter use until around the 12th century, by which time the Roman empire had ceased to exist, so it would be an anachronism to refer to a "Roman castle". I didn't until an editor ripped through my first manuscript with a red pen. Just look, for instance, at the self-publish juggernaut that is The Shack. It includes an "After words", which any editor would have spotted and insisted on changing to an "Afterword." While editors can and have mucked up great works of literature, more often they are the ones who put a steady hand on the shoulder of a writer and say, "Yes, we know you're clever. That sentence is lovely. Now take it out."

3. Paper books will disappear

Some people just love the paper, and not to worry. Even in a world where we read primarily e-books, print will still be an option. Where there is a customer, there is a seller.

Gawker recently put up a post about ebooks outpacing hardcover books. Commenter femme-bot said:

"What will I put on my book shelf to impress dates I bring home?
I'm thinking I should keep all my smarty books and display them. Then when I want to buy trashy books and chick lit I can hide the shame on a kindle."

Obviously, the desire to appear smart to prospective sexual partners means that we will all have to continue leaving copies of War and Peace, Infinite Jest and Generation X on our shelves to prove how smart, cultured and witty we are. Just saying.

2010-07-22T19:32:00.000-07:00

This is making me so sad right now. For some reason, I thought that Dan Choi -- hunky protestor of Don't Ask Don't Tell, fluent arabic speaker, all around good soldier -- might beat the discharge. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Well, Dan, here's hoping that you find yourself a contractor job (with a non-evil company -- not one whose name rhymes with Schmaliburton) with a big fat paycheck.

2010-07-22T07:18:00.000-07:00

Did you read Billionaire's Row? Did you like it? You did? That's great!!

Now how about leaving a review on the outlet where you purchased your copy? Whether it's Amazon, All Romance Ebooks, Diesel Ebooks, or any of the others, you can post a review on the site where you purchased the book. Or, post a review at the Goodreads site.

Honest reviews help readers find books they'll like, and help good books find readers!

And, as always, thanks for reading!

Accepting Praise

2010-07-22T07:00:00.000-07:00

Based on my last post, it would not be unreasonable to think that I am oversensitive. In fact, it's not really even a question: I don't take criticism well, I tend to overreact (even if it's not obvious), and I dwell on every little mildly critical comment. Sometimes, though, I think I might be equally terrible at accepting praise.

I was told yesterday that a friend picked up my book and couldn't put it down. Someone else praised my use of description in the opening part of the book. All I did was giggle and turn bright red.

The thing was, I had (and still have) no idea what the correct response to lavish praise. I'm pretty sure giggling and blushing is incorrect. I said thank you (at least, I think I did. I meant to, anyway), and then I was at a complete loss. Do you just continue to thank the person? Do you change the subject? Do you listen politely? I'm honestly looking for some guidance here.

Average Whining

2010-07-20T06:47:00.000-07:00

Average: being about midway between extremes, not out of the ordinary.

On my Goodreads account, I have received a few ratings, mostly good. One though, was negative. Well, actually, not even negative. It was average: three stars. And in the comments section, my reviewer wrote: "Good thriller, average romance." Good thriller -- yup, that's what I was shooting for. Average romance -- well, average is sort of middle of the road and I can live with that.

Except that in the context of a review, average doesn't actually mean average. It means below average. It means not great. And as someone who loves language, that is problematic for me. If everything that really is average in the dictionary definition sense of the word is called above-average, then even the words above-average and excellent and great, etc., are devalued. Words matter (despite what Sarah Palin might think), and their meanings matter. When we start redefining words down, they all lose their meaning and that's a shame.

I realize that this is just whining, and that it's not even new whining. In The Incredibles, the son says, "Saying that everyone is special is just another way of saying no one is." That is certainly a cleverer way of expressing the same sentiment. And, really, I should just forget about the review. One (only barely) negative review. Dwelling on it is stupid. But I'm not dwelling on it; I'm dwelling on the definition of average.

That's healthier.

Right?

The Fantasies of Straight People

2010-07-19T11:53:00.000-07:00

From The Onion:

"Our men need to know they can count on each other in battle, and we can't have them getting distracted by illicit romantic dalliances. Especially if one's a little blond Adonis farm boy and his buddy's a real tough street kid straight out of Brooklyn. I mean, think about it: What if they lock eyes and abandon their post to start ripping each other's fatigues off, revealing twin sets of glistening washboard abs and at last fulfilling their hidden passions?" - Gen. James T. Conway, commandant of the Marine Corps.

Satire kicks ass.

Soon to be a relic of a bygone era

2010-07-15T06:34:00.000-07:00

Blogger Xeni Jardin dug up this comic book produced by the millitary to explain how DADT works. A PFC Howard is seen by two sergeants engaged in a "homosexual act" with another soldier. He gets his ass discharged. I have to say, Howard takes getting fired fairly well...

Gender Guesser

2010-07-15T05:53:00.000-07:00

We talked about I Write Like... yesterday (which caused me more anxiety than it probably should have). Today, let's talk about Gender Guesser. From the website:

In 2003, a team of researchers from the Illinois Institute of Technology and Bar-Ilan University in Israel (Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Fine, and Anat Rachel Shimoni) developed a method to estimate gender from word usage. Their paper described a Bayesian network where weighted word frequencies and parts of speech could be used to estimate the gender of an author. Their approach made a distinction between fiction and non-fiction writing styles.

A simplified version of this work was implemented as the Gender Genie. They showed that fewer words were needed and that writing styles varied based on the forum. For example, fiction and non-fiction differs from blogs (informal writing). Even though the genres differ, there are still gender-specific word frequencies.

This Gender Guesser system is heavily based on the Gender Genie. In particular, the word lists and weights are reproduced from the Gender Genie. The Gender Guesser extends the interpretation of informal writing to work on blogs and chat-room messages, and combines formal writing styles (fiction, non-fiction, essays, news reports, etc.). It also looks for weak emphasis -- used to distinguish European English from American English. In general, if the difference between male and female weight values is not significant (a "weak" score), then the author could be European. This is because the weight matrix is biased for distinguishing genders in American English.

How could I resist? I entered the first 500 words of Billionaire's Row and came up with the following:

Genre: Informal -- weak FEMALE
Genre: Formal -- weak MALE
(Weak emphasis could indicate European)

So...I'm a European hermaphrodite?

Interview!

2010-07-15T05:45:00.000-07:00

Check out my interview with Shae Connor. We discuss how I got started writing, how I come up with my stories, and how I work. Riveting stuff!

Why libraries are important...

2010-07-14T17:49:00.001-07:00

Can't argue with that logic...

...or those abs!

I write like...

2010-07-14T07:58:00.000-07:00

I Write Like... is a website that analyzes the syntax, word choice, etc., to see what writer you write like. I plugged in the first six or seven paragraphs of Billionaire's Row. I Write Like... says that I write like Dan Brown. I can't decide whether to slit my wrists or rejoice that clearly this means I will soon be a mega best-seller. Hmmm... Must be a New Hampshire thing.

Update: OMFG, it gets worse! You know who else writes like Dan Brown? Sarah Palin('s ghostwriter)!! Does that mean that, by the transitive property, I write like Sarah Palin('s ghostwriter)?!? Also, lawyer, dentist, former candidate for California Secretary of State, and noted crazy person Orly Taitz also writes like Dan Brown!

I have definitely decided to slit my wrists!!

Oh, but wait, apparently Mercede Johnston (sister of Levi Johnston, aunt to Tripp Palin, future sister-in-law of Bristol Palin) writes like...Nabokov? That can't be right. And Gwyneth Paltrow on GOOP writes like Stephen King? ...Oh, I get it.

It's just a stupid little Internet widget.

Okay.

No worries.

Carry on.

Romance v. Mainstream

2010-07-12T16:47:00.000-07:00

Technically, I am now a romance novelist. At least, my publisher's tagline is "Where dreams come true...Publishers of quality m/m romance novels, novellas, short stories and anthologies. Also, my book now appears on AllRomanceEbooks.com (right under this charmingly titled book.

It's a title I'm not particularly comfortable with, if I'm honest. Most fiction has some kind of romance in it, but, to me, a romance novel is one where the story is merely an excuse to get the characters rubbing up against each other. That, and mediocre writing. Also rapey, rapey horribleness.

But, maybe I should accept this title and go with it. After all, human beings (not just women) enjoy some heat between our characters. And I'm fairly certain that there are some fairly hot parts of Billionaire's Row. Maybe I can help make the romance genre not equal horrible. An author can dream, right?

Hustle

2010-07-10T04:41:00.000-07:00

Whenever I tell someone that I've written a 110,000 word novel, they express admiration and often exclaim, "Wow, that takes a lot of [determination/effort/concentration/etc]." And they're right -- it did. But, now that Billionaire's Row is out, I worry that the hard part is just beginning.

It's not that I don't have hustle -- I do -- it's just that I'm not really a natural salesperson. I know in my head that I am probably capable of talking someone into buying my book, but in my gut I would feel guilty about it, like I was manipulating them into spending money on something they didn't want. It was my problem during the brief period where I was a professional saleswoman -- when it came to people who were on the fence about whether to buy, I wasn't able to round them up to a "yes, please, I'll take two."

So, this morning I read this New York Times article about Randy Kearse, self-published author and subway salesman, with interest.

Mr. Kearse, 45, went from hustling crack cocaine as head of a multistate crew, to federal prison, to author and urban self-help guru who not only writes books about his experiences but also mentors children, crooks, prisoners and their families on the perils of the criminal life. Or as one of his titles suggests, he has gone from “Incarceration to Incorporation.”

Plenty of authors have emerged from prison with manuscripts. Some even get them published. But instead of fictional tales of sex, money and murder — the stuff of the booming “street lit” genre — Mr. Kearse has assembled step-by-step guides to going legit, or “Changin’ Your Game Plan: How to Use Incarceration as a Stepping Stone for Success” — another of his titles.

That book, and his overall message of redemption, landed him on “The Colbert Report” in 2007, where he held his own in banter with the host over whether inmates should ever be returned to society.

That takes hustle. The article says that Mr. Kearse has sold 14,000 copies of his books in the last three years, a number that would be fairly impressive even if he had had the clout of a small publishing house behind him. He has done this by working hard.

“My quota is 35 books a day,” Mr. Kearse said. “If I don’t hit that number, I’m staying out until I do. Overtime.”

The article suggests that Mr. Kearse is using the salesmanship skills he learned as a drug dealer, and I'm sure that there's some of that (one would suspect, though, that drugs are easier to sell than books). However, some of it is just who you are. My guess is that hustle comes naturally to this guy. And while I don't think hustle comes naturally to me, it does seem possible to find it, perhaps by using Mr. Kearse as an example. Who thinks I can sell 35 copies of Billionaire's Row everyday.

Read a Book, Submit a Book

2010-07-09T17:16:00.000-07:00

The traditional paradigm has always been that there are people who create content and there are people who consume content, and the people who consume content don't actually want to create content. Once the internet and print-on-demand gave everyone access to forums on which to display the content they produce, it has turned out that a lot of people wanted to produce content but hadn't until now had access to an outlet.

Sometimes, it can seem like everyone wants to be a writer, and I suppose there is probably a little part of everyone who would like to. I don't blame them; writing can be intoxicating. However, I will admit to feeling a modicum of annoyance at all the people you run into who say, "Oh, you're a writer? I'm working on finishing a novel, too." And you know, just from talking to them for five seconds, that whatever they're writing is terrible. It may not seem charitable or kind, but it's true.

Anyhow, it's also frustrating to be a writer and realize that there are more people who want to write than want to read. In fact, it can make writing seem like an exercise in futility. If everyone is trying to externalize everything that they think, then why would anyone bother to take anything in?

Enter Tin House:

A few days ago, Tin House came up with a great little idea, called Buy a Book, Save a Bookstore. It required writers who submit unsolicited manuscripts to purchase a book at an independent bookstore and send the receipt along with the submission.

It may seem heavy handed, but it is an interesting idea. People don't read enough, and they spend too much of their money at Amazon and Barnes and Nobel (I'm just as guilty as anyone). It would be nice for writers to help support local and independant book stores. What does everyone else think?

Connection!

2010-07-09T07:29:00.000-07:00

Billionaire's Row is now available from Dreamspinner Press in ebook and paperback. Buy one! Buy two! Buy three! C'mon, buy a dozen and give them to your friends!!

Also, if you'd like to have your book signed but don't have the time/energy/inclination to stalk me, I can send you a bookplate. Send me an email at SullivanWheeler@gmail.com with your name, mailing address, and a 500 word essay about why I'm awesome (optional but encouraged), and I will send you a sticker with my signature that you can put in your book! For free! How awesome is that?!

The Book Drops Tomorrow!

2010-07-08T06:39:00.001-07:00

Billionaire's Row comes out tomorrow (order it here or here). In honor of the big day, please enjoy this redesign of the blog.

Celebrity Books

2010-07-07T18:33:00.000-07:00

The woman on the left, Kendra Wilkinson, is an author. At least, that's what Today called her yesterday. I probably wouldn't have chosen to identify her as an author. Reality star, maybe. Playboy model, maybe. Or any one of a dozen snarkier identifiers I can think of off the top of my head. But, it is true that she's written a book, Sliding into Home, which she is now on a tour to promote.

It gets worse. Pamela Anderson is an author twice over. Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger is an author. Paris Hilton (gah) is an author. Stephen Baldwin is an author. Danielle Staub of The Real Housewives of New Jersey is an author. Even David Lee Roth is an author.

Most of these people, it should be noted, acknowledged help from another writer, sometimes on the cover of the book. I think we can probably all agree that the professional writer did the actual writing and the celebrity provided a cover shot. But the frustrating thing about this is that these people get to be called "authors" (I probably shouldn't be too snarky about Captain Sully, since he is an American hero -- he's probably earned the right not to write his book) without actually doing the work. The rest of us do the work, spending hundreds of hours painstakingly revising prose and wrestling with the vagaries of English grammar, but these people get to have the title without the work.

It explains, I think, my response the the apparent abomination that is Glenn Beck's latest novel, The Overton Window. From the few reviews I've read, it's an amateurish mess. But the thing is, I think that probably proves that Beck wrote it himself, or at least mostly himself. Somehow, that makes me feel a modicum of respect for him, a feeling to which I am not accustomed. It would be nice if we could see more of this in the future: people actually earning the title of author, even if the writing they produce isn't actually that good.

Update: I stand corrected. Beck's book was ghostwritten by someone called Jack Henderson. My opinion of Beck can remain safely unchanged.

Update: Bulwer-Lytton Award

2010-07-06T18:00:00.001-07:00

I wrote the other day about the Bulwer-Lytton award, the yearly award given to "the worst sentence in the world", which this year went to Molly Ringle for this gem:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss—a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.

Paul Constant over at The Stranger, interviewed Ms. Ringle about how she came up with the worst sentence in the world. She says:

In my case, I tend to be on the lookout for potential metaphors (or similes or what have you) on any average day. Sometimes they can find a home in "good" writing, but other times I realized I was entering parody territory, so in a few cases I turned them into Bulwer-Lytton sentences, and emailed them in. For Ricardo and Felicity (and the gerbil), I never got beyond the first sentence, and haven't thought about where they go next. But I do instinctually feel their affair ends badly. Such a fierce flame could not burn long.

Actually, it kind of makes me want to read more of Ms. Ringle's writing.

2010-07-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

It's the day after the 4th of July and everyone else has the day off, so I'm taking it off, too. The only blog thing I'm doing today is updating my Goodreads page. Here is my review of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, in case you're interested (spoiler alert: I didn't like it). Have a great holiday, everybody!

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson

My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I am so glad to be done with this book -- with the whole "Milennium" series, to be honest. While I enjoyed "Dragon Tattoo", by the time I got to "Hornet", I was just frustrated by the poor dialog, the ridiculous plot devices, and the really lazy characterizations (note to Steig Larsson -- yes I know he's dead -- not every bad guy has to be a pedophile or a rapist. Sometimes people can be venal, or greedy, or lazy, or some other bad thing. Making every bad guy a violent pervert is just lazy, lazy, lazy).

View all my reviews >>

How the Internet may change the way I write...

2010-07-02T08:03:00.001-07:00

So, now that I'm through with writing Billionaire's Row (July 9, y'all), I'm into the promoting. This means upcoming interviews with blogs and podcasts, creating author pages on various websites, and generally making a full court press in getting the word out.

And everywhere I go, they want me to provide an excerpt. Per my contract with Dreamspinner, the excerpt usually provided is the first chapter of my book; this seems to be a pretty standard thing. So, all over the internet, there will be my (fairly short) first chapter.

The thing is, though, conventional wisdom holds that people won't read more than about 500 words on a computer screen. Maybe 1,000 if it's really gripping. But it's unlikely that people would read more than that. And that fairly short first chapter of mine: 1,175 words. It's good -- it's very good -- but it's longer than most of the websites I'm supposed to provide an excerpt to want.

And, now that I'm finished with Billionaire's Row (be sure to buy two... just in case you lose one!), I'm starting to think about my next project (tentatively titled The Campaign, but more on that later). And I'm starting to think, how can I make my first chapter gripping and only 500 words.

2010-07-01T05:52:00.000-07:00

I was a big reader when I was a kid (still am). While there were hundreds of books that I liked, on a few occasions, when I read a book that I really, really loved, my mother would help me write a letter to the author telling him or her how much I enjoyed reading the book. Sometimes, the only answer was silence. But Chris Van Allsburg, who wrote Jumanji, sent me a bookmark (which had a picture of his famous dog on it) and a note. Shel Silverstein (of Where the Sidewalk Ends, The Giving Tree, and "A Boy Named Sue" fame) sent me a message on a sticky note and I'm pretty sure I still have it somewhere around here.

I was just thinking about this as I start promoting my own novel, Billionaire's Row (due out July 9!). From talking with other authors, it seems that readers do contact the authors they like (and sometimes the authors they don't), but they do it by email, or Facebook, or another website. Gone are the days when you sent a letter to the author's publisher, a carefully composed missive in your own handwriting, and waited for some answer. And just when you had almost forgotten that you'd even sent the thing, there would suddenly be an envelope in the mailbox, addressed to you in unfamiliar handwriting, and inside there would be proof that the author of that book you loved -- the one that transported you to some magical place -- was a real person! And he had spent a moment writing personally to you! And there was proof, tangible proof, here in your hand! Somehow, an email...it's just not the same.

I'll be good about responding to my readers, but I still can't help but feel that something important has been lost.

An Award One Hopes to Never Win

2010-06-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

The Bulwer-Lytton Awards were announced today, and, as Billionaire's Row has not yet been published (9 days and counting!), I was not eligible. And thank goodness. The Bulwer-Lytton Award is given to the worst writing of the year, a dubious honor at best.

This year, it went to Ms. Molly Ringle of Seattle, Washington, for this gem:

"For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greated one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss -- a lengthly, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

Mmm...sexy.

It's worth scrolling through the whole thing to read the winners in various genres (the winner in the children's category was especially terrible). I have to say that the winner for worst detective writing, one Mr. Steve Lynch, was just about one editor shy of clever:

"She walked into my office wearing a body that would make a man write bad checks, but in this paperless age you would first have to obtain her ABA Routing Transit Number and Account Number and then disable your own Overdraft Protection in order to do so."

Yeah, not great, but there is a spark of something clever in there. It just needed a few more revisions to get there.

I will take courage from the fact that I'm fairly certain that there is nothing in Billionaire's Row that is quite as terrible as the winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Award, and so I would probably not be a finalist this year. I will just have to hope that there is an abundance of terrible writing next year, so as to spare me the indignity of winning such an honor in 2011.

Release Date

2010-06-22T16:33:00.000-07:00

We have a release date for my novel, Billionaire's Row: July 9, 2010. It should be noted that that date may be subject to change, but, barring any production delays, acts of God, etc., I should be holding a copy of my first novel in my hot little hands within a few weeks! For more information about Billionaire's Row, visit its new page on Dreamspinner Press's website.

Scandanavian Mysteries

2010-06-16T05:50:00.000-07:00

The Steig Larsson Millennium series has been having a moment lately (well, more than a moment; Mr. Larsson passed away in 2004 and the books seem to have been going strong ever since then). A friend of mine turned me on to the first book (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and I devoured it in a rush over a single weekend. Since then, I have read the second (The Girl who Played with Fire) and have just started the third and final (The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest).

I'm still trying to puzzle out exactly what I like about them. Many people I've recommended them to have said that they had a hard time getting into the books, and I will admit that the prose, like the titles, is pretty clunky. And the characters, many of them with awkward Swedish names, often seem indistingushable from each other (Wait, which one is Modig again? Is Malm a police officer or a reporter?). There is no denying that the series is popular, though.

This morning, an article in the New York Times reported on the phenomenon and how it is carrying a number of already established Scandinavian writers along with it. Last week's Slate Culture Gabfest included a nearly twenty minute discussion of the books (the erudite gabfesters mostly seemed to find the series impenetrable and its success baffling).

Judging from the New York Times article, the Larsson books are already having an effect on Scandinavian mystery writers (and rightly so; there is something about the Scandinavian sensibility that lends itself to strange, wonderful fiction and art), but my hope is that it extends more broadly to mysteries in general. I say this not only because my novel, Billionaire's Row, is a murder mystery, but because I think the genre is unfairly ignored.

Unlike other genres (vampire fiction, I'm looking at you), mystery has a long and compelling history and has really become an art form. Writing a good mystery (one that doesn't make you groan too hard when the killer is finally revealed) is more challenging than it would seem. Additionally, mystery seems to provide an excellent opportunity to address social ills within a compelling story (check out this interview with David Simon for more on that -- hell, check out that interview just because it is all kinds of awesome).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, in these sobering times, it's nice to have some killers who aren't undead, immortal, and hopelessly devoted to a human.

A question for all the other writers out there:

2010-06-15T10:25:00.000-07:00

Do you hate editing as much as I do?

Seriously.

It's ridiculous, isn't it?

My novel, Billionaire's Row, is due to be published by Dreampsinner Press in a couple of months and we're in the final stages of editing. At this point, though, I have read through all 110,000 words of this book at least ten times and I can't tell you how much I have grown to hate it. Not that it's not good -- it's excellent and everyone should buy a copy. However, I am just so sick of reading it. I wonder if other writers feel the same way by the time they get to the end of the editing process. I can't imagine that I'm the only one.

The Clinton Marriage

2010-06-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

Full disclosure: I was still in grade school (I would prefer not to say which grade) when the whole Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal enveloped the nation. Over the years, I have only had rare occasion to think about it again. I thought about it a little when Hillary Clinton ran for the Senate in New York. I thought about it a lot more when trying to decide whether to vote for Mrs. Clinton in the New Hampshire primary (in the end, I decided not to; I wasn't sure that I could handle another four years of the media obsessing about their marriage). I think we all thought about it when the Gores annouced that they were getting a divorce (Really? Them? Really?).

What is making me think of it right now is watching The Special Relationship on HBO (yes, I know I'm getting to it late, but times are busy). The movie centers around the relationship between President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair (Full disclosure again: I have a little crush on Michael Sheen. Yeah, I know.). About thirty-five minutes into the movie, the scandal breaks and the movie shows the Clintons discussing the affair: first, he lies to her about how involved with Ms. Lewinsky he was, and then slowly the truth leaks out, much to her humiliation. I am guessing that these scenes are a mixture of what the Clintons have said happened (in the movie, he is shown waking her up to tell her that the scandal is going to break) and what the screen writer thinks happened.

The thing is, I can't escape the feeling that both what the Clintons said happened and what the screenwriter imagines happened are wrong. It seems to me that for them to remain married for this long, they must have some kind of open relationship.

Allow me to present the evidence:

A.) There was, according to the tapes, no vaginal intercourse -- only blow jobs. Maybe it's true that he prefers blow jobs to vaginal intercourse. And maybe he was worried about the possibility of an unintended pregnancy. Knowing what I do about open relationships, though, this could just as easily be a negotiated compromise. He is allowed to fool around with other girls -- provided he is discreet, of course -- but vaginal intercourse is reserved for his primary partner, Hillary. This, an informal survey shows, is a pretty common stipulation in open relationships.

B.) They're still married. Sure, maybe she screamed and yelled and threw things and maybe they went to counselling and maybe they worked through their issues. Or, maybe this was never really an issue to begin with. Look: Mrs. Clinton married a man who likes women -- likes lots of women. From the beginning, he was rumoured to have had affairs with lots of different women (although, he certainly has a type, doesn't he). If you go by the where there's smoke, there's fire maxim, then at least some of those rumours must be true (notice that other presidents -- George W. and George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama, Richard Nixon, etc. -- haven't had these kinds of rumours spread about them). And yet, she stayed with him. Mrs. Clinton doesn't strike me as the gullible type, the type to be duped time and time again by pretty words. Instead, she strikes me as the type who would say, "Listen, Bill, if this is the way it's going to be, we're going to need to have some rules."

I say all this not to make prurient observations about the former president and the current Secretary of State, but to point out something unfortunate about politics: they force the families of politicans to box themselves into little normal squares. Why should Mrs. Clinton pretend that she doesn't tolerate and ignore a little "straying" on her husband's part? Because she would be ridiculed, villified and pitied for it. And her husband would never have been elected.

And we the voters pretend that we're not complicit in all of this. But, now that they're out of office, can we please stop pretending that these people have a standard, monogamous relationship like the rest of us do (or pretend to -- they're more common than you would think)?

Success! (of the horticultural variety)

2010-06-01T13:22:00.001-07:00

In my house, I have the reputation of being a plant killer. I will admit that that reputation is not entirely unearned. Over the years, I have made several attempts at nurturing green things, and for the most part they have been unsuccessful. There was the Christmas cactus that fell off the top of my refigerator and remained, upside down, on my kitchen floor for nearly two weeks before one of my roommates took pity on it and nursed it back to health. There was the lavender plant that suddenly withered and died (I still don't know what happened there).

I have always had fantasies about being a good gardener. As a kid, one of my aunts had a gorgeous yard; all summer, it would be filled with fragrant, brightly colored flowers of all varieties. My grandmother has a Christmas cactus that her mother had; it is now over 100 years old. And I always love it when a friend brings fresh fruit or veggies from her garden; it's extraordinary how fragrant fruit or veg is right off the vine. All these things make me want to be able to do it myself, but I have always been held back by those nagging failures.

I'm not sure what made me pick up the box of gladiola bulbs in the grocery store. Probably, it was just a warm spring day and I was thinking about how much I love a flower garden. When I saw the box, I couldn't help but think, "Hmm, bulbs. They don't require much maintenance. My kind of flower." I bought them and planted in a small bed that day.

It was a couple of weeks later that the first shoots came up. I was shocked. Over a few days, eight green leaves came poking through the soil. And they thrived! They are now nearly a foot and a half tall, like massive blades of grass reaching towards the spring sun.

Emboldened, I went and purchased a couple of Topsy-Turvy Planters and set up a tomato plant, strawberry plants, green peppers, yellow peppers, cucumbers and green beans. Still feeling optimistic, I also bought globe basil, cilantro and several arugala plants. This was a week ago, and they are all still alive! The tomato plant has added new leaves. The beans are twice the size they were before. The peppers are reaching towards the sun. And this morning I saw what I think is the beginning of a strawberry!

I guess the reason that this is so amazing to me is that gardening feels a little like magic to me. Unlike with caring for animals or humans, I don't really understand what is happening inside or how it happens. Instead, it seems as though I pour water on the plants and somehow it gets bigger and then gives me fruit! So, successful gardening feels like performing magic. I am a gardener. I can do magic. That's a pretty fun thing to say.

The Death of Print

2010-05-18T07:22:00.001-07:00

I attended a wonderful writers' conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, a little over a year ago. During it, many of the speakers spoke mournfully of the passing of publishing's heyday. As fewer and fewer people read books, they said, the publishing industry gets squeezed, leading to smaller and smaller advances, smaller and smaller expense accounts, etc. Couple that with the so-called "death of print journalism" -- as newspapers like the New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post, along with countless other newspapers and magazines hit hard times -- and you could get pretty pessimistic about the future of literacy in this country.

The thing is, though, this seems like it may be a pivotal moment. Yes, the state of print might become dire and people may stop reading and switch entirely to being fed a straight stream of pablum right into their brains from FoxNews and MSNBC. Or -- and I think this is more likely -- the innovators in the industry will see this for the opportunity it is. People want to read the news online -- now someone just has to figure out how to effectively monetize that.

And I'm living proof that book publishing is both easier and harder. Yes, my advance was smaller than it might have been twenty years ago. Yes, no editor is going to take me out for a long, boozy lunch at some fancy New York restaurant. But in my case, Dreamspinner can afford to take a risk on me because of things like Print on Demand (instead of having to print several thousand copies of a book, they can print only the copies they need) and the internet (an artist can be located in Washington while the publisher is located in Texas and the marketing department is in New York, all made possible because of communication facilitated by the web).

While I'll admit that there is something extraordinarily pleasant about sitting at the dining room table on a Sunday morning, drinking a few cups of coffee and meandering through the Sunday Times, when was the last time I actually did that? By contrast, I've been on The New York Times's website several times today and it's not even noon.

No, print is going to be just fine. It just might look a little different.

2010-05-14T13:24:00.001-07:00

Ah, the first post.

For weeks now I have been trying to find the right thing to write about for my first blog post. Would it be the fact that Don't Ask/Don't Tell probably won't be repealed until 2013? I wasn't sure that there was enough to say about it other than, I'm disappointed in you, Obama. Would it be George Rekers being yanked out of the closet? It was good for a laugh, but I'm not sure it means anything beyond confirmation of the following rule: when someone loudly proclaims their opposition to the "homosexual lifestyle", it is worth it to ask what they're hiding. Would it be Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court and her possible lesbianism? Turns out she's not a lesbian and I just don't think it would be particularly interesting even if she was.

I thought about writing a little bit about me and who I am, but I had a hard time coming up with what I would say. I considered setting some kind of agenda for the blog, but...what would it be?

In the end, I settled on shameless self-promotion (I'm pretty sure you're going to see a lot of that if you stick around). Yesterday, I got the first draft of the cover art for my novel, Billionaire's Row, set to be published by Dreamspinner Press sometime in the relatively near future. Actually, it was better than even I had imagined and it gave me renewed excitement in this an an upcoming project.

So, keep coming back here for more about Billionaire's Row, future projects, me, and whatever else crosses my mind.

Thanks, and I'm sure the next post will be better.

Sullie.

(P.S. How awesome is it that motherfucking George Rekers hired a rent boy?)