Pioneers! O Pioneers!

You'll probably recognize this poem from a jeans commercial from a few years back. I remember it from my AP English class in high school where I had a brilliant teacher who read it in a voice that I now assume is precisely what Walt Whitman sounded like. The Will Greer reading posted here is still amazing, and I couldn't convince my high school teacher to let me record his voice and post it on youtube.

With the recent inauguration and the 113th congress coming into session, I've been thinking a lot about this poem lately. Yes, we elected our first African American president in 2008, but just as importantly we re-elected him to prove it was not a fluke. The new congress also has a few remarkable instances that give hope.

O you daughters of the west!
O you young and elder daughters!
O you mothers and you wives!
Never must you be divided,
In our ranks you move united,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

These lines encompass what I mean in a way blogging really can't. The new congress has some noteworthy gains for women, but also noteworthy gains in diversity that to this point have never taken place. There is hope in here for other pioneer women in the future. Let's marvel for a moment at the strides we've made before we resume the fight. We're more than 50% of the population and yet there aren't close to 50 female senators or 50% congresswomen in the house of representatives. A long way to go still, but it's good to enjoy the victories of diversity and equality along the way.

Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin is the first openly lesbian senator elected.

Mazie Hirono of Hawaii is the first Buddhist senator elected and the first Asian woman elected to the senate.

Krysten Sinema of Arizona is the lone atheist in the house of representatives right now and is the only openly bisexual person ever elected to congress.

New Hampshire is the first state in the history of our country to have an entirely female congressional delegation. Both senators and both representatives as well as the governor of the state are all women now.

Tammy Duckworth of Illinois is the first Asian woman elected to congress in Illinois, the first disabled woman elected to the house of representatives, a decorated war veteran, and the first member of congress born in Thailand. She's still serving as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Illinois National Guard despite having lost both her legs in the Iraq War.

Elizabeth Warren was elected as the first female senator Massachusetts, which is a good thing that's she's there now, but considering the state was one of the original 13 colonies, it took a little long in my opinion for them to elect their first female senator considering their state is technically older than our country.

Those were all remarkable accomplishments and shouldn't be diminished by how far we still have to go, but now I kind of have to throw some cold water on the celebration with some icky numbers and facts:

1. The obvious one is, yes, we've elected an African American as president twice now, which is good, but we still haven't elected a woman once.
2. While women comprise about 51% of the population of the country, we're only 20% of the senate and 16.8% of the house of representatives.
3. There are only 6 states with female governors.
4. More than half the states in this country have never elected a female senator. The elections in 2012 dropped it from 30 to 26. Of the 26 that still haven't, four of the states (Delaware, Iowa, Vermont, and Mississippi) have never elected a female representative either.

We need to celebrates the pioneer women listed, but we need more pioneer women to be inspired by them in the future.

The Gunfighter's Gambit

 “Four things greater than all things are, - Women and Horses and Power and War” ~Rudyard Kipling

The third book in the Raven Ladies series is finally out. I’m still on the hook for the prequel/fourth book in the series and then my publisher will be looking at the long term success of the books to see if they want more. Right now, the numbers look pretty good for the series to live on, but more would always be better, and thus another promotion blog post.

In the Gunfighter’s Gambit we return to the Gieo and Fiona storyline. Even while Claudia was heading west, Fiona and Gieo were heading southeast. Normally this would be the promotion post for the blog where I talk a little about the book, throw out some teasers, and then post the first chapter for perusal. Not gonna do that this time though. What I’d really like to talk about is Maude.

The cast in the Gunfighter’s Gambit is almost entirely new. Fiona, Gieo, Alondra, Ramen, and Shrimp all made it out of Tombstone and into New Mexico, but the rest of the characters were built from the ground up and there is some serious diversity in the book as the gunfighter’s journey heads into two antiquarian societies. Where everything in the Steam-powered Sniper in the City of Broken Bridges was modernized steampunk, everything in the Gunfighter’s Gambit is heading backward in time. This required me to write an entirely different type of character: anachronists!

Maude is a grandmother, a rancher, a hunter, a lone survivor, and Fiona’s most trusted companion and advisor in the Gunfighter’s Gambit. In writing Maude, I wanted to create a character unlike anything I’d written to this point. In doing so, I also ended up writing a relationship that isn’t easily definable between Fiona and Maude. In the chain of command, Maude is Fiona’s subordinate, but in life experience terms, Maude has far more. They’re equal in survival skills for the post-apocalyptic world, but in entirely different ways. Their relationship can’t be described solely as friendship, sisterhood, mother/daughter, boss/employee, or mentor/mentored. In Maude, I wrote a character that I think you’ll love, who has absolutely no interest in being loved by you or anyone for that matter.

Maude is Fiona’s antithesis. She isn’t young, she was never beautiful, society didn’t laude her accomplishments (although they were numerous), and yet she found a comfortable place for herself within the world in a way Fiona never did. By the time the Slark invaded, Maude had built a life worth being proud of while Fiona hadn’t done anything she wanted to even put her name to. With how much Maude lost in the cataclysm and invasion, she plays her cards close the vest and takes protection of what little she has left very seriously.

Rudyard Kipling would have loved Maude. Three of Kipling’s quotes followed me while I was writing this remarkable woman into my book:

“An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.”

“If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them: 'Hold on!'”

“For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack”

The book is an adventure tale about a journey to protect love in many forms. This is an excerpt from the book where Fiona and Maude are on the trail talking to reconcile their differing views of the world both old and new.

Fiona, Maude, and Shrimp were back on the trail by first light, heading southwest into the open desert with no greater goal than simply being found. They rode slow to conserve their horses and made no attempts at concealing their trail. The desert wouldn’t necessarily be kind, and Fiona didn’t know how long they would have to wander before finding some sign of the Apache, but she hoped, if they were obvious enough, Alondra’s prediction would come true and the Apache would find them.

She and Maude both kept sharp eyes to the desert around them, which was how they spotted the coyote at about the same time. The lanky animal was following along beside them at a distance of a few dozen yards, occasionally glancing over to keep the two riders in sight.

“That coyote bitch has been following us for miles now,” Maude said.

Fiona couldn’t tell the gender of a coyote on sight, but she believed Maude could. She hadn’t even considered the coyote to have a gender the night before. It was simply a strange, unknowable, wild animal. “Yep,” she said.

“Looks like you made yourself a friend,” Maude added.

“I wasn’t looking to,” Fiona replied. “I just gave her a half a lizard.”

“That’s usually how a person starts a coyote friendship.” They rode on in silence for awhile before Maude continued. “A coyote friendship is a fickle, worthless thing. She’ll be warm when you’ve got food and vanish at the first sign of trouble. They’re not dogs.”

Fiona and Maude both glanced to Shrimp trotting along beside them. He’d apparently picked up on their new companion as well, although he seemed determined to ignore the distant coyote. Shrimp glanced in the coyote’s direction, but always snapped his head back to front after only a brief glance. When Maude and Fiona looked to him, he let out a little bark to add to the conversation.

“What animals should I befriend then?” Fiona sniped.

Maude thought on the question awhile. It was asked in jest, but Maude gave it due diligence all the same. If nothing else it seemed an interesting philosophical conundrum to the old rancher woman.

“I’d say you’d do well to befriend a rattlesnake,” Maude mused. “Their friendship is hard-won and dangerous to garner, but once you’ve got it, it’s going to be solid. There’s not much a snake can do for you. Still, it’ll do what it can once it calls you friend.”

Fiona snorted at this. Even from the context of the conversation, it wasn’t clear if Maude meant herself or Fiona or both or was talking out of her ass about literal snakes. Maude certainly matched the definition of a rattlesnake and her friendship fit the description as well. So too did Fiona though, and Gieo actually referred to Fiona as a rattlesnake often. In fact, it was one of the first things Gieo had called her—she’d done it in such a loving, excited way, that Fiona couldn’t help but take it as a compliment.

“Remember Facebook?” Fiona asked.

“Nope,” Maude replied curtly.

“Oh.” Fiona had planned to make a joke about having a friend list full of desert animals by the time they were done with their desert trek. Maude’s terse response made sense though. What the fuck would a person like Maude care about something as frivolous and ultimately fleeting as social networking.

“The world did itself a big favor by getting rid of shit like that,” Maude said. “We’d just about ruined experiencing the world with cell phones and everything that went with them. Staring at a tiny screen with the whole wide world around you was just about the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen folks do.”

Fiona nodded her agreement to this. She’d had a cell phone, like everyone else of her generation, but she’d never liked it. It was a tether to a life she didn’t want and her phone never brought her good news. Before the cascade that destroyed technology and killed most of humanity in the process, she’d dropped her cell phone in a champagne ice bucket outside someone’s room in the hallway of a casino in Las Vegas. Not having it with her when humanity struck the epic blow to both sides probably saved her life.

“Where were you when the cataclysm ended everything?” Fiona asked. There wasn’t even true agreement on the nomenclature of the event. The egg heads in the City of Broken Bridges called it the Cascade and so too did some of the former military folks in Tombstone, as Fiona recalled. Most of the Ravens called it the cataclysm though and gave it little thought or reverence.

Maude spit. “It didn’t end everything.”

“Tell that to the billions of dead folks,” Fiona said.

“At my ranch, most likely,” Maude said, “working like a dog or doing what we’re doing right now.”

That was about the answer Fiona expected. Maude probably rode horses and shot the shit as a primary hobby for most of her long life. The world in all probability stopped making sense a long time ago and only circled back around to making sense after the cataclysm rolled all the technological clocks back. There wasn’t any way Fiona could make Maude see that the world was a better place now, not with how many children and grandchildren Maude had lost. She glanced over to the stoic old woman with the hard features and sharp eyes. No, Fiona was wrong about the world and Maude not getting along. Maude was strong and knew herself; she’d never let the world dictate to her the way Fiona had. In that way, the world likely was worse for Maude simply because it didn’t have as much family and friends as it once did. Maude was going to be who she was regardless of how many cell phones or Facebook pages there were. Fiona envied the hell out of that.

“Are you going to tell me where you were, or you going to make me guess like an idiot?” Maude sneered.

“Passed out drunk on one of those big floating air mattress things in the middle of the Bellagio’s pool.” Fiona hadn’t ever told anyone that. Nobody had asked, probably because it didn’t matter, but all the same, she’d never admitted to anyone to that point exactly how stupid and serendipitous her survival had been. It was a big pool and she was far enough away from anything electronic, insulated by the large rubber raft she was laying upon, that the electronic pulse that destroyed most of humanity and the Slark invaders hadn’t touched her despite being in the middle of one of the most electrically demanding cities in the world.

“You’ve got a dumb kind of luck watching out for you,” Maude said.

Fiona couldn’t deny that. She’d done more than her fair share of keeping herself alive and she’d certainly had others shield her, Ekaterina, Veronica, Carolyn, Gieo, and even Zeke among them, yet with all that, she knew she should be dead. Luck definitely played a large part in her survival, and most of it was aptly called dumb luck.

Maude directed Fiona’s attention to a green spot in the desert off to the northwest a quarter of a mile out. They adjusted their path and began to head toward it. It was mid afternoon when they rode up on the wellspring watering a tiny scrap of the desert. Fiona wasn’t sure exactly how far they’d gotten although she guessed they were likely south of old Jaurez by then, but probably not by much.

They dismounted and set to watering the horses in the verdant little pools. Fiona polished off the last of the hot, dusty water in her canteen and dunked it into the clearest, tiny pond to fill again. Shrimp began lapping at another, smaller pond a little ways off. Fiona glanced over to the dog that was warily eyeing something across from the little delta of streams branching from the wellspring. The coyote had snuck up on them enough to take a drink herself.

Fiona remained stock still, watching the coyote that in turn watched her even as it drank. Fiona lifted her refilled canteen to her mouth to drink as well. The coyote stopped lapping at the water momentarily at spotting the movement, but resumed as soon as she’d assured herself Fiona meant her no harm in the action. Up close and in the light of day, the coyote didn’t look like a dog at all. She was lanky and perfectly formed in ways Shrimp wasn’t. There was a certain awkwardness to the shape of the cattle dog mutt that simply didn’t exist in the coyote. She was flawlessly suited to the world and a little beautiful because of it. Her coat was the same tan of the desert, broken by tiny steaks of darker and lighter shades to mimic shadows and sun. Her head was pointed and precise for hunting small game. And her tail was bushy in a decidedly un-doglike way.

“I watched her head toward the wellspring before I even saw it,” Maude whispered from behind Fiona. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say she knew it was here and thought we might want a drink.”

“And why do you know better?” Fiona whispered back.

“Because that’s not in the nature of a coyote friendship to offer water in exchange for nothing,” Maude replied.

Fiona turned her attention back to the coyote. The coyote paused in its drinking with its mouth still hovering above the water, but without its tongue emerging again. Casual as you please, the coyote turned away, having drunk its fill, and wandered back out of range. It sat in a sandy patch beside a saguaro cactus and waited.

“Your friend there may have helped us more than just the water,” Maude said, drawing Fiona’s attention away from their desert guide.

Fiona stood slowly as not to frighten off the coyote with sudden movement. She screwed the cap back onto her full canteen and turned to see what Maude was talking about. The old rancher woman had walked a little circle around the wellspring, coming to a stop over some tracks.

“Five riders, maybe more,” Maude said. “They were riding single file, but there is enough size variation in some of the hoof prints to venture a guess.”

Fiona knelt beside the churned earth and the u-shaped hoof tracks. A spill out of water had created mud of the desert floor at one point and then dried to cast several near perfect prints. There was no way of knowing how old the tracks were since they were created in dried mud; the edges were crisp, but that could still mean a matter of several weeks or a couple hours. “Any guesses on who left them?” Fiona asked.

“Apache,” Maude replied without hesitation.

“How are you so sure?”

Maude pointed to a set of their own horses’ tracks. “See a difference?”

Fiona stood and glanced between the two sets of prints. The difference was immediately apparent. Their horses had left muddy prints as well, but there were little dots along the u-shapes where horseshoe nail heads sat. The curves of the other tracks were perfectly smooth and unbroken. “They don’t have horseshoes.”

“Yep,” Maude said. “I’m guessing the West Durango folks probably have blacksmiths since they’re stationary, but the Apache likely don’t bother with metal working.”

“I guess we follow them,” Fiona said. “Water is rare enough in the desert that we’re likely to find another wellspring again along their trail.”

“You’re finally starting to think like a tracker,” Maude said.

Fiona smirked. “If I get too good at it, you’ll be out of a job.”

“I’ll be long dead before you’re even a tenth the tracker I am.”

Fiona hauled herself back up into Molly’s saddle. “Shit, you might be long dead before I have breakfast again, old woman.”

Fiona spurred Molly into a gallop down the Apache trail, heedless of whether anyone was following. She heard Maude scrambling to keep up and Shrimp barking at the commotion well behind her. She glanced out of the corner of her eye to see the coyote easily loping along through the desert a dozen or so yards off to the right.

Relationship Parable

This column ran last spring in a few places, but I kind of lost track of it since it ran during my transition from part time columnist to full time novelist. The timeline stuff was accurate in spring when I wrote the column and this was supposed to be the first part of a several part series on relationship parables, which I might still end up writing to post here.

Enjoy!

Not the moving service we used, but close enough.

In case you’ve noticed the absence of a column from me in awhile (or a blog post for that matter), let me tell you a little story about relationships…

I’ve been living with my girlfriend for a couple years now. About eight months ago, I relocated with her from Orange County California to Orange County Florida. Anyone who has tried to move somewhere with someone, you know that aside from the primary function of relocating all your things, moving also seems designed to causes stress, fights, and costs a ton of money. Since my girlfriend and I are both very thrifty women, the costs only added to the stress and fights.

We survived the cross country move but then, at the beginning of March, we moved across town from an apartment to a house, which caused one of the rarest and most intense kind of fights a couple can have, the dreaded:  we’re moving out, so we don’t have to worry about our neighbors hearing our argument. In an empty apartment, we had a proper screaming at each other match. That’s not entirely accurate, technically, she was screaming at me, and I was intentionally getting under her skin in a much quieter way. From the outside, it probably sounded like she was screaming me silly without response, but let me say, I am a master of messing with people without seeming like I’m messing with people. If I ever had an argument with myself, I would probably end up slapping the hell out of me. To my girlfriend’s credit, she only yelled.

Ah, traditional marriage.

We’ve been together for several years, known each other even longer, and we’ve never had a fight like this. More specifically, she’s never had the out of control reaction she had, and it scared the hell out of her that she was able to get so angry. The combination of stress from moving, the huge amount of money we were spending, and her need to take on absolutely every responsibility she can get a hold of, finally caught up with her, and then I started needling her with bitchy comments because I’d felt like she hadn’t listened to me enough that day. I totally earned the screaming at, and I told her so, but that didn’t make her feel better since she was a little freaked out about the rage reaction.

As women, we’re socialized to internalize our anger. We’d rather take stuff out on ourselves than externalize it onto the people who probably caused the anger. In the rare occasion when we do externalize our feelings, it is usually accompanied by a lot of guilt and shame. I have no doubt in my mind that if I was straight, and I managed to get my boyfriend that angry, he would have punched a hole in the wall of the apartment we were leaving and we would have lost our deposit; yay for being a lesbian! We all have those emotions at those intensities in us. It’s a human thing, not a gender thing. So, while it freaked her out because she was still thinking in the socialized terms that women aren’t supposed to have that kind of anger and we certainly aren’t supposed to show it, I wasn’t surprised, shocked, or appalled to learn my girlfriend was an emotionally vivid human being. Having anger is normal, expressing anger is healthy, internalizing anger because that’s what you’ve been socialized to do is damaging.

The intemperate sex indeed.

The relationship moral to this story is two fold:

-           Firstly, and most obviously, understand that moving with your girlfriend/wife/partner/whatever-nomenclature-you-prefer is mind bogglingly stressful. Give each other a break, learn to take breaks from each other, and accept that arguments are almost certainly going to arise no matter how much you love each other.

-           Secondly, and perhaps not so obviously, outward expressions of “unsavory” feelings like anger, jealousy, contempt, etc. shouldn’t be looked down upon. I put unsavory in quotes because there aren’t “bad” and “good” emotions, only “preferred” and “not preferred” emotions; calling these emotions bad is where the guilt and shame over feeling them comes from. Anger isn’t a bad emotion and so expressing it doesn’t make you a bad person. Trying to destroy or suppress a perfectlyhuman emotion like anger is what’s actually bad for you. Within a relationship you don’t just have to understand your connection to these supposedly negative feelings. You have to understand your partner’s relationship to the feelings both in how they experience them and how you express them to your partner. Knowing Nikki had that kind of anger in her didn’t scare me, didn’t make me rethink the relationship, or think less of her; it let me know she was human with a very human need to express her anger sometimes. The really scary thing would be if she never showed me anything but a happy face.

Happy endings involve sunsets and rainbow flags.

Divine Touched

Divine Touched

What would you do if your god stood before you, spoke directly to you, and told you to kill the woman you love?

I LOVE swords and sorcery stuff. Dragons, wizards, elves, orcs, and all that fantasy land fun. I played World of Warcraft in high school. I watched all the Lords of the Rings movies (and then read the books--don't judge me, I was 11 when the movies came out). I love everything Game of Thrones, again, I'll admit to the show starting me on the books. So what is a girl to do if she is known for steampunk and paranormal, but she really wants to write about knights and ogres? The answer is apparently take a stab at the new genre and hope my readers are into it.

Synopsis:
Harper, Sword Maiden for the illustrious Goddess of the Open Ocean, has returned to the fabled city of Griffon’s Rock at the end of the Last Road to rest for the winter months after a disappointing year treasure hunting. Her rest is cut short by a mysterious storm of divine origin, an attempted horse theft of her beloved mount, and the sudden appearance of a beautiful southerner who seems determined to capture Harper’s heart.

As the snows begin to fall, the intrigue and romance heats up. The object of Harper’s desire, the mysterious rogue Calista, appears destined to get everyone into fresh trouble with a mystical stew-brewing ogre, a greedy guild of Dwarven thieves, and finally an exalted march out of the snowy north bent on divine retribution.

Harper must decide if her growing love for Calista is real or a product of the lies she’s been told. Before the spring thaw, Harper will choose between the woman she loves and the Goddess that is the source of her magic.

So here it is, the first chapter of my fantasy adventure epic where a pure-hearted knight struggles with her faith as she falls in love with a cold-blooded assassin. Divine Touched is available: Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and Paperback

Chapter 1:

The Last Season for an Old Friend

  The first storm of autumn darkened the sea to the northwest, rolling in like gray mountains across the sky, carrying with it the scent of the winter to come. The Last Road wound its way up through the granite, heading north along the coast, with the rocky shore to the west and the groves of stone berry trees to the east. Ahead, tall like a tooth of the Gods, stood the Screeching Peak, snow already dusting its jagged cap, stark white against the foreboding gray sky.

 Harper walked slowly, careful to keep to the right of her warhorse, Aerial. The great gray mare, sixteen hands tall and stout like a brawny north man, was finally to be retired. Her coat was lined with scars equal to Harper’s, although the final wound to end her career left only the tiniest mark, no bigger than an arrowhead. Aerial was only seventeen seasons with plenty of career left before her until she lost her left eye to a stone dart of all things at the end of summer. The armored head-crest she wore in combat would have blocked most projectiles much larger, but the stone dart found its lucky way through, given more force by attacking opposite a charge. Harper tried her best to heal the wound, dropping her attack when Aerial reared, yet even her magic couldn’t spare her beloved horse’s eye. Enough remained to stitch together a milky globe that Aerial could barely make out shapes with should Harper pass her hand in front of it. The rest of her company had already ridden ahead, giving Harper private time with Aerial for the last return to Griffon’s Rock.

 Tears rolled freely down her cheeks, pausing momentarily on the shelf of her high, refined cheekbones before tumbling free. Harper was part Sylvan-born on her mother’s side, giving her slightly tapered tips to her ears, delicately triangular facial features, and an innate sense for magic. As she wore her honey colored hair long and typically free flowing, she passed easily for an exotically lovely human woman with the exception of her eyes. They were an otherworldly combination of green and blue such as a northern ocean after a violent storm when the world below the waves is churned to the surface and lit upon by rarified light breaking through the gray dome of storm clouds. Some said they shone with an inner light, although Harper was seldom near a reflective surface to verify.

 Though Aerial had long since lost the need for a lead rope, Harper rested her hand on her equine friend’s flank as they walked together. The ocean crashed against the granite shore down the boulder-strewn slope to their left and the autumnal winds blew through the golden leaves of the stone berry orchards to their right allowing them both to walk blind, guided north only by the sounds surrounding them.

 Aerial sniffed at the air, flaring her nostrils to take in the scent of the approaching storm and rain striking saltwater to the north. Harper followed suit, breathing in deeply the blessing of the Sea Queen. Maraline, Goddess of the Open Sea, spoke to her followers like Harper through the ocean’s song. Harper tried her best to see the approaching storm as a sign of a good resting season to come, a fine farewell to a friend’s long service, before Aerial and Harper would finally part ways.

 Griffon’s Rock rose out of the base of the Screeching Peak like a shining jewel among worthless gravel. The city itself, the wintering home of Harper’s company, was built from the ruins of the Dwarven City State that had inhabited the mountain a century before. The Dwarves had come to rely on the griffons that lived among the peak as their staple herd. Their end came when the dragons, who also fed upon the griffons, took umbrage with the Dwarves pillaging their food supply. The Dwarves were exterminated under the flame of the dragons and the dragons starved slowly after, consuming the last of the griffons without leaving generations enough to replenish the reduced numbers. The city of Griffon’s Rock and the humans who inhabited it learned the lessons of foolish dragons and greedy Dwarves, focusing instead on the easily fostered crop of stone berries: the hearty, tree-grown nuts the griffons had once eaten. The shells of the stone berry were so hard only the griffon’s beaks could crack them, or, as the people of Griffon’s Rock learned, metal nut crackers in the precise shape of a griffon’s beak. The nut within was often crushed, mixed with water, and turned into a gruel for marching troops or high quality mash for warhorses. The armies of the nation of Vaelandria marched on their stomachs as the old proverb went. And the stomachs of Vaelandrian horses and men alike were filled with stone berries grown by the people of Griffon’s Rock. The secondary industry of Griffon’s Rock was to offer winter housing for mercenary companies.

 The treasure seeking season was coming to a close, although earlier than Harper might have liked. Harper’s crew, the Dagger Falls Company had been beset by misfortune the entire season from spring’s first thaw until they’d finally given up their endeavors a week ago. More fortunate companies would continue their work until the first snow, which wouldn’t be for another two weeks, collecting coin and treasure for their benefactors before retiring to Griffon’s Rock. The haul the Dagger Falls Company managed that season was embarrassingly paltry, and Harper didn’t look forward to making their report.

 They’d lost their Jack early in the season. Felix, a street urchin who had risen through the ranks of thieves guilds to turn adventurer and mercenary at the first opportunity, had served ably as the company’s Jack for four seasons. Early in spring, when they were working as caravan guards to make their way into the east, a brigand ambush had struck the wagon train, felling Felix beneath a hale of arrows.

 The company tried their best to replace the talented Jack with little success. Mettler, a grandiose figure with a flourishing rapier as his favored weapon and a bright orange sash tied around his head at all times, had hired on once they’d finished the caravan escort duty. The next job, and Mettler’s only work with the company, was a reclaiming of a captive nobleman’s daughter. Mettler was to scale the stone manor’s wall, enter through an open window, and sneak through the mansion to open the gate for the rest of the company. The loud crash that followed from within, the shouting of guards, and then the frantic pounding on the interior of the keep’s massive oak door told the company Mettler had failed miserably in his task. They’d gained entrance to the keep when the guards burst out the front door in great numbers to see if the foppish Jack was acting alone. The Dagger Falls Company battled well, slaying the guards through force of arms and dumb luck, and ultimately freed the nobleman’s daughter in a distinctly ham-fisted fashion.

 The second replacement Jack they’d hired on, and the one who managed to follow them the rest of the summer, was a Havvish woman—Havvish being the diminutive people having arisen from the union between a Gnome and a Brownie that supposedly took place two millennia ago—less kind origin stories for the relatively new race said they sprang from a swamp of particularly irritating water. Short to the tune of around four feet tall and delicately built, their work as Jacks was legendary and so the company felt themselves fortunate to find one available for employment. Unfortunately, so too are the Havvish people known for drinking, gambling, stealing anything not nailed down, and talking all waking hours and many slumbering hours as well. Brandinne was talented at her work, there was no doubt about that, fighting well with her crossbow and daggers, setting brilliant traps, and flicking locks from their mountings with little more than a look, but she drove them all to the edge of madness with her prattle and stink-weed pipe smoking. Sven and Athol, the two brothers whose family was the company’s benefactor, seriously considered stuffing Brandinne into a sack and drowning her on so many occasions that Harper actually started to fear for the Jack’s life. Toward the end of the season, when they were camped at the edge of the Rusted Plains, Athol had stepped into a leg-turn trap, having somehow found his way toward Brandinne’s side of the camp in the dark. The trap that cleverly combined sticks and ropes in such a way that would turn an ankle if stepped into, had served as a non-lethal warning. Athol claimed he was sleep walking. Brandinne superficially accepted this excuse, but the damage to the group’s cohesion was done. Brandinne took her earnings and left them in the next town.

 On the next job, Harper’s trusted mount and warhorse of great import to the company’s success, took the stone dart to the eye when they were to clear out a colony of goblins that had taken up residence in a town’s only functional mill. The Dagger Falls Company took a vote, declared the season hexed beyond repair, and retired to Griffon’s Rock to spend the winter months searching for a new Jack and better fortune for the spring thaw to come.

 Harper finally strolled through the gates of the city’s massive walls, once built by talented Dwarven masons. The cobblestone streets, brick buildings with thatched roofs, and hearty agrarian people all felt familiar and safe to Harper. The citizenry of Griffon’s Rock were abuzz with preparations for the return of the mercenary companies. At least two dozen or more companies took their winter rest in Griffon’s Rock, bringing with them wealth spent liberally on drink, entertainment, finery, and, if any was left over, supplies for the next season. The town greeted the companies with great hospitality, plied them with food, drink, and wanted wares, and then sent them on their way the following spring, picked clean of nearly every coin. Harper was different. As a Sword Maiden of the Sea Queen, she spent her winter months at the temple to Maraline, healing the sick, performing miracles in the name of her Goddess, and growing the flock of the faithful. Her wealth remained her own, saved in the temple’s coffers, spared by her duty to her faith.

 She walked the familiar narrow alleys along the outer wall to the livery where she would finally dip into her mountain of savings to provide comfort for an old friend who had served well. The livery master came out to greet her, dressed in the stained brown clothes of his work, his equally filthy hair pulled back into a long braid. He smelled strongly of the stables, of sweet hay, pungent horse manure, and leather tack.

 “Greetings to you, Lady Harper,” the stable master said, raising his hand in a three fingered salute meant to show fealty to an agent of the divine.

 “Greetings, stable master,” Harper replied. “I have need of new service.”

 “New or returned service, my lady?”

 “Aerial has lost use of her left eye in the course of duty,” Harper explained, gently turning her horse’s head to show the stable master the truth of her words. “I wish her to rest in a retirement well-earned, paid for by the coin she helped acquire.”

 “Begging your apologies, lady, but we do not provide horse ‘retirement’ services here.” The livery master fidgeted a bit, not wishing to look upon Harper when delivering the news. “Perhaps you should see to the butcher or one of the slaughterhouses for such a thing.”

 The implication struck Harper like a cold knife to the stomach, which she had experienced and hadn’t enjoyed. “No, not in the sense of retire from this world,” she said.

 “Begging apology again, but what other retirement might a horse be offered?”

 “To rest well, eat in peace, the occasional freedom to run across an open pasture, and then sleep in a dry stable.” Harper held Aerial’s head close to her own, breathing deeply of the warm, familiar smell of her beloved friend. “She has earned all of these things and more. Will you see to her comfort as a loyal servant of the Sea Queen?”

 The livery master, still appearing baffled beyond understanding, nodded his agreement. “I do not understand your purpose in this, but if this horse is a servant of the Sea Queen, I will care for her as I would my own daughter.” The livery master took the offered bridle, gave the horse a perplexed look, and led her into the stable.

 Harper considered correcting the livery master before he departed, to tell him she meant he was a loyal servant of the Sea Queen as she had seen him come within the crystal-lined walls of the temple, but she thought better of it. Aerial could certainly be called a favored child of the Sea Queen and if that helped the livery master understand the request better, then Harper was glad to see it done.

 The first rains of the coming storm struck her before she could even turn to take her leave. She tilted her head back to take in the blessed storm, bathing in the baptismal of her faith as she walked the streets toward the Thundering Dawn Inn. People gathered beneath awnings, at windows, and even dared to stand at the edge of the road to watch her pass, Sword Maiden of the Sea, drenched and happy. Harper knew this was as close to the divine as many would come. Few witnessed Gods and fewer still received the personal boon that was magic of the holy—Harper had done both.

 She was but a child of single digit years, the daughter of a fisherman in Anilthine, when she beheld Maraline in all her glory. A blockade had shut the city’s bay to the world over a trade dispute, keeping Harper’s father on shore to fish from the docks with a pole like a common angler. She had joined him at the edge of the jetty, the manmade barrier of piled rocks to partially close off the bay to the wild waters of the ocean. On that fateful day, she went to see the hulking ships of a rival city bobbing along the lazy blue waves as she’d heard they were fantastically different. She was nearly out of her father’s line of sight, although not entirely as this would raise his voice and she didn’t want that, but she had wanted a closer look at the great warships. At the furthest edge of the jetty, where the sea spray washed over her whenever a wave crashed against the rocks, she finally saw the whole of the armada blocking in their fair city. A storm unlike anything she’d seen before or since, rose like a spear in the sky, slicing across the open ocean as no weather could. The men upon the blockade ships shouted, attempted to raise anchor and set sail, but it was all in vain. The storm slashed through their ranks with determined vengeance, shattering ships with lightning, colossal waves, and sail-tattering winds. Standing amidst the storm, gigantic like the statue of the Goddess within the city’s square, was the Goddess Maraline incarnate. She walked along the ocean, smoothing the water as she went, creating a causeway in escort of a lone ship. She passed by the jetty, a few dozen yards only separating Harper from the Goddess of the Open Sea. She was magnificent, beautiful, glowing like the noonday sun set to bounce off the water. Harper felt her power in a way she’d never felt anything before. The touch of the moment lingered, found a resting place in her, and dwelled there like a flame. Her father ran to her, attempted to collect her from the end of the jetty, but he too was struck by the power of the Goddess and, like his daughter, could only hold his ground in awe of witnessing the divine. The ship the Goddess had personally escorted through the blockade held a high priestess with the power to raise the dead, or so the stories went. All Harper knew was that she must devote her life to this great and powerful lady of the ocean.

 The ember of the divine planted in her from proximity to the Goddess had remained, growing slowly, the source of Harper’s magic and anchoring her connection to the deity she served. The rain soaked her hair, made heavy her linen tunic, and seeped into her leather riding boots, but she didn’t care. The rain also grew the ember of the divine within her and she felt closer to the Goddess because of it.

 Alarm rose out of the west. Someone was ringing the great iron bell above the western walls, calling aid to the docks and the lighthouse. Harper snapped out of her reverie. People were rushing toward the sound of the clanging bell. Harper joined them in the charge, sprinting through the puddles collecting in the street. The lateness of the hour and the darkness of the storm clouds left little light to follow by. The storm prevented any torch from gaining purchase, leaving the help called by the bell to flow through the streets almost blindly.

 When she broke free of the city, Harper got her first look at what raised the alarm. The great stone lighthouse on the edge of the jetty lay dark, likely losing its light under the ferocity of the storm. White-capped waves smashed upon the rocks, rolling out of the angry North Sea in gray mountains of water. Amid this turbulent hell of livid water, the remains of a ship was being battered against the rocks beneath the lighthouse. Cargo crates, barrels, debris, and people bobbed as black dots amid the choppy water of the bay, washed over from time to time when a colossal breaker roared clean over the jetty.

 Great pyres of pitch laden logs began lighting around the bay, finally granting light enough to effect a rescue. Men with ropes and floats rushed to the docks and onto the jetty. They struggled hard to pull the sailors from the angry gray waters even as the spray and wind threatened to pluck the rescuers from the wooden planks of the docks and granite boulders of the jetty.

 Harper rushed to their aid, making her way down the path toward the lighthouse. She slid her slender, two-handed sword from the scabbard across her back. The beautiful, holy weapon imbued with the power of the Goddess sprang to life when the rain struck it. This was no accidental squall of the coming season. The blade recognized the hand of the divine in the waters. What could the Goddess wish to destroy on that ship, Harper wondered. She braved the crashing waves at the end of the stone precipice the lighthouse was perched upon, raised the beautiful blade of the Goddess high above her, and bathed the entire bay in the soft blue glow of the guiding light of the Sea Queen.

 Rescuers did their best to work by the light, hauling man after soggy man from the waves by the light until the storm finally battered the last of the ship into little more than kindling, and the entire hulk disappeared beneath the darkened waves.

Random Questions from Everywhere

Random Questions from Everywhere

Yep, it's another fuck it blog post!

I’ve kind of slacked horribly on the relationship advice land questions. Ever since I quit doing the freelance columns, I’ve had a hard time giving out advice. A lot of the questions I get are kind of depressing or lack all the information so it turns into something of an email back and forth, which isn’t conducive to blog posts. In the name of keeping the blog fun, I’m going to answer a couple random, silly questions instead, even if (especially if) the question wasn’t asked in seriousness.

Have you ever “gotten” someone in your books?

Yep! Firstly, let me say this is a long standing tradition in the author world and it is entirely immature, ridiculous, and ineffective. Geoffrey Chaucer did it with Simon the Pardoner way back in the 1300s. It isn’t known precisely who the Pardoner was, or if he was entirely allegorical, which I kind of doubt, but Mr. Chaucer really let the guy have it. Nerd Girl Info: there’s a reference to this in A Knight’s Tale.

I’m certainly not alone in “getting” someone through literary satire. I’m probably not even alone in figuring out how silly the behavior is. Trying to “get” someone with a novel is a little like getting into a gun fight with a musket that takes a year or more to load while firing at someone who probably doesn’t have a gun at all and is so far away, they’re not even aware you’re shooting at them. Let me clarify that bizarre metaphor. It takes about six months to a year to publish a book. So even if a person writes very quickly, which I do, the book will still take six months to be seen by a reader. Odds are, the person being “gotten” won’t even read the work. On the off chance they do, they probably won’t recognize themselves since people are terrible judges of their own character. And even if they do read it and recognize themselves, they probably won’t care enough to even send an email to the author saying, “Hey, I read your book about that incident at a party over a year ago and it truly hurt my feelings to know you thought my pants fit so poorly!”

I'm clearly not the first person to lampoon a cop they didn't like.

To my specific incident of literary “getting” someone…I got a ticket a couple of years ago, a speeding ticket to be precise, and in my 20-year-old brain, I thought the California Highway Patrolman giving me a ticket for going 80 in a 70 zone on an entirely empty section of I-5 was an asshole thing to do. Actually, I still do, but whatever. If you’ve read TheGunfighter and The Gear-Head you’ll probably have noticed there’s a former CHP officer named Rawlins. Zeke orders him around, Gieo blackmails him, Fiona mocks him, and he eventually ends up dead. The GF&GH is a popular book, routinely in Amazon’s top 100 for lesbian fiction. The thing is, I doubt Officer Rawlins reads lesbian fiction. I actually kind of doubt Officer Rawlins even reads recreationally. So, yep, I really “got” him and he has no idea it even happened, nor would he probably care if he did know.

In hindsight (actually a little bit while I was doing it) the whole thing felt silly and a little pointless, which is why I haven’t done it since. Of course, if you get pulled over in the north Central Valley of California by a chubby, arrogant CHP officer named Rawlins, feel free to tell him he’s in a book.

Have you ever tried to start a trending topic?

Why does creating a hand gesture for something immediately make it lame?

This is a question from one of my new twitter followers who is increasingly becoming one of my favorite tweeple. Yes, and several. My history of creating hashtags:

#ShitMyGirlfriendSays: I still do this one from time to time when my girlfriend says something truly fantastic. I probably didn’t create it, but for awhile there all the activity on that hashtag floated around things I was saying and my follower list. So, while I may not have hatched that specific twitter egg, it was mine for a bit.

#TweetingThroughABadMovieOnFX: I used to live chat/tweet during movies on FX. I only picked 2 star or lower movies, only movies I’d never seen, and movies it was entirely likely FX did some truly hilarious things to while editing for television. Last fall, FX showed “Twilight” and I made the mistakes of #TweetingThroughABadMovieOnFX during it. Oh my fucking goddess, did people lose their shit over me making fun of Twilight for a solid two hours. Seriously, I had people pestering me about how wonderful and transcendent of a story Twilight is for weeks! After that, I kind of lost my taste for the whole thing, and FX has started showing better movies.

I pointed to this exact scene as creepy. Twilight fans response: "Ermahgerd isa lurve storah!"

#SexPositiveSaturday: I still think this one is a good idea that just didn’t work out. I wanted to get a bunch of relationship advice/sex advice columnists, bloggers, podcasters, etc. to start posting sex positive information and news on Saturdays with this hashtag. A few of us did for a couple weeks and then it just kinda died, probably due to my lack of focus.

 Have you ever padded out a blog post with pictures to make it look like you wrote more?

Ever get killed in a book?

Book Bloggers

I posted a comment awhile back on a column for the San Francisco Book Review that was written by a colleague who is from the same area as me and someone I’ve grown to like quite a bit through talking with her via social networking sites over the past year or so. Let me start by saying that I’m super happy for and super proud of Rachel for having her article published by the San Francisco Book Review--it’s kind of a big deal place to have an article, especially for California writers. The article was largely written with a writer audience in mind, and so my comment that has been getting so much attention lately was directed at other writers.

I have since been able to clarify my statements, which were posted in haste, with many book bloggers and reviewers on an individual level, and I’ve enjoyed this since it was a good chance to catch up as well, but I thought it’d be a good idea to clarify things on a larger scale.

From the LA Times

Firstly, let me say, I wish I had put quotes around “blogger” in my original post, because that’s really how I meant it. The type of blogger I was talking about isn’t in the majority and I’m very sorry that from the way I phrased my post that many bloggers felt I was talking about them. That was not my intention and I do believe the specific type of “blogger” I was talking about makes up probably less than 10% of the whole. You know what, I’m not even going to use the same word for them when writing this anymore. After talking with an accomplished book blogger on twitter last night, I came to the conclusion that I don’t even see the two as being of the same group. There are book bloggers, paid and unpaid, who behave in a professional manner whether or not they’re getting paid for their time, and many of them aren’t but are deserving of compensation for their work. But then there is another, smaller group that I’ll just refer to as hack-jobbers who go out of their way to find books they’re going to hate so they can attack them. These two groups are not the same in my mind and I feel terrible that my post appeared to lump them together, which was not my intention.

From Bill Wasterston who wrote stellar dialogue for a stuffed tiger.

My post’s primary goal was to give comfort to other writers who have been hit by these hack-jobbers. The original article was written to other writers--it seemed like a good place to talk to them. I may have just come from one of the burn pages or I might just have been thinking about my last trip to one--either way, I was mad and posted in haste to say the writers who were being “reviewed” by these hack-jobbers, who don’t actually seem to finish very many of the books they “review”, should take heart in knowing they’ve succeeded at something wonderful:  selling a book. And they shouldn’t let a hack-jobber make them feel like it wasn’t an accomplishment.

The thing about book bloggers, the real ones, not the hack-jobbers, is that they’re doing something nobody thought they would. I am writing specifically to the book bloggers here; I’d love to sit down with each and every one of you, have tea, and tell you this face to face, but we’ll have to settle for this. The Big Six publishers didn’t think you would do what you’re doing--they bet a lot of money in a roundabout way that you wouldn’t. You’re sorting the huge flood of indies in a way they never could and you’re doing it without anyone telling you when or how. You all just started doing it. You loved books so much that you gave up your free time to help others love books too. As an indie author from an indie publisher, I need you and appreciate you for working on this enormous labor of love, without pay, that will hopefully never be completed. We’re in this symbiotic relationship where indie authors and unpaid book bloggers are creating a literary world that has never existed before. If unpaid book bloggers didn’t review indies, the Big Six would be right about this new system not working and indies would have an enormously difficult time succeeding; likewise, if indie authors/publishers didn’t put out their work, book reviewing would still be dominated by paid reviewers in the New York Times and other publications, and they’d all review the same several books from the Big Six. What is being created by unpaid book bloggers and indie authors/publishers is a system where readers have more choices than ever and opportunities to read books that suit their every taste and/or desire; the Big Six and traditional paid book reviewers simply can’t do this because there just aren’t enough of them. Most indie authors, myself included, would have an extremely hard time standing out from the crowd if it weren’t for book bloggers pointing to us and saying, “Hey, that person’s got a book you might like!”

I’m going to run through a list of book bloggers and show you exactly what I mean about good people doing good work. Some of them have reviewed my books and some of them haven’t, but I’m only going to post one of my own book reviews, and I’ll save that for the end--trust me, it won’t be self-promotion.

The first review I want to look at is from Loving Venus / Loving Mars. It’s an LGBT oriented book review site with expertise in bisexual literature (try to get THAT from the New York Times Book Review). They go with the A+ through F- review format. In this review, Leah is giving a C to the book. I think C/3-star/whatever-is-your-middle-rating reviews are always interesting. You get to watch a blogger really talk about the book in a balanced way. Loved it! and Hated it! reviews are useful, but when you get to see a book blogger with talent working on a 3-star or C grade book, you really get to see their critical processes in action, which also holds entertainment value: http://bi-curious-romancenovel-chat.blogspot.com/2010/09/review-verdict-for-love-by-monica-conti.html

-                     “There were many times when this story was going to be a DNF for me. But I’m stubborn that way sometimes and I kept reading. I’m glad I did even if I have some critical things to say.” -- I love her for saying this. She didn’t quit on a book, despite wanting to, and she found something she would have missed if she had. That is superb book blogging and exactly what I’ve come to expect from Leah.

-                     “So I did have some expectations of a well crafted story, which didn’t happen.” -- This happens. A reviewer will like one book from the author, but not another, and Leah explains precisely why, while keeping perfect focus on the specific book she was reviewing.

I’m not going to go through the entire review because it is very in depth, but the spoiler alert/highlight section is done in a very clever way, so you should at least check that out even if you don’t read the whole thing. Ultimately, her review breaks down to the fact that the author did some POV things Leah felt didn’t work, but that the story being told was a good one, even if the way it was being told wasn’t. And she gave it an accurate C for that. This is the type of review that helps readers AND writers make better choices. Leah has reviewed a couple of my books, and she seemed to like them. She had notes on them that were helpful to me in future projects and she articulated those criticisms in a way that benefited everyone.

Another example of book bloggers/reviewers are the ladies, Rob, Amy, and Susie at Insatiable Booksluts. Rob is a woman, by the way, so that wasn’t an accident or typo. This is a fine example of a generally positive review from Amy. It’s a 4 out of 5 star book, but Amy explains very clearly why it lost that extra star. http://insatiablebooksluts.com/2012/07/22/review-all-about-lulu-by-jonathan-evison/

-                     It starts off with the first line of the book, which I like because it gives the reader a sample to really get the flavor of the book being reviewed. It’s followed by cleverness in her rating of it and background on why she chose to review it. She selected the book because she wanted to review it, presumably because she thought she would enjoy it. That’s precisely why a person should read a book to review it.

-                     Amy provides a clear synopsis so her review will have context and a reader of her review could decide if the story sounded interesting to them as well. Who couldn’t like a book blogger who took that kind of care of their own readers?

-                     She concludes her review with an explanation of why it lost the star it lost, which was thought out and a reasonable flaw for the penalty incurred. She also posted a funny tweet about a typo in the book, but she did explain very clearly that the typo was minor and understandable. I thought this one, well-placed tweet was far funnier than pages and pages of viscous snark.

The website’s banner says, “Voracious readers tell you if that book is going to suck” and they do, but they also tell you if the book isn’t going to suck. They have a balance of positive, negative, and in between reviews, which means they’re taking the task of sorting books seriously, and making an honest, good faith effort to assess each book on its merits regardless of whether it ends up being one of the ones that sucks. They won the 2012 Independent Book Blogger Award for Adult Fiction category and I think they more than earned it.

The last book blogger (because I already know this blog will be +4k words) and the only review of my own work I will be posting today. It comes from Guerilla Bookworm. I don’t know if they’re male or female, and I couldn’t find on the site where it said, so I’ll just call the reviewer “they.” They clobbered my book in an example of a perfectly written 1-star critique. This specific review was entirely validating for me--someone really taking the time to dissect my book and find it wanting meant to me that I’d finally joined the ranks of other professional authors who took a lump or two at the hands of a talented reviewer: http://guerillabookworm.com/?p=164

-                     “How much did I want to adore this book?” -- isn’t that an ominous start? Immediately I knew I was in for it, but I also knew that this book blogger had come to my book with happy expectations and hopes, eager to read and review with an open mind, which meant they were doing their job.

-                     Next, they go into the sex scenes in the book, which they didn’t care for at all. The reviewer prefaced it that they even expected the sex scenes so it wasn’t a surprise to them. The attention to detail in recalling specifics on the scenes they didn’t like shows the reader of the review that the reviewer thought quite a bit about this criticism and took the time to be specific without posting spoilers. They gave reasons and supported those reasons with examples--perfect book blogger form.

-                     “That might have worked if this were a video game instead of a novel.” -- I liked this line a lot. I wanted to be a game designer for a long time. It’s in the middle of a paragraph explaining why the reviewer didn’t care for the protagonists, but again, the writing used to clobber my book is clever, well-reasoned, and an equitable expression of the reviewer’s opinion.

-                     “And, yet, I hung in there.” -- this reviewer was NOT having fun reading my book, it wasn’t even on his list, and they didn’t “owe” me a review because I didn’t submit or ask for one (not that anyone ever owes anyone a review). YET they persisted through the whole thing because they wanted to be fair and reasonable in their criticism.

-                     “I never pick up a book without wanting to enjoy it.” -- statement of what makes them a quality book blogger and not a hack-jobber: making a good faith effort.

-                     “It did give me one good chuckle in a scene involving a robot and a puppy.  So for that, Ms. Duffy, I sincerely thank you.” -- at least I got one chuckle J

-                     At the end, they discuss what they thought I could have done better, encouraged me to continue writing, which kind of surprised me, and then offered alternative reads based on the genre of my book if people wanted to see what the reviewer thought was a quality book of this type. All of which was lovely and provided valuable information for both readers of the review and the author.

The reviewer mentions at one point that they think they’re being vitriolic. I didn’t see it that way at all, but I might have a different point of comparison for that word. This review came out during a very hectic month for me, so I don’t recall if I sent them an email thanking them for their consideration, which I usually do, regardless of the outcome of the review. So, if I forgot to, and I think I might have:  Thank you for your consideration, Guerilla Bookworm, I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy the book, but I appreciated your time and effort regardless.

There are hack-jobbers out there though. Hack-jobbers are NOT book bloggers in my opinion. The people above represent the majority of book review blogs, while hack-jobbers represent a small, but fairly vocal minority. These people, I don’t want to call them reviewers really since that seems like a secondary goal, go out of their way to find books they aren’t going to like so they can say mean things about them. Why a person would waste their time, energy, and money doing this is completely beyond me. And that’s really the point of part of my post on the San Francisco Book Review--nobody is making hack-jobbers do this. If they were professional book reviewers and their boss was making them review books they hated and they couldn’t leave their job because we’ve all got student loan payments, I would probably have a different opinion of them because I’ve had to work a few jobs where the boss breathing down my neck was the only reason I did something. But all the hatred and bashing from a hack-jobber is done voluntarily and without compensation, so they really are just being mean to be mean. Thankfully, I’ve never been reviewed by one. Some bash the authors themselves and some just do a shit job of reviewing a book they clearly set out to hate. One of their goals seems to try to discourage indie authors and publishers from…well…existing.

I thought quite a bit about posting one of their sites as an example, but I decided against it since I really don’t want to provide even more hits and attention for bad behavior. Some people I’m sure will still figure it out.

-                     “I aim my Darts of Mockery at the small-press publisher, who later removed the book from their online store, Amazon, B&N and ARe” -- good for her? Either she’s taking credit for the removal of a book that had nothing to do with her, or she’s taking credit for insulting someone’s work out of the public sphere. Book bloggers provide information for readers to make informed decisions, while hack-jobbers want to decide what books are even available for readers by insulting writers and publishers until they leave.

-                     “so I figured I should out myself a Mean Girl” -- that’s in the header of a section where she’s bragging about all the people she’s mocked recently. It makes the website look a lot like a burn page to me.

-                     “Made it about 20%...” -- that’s a good sign she shouldn’t have even posted anything about the book. What about the other 80%? Should we all go find an actual book blogger who can finish a book rather than a hack-jobber who revels in telling us how much of the book she didn’t even read before posting her review?

Some people are only borderline hack-jobbers, but I believe anyone who reads 20% of a book and thinks they’re qualified to say anything about it needs to get their mean girl head checked.

Or put it in a cute pink book and keep it under your bed.

As for the content of my original post on the San Francisco Book Review…

I used a turn of phrase that people gravitated toward in my post. I talk in colloquialisms. Anyone who has read my twitter feed or blog or has had a five minute conversation with me knows I talk a little like a mix between a Diablo Cody and Aaron Sorkin character. I also kinda write like that too. I’ve only recently realized that turns of phrase, like the one I used, are NOT universal. And I don’t just mean to the world, I mean to the U.S. Did you know “swing a dead cat” is something of a regional saying? I used it when I moved to Florida from California, and probably 60% of the people around me had no idea what I was talking about. “Why would you swing a dead cat?” they justifiably asked. I wouldn’t--it just means there are a lot of the thing in question in the area; so much so that if you had a small dead animal you couldn’t theoretically swing it above your head because you’d keep hitting those plentiful things…explaining the “swing a dead cat” phrase did not help it make sense, by the way. I used the term “above my pay grade” in the post. This is a phrase typical to military people or people with military families of a certain time frame and, as I learned, is NOT universal. I come from an extended family with a lot of military service. “Above my pay grade” has nothing to do with how much money a person makes anymore than “swing a dead cat” has to do with swinging dead cats. It’s used in the military sense when a soldier doesn’t want to answer a question, but doesn’t want to say, “I don’t want to answer that question.” The way I used it in my bastard child of Diablo Cody and Aaron Sorkin way was to mean, “outside of what I normally like.” I should have just posted that instead.

This is a picture of the space ship called Nostromo from the Alien movie--it has nothing to do with the book Nostromo, which bummed me out some.

The reading “outside of what I normally like” section of the post also included Nostromo. That is a hyper specific example, and many people caught on that. I used it because that’s MY hyper specific example of a book that was “outside of what I normally like.” A friend recommended it, said if I liked Dostoyevsky it would be right up my alley. That friend and I don’t talk anymore…I’m just kidding, I killed him to avoid future awkwardness. For those of you who haven’t read Joseph Conrad’s opus, it is as dense as marble and more intricate than a Swiss watch. The layers have layers upon layers and if you aren’t super focused the entire time, you’ll probably miss something you’ll need later. I don’t like reading stuff like that because I have a wandering mind that tends to daydream occasionally while reading. I did not end up finishing Nostromo. It was well written, the story was as massive as the sun, the imagery was compelling, but it was way outside of what I normally like. I wouldn’t review Nostromo because I didn’t finish it. The book might have had an “ah ha!” moment two pages from where I stopped reading that would have magically knocked everything else into place--Joseph Conrad was that good of a writer. But I didn’t finish, so I will never know if that would have happened. People have preferences that not every book, even the greats, will fit into, which is what that part of the post was meant to say.

I don’t believe any author could ever write something that is universally understood and meaningful to all readers. That is a preposterous goal like a person trying to fly by flapping their arms. Can people fly? Sure, or the movie Top Gun would have just been a really long beach volleyball scene. But we can’t do it at will, we can’t do it all the time, and we can only do it a few people at a time--that’s the same with writing. An author can only reach some readers some of the time with some of their message, which leads to some readers not understanding every single message or reference in a book. It’s not the reader’s fault, nor is it the author’s fault. The pieces for something to make perfect sense simply weren’t there. Book bloggers are very aware of the limitations of the written word to convey ideas perfectly and make allowances for it, because they know how it is because they’re writing a blog trying to convey ideas. Hack-jobbers assume if something doesn’t make sense to them, the fault is with the work or the writer, and maybe it is, but maybe it’s just the passage required a reader to possess a certain reference that particular reader didn’t have.

Example:  I took an Avant-garde fiction class in college. It sounded like fun and authors came to visit all the time so we could talk to them about their books and get some first hand answers about what we read. I’d never read any Avant-garde work to that point and I haven’t really since. That particular field of fiction is very self-referential, so the fact that I hadn’t read any became a real problem for my comprehension. An author of one of the books wrote extensively about another Avant-garde writer and one of her works. There was a specific passage in a particular book of this other writer that he suspected involved a very lewd act being performed while she wrote it. An email exchange later between the writers confirmed this was true! And everyone but me in the auditorium laughed. I wasn’t a stupid or inept reader--I simply hadn’t read the other book being referenced. The author could have explained that other book and the other scene in several paragraphs, but that would have completely halted the flow of writing and spoiled the remarkable musicality his work had. I was there, the author was there, and so I just asked him what the other scene was about. I won’t bore you with the whole story, but it was funny, the author explained it well, it involved a dildo, and when the premise for the reference was explained, it made perfect sense.

I write lesbian books. Moreover, I write silly lesbian books. I do it because I like writing silly stuff and I’m a lesbian. That’s about as nefarious as my process gets. I don’t want to trick readers, I don’t want my work to talk down to them, and I don’t write for a universal audience since I know not everyone likes silly or lesbians. My books contain references to lesbian culture that I seldom explain, but could easily be understood with a quick google search. Some readers run the search and some don’t. Either way, a scene not being understood is almost never due to a reader not being smart enough or a writer being too smart. Especially not in my books which are about robots, and vampires, and puppies, and first loves, and oral sex, and post-apocalyptic blimp piloting, and gangs of department store Santas running extortion rings, and…you get the point. I’m not writing highbrow stuff so I assume if a reader doesn’t understand a section in my book, it’s probably just because they haven’t had any experience with the terms gold star lesbian or uhauling or “the chart” or someone being a total Shane. Readers aren’t dumb, but no reader can reasonably be expected to have heard of everything a writer puts in their book and no writer can reasonably be expected to explain absolutely everything they mention. And that was my point that kind of got lost in the original post on San Francisco Book Review.

Someone brought up Mark Twain being snarky toward JaneAusten and James Fennimore Cooper--he was, but the authors he attacked were long dead (Literary Offenses came out in 1895. Cooper died in 1851 and Austen died in 1817) and Twain had his own body of work for people to criticize in response if they so chose and he encouraged anyone who felt up to it to do precisely that; to my knowledge, nobody wanted to get into a literary fist fight with Twain, but he did invite anyone who felt like it to try. I’m sorry, but that analogy doesn’t fit hack-jobbers. If Stephen King suddenly decided to put his Mark Twain suit on and write a tell-off piece about Faulkner, that would be a valid analogy to what Twain did. Anonymous or semi-anonymous people posting insulting comments about a book on the internet are not analogous to Mark Twain.

As for the snark stuff, censorship, and first amendment rights to voice opinions…with very few exceptions, people can say what they want. Does what they say hurt other people? Does it reduce the level of dialogue? Are they being mean in an attempt to be funny to other mean people? If the answer to any of that is ‘yes’ then it would follow that a reasonable, kind person wouldn’t say it know matter how protected their speech is. A good example of this: my own original post on SFBR. I was a writer talking to other writers about hack-jobbers and yet I ended up hurting book bloggers with my words. Simply having the right to say something doesn’t mean you should.

As for the comment section, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with that yet. I will warn people about this though: any comments pertaining to the SGRB/Goodreads feud will be deleted. I’m not happy about so many people trying to drag me into drama that I’ve made clear I want no part of, and I’m not interested in hearing why someone thinks this post relates to something I have nothing to do with and want nothing to do with. If fanning the flames on that mess is your idea of fun, you’re welcome to it, but not on my blog.