Lost in the Mist

Last rant! Well, for the time being...

2012-05-24T17:50:00.001-07:00

This is the last in a series of rants that began here:
Rant #1: Change!

In reply to someone who suggested civil unions are adequate because all gay people want is the rights that go with marriage, I wrote again about respect:

When you rush to the hospital because your beloved has been injured or taken ill, if you say, That person is my partner, or That person is my civil union person, or Drat! I left my power of attorney at home, the nurses may well invite you to take a seat in the waiting room, or tell you that they will only admit "family" to the patient's room.

When you say, That person is my wife, you get shown in right away. You get treated with respect.

Further, when our government and our institutions treat gay people with dignity, they teach the people by example to treat gay people with dignity.

The rights are the practical side--a way to ensure that ALL families are protected and supported. The respect gay people are demanding is what will prevent much of the very real harm done to gay people every day.

It is still OK to bully gay kids. Why? Because people don't respect gay people, and therefore young people believe they don't have to respect them. Many people think it's OK to hate gay people because God hates them. Kids are killing themselves because it is not OK to be gay in this country.

Are you aware that several state legislatures now considering anti-bullying legislation are excluding gay kids (or kids perceived to be gay) from protection because that would infringe on the free-speech rights of religious people. I don't know of any religion that says it's OK to bully people.

This battle was just fought in Michigan, and while the legislators were dithering over the issue, ten gay kids in Michigan who were victims of bullying killed themselves. They finally passed a watered-down law that opponents say is a "bullying is OK in Michigan" law.

The suicides (and they are more than you would ever believe) of gay kids are an extreme example of what happens when you set a group apart as different. The corrosive effect of anti-gay rhetoric on gay people (married or not, wanting to get married or not) undermines our sense of self-worth and reminds us every day that we are second rate, not quite good enough, and by some actively hated.

When I was young, it was OK to make racist and ethnic jokes. It was OK to say the n-word. There are plenty of people alive today who believe that people who are different from themselves, racially or culturally, are inferior. There are plenty of people alive today who are racist, but it's not OK anymore to say racist things in public.

My point is that as a society we have decided that certain things (racist hate speech) are NOT OK, and we criticize people who do and say those things. Someday I would like hate speech against people like me to be included in the list of things that are NOT OK.

And finally, when someone once again brought up the old testament, I said:

Note that the old testament says not one word about same-sex relationships between women.

Here's an illustration of just what people are so afraid of. Warning! It's really scary!!!

god on our side

2012-05-23T14:17:00.002-07:00

This is Rant #5, my response to a post from someone who gave his/her Catholic religion as a reason for his/her position on marriage equality, although s/he did also affirm that s/he is more "accepting" than his/her religion would allow.

Most Catholics, including the Catholic hierarchy, aren't asking our government to outlaw remarriage after divorce, because they have the sense to realize that freedom of religion as guaranteed in our Constitution protects the Catholic church (a minority) equally with other churches that have no problem with divorce. They also have the sense to realize that a large majority of Americans would take it amiss if the Catholic church were to meddle in our civil marriage laws. Yet when marriage equality for gay people is the issue, freedom of (and freedom from) religion go by the wayside.

I also assume that most Catholics do not disrespect or disparage the marriages of their friends or co-workers, Catholic or not, even though those people may have been previously divorced, because another fundamental value of both religious and non-religious people is freedom of conscience.

[The poster suggested having two words with the same meaning, to appease both sides.]

There's that separate but equal thing again. Shall we have two institutions called, say, Marriage A and Marriage B and thereby duplicate every section dealing with civil marriage in every law book, in every statute book, in every legal document, state and federal, in order to appease those who want to keep marriage all for themselves?

And of course Marriage B would only be for the people we exclude from Marriage A. Who's that? Why, gay people, of course. So once again we're offered a seat in the back of the bus. Thanks, I'd rather walk.

The solution is not to "appease" anyone. The solution is to understand one of the basic principles on which this country was founded: the separation of religious doctrine from the workings of government. Our courts, both state and federal, have declared that the majority's dislike or disapproval of a minority group is not a legitimate basis for excluding that group from equal protection of the laws.

[The poster stated that the religious side will never give up.]

Actually I believe they will. I'm seeing books published now from a Christian perspective urging religious people to change their minds. Almost all of them disavow the "clobber passages" in the light of recent scholarship, while others simply ignore those passages, along with passages that command parents to kill their disobedient children (Deuteronomy 21:18-21) or passages that declare it an abomination to eat shrimp or lobster (Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you. Leviticus 11:12).

What these books affirm is the duty of Christians to love, and to live according to Christ's example.

It would be interesting to research the progress of American Christian churches after the Civil War as they began to realize that they had been wrong about subjecting so-called "inferior" (please note the double disclaimer) races to slavery. Few of us today would argue that by choosing to accept the full humanity of black people they became less Christian. In fact, most Americans would affirm that they became more Christian, i.e. more in tune with the life Jesus lived and the principles he preached.

I don't know how many religious people have actually read the bible, but I have, the whole thing, more than once, and in my opinion, the bible is on our side.

Catherine M Wilson

Courage

2012-05-22T14:01:00.001-07:00

Here's Rant #4. You can find Rant #1, along with info about what prompted it, here:
Rant #1: Change!

One of the posters to the Yahoo! group thread I was ranting on mentioned that my speaking up on that group took courage. Here is my response:

I must disagree that what I wrote took courage. I have been speaking up for people like me for a very long time. What takes courage is living as an out lesbian for over 40 years.

I do find it interesting that a few of the folks who spoke up expressed some trepidation about doing so, even though none of them are gay themselves. That tells me that speaking up for equal rights is still a scary thing to do, even here.

When I was young in the 1960s I spoke up for black people when I joined the Civil Rights Movement. Then I discovered that, as a women, I was lacking many of the rights I was trying to help others obtain, so I joined the Women's Movement. When NOW tried to purge the "lavender menace" from their ranks, I finally realized that I belonged in an even tinier ghetto of people who would be the last (if ever) to obtain equal civil rights.

My family has been in this country for 400 years and members of my family have fought in almost every war this country has waged, from the Revolution, through the War of 1812, the Civil War, and World War II. (Somehow we missed the Great War of 1914-18.) Given the principles on which this country was founded, I find it astonishing that equal rights for everyone is still such a contentious issue.

I would like to mention that I no longer speak up for myself. I am 68 years old, and it's too late for me. I'm speaking up for the young, some of whom are your own children. I don't know how many children the members of this group have altogether, but I guarantee you that some of them will turn out to be gay or bisexual. Some may even be transgender. I speak up to remind you that every time you say something that indicates your disapproval of gay and lesbian people, you may be telling your own child that he or she is not OK.

Tyler Clementi came out to his parents moments before he left home to attend Rutgers. By his own account, his mother didn't take it well. I can't imagine how she must feel now if she considers that a few accepting words from her might have been enough to prevent his feeling so utterly abandoned that his life was no longer worth living.

I'm sorry to bring up such a heavy subject on this mostly lighthearted list, but this is a serious issue, and I think most heterosexual people believe it has nothing to do with them. Where do you think gay people come from?

Catherine M Wilson

R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

2012-05-21T13:29:00.002-07:00

This is the third in a series of rants I introduced in my blog post of May 19th (Change!). You might want to check out my introduction to the first rant to see where this one came from.

This rant is in response to one of the previous posters to the Yahoo! group stating that by "different" s/he didn't mean inferior. S/he provided a number of examples of "different" but not superior or inferior kinds of marriage. (See Rant#1: Change!)

What I think you may be saying here is that by "different" you don't mean "less than." If your idea of marriage includes all those other ways of being "different," then why exclude only the same-sex "difference" from marriage?

Gay and lesbian people have been free to engage in sexual relationships without fear of government intrusion since the Supreme Court decision of Lawrence v Texas in 2003, overturning the 1986 decision in Bowers v Hardwick, which affirmed the government's right to criminalize same-sex sexual behavior. The freedom to have (consensual) sex with the partner of one's choice has been ours for almost ten years now. What we don't have is the right to form a family that will be recognized by our government and respected by society.

I believe that "society" doesn't care about what rights our government grants us, hence the popularity of the civil-union alternative. I believe the real issue behind the opposition to marriage equality is the issue of respect. Phyllis Schlafly went right to the heart of the matter when she said, "Nobody's stopping them from shacking up. The problem is they are trying to make us respect them."

I disapprove of many things that my fellow Americans are free to do. I believe, to take an incendiary example, that raising a child to follow the religion of his or her parents is an infringement on that child's freedom of thought, but I acknowledge AND I RESPECT the right of parents to raise their children as they see fit (with proper disclaimers re: child abuse, etc.) I have opinions, but other people have rights, and I respect those rights. It is fundamentally unfair that my rights are curtailed by other people's opinions.

Catherine M Wilson

The Religious Argument

2012-05-20T11:55:00.001-07:00

This is the second in a series of rants I introduced in my blog post of May 19th (Change!). You might want to check out my introduction to that rant, as well as its content.

Inevitably in our little neighborhood discussion the religious argument came up. The "proper" response to the religious argument is to point out that we are talking about CIVIL rights, not religious rites. But there is an excellent case to be made to sincerely religious people. I tried to make it here:

For anyone whose religious beliefs give them pause when considering marriage equality, I highly recommend the book "God vs Gay? The Religious Case for Equality." The author's thesis is, essentially, that the bible does not condemn loving, committed same-sex relationships, but it does condemn quite clearly the oppression of people who are "different" and it clearly states that the one law we should abide by above all others is the law of love.

Another excellent book is "Unfair: Why the Christian View of Gays Doesn't Work."

Many people who take their religion seriously are beginning to realize that the so-called "clobber passages" in the bible that have been used to oppress gay people do not stand up to close scrutiny. Biblical scholars seeking to truly understand those passages by studying the ancient languages of the original texts are coming to the conclusion that the "clobber" interpretations are based more on outdated cultural biases than on the true meaning of those passages.

Anyone who is seriously considering taking an anti-gay position re: marriage equality has a duty, in my opinion, to inform themselves fully about current thinking in religious scholarship before they add to the oppression that future generations will be apologizing for, just as we now apologize for slavery, which was once defended by another set of biblical clobber passages.

(The fact that a majority gets to vote on the rights of a minority baffles me. As Rachel Maddow said, "Here's the thing about rights. They're not supposed to be voted on. That's why they're called rights.")

At the start of this discussion, [name redacted] said:
I assumed I was totally for gay marriage, but then I thought, marriage to me is pretty sacred.

I would remind you that it is love itself that is sacred. Marriage is sacred because love is. If the love between any two people, gay or straight, is sacred, then the marriage between any two people, gay or straight, is sacred.

However, we certainly don't hold all marriages up to this ideal yardstick. If the "winners" of reality shows can get married for a few weeks, why can't a gay or lesbian couple who have loved each other and remained together for decades despite all the efforts of others to tear them apart?

As a non-religious person, I really don't care if we all have marriages or civil unions, as long as we use the same term and apply the same rules to everyone. For those of you who think civil unions (separate but equal) are enough for gay people, please educate yourselves about the over a thousand rights that marriage confers that civil unions do not and cannot. Over a lifetime gay and lesbian couples will spend tens of thousands of dollars more than their heterosexual counterparts to try to approximate all the rights that marriage confers. And even then, they will come up short.

If your spouse dies, do you doubt that you will continue to live in the home that you and your spouse lived in together? Or will you be presented with such a huge tax bill that you will have to sell your home and move?

Do you assume that, if you are the widowed spouse of your family's primary or only wage-earner, you will receive your spouse's Social Security benefits so that you can enjoy the secure retirement that your spouse earned for you?

Do you take for granted that your spouse and children are covered by your employer's health insurance?

Do you fear that your spouse's biological child whom you have known and cared for from birth will be taken away from you if your spouse dies or divorces you? Or do you rely on family law to protect your right to a role in that child's life?

These are the very real obstacles that are placed in the path of every same-sex couple, even in states that have marriage equality, because many of them are federal benefits, and the federal government does not recognize any same-sex marriage.

Granting marriage equality to gay and lesbian couples requires heterosexual couples to give up absolutely nothing! No one is asking straight people to take a little less so that others can have a little more.

Finally, if I were a religious person and concerned with what I would be hearing from my Creator when I meet him (or her) face to face, I would rather hear that I had erred on the side of love than that I had failed to remove the plank from my own eye before trying to remove the speck from my brother's eye.

Catherine M Wilson

For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Matthew 7:2

Change!

2012-05-19T21:27:00.001-07:00

It has been almost two years to the day since I last posted to this blog. A lot has happened in those two years. Publishing is changing, and this country is changing.

Change scares a lot of people. I've been around for awhile and I don't scare as easily as I used to, but I feel this country is poised on a knife edge, and the election in November will tip us one way or the other.

I hope we will tip on the side of progressive thinking, but my worst nightmares feature a Republican president who has so little empathy for others that he sees nothing wrong with strapping a dog (in its crate) to the roof of his car or bullying an "effeminate" young man at his prep school. The young man later admitted to being terrified. I don't doubt the dog was too.

These two incidents speak to the character of the man who wants to lead this country. Whatever else he stands for (let me consult my etch-a-sketch) I doubt that a wealthy, privileged person with no empathy can possibly understand the plight of so many Americans whose wealth, in the form of their homes, has been stripped from them, along with their jobs and much of their sense of self-worth.

I shudder to think what he would do to gay people.

Our current, and hopefully future, president just came out in favor of marriage equality, and I've been surprised by a lot of the reactions to his announcement. The one that surprised me the most came from my own back yard.

I live in a very liberal part of the country, so I was surprised when I read on a Yahoo! group composed of people from my very small community that some of them are still struggling with the idea of granting gays and lesbians full equality.

Well, folks, I just had to speak up! And once you get me started, it's hard to make me stop, as my neighbors soon discovered.

Then I started seeing people commenting on Huffington Post that they are struggling with the idea of gay marriage, so I decided to post some of my rant from that Yahoo! group to this blog, so that I could refer these struggling folks to something that might help them sort out their thoughts.

My rants are long, so I will post them one at a time over the next few days. Or maybe sooner. Cuz, y'know, once I get started...

One poster said:
maybe it should be called something other than marriage, just syntactically, because it is different.

So I responded with:

Why is gay marriage different from straight marriage? When two people fall in love, no matter if they are same sex or not, the love they feel for each other is the same. When two people love each other enough to want to spend the rest of their lives together, they want what almost every person on the planet wants--to find a true partner with whom they can share their life, and often they wish to express and increase their love by creating a family that includes children.

To say that gay marriage is different is to say that it is less than heterosexual marriage. It says that gay and lesbian people are less than heterosexual people. It says that the children of gay and lesbian people are less than the children of heterosexual people.

Separate but equal was wrong in the segregated South, and it is just as wrong when applied to the very real lives of gay and lesbian people.

We now consider it obvious that people of different races should be able to marry. A generation ago that wasn't obvious to a great many people. It took a Supreme Court decision to begin to change people's minds.

The reluctance of so many people now to be willing to change their minds is causing great harm, great suffering, to gay and lesbian people. I am one of them.

I have been rubbed raw by the recent rhetoric of the Republican Party, by the vote in North Carolina, and by some people who just can't seem to understand the PAIN they are inflicting on gay and lesbian people, many of whom are your neighbors.

When Proposition 8 was on the ballot, I saw signs in my neighborhood that said Yes on 8! and I realized that even here, in this relatively liberal and tolerant place, there are people who hate me. Yes! That's what those signs told me. Because they told me that there are people here who would actively interfere in my pursuit of happiness, who would take steps to ensure that my life would be more difficult than it needs to be, and to let me know that in their eyes I am not OK, that I am not worthy of love because I love the "wrong" person. If that isn't hate, I don't know what else to call it.

This is the [location redacted] Family Network, yet some of you who are here to share resources and knowledge, to help and support each others' families, feel that the families of gay and lesbian people should be excluded from help and support. You take for granted the rights that marriage gives you. You never think about the many ways that marriage protects you and your children, but if you lost those protections, you would be outraged! Why do you not see the outrage of the people to whom you would deny those protections that you rely on?

This weekend I attended a college graduation. The speaker, quoting Jeff Bezos, told the graduates that cleverness is a gift, but kindness is a choice. I hope that some day the people of this country will learn to choose kindness.

Catherine M Wilson
(You may see me around town. I'll be the one wearing the t-shirt that says, Second Class Citizen.)

Celebrating the End of an Era in Publishing

2010-05-31T16:59:00.000-07:00

Garrison Keillor wrote an interesting column published in the St. Petersburg Times.

In it he bemoans the passing of an era in book publishing. He concludes by saying:
Children, I am an author who used to type a book manuscript on a manual typewriter... And mailed it to a New York publisher ... I waited for a month or so and then got an acceptance letter in the mail. They offered to pay me a large sum of money. I read it over and over and ran up and down the rows of corn whooping. It was beautiful, the Old Era. I'm sorry you missed it.

My first response to this was: maybe it was beautiful to Mr. Keillor, but to me, and to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other writers who weren't writing what publishers were interested in publishing, it was yet another door slammed in our faces. Lesbian fiction? In the 80s, Naiad Press was the only niche publisher that would publish love stories about lesbians that ended in "happily ever after." Now we have at least 6 niche publishers publishing our stories, and many more of us have chosen to publish ourselves.

I was amused to note that of the 7 comments following the article (you had to register with the newspaper site to post), two were by self-publishers. One said: "Self-publishing has another upside: the ability to let the value of your work be decided directly by readers, not by a tiny population of editors in NYC."

Oh yeah. Readers. Let's think about readers for a minute. If we had no way to publish our own stories in the "Old Era," how were we supposed to find the stories we wanted to read? It seems to me that the "let all flowers bloom" publishing model benefits readers too.

It has been the case fairly recently (like last month) that people assumed anything self-published was crap. And granted, some of it is. But I have been observing my own reading behavior lately, and I've noticed that, while I have a pile of traditionally published fiction I intend to read, I more often choose my current read from the pile of books by niche publishers or self-publishers. The quality of the writing runs the gamut from quite good to woefully amateurish, but I read them anyway, because they tell the stories I most enjoy reading--stories about people like me.

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Reviews

2010-03-31T18:19:00.001-07:00

In an earlier post, I mentioned that When Women Were Warriors Book I is a quarterfinalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Today Amazon sent me a link to some reviews by "ABNA Expert Reviewers." A selection from the reviews can be seen here.

The feedback on CreateSpace, which I had to log in to see, has entries from two "ABNA Expert Reviewers" and contains a review that doesn't appear on the public page. I found that review interesting because of this:

Reviewer 1 said:
Perhaps an opening action sequence, followed by the present opening, would get the book off the ground faster.
and
Although the book is a bit slow out of the wattled gate,

while Reviewer 2 said:
It would be nice to have more description of the setting, perhaps slow down the pace a little.

Which is why listening to everyone's advice can drive a writer crazy.

Reviewer 2 also said:
The strongest aspect of this excerpt is the beauty of the writing. It is descriptive, catching, and musical.
and
When Women Were Warriors has great strength of plot and prose.

Which is lovely, so I'm really not complaining.

Reviewer 1 also said:
The book might be better served by a stronger hook to catch the reader. Instead, the opening is more subdued, assuming that the reader will ride along patiently until some action (which is surely foreshadowed with all of the war talk) takes place. Perhaps an opening action sequence, followed by the present opening, would get the book off the ground faster.

This is advice I've never taken because of an experience I had quite a few years ago in a writers' group. One piece that we read started with a fight between two combatants who were trying to kill each other. It was very dramatic, but no one in the group could read past page 2. We didn't know who the combatants were. We didn't know who to root for. We didn't care about them. We didn't care who won. We just wanted it to be over, so that we could get acquainted with the world and its characters.

Perhaps the fact that all the members of the group were women accounted for our instant response of catatonic boredom when faced with several pages of two people we didn't know fighting each other.

The kicker was that the writer had originally started her book by introducing us to the world, the characters, and the issues before launching into the fighting. On the advice of her editor, she put the fight scene first, to "hook" the reader.

In the world of book publishing, there are some items of "received wisdom" that are never (almost never) questioned. One is that you have about 5 seconds to "hook" a reader, so you have to open with a whirlwind of activity that will keep a reader reading. Long, slow introductions are out of fashion.

I think this advice vastly underestimates our readers. It assumes that they have the attention span of a flea and not enough depth of understanding to appreciate something that goes deeper than what can be conveyed by action scenes.

Which is one reason why I'm glad I self-published. I wanted to tell the story the way I wanted to tell it. I wanted my narrator to tell the story as she was living it, step by step. The slow start prepares the reader for what is to come. And that seems to me to be appropriate for a three-volume epic.

This blog has moved

2010-03-25T03:02:00.001-07:00

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When Women Were Warriors Book I is a quarterfinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award

2010-03-25T02:50:00.000-07:00

Today Amazon.com announced the 250 quarterfinalists in the General Fiction category for the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Book I of my trilogy made the cut!

Here's the announcement.

They gave it a nice little review.

And two weeks ago the same book won an EPPIE! That's an EPIC ebook award. In the Mainstream category.

I must admit to feeling a bit stunned.

And lately I've had some lovely emails from folks who have read my books and liked them a lot and said some very nice things about them.

So I'm just going to enjoy all of this awhile. And maybe gloat a little.

Amazon fails again (more about the Macmillan flap)

2010-02-27T16:34:00.000-08:00

I was going to comment more extensively about the Macmillan flap, specifically about Amazon's "ham-fisted" (their word) tactics, but the price of ebooks is much more interesting to me at the moment. I will mention, briefly, that Amazon retaliated against Macmillan by delisting from their site every title published by Macmillan and Macmillan's imprints, approximately one-sixth of Amazon's inventory. Not just ebooks. ALL their books.

Did it hurt Macmillan? A little bit. Did it hurt Amazon? Plenty. Did it hurt Macmillan's authors? Yes, a great deal.

Here's an excellent (and quite funny) blog post on how Amazon managed to totally piss off authors and their readers once again.

Amazon pisses off their customers

Here's a short quote from that post, to get you started:

Note to Amazon: Real people do not give a shit about your fight with Macmillan. Real people want to buy things. When your store takes them to a product page on which they cannot buy the thing on the page, they will not say to themselves, “Hmm, I wonder if Amazon is having a behind-the-scenes struggle with the publisher of this title, of which this is the fallout. I shall sympathize with them in this byzantine struggle of corporate titans.” What they will say is “why can’t I buy this fucking book?”

Macmillan and Amazon: more about the price of ebooks

2010-02-06T16:22:00.000-08:00

There's a new dust-up over the price of ebooks, and it could be very good news for small, independent publishers, although not such good news for consumers.

The short version is that Macmillan, one of the 'big six' traditional publishers, wants Amazon to price their ebooks using an "agency model." That means that Macmillan sets the price the book sells for on Amazon, and Amazon gets 30%, with 70% going to the publisher. Under the existing model, Amazon pays Macmillan 50% of the retail price, but Amazon is free to sell the book for whatever price they want.

Amazon charges $9.99 for most best-sellers in order to promote their Kindle, and they take a loss on most of those books. Macmillan wants the ebook price to be closer to $15. They say that if Amazon won't adopt an agency model, they will delay the publication of the ebook by seven months after the publication of the hardcover.

Macmillan has a good reason for doing this. They're afraid that a $10 ebook will steal sales from the $25 hardcover. As I've noted in earlier posts, traditional publishers have lots of expenses to recoup. They have the author's advance, the cost of editing, book design, cover design, and marketing, plus they have to print books, warehouse them, ship them to distributors, and be prepared to accept returns. True, some of those costs don't apply to ebooks, but the creation of a book, print or digital, is expensive, and when Macmillan puts out a new book, they want the same profit for the ebook that they get for the hardcover, and they don't want the expensive hardcover to have to compete with a cheap ebook.

Recently Hachette and Harper Collins have joined Macmillan in demanding an agency model from Amazon.

Why is this happening now? The Apple iBookstore, which will open soon to provide books for the Apple iPad, uses the agency model. Now that publishers have a viable alternative to Amazon's Kindle, they can demand better terms from Amazon.

Kindle owners tend to resist spending more than $9.99 for an ebook, and as I am also a Kindle owner, I understand why. When I buy a paperback (I don't buy hardcovers), I can pass it along to friends or family, or sell it online or to a bookstore, or donate it to the library. If the ebook and the paperback are about the same price, I'll buy the paperback. It's all about value, what the book is worth to me.

I have on occasion bought the $9.99 ebook edition of a new release that was only available in hardcover, but I very much doubt I will ever pay more than that. I'll wait the 6-8 months until the paperback is available, or until the price of the ebook drops.

That's the consumer's point of view, and as a consumer, I won't be paying Macmillan their $15.

As an author/publisher, however, I'm ecstatic! My books, priced at $9.99 (with Book I at just 99 cents), will be that much more attractive, compared to new releases from traditional publishers.

But the best news is that Amazon is going to be offering a new contract to publishers starting in June. Right now I receive just 35% of the retail price of Kindle books. The new deal will offer me 70% of retail, less delivery costs of 15 cents per MB. There are a few conditions. The book must sell for between $2.99 and $9.99 retail. Aha! There's that $9.99 price point. Also, the ebook must be priced at least 20% less than the paperback price.

I will have no problem meeting those conditions, and that means that in June, I may be able to lower the price of my Kindle books. The meager 35% I get now means that I make over $1 less on ebooks than paperbacks. Because I sell 3 or 4 ebooks for every paperback, it's a reasonable trade-off, but it also means that I've been reluctant to price the ebooks at less than $9.99, especially given the very low cost of Book I.

We have Apple, Macmillan, and the agency model to thank for Amazon's new terms, because Amazon would never have done it without the competition. If you have read my earlier posts, you will remember that I have stated more than once that when Amazon wasn't the only game in town, they would have to give authors and publishers a better deal, but I didn't expect it to happen this soon.

There are more issues to discuss here, and I will be blogging about them in the next few days, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, here are some interesting links.

An overview:
Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider's guide to the fight

Amazon's "new deal" for publishers:
Publishers Who Play Ball with Amazon's Kindle Will Get 70% Royalty Rate

Apple's iPad's effect on the publishing industry:
Hachette joins Macmillan's iPad Amazon pricing crusade

Ebooks and Smashwords

2010-01-13T02:33:00.000-08:00

A remarkable thing happened on Christmas day. Amazon.com sold more e-books than physical books, which means there must have been a lot of Kindles under the tree.

Barnes & Noble sold out of their Nook e-book reader well before Christmas and more e-readers are being announced every day. Not only that, but now you can read ebooks on other devices, like your cell phone.

I love ebooks. They're usually cheaper than the paperback, I can download them instantly to my Kindle, and they don't overflow my bookshelves. As an author, I'm convinced that ebooks will become a large and important part of the publishing industry. I already sell 3 ebooks for each paperback. I have had my books available for Kindle for a year now, but getting distribution in online ebookstores other than Amazon is difficult. Most, like Fictionwise, don't contract with small fry like me.

But Smashwords contracts with all those ebookstores that won't contract with me, so I've made all three books of my trilogy available there. Smashwords has a premium catalog that distributes ebooks to Barnes & Noble, Fictionwise, Books On Board, and many other ebookstores. Smashwords also makes each book available in multiple formats, including html (for reading online), JavaScript, ePub, PDF, RTF, LRF for the Sony reader, PDB for anything running Palm OS, and plain text.

Smashwords doesn't use DRM, which is very good for the consumer. You can download any book you buy in multiple formats and install it on multiple devices. And as a consumer I really like that. As an author, however, I'm a bit nervous about watching the books I labored 10 years to write become Napsterized, but I'm hoping that the increased distribution will more than make up for the books that people share with their friends.

Link to When Women Were Warriors on Smashwords

The divine mind of the infinite

2009-10-25T22:09:00.000-07:00

A week ago, Nicola Griffith blogged about something that happened to a lesbian couple in Miami. You can read all about it here:
Trembling with rage

For those of you who didn't read it, it's about a woman who died alone in a Miami hospital, while her life partner and their children were kept from her by hospital staff.

Colleen Lindsay read Nicola's blog and blogged about it here:
The Swivet: When Compassion Dies

Here's a comment from that blog, posted by Fawn Neun:

I'm just a straight chick, what do I know, except I know what's right. Love is love, people are people, nature creates us as we are meant to be and anyone who thinks they know better than millions of years of evolution or the divine mind of the infinite probably needs to check their ego at the door of reality.

A lovely new review

2009-10-12T19:54:00.001-07:00

I'm delighted to let all my faithful readers know that RedAdept has posted an excellent review of Book I of When Women Were Warriors on her Kindle Book Review Blog. She has an unusual and very effective method of writing reviews. She gives an overall number of stars, and also gives stars for Plot/Storyline, Character Development, Writing Style, and Editing/Formatting. She also gives the author an opportunity to say a few words about the book, using questions that pretty much cover anything the author might want to say about it. The whole package provides a comprehensive, in-depth look at the book while giving nothing away in terms of plot twists or anything that would spoil the story for the reader. A very professional job, I think, and I would think so even if she hadn't given me 4 1/2 stars.

I wrote a response to the review, clarifying some of the points she brought up, and posted it as a comment on her blog.

Here's the link to the review:
When Women Were Warriors Book I review by RedAdept

A Short Whine

2009-09-21T18:44:00.001-07:00

I had just about made up my mind to make Books II and III of my trilogy available as DRM-free e-books when I noticed that someone had searched Google for "free ebook download women were warriors book ii"

Granted, this was just one person out of the several hundred who go to my site every month to download a free copy of Book I. But it was discouraging.

And of course the ultimate nightmare of writers and publishers of e-books is that once a book is out there in cyberspace unprotected, people will be e-mailing free copies to all their friends and relations and offering it from their own websites. The irony of course is that an author's work may become wildly popular and the writer receive not one penny for it.

Then, to add injury to insult, someone reviewed Book I on Amazon.com and, while she acknowledged that "This 'book' was inexpensive so I cannot complain about the price for this volume," she then proceeded to complain that "The others are being offered at complete book prices which feels to me like the publisher is trying to milk all the money they can get."

I'm assuming that this reviewer is referring to the Kindle edition of Book I, which costs 99 cents from Amazon and is free from my website. Why she would resent the fact that Books II and III, both of which are full-length books (over 300 pages each in paperback edition), are priced as "complete books" is beyond me.

And to make it worse, the little she said about Book I leads me to believe that she enjoyed it. So if you score a free (or very cheap) book, and you enjoy it, and you think that you will probably enjoy the next two, why do you resent paying the author for her work? Why would you feel ripped off? Books II and III are priced at $9.99 each for the Kindle editions. That makes the cost of all 3 books under $21, which is about $7 each.

Well I guess this whine isn't as short as I anticipated, and I will probably delete it from my blog in a week or two, but once again I'd like to encourage those of you who are avid readers to support the authors whose work you like by reviewing their books on Amazon, on Goodreads, on your blog, or anywhere else where you gather in cyberspace to talk about books.

Dr. Phil often says that it takes a thousand "Atta girl"s to counter one "you suck," or words to that effect.

More about genre and literature

2009-08-12T18:36:00.000-07:00

I've had a few more thoughts about genre since I blogged last, and one of them is, why is genre so popular? It seems obvious to me that it's because genre helps people find the kinds of books they like.

If you like, for example, mysteries, you will probably find other books in the mystery section of the bookstore that you will also enjoy. Genre makes it easy to find more of the same.

So what's the downside of genre? Well, sameness, but sameness that isn't quite the same.

Let's say you read a book and you really liked it, so you think, I want to read another book just like the one I just read, and you choose another book of the same genre, and it seems to have a lot of things in common with the book you liked, but it doesn't really do it for you. It seems the same on the surface, but it isn't as satisfying on a deeper level.

So then you seek out more books by the author of the book you liked, and if you're lucky, all of that author's work is similar. Now if you're that author, and you have a following, do you want to surprise your faithful readers with something very different? Probably not. But what if you're sick of writing the same old thing, or you've said all you really had to say about it, but your readers expect more of the same, so you grind out more. You see what I'm getting at here. After awhile your heart just isn't in it anymore and your readers will know that (most of them) and they will complain. Of course they'll also complain if you give them an unpleasant surprise by writing something very different from your usual. But if they're going to complain anyway, you might as well write what you want.

Which reminds me of a dream I had a few years ago, and I know I digress, but hey! it's my blog to blather in. One night, after a particularly unpleasant experience with an "expert" in the publishing industry who told me I would never find a publisher, a voice came to me in a dream. It said: "You're f*cked anyway, so you might as well write what you want." And so I did.

But back to genre...

When I was young and impressionable, I read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. It remained my very favorite book for decades, and I reread it half a dozen times at least. But when I went looking for more books like that one, I was frustrated. I read a lot of fantasy books, and they were OK, but it seemed that so many of them just threw in a few ogres and trolls and elves and wizards and thought that was enough. But Lord of the Rings had something that none of the others did, and I still can't articulate just what that was, except to say that it had soul. It touched something very deep, and it took me on a journey that taught me things I wasn't conscious of learning at the time. It was a book I loved walking around in.

What grabbed me and wouldn't let go was the message of the book, and by message I don't mean something you can define in 25 words or less. Part of it is meaning. Part of it is the emotional journey. If a book takes you somewhere and you return to your everyday world moved, enlightened, renewed, with new ideas, new perspectives, and a new appreciation of life, you've found a great book, and it has nothing to do with ogres and trolls.

So how do you find those books? Very difficult. Genre books may contain all the trimmings of a book you loved--ogres and trolls, a hero's journey, a central love story, a space adventure--but have none of the heart.

Some people believe that to find heart, you have to read literature, but I have read a lot of so-called literary fiction, and some of it has heart, and some of it doesn't. People say that literature is "difficult," which means, I suppose, that the meaning isn't spelled out for you, that you may have to work at it a little. Which is fine if there really is meaning there and the author understands it enough to make it accessible. But so much literary fiction, at least what I've read, is more about obfuscation than clarity--an Emperor's New Clothes thing. If you don't see the deep meaning in this abstruse work, it's because you're not "refined" enough to perceive it. To which I say, Nope, the Emperor is buck nekkid!

I tend to plug away at genre because, at the very least it's entertaining, and sometimes I do run across a genre story that has that deep undercurrent. I know right away when that happens, because I become engrossed in the book, when I'm not reading it I'm still thinking about it, and I mull it over and revisit it after I've finished it. Sometimes it's just because the world the author has made in that book is fun to be in, and sometimes it's because I enjoy hangin' with the characters, but it's also because on some level that book is doing me good.

And that's why I read in the first place.

More about Amazon, Kindle, and the price of ebooks

2009-07-29T17:29:00.000-07:00

Eric Hammel, in his blog on Goodreads, posted about Amazon's Kindle strategy and why selling an e-book for $9.99 just doesn't make sense for traditional publishers. It's well worth reading.

Here's the link:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2991405.Eric_Hammel/blog/115843-kindle-is-a%5C-reverse-razorblade

Did you read it? You really should. In it he explains how publisher and author compensation has to come out of the paltry 35% of retail ($3.50 for a book that sells at $9.99 retail) that Amazon sends to the publisher (not the author!). He also points out that to make a middle-class income of $60,000 a year, a writer has to sell over 34,000 copies of a Kindle book. And that's assuming that the writer completed his or her novel in a year.

Hammel's arithmetic goes a long way toward explaining why authors and especially publishers aren't rushing to make their books available on Kindle.

It seems that what the digital publishing revolution is giving authors with one hand it is taking away with the other, because the distribution is still done by gatekeepers like Amazon who set the terms.

I, however, am more hopeful. The Kindle may be the bully on the block right now, but more e-reader devices are on the way, and if they will give authors and publishers better terms than Amazon, we'll go there. And if they also give better terms to the customers, readers will go there.

In the meantime, Kindle has made it possible for me to sell many more e-books than paperbacks, and as I am both author and publisher, I get to keep the whole $3.50. Not quite the
profit I make on a paperback, but I'm happy with it. Of course I also have a day job.

And that's the thing. I took many years off from working a day job to write my trilogy. I depleted my savings, including my retirement savings, to do it. It was a labor of love, and I don't regret it.

BUT

Am I writing now? No. I'm trying to earn back enough of my savings so I can retire someday, and I am already past the age when most people retire.

Do I have more ideas, more things to write about? Not a day goes by that I don't jot down a thing or two to pursue when I have more time. I have lots of ideas. I would love to write the books that could come from those ideas. But I can't afford to take the time right now.

Maybe, in my 70s or 80s, if I should live so long and my mind holds out, I will get around to writing that YA novel about family secrets, about a young girl who becomes a real-life sleuth to uncover the truth about a mysterious person from her past she just barely remembers but knows in her deepest heart of hearts matters just as much to her as the family she grew up in. Or maybe it will be the story that keeps flitting through my head about two women whose paths keep crossing through their youth and middle age, but who keep just missing each other, until...

But all of that is on hold for now, while I dig myself out of the financial hole that writing my trilogy dug for me.

So if you are a reader, and if you like a particular author, please--tell people! Post a review on Amazon. On Goodreads. Blog about it. Let people know that you read this great book, or discovered this fantastic author. Give books as gifts, especially to young people. Because if an author can't afford to write, you may never know what you'll be missing.

And now for something completely different: Genre vs Literature

2009-06-20T14:27:00.000-07:00

How lovely to have something new to talk about.

Sonya Chung (a literary writer) has a post at The Millions, a site described as "offering coverage on books, arts, and culture," about genre vs literary fiction and how to persuade readers of genre to upgrade to something more literary.

Sonya characterizes literary fiction as "difficult pleasure" and "complex meaning" and genre as "mindless escape" and "convention-driven predictability." She states that her "ultimate mission" is "to convert the unbelieving to the (crucial, soul-shaping) fact that you needn't ingest bad or 'not that bad' writing in order to be entertained and/or absorbed by a book."

I recently read somewhere (and now I can't think where--a blog post maybe) the statement that the current convention is for literary fiction to end unhappily, or at least messily, with no neat "tie it up with a bow" ending that people might find comforting. Because real life is messy and complicated, and hardly anything gets tied up with a bow.

And that's why I more often prefer genre fiction to literary fiction. I'm not a big fan of unhappy endings. I already know thousands of ways to screw things up. What I ask of fiction is: tell me how to do it right! Show me how to navigate this messy life with a little more success. Above all, leave me with a positive feeling.

Jennifer Crusie (a romance writer) wrote an essay called "Let Us Now Praise Scribbling Women," in which she says many insightful things about genre fiction. Among them, she states that fairy tales, and genre in general, promise a just universe. She says, "Mystery fiction promises a morally just universe, and speculative fiction promises an intellectually just universe, but romance trumps all of these because...it promises...an emotionally just universe."

I think most of us understand that the universe isn't all that just, and that even if we do everything "right" disaster can still ensue, but in books we may be able to experience life as it should be, and that may encourage us to try to achieve "life as it should be" in our own lives. And at the very least, it may offer us a moment of respite while we are experiencing "life as it shouldn't be."

I hate to come to the end of a book and think, Ah yes, just as I suspected, life is endlessly tragic and nothing ever works out well, and dismal, dismal, dismal, I might as well shoot myself.

A few "literary" novels I've read recently (I won't condemn them here) left me with that feeling. One of them redeemed itself a little bit by allowing me to enjoy a bit of vicarious revenge, not an emotion I really want to enjoy, and another just left me puzzled about what really happened, which I found out when I saw the movie.

That said, I agree with much of what Sonya Chung says in her post, but I have two mild disagreements with her basic assumptions. First, bad writing is not confined to genre fiction. Second, she implies that being "entertained" by a book somehow isn't enough.

Here's my take on "bad writing." I've read some genre fiction that was very badly written, usually self-published, with typos, grammatical mistakes, and many of the faults that are common with so-called amateur writers, and I managed to overlook those thing and enjoy the book because it told a good story. That's what it's all about for me. Tell me a good story!

I've read literary fiction that was so "literary" I didn't have any idea what was going on. Sometimes it worked, and I was left with an impression of what was going on. But mostly I find it annoying.

And now that bit about "entertainment" not being enough. I believe that each of us has a sense of what is good for us. We seek out things that bring us enjoyment and pleasure, and we avoid things that bring us pain, either physical or emotional. Perhaps some of us haven't been offered enough choices, and the better being the enemy of the best, we stick to what we know we will like and find rewarding. So I do agree with Sonya Chung that venturing out of one's comfort zone could be as good a thing in choosing a book as it often is in real life.

But I don't think we should be ashamed of liking what we like. I would rather experience pleasant emotions vicariously than unpleasant ones, and for me, the best books (genre or not) take me on an enjoyable emotional ride. A little bit of fear, sadness, and dread are fine, but if a book doesn't resolve those feelings with a satisfying ending, I don't want to go there.

And now a word about my own books. The first page of my publisher website, Shield Maiden Press, contains an interview with myself in which I try to convey that When Women Were Warriors doesn't really fit nicely into any genre. I've always hesitated to call it literary fiction, because its literary quality is not for me to judge, but it doesn't slot neatly into romance (although it contains romantic/sexual relationships), or fantasy (no glowing sword of specialness, as one reviewer noted), or speculative fiction (although it does speculate on one central question: if women were in power in the real world, what would that be like?). It does seem to appeal, however, to readers of all these genres, because the promise I make to my readers is this: Bad things may happen here, but it will all come right in the end, and the journey will be about how my characters achieved that ending.

I wonder if Sonya Chung has read much genre fiction...

New York Times article about DOMA

2009-06-16T11:59:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since I've blogged, because I spent the last 5 weeks attending, then recovering from, a 4-week class on Drupal, which is a whole 'nother conversation.

But I had to point out the New York Times article, A Bad Call on Gay Rights. The text of the article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/opinion

I do sometimes get tired of hearing myself drone on and on about gay civil rights, but the subject just won't go away. And of course we won't go away either, so all the people who are trying to stuff us back into that nasty closet are just sh*t out of luck!

I wonder if the people who hate us (yes, that's what it feels like) and even the people who don't care one way or the other, ever stop to contemplate the price they are paying for treating gay people like we don't matter.

Let me mention, first, that you just might have a gay relative, a nephew or niece, a brother or sister, or even a parent, who has been keeping a humongous secret from you all this time because they think they will lose your respect and/or love if they tell you the truth about themselves. Even if you have never expressed a negative opinion of gay people. You might even have a gay child, and to appreciate the consequences of disregarding that possibility, you should read Prayers for Bobby, a heartbreaking book by a mother whose son killed himself because he couldn't obey her demand to change.

But the everyday costs of believing that gay civil rights have nothing to do with you, though less dramatic, are also steep.

Think about this. If you believe marriage should be denied to same-sex couples, you must also believe that life should be harder for people in same-sex relationships, because that is a direct consequence of the ban on gay marriage. You are also implying that there is something wrong with gay relationships, and therefore there is something wrong with gay people. It means you think we're not as good as you, not as worthy of a peaceful and productive life, not as worthy of love.

What good do you expect to reap from creating a marginalized class of people who always feel that their lives are in danger and their relationships are in jeopardy?

Gay people spend a tremendous amount of energy coping with the difficulties of being gay in America. And being gay in America is orders of magnitude easier today than it was even ten years ago. And all of that is wasted energy, and worse than wasted, because people on the fringes don't contribute all they have to offer, either because their circumstances make that difficult or impossible, or because of their resentment of being regarded as "less than" by the society they live in.

There are countless examples of the price society pays for discrimination. And all discrimination sends the same message: you're not equal, you're not worthy, you're not us.

Is that really what you mean to say?

Amazon: A History of Homophobia?

2009-05-18T18:25:00.000-07:00

Pat Holt, in her Holt Uncensored blog, had some interesting things to say about a court case from ten years ago. You may recall that Amazon Bookstore, a feminist bookstore in Minneapolis, sued Amazon.com because of the name confusion. Oddly enough, it seems that the lawyers for Amazon.com thought that repeatedly asking about the sexual orientation of Amazon Bookstore's owners was an appropriate line of questioning in a trademark infringement case.

This reminder combined with another issue to make me even more annoyed with Amazon.com.

Someone e-mailed me complaining about the price of my ebooks. I do give Book I of the trilogy away for free in multiple ebook formats (see this page), but she felt that, at $9.99 each for Books II and III, I was charging too much.

But here's the catch. When I listed my books on Amazon.com's Kindle site, I agreed to their terms. One of their terms is that I can't sell the books anywhere else for less than the retail price I set with Amazon.com. And since Amazon.com takes 65% of the retail price, that means that at $9.99, I receive over a dollar less for an ebook than I receive for a paperback.

I am reluctant to charge more than $9.99 for an ebook, because most ebook readers, especially Kindle readers, expect to pay no more than that. But when I list the ebooks in other formats on other sites, I have to charge the full $9.99 retail price. Most of these ebookstores offer the publisher more generous terms than Amazon does. Many of them even allow the publisher to set the discount amount.

I could lower the price of my ebooks on non-Amazon sites and still make a reasonable profit on the books, but Amazon's terms prevent me from doing so. And if I lower my retail price, I lose too much on the Kindle sales, which are the vast majority of my ebook sales. It's a real double-bind. And it disturbs me that Amazon has so much power to set prices in the marketplace because of the popularity of their ereader device.

Maybe in a few years, when more (and cheaper) ereader devices are available and other ebookstores can compete effectively with Amazon.com, the price of ebooks will come down.

I hope consumers come to realize that Amazon's virtual monopoly is not a good thing for readers or writers.

My gay agenda -- Item #2

2009-05-06T19:09:00.000-07:00

[Aside:]
I never realized how difficult it would be to have an agenda. How does one come up with an agenda? It's one thing to have an idea of how you'd like the world to be, but quite another to suggest ways of achieving change. Especially when it comes to changing other people.

[However:]
I did manage to come up with Item #2 for my gay agenda:

I want someone in AUTHORITY (Congress, The President, the Supreme Court) to remind the American People why our Constitution protects our right to Freedom of Religion, which also protects our right to Freedom from Religion.

Perhaps a little history lesson is in order:
After centuries of religious wars in Europe, in which Christians of various sects maimed and killed each other over whose brand of Christianity was the right one, people began to realize that no one was ever going to win, and that maybe all that killing and maiming might just be a little un-Christian.

And guess who came to America? People who were being persecuted for their religious beliefs.

What amazes me is that most Americans can easily criticize the Taliban and other Muslim extremists for imposing the harsh penalties prescribed by their religion (cutting off the hands of thieves, for example, or stoning to death a woman who has been raped, and therefore has technically committed adultery), yet few stop to think that, by insisting that our laws conform to their religious beliefs, they are doing pretty much the same thing.

What no one really seems to come to grips with is that, while it may be possible to compel behavior, it is impossible to compel belief. You can force me at gunpoint to go to church, and maybe you can insist rather forcefully that I mouthe certain prayers or credos, but you can't change what is in my mind or in my heart. That's the best reason not to force a religion or set of religious beliefs on anyone. It simply doesn't work.

And of course when you protect my right to believe and worship (or not worship) as I see fit, you protect your own right to do the same. If my rights can be abrogated, so can yours.

So keeping all that in mind, let's contemplate gay marriage. Or how about we just contemplate marriage, because I think we haven't given sufficient thought to what marriage is.

When a man and a woman marry in the religious tradition of their choice, they presumably make a commitment to found a family according to the beliefs of their religion about what constitutes a family, and what the rights, duties, and obligations of the spouses are. As a bonus, the state also agrees to recognize the new couple as a family.

Believe it or not, there are religious institutions that perform same-sex marriages, but so far only a few states (and not the federal government) acknowledge that two men or two women can form a family.

Prop 8 in California (which denies same-sex couples the right to marry) would never have been passed if not for the massive support of churches. Why do religious people feel they have the right to impose their religious beliefs on others?

It has been suggested that the state scrap marriage altogether, and just recognize civil unions between two people. So any male-female couple can have all the rights we now accord to married couples, but they won't have a marriage license, they'll have a civil union license, and if they want, their religious institution can provide a marriage license, just as they now provide a certificate of baptism, which is not the same thing as a birth certificate.

Because it seems it's the word "marriage" that gets folks all steamed up. And I don't think most gay people care what you call it, as long as their relationships are accorded the same respect as the relationships of the majority.

The Supreme Court of the State of California said:
retaining the traditional definition of marriage and affording same-sex couples only a separate and differently named family relationship will, as a realistic matter, impose appreciable harm on same-sex couples and their children, because denying such couples access to the familiar and highly favored designation of marriage is likely to cast doubt on whether the official family relationship of same-sex couples enjoys dignity equal to that of opposite-sex couples.

Here's the entire text of the decision:
http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/archive/S147999.PDF

My gay agenda -- Item #1

2009-05-02T22:53:00.001-07:00

Since I am so often accused of having an agenda, I thought I might as well come up with one.

Coming up with an agenda, though, is a bit of a head-scratcher, because I really don't want to rule the world. Just my little part of it. And not rule it, exactly, but maybe influence it a little, to make it a bit more comfy. Like plumping up sofa cushions.

So here's something that would make me much more comfy.

My gay agenda item #1:

I wish I would never again hear anyone speak of the way I love as if it were something dirty.

Let's consider my experience of the past few weeks. First Amazon.com removed my books from their searches because they considered the content "adult." And then the West Bend, Wisconsin, County Council wanted to toss my books out of the public library.

The cause of both these incidents was neither a glitch nor a vast rightwing conspiracy. It was ignorance. And what is the cure for ignorance? Information. Information that we find in things like, oh, books, which we obtain from places like, oh, Amazon.com and the public library.

These ignorant people don't want anyone, especially the young, to see a book that might depict the lives of gay people in a non-negative way. Amazon did not remove from searches A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Once the other gay books were gone, that one came up #1 in searches on homosexuality. (It still does, along with several others that are clearly anti-gay.) And I doubt the West Bend County Council would object to keeping books like You Don't Have To Be Gay in the YA section.

Being old, I am long past being upset by things like this, but being old, I tire easily, and this is one battle I'm tired of fighting.

So let me witness here that all those ignorant efforts are in vain. I grew up in the 1950s, when homosexuality was all but completely invisible, and I was still gay, even then. I grew up in a society that was overwhelmingly heterosexual, and I never knew (or knew I knew) anyone who was gay until I was well into my 20s, and I was still gay. Before I was 25, I never read a book, saw a movie or TV show, went to a play, or heard a song on the radio that suggested that maybe a girl might fall in love with a girl, but I did anyway.

Seeing ignorant people trying to make us disappear doesn't hurt my feelings anymore, but it does make me feel their disrespect--disrespect for who I am, for what I've accomplished in my life, and for the one thing that makes our lives worth living: love.

To anyone who would say to me, You will go to hell for sins against nature, my reply will always be, If you believe in hell, which I do not, you may find yourself there one day for sins against love.

West Bend, Wisconsin, follows amazonfail

2009-04-29T17:01:00.000-07:00

According to Publishers Weekly, the County Council of West Bend, Wisconsin, dismissed four members of the library board because they refused to remove "controversial" books (i.e. books about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues) from the public library system.

GLBT? Gee, where have we heard that before?

It seems two library patrons complained about glbt books in the YA section of the library. Hey! That's the section where young people questioning their sexuality might discover that they don't have to off themselves! The patrons accused the library of promoting "the overt indoctrination of the gay agenda in our community."

The library board members refused to remove the books and they were fired.

Was it only a few blog posts ago when I relegated job discrimination to the dim past? I guess you can't be fired for being gay, but you can be fired for being pro-gay.

Why I'll read anything Nicola Griffith writes

2009-04-24T16:54:00.001-07:00

Nicola Griffith had her own choice words to say about the Amazon "glitch."

Check out her blog post about it.