No more signed books for awhile

If you went to my website, catherinemwilson.com, and couldn't manage to order autographed books, the reason is that my house burned to the ground in the CZU Complex Fire in California in August, 2020. I no longer have a place to store an inventory, so the sale of autographed books will be on hold for awhile. I haven't had a chance to update my website. That will have to wait until I have more time. I am still offering signed bookplates, but that too will take awhile because I have to order more of them. Also, if you have emailed me asking for signed bookplates and have not received an answer, please email me again. I also lost my email in the fire. Thank you for your patience.

Why I Don’t Write Lesbian Fiction

Several days ago I received an email from a heterosexual woman. She said she started reading Book I of my trilogy without realizing there would be lesbians in it, and she almost stopped reading, but the story and the writing wouldn’t let her stop. She ended up reading the entire trilogy. Twice.

This was my reply to her and it may answer some questions for some of my other readers as well:

I realize I am being premature, but white people will now read Toni Morrison and Amy Tan because they—well, most of them—recognize that those authors are not writing about black people or Asian people, but people, and people who are not so very different from themselves. I hope someday gay people will be seen as just people too.

I market my books to the mainstream because I did not write them for gay people. I wrote them for young people, male and female, and for women, because I believe women are finally coming into power in the real world and we need to do a much better job than men have done.

I wrote them for everyone open-minded enough to see love and not just sex in same-sex relationships. Frankly I have never understood why a straight person would believe their own experience of love (and sex) is any different from a gay person’s experience of love (and sex).

And I wrote them for the not-so-open-minded folks, because they refuse to get to know gay people, so perhaps they can get to know us in a book and see that we are not monsters.

I market to the mainstream because teenagers and young people who are questioning their sexuality will not look in the gay ghetto for things to read. They won’t look there because they’re terrified that’s where they belong. And for many of them it’s the worst thing in the world. So if they can find a book that shows them their own hearts, and that their hearts are beautiful just as they are, it may help them build their self-esteem. And when the world tries to shame them, perhaps they won’t feel the need to shame themselves. I correspond with young people who tell me my book saved their life. Possibly not an exaggeration.

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I would add to the above that the reason mainstream readers haven’t encountered many gay people, especially gay protagonists, in traditionally published fiction is that traditional publishers have been reluctant to publish those books. That’s easing up a bit now, perhaps because of the success of indie authors writing LGBT fiction.

But several years ago I asked a traditionally published author if her publisher would have allowed her to make her protagonist gay. Her reply: Absolutely not! Gay supporting characters were OK, but not the hero. She later clarified that traditional publishers feared alienating their mainstream audience, that they believed a mainstream audience would not be able to identify with a gay protagonist.

It has always been difficult for the LGBT community to find ourselves represented in mainstream media. At the moment, some popular TV shows (The 100, The Walking Dead) are facing a backlash from gay fans because they have employed, yet again, the Lesbian Death Trope™. Anyone who has read Vito Russo’s book, The Celluloid Closet, or seen the film of the same name, knows that because gay people were considered either sick or sinful until quite recently, any representation of a gay person had to end with their downfall. Sometimes it was death. Sometimes they turned heterosexual. Sometimes they went mad.

The point of those endings was to express the disapproval that society felt for gay people and to reassure their “normal” audience that “immoral” people never prosper. So we were portrayed as immoral people who would never deserve a happy ending. The tragedy in that is that so many young gay people choose to leave a world where they are assured that although they might have a moment of happiness, they will never have a happily ever after.

#clexa #the100 #twd #lesbiandeathtrope

What is the price of salt?

This is a review of the book, The Price of Salt, which has now been made into a movie, Carol.

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!!!

The Price of Salt, published in 1952, is considered the first book—and the only one for a very long time afterwards—to depict a lesbian relationship with a happy ending. Having just reread it, what strikes me now is how anyone, even lesbians, especially lesbians, could have thought that losing custody of your child with no visitation rights and being publicly humiliated in court and in the newspapers constituted a happy ending.

But we said, “At least neither of them died or went to jail or was committed to a mental institution or gave up her beloved to live a ‘normal’ life married to a man.” Because that was what happened to lesbian lovers in pulp fiction. And pulp fiction was the only place you could find stories about lesbian lovers.

When I puzzled over the title, The Price of Salt, what first occurred to me was a quote from the book of Matthew in the New Testament:
… if the salt should lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?
I later learned from a biography of Patricia Highsmith that that is indeed where the title came from. In asking the price of salt, she is asking what price a person must pay to live an authentic life. In those days it was a high price, if it was possible at all.

At the end of the book Carol and Therese have a future together, and for us that was enough. So The Price of Salt does not have a happy ending, but it does have a hopeful one. And I am hopeful that the release of the movie will herald a time when no one, no matter how ‘different’, must settle for a life unsalted, without savour.

Meet the Characters Blog Tour

I was invited by Michele M. Reynolds to join the “Meet My Main Characters Blog Tour.”
This is a blog tour for authors to share information about stories they are currently writing. I am not, yet, actually writing, but my next story seems to be working itself out somewhere in the back of my head, so I am able to offer a few tidbits here.

1) What is the name of your character? Is he/she fictional or a historic person?
She’s a fictional person. I don’t know her name yet. I probably won’t discover it until I know a lot more about her.

2) When and where is the story set?
The story is set in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s or early 1980s. I’m still working on the timeline.

3) What should we know about him/her?
My first protagonist, Tamras in the When Women Were Warriors trilogy, was 16. I think my new protagonist is also going to be 16. I’m starting to think I may be a case of arrested development.
I do seem to have a fascination with the point in a young person’s life when she takes that first irrevocable step toward becoming the person she is meant to be.

4) What is the main conflict? What messes up his/her life?
Something that has always intrigued me is the secrets families keep and the fact that each child comes into a world, and into a family, where things have happened they know nothing about. My protagonist has an intuition that there is a family secret she needs to know in order to get on with her own life. And the more her family denies there is a secret, the more she is convinced it’s an important one.

5) What is the personal goal of the character?
To discover the identity and whereabouts of someone she remembers from when she was very small, someone no one will talk to her about.

6) Is there a working title for this novel, and can we read more about it?
No idea for a title yet.

7) When can we expect the book to be published?
My trilogy took ten years to write and two years to publish, so I wouldn’t hold my breath. That said, my new story is much simpler, and will probably be much shorter.

I haven’t tagged anyone else to participate in this blog tour, so if you’re an author and would like to participate, consider yourself tagged. You can leave a comment here with the link to your post.

Book I is now an audio book narrated by Janis Ian

Book I of the When Women Were Warriors trilogy is now an audio book!

It's available directly from Dog Ear Audio and many other audio book distributors and libraries. Here's the link:
http://www.dogearaudio.com/

I've been meaning to blog about the recording experience, but it's been such a busy year that blogging has had to wait. Now that the audio book has been officially released, I can take a bit of a breather and try to catch up.

We raised the money for the project through Kickstarter, and one of the perks was a daily email about the experience of making an audio book with Janis Ian and Dog Ear Audio. I was thinking I would put a condensed version of those emails here on my blog for everyone to read, but as I looked them over, I realized that the best part was the immediacy of the experience that I was able to share with the folks who funded the project. So I am reproducing them in their entirety here.


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Sunday, September 22nd, 2013:

Karen and I arrived in Nashville yesterday (Saturday) and had a lovely dinner with Janis and her wife Pat at their favorite sushi restaurant, where we talked for almost four hours about everything under the sun. I have never met a famous person who is as real as Janis. Her talent aside, she is a first class human being, which I think most of you already know. If you haven't read her autobiography or listened to her Grammy-winning audio book, please do, because you will discover an extraordinary person. I'm sure I'll have a lot more to say about Janis as the week goes on, but that's enough for now.

This afternoon Karen and I went to see the studio where we will be recording. I think Karen will be putting up some pictures on Kickstarter and telling you more of the technical details. From the author's perspective, it looks to be a place where some serious work gets done. Karen had a very technical talk with our engineer, Randy Leago, while I gawked at an impressive collection of electronics.

This evening we had dinner with one of my favorite authors, Liz Bradbury, and her wife Trish. Although we've worked on a few projects together and spoken on the phone, we had not met in person, so she drove a bit out of her way to see us and wish us luck. If you aren't aware of Liz, she is the executive director of the Pennsylvania Diversity Network, and is a powerhouse working for LGBT civil rights. I hope she gets everything sorted out soon, because I'm waiting impatiently for her next book. (The Ginger Thai Restaurant in Nashville is excellent!)

It's past my bedtime, so I'm going to sign off now. I need to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for tomorrow!


Monday, September 23rd, 2013:

Karen and I are beyond bushed right now, but we had a GREAT!!! day in the recording studio with Janis. What can I say about Janis except that she is the consummate professional. That she came prepared goes without saying, but the heart she brought to the work is so above and beyond that I'm still in awe. She knows the characters through and through, and her voice brings them to life.

I asked her, Do all the authors weep when they hear you read their work. She said yes. And of course I did too, because the story is not only close to my heart, but buried deep inside it, and her rendering of my words moved me to tears more than once.

As the author, I am hearing the story read (performed is a better word) with emphases and intonation that are different from the way I heard it in my head, because, as Janis warned me when we started, the work will be her interpretation of the book. What that does for me is show me the story from another angle, which only makes it richer.

The technical part of the recording went very smoothly. Karen and Randy Leago, our engineer, made it look easy, but having worked in broadcasting in a previous life I know the degree of expertise and talent required for this kind of work. It's enough to ask of an artist to give her best performance, but when the work is constantly interrupted by technical glitches, it's much more difficult. I think we had two or three technical glitches (a vanishingly small amount in my experience), and a few interruptions by airplane and car noises. Karen can tell you more about Janis's error rate (# of goofs per page) which is also vanishingly small.

Thank you all so much, and special thanks to Liz Bradbury's wife Trish for the lucky socks she knitted for me. I'm going to wear them every day!

Catherine


Tuesday, September 24th, 2013:

We had another great day in the studio today. Janis is getting through the material more quickly than we had anticipated, which is good, because if we run into trouble later, we'll have time to deal with it. First thing this morning we had a strange hum. It turned out to be the incandescent bulb Janis was reading by. Gremlins like that happen in every project, and they tend to appear and disappear capriciously. Randy, our engineer, figured it out in record time, and the rest of the day went smoothly.

While Karen and Randy are watching the script and the waveforms and listening for extraneous noises like airplanes, I just sit with my eyes closed and listen, and Janis takes me there. She conjures the settings--both emotional and physical--and brings the characters to life. Just wait till you hear Gnith!

Janis did the most lovely thing. You may recall that when the folks in Merin's house celebrate midwinter's night, they have a little song they sing. Janis, on her own initiative, wrote music for it. I heard it today for the first time, and it is stunning! And yes, she made me cry again. ;-)

Here's something I didn't anticipate. While we all know Janis has a lovely singing voice, her speaking voice is just as beautiful. Now I understand how lucky we are to be working with a musician, because her sense of timing and the way she renders emotion come from that sensibility. The story is a heroic epic, and Janis is making it sing!

Tomorrow morning we'll be joined by four of our Kickstarter contributors. I hope the experience is as magical for them as it has been for me.

Thank you all so very much!!!

Catherine


Wednesday, September 25th, 2013:

We had another outstanding day today. This was the day that our four Kickstarter contributors joined us. Pam, Terri, Wendy and Lori met Karen and me at Randy's studio, and we had time to show them the studio layout and take some pictures before Janis showed up. Then we all took pictures with Janis. Karen is going to be posting some of them to the Kickstarter project page.

Today's energy was different from the first two days as we were all getting acquainted, but once the work began, our guests settled down to listen. We were all on headphones, so speaker noise wouldn't bleed into the sound booth. Since we were well ahead of schedule, we took a long lunch break. Our guests had come from as far away as Seattle, Florida, and Iowa. They are an impressive group of very accomplished women, and they had been so well-behaved that Janis invited them to stay for the rest of the day.

After we finished, Janis hung out with everyone for an hour or so. She usually finishes the day on empty, but the energy of the group held her up, I think, and she regaled us with insider tales of the music industry.

Karen and I took our guests out to dinner and we all got to know each other a bit better. Terri and Wendy are one of the funniest comedy teams I've ever met. Someday they're going to have to take their show on the road. Lori took a picture of my lucky socks. When she gets home in a few days, she'll post it to Facebook and then I'll steal it and put it on the When Women Were Warriors page.

Janis was, of course, her brilliant self, and she made me cry again in front of everybody, but I didn't mind at all.

Catherine


Thursday, September 26th, 2013:

The folks who haven't read the book might find this update a bit of a spoiler, so I'll set it off with a spoiler alert.

********  SPOILER ALERT ******

Those of you who have read the book may recall the Spring Festival chapter. It was the one part of the book I was most worried about, because a less than perfect reading would have been a disaster. Not to worry. Janis was flawless. She just about blew the top of my head off, and my skin has only just stopped tingling.

The Spring Festival is a celebration of sacred sexuality, when both humans and animals participate in the creative principle with the goddess, or the Mother, or whatever you want to call her. There is a beautiful pagan prayer, The Charge of the Goddess, that was my inspiration for that chapter, and especially this part:

Ye shall dance, sing, feast, make music and love, all in Her praise. For Hers is the ecstasy of the spirit, and Hers also is joy on earth; for Her law is love unto all beings… Let Her worship be within the heart that rejoices; for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are Her rituals.

Janis read the chapter as if these words were engraved upon her heart.

********  END SPOILER ALERT ******

As if it wasn't enough that I get to come to Nashville and record an audio book with Janis Ian, tonight Karen and I went to Puckett's Boat House in Franklin, Tennessee, to hear our engineer, Randy Leago, play with the Cajun Zydeco Band, Ya Ya.

I live in a tiny town in the mountains of central California, and we don't get a lot of live music close by, so it was a real treat for me. They put on a great show. It was all I could do not to get up and dance, but a little old lady rocking out to zydeco isn't what most folks want to see. ;-)  It was a great way to unwind after an intense day.

Catherine



Friday, September 27th, 2013:

Ladies and Gentlemen, it's in the can, as we used to say in the olden days.

We finished up by lunchtime, took care of a few details, and now I can heave a huge sigh of relief while Karen gets to start thinking about the editing job ahead of her.

I cannot thank you all enough for your contributions to this project. It could never have happened without the help and encouragement from each and every one of you, and it has been a privilege and a pleasure to share this journey with you.

Catherine

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I think you get the idea from these emails that recording with Janis was an extraordinary experience, and I'm hoping to repeat it twice more in 2014 when we do Books II and III.

I'll announce the Kickstarter campaigns here and on Facebook, and remember, for as little as $1 you can become an official supporter and receive our email updates in real time as the recording happens.

To all of you who supported Book I, and to future supporters of Books II and III, thank you so very much for making this project possible. You are true patrons of the arts.

Janis Ian will narrate Book I of When Women Were Warriors!

I'm thrilled to announce that Janis Ian has signed with Dog Ear Audio to narrate the first book of my trilogy. Janis read the books in late 2011 and was kind enough to review them on Amazon. Then she wrote to me and asked for my autograph. [gobsmacked!]

We exchanged autographed goodies, but at the time I was between editions and didn't have any of my books to send her. When I learned she would be coming on tour to Santa Cruz, California, not far from where I live, I took her a set of paperbacks. She had just won a Grammy for narrating her own autobiography, so when I introduced myself, almost the first thing out of her mouth was, Are you going to do an audiobook?

I replied that I had just signed with Dog Ear Audio and we were looking for talent. And she said, I'd love to do it! Now, I am not one to let gifts from the universe go unrecognized and unappreciated. We were off and running!

We're raising money for the production through Kickstarter. Karen Wolfer of Dog Ear Audio has done a tremendous job of putting some great perks together. If you're at all interested in an audiobook, you can get an early release copy, either by download or on CD, by donating to the project.

I will be blogging about the whole recording experience, and for supporters of the project, I will be sending out a daily email with insider info and fun anecdotes, so you can follow along with us.

Here's the link to Kickstarter, with lots more information about the project:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1851755083/when-women-were-warriors-book-1-audio-book-product

What race is Maara?

***SPOILER ALERT***

If you've finished Book I, you'll be OK, but if you have yet to read it, try forming your own image of Maara before you read this.

*************************

So, what race is Maara, anyway?

Short answer: whatever race you see her as.

Long answer:
When I was working out Maara's place, or lack thereof, in Merin's house, I knew, for the sake of the plot, that she was going to be an outsider, and that she would always be seen as "other" by the people of Merin's house.

The problem is, that's hard to do, because when we get to know somebody, no matter how prejudiced against them (or people like them) we may have been at the start, we learn to relate to their human qualities and our differences seem less "different" somehow.

Maara needed to be clearly "other" in a way that people weren't going to forget about or be able to ignore, so I hit on the brilliant idea of making her racially different from Merin's people.

Who were the various races running around the British Isles during the Bronze Age? Rosemary Sutcliff includes glimpses of the "little dark people" in her stories of Roman Britain, and European fairy tales feature the little people, the fairy folk, leprechauns, etc. Those tales come from the folk memory of the people who populated Europe before the Celtic people showed up.

I saw Tamras and her people as being part of an early migration of pre-Celtic people, but closer to the Celts racially, i.e. fair and blond. The "old ones" in Book II represent the remnant of the hunter/gatherer tribes that were pushed into marginal lands by neolithic farmers. No doubt some of those early tribal people would have mixed with the newcomers and settled down to farming, much as some of the North American native tribes did when faced with European settlement. It's this mixed race group that Maara comes from.

Now we're going to switch topics for a minute. Brace yourself!

Something that has always bothered me is how little diversity we find in the stories we read or watch or listen to. When I was a child, back in the Dark Ages of the 1950s, I had friends who weren't white. I never saw them, and they never saw themselves, in picture books, in movies, or on TV. Just like girls never saw themselves as the hero in adventure stories, and gay people never saw themselves at all.

As it happens, a few of my early beta readers were people of color, and one in particular didn't find my book very interesting until Maara showed up and it was obvious she was non-white.

And that reminded me. We always want to be included, to see ourselves as belonging in a story, as in life, just as we are.

So what started out as a plot device turned into an aha! moment. Even though When Women Were Warriors is set in a particular place, at a particular time in history, it isn't about Britain or the Bronze Age. It's about people!

Some of my readers have transposed the story into another place and time that feels more real or more relevant to them. Fine by me!

Here's the definitive answer from the horses's mouth:
Maara is whatever race you see her as, and that goes for the rest of the cast of thousands!

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

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

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

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!

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

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!

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

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

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.

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

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)

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

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

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