Thoughts on Boston

I had planned to spend this evening working on my novel. I’ve written about 12,000 words in the past 2 weeks, with a planned schedule of about a thousand words per day. But today, at the risk of depleting the supply of words I may have for my novel, I am going to make words here about today, about what happened today, about what may be described as a tragedy, definitely, or what may be described, less popularly, as a wake-up call.

First of all, I am terribly hurt that lives were lost or permanently altered as a direct result of the bombings in Boston this afternoon. My heart goes out to all involved. What I have to say here should not diminish this tragedy as a personal one that personally affects so many people. However, it is impossible to regard an incident like this solely in the context of personal tragedy, and therefore discourse about the incident as metaphor is demanded and must be answered.

There is a right way and a wrong way to do this, and a spectrum of ways in between. I would assert that Alex Jones chose the wrong way,  who tweeted these two sentiments in the same breath, “Our hearts go out to those that are hurt or killed #Boston marathon - but this thing stinks to high heaven #falseflag.” I am not sure what I am doing here is the right way or the wrong way. When does the window open when it is not “too soon”; when does it shut when it is too late, when people have already moved on to the next sensation, whether real or manufactured? Perhaps there is no window at all. Perhaps, to some people, it will always be wrong for me to say these things. I’ve already been accused of “turning this political” and being in “bad taste.” Perhaps others are ready to hear what I have to say. Perhaps they have been ready for a long time.

We (and Americans, I am speaking specifically to you) need to take a moment and consider our reaction to this news. When you heard, when someone told you or you saw the headline, what was your first thought? What thoughts did you have after that? How did your brain feel, your heart, your guts? Did you try to contact people to be sure they were okay? Did you spread the word? Did you research the news to see what facts were real and which weren’t? Did you formulate scenarios, imagine who was to blame, maybe even speak aloud this speculations to see if others agreed?

Did you do the same thing after Newtown?

Did you do the same thing after 9/11?

Did you do the same thing after you heard 16 civilians were killed yesterday in Iraq by bomb, bringing the total civilian body count in Iraq to 187 in April alone?

Or didn’t you know that.

Or didn’t you care.

The thing that makes the Boston Marathon Bombing different, even though fewer people are dead, is that it happened here. Except, what about the 28 people, including 3 children age 13 and under, who were killed by gunshots over the weekend. That happened here. It happened everywhere, all over America. In fact, it happens every single day, all over America.

How does your brain feel reading that, your heart, your guts? Why is it so different than when you heard that there were two explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon?

I believe it has to do with the ideas of safety, expectation, context, circumstance. The problem with 9/11, the problem with Newtown, the problem with Boston is that the people who were hurt were analogs for ourselves, for our friends and families. In our minds, these people are, we are, innocents. We are supposed to be safe. We did not choose the kind of life where death and destruction are a normal circumstance. But in our minds, if it could happen to those people, it could happen to us, and the realization that we are not in control—that no one, not our police, not our military, not even our gods are in control—is frightening on a level that goes soul-deep.

The problem, though, is that when we think of ourselves that way, as innocent, as out of the circumstance of violence, the implicit assertion is that people in those other circumstances—Muslims living in a third world war zone, say, or gangbangers living in a first world war zone—are the opposite of that. Whether subconsciously or otherwise, there is the thought that these people somehow were not completely innocent or undeserving of what they got. Collateral damage in a war zone is not shocking; it’s barely news. It’s a ticker beneath a celebrity nip slip.  Getting the annual homicide rate below 200 in Baltimore is considered a success. Maybe if those people don’t want to get killed they shouldn’t be involved in the drug trade, right? Maybe they shouldn’t be poor. Maybe they shouldn’t be black. Maybe if they lived in a nice Boston neighborhood and could afford to take the day off work to watch people run for fun and not because they’re being chased it would be more gut-wrenching when they died, and people might say it’s in “bad taste” when someone else politicizes it.

You’re not safe, my fellow Americans. Your safety is an illusion. And that illusion is a pacifier that keeps your eyes off the ticker, keeps them glazed over, keeps your mouth shut except when your knee jerks because you have a ready-made sound bite you can throw at something you think deserves throwing-at. You are not safe because you live in an aggressive, hostile bully of a country—except America doesn’t steal lunch money, it kills thousands of innocent people in foreign countries, sends thousands of soldiers to die in foreign countries, and makes the deaths of thousands of victims on domestic soil into a wedge issue instead of a dire fucking emergency.

More people have been killed by gun violence since the Newtown shooting than were killed in 9/11. You want to talk about terrorism? The government has you in terror that you’re going to lose your guns so much that you forget to be scared of actually losing your life. You’re lulled into submission because we spend more on defense than the next 13 countries in the world combined so that you can feel safe, so that “war zone” is a pithy metaphor used to describe two bombs going off in a major American city, instead of your everyday forever reality. So when something like the Boston bombing happens, you get upset because something woke you up.

It’s okay to be upset. But you really ought to follow up that emotion with some good old-fashioned, red-blooded American anger. And then you better fucking do something. The window for talking about this isn’t open and isn’t closed because it doesn’t exist because somebody somewhere made you think it was in “bad taste” to talk about it, because they don’t want you to talk about it. If we want the killing to stop, if we want true safety instead of the mere illusion thereof, we must treat all deaths equally with our brains and our hearts and our guts.

Never forget.

Never forget.

How many commercial breaks until you’ve forgotten? Don’t be one more American Idle.

Here’s my thousands words. 

Is a Brief Blog Post Flash Non-Fiction?

Just a quick update: I've been madly working away on preparing the second edition of The War Master's Daughter, as well as continuing to draft my next novel, Bugged. I've also been working with production company Liquid Squid and musician Ryan Stevens to create the book trailer, which will be released in tandem with the second edition and a re-boot of the web page. I can't apologize for not having kept up the blog because there is too much other great stuff going on! 

If you need a signed copy of The War Master's Daughter in time for Christmas, please order by December 10. The current stock is running low, and SMLX Books needs time to re-stock and ship before the holiday. This may be your last chance to get a signed first edition. The second edition is due out late winter 2013! 

I hope you are all having a joyous holiday season filled with lots of cozy evenings curled up with your favorite book, a crackling fire, and a mug of cocoa (with or without rum)! 

The Power of Punctuation

Thanks to Aubrie Dionne for inviting me as a guest blogger on Flutey Words!


Earlier this week, Facebook rolled out a feature that turns punctuated emoticons like this :) into small illustrations in the comments you post. So it seems an apt time for us writers to remind ourselves that punctuation has a far grander purpose than to wink at your reader.

When mucking through a first draft, punctuation is usually the last thing on a writer’s mind. One may give it a second thought during the final polish stage, but this thought is more toward correction than choice. Whereas so many writing techniques seem to fall along a spectrum, we think punctuation is binary: right or wrong, required or not required. Its becomes not an option to be considered but a rule to be remembered. We think, “Is a semi-colon correct here?” Hardly ever: “Is a semi-colon the best choice here?”

I’m here to tell you that punctuation is one of the most powerful tools in your writer’s tool box and that you ought to consider periods, commas, dashes, colons, etc. to be a subset of your greater Writer’s Alphabet—which is not just twenty-six letters, but the entirety of your keyboard. . . . 

Read the rest of this post on Flutey Words! 

A Thousand Times Yes.

What I have to Offer from Eliot Rausch + Phos Pictures on Vimeo.

A View of ROOM

I don't do a lot of book reviews on this blog. I tend only to review books I read when they knock me over with a wrecking ball, or when I have extremely high expectations that don't reconcile in any way with the experience of reading it. (And even then, I don't always; I have yet to write a review of Watchmen [the former] or The Hunger Games [the latter].) The motivation is sometimes to drive people to drop what they're doing and go change their lives by reading a certain book, and sometimes it's something akin to screaming, "What were you thinking?" Upon finishing ROOM, a Booker Prize finalist and international bestseller that is published in 39 countries, I was so energized by my dislike for it that I sat down and promptly wrote about 1,600 words. I thought I'd reprint them here.

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I don’t read a whole lot of novels anymore. More and more, I find myself starting popular, lauded novels, only to stop a third or halfway through because either they bore me or they irritate me, or both. I knew absolutely nothing about ROOM before I read it, only that I’d seen its cover frequently in the media and in “Best of” and “Must Read” lists, and that I thought that cover was one of the best ones I'd ever seen. I did not even read the jacket copy or the cover blurbs, preparing myself to become entirely enraptured in this “page turner” that had captivated so many readers.

However, it turned out ROOM was both boring and irritating. But I forced myself to finish to ensure I wasn’t missing a grand revelation that would make the whole ordeal worth it. I read the entire book from a Friday night to a Saturday afternoon because I was afraid if I stopped reading it, I would never pick up again. This revelation did not occur. I should have stopped reading.

**The remainder of this review contains SPOILERS**

The book is split into two halves of nearly identical length and is told through the eyes and voice of 5-year-old Jack. The first half of the book busies itself with showing how Jack and his mother busy themselves in an 11-by-11 room, wherein they are being held captive. A man, called Old Nick, brings them food and takes out their trash and rapes Jack’s mother, Ma. The story is considerably hampered by the first person narrative in Jack’s voice. While he ascribes names and genders to inanimate objects, the people in his life—Ma and Old Nick—fail to transcend being inanimate objects themselves.

To Jack, Ma is nothing more than his mother. I often observe women for whom motherhood is their personality, and they are patently uninteresting to me. Ma’s circumstances have made her into a person who is only “mother,” because to recognize herself as anything else would be unbearably devastating. (We do see how she deals with her flashes of recognition through a bit of non-serious drug use, and periods of catatonic depression.) Perhaps this is an issue with myself rather than the book, but I was not that interested in Ma as a character. Moreover, a 5-year-old narrator who has not yet developed his own skills of empathy does little to elicit empathy from the reader for the characters he observes.

Old Nick is the most uninteresting 2-dimensional villain of all time. More than anything, he serves as a plot device. He put Ma in the Room, he got her pregnant with Jack, he inexplicably let her keep Jack, and with nearly unbelievable stupidity, he allows them to escape, which sets up the second half of the book. There were multiple aspects of the set-up that did not serve to suspend my disbelief. The first was the entire premise of Ma having a child to begin with. There are so many questions raised that could not possibly be answered through Jack’s narrative. How was it that Old Nick apparently has sex with Ma nearly every night, but she only became pregnant twice in 7 years. The book sets up at the beginning that Ma takes birth control (ostensibly provided by Old Nick, who has a “guy”), but that obviously only started after she became pregnant with Jack. It’s revealed that she delivered a stillborn baby a year before Jack was born—why did Old Nick not put her on birth control then? If Ma enjoyed having babies, and Old Nick let her have them, why did she even take the birth control? Alternatively, why did she want to bring a baby into the horrible world she was living in? She reveals that she had an abortion when she was younger and did not regret it. Why did she let herself become, and remain, pregnant—twice—while in Room?

The escape itself was confusing. My first question was why on earth would Old Nick (who seemed to think of everything in designing his horrific love nest) not check to see if Jack was actually dead? Why would he not find a way to make sure Jack was dead, beat the body with a shovel or something? He’s supposed to be a psychopath, right? Was this out of respect or love for Ma? Old Nick’s motivations are paper thin, and the reader is just supposed to go with it. There was not enough here for me to go with it. My disbelief was not only not suspended, it grew with time. As a reader, I felt manipulated.

(Other readers have noted the similarities of this book to the Fritzl case and that the existence of a real-life case is evidence enough to support the premise of this book and its villain; I disagree that it’s enough, and a novelist owes her readers to create an entirely self-contained world.)

The second half of ROOM follows the escape, and has its roots in the classic trope of “Fish Out of Water” stories, with such subtropes as “Raised By Wolves” and “Stranger in a Familiar Land.” Ma attempts to reintegrate herself to the world from which she was taken, while Jack observes this new world through little “kids say the darnedest things” commentaries that are meant to be wise, but only skim the surface of striking a new insight. Every one of these “world through an innocent child’s eyes” scenes is deeply irritating. I was reminded of Tarzan, Third Rock From the Sun, Encino Man—any number of stories wherein someone unfamiliar with our world sees things differently and makes “profound” observations. They take idioms literally. They inadvertently ask silly questions that make people laugh. It’s been done to death, and it’s been done better.

That’s actually the best way I can describe my experience of this book: irritating. I won’t pretend that I’m a huge fan of small children in the first place, but being trapped in this kid’s head for the length of a book was the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. I think part of it was because it wasn’t done exceptionally well. Jack is supposed to be precocious and have a big vocabulary. He also watches tons of television (where I imagine they speak like real people), and his mother frequently corrects his grammar. So why does he say ridiculously wrong things like, “Ma hots Thermostat way up”? There’s also inconsistency. I was inordinately irritated that Jack first says the trash can lid goes “ping,” then later it changes to “bing,” and still later it’s “ding.” Jack has childish obsessiveness with repeating and patterns and sameness, so it was really jarring when he didn’t follow the “rules” that were laid out for his character. Related to this, I was annoyed by the non-American speech mannerisms that abounded in the book, which ostensibly takes place in America, such as “bit” instead of “part” and “meant to” instead of “supposed to.” I know Donoghue is not American, but I shouldn’t have been able to tell that in the book—because Ma and Jack are. ROOM needed a much more highly skilled editor than was assigned.

The other major thing that irritated me about ROOM was that it seemed too self-aware and too clever, which again, did not serve the suspension of disbelief. It reminded me of the Time Traveler’s Wife in that the author was trying to be too hip for her book. Jarring pop culture references abounded, including song names like “Tubthumping” and “Lose Yourself.” (Really? Eminem? Really?) Dora the Explorer was an ongoing thematic element. Again, really? I wonder if perhaps Donoghue relied a little too much on her own relationship with her 5-year-old son to add veritas to the experience of a 5-year-old, instead of sticking with her own invented world. No one would have had a problem if Jack’s favorite television show was made up for this book only.

Related to this was the sense that Donoghue had some sort of unclear ideological motivations that she needed to get out in the book. The whole breastfeeding theme seemed unnecessary (not to mention uncomfortable); it was charged with something much more related to the author than the story. The secondary characters are aggressively diverse, with names like Ajeet, Oh, Lopez, and Yung. Ma’s brother, Paul, is in a “partnership” rather than a marriage (like the author herself), and it happens to be an interracial one at that. Now, I have no problem with any of this; I’m as progressive as it comes. But when you stick it in a novel the way Donoghue does, it’s not part of the book’s tapestry; it’s a big neon sign that says “Look how modern and progressive I am.” Coupled with the pop culture references, this book is going to have a really short shelf life.

But absolutely the worst part of the book was that it was boring. The things that children obsess over—their toys, their meals, their poo—are really not all that interesting to adults. Put that in a room where nothing ever happens, and it gets really old, really fast. There was some tension and movement once Ma decided to hatch their escape plan, but that lasted for maybe 15% of the book. After they escape, the tension dissipates completely, and I found myself skimming large sections just to see if anything was going to happen. No, nothing happened.

If you’ve read this far in the review, you’ve probably already read the book, so I can’t tell you now to take a pass. But I wish now I would have let someone stop me.

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Semantics

I recently had a brush with the effect poor word choice can have. In the wake of all that, now I’m wondering: are we really all speaking the same language?

I used to think that the terms “self-publishing” and “independent publishing” were interchangeable terms, albeit with different spin. I typically favored “indie” because it has less baggage, but used “self” when I wasn’t thinking too hard about it (or needed that one extra character).

But thanks to Kriss Morton, who recently commented here on SYEWW, I had an interesting change of perspective regarding some of the terminology we throw around in this world. “Indie” and “self” don’t have to mean the same thing, and the differentiation can actually be a handy tool by which we separate the wheat from the chaff. But I’ll get to that in a moment. 

I want to start with a few other terms that frequently get tossed into this mix, which are patently not interchangeable with either “self” or “indie.” For reference, I also submit Exhibit A,  the "indie triangle."

Vanity Publishing – This is quite a nefarious term—the negative connation is right there in the words! According to the folks that coined the term (the origin is in question), an author who goes this route is vain. It’s not a compliment.

Vanity publishing has a long and storied history (pardon the pun) and still exists today, preying on the young and the weak of the indie movement. Vanity presses charge authors money to put out their books, while at the same time, making the authors feel all warm and fuzzy. The whole deal is plain sleazy. Authors who go this route are not usually vain, but rather naïve—not understanding Yog’s Law. (Thanks to Dan for making me hip to this handy term.)

It is very important not to confuse vanity publishing—which is basically falling prey to a network of evil hucksters—with any of these other terms. It may not be used coincidentally with “self” or “indie” because, while the author made the decision to publish, the vanity press is doing the publishing. Only two sides of the indie triangle are at work.

E-Publishing – Due to the recent years’ upsurge in the accessibility of e-publishing, coupled with the upsurge in the demand of e-books, e-publishing is definitely a thing. Because you really only need a Word file and a good service or software, anyone can e-publish a book with zero dollar investment. But it’s funny to me that this is a “new” term, and newly associated with books specifically. People have been “e-publishing” (making their content publicly available via electronic means) since the dawn of the Internet. Yes, I include blogs in that. I include e-magazines like HuffPost and even your Twitter feed. I include anything posted online for all to see. I would hazard that nearly everyone reading this right now has e-published something.

But what gets my goat about the term “e-publishing” is that it’s so conflated with self-publishing, as if that’s the only route indie authors have. Now, I have absolutely no statistics to back this up, but my gut tells me that most self-published authors are also only e-publishers. However, with the availability of CreateSpace, Lulu, and Lightning Source (to name a few), it’s a wrongheaded assumption to think no self-publisher is publishing in print. (Speaking for myself, it was essential to me that a paperback of my book be available. I’ve sold more paperbacks than e-books. And I get to sign them and dedicate them and that makes me feel all gooey inside.)

So this term may be used coincidentally with self-publishing or indie publishing; however, the terms are not interchangeable nor redundant of one another. One can independently e-publish. One can be e-published without being self-published. E-publishing is a reference only to the mechanism by which your work is available; it’s only one side of the triangle.

Now, to the draw some lines in the sand. I am making a promise right now to abide by these definitions on this blog and in other discussions. I think it’s a useful distinction to make, and I encourage others to start making it as well.

Self-Publishing – This term is for authors who make their own books available to the public independently of a “traditional” or “legacy” publishing house. (Let’s visit those terms another day.) In other words, the person who made the decision to publish the book, the person who publishes the book, and the person who wrote the book are one and the same. All three sides of the indie triangle are present.

But the defining characteristic of the true “self-publisher” is that he or she does everything by him or herself, including editing (or not), cover design, layout, etc. For better or for worse, the self-publisher does not get others involved, and does not necessarily follow all the steps of established publishing processes.

Independent Publishing – This term encompasses the same definition as the first paragraph of the “self-publishing” definition. In addition, the indie publisher/indie author understands the importance of quality and that having mad skillz in writing does not necessarily mean one has talent for editing one’s own work, or knows one’s way around InDesign.

The defining characteristic of the indie publisher is that he or she recognizes that going it by one’s self is not in anyone’s best interest. The indie publisher will seek training, obtain assistance, and/or hire people with the necessary skills to turn out a high quality product worthy of the reading public.

There is danger here of inadvertently conflating the no-no-badness of vanity publishing with hiring help to put out your own book; Yog’s Law is easily misinterpreted. Here’s my law: Thou shalt not pay to be published; however, thou shall treat publishing as a business and invest appropriately in that business, with time and/or moneys (usually both). Just remember: hire someone to do a job. Don’t pay them to stroke your ego.

I’m not looking to cement anything as a pejorative, and I realize I am walking that line. I’m not here to say, “Whenever I use the term ‘self-publish’ I’m speaking only about crappy books.” If people want to use the term “self-publish” free of negative connotation, I bid them good luck with it, and I promise not to pre-judge. I’m sure there are some wonderful books available that have been truly self-published with no outside assistance. But by and large, self-publishing has a terrible, terrible reputation, and the reason for this is that so many authors don’t invest in their books to the degree they should have. The result is a lot of first drafts floating around as finals.

What I am looking for is a semantic way to distinguish myself and other high-quality independent authors from a term that stuck its foot in the Bog of Eternal Stench. I choose “independent publisher.” These are the authors who approach publishing their own books in exactly the same way a publisher would approach publishing someone else’s book. As author Shauna Kelley points out in a recent post, you don’t go from typing “the end” directly to pushing the publish button. I have personally gone through the entire cycle as a professional publisher of other people's books, from acquisition to final print, through marketing and publicity—there are lots of steps if you want to do it right.

“Self-publishers” (and you know who you are): you can bring it to the next level and become independent publishers. Help our community improve its reputation as one of quality, professionalism, and above all, creativity. We owe this to ourselves, to each other, and—most of all—to our readers. 

What are your thoughts on semantics? Is it worth making this distinction? Is it fair? Maybe we should just stick to judging each book individually? Leave your thoughts in the comments. 

El Libro Que No Puede Esperar

"Books are patient objects. . . . That's okay for books--but not for new authors. If people don't read them, they'll never make it to a second book."