Love in Dark Settings

"When I was writing Trumpets in the West in the middle of India, with scarcely any reference-books, I discovered just in time that the stage-coaches in 1686 carried no outside passengers. It meant rewriting a complete chapter. Probably no child would ever have noticed the mistake, and perhaps no History teacher would have minded. . . . Similarly a whole chapter of Thunder of Valmy had to be rewritten when I discovered by chance that a certain morning at Versailles in May, 1789, had been grey and drizzly, not sunny as I had first pictured it. What does it matter, a pedantic detail like that? Just as much, or as little, as the workmanship which old-time sculptors and carvers put into figures so far from the ground that no human eye would ever appreciate it."

--Geoffrey Trease: Tales Out of School.

( Background to my entries )
( Mentoring: An exchange between my apprentice and me )
( Writing: #1 reason to love the U.S. government (Prison City research) )
( Writing: #1 sign that it's time to stop gathering research material )
( Writing and Simplicity: Starting into my writing season )
( Simplicity: Purging my hard drive )
( Writing: Slugging away at the Prison City lighthouse research )
( The play 'Fishing Gone' (Prison City Research) )
( Writing: Rugby, watermen's dialect, and steamboats (Prison City research) )
( Writing: Playing around with EPUB e-books )
( Writing: Preparing my domain for next year; plus, novel-reading related to Prison City )
( Writing: Speaking of demoralizing . . . )
( Writing: 1910s watermen's dialect (Prison City research) )
( Simplicity: Freeing up space on my computer )
( Simplicity: Freeing up space on my computer, Part 2 )
( Writing: Turning over the slate )
( Writing: My Muse moveth )

An update for those of you who don't read my regular Daily Life entries: I've settled that the Calvert Cliffs cove near Cove Point in Calvert County is a suitable home for my protagonist. I've written the Hoopers Island watermen chapter. I've rewritten the Solomons Island chapter. I still have to write the lighthouse chapter and the Calvert Cliffs chapters.

But meanwhile (or rather, before I wrote the Hoopers Island chapter), I went off to Dorchester County again, this time with spiralred.

( Chesapeake Marshlands National Wildlife Refuge Complex (at Bishops Head Point) )
( Hoopers Island )

Thanks to Spiralred and her willingness to tramp through uncharted marshland, this trip gave me the material I needed to write the Hoopers Island watermen chapter - not to mention a new scene featuring a marshland pond - though I'm still struggling with nature terminology. I'd really like to get someone from Hoopers Island to look over the manuscript - though how the heck I'd find that someone, I don't know. Maybe I can stand in the island store again, holding my manuscript and looking like a pathetic tourist till someone takes pity on me.

"When publishing was a matter of standing in front of a large enough audience and telling a story, publishing could be assayed by literally anyone. If a storyteller wanted to tell a story, he did so. If he was good enough at it, he got the accolades and respect of his audience, and perhaps even payment, in the form of food, shelter, etc. The developments of technology, beginning with written languages, continuing through such crude printing technologies as woodblock and hand-cast metal type, and eventually reaching block-long high-speed web-fed printing presses, took this immediate access away from the average storyteller. Now, in order to put his story in the hands of his audience, the storyteller had to do one of two things. He had to acquire a printing press, or he had to go to someone who had one.

"There were, perhaps unfortunately, more storytellers than the printers could handle, and they (like all industries) learned how to say no. The perceived function of the owners of the printing presses as a gatekeeper has its actual origin right there: the printers simply could not hope to publish everything. Nor could they hope to attract all the readers in the world, and in an attempt to differentiate their services from those of their competitors, they began to add what they perceived as value. They added editing. They added color. They added illustrations. And they added snobbery.

"But the question remains unanswered: do we want a gatekeeper to the public square? Do we want a not-so-disinterested third party telling us what we can and cannot read? Remember the fireside? Remember the storyteller who stood there, regaling his audience with the story of how he conquered a saber-tooth? Aren't we capable of deciding for ourselves whether we want to spend our time listening to him? I said that if he was good enough, he got respect and accolades. What I didn't say was that if he wasn't good enough, he got ignored. He lost his audience. He either stood by the dying fire alone and spoke on and on to nothing and nobody, or he went home and hoed his potatoes. His publishing career was over. Market forces did him in, not some gatekeepers somewhere, standing with crossed lances, turning him away."

--Levi Montgomery.

"The importance of gatekeepers does not lie in their ability to prevent bad books from being found, but in their ability to make the good ones easier to find."

--Response by Marion Gropen, co-moderator of the Self-Publishing list, followed by a spirited debate at TeleRead.

( Background to my entries )
( Writing: If you're seeking software by which to convert e-books into the EPUB format . . . )
( Mentoring: Quotations from my apprentice )
( Simplicity: My diet )
( Writing and Mentoring: The servant problem )
( Writing: Lambda Literary Awards )
( Writing: Final days of my publishing season )

"Our new program is staffed by a diverse group of professionals and volunteers, bound together by their desire to serve your research needs. . . . Online chat hours will be expanded in the future. We are using cutting-edge Meebo technology that allows users to chat live with our researchers directly from our web site. No software or messenger accounts are required, and since you can reach us from home, even clothing is optional!"

--An advertisement for the research services of the Leather Archives & Museum.

( Background to my entries )
( Simplicity: Internet time this month )
( Simplicity and Writing: Gathering and burying nuts for the winter; plus, Eastern Shore memories )
( Home: Money )
( Mentoring: Lunch with a slave )
( Simplicity: My ideal wardrobe )
( Simplicity: Scanning my winter reading )
( Writing: Prison City research - countdown to the finish )
( Writing: Prison City research - almost finished with the Chesapeake research )
( Mentoring: My apprentice's health )
( Mentoring: An exchange between me and my apprentice )

"Only on [the Erotic Romance Writers Forum] would someone have an 'immediate need' for text on fisting."

--Cupnjava, responding a couple of years ago to one of my research requests.

( Background to my entries )
( Two exchanges with my apprentice )
( Prison City research: The oyster wars )
( REVIEW: Recommendation of Syd McGinley's The Complete Dr. Fell, Volume 1: Lost )
( Historians need to be sent back to school )
( Protocol prep )

"As for the intellectual property, I try not to get too worked up about it. There's a lot of people angsting about piracy and copying of stuff on the Internet, publishers who are very, very worried about the whole idea of ebook piracy. I like to get a little bit of perspective on it by remembering that back before the Internet came along, we had a very special term for the people who buy a single copy of a book and then allow all their friends to read it for free. We called them librarians."

--Charlie Stross.

( Background to my entries )
( Internet time )
( Finished culling books )
( My apprentice, me, and david stein's new book on gay masters and slaves )
( Publishing season finished )
( The dog days of August )
( Preparation to clothes culling )

"My definition of 'porn' as opposed to 'story' (and I don't have a problem with either one, but I do think there's a distinction) is not the ratio of sex to whatever else, or sexy stuff (eg slavery) to whatever else, but basically the lack of complex characterization and motivation driving the characters' actions, in porn. In porn, you don't need any motivation beyond 'Laura is horny, the pizza deliveryman is there, grunt grunt grunt' whereas a story is like, 'Laura was so incredibly bored and sexually frustrated that morning, on account of David being on the antipsychotic medication that killed his sex drive, that when the pizza guy showed up they had all kinds of wild crazy sex. She felt no guilt; as the pizza guy drove into her, drawing her body slowly towards its peak of ecstasy, she reflected that it was surely no different from taking iron supplements when you became a vegetarian for moral reasons. She'd stay with David, of course, see him through his difficulties, but there was no sense wasting away through neglect of her own body's needs. The only trouble was that the pizza guy, be he ever so well-hung, was no more a satisfactory substitute for David, David's dear familiar body over hers, his eyes gazing down at her as they had done before the hallucinations began, the sweet married sex with no fumbling, than iron pills were a substitute for a good juicy rare sirloin. Afterwards, the pizza guy, who was younger than she'd guessed at first, with a heartbreaking little soul patch on his chin, wanted to cuddle, but Laura managed to fend him off and get him back into his uniform-- "Franklin," said his nametag, which she hadn't bothered to read before undressing him. She tipped him generously before shutting the door. Franklin. Jesus. No wonder he was up for boning bored housewives. She wondered briefly whether she'd just deflowered him, then got down to the business of getting the sheets in the laundry and the pizza buried deeply in the trash where David wouldn't see it when he got home.'"

--Maculategiraffe, in an idle moment. As one commenter to her journal put it, "Why the hell can't I write plot that easily?"

( Background to my entries )
( 'Rebirth'; plus, my Internet time this week )
( Looking forward to next year's publishing season )
( My optimistic plans for writing and editing this winter )
( Stage One of my book culling ends )
( Why old books deserve to be reread )

"As for the future, computers offer publishers two possibilities: to streamline the process of transforming raw text into print, and to go beyond print into the realms of publishing material on disks specifically for use with computers. Such material is called software (as opposed to 'hardware', which refers to the machines themselves) and includes word processing programs. There is a lot of computer software available already - computer games, educational programs, business programs and 'on-line databases' (systems whereby people can subscribe and gain access to a central bank of information via a link to their own computer). Most of what is available now is not put out by publishers - and much of it is not sold in traditional bookstores, but in computer stores or department stores. It is a big step for traditional publishers to contemplate. But the market is wide open and publishing will have to change radically to meet the challenge. The future is already here."

--Geoffrey Rogers: Editing for Profit (1985).

( Background to my entries )
( Back to the future: computers and publishing in 1985 )
( Publishing progress again; plus, excerpts from historical novels )
( Little snippets )
( Erotica versus pornography; Scribd versus Smashwords )
( Barnes & Noble's e-bookstore and e-reader: We Are Not Impressed )
( Amazon shows once again how much it loves self-publishers; plus, not enough hours in the day )
( What I can learn from television addicts )
( Reworking my schedule )
( Anniversary )
( Getting rid of books and magazines )
( E-mail, Torchwood, and The Eternal Dungeon )
( New approach to trimming my book collection )
( Scything my way through my inbox )
( Monthly totals )

As graphically presented by pageaddict, a wonderful Firefox add-on.

( Image under the cut )

"Late Sunday night, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt congratulated the Pirate Party on their unprecedented win at the European elections.

"A few hours earlier, the party dinner had come to a close with volunteers and members singing 'The Broadband Hymn'. . . . 'We'll share files in Brussels!' a young man shouted as he ran to the bar at election night."

--How Pirates Shook European Politics. Not a parody. Seriously.

( Background to my entries )
( Publishing matters and monthly totals )
( Getting rid of science and music books )
( Summer publishing plans and winter composing plans )
( Getting rid of language and literature books )
( Good news and bad news )
( Reorganizing my computer space )
( The state of my Internet addiction )
( Getting rid of religion books (part one) )
( Internet addiction progress )

"I am more and more certain that I still have not left the world but keep lingering on the edges. I am plainly and simply scared of 'no return,' and fear that the road of total commitment . . . is arduous, painful, and very lonely. . . .

"It is this type of extremism, of absolutism, of total surrender, of unconditional 'yes,' of unwavering obedience . . . that frightens me and makes me such a wishy-washy soul, wanting to keep a foot in both worlds. But that is how one stumbles."

--Henri J. M. Nouwen: The Genesee Diary.

( Background to my entries )
( Taking a second look at my life )
( Spiders, housework, and me )
( An unexpected visitor )
( Miscounting The Eternal Dungeon )
( Progress with publishing and with my Internet addiction )

"Books are normally built up from gatherings or signatures - printed and folded sheets - with each signature forming a unit of 8, 12, 16, 24, or 32 pages. The 16-page signature is by far the most common. Typographers therefore work to make most of their books seem divinely ordained and conceived to be some multiple of 16 pages in length. Seasoned book typographers recite in their meditations not only the mantra of points and picas - 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72 . . . - but also the mantra of octavo signatures: 16, 32, 48, 64, 80, 96, 128, 144, 160, 176, 192, 208, 224, 240, 256, 272, 288, 304, 320, 336, 352, 368, 384, 400. . . .

"In a work of continous prose, the illusion of divine love for the number sixteen is obtained by straightforward copyediting."

--Robert Bringhurst: The Elements of Typographic Style.

( Background to my entries )
( ISBNs )
( Death and leading )
( Oo, shiny! Font Conference video )
( Life outside the Internet: gardening )
( Gardening, layout, and publishing plans )
( Prison City research day )
( A WTF moment: 'Career Building Through Fan Fiction Writing'? )

"'I wouldn't want to make it look like a gardener's garden, all clipped an' spick an' span, would you?' he said. 'It's nicer like this with things runnin' wild, an' swingin' an' catchin' hold of each other."

"'Don't let us make it tidy,' said Mary anxiously. 'It wouldn't seem like a secret garden if it was tidy.'"

--Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden.

That's what I want too: a "lovely wild place" that "would be a wilderness of growing things." But I'm darned if I can find any writings on this topic.

( Can you folks help me find what I'm looking for? )

"UK booksellers are not yet reduced to the condition of their American cousins, who have gone beyond firing staff and are now using their bodies for food and heat. They fear the Kindle like it was the breath of the devil's cock on their shoulder - despite the fact that Mr Bezos's clever little board has probably not sold a million units yet. Because, as any American bookseller will shriek at you while gouging their own forearms open with Stanley knives, only 34 Americans actually buy and read books."

--Warren Ellis: The Kindle is a mewling, crippled pining thing.

( Background to my entries )
( Mapping out my publishing time )
( Oo, shiny! Closer v. 2 )
( GLBT Bookshelf (wiki for GLBT literature folk) )

So here I am, publishing stories about the propensity of a certain character in The Eternal Dungeon to self-destruct, and meanwhile, I'm trying to convince a close friend not to kill himself.

( Read more... )

( Background to my entries )
( REVIEW: Recommendation of Clare London's Freeman )
( Blog-writing self-consciousness )

"On the first Saturday of November the skipjacks of Tilghman Island were dressed for a ritual. The ritual was the Chesapeake Bay Appreciation Day skipjack race, which marked the beginning of the oystering season. This was to be my first season dredging oysters aboard a skipjack. . . .

"By 10:30 A.M. seventeen working skipjacks had gathered off the beach at Sandy Point. The Bay rippled with a light southwest breeze, and [Captain] Bart sent [his first mate] Bobby into the push boat to shut off the Cadillac. The skipper paid out the main sheet, motioned for me to take the wheel, and let Ruby Ford sail with the wind abeam. I turned the wheel tentatively to starboard what seemed two or three full turns, but the skipjack held her heading and drifted in the current with 1200 square feet of sails fluttering overhead.

"'Honey, come over[.]' Bart's right arm waved to starboard.

"Slowly his message sunk in: 'Turn the wheel, stupid.' I did."

--Randall S. Peffer: Watermen.


( About the trip )
( Talbot County, Maryland )
( Lewes, Delaware )
( Dorchester County, Maryland )
( Your turn now )

"'You have been reading some of that Vulcan-human pornography that you Terran medical staff are abnormally interested in.'

"'Only a little,' McCoy protested feebly.

"'In the first place, for Vulcans sex is a necessity only once every seven years; in the second, the Vulcan male sex organ is neither unusually thick nor unusually long; while it is green, it does not possess tentacles, and in no way does it resemble a towering pillar of green flame. In fact, given our different species, the male sex organs are very much alike, except that in Vulcans the organ is more withdrawn within the body. Now if your curiosity is satisfied, shall we go to bed?' Spock snapped."

--Jane Carnall: Through a Glass Darkly.

( Background to my entries )
( A local meeting of slashers )
( Making further changes toward simplicity )
( Fade to black and pacing )
( What I've learned about simplicity in the past six years )
( Looking at my decision the morning after )
( My Muse goes into editing mode; plus, Guy Gavriel Kay and cellphones )
( Income )
( Noah's Ark redux )
( Iced tea as culture )
( Swine flu )
( How much posting I've done at Web forums since 2000 )
( A memoir on the history of original slash )
( Review of Star Trek (spoilers only for the trailer) )
( Too much fic to read! )
( The Eternal Dungeon editing continues apace; plus, Prison City research )
( Update on how I'm doing in keeping off the Internet; plus, a thank-you note for reader posts/e-mails )
( Scheduling the next couple of weeks )

"The Internet arrived as an incalculable blessing. We should never forget that. It has allowed isolated people to communicate with one another and marginalized people to find one another. The busy parent can stay in touch with far-flung friends. The gay teenager no longer has to feel like a freak. But as the Internet's dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing. Ten years ago we were writing e-mail messages on desktop computers and transmitting them over dial-up connections. Now we are sending text messages on our cellphones, posting pictures on our Facebook pages, and following complete strangers on Twitter. . . .

"And losing solitude, what have [we] lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life - of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing 'in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures,' 'bait[ing our] hooks with darkness.' Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world - that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude."

--William Deresiewicz: The End of Solitude.

( Background to my entries )
( Now on my list of must-read books )
( Back in the days before the Internet ruled OK )
( Cautiously optimistic about a possible breakthrough in my fight against my Internet addiction )
( Continuing on track )
( Prison City research )
( More progress )
( The death of real-life media )
( And yet more Prison City research )
( Marketing )
( My moronic mania, and how I'm taking advantage of it )
( Prison City research. Again. )
( I need a break )
( Offline )
( Clearing clutter and getting editing done )
( Simplifying my reading )
( REVIEW: Recommendation of Blake Nelson's Gender Blender )
( Catching up on the news about my life of simplicity this month )
( Steady progress with The Eternal Dungeon )
( Making progress in clearing my inbox )
( And an odd sort of progress with my leather fiction )
( Interlibrary loan and Prison City research; plus, a decline in literature )
( Deciding which POD printer to use, and deciding how to lead my life )

Look, we made the New York Times! Plus, Publishers Weekly and CNET and the Associated Press and The Guardian and The Denver Examiner and the New York Daily News and Los Angeles Times . . . Well, just do a Google News search on "Amazon." There are currently 773 articles listed there.

Many of the authors being mentioned in the news articles (such as Erastes, to whom I handed the directorship of the Erotic Authors Association, after I burned out on that job) are slashers.

Lesson: Do not tangle with slashers. We rule the literary blogosphere.

It all started with this post by slasher and gay romance author Alex Beecroft. Then this post by Mark Probst, a gay romance author, caused a lot of stir because it suggested that Amazon was censoring GLBT titles. (Also note this back history.) The first person to respond to his post was a slasher, Vashtan, and he stated that he was going to announce the news on Twitter. Which he did, but (as she was kind enough to point out in response to my post) slasher Storm Grant was the one who "named it #amazonfail and started to thread on Twitter that is 200,000 tweets and still growing." That was how the word spread.

The latest news on what happened is at meta_writer, especially this post. Note that Amazon has issued a statement saying it was all a mistake. Everyone is now having a lively time being cynical about that statement.

Dusk (feeling a bit disconcerted, because I read Mark Probst's post before this news hit the mass media)

Edited at 2:20 to add Storm's information.

Edited at 2:46 p.m. to add: Storm Grant has pointed me to this interesting post by Leah Braemel, chronicling the development of the twittering and pointing out that heterosexual titles were affected too. (I shouldn't neglect to say that it was a very specific section of the slash community that blogged and twittered about this: the authors who are writing small-press gay romance.)

Edited at 3:28 p.m. to add: Vashtan has replied to my post with more information about how the news spread. (His snigger is in response to my speculation about what things were like in the storm.)

Edited at 3:48 to add: Lee Rowan adds more information about how the word was spread, as well as a link to Erastes's round-up post. The groups that Lee Rowan mentions are the gay historical fiction groups started by Erastes (and possibly others too, but as far as I know, Erastes who was the one who started the gay historical fiction community).

Edited at 5 p.m. to add: As Mark Probst points out, Channel 4 in the U.K. covered the story (skip to 7:54 in the video). Notice that Alex Beecroft's book cover was shown by Channel 4. Alex has posted briefly at this blog, and gay romance reviewer Elisa Rolle has given a rundown here on how matters developed on her end.

Edited at 5:15 to add: By the way, is everyone here aware that this isn't the first time that Amazon has played the heavy? But here's the interesting thing: the slashers/GLBT folk did a much better job of spreading the word about their problem than the self-publishing community did about theirs.

Edited at 5:57 p.m. to add: If your book is still not listed at Amazon, Alex Beecroft offers suggestions at the bottom of this post.

Edited at 7:25 to add: Some much-needed humor.