Life, The Movies, and Everything

Last week is the first week DH and I haven't gone to the cinema in a month. Instead, we crashed over the holiday weekend. We caught up on a few chores, but we spent most of our time as recliner potatoes and eating good food.

However, we did watch Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves on streaming. It was a rather adorable gender-bender of tropes. Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez were absolutely cute as best friends. We also plowed through the second seasons of Picard and Ted Lasso.

My crimping tool and crimp tubes arrived over the weekend. While Tacky Glue on knots works well, it's not as an attractive finish for beaded bookmarks. I'll be working on those for an hour or two every day until I can get my arts room cleaned out and arranged to my liking. I say "arts" because there's Barbie face painting and hair rerooting in addition to the sewing and beadwork. Plus the stickers I plan to design will be a wacky mix of Dia de Los Muertos and Barbenheimer.

Yes, I already bought the t-shirt above. It's available at TeeFury.com

Why am I going to all this trouble? I need something to do besides writing and crocheting during movies and TV at home in order to keep my mind active and my fingers nimble. I want to be as crochety and active as FIL and the dad of DH's best friend when I hit 90.

Art and Politics

I haven't posted anything in the last couple of weeks. While I could blame my efforts on getting Zombie Goddess ready for publishing and writing Sacrificed, that's not the entire truth.

I'm sure there are those who will mock me, saying I spent the time crying into my pillow because I'm a woman and the 19th Amendment will be revoked and etc. Those insults aren't the whole truth either.

The reason I didn't post is because I wasn't sure how the election outcome would affect my writing (I haven't been self-censoring, whew!) and my business (ironically it's up).

There's always going to be those who reject my work because my personal beliefs don't match theirs. I hate to inform the most recent haters, but this is nothing new. People I don't know are more vocal about their displeasure with me, but I really doubt you would have read my books before the election results.

If anything, I've seen people twist their hate, the hate deliberately flamed by the politicians this last election cycle, into self-defeating behavior. Even Kris Rusch, the most knowledgeable person blogging about writer business interests today and the most politically neutral of commentators, ran afoul of at least one reader. The topic was how a writer needs to plan for all scenarios, regardless of personal feelings.

That's being responsible on the business side. I've known too many people who've let their personal feelings get in the way of objective business decisions. You can't stop them, and I'm too old to try at this point.

But what about your art?

I hate to say this, but art has always been political. Art comments on the things we often dare not say aloud or even directly. Even something as simple as Star Trek: The Original Series was political. It often addressed the ongoing Vietnam War and the volatile race relations that were happening as it aired. And the other series of the time that played it safe by ignoring those very issues are no longer remembered, or if they are, they are considered relics of an unenlightened era.

Many people would find Alter Ego's books objectionable because they include polyamory and BDSM. Even the books under my own name would be questionable because of interreligious relationships (the Egyptian prince and Jewish-American princess in Blood Magick, which I swear, no one seems to get that's what happened in the damn book!), interracial relationships (fae and human in a future short story), differently-abled relationships (A Question of Balance) or even an older woman/younger man relationship (Blood Sacrifice).

Invariably, there are those people who are just in a pissy mood, and they decided they're going to take it out on everyone. It really doesn't matter what you do.

Over the weekend, the vice-president-elect Mike Pence attended Hamilton: An American Musical. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway show, about the U.S.'s first secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, is sold out three years in advance. (I know for sure because I tried to get tickets for 2019.)

At the close of the show Friday night, cast member Brandon Victor Dixon addressed Pence. Dixon also chided the audience for booing the vice-president elect. Yet, all the major news outlets and president-elect Trump are calling for the Hamilton cast to apologize, and they totally ignore Dixon's call for civility. I strongly suggest you watch video of the incident without the commentary and decide for yourself. The thing I find funny is Dixon plays...


...wait for it...


...VICE-PRESIDENT AARON BURR!


Yes, I have a very perverse sense of humor.

By the way, if you're totally offended by what happened at Friday night's show and you already bought your Hamilton tickets, I'd be more than happy to save your delicate sensibilities by taking them off your hands.

As a commenter on Facebook said, if the cast had said nothing, the Saturday headline would have been "Hamilton Cast Snubs V-P Elect".

For me, I just going to keep writing.

Instead of listening to Lady Gaga's new album ad nauseam for the last two weeks as I'm wont to do when she drops a new one, I've been pulling out a lot of hip-hop and rap I listened to in the '80's and early '90's. They were the protest acts of my generation, just like Bob Dylan was for the previous generation.

So to my fellow artists, keep writing what you're passionate about and kill the naysayers with kindness, the Hamilton way.

And we'll end today's ruminations with Above the Law's "Freedom of Speech":

KU and Wanting to Be Read

Last Wednesday, I posted my initial thoughts on KU. Over the last week, I've read several other writers' thoughts on the matter. I'm surprised how many writers don't care if they are read; they just want to make money from their books.

I have to admit that this sort of thinking boggles me. Fiction publishing is delicate balance between art, entertainment and widget selling. It's a little bit of all three, so believing it's all one thing turns into a self-defeating mess.

Why? Because if the art doesn't entertain, it will not be borrowed, much less bought by the populace. If my first book doesn't entertain, then the reader will not pick up the second, or third, or fourth, etc. I will not continue to make money because I disappointed the reader, and the reader will most likely share their opinions with their friends.

Now granted, it's impossible to please everyone, but writers should hit with a good chunk of their target market. This is where word-of-mouth kicks in. As readers talk about your book, more of their friends and relatives start reading your books. In return, you make more money.

However, some writers just want to be bought, or borrowed under the old KU system. They make money on the appearance of entertainment, not on actual entertainment. It means instead of only polishing the first 10% of a story, they need to polish the whole damn thing in order to for the book not to be returned, or to earn money on the revised KU system.

This is what Kris Rusch was talking about when she referred to gaming in her column last week. It's not about short story writers vs. serial writers vs. novel writers. It's not about genre vs. genre vs. litfic. It's about giving the reader the experience they desire when they read. Which means a quality product for that particular length and genre. That means wanting to be read.

Not throwing up random words. Not posting cut/pasted stories or articles. Not putting in a bunch of filler to pad the content.

Write a great story that has your reader's coffee grow cold. One that makes her forget to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer. One that makes her miss her subway stop.

Write a story they can't forget. That's the way to make money on KU.