Pop Culture Nerd & Mariposa

I'm kind of a pop culture nerd. This will come as no surprise to anyone who already knows me, but it definitely played an important part of the writing of my first novel. And I've been thinking about that, and realized I should say something about it.

So my husband has been essentially writing fan fiction for my novel, Mariposa. He didn't think I told the guys' story properly, and is writing that, as well as creating something new. It's really not bad, although I'm going to have to help him edit it, a lot. (Which I will admit I'm not exactly looking forward to....editing anyone's work sucks but editing someone else's work in your universe... ick.)

I find this equal parts exciting and flattering and uncomfortable at times. I love that he wants to expand the story, and I agree with him and others that there is room for more to tell about Meg's world. To do that, I'm supposed to be finishing Orpheus & the Butterfly this summer, and I'm close, but it has hit a stalling point lately-- and I'm mostly okay with that. (I promise I'll finish it soon. I just need to work out a tricky scene or two).

Isn't it cool? If you've read the novel,
you know what this is....

But the discussions I've been having with him about the story as a result of his work in progress have reminded me of some things I wanted to say about the writing of the book itself. It really was a love-letter to San Antonio, which I miss very much. And I think, according to several of the reviews I've seen that mention this specifically, that love comes across in the descriptions of the city. Many people have remarked how they want to visit San Antonio because of my book (I'll take my commission in small unmarked bills, thank you, city tourism board). There's a reference to several of my favorite restaurants, including one with an amazing Mexican bakery. And when I was telling someone the other day about a house we've been looking at to buy in San Antonio, I told her "it's right down the street from the koi pond that Meg visits" and a sparkle lit in her eyes at the thought of getting to live next to that. (Me too, for the record.)

The snow globe that appears in the novel was one that I used to own and wish I could find a new version of, but sadly, it's a hard to find item. It played "Deep in the Heart of Texas" and my son dropped it.... I suppose that's one way to free someone...

One of the points in the book is that Demetrio temporarily swipes a book called Caballero, by Jovita Gonzalez. I put the book in my book for a couple of reasons, and I'm thinking it deserves a little attention here. If you read Caballero after reading mine, you would get a little more out of both books. It's not just dropped in there randomly-- it actually adds to the story to know about Gonzalez' work.

I read Caballero when I was in grad school and I loved it. There are these rich descriptive passages in the novel, and I wanted to do that same thing with my writing. It's also part of Demetrio's exploration of his heritage, which he shares with Amelinda. This was not always clear to everyone as a point of the book. Yes, it's a quest-motif and a ghost story. But it is also about the journey the characters experience through cultures. The history is crucial to what makes Demetrio who he is, and Amelinda, and even Meg, eventually. Those stories will be told, and are a blend of Spanish history and the way San Antonio is made up of multiple cultures that work nicely together.

Without telling too much about it, I think Caballero is a novel that a good many people would really enjoy reading, I think. It has never gotten the acclaim I think it deserves, mostly seeming relegated to grad school reading lists. It's a historic romance, and fans of that genre would quite like it, I think. It's a little like Gone With the Wind for the Spanish colonial peon system in Texas, but it also has a bit of a Romeo & Juliet vibe. Not magical, like my stuff, but I think my ghost-sections have the touch of history to them, as well as that rich description.  My writing is not "sparse" and clean, like Hemingway. I like some adjectives, baby. As did Gonzalez.

Another important detail of my novel is the ghost stories, which are all but one based on real hauntings in San Antonio (I won't tell you which one I totally made up. But if you guess, I'll fess up). An early editor discussion was when one of my editors said he felt like the "side" stories with the ghosts (spoilers at the links, though....like Sallie White and Ollie and even Martha) were distracting to the main narrative of the story. And a friend who reviewed it said at first she thought so, too, but when she kept reading, she realized that they are a major part of what's actually going on.

I'll admit: It's not a particularly linear story. I get that, and it was on purpose. The side-quests are crucial in Meg's journey because they both show her who she is and what kind of dangers await her if she doesn't figure out why she's "still here." And they are also one of the places that future stories are likely to go (as well as where Lady in Blue ties in, too...) I really love them, and there was no question in my mind that they were going to be deleted.*

Anyway, to make the point of this post clearer, my novel is intended to be in the same genre as Chocolat, by Joanne Harris, or Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman. It's a little intended to be like Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire stories but less punchy, and definitely less sexy. I also love Sean Stewart's works, Galveston & Mockingbird, and I was hoping that the novel fell into a similar pattern of magic realism. Finally, and I specifically mention his work, Charles DeLint's brilliant Newford stories, where his city is so powerfully drawn that it's not a setting but another character.

So if you liked my book, and you haven't read the above books, you should go grab them, or get them from your library. If you love the above books, and haven't read my book, I think I can humbly suggest you might enjoy mine, too.

So there you have it... my love of pop culture and magical realism means that Mariposa, as well as everything I write, will be loaded down with these kinds of references. I hope it's part of the fun for you as a reader to find them, and I'll keep pointing out the sources of them if you're interested.

*I did, however, delete something like 40,000 words of excessive description. You're welcome. :) 

Pennsylvania FanFic on Sale

So Michael Bunker's Brother Frankenstein is on sale this week. It's set in the Pennsylvania world that he created which is a sci-fi cyberpunk meets colonization story that is really unique and interesting. It's genuinely a new idea in sci-fi-- how often does that come along? I'll give you a moment to think about it.

And if you like that kind of thing, I also happen to know of several indie authors who have written official fan fic of that universe (including my story, which has gotten great reviews so far.) So while you're grabbing Brother Frankenstein, consider loading your Kindle with these other three stories!

Sisters of Solomon by Kim Wells

Donavan by D.K. Cassidy

The Yesterday Adjustment by David Bruns

Googly Eyes

WHY am I putting this picture on here? I hate it! 

So I just read this blog where a super funny Geraldine (LastNameRedacted) discussed how she tormented her husband by sticking googly eyes all over everything. The appliances were sad, the tissue box was enduring agonizing pain but willing to sacrafice for her beloved husband, and I laughed til tears squeezed out of the corners of my eyes....

I thought "I need to do this. My kids would love it."

And the next thought was: "I'll bet I can get those googly eyes on Amazon!"

So I googled it (there are a lot of google words in this post.)

Suddenly, I found I had triggered the sheer horror of my phobia of tiny holes in things as this image was staring back at me.

NO! Don't google what it's called. You can't unsee some things. You'll thank me for not knowing. There's a reason why Pandora is considered a bad story... you open up a simple box and you end up letting things out into the world and forever and ever until you end up being the name of an Internet radio station. (And seriously: until I just mentioned it, the connection between Pandora and PANDORA had never occurred to me before. Boy, that PhD was totally worth the money cause I reading comprehend like a real champion!!) 

Luckily Boz Scaggs is playing on my Pandora station right now and things are getting better. I also have wine in the other room chilling for later, and company coming over.

And I think I'm going to take a deep breath and go order some of those googley eyes and start planning the notes. My refrigerator has seen angst like nobody's business.

The Carrier Bag Theory of Publishing: On Feminists, Revolution, and the Shape of the Future of Books

A long time ago, I wrote a speech to give to a group of women writers, because as a scholar in the field and the creator/editor of my Women Writers zine, people wanted to hear what I might have to say to a small group of professional women writers in the Buffalo, NY area. In that speech, I started off summarizing LeGuin's amazing scholarly article "On the Carrier Bag Theory of Narrative" from her collection Dancing on the Edge of the World, and I'm going to quote myself a bit here:

Ursula K. LeGuin's interpretation of narrative, based on an anthropological theory that the first tool used by humanity wasn't, as popular media would have us think, a stick to bash someone with, but a bag-- something to use to carry home the nuts and berries, or the fortunately caught rabbit for dinner, or even hold the baby who would wiggle and wander off to be lost without some kind of attention being paid, attention that needed to be on the gathering of daily foodstuff instead.

LeGuin imagines that the true shape of narrative is more like that carrier bag-- not the pointed, linear hero-quest where halfway through you slay the beast and move on to a heroic victory parade, but a mixture of things thrown together next to each other, jostling, competing, and overlapping, somewhat like a quilt, enhancing each other, but sometimes contrasting. (WW, 5/15/04).

I'm going to come back to this quote-- so hold on to it in your mind for a moment...just be thinking about a writer's toolbox, and how she might use it. 


Today, a discussion has been going on in the "indie writer" circles that I am a part of about LeGuin's continued [edit to opposition-- at least say] objection to or misgivings about* to digital books, including, and especially, Amazon. In her speech to the 2014 Book Awards, and more recently in the article "Up the Amazon with the BS Machine," LeGuin repeatedly argues that Amazon, in particular, is anti-book, and the marketing by Amazon specifically is turning books and American Literature into a BS (bestselling) commodity that sacrifices profit for freedom, and especially an idea of a sort of market censorship and even using the strongest words like "dictatorship" for Amazon. 

She especially dislikes the idea of Amazon's marketing, and bestseller lists being "cheaply produced & immediately dumped" and "easy to manipulate" are foregrounded in the article. LeGuin seems to have her biggest objection to people buying books from Amazon. She does say that she doesn't really have a problem with indie writers publishing with Amazon, although she does say she might "have a few questions for us." 

Well, I have a few answers to those unspoken questions.

About the BS Yes. Amazon sells & aggressively markets "Big BestSellers." Books that are written to sell a million copies and go out of print quickly. These are exactly the kinds of authors that the Big Publishing industry wants to find. These are the authors that they woo because they write books about sparkling vampires. 

Those bestsellers are exactly the reason why authors who choose to write indie books often decide to self-publish instead of fighting the years of slush piles, where bored, tired PAs read manuscript after manuscript that ISN'T the next Twilight or Harry Potter and reject them. 

Different narratives. Different books. Not the "linear driven plots" of the bestseller that slays the market and moves on to the next beast, but a cross-genre, different kind of book. Indie is FILLED with those. (Mine are that-- cross-genre books that probably wouldn't catch the eye of a publisher because it doesn't have the "buzz of the moment" with them. But that doesn't mean people haven't loved reading them).

So Amazon has created a market where we can independently publish our books, and we can make a bit of money off of them. And we can share our creative process with hundreds, thousands, even, if we're very lucky, millions. All without having to wait on a huge slush pile for years and years and have our dreams of writing die under an agent's decision that we're "not marketable" or their quest to find the next big Vampire Zombie BDSM hit. 

Today's market is markedly different from the market of even 20 or 30 years ago. There are many, many voices vying for attention, and fewer readers and fewer bookstores every day. We would not be published, most likely, and be able to share our work with our fans without the indie publishing arm of Amazon, which is supported in part by all those bestsellers. 

The Commons of Indie: I am not the biggest, by any means, indie writer who is publishing her work on Amazon's Kindle Direct Program. I'm just a newbie, having hung up my publishing shingle just a few months ago after years of writing and then debating sending my work around to traditional publication's route. I know of other authors who are genuinely making a living with indie writing through Amazon, however. I'm friends with some of them, and they are the hardest working people I know. 

And a lot of them are writing fiction that could very well be traditionally published, that is -thoughtful, ground-breaking, and simply breathtaking. You can find a list of some of them in a blog entry I wrote the other day, in fact. 

But most people think "indie" means vanity press, or crap. Yes, some indies are slapdash writers who toss their books up on Amazon with a hand-drawn cover, poor editing, poor formatting and call themselves writers. That is true, and I do wish that people would craft their work. But the traditional world is not immune to that, either. 

Still, there is a vastly different group of people who are self publishing who have used KDP as a market to find readers, to find a voice, to publish work that is not easily categorized or sparklie. (Although some of it is as sparklie... that's a different essay, though.) 

Within this common area of Amazon's big bookstore, we have created an entire community of indie artists. We support each other, we sell to each other, we find new readers and writers and love of reading among this common-ground. We overlap, like that quilt. We enhance each other at times. We share. We learn. We cheer our successes, mourn our losses. We even raise money when one of us falls, or memorials for others lost, forever. 

The conversation many of us indies have been having today shows that those of us in the indie trenches realize that perhaps the greats* (like Ms. LeGuin) don't really know much about us, and why the bookstore (not publisher) that Amazon Can Be makes us possible. 

We are each our own publisher. We have our own small printing press. It's as revolutionary as the press that Gutenberg created around 1450. It truly is. I say this as someone who has devoted my entire life to studying literature and the history of literature. And I say this as someone who has respectfully left the classrooms where I was spending my life teaching verb tense and comma splices to try to instead spend my life creating literature. 

I know-- it's really blurry.... my camera was broken....

Just as Gutenberg opened the door for the Protestant reformation by allowing the words that had previously been held only by the Elite into the hands of everyone, Amazon has opened a door that the non-elite can share their ideas with everyone. The day I held my first printed book with my name on the cover in my hands was a life-long dream coming true. I might have been able to find that with a traditional publisher, but I might have sat on a slush pile forever, too. 

The indie community works together: we pay artists-- cover artists, graphic designers, editors, formatters, to make our work better. We have a vast cottage industry of people we can go to when we need some advice to make a storyline work a bit better. We have groups of readers who are willing to write reviews, to whom we listen and attempt to answer. We even have marketers-- mailing lists, websites, reviewer magazines, etc, who curate collections of sales, deals, new hot books. 

All of us are out here, every day, working to share our ideas with others. Just like any artist, some days are better than others. 

We are all our very own, self-owned small international independent bookstores, each of us working from our own office in Shreveport, or New York, or Australia, or Texas, or Iowa. Wherever there is a Wi-Fi connection and a computer, we can publish. Amazon is the distribution point, and as soon as we hit that "publish" button, we become a partner with them for however much our profit is. It comes directly to us, and we immediately know what works and what doesn't.  So far, for me, most of that profit has been turned right back into new art, new editing, new formatting. But I keep going, and I still think my prose is good enough that it will eventually catch a wider audience. But if it doesn't: so what? I'm loving the creation. It's worth it. It is an ARTISTIC ACT of defiance against the mediocrity of daily life. 

Indie publishing, which Amazon has been a forerunner of, can be the exact opposite of "Junk food" and the exact opposite of the BS Machine. We don't have to be a bestseller to exist. Or even a midlist. As someone just getting started, I've made the amount of sales that a publisher would laugh at-- but I have shared my ideas with a good amount of people who have found me and expressed their joy at my work. I'm creating art not for profit (although that would be nice) but for the joy of sharing my work. 

Some of us have created anthologies that are very much like the Golden Age magazines where "the greats" got their starts, magazines that don't really exist anymore. We are reinventing the short story, and finding a conversation with each other. Those are so much fun, and we're going to keep doing it. Thanks to Amazon. 

And now I'll get back to that inherently feminist idea of stories being non-linear, a catchall bag for whatever women might have need of, rather than a pointed linear quest owned by the hunters to say that:
Indie publishing smashes the patriarchy. The act of writing, of asserting my voice as worthy of being heard, is an inherently feminist act. Doing it for very little financial reward is definitely anti-status quo. 

It takes power away from the few and gives it to the many. 

It takes the control of our words out of the hands of the few elite publishers who are putting out book after book of the same old plots reconstructed with the next big thing, the next celebutant gossip, or politician autobiography or ghost-written junk endorsed by a famous reality show family. Indie publishing allows women and men to work from home while we supervise the learning of our children, while they play games at our feet. We can work any hours we want, not set by a corporation. We can write whatever we feel like writing, set our own deadlines. We don't have a soulless boss reminding us to fill out our next TPS report (unless we do that for ourselves). 

And most importantly: our books are in OUR control. We can FOREVER keep going with a book that isn't selling, without it going out of print, just because we want it to be there. We alone choose whether to "unpublish" that book. 

And we can choose what we think of as a fair price. I can't tell you how many amazing foundational feminist texts I have wanted to recommend to someone but found that they were selling for a huge price in e-book format because a publisher still controls that story, that idea, and therefore, the new potential reader has passed on the book-- that the publisher made its initial investment on years and years ago. We indies set our own prices. 

We keep our books on the market and don't have to worry about whether the bookstores tear the covers off and toss them into the dumpsters because no one wants to pay 10.00 for a forty year old edition of a book they could get at a library. And then never read because it would be a hassle to go to the library. 

The problem that LeGuin has with this theory of BS marketing and Amazon is actually the problem of Big Publishing, which is a creative oligarchy of sorts.  Big Pub wants to make a lot of money off of bestsellers, yes. 

Big Publishing predicts the past: They want the next J.K. Rowling/Stephanie Meyer/50 Shades Blockbuster. And they spend all their energy on finding the next Rowling (or someone like her). Meanwhile, midlist or new writers sell out of their print run and find demand being unmet, and cannot reprint any other copies of their books because they no longer own them. They have sold their babies into slavery, and can only get them back many years later, after Big Pub has ignored them long enough to let them go as unworthy. I know of a new amazing writer whose press sold out of her book because of immediate clamor/demand. They waited and waited with the book out of print for ages, losing all of that immediate demand, simply because they didn't want to bet on a writer who was already showing amazing potential to be the next big seller. Who has gone on to be that great seller. But think of all the people who left that "store" disappointed and never came back, never read that author? Such a loss in potential ideas exchanged. Print on demand & e-book publishing makes that loss unnecessary. 

Little publishing, Indie publishing, is the opposite of the BS publishers. But even some of the indies do become bestsellers, even passing up the Big Sellers sometimes on the bestselling lists-- all because of an ad strategically run and a sale strategically offered. A book can go from a non-seller to the top ten with a quick ad. Mine have, in fact, hit Amazon bestseller lists-- not by manipulation, but by me getting some folks to simply try it out. One of them is still ranking a little on the Short Reads list right as I write this. Short stories do NOT get in the hands of people in the "Real World" regularly. But they do on Amazon. 

And all of this amazing indie work would be virtually impossible without the risk that Amazon takes in letting us do the publishing. Yes, they take a cut, but it is within the range of the percentages that any agent would take on our work otherwise. 

We just ask that people who have their long-career, their long history, see the trees for the forest. Please. 

See instead this small, good-naturedly jostling inherently feminist and anti-capitalist industry within the giant carrier bag that is that huge bookstore online. We aren't fighting to win the war, but every time someone says "don't buy from Amazon; it's all crap" it hurts. And it causes readers to think they only need to keep supporting that BS machine forever, and not even try to find the corners, the places where the new voices are waiting. (Not to mention that there are very few "independent" brick & mortar bookstores anymore-- not that Amazon was the one who destroyed those... look to other corporations and the publishing practices of the last 20 or so years for that answer). 

Amazon is a gathering place, a watering hole, and all of us small publishers are creating our art and selling it there.  As long as we want it to be there-- we alone make the choice to take it down, for it to go "out of print." 

That is the exact opposite of "Quick obsolescence, disposability — the creation of trash — [the] essential element of the BS machine. Amazon exploits the cycle of instant satisfaction/ endless dissatisfaction. Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment." 

So please, in addition to "trad pub," support your local indie writer, publisher, artist, editor, illustrator. We are building a new industry from the ground up, and it's good to have a common area to share those creative works in. And Amazon provides that giant bookstore where everyone can find us, sitting right next to the greats. That would never happen in a traditional context. 

This is the future, the great speculative market where we have left behind an industry supported by the hard work of a lot of authors who never really earn the money they should, who never really get on the shelves because the BIG authors are being marketed.  

I'm going to quote myself and my speech (and also LeGuin) again. Virginia Woolf once famously wondered what it would take for a woman writer to exist. The famous "500 pounds and a room of one's own" quote comes from that idea. "And a door, with a lock" is often left off of that quote. 

In LeGuin's essay, she thinks about Woolf's image of a woman writer on a bank of a lake of inspiration, fishing with the imagination. LeGuin pictures a daughter down the bank of that lake, playing in the mud and trying not to disturb her mother's professional endeavors. At the end of the essay, the imagination, which Woolf's woman writer has lost hold of, goes to talk to the little girl. I want to quote the essay at a bit of length because I love it so, and I think it might get at, finally, what I think about writing and being a woman, and being successful, even with, and maybe because of, the distractions. The child asks: 

Le Guin imagines: "Tell me, Auntie. What is the one thing a writer has to have?""I'll tell you," says the imagination. "The one thing a writer has to have is not balls. Nor is it a child-free space. Nor is it even, speaking strictly on the evidence, a room of her own, though that is an amazing help, as is the goodwill and cooperation of the opposite sex, or at least the local, in-house representative of it. But she doesn't have to have that. The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on the paper. In other words, that she's free. Not wholly free. Never wholly free. Maybe very partially. Maybe only in this one act, this sitting for a snatched moment being a woman writing, fishing the mind's lake. But in this, responsible; in this, autonomous; in this, free."

Amazon, and its indie publishing arm Kindle Direct, allows me (and many others) that freedom, that autonomy, that moment to fish in the mind's lake. And I can freely share it with others, who can find those ideas one way or another, on one path or another. We have entire communities out here. Maybe those who resist can join us someday, when they stop seeing Amazon, the huge corporate bookstore, as the Evil Empire that is oppressing books & writers.  

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

In 2009, LeGuin resigned from the Authors Guild in protest over its endorsement of Google's book digitization project. "You decided to deal with the devil", she wrote in her resignation letter. "There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle." This, to me, seems a bit like opposition to the digital age forthcoming... that, and her one-sentence summation of indie publishing makes it seem like she's at least not a fan.

*(and I very much consider LeGuin to be one of those... her novel the Left Hand of Darkness was groundbreaking and a revelation to me when I started college.  Still is....)  

(And don't even get me started on the environmentalism of buying all of our books digitally and not killing trees for books that end up in dumpsters because they aren't selling....)

***********************************
And let me also say: I don't object to sparklie vampire books! I don't even dislike them, inherently. (Poorly written once make me grind my teeth, but I don't object to a well written genre pulp read.) Heck, I write ghosts/magic/witch books. I just want the market to make room for ALL the potential stories out there, not just the ones that have already made it....

I also have nothing inherently against traditional publishing. There are many amazing authors published by even big presses... and I read them, still. It's not a war of attrition. I have room on my e-readers for all of them.

There is, finally, an ironic element in telling readers not to purchase a book from a bookstore because it contributes to the oppression of ideas when one's own book is for sale there. 

Sisters of Solomon cover reveal!

Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you—
if you find my beloved, what will you tell him?
Tell him I am faint with love.

"It was a woman Edward Fitzgerald, I think, suggested who made the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, on the length of the winter's night." ~Virginia Woolf.

So I wrote Sisters of Solomon last summer, after reading Michael Bunker's Pennsylvania novel about a young Amish man who is traveling to a new planet/colony and gets involved in a conflict he didn't even know existed. It was a really cool look at a new kind of story, and I thought "hmm. Interesting take on the hero-myth." And I thought I was done.

Then I started having vivid dreams about a woman in that world, a young Amish bride sent to colonize a strange planet. And the consequences of that action, the travel to a place where your only family is the other community of colonists and your spouse, and what would happen if....and lo and behold, Michael Bunker & my friend Chris Pourteau accepted it for inclusion in the Tales From Pennsylvania anthology.  I was so excited! It was my first official publication in the real world!!

I've always been really into the idea of women's history-- the stories that haven't always made it into the history books. Sure, we can see what happened during the Revolutionary war, but aside from a few stories about say Betsy Ross or Abigail Adams' letters to her husband, what all do we know about a woman's life during that historic time? Or ANY historic time, for that matter?

In her amazing book, A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf said "I would venture to guess than Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman." And I think that's true-- women were busy doing other things. They weren't much for writing books, poetry, history. But they were there. They were sewing quilts, they were canning vegetables. Alice Walker also talked about this issue in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens-- that a woman's art, at one time, may have been in those quilt colors, in the beauty of her flower garden.

And so, I like to write that story, even in small snippets. I did it some in Mariposa-- the long stories that some people have thought were distractions from the main action of Sallie White selling her chili in San Antonio, or of the tragic actresses, or even the sad story of the ghost of one of San Antonio's respected hotels. They are all women's stories, small bits of a life often unrecorded. Anonymous.

It also seems to me that a lot of women don't read or write sci-fi. Genre fiction is often "paranormal" (and I love that genre, myself, wrote a book or two in it.) But sci-fi is not the preferred. Why is that, do you think? So they stay anonymous, in those "space opera" kinds of stories.

Not anymore. This story is a little sad. It's a diary written during a time of transformation for Sarah Atwood (named, by the way, partially after Margaret Atwood and partially after Sarah, from the Bible.) But I hope to revisit Sarah, at least in a short story, and discover the ways that she transforms from a grieving young woman to someone who takes the history into her own hands. I hope you'll come with me. There's a reason I called it "Sisters of Solomon." It's based on the Song of Solomon, from the Bible, which is a beautiful love-story. And it's about Sisters. Maybe even Shakespeare's Sister. I've appropriated a little corner of Michael Bunker's universe to find a woman's story, and I think she is going to be interesting, to say the least.

Here, then, without further yakkity yakking, is the amazing cover. I just love the colors, the brightness of the yellow with the twilight blue of the background. Just... yes. I love it. I hope you will too. The story is already live on Amazon, and if you've read it already, I would very much appreciate your opinion, your review.

All About that Indie

This morning, I was thinking about the path I've taken in the last year. It was about this time last year that I was bored, hanging around on The Facebook (I like to call it that to be so retro) and I noticed a "Launch Party" for a book called Synchronic.  I didn't really know what a launch party was at the time, but I moseyed in there and started watching people. Chatting in a launch party can be really fun, depending on who is hosting at the moment. One of the authors there (Nick Cole) offered to write a free blurb for anyone who had bought the book, and since he was a trad pub author, he had obviously done a pretty good job on his own. So I threw a short plot synopsis of my manuscript, as then unpublished, which I was still considering sending out to trad pub agents/etc. He gave me a blurb, and I thought it was pretty good. Then, another of the attendees at the party, Samuel Peralta, helped me tweak it 'til it was what I have now. I was pretty happy with all the help I had gotten. And then, I had a revelation.

I didn't need to wait. I didn't need to send my manuscript around to agents and the like who would take forever, then maybe or maybe not reject me as unmarketable, or whatever. Mariposa is not firmly in a specific genre-- it skirts a couple-- and it's not one of the "hottest" markets. It's not technically Urban Fantasy (although it's close). It's not horror. It's definitely not YA, although it's kind of New Adult, but also not really. It's best called magical realism, but no one really seems to quite know what that means. So I probably would have not been considered an easy sell by most traditional agents.

But So What? I sent out a note to my awesome cover artist and commissioned my art. I found myself a developmental editor to see if the manuscript which I loved but probably didn't have the distance to actually notice the flaws in and he got to work. My target launch date was early November. And I did it.

I launched my novel a little later than November, but in the meantime, I was also invited to submit a short story for my first anthology, Tales From Pennsylvania. That story, "Sisters of Solomon" will soon be available to read on its own, and it's set in the world of Michael Bunker's Pennsylvania.

And now, since then, I've published an entire new novel that I hadn't even thought up 'til last October or so. I've also published a couple of short stories, one in an anthology called The Dragon Chronicles, "The Book of Sefkhet," which will be released as a standalone in July sometime.

All of this stuff about me is actually an introduction, then, to all the amazing work I've read this year, and the indie writers I've met as part of the scene. People who I have on my Kindle, who I have read, and who are on my increasingly long To Be Read list.

A lot of people think "ew. Indie publishers are just vanity writers who need edits and have ugly self-made covers and sucky stories who couldn't get published on their own." NO. Some are, yes. But none of the people I have come to be friends with fit into that category. We have professional teams-- editors, cover artists, formatters, beta readers, and reviewers, all who truly put out an amazing product. Some of the authors I know have hit the bestsellers lists like USA Today and NYTimes. Seriously. And the great inspiration for a lot of us, Hugh Howey, is a stellar superstar of indie publishing that sets a very high standard.

So, long story short, (too late) here is my list of writers you ought to be reading. Amazing work, super awesome nice people, and great books. Books that will change what you think about indie publishing. Books that kick the crap out of a lot of trad pub, and that seriously did it all in the kind of independent drive to succeed that people applaud in industries like music, but who for some reason make fun of in books.

So I'm gonna go through my Kindle, and list what books pop out at me that you really ought to read. I'm probably going to miss some people, but if you get started here, you will be on a path to greatness. A lot of these books are written by authors who I have read multiple works by, but I'm putting here my favorite, just so simplify. I'm only doing one book per person, although the temptation to put more is great.  Oh, and I'm also only including people in the list below who are not also included above, but you should find those up there ^ too.

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

Read these. Not necessarily in this order. But read them. 

• Wool, by Hugh Howey. (and all the Silo books. But this is THE ONE that inspires a lot of us to get started writing and stop wondering if we sorta could someday).
• Fluency, by Jen Foehner Wells (no, we are not related.)
• Strikers, by Ann Christy.  (YA)
• Third Daughter, by Susan Kaye Quinn. (YA)
• Akaela, by E.E. Giorgi (YA)
• Hello World, by Peter Cawdron
• Hugh Howey Lives, by Daniel Arthur Smith
• Hidden, by Megg Jensen
• The Fourth Sage, by Stefan Bolz (YA)
• Mulligan, by Hank Garner
• The Sky Used to be Blue by Patrice Fitzgerald
• Unconditional: A Tale of the Zombie Apocalypse , by Chris Pourteau
• A Whimper by Will Swardstrom
• Heaven's Vault  by Pavarti K. Tyler
• The Barn that Hanna Built by Lesley Smith

Next time I'm going to create a list of the books that I have on my Kindle and TBR list that you should also read. I have so many. It's a long list. It will take me a while to compile, but it has amazing writers on it, and they're all great folks who I really need to spend less time chatting with on FB and more time reading their books.

Anyway... the point of it is this: these books are all amazing. And if people ask "why bother reading indie writers when there are so many other writers who have been proven by agents & publishers to be good?" Seriously-- some of them are. Truly. I am not against traditional publishers. But I also realize that there is an element of luck and timing and who you might know to getting your manuscript noticed and published in the traditional path. And for a lot of people, that's simply not realistic, but that doesn't mean they aren't GOOD.

There are some really good indies. Just because you took a chance on an indie book one time and it sucked, don't give up on all of them, because that is just a shame and you're missing out. 

4.9 stars!

That last .1 star! Augh!

How do you like my new graphic for the promo?

Sale! Sale! Sale!

My novel Mariposa is on a limited time Kindle Countdown deal starting today for only 99 Cents!!    

I think most of my friend list already has a copy, but I'm really hoping that if you liked it, you'll "gift" a copy of it on Amazon to a friend who you think might like a new read. I'm still hard at work on the sequel, the story of Tony, Meg's boyfriend, and hope to get it published very soon. But for now, check out the novel one reviewer called "The best book [he] read all year" and others have called beautiful and said it kept them up all night!

It's a love story. It's a ghost story. It's about history, and all the things that keep us stuck in our own bad patterns in life. It has intertwining main characters that have to learn what "haunting" really is all about. Not to mention supernatural wolves!For less than a buck!!

Goin' up to Memphis

Like a bitter weed, I'm a bad seed
But when that levee's through and I am too
Let the honky tonk roll on
Come mornin' I'll be gone
I'm goin' to Memphis, yeah Memphis....
~Johnny Cash

by 5@CDickerson

This summer, the family & I are planning a trip up river. Up the Mississippi river, to be exact. Part of it is research for my sequel to my Apocalypse novel Memphis King  (due sometime this Fall) where we might even get to meet THE King (oh, forget the might-- you'll totally have more than a cameo from our favorite King). 

We're going to pop over to the Mississippi Delta to meet up with a dear old friend, then up to Memphis, then we're planning to ride the City of New Orleans train all the way up to Chicago & back to Memphis. It'll take us about a week, I think.

So the point of this blog post (and subsequent Facebook & Twitter posts) is to ask anyone following me who know:  what would you do, see, be sure NOT to miss along that path? Any tips? Places to be? Share away with me in the comments &/or any means you like... I need to know.

We plan to visit Graceland and take the VIP tour because DUH. In spite of some warnings that the neighborhood isn't great, we'll probably stay at the Heartbreak Hotel anyway. So those are covered. The trip up to Memphis from Shreveport will be car, then there's the train, and then Chicago city time. So-- give me your best shot, Internet.

Oh, and speaking of Apocalypse Weird, the first three of my friend's novels are on sale this week for only 99c, across all platforms. So if you've been waiting to try them out, now is totally the time! 

The Art of the Short Story

Sometimes, writers get stuck. I'm writing my sequel to Mariposa, called Orpheus & the Butterfly. It's actually going pretty well, and is on target to be released this summer. It's the guy's stories, and I think readers who enjoyed Mariposa are going to like it. I'm not really stuck on it, but the writing is slower, and I was in the mood to do something else. Which I just spent three days doing, and just finished up....

But this week, I saw a discussion of cyborgs that made me think. I've actually always wanted to write a cyborg story, and as I wrote this one, I also worked a moment from another source into the story that I've wanted to tell for a long time. It's a very sweet piece of the story I just finished, in fact. I really like what happened there.

I used to write short stories all the time, back when I was first in college. I was taking a creative writing course, for one, and they were our assignments. But I wandered into poetry-writing and also into academia-writing (which is soooooo not the same.) And I wrote my first novel over the course of the years it took to write that (which we will not talk about today....) And I stopped writing short stories.

But I've written a few lately. I suspect they'll all eventually end up in a collection that I'll release, but what's fun about the indie platform is that there are a number of ways to share them. There are amazing anthologies, like the Dragon Chronicles that I'm in (which is releasing tomorrow, by the way, go grab a copy and see "The Book of Sefkhet," my story in it).

A short story can be fun. This one, I came up with a little bit of an idea and thought about and then had this intense night filled with dreams where the first paragraph basically wrote itself. I kept waking a little to hear a line in my head, and I knew that I would be able to remember it. I usually can, in fact. I know some writers put a piece of paper next to their bed so they can write down ideas like that but for me, it's this lucid dreaming, waking dream, that I rarely forget. I've come up with some pretty neat story ideas that way. To be honest, I used to sometimes dream about academic papers that way, too-- don't get me started on the day of dreaming I had after reading the first half of Homer's Illiad.

A short story like the one I just finished is self-contained. Sure, I could maybe develop it into something longer, but it actually stands on its own merits, as well. It has an ending that I am pretty pleased with, that came out a little on the "poetic reversal" side. I kept something a secret through the whole story and then blam blam, there it was. In fact, the characters didn't even really know that secret til that moment. I hope it will make the readers howl/smile/laugh in delight.

Dorothy Parker famously reviewed a book "this is not a book to be set aside lightly. It should be hurled with great force." I love Dot. She has always been one of my favorite smart asses. I would hope you won't hurl your Kindle aside with disgust when you read my story, which will show up when it shows up.  I'll keep you posted as to how it will get itself published. Just long enough for you to have forgotten about it and then be surprised all over again.

© Avava | Dreamstime.com - Students Passing Notes In Classroom Photo

That, by the way, is what a little gem of a story like this one will do for a writer, too. It's a few days of obsession, followed by getting to know it a bit better and then it's perfect. Sort of like a brief but heated crush on someone. Writers discover it like a love affair, write it a little note which they fold and pass along:

I like you. Do you like me? Check yes or no. 

Attachment

I miss you.

Maybe we've known each other since we were girls, huddled on a sleepover, before the complications of boys and distance sent us away. When we could whisper a secret and know that it was true because we were there for each other every day. We might have swam in the salty warm Gulf of Mexico all day, our hair messy, skin kissed with sun. Flirted with inappropriate boys, sipped sodas without guilt. I miss the ocean, the beach. But I really miss sitting on it with you.

Maybe we met later, after marriage, when jobs and life took us far from family, when the second family of that life was as close. When we laughed over glasses of wine and long nights out in a town busy with traffic, awash with brightly lit sky-scrapers, feeling glamorous. Dressed up in party clothes with sequins, knowing that you hold tightly what you most value.

© 1000words | Dreamstime.com - Miss You Written In Sand Photo.

I miss knowing everything-- what you had for lunch yesterday because I was there with you, sneaking a break in between studying, or a shift at the place we worked. We were sure of ourselves, too sure, too unheartbroken.

I miss being that sure. 

Maybe we've never actually met-- I miss you too. I might even miss you the most. Sometimes, I look at the faces of people going by in cars and I think "wait-- do I know you? Are you someone I miss too?" And the answer is yes. I miss you too. What stories would we have told each other? What dramas would we have laughed over, cried over? Do you like the color red, too? Is summer too hot but also the best, like when we were kids, because there's nothing to really do? I miss knowing that.

Maybe we spent ten years every other night meeting up, going to dinner, sharing stupid jokes about broccoli and poodles and tights. Maybe I long to cook you enchiladas, drink icy margaritas on my back patio, a patio covered in lovely green grape vines, the stars at night big and bright. I miss being there again. But mostly, I still miss you.

Maybe we live in the same town, used to go on playdates, carry diapers in purses, sneak one (okay, maybe two) chicken nuggets on the side of our mom-approved salad. Time, practices, different schedules might have made it so that we can't get together except on certain party days. But I miss knowing that certainty of a park-date, of how tired you are too. Miss smiling across the gym. Miss lunch with too many kids to count making the cashier roll her eyes at the group.

Sometimes, the weight of all the people I want to just get to know, to just chat about our day, to consider my good friend, gets so heavy that it makes me think up songs in the middle of the night, write poems, tell stories, eat too much chocolate, drink too much red wine.

I'm too sensitive, too attached. Not a good "detached" meditator on the power of letting go. I don't let go. I hold on, tightly. Maybe too tightly, maybe not.

I'm a hermit; I'm an introvert. I don't like going out to loud clubs anymore so much (although I will admit I miss the fun of anticipation of that, too, because I'm apparently insane today.) But I do miss everyone, and I long to drag everyone here, with me, to just-- share. To share fun, to share tears, to share great meals. (Maybe even share the chocolate, although, on second though, you should bring your own.)

I just-- miss you. I miss you all. Consider yourself longed for, and loved.  

The White Dragon

My friend Stefan's Apocalypse Weird book launched today! It's called Genesis, If you've already read Hoodoopocalypse, you met his main character very briefly in an Easter Egg in my novel. She's a really cool, strong hero and Stefan is a super cool guy. His launch party is going on tonight here and I will be there at least for a little while before family duties are going to possibly call me away. But launch parties are pretty fun ways to hang out on FB and chat with other authors & fans and win cool swaggy stuff. In fact, the main purpose of this blog post is to list a giveaway where you can win a few cool things from me.

There's a nice description of the plot of the novel here, on Stefan's blog, too, and it actually includes him reading a bit of the book. Seriously, it's worth a listen. There's also a fun interview with him over here at the Chimeras blog.

So go do your homework and read up, and go hang out at the launch party and win some stuff. Oh, and log in below to win one of 5 free copies of Hoodoopocalypse. Cause I'm feeling generous.  (Contests Over).

The Wall: or, Dreaming the end of things

So I have mentioned before that when I am in the middle of writing a story, I dream about the characters. A lot. Sometimes it's because I will deliberately set the goal of having a lucid dream nap to work out a character issue of some sort. I need to know what will happen in a scene, just so, and the freedom of my conscious brain being relaxed and sleepy helps turn the inner critic into something that allows for more creativity. 

But sometimes it's just my brain being weird. 

Last night, I had extensive dreams about a post-apocalyptic world. It wasn't anything like my Apocalypse novel. It was more like something kind of post WW2 meets sci-fi alien invasion. There were monsters, and an extensive language system that sounds a lot like it would have been created by text messaging. The end of the world was called the "Apoc." In the dream, my kids were teenagers, and they both were in training to be "Comp Sci" professionals. You can see how this is going.... if we were all always communicating by text messages, we might like to drop some syllables out. 

In one vivid part of the dream, brick layers were walling up the bottom floor windows of a large,

© Ebolyukh | Dreamstime.com - Red Bricks Photo

institutional building that had been a shopping mall. We all lived in this place, by the way... it was a cross between the mall and perhaps a school, and our "apartments" (they were called racks) were inside. For whatever reason, I guess the monsters couldn't get in on floors 2 and up, but bricking up the low-level entrances was an answer to keep everyone safe. 

As I write it, it sounds kind of interesting, but the thing that is being left out is that WW2 post England Blitz feeling to the whole thing, too. It felt sort of, what, retro? Like, there would have been sirens in the night and gas masks and people sleeping in the Tube tunnels. (How this meshes with the bricking up of the ground floor don't ask me... my sleeping dreaming writer self wasn't concerned with that.) 

So as I was waking up this morning, my still flexible creative-brainpart was toying with the idea of the story elements, still sort of immersed in that world, as though it were real. It wasn't scary, at that time, and there was something going on with a guy who was trying to rewire an electrical line and some farming for crops... 

It's an interesting look at how stories are born. This is nothing like my Hoodoo world-ending plans. There weren't really any main characters, and I still don't know what the aliens/monsters who we were fighting looked like. As a story, the idea could go to-- nowhere. I could just shelve it and not ever write anything about it. But as a dream, it had something interesting, that made my waking up self linger for a while, exploring the story and poking around at elements that could become something else. 

In reality, I need to go work on my work in progress and write some of that story today. Get another coffee beverage, write for a 1000 word sprint or so and then move on to other things. But that last little moment of sleeping dreaming brain still wants to linger over the image of workers bricking up the entrances, this arched doorway being turned into a barrier, and the shortened slang-like language we spoke. 

So what are you thinking about today? 

Writing about Voodoo

Why witches? Because witches sing. Can I hear this singing? It is the sound of another voice. They tried to make us believe that women did not know how to speak or write; that they were stutterers or mutes. That is because they tried to make women speak straightforwardly, logically, geometrically, in strict conformity. In reality, they croon lullabies, they howl, they gasp, they babble, they shout, they sigh. They are silent, and even their silence can be heard. Xavière Gauthier, “Porquoi Sorcières,” 199.


Today, there's a cool newspaper story about my book, Hoodoopocalypse, and I thank Judy Christy for the amazing interview opportunity.  Reading over the interview questions made me think about the content of my story again. Voodoo/Hoodoo.

People have asked me why I changed it to Hoodoo. Most people are pretty familiar with Voodoo (or think they are... I'll get back to that in a sec.) But a lot of folks don't know what Hoodoo is. It's kind of the same thing but also not really.

Hoodoo is a Southern United States version of Voudou. Voudou (Voudon, Voodoo, Vodeaux) is a real religious practice that honestly millions of people follow. It's a religion that is a mixture of Catholicism and the religious practices of the Africans and Caribbean slaves, especially after the 1700s or so. It was a huge part of the Haitian Revolution. The link is great, but it's honestly one of the only successful revolutions against Western slavery in history, and the religion certainly helped.

There's a neat description of "Louisiana Voodoo" on wikipedia, too, and it helps to understand that the practices are this mixture of folklore, herbal magic, witchcraft, and genuine "go to church on Sunday" religion. A lot of what I referenced in the book is from this kind of practice. I'm super familiar with it so it just permeates the story....it made writing the book so neat because I literally could almost do anything. If magic is real, then you can play with every part of reality. This is a gift of amazing proportion for a fiction writer.

The depiction of Voodoo in popular culture almost always involves women dancing around in white dresses, a mean guy with a top hat and a cigar, often with a white skull-painted face. People got upset with the TV series American Horror Story because of this, actually. In spite of having a bad assed real life priestess and one of the most beautiful modern actresses playing her, they still landed on cliché and lazy research. You would think all that the religion needs is a couple of Voodoo dolls and cauldrons full of bones, too.

That is part of what I played with in Hoodoopocalypse, too, but I tried really hard to use authentic images rather than the Hollywoodized voodoo. Baron Samedi is a great bad guy, but he is not the only one out there, and he's not the only Voodoo loa, either.

Voodoo is neither black or white magic entirely. There is a blend, and just like with all human life, there are both good and bad practices. Kalfu, the bad guy in my book, is a dark-half of the Loa Papa Legba, who is a genuine good guy. Yes, there are spells and bad guys and lots of real magic in my book. That's the fictional element of the story. If you go to New Orleans, you're not likely to run into any Guédé who are going to trap you and put you to fighting in the SuperDome. Yet.

But seriously, I changed the title to Hoodoo because I was trying to focus the story more on a kind of home-grown magic practice, and not offend a bunch of folks for whom this is their authentic religious practice. I hope that I did an okay job with that. I have a whole chapter in my dissertation on Voodoo, by the way, if you're interested in it and learning more about how it as a religion actually was part of the slave/master relationship and real, true revolution.

To quote myself a little for a TL;DR moment:

Voudun is an example of a type of religious magic which, in its foundation and innate nature, resists hierarchy, empowers the poor and disenfranchised, and has preserved hope and history in several non-dominant cultures. As such, the greatest real-world magic of Voudun may be its ability to inspire great societal change. As early as 1959, Alfred Métreaux, in his foundational anthropological study Voodoo in Haiti (1959), wrote about the complex hegemonic exchange of power and fear in Vodoun’s history as he asserted about the complex relationship between those with power and those without: 

Man is never cruel and unjust with impunity: the anxiety which grows in the minds of those who abuse power often takes the form of imaginary terrors and demented obsessions. The master maltreated his slave, but feared his hatred. He treated him like a beast of burden but dreaded the occult powers which he imputed to him. And the greater the subjugation of the Black, the more he inspired fear [. . . ] it was the witchcraft of remote and mysterious Africa which troubled the sleep of the people in “the big house.” (15) 

In “troubling the sleep” of those with power, Vodoun gave its practitioners a little bit (and eventually, a lot) of power over their own situation.

Think about that a little, and then go read my book. It's pretty cool, and I'm so glad I wrote it. I hope people will give it a chance to keep them up at night.

Oh, and in my dissertation, I wrote about some amazing books by Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring), Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic), Sean Stewart (Mockingbird), Chitra Divakaruni (Mistress of Spices), the TV show Charmed, and a whole chapter on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Co-writer

So recently I finally got my hubs to read Mariposa.  In all the years I spent writing the story, I had read him a few scenes here or there and also we discussed what I was doing. He had a hand in several directions the story went.

But now he's gotten inspired by the story to write. I'm in the middle of writing Orpheus & the Butterfly, the story of what happened to the guys (Tony, Demetrio, Omar, and a few others) during the events of Mariposa. I'm about halfway through the writing now and I have plans for where it's going that are pretty strong.

But Andrew hated a scene I wrote that included some boxing, and since he is a boxer, he said he would "write a little something" to help me out.

Well, a week or so later, he's still writing. And writing. And writing. Honestly, he's written way more lately than I have. I feel a little hijacked, to be perfectly honest-- it's not a bad thing, and I don't mean it to sound bitchy. But he's kind of going to end up with a co-writer credit of sorts for this story because I am actually going to work some of that stuff into my story too. And I don't know if our family can truly survive with two writers in the house.

But it's honestly all good. I do like some of the places his writing is going, and it will be cool to work it into my stuff.

But sheesh. Co-writers. Who knew!?