random observations

You don't always get to pick your priorities

It sure felt nice to set a goal and decide that Priority #1 was going to be the novel!

Well, man plans, God laughs. The problem is that Priority #1 has to be the family, and everything's not quite mopped up from the crisis earlier this year. The lasting suckage of the last two family deaths is that Team Responsible Adults is now permanently down two members. My fingers are crossed that the situation can stabilize without radical, time-sucking solutions (like a cross-country move on my part), but who knows? Anyway, it's requiring some added attention now, but hopefully will settle down soon.

My random other project

So, I got really annoyed at what happened to Block B, and then my Browncoat instincts kicked in, and--well, now I've built a Web site that is going to be BlockB.com as soon as the domain transfer is finalized and I get the domain name mapped onto there.

Hey, I now am much better with GIMP!

Anyway, if you don't mind running over there and clicking links, checking for typos, etc., I'd appreciate that. Also if there's stuff, like Korean cultural references, that maybe needs some more background to be accessible, let me know.

Bad vs. legally actionable

So, it's not like I'm trying to turn this into a K-pop blog or anything, but Block B recently had its lawsuit against its label dismissed. The case reminded me a lot of the failed class-action lawsuit against Harlequin in that the company being sued was engaged in behavior that clearly was very bad, but that, for various reasons, was not considered by the courts to actually be lawsuit-worthy.

In Block B's case, the label:

1. Did not pay members until the members started to sue.

2. Owes the members a substantial amount of money (roughly $400,000).

3. Hired as CEO a man who stole money from the member's families and then committed suicide.

Not shockingly, the members of the group feel that their label is Not A Good Label. (In fact, they are going indie now, which honestly I think is probably the best thing--in the Korean music industry the performers are typically just talking heads, so it's pretty standard for a band's legal relationship with their label to closely resemble that of a monkey to an organ grinder.)

But all that is pretty much irrelevant to the court. Why? Because the court is trying to determine if the label's actions are so bad that the contracts have been voided. And the court said no.

Why? Well, the court looked at the above points and said, Yeah, but once you did sue, the label paid you. And yeah, they still owe you money, but it sounds like they're planning on someday paying you that, too. Plus, there's no evidence that the label underpaid you because they were trying to rob you--it's more likely that they underpaid you because they're completely disorganized and keep craptacular records.

You might think that that sort of thing wouldn't happen here, but rest assured, it does: What a court considers Bad is often far below most people's Get Me the Hell Out threshold. It's kind of like the difference between someone being a bad driver and someone having their license revoked--there's a whole grey area in there where you don't let that person drive your kids around. And it's something to keep in mind before you go a-signing contracts with a publisher or other company that may or may not actually prove to be of service to you.

Really random link

This is a Wall Street Journal interview with Kid Rock about how he's pricing his concert tickets at $20 but still hoping to make s---tons, or perhaps even f---tons, of money. Interesting stuff--basically he's hoping that by lowering the barriers to entry, he'll 1. sell more tickets, making him more fans in the long run, and 2. make more money, because he'll be getting a share of T shirt and beer sales. (And he's got very high expectations for those beer sales.)

Do you want people to enjoy your work, or build a shrine to it?

So, I'm back home, and I'm going to try to get gradually back into the swing of things. Emotional issues aside (because those are so very easy to ignore), as a practical matter my brother's death puts quite a bit of responsibility on me, so let's just say I don't expect to be brilliantly focused. And I may just need to switch projects for a while--like I said before, Trials is kind of a rough book with a lot of loss in it, and it may just be too much right now. I really, really, really do not want to produce my very own version of Accordion Crimes.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago Dialectrix, who is an Australian hip-hop artist who I happen to like a lot (listen here), posted this rant about how people should not buy his music digitally, because then you'll listen to the songs out of order and ignore his beautiful cover art and won't be able to display it on your shelves so that all your friends can see it.

And wow, the whole thing is both totally misguided and coming from a place I can totally understand. The minute you finish a major project, be it an album or a novel, you feel really entitled to some serious love! You don't want to think about, say, giving it away for free (a strategy, I should note, that has been working just fine this past month despite receiving zero attention from me), or people ripping your songs out from their careful order and mixing them up with a bunch of other music like they were some kind of radio DJ or something!

"I see the convenience in newer technologies," writes Dialectrix, but he's kidding himself. What he doesn't see is that if the technology isn't convenient, I won't use it. At this point, if the music is not on my iPod (which I can plug into both my home and car stereo), I simply don't listen to it. And that actually predated my getting the iPod--I increasingly was not bothering to buy CDs or to listen to the ones I bought because it was kind of a pain. (Just like I was increasingly not buying paper books, come to think of it--it's the clutter factor.)

The way things are now, I listen to Dialectrix all the time--in fact, I listen to him even more than I really want to because my iPod has fallen in love and plays his music every other song. (Easy there, iPod--he's a married father. And I think he may be a little prejudiced against your kind.) If I did what Dialectrix wanted, I would never actually consume the media he produces, which seems rather counterproductive

And of course, Dialectrix is risking pushback from fans who feel insulted and put upon by these sorts of demands. At least Dialectrix is still making his work available digitally (unlike Stephen King who seems to be actively wooing pirates). Nonetheless, it's easy to get pirated digital media for free, and I think the last thing you want to do is tell the people who do pay for your digital media that you don't appreciate it.

How I probably should be doing social media

Adding to yesterday's chemical-induced excitement was the fact that Zico of Block B released another single. (That you can't pay for. Because it's a remix of another song. That you can't pay for. Because while the label went to the trouble of making a music video, they never actually released that song to iTunes or anything. Did you know that the Korean music industry has a huge problem with people illegally downloading songs and not paying for them? I wonder why that is?)

I found out about the new song through the English translation of Block B's Twitter feed, which I check religiously at this point. (Another song came out today!) The group is currently on hiatus as they sue their label, but as Zico writes (translatedly), "Who said it's an absence period when things are coming out all the time [Korean character indicating laughter]."

Anyway, this got me thinking about the fact that, hey, I do check this random Korean hip-hop group's translated Twitter feed pretty much every damned day. And that's something, because 1. it's not like the translators update it every day, and 2. I'm incredibly lazy about Twitter and never follow anyone on it who I don't actually know--I've certainly never followed a music group before. (Yes, if you follow me, I will follow you back. And then I will totally ignore you. I am a Twitslut, sorry.) In addition, people keep remarking on how Block B has managed to maintain its fan base despite the fact that they're on hiatus and not doing standard promotions, and I think their use of social media has a lot to do with that.

So, I thought I'd take a crack at analyzing how Block B uses Twitter, with the vague, gauzy notion that, if I were a more-industrious sort of person, I'd actually apply these lessons to my own use of social media. Keep in mind, though, that what I see is the English-language feed, and that's both compiled and curated by these guys.

Here's what I notice:

1. They talk about something other than themselves. In their case, music. As a result, the feed never degenerates into boring pictures of what people ate today. They don't assume that you're there because you're an obsessed teenaged fan with no life--they're willing to assume that you and they share a common interest, which is not How Totally Awesome They Are, OMG, Squee!

2. They both fulfill and subvert expectations. The members of Block B still must cater to fans (and expectations in Korea are actually pretty rigid in this regard). So when fans send them presents, they Tweet pictures and thanks.

They also post "selcas," which is short for self camera--a phrase that is utterly meaningless in English, but has been adopted by Koreans to mean a picture you take of yourself. Teen idols post flattering selcas all the time.

So, when Block B's Jaeyho goes for a hike, he posts a flattering selca. And then, because he's with Block B, he posts an unflattering selca. He and the other members do that all the time--they call them anti-idol pictures. Taeil gets a bad haircut? Selca. Here's an anti-idol photo of the whole group.

3. The primary goal is entertainment. If it's funny, it goes public. Jaeyho's brother is pissed because Jaeyho won't answer the phone? It's a Tweet.

Because of that, the feed is like a little treasure hunt: You never know what you'll find, and it's sometimes really funny, cool, or otherwise rewarding. It's intermittent reinforcement, which psychologists will tell you is even more motivating for people than the predictable kind of reinforcement, and which emotionally-abusive douchebags will tell you is also way less demanding of your energy and time.

Korean music and the digital marketplace

One of my top priorities during this last trip was to not become the main player in a tragic murder-suicide. To that end, I spent a lot of time with headphones on, listening to Korean music.

Why Korean music? Well, it's new to me, and it's interesting. I'm not talking about traditional Korean music, or even K-pop, but rather certain Korean rock and hip-hop artists. (I actually feel sort of weird about lumping these groups together, because they're quite different musically. The only real similarity, I think, is a willingness to cross genre lines in unexpected ways, which probably says more about what excites me than anything else.)

So, how does a non-Asian, non-Korean-speaking ajumma living in the U.S. find Korean music? The answer is, totally randomly! As I mentioned, I started looking into the music because I was trying to extend the experience of watching a show I liked. That got me to FT Island and CNBlue on YouTube. Then I was curious if Psy was actually any good, and the answer is, he sure as hell is. (Language warning on the first one--yes, Psy lived in Boston and cusses quite comfortably in English--but not on the last one, because what sounds like "nigga" is actually the Korean word "niga," which means "you are.") Then I went to Pandora's CNBlue channel, which played this song, and lo, I discovered Epik High. Then, operating on the theory that Korean bands that have had major scandals tend to produce more-interesting music, I found the hip-hop group Block B, featuring the rapper Zico. (Let's just say they were hoping to create Korea's own Eminem, and by their more-conservative standards, they totally succeeded!)

If this seems like a haphazard method of music discovery, I KNOW. (Of course, as a rule, you never know how people will find your stuff.) Poking around YouTube is just not efficient. The band's official channels tend to be dedicated to stuff like Christmas messages to (existing, Korean) fans. Pandora has been of surprisingly limited use: The Psy channel is novelty rap; FT Island didn't have a channel until just a few days ago; and Pandora has apparently decided that if you're on Epik High's channel, you're just weird, so they'll give you some folk rock. You know, to go with your hip-hop. I fully expect to hear Simon & Garfunkel on the Jay-Z channel now.

What's been helpful with FT Island and CNBlue has been their live concerts on YouTube. They are excellent. Of course, FT Island's concert wasn't even posted by them or their label. Instead, it was put up and given English subtitles by a fan. (Which is nice, because it turns out that Mae West has been reincarnated and is FT Island's lead singer now.) CNBlue at least posted its own 392 concert, but there are no English subtitles available--and they talk and talk and talk while the audience laughs and laughs and laughs.

Once you find songs you like, there's a whole 'nuther tangle: How do you buy them? CNBlue's 392 album is $50 on CD. Presumably the songs would be cheaper (and the band would actually make more money) if you got them on iTunes, but you can't--392 is not available on iTunes.

Other CNBlue songs are on iTunes, but you'd better spell that name right. Spell it "CN Blue" like some native English speaker, and only one album comes up. "CNBlue" gets you more, but not 392. Oh, wait, you really liked the 392 live concert? They're a great live band, aren't they? I actually like the live version of CNBlue's "Coffee Shop" much better than the studio version. Too bad, though. If you want the live performances, you have to shell out $50 for a concert DVD--and forget about those little live TV appearances.

(I will say that YG Entertainment, which is Psy and Epik High's label, seems to have it waaaay more together. Presumably the success of "Gagnam Style" woke them up a little. Although they still don't have any live versions for sale (which strikes me as abundantly foolish--you can sell the same song two or three times over! What's not to like?), and they don't have English translations for the titles of a lot of their songs, meaning that once you have the MP3s, it's hard to find the particular song you wanted to listen to.)

Where this gets incredibly frustrating is when it comes to Block B and Zico. The band is suing their label for what looks to be some pretty serious financial mismanagement, and Zico managed to offend the entire nation of Thailand. (But he has yet to be sued by his own mother or to threaten anyone with a gun. Work harder, Zico!) All that means his chances of finding another label or getting the acting roles and endorsements that seem to form a big chunk of many Korean musicians' earnings are pretty slim.

So what's he been doing? Putting out a TON of music, that's what! He's put out his own mixtape (Zico on the Block 1.5) and produced one for P.O., who is another rapper in the group. Of course, he's giving it all away. Yeah. And it's not the first time--the original Zico on the Block came out a couple of years ago, and those songs were given away, too.

Do you know what happens when you give music away? No one has a financial interest in carrying it, so becomes very hard to find. And when you do find it (I really had to have this song), it's at some really dodgy download sites--I ran anti-virus software on everything, but you know, if I'm going to contract a virus from a problem-child musician half my age, I'd like to at least have a good story to go along with it. I would rather pay iTunes 99 cents or $1.29 than deal with dodgy downloads. Plus, I'm lazy enough that if Zico's music was on iTunes, I'd never even think to try to find it for free.

Obviously, I don't know all the details--maybe the contract he's suing over prevents Zico from actually selling music, or maybe iTunes is not free or easy to use for musicians living in Korea. There are legal issues surrounding selling mixtapes, of course, but I would think that that sort of thing could be worked around, since it's basically a matter of getting permissions. And I feel like if you're the kind of musician who wants to focus on making music rather than looking pretty, you need to take a serious look at how to monetize the music you make. I realize that Korea is not the United States, but look at Owl City--that was literally some guy sitting in his parents' basement uploading music to the Internet until he hit it big.

That's exactly what I look like when I write!

The eagle has landed, more or less in one piece, and although I am still out of state, I now have access to the Internet.

Which means I went poking around again looking at Korean entertainment--music, this time, because I found a couple of bands that I like. (It turns out that both Shin Woo and Jeremy from the imaginary boy band in You're Beautiful are musicians in real life--and they're both actually quite good, which I was REALLY not expecting.)

Since I am incapable of not turning everything into a research project, I wound up looking up English translations to some of the song lyrics, which lead me to these extremely realistic depictions of the song-writing process of the band CNBlue. As you can see in that first photo, they all hang around in ONE ENORMOUS BED as the Muses speak to Jung Yong Hwa (aka Shin Woo), who has never heard of the importance of removing your makeup before you hit the sack. WITH YOUR BANDMATES. Not to suggest that I'm not entirely dedicated my craft, but if that were me lying there, I certainly wouldn't be writing.

How much does it amuse me that Yong Hwa's life is even more ridiculous than Shin Woo's? It amuses me a whole lot.

But this kind of author porn always cracks me up. I mean, writing is just not a really glamorous undertaking--the main risks are the health problems caused by being sedentary and not having a ergonomically-sound workspace.

People keep trying, though. When I worked for an educational publisher, we did a biography of Muhammad Ali that featured as its sizeable frontispiece a photo of a young, shirtless Cassius Clay lying on his side, pencil (of course!) in mouth (of course!) as he penned his next insulting poem about, I dunno, Joe Fraiser or someone. Of course, I can't find it now, but turn this picture sideways, put a pencil in his mouth, and have him look up and to the side just like Yong Hwa does in that second photo, and you've got the general idea.

I mean, I realize they're writing songs and short poems, but how productive can you be lying down, with no shirt on and/or several bandmates in bed with you? Why gaze up and to the side when your paper is right down in front of you? And what's with the pencil and paper? Computers exist for a reason. If you really prefer the look of writing over, you know, actual writing, just go all the way with the quill and the blotter like Will Wheaton at the 5:30 mark here,

K-drama

So, these past few weeks haven't been a very productive time. Some of it is the kids, some of it is the issue of being bored with a beta task but not with-it enough to write.

And some of it, I must confess, is k-drama.

What is that? Korean telenovelas. This all started after I read this article and decided that, if other people are destroying their lives by watching 28 hour-long episodes of Shining Inheritance in a row, why shouldn't I?

So I popped some Korean dramas into my Netflix queue and got on with life, ignoring the little time bombs I had set for myself.

Well, I never watched more than one episode of Shining Inheritance (it reminded me too much of Dallas and Dynasty). The problem is that I started with a much more dangerous show: My Girlfriend Is a Gumiho.

What's a gumiho? Oh, you can find out about that here. You can also find out what an oppa and a noona are, and the difference between jondaemal and banmal. Oh, and what are mania dramas? What's the live-shoot system? Did you know that the Korean wave now so dominates Asian entertainment that there are dating services in Japan specializing in Korean men?

You see the problem? It's not just a show, it's a research project. Add on the facts that Gumiho is rather like Buffy, that I am apparently a natural fan of the Hong sisters, and that Netflix is pulling a bunch of these shows off streaming March 1st (A DEADLINE! AIIIIGGGGGHHHH!!!), and I've got the perfect storm of time-suckage.

Really, who needs crack?

So, I started with Gumiho, went on to Secret Garden, and then had to make some tough choices because there was no way I'd get more than one series in by March 1st. So I went with another Hong sisters drama, You Are Beautiful, and now I want to watch that one again but there just isn't time! (The DVDs are fricking $110 a set, too. Way to price yourselves out of the market, idiots.)

Instead, I've been thinking about why the shows are compelling, even when they're kind of disappointing. (The live-shoot system basically means that the quality of the show is guaranteed to degrade in the later episodes, which really works against the strength of a telenovela in my opinion. One nice thing about the Hong sisters is that they plot things out in advance--and whether they like it or not, the fact that their shows aren't popular enough to get a few extra episodes tacked on to the end at the last minute is also helpful. I think Secret Garden would have been a much better show if it hadn't done so well in the ratings.)

Certain conventions in Korean dramas seem...odd to me. For example, they use soliloquies, which strikes me as a little unnecessary because the acting is usually quite good. A lot of tears get shed: You get about three-quarters of the way through and everyone's just weeping and weeping and weeping. These are romances, but they can't show a lot of physical intimacy, so guys demonstrate their interest in girls by grabbing their forearms and dragging them around like they were a sack of beans. (Honestly, girls, just do the "wax on" thing, OK? That's an easy hold to break.)

But thinking about why I like these shows (despite not being too crazy about romances), is that they tend to be in the Pride and Prejudice school of romance-as-a-mutually-beneficial-partnership, rather than the Twilight school of romance-as-salvation-for-the-woman.

In other words, in the k-dramas I found compelling (and even in the one I didn't), the guys need work. There's certainly a fantasy element to the men (they're typically rich and/or famous, plus good looking and capable of eventually becoming a worthwhile and stable partner), but at the beginning, they tend to be pretty seriously damaged. They need to learn some life lessons and become better people. Likewise the woman typically needs help and/or work, which she receives from the guy.

It is simply more gratifying to me to see a partnership develop where both parties have something to offer and both are improved. You don't have this useless wad of a gal sitting around feeling sorry for herself until Mr. Wonderful rides in on his white horse and wooshes her away to his magic castle.

I really don't like the notion that it's someone else's job to fix you--in my experience, you either fix yourself, or you stay broken. That's probably the core of my discomfort with romance, because these days the barriers tend to be internal, which usually means that there's a damaged person there who needs to be fixed.

But--and I realize this sounds like a subtle distinction--I don't mind it when a character is motivated to fix themselves in order to obtain a romantic goal (or any other kind of goal).

That's why Knocked Up didn't bother me, even thought the Seth Rogan character was, you know, a Seth Rogan character--a seemingly hopeless man-child. The Katherine Heigl character explicitly surrenders the job of fixing him. She means that in a positive way (she doesn't want him to change), but her leaving the ball in his court essentially forces him to take responsibility for his own life and his own choices for the first time.

And that's what these k-dramas get right. The guys (and the women) grow, and they grow on their own. They do it for the other person of course, but they also do it very much for themselves.

I know damned well there are people who are completely incapable of growth--the notion that people can improve themselves is in its own way something of a fantasy. But many people (sometimes some very surprising people) do grow. And I'm not such a black-hearted cynic that I can't enjoy it in fiction.

The day after the giveaway

So, not shockingly given how much better this giveaway did than the others, I am actually seeing some benefits after having switched back to paid: I'm #19 on the science fiction: series paid bestseller list, which just barely puts me on that all-important front page.

I've also dropped the price to 99 cents, for two reasons. Reason number 1: I still plan to make the book free. Reason number 2: People have suggested that, if you do have a good response to your free days, dropping the price can keep the momentum going.

My previous experiment with the 99-cent price point was a bust, but this time around (when I have more reviews and better placement on the bestseller lists), it's working like a charm--I haven't gone through the old sales reports to do an exact count, but in all likelihood I've sold more copies of Trang today than I did in 2011 and 2012 combined. Of course it's impossible for me to know if I'm really making more money this way than if I'd kept the price up and took the higher royalty, but since I'm planning to make Trang free anyway, I'm OK with making 35 cents a sale if it keeps the book on the front page.

So that's all very nice for me. But I think it points to some larger lessons for all indie writers, which I shall patronizingly spell out in a numbered list because I've got a really big head right now:

1. Prepare. A lot of the stuff I did, like backmatter links, targeting the cover and description, getting into the right Amazon categories, and getting reviews did NOT pay off immediately. Clearly, it was still worth doing, because it's paying off now. (OK, it's not paying off in a financial sense yet--I still have a long way to go before I break even. But you have to crawl before you can run, and the momentum is definitely in the right direction.)

2. Experiment. Do we need to go over how much money I've wasted on marketing that did not work? It's embarrassing when that happens, and if you're me and you know you don't know much about marketing, it makes you feel like this is something you'll never really get a handle on. But if I hadn't been persistent with BookBub (and it took two tries), I wouldn't have had such a successful giveaway. And I doubt that I wouldn't have gotten into BookBub in the first place without all the work I did earlier to get reviews, have a good description, have a targeted cover, etc.

3. Believe. Recently Edward Robertson did a post on giveaways in which he says, Oh, you should be getting thousands of downloads. Which, I didn't before. But the important caveat there is that if you get your book on one of the free book sites you should get thousands of downloads. And you know, once I did, I did.

It can be hard to hear stuff by people who are better established and are saying things like, Oh, just get your book on Pixel of Ink (can't, sorry); or, Just make your book 99 cents (didn't work); or, Don't market. They're trying to be helpful, but when what works for them doesn't work for you--or doesn't work to a level that they would deem acceptable--it can make you feel like a big old loser who has written a crap book.

But there are still differences in the playing field, even on Amazon, even with e-books. Someone with a 20-year career as a novelist behind them is simply going to have an easier time finding readers. Amazon is going to help you a lot more if you've sold 20,000 copies than if you've sold 20.

It's hard starting from zero. But it doesn't mean you wrote a bad book. It doesn't that your book lacks potential. It just means that...it's hard starting from zero. True in any career.

4. Persist. Always the bottom line for writers, right? You can't win if you don't play. 

Random linkage

Jaye Manus has a good post on how many conventions about books--even the prevalence of the novel--are the result of the economics of the old traditional-publishing industry. Take away things like the cost of producing a physical book and the limits of shelf space, and the possible formats really open up.

And this is a fascinating article from a few months ago in The New Yorker about K-pop (a.k.a. Korean pop music). While obviously performing songs is different from writing books, I do see similarities (the article exists, after all, because digitization has made it possible for an American writer to become mildly obsessed with a K-pop girls' group). The author writes:

When an entertainment industry is young, the owners tend to have all the power. In the early days of the movie business, Hollywood studios locked up the talent in long-term contracts. In the record business, making millions off artists, many of whom ended up broke, used to be standard business practice.

Of course, traditional publishing is hardly a young industry, but I would argue that owners tend to have the power when an industry is young because they're the ones who have figured out how to work the system and sell stuff. If they can shut out artists, then the same thing happens--if the only way to sell books is to get into a bookstore, and the only way to get into a bookstore is through a traditional publisher, that gives the publisher all the power.

Anyway, the punch line for the article is that, despite all the effort to sell squeaky-clean, highly-polished K-pop internationally, the first big breakout song was Psy's "Gagnam Style." Oops. Yeah, you never do know what's going to be a hit.

Le sigh....

Since I've been a virtuous little points-grubber, a bottle of Paperback perfume arrived in the mail today. Sadly, while it smells fine, it doesn't really smell like a paperback. That's kind of unusual for Demeter--I've worn their Dirt and Sawdust perfume, and both smelled like a very pleasant version of either dirt (clay, I'd say) and sawdust, so I wasn't thinking that a paper smell would stump them.

Alien lives

Despite the Trang series featuring many, many space Marines, I've never felt like I ought to market it as military sci-fi.

And one reason is because I keep coming across this scenario in military sci-fi:

There are aliens. The aliens are enemies for whatever reason, or you know, no reason whatsoever. The enemy aliens decide to attack or are preparing to attack, so the humans and perhaps some good aliens get together and, relying on some far superior military technology, they surround the enemy aliens and they kill them all. Every single one!

Pardon my focus on semantics, but--isn't that properly called a massacre?

I realize that the rules of engagement tend to go out the window in the heat of combat. I don't judge that: I don't want to get killed, either, and if I were in combat the fact that I had much better weaponry than the other guy wouldn't slow me down one whit.

But in these books, these things more often than not are planned. There's a trap, the enemy falls into the trap, and then the humans kill them all!!! Forget negotiating surrender or taking prisoners--it's slaughter time!

Oh, but the enemy aliens don't surrender. That's always the moral loophole in these stories--Gee, Mom, I had to wipe out that village! Those guys don't surrender! Plus, you know, they are ugly and talk funny and eat weird food and don't live like we do--better to kill them all. It's just so much more convenient. So much more satisfying.

This may be another example of me having a hard time letting go of the metaphor.

I guess I feel like people are already so very prone to dehumanizing enemies that it's not something that needs to be encouraged. Playing up the alien's alieness to make massacre more acceptable--they're evil, they're bad, they don't surrender, we have no choice but to kill them all--makes me feel like I'm reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Because according to Hannah Arendt, that's basically what the Nazis told soldiers who didn't feel particularly good about massacring Jews: You have no choice. It's not pleasant, but it has to happen. They're evil and they won't surrender. We have no choice but to kill them all.

History: Not what you think!

I really liked this post by Fox Meadows about whether the past was really as white and sexist and hidebound and bigoted as less-well informed people tend to think. The background is that a fellow wrote a book featuring a Black female pirate, and someone decided to bitch and moan because the book did not feature a White male pirate instead. Part of the complainant's problem with the Black female pirate (other than her being Black and female, which were clearly issues for him in and of themselves), was that he felt it was unrealistic to have a pirate who was a woman. Meadow's post points out that what people think is historically realistic often has nothing to do with the way history actually was (plus, you know, it's fiction, dipshit).

(I don't know what the complainant was expecting to accomplish, but the author's response was to offer him "this engraved invitation to go piss up a hill," as well as another, equally heartfelt invitation to stop reading his books. And I have to say that, under similar circumstances, I would do the same.)

I don't blame people for assuming that, say, all pirates or all American cowboys were all white, because the sad truth is that most people get their knowledge of history from Hollywood, and Hollywood is an abominable teacher. The Western genre was really popular in the 1950s and 1960s, and by George, you can watch Western after Western after Western and not see a single African-American cowboy--not one. In addition, all the women wear Revlon Fire & Ice on their lips and nails, and there's always one with platinum blond hair who looks just like Marilyn Monroe, sometimes because she actually is Marilyn Monroe.

Movies--even "true" movies--are a tissue of lies, often the sorts of lies that leave you with your mouth gaping open at their chutzpah (coughcoughA Beautiful Mindcoughcough). The goal of movies is to attract audiences by putting beautiful characters in wish-fulfillment situations, not repel audiences by putting starving and gross people in really upsetting situations. When people think "pirates," they think of Johnny Depp (yum) in Pirates of the Caribbean (whee). They think of freedom and excitement and Halloween costumes and Talk Like a Pirate Day. The reality of pirates, past or present, doesn't even come up.

Even if you don't learn everything you know about history from movies or television, teachers and books sometimes have a definite agenda. I think the educational system has gotten better about this, but there has been a lot of propaganda fed to people over the ages. When I accompanied my elderly relative to Peru, we traveled with a group organzied by a company that specializes in trips geared to older people. The people we were with were all basically lovely, intelligent, and well-educated enough that I was very surprised at how little they knew of history. We visited a number of Moche ruins, and the Moche were very enthusiastic practitioners of human sacrifice. And people in our group kept saying things along the lines of, "Well, I don't know why these people had to kill each other all the time--Christians have certainly never slaughtered each other like that!"

Wow. Um, yeah they did. Like, for centuries. Seriously, how did their history classes go? "Martin Luther hammered his 95 theses to a church door, and after some calm and rational discussion, it was decided that large chunks of Northern Europe would no longer follow the dictates of the Roman Catholic Church." "The Inquisition was exactly like Monty Python portrayed it, comfy chairs and all." "The religious dissidents left Europe and came to the North American colonies because they loved adventure!"

But the thing that really bothers me about efforts to render history more palatable and comfortable to people, is that it cuts people off from exciting stories.

Yeah, I know, that is a horribly writerly reaction, so writerly that it verges on the psychopathic, but honestly, when I was editing Black history books, that's what struck me: This is some great shit!

I mean, the violence of American race relations and the brutality of slavery meant that every little interaction could result in HORRIBLE TORTURE AND DEATH. Those are fantastic stakes. Asking for water could get you killed. Walking down the street could get you killed. Starting a business could definitely get you killed.

Deciding, "You know, I've got really light skin. I think I'll pass for white and go to the Deep South in order to investigate lynchings for the NAACP"--? Holy shit. Great story. Why no one has done a movie about Walter White I will never know.

Except that I guess I do know. It's similar to why there are no really good non-white fashion models--it's a problem of gatekeepers. Lazy gatekeepers, or gatekeepers who think it's great but there just isn't a market for that kind of thing. I've heard writers say, "Well, I'd love to write about X. It's a really fascinating topic, and I think there would be some fantastic stories there. But they'd never let me."

But guess what? NOW YOU CAN!! Now, with self-publishing, you can have your Black female pirates! You can write historical fiction that's actually accurate, and when someone says, "That's not realistic," you can tell them how wrong they are!

And who knows, maybe you'll manage to educate people about the past, so that they have the slightest clue that, yes, racial attitudes in 1453 Europe were rather different from those in 1953 Selma, Alabama, because there's 500 years and thousands of miles of difference there. Honestly.

Random fun

One of the neat things about writing is that when you do it, other people realize that they can do it, too. The kids, for example, have seen my books, they know their auntie writes books, and they are totally down with the idea that someday, if they want to, they too could write books.

(Fine, maybe that kind of thing excites me because I grew up in what we not-so-affectionately call "the open-air ghetto," so I'm always happy to see people expand their ideas of what is possible.)

Anyway, my sister is a talented writer but (being sane) never pursued it professionally and hasn't written in a while. But apparently all this yapping about creative writing rekindled the fire, and she has written an episode of the show Sherlock. If you've never seen the show, her episode won't make a lot of sense, but if you have, you should read it: She really has the humor down.