Update: Canada “clarifies” their transgender regulation

I already told you about Canada rules regarding trans passengers, but this updated post has a lot more information that I will pass over to you and only distill the key point the conservatives are making, and missing. In essence, they claim that anyone can fly, provided they have a letter from a medical professional affirming their gender non-conformity. Some of you may be thinking that sounds reasonable, but let me assure you, it is not a reasonable request to someone who is non-op and not seeking therapy for their gender. It is not a reasonable request for any person who does not fit their documented gender, but does not seek medical help as a “sicko.”

The so-called “carry letter” that conservatives want is forcing all transgender people to seek medical treatment, as if simply having the wrong gender presentation is a serious illness. No letter means a chance of being denied the right to fly, simply because someone doesn’t like how you look. It is discrimination, and asking all transgender people to use carry letters, regardless of which kind of trans person they are, is prejudice. Further, Canada is not honoring international regulations by adding these rules. That is a blatant lie, and nothing about this is concern for the safety of the other travelers. It’s an extra stumbling block to make the lives of some trans people harder, and it serves no other useful purpose.

There are already measures coming up in the Canadian parliament to strike this regulation down, but the conservatives MPs will play with this as a wedge issue and pretend they are concerned about flight safety. If you are Canadian, especially if your rep is conservative, contact them and tell them that gender discrimination has nothing to with the safety of other airline passengers.

Let’s drop the notion that carry letters are needed for trans people to travel or even just go to the bathroom. If you support trans diversity, then you must also support the trans people who don’t want to seek medical validation and let them travel as freely as any cisgender passenger.

Really, no rants here. Just, if you can help, please do.

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About Penny…

I’m finishing up the fourth round of edits on Penny for Your Debts, and as my cover reveal implied, it is coming soonish. Some writers like to schmooze with readers before release and sell folks on the reasons to like a book before they buy it. I prefer to try radical things, and so I’m going to give you all the reasons you might not want the book before I give you reasons you might try it.

You are opposed to books with violence against minors.
Perfectly valid, although technically this precludes you from reading even tame material like Harry Potter. This book is nevertheless a lot more punishing to the main character than you would expect to see in a story with a magic-using child as the main character. Poor Penny loses a few quarts of blood in the telling of this story.

You are opposed to books with minors involved in sexual relationships.
While the focus of this story is more about the long-term, evolving relationship between prisoner Penny Sterling and her captor, Nicholas Rumpelstilts, during the latter half of the book, Penny does allow Nicholas to become her lover. I do not view the intimate scenes in this book as being any worse than what King published in IT, what Rice wrote in Belinda, or what Anthony wrote in Firefly. But if you don’t like seeing minors abused in fiction, this book is not for you.

You are opposed to fantasy stories with difficult personal themes.
You may be among the purist crowds who think that fantasy should be all about killing stuff, or banishing it in the case of stuff already dead or undead. Or you may think that topics like child brides and Stockholm Syndrome don’t belong in fantasy. In either case, if you feel a fantasy’s core plot should always be about questing or stopping an evil force using some prophesied magic item, this story is all wrong for you. Continue reading →

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More complications…

I was all set to move my blog yesterday, but Namecheap has a nice gotcha I didn’t notice, and one which the manager who emailed me forgot to mention. I can’t leave for 60 days after I’ve moved a domain name. Namecheap also claims they won’t normally give customers back money on any account that isn’t closed after 14 days…and yet, they won’t let you leave for 60.

In our last email, I was assured that I would get my money back, but now I’m worried that they will try to give some reason for why they get to keep money for a pre-paid year of hosting despite not actually rendering any such service to me. Even if they do at this point, these policies are still in place and can serve to potentially hamstring anyone thinking to move after realizing Namecheap isn’t the right host. In March, we’ll see if I get back the rest, but I’m really not happy with having to spend another month with these people.

As it is, you may have already noticed certain glitches like missing graphics in the sidebar. This is because those files were hosted on the GoDaddy server, and when my account was closed, all my thumbnails online went poof. Which probably breaks links in about a billion old forum posts. But that’s okay. Nobody was reading those posts on the day I posted them either. (ba da pish)

In writing news, not a single project isn’t hitting a snag that requires me to hold the titles back. I briefly considered pulling out another trunk novel to toss on Smashwords without a cover, but my editor sense says there’s still too many typos in the only book I’ve got that’s close enough to be ready. Plus, y’all don’t want a coverless whimsical trans romance from me anymore than you’ll want the next couple of book releases with covers. No, that’s not low self-esteem speaking. It’s a keen understanding of my sales history. Besides that, the theme for all three books in the queue are almost the same despite each book having been written years apart from each other. (One disadvantage of working with a huge buffer of unedited material: I don’t notice trends in my releases until I’m already partially committed to a release schedule.) Continue reading →

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Offered without comment, a comment from…er, wait

This is a comment made on Brian Keene’s blog in a post where he is once again talking about Dorchester and their loss of anything resembling a conscience. If you haven’t been reading Brian’s blog for Dorchester updates, go ahead and scroll up from the linked comment to get a basic rundown of how terrible things are with Dorchester. But what I really want you to read is the comment, and I want to share part of it here to explain why I think this is worth your time:

Before Dawn’s death, she turned the rights to her books over to her sister, Diane. Diane is disabled, living at the poverty line (which Dorchester is aware of). Last August she got a notice that one (just one of Dawn’s books had earned $4300 and a check would follow. A check never followed. This is the same thing that happened before. Chris sent a notice that $10,003 would be forwarded to her and that never came either. She is barely getting by and nearly died last week, and is now facing heavy medical bills she cannot pay.

Please spend a minute to read the rest.

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Quarterly reports

Smashwords has sent me a quarterly sales report, and I have the money to pay for the move to another webhost. (Again.) I’ve also recently got my final statement from Belfire, and sales were not bad, all things considered. The same thing could be said about my sales with every vendor, including Amazon.

This is even more remarkable because I don’t use banner ads, or banner exchanges. I don’t haunt forums or frequent multiple social sites in a constantly rushing bid to capture sales. Obviously if I don’t tweet book links, there’s also nothing to retweet, so I’m not reaching people through “second hand tweets.” I’m so anti-promotion at this point that my Twitter profile starts off “Go away.” Yet, despite this big mouth, people still buy my books. Despite my lousy attitude, people search for my blog by writing my name, and then the topic they want to see me rant on. I don’t get traffic like a big blogger like, say PZ Meyers, but then I don’t have nifty links to octopus stuff or jokes about christly crackers.

But that does remind me that early today, fellow Tweeter and artist/author @irkdesu had commented using a hashtag #christonaglutenfreecracker. This led me to ask her if a Eucharist cracker is gluten-free, and she said they aren’t. Which leads me to wonder, does the Catholic church have a supply of Eucharist wafers that are kosher for gluten intolerant followers? Or, put another way, do they have anything left of Jesus that’s more easily digestible?

(EDIT: YES, there are gluten-free Christly crackers! Hat-tip to @princeherb for answering a stupid question. =^D )

Yes, I really will be here all week. No, I’m not leaving. Stop asking, and enough with the hook from stage right already. I’m tired of dodging it. But getting back to my good fortunes, I also want to stress, sales are no better or worse than when I was busting my ass with the begging and pleading. They are holding steady, and even if I would love a pay rise, I certainly cannot complain with steady sales in spite of my lack of efforts or my often bitchy tone here on my blog. It’s because I have to complain about so many other things that when my royalty statements roll in, I feel obligated to say thank you to all the people who still look at my stuff in spite of me.

So, from the bottom of my beady black heart, thank you very much for your continued support of my art, and for your continued visits to my blog. You may not think I appreciate your attention, but I consider time a valuable, precious, and finite commodity. So that you give me any of your time is more of a gift than you realize. And when you add money by buying a book, that’s even better. Because when enough of you do it all together, it means new video games and more pizza and beer. Which makes a nice change of pace from cheese sandwiches.

Seriously, thank you. Piss and vinegar will return shortly.

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German trans child to be abused by the state at father’s request

Anybody who wants to argue that we don’t still live in a patriarchy needs to look at this story about a trans girl, only 11, who will be institutionalized by the state and forced to conform to a gender she isn’t comfortable with. Read the story all the way through. Appreciate that this is in Germany, which has to obey EU laws on respecting trans rights but will choose to ignore them for this case. Note how the child is in school without problems, and has the support of her mother. But, because the father wants a son, the Germans are looking to institutionalize a little girl and force her to be a boy. For the father.

I really can’t say anything else on this without becoming hysterical. Just please, read the story, and think about sending it on to someone else. If you can do something more to help, please do so. This girl needs all the help she can get.

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So what is it like to publish?

Over on the Books of the Dead Press blog is a long post from James Roy Daley about what it’s like to be a publisher. I’ve never dealt with the problems of having other peoples’ work on my shoulders, but running a self-published imprint I can tell you, all the rest of this also applies to self-published authors as much as it does to anyone trying to do this as a business with a stable of writers. Give it a read, because it really does explain succinctly why publishing can be stressful for everyone involved. Yeah, it’s no fun for us writers, but it’s no walk through a garden of money trees for small press publishers either.

What I like is how the path of publishing followed includes everything, right up to “you had a brain fart and said something stupid.” I can so relate to that! Although I think at this point, I’ve just fallen into a rut of one long brain fart, and I stopped caring about damage control. Anywho, also good was “5 more terrible reviews came down the pipe and two of them are from people that haven’t read the book; the urge to respond is overwhelming.” Yar, it’s even more problematic when reading reviews that make me go, “What fucking book were you reading? It sure as hell wasn’t mine!”

And don’t even get me started on the section on formatting problems, little digital hiccups that take a happy file and turn it into a potential ebook PR nightmare so awful, you do overtime to reformat the whole book overnight and upload it again. And then there’s, “Oh, sure, all the ebooks look fine, EXCEPT for the Kindle file.” Sure, only the most active book market, where your book is looking so butt ugly, even you, its figurative mother, will not love it. So that’s a do-over too. Unless you choose to work with KDP directly, which comes with its own little list of headaches and potential gotchas. And then there’s the “joy” of opening your latest print novel and finding a typo on page one despite you going through three proof copies “to be sure.” SOB!

So, yes, I can totally, completely relate to the sentiments expressed in the post. While it is long, I think it is totally worth your time, as it gets “better” as it goes along. So if you’re wanting something interesting to read while waiting for my next flop to drop, try reading what a publisher has to go through to earn “easy money.” It very clearly illustrates the maxim “If the grass seems greener elsewhere, that’s because the grass is growing where the septic tank is buried.”

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Oh, Canada

In this story I want to show you, trans people are banned from boarding airplanes in Canada. You may be stunned to learn this because there was no legislature like this passed through the parliament. Well that’s because this was put in place through the Ministry of Transportation, which is currently run by a conservative. So, even though his country has laws about discrimination, he has effectively written a rule that discriminates on every trans person who doesn’t conform to the gender designation on their identifying documents.

This is how bad laws get through without a vote. Someone gives a middle manager power in a bureaucracy to make up his own rules without getting upper management to approve the plans, and without checking to see if those rules contradict anything else on the books about, say, human rights or civil liberties. And now that it’s in place, it will probably take a lawsuit and court order to get the ruling struck down.

The law just recently went into effect, and as of yet, no reports have surfaced of it being enforced. But it would be great if ya’ll Canadian readers might ring up your local MP and ask them to look into why the Ministry of Transportation has chosen to discriminate exclusively against trans people.

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A random thought on long-term promotions…

So on Twitter, I was pointed to a game article where Satoru Iwata expressed hope that fans would improve word of mouth ads for Nintendo’s games over a few months old using DLC. His theory is that adding new levels and game upgrades will keep fans talking and making new coverts, because presently, even if gamers really like a game, once they’re done with it, they stop talking about it. This is a problem I can relate to.

I hope that using DLC works for Nintendo to rebuild fan loyalty, and my first thought was how on Twitter, I tweet what games I’m playing. Once I’m done with a game, there’s no reason to keep promoting it, so digital content adding to the original game is one way to get me to continuously promote old games. It’s a case out of sight and out of mind, so the DLC plan helps keep the names popping up n my Twitter stream. As an example, new DLC packs for Forza 4 keep me buying new cars, so I still have new reasons to play the game, and thus to tweet: “I’m playing Forza 4 again.” In this way the product stays fresh even after it should be considered stale.

I’m already in the habit of tweeting a list of my top 8 artists as compiled by Last.FM, and as my listening is all done on my phone, pretty much my whole music day is tracked. (Sometimes I shift to the Zune Player on my desktop, or I forget to activate the scrobbler while I’m listening.) So I’m promoting music both on Twitter and through my Last.FM profile every day. It may have been a long time since I reviewed Janelle Monae, but I still promote her albums every day thanks to these listing tweets.

Thinking about that got me thinking about how I promote books, which is not the same thing as WebLit. When a WebLit friend has a series, every chapter or episode is a promotion, and if I’m online and catch it, then sure, I’ll retweet that. So the serials have a built-in method of generating word of mouth, if the quality of the serial is good enough to warrant excitement. (Or if the writer has other writer friends willing to help them promote.)

But whether we’re talking print or ebooks, I don’t tend to bring up a book title after I finish it. This is true of good books and bad, and the only exceptions are the books that were SO GOOD, I had to keep promoting them even months later. There’s a few books that spring to memory that qualify for the distinction, and I’m happy to say there’s as many indie titles as there are pro titles from big name authors. But if a book is merely good instead of mind blowing, it gets relegated to the same status as the books I despised. Either way, I’m like, “Let us never speak of this again.” Continue reading →

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