THE JEWEL OF MEDINA by Sherry Jones

A resident of the Ivory Tower, who apparently called dibs on A’isha (child bride of Muhammed) as her personal and exclusive domain of study and forgot to send the memo, raised a ruckus about a book she didn’t like and managed to get Random House to pull it after the author had been paid her $100k advance and the presses were rolling. I say it’s an academic hatchet job.

You can read the prologue here and then you may come weep with me that we won’t get to read the rest of it unless someone else picks it up. I like midrash-ish treatments like The Red Tent (although I haven’t read Card’s series on Rebekah, Sarah, Rachel and Leah yet).

I’m not going to wade in on all the outrage and outcries of what normal Muslims do and don’t think (’cause I ain’t one), but naturally, they’d be offended that their prophet is written about in a secular and therefore, profane, way. Catholics were offended by Dogma and The DaVinci Code. Jews were offended by The Passion of the Christ. Christians were offended by The Last Temptation of Christ and Piss Christ. Mormons, well, you know the drill. Anyhoo, my question is this: Why does a major publisher pull “offensive” material about one religion’s sacred icon but nobody else’s?

Update from today’s Galleycat: The dude who wrote Prophets & Princes: Saudi Arabia from Muhammed to the Present opined:

“I agree with [the aforementioned Ivory Tower resident]…You don’t turn scripture into soft core pornography.” While admitting that he hadn’t read any of Jones’s novel…

WTF?!?!? These people are scholars?

eBOOKS, iTUNES, iPHONE, eREADER, and STANZA

So Teddypig of The Naughty Bits blog has a most excellent article on epublisher website design, which I use as a guideline when I’m building and coding. I may not always get it right, but I’m working on it. Anyhoo, he directed Smart Bitches toward a functionality of iPhone to set up ebooks as applications in the iTunes shop for download to iPhone. Apparently, the process is a little whacked (because it’s an application, not a text/data file), but I’m all for getting ebooks out there via iAnything. Steve, I shall ask again: Where is your iBooks store? I don’t want the Kindle to be the only game in town and it looks like Sony’s all but given up the ghost.

Fictionwise’s eReader was downloaded on 130,000 iPhones in a month and Stanza is apparently only a little behind that as the ereading software alternatives to downloading ebooks-as-applications on your iPhone. I am a-quiver.

NEWSPAPER BOOK REVIEW SECTIONS and THOSE DIRTY BLOGGERS FROM THE WRONG SIDE OF THE TRACKS

So the LA Times book section shut down amidst weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. Color me clueless. I never read book reviews before Smart Bitches and Dear Author (which sites I read religiously). The elites got all in a tizzy because review sites whose reviewers obviously don’t know what they’re doing started popping up all over the place.

Hey. Newspapers. Publishers. You can’t go home again.

FIGHT AUTHOR ABUSE

What is it about publishing accounting I don’t understand? I mean, I was a college student once and pretended to take accounting 101 for an entire semester. I get it. First, there’s reserves against returns. Second, there’s returns (aka consignment, tyvm, and say, how’s that Breaking Dawn return-don’t-burn campaign coming along?). Third, there’s the actual tallying which seems to be done by typing monkeys. You know, the ones who can’t count.

On a different front, there’s the copyright and plagiarism issue, which seems to be thought of in PublishingVille as the crazy aunt in the attic of intellectual property law. What, publishers, you don’t have enough stake in seeing that your property is stolen that you can’t do something about it?

In the most egregious and outrageous case I know of (aside from Cassie “The Ferret” Edwards), Janet Dailey stole from Nora Roberts. Thieved. As in, took something that wasn’t hers and got off with a slap on the wrist. Ms. Roberts calls it “mind rape.” Indeed. So if that weren’t enough (I don’t even think I can bear this, but I’ll take one for the team), Jane of Dear Author writes:

Nora was also subjected to many people arguing that she shouldn’t have gone public with the copying (although it was a fan who had made the case publicly in the first place); that she, Nora, was being petty and vindictive.

Crabs in a bucket, I tell you. One attempts to climb out, but the rest just pull her back in. Yes, I used “her” on purpose.

So I was amused to note on Charles Bock’s copyright page of Beautiful Children (also the result of Random House’s research into how DRM doesn’t work and passing out free ebooks without it does), the following notice: This is our intellectual property, so kindly don’t fucking steal it. I haven’t read this book yet (I got a copy when it was hot off the interwebz), but it’s in my queue somewhere up front because his last name begins with B.

And finally…

LOVABLE ASSHOLE WHO NEVER ENDED ON AN UNSTRESSED SYLLABLE

Lots of profanity here, which of course means that I like it. A London restaurant reviewer seems a wee bit testy about the way his articles are randomly edited by People Who Don’t Get It.

And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed “a” so that the stress that should have fallen on “nosh” is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable.

You know, I only love this guy because I don’t work for him.

I don’t watch many movies because I’m usually obsessed with the ones playing in my head, begging to be laid on paper.

But I’ll roll over for post-apocalyptic tales (oh, 12 Monkeys and Waterworld come to mind and that reminds me, why [other than Kevin Costner's acting] is Waterworld so reviled?). I Am Legend is the best I’ve seen yet.

My husband doesn’t like stories told in flashback (even little bits of backstory), so that bugged him, but he’s not a post-apocalypse fan AT ALL, so the fact that he liked it at all was impressive. And Will Smith? The man can act. I need to see Hancock. I don’t even know what it’s about, but Will Smith has excellent judgment as an actor and businessman, so I’ll not question him on the roles he chooses.

Over at Toward an LDS Cinema, I’ve been on Trevor’s case to see Dogma (as all 4 regular readers of this blog will know). I still think that’s a fabulous not-quite-post-apocalyptic movie (amongst other themes, leit motifs, and regular ol’ motifs).

I have my own post-apocalyptic tale in the hopper, so we’ll see how well I do at creating a world that doesn’t exist, but could.

C’mon, folks. Give me a rundown of your favorite post-apocalyptic movies and/or books. Pwetty Pweeze?

UPDATE: I’ve begun a list of post-apocalyptic tales, both book and film. Be a contributor! Comment on this post or email me and I’ll update as time allows.

It also trashes things I believe in. Does it bother me? On some visceral level, yes, but that doesn’t make it difficult for me to listen to it and it certainly doesn’t keep me from listening. I’d miss a whole lot of good music (and that voice!) if I took umbrage at other people’s opinions and the way they state them (usually the way they state them is more off-putting than what they say).

So it started me thinking about how I read fiction,
what fiction I read, and how I deal with ideas and philosophies, opinions and teachings in fiction that either I don’t hold, don’t like, or despise for any number of reasons. I surprised me. I don’t care as long as the story’s good.

At some point, I must have gotten over my instinctive outrage when, in the middle of a good story, I got plopped down into philosophical wanderings that were either not my own or insulted mine. I know it wasn’t one piece that did it. It was bits and bites of stories throughout the years that let me know that A) I wasn’t alone in the world and B) other people had different opinions from mine and C) they were no less valid and D) informed their worldview the same way my opinions inform my worldview and E) it didn’t make them wrong and didn’t make me right. The only caveat to that is that the story be engaging enough for me to swim upstream.

I can actually pinpoint the one book that started me down this path, but I have only recently thought about re-reading it as an adult with vastly different tastes than I had when I was 15 and completely repulsed by the heroine. Who, in case you would be wondering, was Scarlett O’Hara.

I also became a more discerning reader, understanding that sometimes, ideas that were neutral or positive for me did inflame others. Example (because I can’t remember the last book I read that I thought was that didactic, which only speaks to my current tolerance level): Dogma is one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s irreverent and profane (well, naturally, because Jay and Silent Bob are in it) and, most would say, blasphemous. Protests were organized over this movie (although I think protesting something you haven’t seen is disingenuous).

Don’t get me wrong; it is irreverent and profane. Deliciously, devilishly so. But it is not blasphemous. Through all the muck and mire, the four-letter words, the irreverence, Kevin Smith gave me something uplifting and positive. Trevor, over at Toward an LDS Cinema, had an intriguing post why Mormons would do well to take some lessons from Fight Club for many of the same reasons I like Dogma.

Another reason? I tired of one-dimensional characters long ago. I remember distinctly a Harlequin Presents I read when I was a teenager (I think a Janet Dailey, but don’t quote me) wherein the hero is a pastor of a church whose denomination is not specified who sets out with great determination to seduce the heroine. I was shocked and outraged all the way down to my 15-year-old good-Mormon-girl toes. When she questions him of this dichotomy, he quotes the Song of Solomon and gives her some bullshit meant to fuzz the issue of what is and what isn’t fornication and besides, it’s not really bad.

Please. Anybody with a contact high off any one of the Abrahamic religions knows that fornication’s not on the kosher side of the Chinese menu. I kept reading in spite of my outrage, but over the years, that’s morphed into a different take-home message:

People aren’t one-dimensional. I don’t know if he was attempting to justify it to himself as much as or more than to the heroine, but even now as an adult, I still don’t think it was honorable for him to twist the concept of fornication inside out to get to his goal without owning up to it eventually. It would have been more interesting for him to have owned his weakness, but it was interesting enough that an author put religion and sex together in a book. Lookit, here I am 25 years later still remembering and being influenced by that concept.

In Dogma, Kevin Smith gave me a cast of characters with depth. I mean, really, a descendant of Jesus who works in an abortion clinic? Christ’s 13th apostle who’s pissed he got written out of the New Testament because he’s black? A muse-turned-stripper because she lost her touch? George Carlin as a Catholic priest? Alanis Morissette as God? Priceless!

(‘Scuse me while I go put it on the DVD and watch it again.)

So that brings me to The Proviso, in which I will have managed to offend most everybody with the language, the sex, the politics, the religion, the money, and, most likely, the reading preferences of its characters. It’s my Dogma. I thought a lot about what a reader would bring to the table while reading this book, but at the end of the day, I had to write the story Knox, Sebastian, Giselle, Bryce, Eilis, and Justice gave me whether it offended anyone or not.

Likewise, my antagonist, Fen, is as morally ambiguous as the protagonists. One-dimensional villains don’t interest me anymore, either, and I wanted a villain who was likable, to show him on his downward spiral, wherein he owned what he did and actively engaged protagonists he knows and (in the case of two of them), loves.

This is who these people are and to mitigate them in some way would be to cheat them. Some of them believe the doctrine they’re attached to by birth and some of them don’t. They are flawed, deeply so, and they have questionable motives for what they do, but they do them and own them and take the consequences for it. I think that makes them interesting.

I finally came to the conclusion that if my storytelling is engaging enough for a reader to keep reading in spite of his umbrage or discomfort or disapproval, then I will have done my job.