Never underestimate the commercial value of mental illness.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Dude and I went to see this movie for his birthday. I haven’t been interested in reading the books because a) I’m not a thriller/mystery fan and b) haven’t had time to devote to sampling genres I’m not usually interested in. I’m still not interested in reading the books, because I either read the book or see the movie, but not both. (I got burned in the Bonfire of the Vanities.) I am interested in seeing the Swedish version. Read more
My editor and partner, Theric Jepson, who runs Peculiar Pages alongside my running of B10 Mediaworx, made some sort of joke on Twitter (don’t remember the joke), and Wm Morris of A Motley Vision (a MoLit blog) had an idea. And the idea was to skewer the 19th-century literary tradition of using Mormons as stock villains in pulp fiction by turning the Mormons into the protagonists instead of the antagonists.
Plans were being made. I felt no compunction to submit a story to this anthology of pulp fiction because a) I don’t read pulp fiction; I read trashy romance novels aka porn for women and so b) I didn’t feel qualified to write anything for it. But then Wm posted an update on AMV saying, “I’d like to see X, Y, Z, and A, B, and C.” Well, I thought. I could do Y, Z, and B. So I did. Read more
by Tax Deduction #1
(3rd grade)
Uh oh I get in trouble for drawing on the walls. “[FIRST MIDDLE LAST]!” Mom yelled really loudly. “WHY DID YOU draw a little dot on the wall!” “[FIRST]!” my dad snapped. “You are not going to have chocolate chip pie for 1 month.” “Ha. Ha, ha, haaaa, ha, stinky head!”* said [Brother]. “You are not having apple juice for 3 months.”
*do not say this to your mom or dad
Now after 2 months I am getting bored. “When is my grounding over?” I asked. “After another two months,” my mom said.
It’s been 4 months and I am not grounded anymore. “Hurray!” I shouted.
[2025-07-24: Blackbird Pie plugin no longer exists, nor do the tweets. Text pulled from backups.]
Dear Berkley, I was all set to buy INDIA BLACK on my Kindle, but it was $9.99. No Effing Way.
twitter.com/#!/MoriahJovan/status/22156474088169472
Dear Big-6 Publishers, it’s not that we’re not buying books. It’s that we aren’t buying YOUR books.
twitter.com/#!/MoriahJovan/status/22157961505800192
I used to be a writer. I wrote lots of stuff. It never got published and I gave up. I just … stopped … one day. Sometimes I read what I wrote and I get a charge from it, and I catch myself wondering how the author would have finished it if she had finished it. I suppose I’ll never know.
(I started writing The Proviso in August 2007.)
So most of us DIYers out here are trying to brand ourselves. We spend our time on Twitter and Facebook and message boards and whatnot trying to build an audience and a fanbase.
Then the midlist authors come along and digitize their backlists, and everybody’s happy because they already have a brand and they’re simply supplying a product that people want. Yay.
And then there are the midlist and higher-up authors who self-publish new stuff. That’s kind of an interesting experiment. I like watching it all play out even though, well, their brand trumps my brand and I have to work harder at establishing my brand. Read more
I saw this in an author post somewhere on the ’net:
Thinking isn’t writing.
Outlining isn’t writing.
Research isn’t writing.
Rewriting isn’t writing.
Putting pen to paper is writing.
Really. Read more
A fan I tweet with regularly told me my books mess with her head and take her places she doesn’t want to go, but she goes there anyway.
I regularly hear the arguments that reading fiction can teach you empathy or give you a peek into someone else’s world. In other words, fiction is good for you. Like eating your vegetables is good for you. Read more
Yesterday I had surgery for the first time ever (not counting wisdom teeth). It was elective and went well, so everything’s fine.
Anyway. I very rarely go out. I’m a serious hermit. When I do go out, I avoid people like the plague. I don’t care to be touched or talked at by total strangers. I’m very conscious and protective of my personal space. But.
I watch. Read more
I wrote on this topic two months ago.
I still don’t know what to do, but I’m losing my patience because I discovered that writers of some of the stuff that’s really bad are giving writing advice. Oy. Stop it. You’re not qualified to give writing advice. Really.1
In light of this post and this comment, Read more
For a ticket to a fast and hawt ride on the rollercoaster of angst and love, the line starts here:
And its first review!
My son said this to me a couple of months ago and I’ve been guilting over it ever since.
Well, it’s because I’m stressed. My work life kind of exploded some time last summer when I decided to escape the (dying) industry I’d been in for the previous seven years in favor of the formatting work that was falling on top of me. I kept thinking I could do less work for more money and spend time with my kids, but … That’s not the way it worked out.
Is it ever? Read more
For whatever reason, NetGalley has decided to start putting tighter restrictions implemented publishers’ tightening of restrictions on who gets free eARCs (electronic Advanced Reader Copies).
So what.
Here’s the thing: NetGalley charges what is, to me, a micropress, an astronomical amount of money to give away books. That’s right: I would be paying to give my product to people in exchange for … very little in the way of a quantifiable return.
NetGalley is not in business to lose money. It’s in business to make money by providing a publishers’ colony. However publishers decide to define their ROI (return on investment) is how NetGalley’s going to be bringing in the money.
Follow the money.
When all other explanations fail, just follow the money.
I totally don’t blame Scalzi for being sick of the arguments for self/digital publishing. I self/digital publish and I’m sick of the evangelizing, too. (Because most of the arguments are just shitty logic.)
HOWEVER.
There’s another side of the Electronic Publishing BINGO card: Printgasm BINGO, for those who believe that reading ebooks is just one step away from civilization sliding back into the primordial ooze.
![“Printgasm” BINGO card. Text: “B1: I can dog-ear the pages. B2 [in various colors]: I can highlight passages in books in color. B3: I can write margin notes in a book. B4: I can put a Post-It note in a book. B5: I can use pretty bookmarks. I1: I like the feel of a book. I2: I like the smell of a book. I3: Books are prettier than electronic files. I4: I can show off the cover to strangers. I5: I can look at books on shelves. N1: I can read books in the bookstore while I drink my coffee. N2: You’ll pry my print books from my cold, dead hands! N3: I’ve never read an ebook, but I hate them. Nya nya nya. HATE! N4: I like to see the books in my TBR stack. N5: I don’t need a machine to read books. G1: Books keep printers employed. G2: I can buy books used. G3: I can re-sell my books. G4: I can lend a book. G5: Books don’t have DRM. O1: I can burn a book for emergency fuel. O2: I can take a book to the beach. O3: I can use pages for emergency toilet paper. O4: I can read a book in the bathtub. O5: Books won’t break if dropped or sat on.](https://moriahjovan.com/talesofdunham/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/20110321_bingocard-scaled.jpg)
The last year or so (by my completely unscientific method of measuring time, which is to say, “It feels like a year, what, it was only a week, it wasn’t a year? It felt like a year … ”), there have been increasing conversations across Romancelandia about whether writers (especially those writers who are not Nora Roberts) should review books and give them less-than-glowing reviews.
It’s coming to a head now.
Eh, I don’t really care about reviewing books from Romancelandia. There are A LOT of books and A LOT of romance readers, and so other people do that just fine. More to the point, I don’t really care to review, because some books seriously just piss me off and then my head would explode online and that’s always a mess to clean up. Actually, the only books I really want to write about are the ones that piss me off, and so that would skew my blog the other way, making me look like a recidivist toxic bitch.
Oh. Wait …
Anyway, I’ve reviewed some books. I’ve pretty much stopped reviewing books, except for a notation here and there on my Reading List. I’m on the fence about the “be nice and also it could wreck your career” versus “I’m a reader too and I have a right to review honestly and fuck you if you don’t like what I say, especially if I paid money for your book and spent time I could’ve been making money to read it.” I just hate feeling taken advantage of by a bad book, in both money and time.
All that said, I do have my foot in one lit world (Mormon lit) that’s so small that if nobody reviewed anything, nobody would get reviewed at all. And that’s a shame. Because some of the stuff I’ve been reading, put out by the major Mormon publishers, is really bad. And the stuff that’s really good (i.e., brilliant, e.g., Bound on Earth by Angela Hallstrom) gets lost in the shuffle because a) people who want to read good stuff will assume it’s bad and b) people have been reading schlock so long they don’t know what’s good.
But you know, from the cradle, we’re trained to be nice. (Clearly, most of that didn’t take with me.) Our cultural heritage is Nice. And so what does Nice get you? Crap work because nobody wants to say, “This is crap work. This is why it’s crap. Everybody, take note. Don’t write like this.”
Actually, what I want to say is, “This was vetted by a Gatekeeper who asked money for it, and I spent that money and I spent the time based on the fact that it was vetted by a Gatekeeper, and now I have to wonder what the Gatekeeper thinks is good writing, because this ain’t it.” Our market is flooded with (sub)mediocre writing, and it distresses me. I’d rather have nothing than most of what passes for good in our market. Are we so starved for “clean” content that we’ll take anything we can get and call it good?1
Now, after reading Shelah Books It lit blog, I think I may have to gather all my little courages together and review the Mormon lit I read, because she has said, in language I can grok (i.e., cranky), what I’ve been thinking all along.
And I can’t be the only one.
______________________________
1. Please note: I did not give the name of this book because I felt so bad about about what I had to say. In the comments, an anonymous poster came after my book with the same complaints. Oh, I don’t care if she doesn’t like my book; a lot of people won’t. What I care about is that she felt she had to post anonymously. Because in our culture, when you can’t be Nice, you be Anonymous.
If I hear/see that one more time, I’ll puke in my wastebasket.
What bullshit is this? Who came up with this? Who thought this was a good idea? Oh, Churchill? Right, him. The guy who was leading the charge in World War II before Pearl Harbor was a glimmer in our tears. He gets a pass.
You could come back at me and say:
“Changing your tactic isn’t giving up.” That’s true.
“Retreating now to fight another day isn’t giving up.” That’s true, too.
But maybe, if you are stacking up too many “nevers” to modify your “give up,” you should probably rethink your goal or at least think about it in realistic terms. Without context, platitudes and proverbs mean less than nothing.
Sometimes, giving up is simply breaking out of a jail you built for yourself.
Get a professional editor.
Period.
No excuse.
I don’t care how good your beta readers and critique partners are.
I don’t care if you’re a traditionally published midlist author going out on your own.
Get a professional editor.
You want to self-publish? Put in the time and the effort and the money, just like a big publisher would. This is a business and you are creating a product to sell to people. Give them a good product.
That product begins with a professional editor.
There’s a 