…but plenty of tears.
[2025-07-08: Video no longer available; that’ll teach me not to note what it was in the link.]
Whatever else I believe, my faith in man’s basic goodness remains.
Miscellaneous
Where I put my brain
KeyNote (not the Mac thingie). Freeware.
Unfortunately for MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE (because it’s all about me), this application is A) not undergoing development and B) not a portable (stand-alone) application.
Still trying to figure out how to get B without A. Poor guy went radio silent in 2005. I’m tempted to e-mail him, but I don’t want to impose.
Yadabytes Passwords. Freeware.
Fortunately for MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE (because it’s all about me), this application is a portable (stand-alone) application.
If you scroll down and see Yadabytes Notes, I did try this in lieu of KeyNote because it’s a stand-alone portable application, but I wasn’t impressed.
Multi-Timer Ultimate. Shareware.
Uhhhh…I have v1.27, which is super-easy and not this hard on the eyeballs, so I can’t vouch for THIS version. Unfortunately for YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU, I can’t find the earlier, easier version I have and I’m not sure it’d be kosher for me to let you download mine from here. Maybe JumboTimer would be simpler.
Oz never did give nuthin’ to the tin man
that he didn’t already have.
This is one of my favorite sentences and has been since I was a child. When I was a child, I didn’t quite understand it (and some days I think I still don’t), but it resonated with me deeply until I was old enough to at least grasp the intellectual concept. (Some of the best things I’ve ever read/heard come from a subconscious wisdom that it took chemical enhancement to drag kicking and screaming into the light, but what the hell, right?)
I still draw on it for strength and encouragement fairly often, at least once a week. I don’t have it posted anywhere; I don’t need to.
Go ahead. Be brave. Pony up with your guiding maxims.
Creating e-books: Gather your “materials”
I want to make something very clear. What I’m doing is giving you the tools to create e-books from scratch with very little money and not a lot of automation. There’s a reason for this: When you learn it this way, you learn principles you can carry with you to other projects. If you’re expecting oh golly gee whiz bang flashy stuff, this ain’t it. It’s just the nitty gritty. Now, it is a time suck, but hopefully, if you’re inclined toward DIY and you want to know how things work, you might have fun. In fact, I want you to have fun.
I. PRELIMINARIES
For the purposes of this series, I’m going to demonstrate using a short companion vignette to The Proviso called “July 14, 2001.”
A. COVER ART AND ANY GLYPHS
I’ve assumed you’ve formatted your cover art for use on a 6″ x 9″ trade paperback. At 300 dpi (as per Lightning Source’s specifications), that’s 1800 x 2700 pixels. I suggest you do everything to Lightning Source’s specifications because if you eventually want to go into paper, you will be used to them.
I have several different sizes and formats of the cover art for The Proviso for many different purposes. One includes a grayscale .png file for the IMP format that is 290 x 435 because that’s the most comfortable size my eBookWise device allows. Most of the software we’ll be using will allow you to use your biggest size and will re-size it for you.
If you use glyphs (e.g., a publisher or imprint logo), they should be simple, small, grayscale, and in the .png format.
B. FRONT MATTER
1. Title Page
2. Copyright notices
3. Table of Contents (if the work is long enough).
4. Any acknowledgments or specialty items necessary for understanding the story (e.g., family tree, maps, provisos [heh]).
C. TEXT
D. BACK MATTER
.
.
II. PREPARE YOUR TEXT
I’m going to assume you’re working from a Word document. You should work from your final manuscript (with minimal or no styles applied). Do not work from your typeset-with-styles document that you will use for your PDF format.
A. SELECT “Save As…” THEN CHOOSE “web page (.htm; .html).”
B. OPEN THE HTML DOCUMENT YOU JUST SAVED USING WORDPAD OR NOTEPAD.
C. STRIP ALL OF WORD’S MARKUP.
There will be scads of lines of it at the top and some along the bottom. Take it all out. You should have nothing left except straight text with <p></p> tags.
D. BUILD THE SKELETON OF THE HTML FILE:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN”>
<html>
<head>
<title>…</title>
<style type=“text/css”>
INSERT YOUR CSS STYLE SHEET HERE
OR
LINK TO YOUR CSS STYLE SHEET HERE
</style>
</head>
<body>
INSERT YOUR CLEANLY MARKED-UP TEXT HERE
</body>
</html>
E. BUILD YOUR CSS (CASCADING STYLE SHEET).
You should have learned how to do this elsewhere.
NOTE: In my opinion, these are the things you should include in your styles:
1. Left AND right justify your text.
2. Put a fraction of a line space between each paragraph if you wish. In e-book reading, I find this desirable, but others may disagree.
3. Indent your paragraphs. I find this desirable no matter what.
4. Make sure your left and right margins don’t go to the absolute edge of the device’s screen.
F. MAKE IT PRETTY.
You don’t have to, but I think it means something to the reader, which is that you care. You care about your work and you care about the reader. You care about how the reader sees your work. They may not notice or they may, but you will know you did everything you could as professionally as you could.
So if this is important to you, do it. Use the HTML entity or ISO Latin-1 code for curly quotes and apostrophes, accented letters, em dashes instead of double hyphens. Find-and-replace will automate the process somewhat. Always use the ASCII codes instead of depending on the visual in WordPad; it won’t translate to Notepad if you care to use that as your editor. For an ellipses, use 3 periods with spaces between them. Do not use the ASCII or 3 periods run together. (You should probably just get into the habit of doing this in your manuscript.)
Left double quote: “
Right double quote: ”
Left single quote: ‘
Right single quote (apostrophe): ’
Em dash: —
G. CHECK AND DOUBLE CHECK YOUR ITALICS AND BOLDS.
Find any other specialty tags you used (e.g., double underline, strikethrough, etc.).
H. ADD IN YOUR FRONT MATTER AND BACK MATTER.
Mark it up as you wish to make it pretty, too.
I. HAVE FUN.
Experiment. Try different things to make it as pleasing to your eye as possible. It won’t be possible for you to make it pleasing to everyone, but have fun in the trying.
.
.
III. REFINE
A. PAGINATE
I say that tongue-in-cheek because, as I’ve already discussed, there is no such thing as a page in an e-book. But for the purposes of this discussion, there is such a thing as front matter breaks, chapter breaks, and back matter breaks and I firmly believe they need to be separated and not run together.
You’ll need this tag:
<p style=“page-break-before: always”>
Live it, learn it, love it.
B. BUILD YOUR TABLE OF CONTENTS
If you have a novella or short story, don’t worry about this. If you have a doorstopper, do this. Unquestionably.
You’ll need these tags:
table: <a href=“#MARKER NAME”></a>
reference: <a name=“MARKER NAME”></a>
C. INSERT HEADERS AND FOOTERS.
If your device/reading software needs that done manually. My eBookWise does and I like it.
You’ll need these tags:
<!– HEADER –>
<header>
<table border=“0” width=“100%”>
<tr>
<td align=“left”>TITLE</td>
<td align=“right”>AUTHOR</td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr>
</header>
<!– FOOTER –>
<footer>
<table border=“0” width=“100%”>
<hr>
<tr>
<td align=“center”>PUBLISHER</td>
</tr>
</table>
</footer>
IV. CHECK IT OVER
What you should have when you’re finished is a cleanly marked-up HTML document ready to put through the eBook Publisher to create an IMP file (OEB container). Open it up in your browser. Look for formatting mistakes.
We’re going to start with the IMP (eBook Publisher) because this program has a compiler that will catch a lot of your markup errors and will help you create an even cleaner HTML document for the construction of the rest of your formats.
Faith and hope and elbow grease
I’m a permablogger over at Publishing Renaissance (for those of you who don’t know). I’m alternating Thursdays, starting January 1 (yeah, I know, it was 2 days ago). And it’s so cool to be kicking off Publishing Renaissance’s year.
Lately, I’ve been around some blogs that are extraordinarily kinda negative and I notice it brings my production down, in terms of writing the next books in the Dunham series, in terms of the projects B10 Mediaworx has on the table right now (I don’t have enough fingers to count), in terms of my own blogging, in terms of doing what writers are supposed to do once their books are published, in terms of the DDJ, and most importantly, in terms of how I treat my Tax Deductions and Dude. I know I shouldn’t allow myself to be that influenced by negativity that it starts trickling down to my fandamily, but I am.
I’ve never been a positive-thinker type of person, but Dude is and he’s rubbed off on me. I’m also not one of those “think it into existence” people, either. It’s just that I’ve noticed that the more productive I get the more positive I get; the more I hang around negativity, the less productive I get. This isn’t a good situation. I have too many interesting things to do to mess around with things that don’t advance my goals.
One of the interesting things I’m into is, as you know, independent publishing. While I do point out what I feel are the weaknesses of traditional publishing (and I’ll admit to a certain level of frustration and bitterness—I’m only human), I do that to highlight the fact that one can be in charge of one’s own destiny—
—and it’s an incredible feeling, let me tell you.
There are “vanity press” naysayers and name-callers and compulsive “helpers” who aren’t really helping. The fact that they quite often don’t differentiate between “vanity” and “POD” and “self” publishing is, I think, a function of insufficient research or a measure of insulation from the querying masses or resentment for taking a “shortcut” and bypassing the “system.” Depending on the day, that might hurt my feelings, but I keep on keeping on.
Mostly what keeps me going is when I look at the pile of projects that have been brought to us (B10 Mediaworx) that are incredible and fantastic. To know we might have a role in bringing such incredible and fantastic things to the public—things that have never been done before and we would never have conceived of on our own—because I took my destiny in my own hands is…
I have no words to describe it.
We might fail. I might fail.
And that’s okay.
But I have to make the effort, cut through the bullshit, and go forward with courage and optimism. Maybe, just maybe, I can offer someone else a hand up or a piece of information they needed or some encouragement along the way.
Happy new year, pass the bleach
Okay, so I’m a schmuck who makes New Year’s resolutions. Kinda sorta. Maybe. It depends.
This is how it goes.
On New Year’s Day, I take down the Christmas tree, throw a sheet over it and stick it in the coat closet. In my world (and it took me 6 years to bring Dude around to it, although he won’t ever completely be around to it), you decorate a Christmas tree once about every ten years. And only once.
Next: Taxes. This means bookkeeping.
If I’ve been a good girl all year, this will only take me 2 or 3 days. If I haven’t, well … a week. It involves the following:
- Paring files.
- Sorting receipts.
- Tossing, shredding, burning.
- And other activities indicative of office-spring-cleaning.
What do I end up with? A clean office, clean files, and my cursor on the TurboTax SEND button the minute Dude’s W-2 hits our mailbox.
- Next: Hard drives.
- Next: Storage room.
- Next: Projects A, B, and C
Get the drift?
I might not get all of this done, but I like to spend the new year cleaning out the past year and preparing for the new one. I simply cannot make any New Year’s resolutions until I burn through the past, look to the future, and figure out where I need to go next—
—which means I usually end up making my New Year’s resolutions on or about November 12.
Creating e-books: The easy way
I AM AGAINST DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT (DRM). ANY VENDOR I RECOMMEND WILL SHARE THIS STANCE AND ANY INSTRUCTIONS I GIVE WILL IGNORE ANY POSSIBILITY FOR ENCRYPTION. IF YOU WANT TO LOCK UP YOUR WORK, FIGURE IT OUT YOURSELF.
In my last episode, I instructed you to go learn (X)HTML/CSS. I was gently taken to task for that with the point, “writers shouldn’t have to learn code.” While I am of the opinion that for some writers, this is not only true, but that they should be kept from any computer interaction whatsoever, I’m afraid it’s just not realistic in the long run. You will learn something, even if it’s only the paragraph tags and all of it will be useful to you at some point.
Yes, you can use blogger.com or wordpress.com or any other sign-in platform for your blogging.
Yes, you can use Word and PrimoPDF to set type and distribute your work as a free PDF.
If you want to:
- offer more than one file format (PDF) and/or
- charge for your work
you’re going to have to either pay someone to do it for you or learn how to do it yourself.
There are quite a few places that will help you with #A.
FEEDBOOKS. As far as I can tell, if you use this service, you must offer your work for free. If this is not acceptable to you, just don’t use their service. (And if this isn’t true, let me know because I scoured the site and couldn’t find any “payment” type information.) Also, you must manually build your book. Now, this has its pros and cons. The con is that it takes a while. The pro is that you can make it look purty with a little care and attention without having to learn much (if any) (X)HTML/CSS.
BOOKWORM. This is a peculiar service in that you may upload your own book, but the only format you get is the EPUB format. It is also more for reading than publishing (as far as I can tell; more information on this is welcome).
SMASHWORDS. This is the Q-DOS of e-book building/formatting. It’s very quick. And yeah, sometimes it’s dirty, especially if you don’t format your Word document correctly (as in, according to standard word processing practices and to Smashwords’s style guide). That’s the con. The pro is it’s fast and you can charge for your work.
I’m making several assumptions here. The FIRST assumption is that you want your book to be in as many electronic formats as possible. The SECOND assumption is that you want to have those formats available to you on your own hard drive for dissemination as you please. The THIRD assumption is that you want your work to have widespread visibility across the interwebz. The FOURTH assumption is that you might want to get paid for your work.
So let’s talk about Smashwords.
I heard about Smashwords from Eugene Woodbury quite a while back, who used it for his novel Path of Dreams, but I dismissed it because I thought the work had to be offered free. Then Zoe Winters used it for her free novella “Kept.” Okay. But then Aaron Ross Powell used it to offer his draft of The Hole in more formats than Kindle right after I bitched about it. Then RJ Keller used it to offer Waiting for Spring, and that’s when I had the V-8 moment.
I figured, well, what the hell, I’ll try this thing. So I took a vignette from The Proviso’s world (not in the book) called “25 to Life” and decided to put it on Smashwords.
[07/15/2025: At the time of cleaning this post up, I can’t retrieve “25 to Life” from the archive where I put it, so instead, I made my story from Monsters & Mormons, “Allow Me to Introduce Myself” available for free to demonstrate.]
CAVEAT: “25 to Life” did not call for fancy formatting like The Proviso does. The Proviso has blog posts, e-mails, news clippings, court transcripts, social services records, a wedding announcement, and other specialized formatting that required different fonts, spacing, and margins to make those items look good. If you have something like that, this will not work for you.
ASSUMPTION 1. That you want your book to be in as many electronic formats as possible.
They have this nifty little API they call the “MeatGrinder.” It will turn a plain, properly formatted Word document into any one or more of the following digital formats:
“Allow Me to Introduce Myself”
uploaded 07/15/2025 for demonstration purposes
Now you can read “25 to Life” here for free.
uploaded 07/15/2025 for demonstration purposes
Now you can read “25 to Life” here for free.
| Online Reading (HTML) | |
| MOBI (Kindle) | |
| EPUB (open industry format, good for Stanza reader, others) | |
| PDF (good for highly formatted books, or for home printing) | |
| LRF (for Sony Reader) | |
| PDB (Palm Doc, for Palm reading devices) | |
| TXT (plain text: flexible, but lacks much formatting) | |
As you can see, that’s a lot of variation. I got both The Hole and Waiting for Spring in the RTF format, as that was the easiest for me to convert to my eBookWise reader. Powell asked for $2.99 and Keller offered hers for “you set the price.”
ASSUMPTION 2. That you want to have those formats available to you on your own hard drive for dissemination as you please.
I don’t even know if you have to buy it yourself (if you set a price) to download which formats you want to offer from your own site or elsewhere, but even if you do have to, you got off cheap in both time and money.
Don’t be an ass. Be courteous and leave it up on Smashwords. They did the work for you.
You will not be able to get a straight HTML document to download and then tweak to other formats, which is good.
ASSUMPTION 3. That you want your work to have widespread visibility across the interwebz.
The founder of Smashwords, Mark Coker, says: “Our mission is to give every author a chance to find their audience.”
Smashwords is gradually gaining in name recognition and usage. Augment your presence on Smashwords with placement of your work elsewhere on the ’net. It benefits you and Smashwords (you know, the people who did the work for you).
ASSUMPTION 4. You might want to get paid for your work.
There are several payment options at Smashwords, which I’ve addressed. In my first “creating ebooks” post, commenter and indie author champion Morris Rosenthal told me about e-junkie.com, which is a payment portal for downloads. He’s had quite a bit of success with this method, though I can’t vouch for it at this time (although I do intend to check it out).
However, as far as I know, Smashwords is the only independent e-publishing vendor that offers an API process AND a payment portal and quite frankly, there’s just nothing else that beats that, even if you do have to sacrifice a little formatting.
So after having put “25 to Life” up on Smashwords, used their API, seen their output, what do I think?
The HTML and
Javaversions (the ones that you read on your computer) are very pretty and you can adjust fonts, colors, and sizes as you like.The plain TXT ones are, well, plain text. It says “may lack some formatting,” but if you know anything about plain text, you know that means no formatting.
The EPUB (use with Stanza for iPhone/iTouch, Adobe Digital Editions) format doesn’t seem to have centered anything, but I can live with that.
The LRF (Sony) and PDB (Palm) didn’t pick up the italics, which is something I can’t live with, but it’s being worked on right now (no promises!).
The PDF looked like a manuscript because, well, it comes from a plain Word document, so you know that going in.
The MOBI/PRC (Kindle, MobiPocket) looked great.
The RTF is obviously going to look just like a Word document, and it’s my go-to for conversion to IMP (eBookWise), so I don’t care how it looks.
If you follow the Smashwords style guide to the letter, you’ll have a slew of decent-looking e-books (including EPUB!) as defined by my last post on “the page” and you’ll get them in about 3 minutes, along with a payment portal.
Smashwords is an elegant little API, and it’s still in beta testing. I can’t wait to see what it’ll be at full force.
Officially on holiday
I have a boatload of work to do on the damned day job (filthy lucre!!!) and I have 23 people coming for Christmas Eve (which wouldn’t actually mean much unless you saw my house) and Tax Deduction #1 is home on Christmas break (yay) and I want to spend some time reading and writing (and possibly sewing). I’ll be back Saturday or Sunday or thereabouts. Thought I’d leave you with a pic of what a friend called my “dreidel tree,” which lives in my office in November and December.
Creating e-books
Note: I cross-posted this on Publishing Renaissance on December 24, 2008.
I’ve been thinking about offering a quick’n’dirty series on how to create various ebook formats, wondering if independent publishers (or even micro- and small presses) know how to disseminate their wares effectively in electronic format. I know PDF is the fallback position and while I have a love/hate relationship with PDF (formatting, yay! reading on computer, boo! hiss!), most people who don’t have an ebook reading device pretty much are stuck with the computer.
(This is one reason I have issues with places like Lulu, iUniverse, AuthorHouse, etc. Their electronic delivery is exclusively PDF. I don’t know if the authors have the option to create other formats or even if they’re inclined to do so, but I urge those indies who choose such providers to check it out and diversify.)
SmashWords has a grinder program that allows you to upload your document and then spits out various electronic incarnations of it, but it has formatting issues, which is to say, some it ain’t pretty especially if you have a not-very-well-formatted RTF document to begin with. Oh well and get over it. They do a marvelous job with what they get and it’s a few hundred steps in the right direction—not to mention the fact that once you get it on your ebook reading device, it probably won’t make you any difference.
But in case you do want to know how it’s done (or, more properly, how we did it, properly or not), what tools we used, why—and we invite others to correct us on more efficient ways to do it (that doesn’t involve Book Designer, thanks)—here’s the first and most important thing you have to do:
Learn XHTML and CSS. Really.
O’Reilly at Tools of Change is pushing for all formats to be based on XML, but if you’re reading this post, this is probably a DIY project and XHTML is, IMO, easier to learn. You will need this for every format you might want to offer (except PDB [Palm] and as an ebook application [iApp] to be sold in the iTunes store).
After that, it’s all tweaks and about 6 different pieces of (almost free) software.
Go on now and learn XHTML and CSS. I’m not going to post tutorials on that when others have done it better than I.
Shit or get off the pot
So around the bloggernacle I go about twice a week. I don’t spend too much time there because everybody discusses the same things over and over and over again and it’s wearying. The feminists fondle the patriarchy of the church like a worry doll; the academes throw around their $100 words and concepts that I don’t understand (click away! click away!); the more-righteous-than-Mojo bewail the crumbling standards in the church and how wicked the world is; the artistes ask, “Where are our Miltons and Shakespeares?”
Yawn and no big.
But then there are the people with way too much time on their hands who come up with nifty ideas that they want Someone Else to (help) implement Right Now and then wail and moan that these ideas haven’t come to fruition and what is wrong with You All?
Endlessly.
This isn’t an LDS blog phenomenon, so don’t think I’m picking on my own again. I see it in every sector of the web I visit, in the smaller niche communities where, apparently, because we’re “all in this together,” we’re all supposed to roll with the Next Great Idea because of some artificial construct of solidarity.
And every time I see the same permabloggers on every blog they contribute to express their desire for the same thing they expressed elsewhere, with the same plaintive whiny tone, I just want to say, “Do it your owndamnself.”
I see all sorts of ideas and requests for programs and calls to change, but the work product is pretty much 50,000 words of “Why won’t you support Meeeeeeeeeeeeee and my Great Ideeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee????” spread across about 14 blogs, mired in clarifications and addenda and backpeddling.
Oh, and speaking of backpeddling. When I began the process of actually implementing a (better, I thought) version of one of these ideas and shared it with one of the terminal whiners, the response was: “Yeah, good luck with that” with the internet equivalent of a sneer and no offer of help—for an idea that was GREAT! until it A) morphed out of this person’s comfort zone and B) started to require thought and action and money.
This happened to a friend of mine, too, in an interwebz community I inhabit, but she doesn’t. However, she’s good at looking at ideas and finding ways to monetize them. So she contacted the person with the Great Idea and the minute it involved A) work and B) money, the person promptly ignored her.
Eh, fuck ’em and the ideas they rode in on.
I’m not taking any of it seriously anymore until I see some evidence that it’s more than simply masturbating to Idea PrØn.
Publishing Renaissance
It’s my day to blog over at Publishing Renaissance, a group blog by independent authors exploring the industry, writing, publishing, and the business of publishing. C’mon over!
The rejection that makes me smile
circa 1996
Technology: the down side
Computer issues all over the place yesterday and today, folks. For those of you who emailed me, I got it, but just haven’t had a chance to reply yet. But I will!
There’s a moral in this somewhere…
Tax Deduction #2: Mama, after I eat my lunch, may I have candy?
Me: Yes.
TD#2 eats lunch. Carefully chooses a piece out of his bag of Halloween candy. Oh, goodie. Chewy Fireballs.
Me: Are you sure about this?
TD#2: Uh huh.
Chomp. Big eyes. Tears. Wail.
TD#2: Mama, tongue!
Me: Yeah, it’s hot, hunh? That’s cinnamon.
TD#2: Simmum for toas’.
Me: For candy, too. Want me to throw that away?
TD#2: No.
Chomp. Big eyes. Tears. Wail.
TD#2: Mama, hurts mouf!
Me: Yeah, I know. Are you sure you don’t want me to throw that away? Mama doesn’t like them, either.
TD#2: No.
Chomp. Big eyes. Tears. Wail.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
No, I want the pink-fur handcuffs, Officer.
Cutting in and out
And sorry for the sporadic posting, folks. We’re up to our eyeballs in last-minute publishing-type stuff, getting reading to put The Proviso up for public consumption on Friday. Yes. Friday. I can hear your credit cards trembling as I type. I promise I’ll be more regular once that’s done.
In which fashion pimps for pedophiles
Yo, New York. Milan. Bentonville.
I’m tired of having to tart my 5-year-old FEMALE Tax Deduction up like a 63rd & Prospect streetwalker. There’s this thing called a waist. There’s this other thing called a waistBAND. The waistBAND should come up all the way to the waist.
A) I do not have the time nor inclination nor money to sew my TD’s jeans. I know how. Sorta. They’d look homemade and I don’t want my TD to come home crying because she got laughed at about her homemade jeans.
B) It’s not like I don’t want her to be fashionable. I just don’t want her to be Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears at 5 or until she can pay for her own damned clothes and the laundering thereof.
C) This is not out of some outraged sense of modesty or affront to church standards, either. She’s FIVE YEARS OLD. She’s a target just by being five. I spose the gender doesn’t matter much these days.
D) I’m not even saying get rid of low-rise, but SHIT! Give me an alternative, eh? You give me boot-cut and straight-leg and bells, but you don’t give me a choice on rise?
E) If she does want to tart up like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears in the future, I could deal with it better if I could point my nightmarishly teenager-girl-ish Tax Deduction to her contemporaries who have a waistBAND touching their actual WAIST and tell her where she needs to shop. And, oh, the thrift stores are no better because they’re backing up on the last 5 (that I know of) years of other little tax deductions who outgrew their 4- and 5-year-old skin-tight, low-rise skank makers.
Every time I go clothes shopping for this kid I get pissed off about this and then I forget about it–right up to the point I have to take her shopping again. I can find modest blouses, no problem. It’s the jeans and khakis that are giving me fits. Or not. If anybody has a source for high-rise jeans/khakis online, I’ll take it.
When does a blog stop being yours?
In romance [well, in other genres also? I don’t know], sometimes authors strike such a chord with readers that the characters the author created seem to belong to the readers (aka fans). When an author does something bad to one of her characters, much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues. Well, you know, you write romance, you know that there needs to be a happily ever after (HEA) or at least a happily for now (HFN) ending. (We will parse the romance “formula” later.)
Well, I can see why there’d be some legitimate reason for distress here. The author created these worlds and people and they belong to her, true, but the public pays to read about them. Do they have an expectation to get the story they want/expect/hope for or not? Hell, I don’t know. I’m going to write my Imaginary Friends the way my Imaginary Friends tell me to. [Uhm, I’m independent. I can do that.] But I have to expect that some people are going to cry foul if I just completely make one of them [insert horribleness here].
But now over at one of my must-stops for blog cruising, Dear Author, apparently the blog has ceased belonging to the person who built it, maintains it, and pays for it—
Do you not think that unless you know the full story before you judge?
Welll … I do and I don’t. She presented her side of the story in the article, and I didn’t buy it. Yes, it’s possible they left stuff out. It’s possible she spent hours making a passionate case and the reporter discarded all of that and went for the killer angle.
But to say you can’t have a thought or a knee-jerk reaction or an opinion without knowing every detail of everyone’s side of the story does seem a bit much to me. To me, there’s is very little that could fully justify this woman’s decision. That might not be the case for everyone. I admit that, having been the child of a non-custodial mother, my feelings on this may be sharper than others’s (and my Mom was always in touch, I saw her regularly, all of that, but nothing ever fully takes away the feeling that you needed your Mom and she wasn’t there, for whatever reason.) It may be partly the fact that I am a mother and cannot fathom any force on this planet that would induce me to leave my children like that.
Women leave their families every day, but I think there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way, and I think this woman simply did it the wrong way.
Women who leave their children are judged much more harshly than men who do the same – yet women do it much more rarely, and usually with a lot more compulsion. I would look at this and say, it must have been something truly extraordinary that made her do this. Maybe her reasons still wouldn’t pass the moral bar, but peering at someone else’s family with a microscope is something I believe we shouldn’t do unless we’re involved.
And that is true, to some extent. Yes, they are judged more harshly then men by some. Not by me. When a friend of mine left his pregnant wife (he “didn’t think he wanted to be married after all”) he ceased being my friend. Point blank. I told him exactly what I thought of him and his actions and that was it.
Perhaps it’s cyncial of me. But I just can’t look at this woman and be as sympathetic as you can. You say it must have been something extraordinary; I say it’s possible, but it feels more like she just wasn’t happy and met some guy online and decided to run off and be with him. What sort of “absive husband” who doesn’t let his wife have access to a vehicle or money (yet she was apparently able to clear out their savings), let her go on solo vacations to England after he’s found evidence she’s been having online affairs? Why divorce through this “special process” by which you say you can’t find the other person if they’ve been sending emails, cards, and gifts?
I simply look at the situation and think, that child has some legitimate greivances, and of all the parties involved, she’s the one I’m inclined to believe.
But you have made a salient point, I think. I can’t agree with it, but I do think it’s valid.
—which is a far different matter from creating books that you then persuade the public to buy who then eats them up and feeds your bank account.
I’m watching this train wreck of a thread and wondering: Why, if people don’t like a thread, a blog, don’t they simply stop reading? This isn’t Usenet, people (darn it). It’s Jane’s blog. She can post what she wants to and expect reasonably that people will remember that fact—without having to confront people who feel betrayed that what she said in her own house didn’t exactly fulfill their reading expectations that day. The sense of entitlement running through the thread is kind of … interesting.
Yo, all you gotta do is not go there. Or not read. Or sumpin. When did Jane’s blog become yours?
Abolish marriage
“Marriage” is an ancient artificial construct that, in modern US society with no property rights attached to the female (i.e., dowry), has no real place.
As I said on chosha’s blog A Little East of Reality, what’s going on with California’s Prop 8 and the LDS church’s involvement with that, is one of defining the term. What needs to happen is that the underpinning law defining the term needs to change and then let linguistic evolution take over as to what is and is not marriage.
Here’s what needs to happen:
You and your intended(s) go to a lawyer and draw up a contract (people already to this for prenuptial agreements). You specify things like kids, power of attorney, healthcare decisionmaking, who does and does not have access to your healthcare information (thank you, HIPAA), and other things that heterosexual couples just…get…legally because they’re married as defined by law. In this case, the contract becomes the law. The lawyer files it with the court (like a divorce decree, only it’d be called something else like, oh, a companionship contract), the state collects its data, and everybody’s good to go.
If you and your intended(s) then want to go to your local ecclesiastical entity (whatever it is) and have a rite performed, you do that. Or don’t, if you don’t want to.
Or…do none of the above and after X number of years, you’ve converted from cohabitating to common-law “marriage” and that could apply to whatever living arrangement you have.
Here’s the thing. You change the labels and the populace will decide what marriage is based on their vocabulary.
Since I’m a libertarian, I have no investment in regulating what people do with their bodies as long as it doesn’t endanger me and mine.
I also have no investment in helping the church attempt to define “marriage” in California (although thankfully I haven’t been asked because then I’d be forced to be rude) because marriage has historically been about money and alliances.
What I find hypocritical is that the people who are most invested in re-defining marriage to include same-sex couples then turn around and vehemently protest polyamorous unions, which should have the same protections under whatever law gets passed.
William Saletan goes to great lengths to define why this should not be allowed and I find that simply ridiculous. Two people know what they’re doing, but three or more don’t? Let’s protect you from yourselves!
Here’s the answer. The number isn’t two. It’s one. You commit to one person, and that person commits wholly to you. Second, the number isn’t arbitrary. It’s based on human nature. Specifically, on jealousy.
Ah, okay. There’s a good argument.
In an excellent Weekly Standard article against gay marriage and polygamy, Stanley Kurtz of the Hudson Institute discusses several recent polygamous unions. In one case, “two wives agreed to allow their husbands to establish a public and steady sexual relationship.” Unfortunately, “one of the wives remains uncomfortable with this arrangement,” so “the story ends with at least the prospect of one marriage breaking up.” In another case, “two bisexual-leaning men meet a woman and create a threesome that produces two children, one by each man.” Same result: “the trio’s eventual breakup.”
Let’s protect the women and children!
Then he resorts to quoting the Bible, so he loses credibility with me right there.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: What’s good for the homosexual goose is good for the polyamorous gander and I defy any same-sex couple to give me a decent argument why that isn’t so…
…but that’s not my main point. My main point is this: You make it a civil contract between consenting adults, then let society’s usage of the word “marriage” define the word “marriage.”
The cold-blooded murder of the English tongue
I am resigned, although I have yet to make the official transition.
I have finally, irrevocably, inexorably decided that I cannot stem the tide of the use of “to raise” in reference to human beings. Much like the law of chastity, the use of “to rear” in reference to humans versus the use of “to raise” in reference to animals was beaten into my head from an early age and, well…
…I give up.
But I swear, they’ll have to waterboard me before I’ll give into “alright.”