No.

Moriah

This popped up in my feed today:

Kurt Vonnegut quote. Text: “Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.”

“No,” I said, immediately and out loud.

I remember by whom, when, where, and why I was earnestly exhorted to “be soft. Be soft. Be soft.”

His name was Joe, a much-older friend/teacher. It was a Monday in November and it was dark and raining and I was 18. I was sitting in his car in the parking lot of Merrill Hall at BYU, after he had brought me home from class. I was upset that I couldn’t seem to get what I wanted (a date).

“Be soft,” he said. But I’d had soft beaten out of me long before then and I was pretty sure I’d never be able to become soft, so I silently rejected his advice as an impossibility. I didn’t know it then (nor did he), but I was angry. There’s just no dealing with anger when you don’t know that’s what it is. And why do people find women’s anger so frightening?

I understood what he was trying to tell me: Attractive women aren’t hard. They certainly aren’t cynical, sarcastic, and wary. They are not angry. If you want a date—a husband, you can’t be those things. Men don’t find those things attractive.

Be soft, he said then.

I don’t know how, I said.

Be soft, Vonnegut says today.

No, I say.

No.

“Heroine decapitates someone in the first scene”

Moriah

I am proud to announce my first 1-star review for Dunham, which you can find here. But I will quote it in its entirety for your convenience.

This book contains some shocking and gory scenes of violence that, for me, were difficult to get past. It seems more like historical fiction masquerading as romance, which isn’t my preference as a reader. I found little to recommend the heroine (she decapitates someone in the first scene), and the hero’s introspection was clouded by odd lines that were stream of consciousness? Bad poetry? I’m not sure what it was, other than that I didn’t like it. I’m surprised that kind of thing got past an editor, as it should have been punctuated or scrapped entirely. In all, I just didn’t like the book–it seemed a little too in love with itself and was weighed down by too much needless dialogue that I couldn’t be bothered to wade through. This one was a DNF for me, unfortunately.

(bold is mine)

I am absolutely and utterly delighted and thrilled with this review. Why? I will tell you.

I wrote the first scene, where Celia mutinies her captain by beheading him on the first page, almost 20 years ago. It was not then, nor was it for many years afterward, warmly received by any critique group and/or would-be beta readers (except one total stranger who loved it). It was, apparently, “not heroine-like. Your hero could do it, though.” (That’s a quote.) (By a male.) In fact, it was insulted, reviled, and generally all-around “WTF do you think you’re doing? WOMEN DON’T DO THAT!”

And that’s why I kept it. Through all the naysayers and insults, I knew what I wanted to do and I never wavered. I meant to write a female pirate and I’d be damned if my female pirate didn’t act like an actual pirate.

Even when that wasn’t fashionable.

Regardless, that scene (as does every opening scene in every one of my books) serves as a litmus test for me and the reader. It tells the reader, “If you can’t make it through the first few pages, you really aren’t going to like this book, so don’t waste your time.” It’s a public service, really.

But if you can carry on in spite of its opening, you’re in for a real treat.

As for this: “It seems more like historical fiction masquerading as romance,” well, that’s probably true, too, although I never really looked at it that way because I consider myself a romance writer.

But you know what? What this tells me is that it will appeal to many people, not just romance readers who like strong females and want something different. Because I’ve been vindicated. There are plenty of people who like Celia because she decapitates someone in the first scene.

I like a good beheading in the morning.

PS Please please please go upvote her review because that’ll help me sell more books. CONTROVERSY!

Dunham: The Past

Moriah

It is finished. I will now wring out my brain.

Now, you! Go go go! Get it and enjoy Revolutionary War swashbuckling on this Independence Day!




Tales of Dunham #4
© 2013 Moriah Jovan
280,000 words (740 pages)



READ THE EXCERPT

Side note: A bit of this book occurs on the Barbary Coast. Celia, the heroine, has spent some time in Egypt. So I am finding the Egyptian uprising today particularly poignant. Independence Day for Egyptians too?

Not that I blame them …

Moriah

Emoji with a zipper for lips.After hours and hours of XY Tax Deduction running his mouth and being told repeatedly to be quiet:

Me: “Look. You need to get some imaginary friends and talk to them.”

XY: “I don’t have any.”

Me: “Make some.”

XY: “Well, I did have some, but they ran away.”

Me: “Why?”

XY: “I talked too much.”

A professional milestone

Moriah

It may or may not be common knowledge that, under my real name, I run B10 Mediaworx, an author services / digital formatting company, which I’ve been doing for the past … mmm … four years. I think. Anyway, before that, I was an at-home medical transcriptionist for six years. I haven’t worked out of doors in ten years.

Well, doing this with babies/toddlers isn’t easy, let me tell you, but once they started going to school, my work life got a lot more productive. And it was so blessedly QUIET. I love(d) working at home. Free and breezy. But a couple of years ago, I found I had a lot more work to do AND I was slacking on the internet during the quiet time. So I started going to the UMKC library on Sundays to work, because they’re open until 11:00pm. AND it was a hassle getting a password for the internet, which I declined to do, because I didn’t WANT to be on the internet. One problem: They aren’t open every Sunday. Well, okay, I could work around that.

Until I couldn’t.

In November, we found out my husband’s employer was closing its Kansas City offices and sending its employees home to telecommute. Talk about a life change. And I do not do well with change. Of any sort. Even good ones. (Don’t come near me for two weeks after I’ve moved into a new house. Just don’t.)

A 19th-century 2-story cream stucco building on an American town square surrounding a courthouse that says Brant’s Men’s & Boys’ Wear.For reasons I don’t know, Sunday, I was cruising Craigslist for office space. I mean, that’s not what I started out looking for. But I found this awesome deal for a little hole-in-the-wall above an old store in an old section of Liberty, Missouri. And it happens to be kitty-corner to the perfect bookstore. (Which is still perfect and I see a whole lot of other people are just discovering the concept and thinking they were original. Heh.) I emailed, as per protocol, but heard nothing. My husband had Monday off and said, “Well, why don’t we go up there and see what we can see?” Well, why not, indeed. I took my checkbook, just in case.

An hour later, I had an office. 140 ft2 of rehabbed historical building on Liberty Square, across from the courthouse, down the street from Jesse James Bank Museum, with a door and a lock and, most importantly, NO BOSS.

Today, I started moving in.

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And I am ridiculously giddy.

Back to blogging, maybe

Moriah
  • Dunham’s wrapping up and going into production, which means I’m right on track for my July 4 release date.
  • I have the attention span of a gnat, and I’ve always thought/spoken in bullet-point lists. It just got worse since I fell in love with Twitter oh so long ago. 140 characters is just about perfect.
  • I had a midlife crisis recently when I turned 45, realized I might not actually die young like a lot of people in my family do, AND realized I’d done everything I intended to do and that Dunham is the culmination. It’s the book I’ve worked on sporadically since I caught the idea in 1990 and had no idea what to do with it. That may have been a miscalculation.
  • In terms of the publishing world, I’ve said all I had to say. If I were inclined to told-you-so’s, I’d be RTing my ancient blog posts all the freaking time. Welcome to my 5-year-old epiphanies, Publishing. You’re still getting it oh! so wrong, but I’m too tired to yell at you.
  • I’ve always appreciated good craftsmanship, whatever it is. I have occasionally featured artists on my blog before whose work I like because I think it’s important to tell a craftsman when you like his work.
  • Lately I’ve taken to Pinterest and Tumblr just for pretty pictures. I’m trying to find my Zen and it seems that pretty pictures and well-done crafts do that.

An image of cups of yogurt topped with sugared or iced raspberries, on a weathered table and mismatched silver spoons of vintage patterns.

  • I need to get my house in order. Declutter. Shred old tax documents. Craigslist the shit out of my house, beginning with paper books and CDs.
  • The things I feel strongly about and would like to rant about here include religion and politics, and you know what? I’m actually not interested in getting on a soapbox on my blog. That’s what my books are for.
  • Romancelandia (which is a nanoscopic part of romance readers) (which I found out at RT), is too fraught with infighting and contrary agendas and politicization and passive-aggressive hostility and cowardice and trolling disguised as activism / education. Not interested in getting into that, either. I like what I like and fuck you if you think I’m privileged / ignorant / stupid / still-under-the-thrall-of-the-patriarchy, and need to be protected from my deplorable taste in literature. And fuck you 60 times over if you don’t think “IT” (whatever “IT” is) should be written and/or read. GTFO of my entertainment. (That’ll land me on a few more badly-behaving-authors lists and garner some grudge-ratings and hate-readings, to which I say, if someone has the time to do that, they are very privileged to have that much time on their hands.) Now I have nothing more to say on that topic.

And so. This blog’s probably going to look like a Tumblr for a little while because a) I like to share things I find beautiful / useful / funny, b) I’m short on words right now, and c) I want to share my Zen as I stumble my way around life post-bucket-list to find it.

The making of Dunham

Moriah

And so begins a post (or series of them) (you know how wishy-washy I am) on Dunham, the privateer-heroine and pirate-hero Revolutionary War swashbuckler, which, for those of you not following the serial, will be available for sale JULY 4, 2013.

To kick it off, here’s the final cover for the official book:

Dunham full-flat wraparound cover.

I struggled with the question of whether to go with a slightly modified version of the serial’s cover to deal with familiarity to those who’ve followed the story all year (yes, almost a year!). But in the end, I decided not to. Why? Several reasons.

  1. At and during the RT Booklovers convention two weeks ago in Kansas City, I had a few marketing epiphanies courtesy of Tracey Reid (but most of which I can’t articulate yet, which is why I haven’t written about it).
  2. My attempt at articulating this epiphany to my friend Melissa Blue brought forth an issue I hadn’t thought about: my books’ covers. ALL OF THEM. The fact that they needed a serious makeover. And that it must be done before Dunham was released to take advantage of the marketing wave.
  3. So I did that. The Proviso, Stay, Magdalene, and Twenty-Dollar Rag have new covers. In a different post, I’ll talk about the evolution of those, as I did before, long ago when I was just starting out.

Collage of cover revamps for THE PROVISO, STAY, MAGDALENE, TWENTY-DOLLAR RAG

  1. After I had done that, I realized that the variation of the serial cover I had made could not conform to the format I’d made for the previous titles, so I scrapped it and redid it from scratch.

I also decided to remove the series tag from Dunham and, subsequently, book 5, which is a post-apocalypse polyandry tale (as yet not officially titled). That, too, was for a reason: people see a series number and assume that the series has an overall arc and that book X is NEXT in the chronology. It makes them less inclined to pick it up because who wants to start something in the middle of a series? Even so, the four contemporary ones above, while perfectly able to be read alone, are, in fact, chronological, and so the series tag is appropriate.

Yet I needed the cover of Dunham to conform with the first four while still being separate. You will also notice that the featured couple is on the back instead of the front. Why was this? Because Dunham is as much epic adventure as it is romance, I want to capture male readers. There are ships involved and thus, naval battles.1

And so we have a cover that reflects the pattern of the four contemporary covers, but is also separate.

People DO judge a book by its cover because marketing has evolved so much that people can tell exactly what’s in it. Well. Maybe not exactly. But close enough to the target market to do the job.

______________________________

1. I have done as well as I could regarding ship details and battles involving tall ships, which, I will have you know, is very difficult to come by for this very narrow window of time. It was a time of shipbuilding upheaval and drastic changes in naval warfare that began somewhere around 1760 and ended right around 1798, from which evolved the zenith of tall ship building and warfare, on display at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. In short, a LOT of significant things happened in shipbuilding technology and naval warfare between 1780 and 1805.

Veni, vidi, vici.

Moriah

Meme. Cartoon of sarcastic black-haired woman, with the caption, “Seriously—STFU!”I had several ideas for this post’s title:

“I’m not one of you.”
“Repeating myself”
“Tired of the sound of my own voice”
“Being silent”
“Serial starter”

Anyway, all of them are pertinent to my point, but they all mean different things. I’ll take them one by one.

“I’m not one of you.”

In the cult of self-publishing, the loudest voices are the ones who write fast and put out an oeuvre faster than I can switch channels on the TV. They are the ones who say such things as:

“If you’re not writing, you’re not a writer.”
“If you want to make any money at this, you have to write X number of words per day.”
“Writing is a business.”
“You must outline to write a decent book.”

and my personal favorite,

“Writers are lazy,” which post I would link to, but it has since been pulled. (Here’s the rebuttal.)

It’s all bullshit. Rather, the fact that all writers must follow these instructions as gospel is bullshit. The fact is, writers write for a whole host of reasons, only one of which is to make their works commodities. I provide a commodity service. I’m not in the business of writing novels to make them commodities too.

Commodities are soulless, interchangeable widgets, and I don’t believe that books are commodities at all. I also don’t believe that writing fast makes a book soulless. I simply can’t write that fast and put the time and thought into them that I do.

So, to you incessant voices in self-publishing and those of you who were trained as midlist authors to keep putting product out there, I’m not one of you.

Which leads me to my second point:

“Repeating myself”

I am not on the vanguard of self-publishing. Dan Poynter is. Aaron Shepard is. Morris Rosenthal is. April Hamilton is. They are mostly nonfiction writers and they speak to writers of niche nonfiction. For instance, Dan started out publishing parachuting and skydiving treatises.

I am, however, on the vanguard of self-publishing fiction, along with Ann Somerville and others in niche genres. I took a lot of heat for it, too. The loudest voices in self-publishing now were once rabid anti-self-publishers and some of them attacked me personally both publicly and in email for it. Hey. Assholes. I blazed your trail. You’re welcome.

(Oh, is that arrogant? Yeah, I know. I’m a woman. I’m not supposed to be arrogant. Suck it.)

I’ve said all I want to say, I’m noticing repetitious themes in my writing that annoy me, and I’ve become

“tired of the sound of my own voice.”

You may have noticed that, other than posting Dunham chapters, I haven’t blogged a lot.

“Being silent”

I seek silence like water seeks the ocean. You wouldn’t know it to meet me at a cocktail party, conference, or convention, but I’m an introvert. (Please see ”Caring for your introvert“ and ”Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.”)

“Serial starter”

I like to start projects. I rarely finish them. The ones I finish, I really, really care about. And then I abandon them. Because I’m bored with that.

“Veni, vidi, vici.”

You know where I’m going with this by now. For decades, I have wanted to be a published author. Like, since I was 15, which is exactly three decades. It may have been earlier, when I was around 10 and wanted to submit something to one of the Reader’s Digest quip sidebars. I knew how to follow instructions. My submission wasn’t published. But by the time I was 15, I had found out a) how to submit to Harlequin, b) what to submit to Harlequin, c) how many words I had to write to submit to Harlequin (Presents line, in case you were wondering), and d) about how much a Harlequin advance was and how much in royalties I could expect and when (answer: zero, which was okay with me at the time).

Along the way I have had disappointments and obstacles and tangential projects and replacement projects, all while going to school, earning a living being, basically, an administrative handyman because I had an unbelievable skillset and a degree. You know, living life as a marginally normal person. There was always something odd about me. Everybody knew it but me, until I finally got a clue by working in a very dysfunctional place.

So along comes 2007 and, after 7 or 10 or however many years when I had given up writing totally, out pops this doorstopper. And so I published it. And so I had MOAR STORIES TO TELL!!! So I did that. And here we are, five years later and I’m about to publish book 4 in a planned 5-book series, and I realized this morning … I’m done. I did it. I did what I wanted to do, which was to get my stories out on paper and to the public.

I have no more stories. I will write book 5, but it’ll be a while, and I will likely go dark for that time, but I owe those fans who have been slowly accumulating and who love the world I built.

The difference this time, in seeing the light at the end of this obsession’s tunnel, is that for the first time in my life I have no overarching “This is what I want to do.” I’ve done it. I quit writing once and had nothing to fill that creative void so I made a cross-stitch design company and permanently killed my love for my favorite hobby. But always, getting a book published was my overarching life goal–because I thought it would take my entire life to do so. Writing was my life’s work and I never thought I’d run out of stories to tell.

But I have, and now it’s time to move on.

So … where do I go from here?

I dunno, but I’m gonna read a lot of books while I try to figure it out.

Of artists and assholes

Moriah

Meme with a cat sitting at a table like a human. Text: “Sit down, let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, I ate your hamster this morning.”Orson Scott Card doesn’t make a hill of beans’ worth of difference to me. I never read him until I was an adult (and haven’t read Ender’s Game), I was underwhelmed with the Alvin Maker series, and aside from his strong views on homosexuality, he has some other truly whacko ideas that also thoroughly and completely offend my libertarian sensibilities.

I weighed in on the controversy over his short story “Hamlet’s Father” because I can’t stand it when people rant about books they haven’t read. That is intellectually dishonest, and the people I saw doing this promote themselves as intellectually honest. Sorry, nope. Get off your fucking high horse and read the fucking book, then come back and talk to me.

A couple of days ago, I was cleaning out my feed reader and old web articles I’d saved and came across this: Broken, by Lefsetz, a music industry critic, in which he opines about the necessity of great art to come out of broken people. So this was already on my mind when I had an email conversation with a friend who is grieving her relationship with Card’s work because he personally is an asshole.

So this is what I said:

You wanna know why lit programs take the author out of the work? Because they don’t want to know what assholes the authors are.

I don’t know why anybody thinks an asshole can’t write empathetic characters. All you have to do is observe people and understand human nature. And in the end, the authors will reveal themselves to you in one of their characters, or leave bits of themselves in all of them (cf this article’s reference to Peter—the villain, I take it?).

Charles Dickens, pen and ink.Dickens was an ass. Scrooge? Maybe parts of him.

Hitler was a talented artist.

Artists, great ones, are depressive, narcissistic, selfish, mentally ill, and sometimes evil. There are some who know how to act in public and some who don’t. It just kinda goes along with the artist thing.

It’s just that now people have access to these artists’ assholery and they don’t like the type of personality it takes to make great art. Not only that, but they don’t want them to self-medicate to mediate the bad personality traits but keep the great art. They want them to be emotionally stable. They want them to be normal.

Oh, hello, Van Gogh. Mozart. Polanski. (Shall we talk about Polanski?)

But art that touches people doesn’t come out of normal.

Card fans are grieving. Deeply, by the tenor of what I’m reading around the web. While I understand it, I’m kind of unsympathetic because people want great art, but they don’t want people to have the characteristics of what it takes to make great art.

Magdalene and Publisher’s Weekly

Moriah

For an author, a Publisher’s Weekly starred review is one of the holy grails of reviews. It’s one of those things that, for a writer, is right up there with The Call (“Hi, Mojo. I want to offer you a contract for your book.”). I’ve had pretty close brushes with getting The Call, which (three times, to be precise) ended up to be “I love this book and I want to buy it, but I can’t because of Freak Things 1, 2, and/or 3.” What I have never dared aspire to (especially once I started down the self-pub path) is a review in Publisher’s Weekly at all, much less a starred one. But then Tuesday, this happened:

Review of my novel MAGDALENE in PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY. Text: “STAR. Jovan’s explosive saga about the lives, loves, and deeds of a group of powerful Mormons continues in her outstanding third Dunham novel (after Stay and The Proviso). Kindly Mormon bishop Mitch Hollander, while reorganizing a merger between his steel company and a manufacturer that occurred under perilous circumstances, meets brash and brilliant Cassie St. James, one of Wall Street’s toughest strategists and a former prostitute. Their immediate attraction is just as strong as the gulf between Cassie’s ruthless attitude toward sex and Mitch’s LDS morals, which include no sex outside marriage. Meanwhile, Mitch’s scheming subordinate in the church hierarchy, Greg Sitkaris, whom he’s trying to have arrested for embezzlement, threatens everything Mitch holds dear, including Cassie and Mitch’s flock. Filled with nuanced, unforgettable characters and keen insights into Mormon faith and culture, this is a thrilling, romantic page-turner with a sense of optimism that never comes across as forced or cloying. Like the Left Behind series, the Tales of Dunham have great cross-over potential. (Apr. 2011)

And you know what? I’m kinda proud because I had some goals with this book and, at least for this reviewer, I hit some of them. Later I received an email from the senior editor of reviews at PW passing along some more remarks the reviewer made, which made me believe that I accomplished almost all of my goals with the book.

But there is one I want to talk about because it’s not one that’s obvious. And it’s not obvious because I set this challenge for my own benefit, not for the reader’s.

In 2008, my editor for Monsters & Mormons, Wm Morris, wrote this piece at A Motley Vision (a Mormon lit blog): “Stephenie Meyer’s Mormonism and the ‘erotics of abstinence.’” The erotics of abstinence. Well, that’s an intriguing little idea. He was springboarding from this Time piece: “Stephenie Meyer: A New J.K. Rowling?”, wherein the author says this:

But it is the rare vampire novel that isn’t about sex on some level, and the Twilight books are no exception. What makes Meyer’s books so distinctive is that they’re about the erotics of abstinence. Their tension comes from prolonged, superhuman acts of self-restraint. There’s a scene midway through Twilight in which, for the first time, Edward leans in close and sniffs the aroma of Bella’s exposed neck. “Just because I’m resisting the wine doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the bouquet,” he says. “You have a very floral smell, like lavender … or freesia.” He barely touches her, but there’s more sex in that one paragraph than in all the snogging in Harry Potter.

I, like Wm (and pretty much everybody else who read the book), was intrigued by that idea.

In 2008, Mitch and Cassie were a bare glimmer in my mind. I had mentioned Mitch’s name a couple of times in The Proviso with absolutely no intention of following up on that. Cassie didn’t even exist when I wrote the sketch with a nameless unreliable and unlikeable narrator in the style of “Snuff.” I like to do those sometimes, usually because something catches my attention and I’m restless and haven’t written for a while and though I only have a few words in me, they must come out. That 250-word monologue was in my head when I started thinking about Mitch’s role in Sebastian’s life. The two disparate ideas simply wound in and around each other like different streams of smoke drifting on the same breeze, tickling my mind with vague possibilities.

I was still in the planning stages of Magdalene, trying to figure out if I would or would not have my bishop succumb to temptation. I will tell you: I didn’t want him to, because that wasn’t who he was and besides that, I’d already gone down that road with Giselle. But how was I going to do this? I didn’t think I could write sexual tension, didn’t think I could carry abstinence too far and still make it seem legitimate. (We Mormons have all sorts of ways to justify our celibacy, but nobody outside our culture buys a word of it.)

Then I stumbled upon the “erotics of abstinence.” Stephenie Meyer had to go to paranormal lengths to justify abstinence until marriage. I don’t write paranormal, so I didn’t want to do that. She also had teenagers, which is its own justification. I don’t write teenagers, so that was out of the question.

I wanted to do that. With adults. Who weren’t vegetarian vampires. Plausibly.

I wanted to do it better.

So I did.

Look at me! Look at me!

Moriah

[[07/15/2025: This’ll teach me to use an embed plugin instead of screenshots, and also not to put in the text.]]

So this morning around 10:13 a.m., I read a piece in HuffPo about a possible alternative chronology to the New Testament that puts a new spin on things. I thought it was an interesting concept. I RTd the link, though I forgot from whom I lifted it.

A tweet from me, @MoriahJovan. Text: “Reading the New Testament chronologically: ow.ly/dnpJq VERY INTERESTING (can't recall who tweeted this--sorry!)”

My friend replied: [deleted tweet]

Another friend replied: [deleted tweet]

We had a nice little chat about that that lasted all of about 1/2 hour. Then I had to go do grownup things like work and take care of the gas leak I had and arrange for a plumber and new water heater.

And then this guy shows up six hours later: [deleted tweet]

And that’s where he started the fight without bothering to ask us to define our terms first. (First rule of Twitter when butting into a convo you want to involve yourself in: ask for clarification from the participants first. You’ll probably get a nice response and a welcome to the convo so long as you can keep it civil, even if you disagree.) Regrettably, we engaged for about three tweets each before we figured out he had no home training and blocked him.

But before I did, I did a little preliminary snoopage, as per SOP when strangers with an attitude butt into my convo six hours after said convo has been put to bed. Matthew Reeves is 20. He writes YA. How sweet of him. How … 20 years old of him.

I was 20 once. It was a nice year. I had fun. And yeah, I thought I knew everything, too.

So! He’s blocked and I go back to harrassing @mikecane, as per usual, interspersed with some time spent making my son do manual labor, and Matthew Reeves continues to rant at us, but who cares, right? Because we can’t see it and there are soooo many more interesting people on Twitter who really can school us on something.

But apparently Matthew Reeves needs to broadcast his point of view to the world, so without further ado, and because I’m occasionally a nice mommy to my own know-it-all son, I’m going to assist him in this endeavor:

Dude, I’m A Historian (but not in the subject being discussed). [dead link]

Bless his heart, picking a fight with two people he doesn’t know who are old enough to have shot him out of our vaginas, and is now mad because we won’t pay him any mind. Precious. Just precious.

And now he’s disillusioned: [deleted tweet]

Sadness.

Go away, kid. Ya bother me.

Economizing

Moriah

…as the folks in Regency romances would say. With an “s.”

I’ve hosted a bunch of websites for years and never really thought much of it until I started listing how many and for how much money. It was the first time I’d seen it in one place before because they’re all spread out through the year and I get the bill and pay it.

So I’ve consolidated a bunch of my websites down to two: moriahjovan.com and b10mediaworx.com. The site where I had planned to host the serial was theproviso.com, but it wasn’t getting enough traffic to justify keeping it. Yet I still wanted a site where all my Dunham-related work was consolidated. Ah, the beauty of subdomains.

When you go to theproviso.com, you will be redirected to moriahjovan.com/talesofdunham. I’m not quite finished with it yet (is one ever?), but I’m happy with the clean look and the ease of editing the theme. Now, there are three links out there to free downloads that were hosted off theproviso.com. I have no idea where those links are, but as of last night when I canceled the hosting, they were still getting hits. Sorry about that, but money’s a little tight. No, not that tight.

Meh. The truth is my head got a little scattered and I had to declutter, consolidate, and reorganize.

I have assimilated. Sorta.

Moriah

I have/had a Dell laptop I’ve had for 5 years. That thing has been a workhorse, but it had been having a couple of problems I either found a workaround for or put up with. It was on and cooking 12-18 hours a day every day. It had been reformatted twice, hauled around on vacation and to the library to work on it.

I go through keyboards like crazy because eventually the letters wear off and the fingernail grooves get too deep. That’s not why I get rid of them. I wear them out until they stop working. But I have an external monitor and wireless keyboard and mice. The most vulnerable parts of the machine were protected.

So my laptop’s been well taken care of, the keys are still relatively pristine, as is the screen. I was running XP Pro with Office 2000 (you can see my reasons why here).

But 5 years is a long time and beyond its expected lifespan. Dude was getting worried it would die in the middle of a huge deadline. We decided to get a new laptop. Now, I trust Dude with these decisions and he’s an ASUS fanboy, so I now have a shiny new ASUS.

  • Intel Core i5-2430M CPU @ 2.4GHz
  • 6.00G RAM
  • 64-bit
  • Win7 Professional

We’ve had it since April, actually. Dude’s been using it. I customize a computer to beyond an inch of its life and I really didn’t relish the fact that I would have:

  1. a completely new operating system
  2. incompatibility of my preferred work tools
  3. unfamiliar new work tools
  4. moving data
  5. customizing those new work tools

I also had a Western Digital external hard drive we bought in 2004-2005 that held all my archives. Since it was the backup, I hadn’t felt the need to have backup on it. Oh woe was me. Little did I know that it was on its last legs and this move killed it. I may or may not have unplugged it from the computer before it was supposed to have been.

Dude spent three days with a very kind Samaritan retrieving the data. There are other issues with the data now, but it’s there. I have it. This guy is a peach for helping us and here is his information: James Litten.1 Watch the video [dead link]. Seriously, people, give this guy business. He deserves it. I cannot stress this enough.

So I’m almost totally moved in. I cannot stand the fact that this OS’s changes seem to encompass how it looks. As far as I can see, the only reason it exists is to make the roundy corners on dialog boxes transparent and wavy. Whatever else it does, I don’t know. Please feel free to enlighten me below.

The first thing I do when I move into a computer is change the theme to resemble, as closely as possible, Win95. The new start menu was completely unintelligible and/or takes more clicks than it needs to. I started pinning things to my task bar immediately.  But I still couldn’t deal with the interface. So I found this tool: Classic Shell XP (because XP was good about letting you have the 95 look). I still have the little wavy in the toolbar, but okay.

A screenshot of a mostly clear desktop (Win 3.x green rivets background, task bar on the right), dated 07/13/2012.
That really is Win 3.x green rivets background.

HOWEVER, my hatred for moving was borne out by the fact that while Office 2000 and Acrobat 7.0 Standard will run on Win7, their functionality is rendered nearly useless for my purposes. Every time I closed Word 2000, it said it had crashed. Acrobat 7.0 can’t be installed as a printer driver at all. This is purposeful on Adobe’s part and I’m coming to despise Adobe almost as much as I despise Apple.

Then I found XP Mode/XP Virtual Machine, which … crashed when I tried to install Acrobat 7.0 as the printer driver. I was despondent, thinking I’d have to buy an upgrade. Why? Why is this necessary, Adobe? What functionality have you added that I actually need? None.

I went on eBay, where I always get my software a couple of versions back and for cheep! I found this listing. Then I Googled what this is selling for everywhere, so clearly this listing was the jackpot! Now, I’ve been on eBay since dirt and have had about two bad buying experiences and it’s because I know how to read the listings. What’s wrong with that one? Rant in the comments below. (Now I see there are new listings.)

So I’m back to the sinking feeling I’d have to buy Acrobat X. I had some difficult (for me—shut up, this is traumatic!) decisions to make.

In the meantime, I needed two antispyware and antimalware utilities, which CNET conveniently had. Both gave me viruses and/or adware and/or spyware. CNET, you are worse than useless. You are perpetuating computer disease and whatever trust you have built up over the years is gone. I want everyone to know you are destroying computer health with these bullshit downloads.

Dude had a copy of Office 2010 he got from his work for a minimal charge, so I sucked it up and installed it after I read that it had a function to “save as PDF.” Another reason was because I had to do a quote PDQ and needed a PDF that wasn’t created with some cheap-ass generic PDF maker. Getting my normal.dot into this fucker was a nightmare. I still don’t know where the normal.dotm is stored, but I was FINALLY able to find where to point it to my preferred folder for templates.

That’s another thing. I’m very specific about where I want what stored. I have C: for the OS and program files. I have D: solely for data. Something I consider data is my Word and Excel templates. So I put those in D: and boy did Word 2010 make me work to find the way to set that. It imported all my macros and styles, but it still didn’t import my toolbars from normal.dot, but that’s because Microsoft has totally borked the purpose of toolbars. Don’t these people actually use the products they design? So now I’m faced with the task of rebuilding my toolbars and preferences and getting used to it. Cry for me, Argentina.

Well, I found out that Word 2010 really DOES “save as” PDF. Hallelujah! I may have done a victory jig. (Pix or it didn’t happen.) Until … I tried to print to a different page size. It seems that 8.5×11 is the default with no way to edit the page size to 6×9, for example. And I still don’t know if those PDFs are acceptable for Lightning Source. I also don’t know what effect using Word 2010 will have on the Smashwords documents I create. I guess I’ll find out next week when I upload the next installment of Dunham.

My next problem was Flash. Isn’t it always. The Shockwave Flash plugin for Firefox was crashing like crazy. I had to disable the damned thing and trust me, after having been denied access to Flash on my iPad, I was not willing to do so on my PC. Apparently this is a common problem, as evidenced by posts and no solutions. How the fuck do you not have a solution after two years?

Really, it seems many of my problems are caused by the change to a 64-bit system from a 32-bit system.

This has been going on since last Tuesday. What used to take me around 8 hours has taken me almost a week of dedicated effort. (No, I don’t use a moving wizard because I like to customize as I go.)

What I still have to do is:

  1. transfer the data from my dead hard drive (currently on Dude’s computer)
  2. customize Word and Excel 2010, and …
  3. wait for and install Adobe Acrobat X that I ended up buying.

UPDATE 7:14PM CDT: It appears that Firefox and Google want to protect me from myself, but because I hadn’t updated Firefox in forever, I was unaware of this bullshit, and now that I’m running the latest version of Firefox, I’ve got brand new annoyances to deal with.

______________________________

1.  EMAIL: James@Litten.com, PHONE: (848) 207-4291

Comfort foot: Barbecued beans

Moriah

There’s nothing special about this and there is no weird story behind it like yesterday’s; it’s just a childhood favorite I haven’t made in years. However, we had a block party Saturday and thus I bade Dude to purchase the dreaded pork’n’beans.

64 oz. pork & beans
hot dogs or sausage (sliced)
2 large onions, chopped
1/2 c. brown sugar
2 Tb. molasses
1/2 c. barbecue sauce (I use Gates. Do NOT use Bryant’s!)
3 tsp. liquid smoke
bacon
 
Combine all ingredients but bacon. Put in a 13 x 9 and cover with bacon. Bake at 350 for 1 hour.

Comfort food: Trouble salad

Moriah

Okay, it’s really macaroni salad and about as ubiquitous as can be, but there’s a story behind the title.

It was 1980. In Kansas City. In the summer.

The 1980 United States Heat Wave was a period of intense heat and drought that wreaked havoc on much of the Midwestern United States and Southern Plains throughout the summer of 1980. It is among the most devastating natural disasters in terms of deaths and destruction in U.S. history, claiming at least 1,700 lives and because of the massive drought, agricultural damage reached US$20.0 billion (US$55.4 billion in 2007 dollars, adjusted for the GNP inflation index). It is among the billion-dollar weather disasters listed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. [ … ] In Kansas City, Missouri, the high temperature was below 90 only twice and soared above the century mark (100 °F/38 °C) for 17 days straight [ … ]

And we did not have air conditioning. No, we did not. But my grandmother, who lived about four blocks away, had a little window unit, so every afternoon, we would hie ourselves up there to sit in her living room for a while, then come home to sleep. If you can call it that. (Oh, and a little trivia: My room faced east, so I had the joy of the first blast of heat every morning.)

My mother would make dinner that we would bring to grandma’s while we sat in the cool. And one day she made this:

  • 7 oz. dry pasta
  • 1/2 c. Miracle Whip
  • 1/2 c. sour cream
  • 1 15-oz can drained sweet peas
  • 1 c. diced ham
  • 1 c. diced cheese
  • 1/2 tsp. celery seed
  • 1/2 tsp. onion salt
     
    Cook pasta while mixing Miracle Whip, sour cream, and spices. Stir in peas, meat, cheese, and pasta. Chill.

As you see, it involves a stove and boiling water. We three children (12, 6, and 4) were lined up at the door waiting for mom to bring the ginormous stoneware crock full of this so that we could go to grandma’s. Unfortunately, two steps from the front door, she tripped, dropped the bowl (which broke), and sprayed macaroni salad and clay shards everywhere.

My brother laughed.

He, um, got in trouble. (Turrble turrrrrrrrrrrble trouble.)

Hence the name. I don’t think my mother’s made this since and I have only a couple of times, but I love it and thus, the block party Saturday was graced with TWO dishes out of the Dude-and-Mojo household.

That’s what the fresh concrete in front of our beautiful porch says: Dude + Mojo = ?

Creepy collective consciousness is creepy

Moriah

It appears I’m not the only writer with her knickers in a twist over The Book That Shall Not Be Named, and not only that, but it appears the writerly collective conscious had gotten its knockers knickers in a twist somewhere between Sunday night and Monday morning. Usually when the twist in my knickers gets too tight, I simply avoid the source. In this case, I can’t. It’s everywhere, including my snail mail box after my 70-year-old aunt in Salt Lake took the time to cut an article on it from Deseret News and drop it in the mail to me. I can’t get away from it.

Between this and the incessant banging on the marketing drum, I’ve pretty much had all I can take of the business side of being a writer. (Note: Being a publisher is an entirely different thing.)

Monday morning I went whining to a couple of people, one of whom was utterly unsympathetic and the other who sent me to Cliff Burns’s latest blog post. Lo, there not only did I behold my own frustrations laid out in more articulate language than I’ve been using lately, but on the same day I was having my existential crisis.

Building character through self-flagellation | Cliff Burns – “Books not selling, readers indifferent, preferring to spend their hard-earned shekels on dry-humping teen vampires and spank me-fuck me fan fiction. Not a brilliant stylist, so I can’t even hope for the consolations of posterity.”

Then a friend, who thinks something must in the water:

The rise of the published first draft | VacuousMinx – “I fully agree that TBTSNBN has an alchemical appeal for readers, one that transcends its many flaws. But while its appeal cannot be copied, any more than you can catch lightning in a jar, the (lack of) process can and will be. […] So we will get more barely-altered fanfic and more un-self-critical writers who are proud that they can write 100,000 words in a month and send the resulting manuscript off to a publisher.”

sent me to yet another writer writing at the same time:

Striving for a WIP that’s actually “in progress” | KZ Snow – “Does it even pay to write well? Maybe I should follow the lead of some of my peers and strive for quantity, compose a few tearjerkers or sex romps or chuckle fests every couple of months. There’d be nothing wrong with that. Readers seem to enjoy the output of speed writers as much as or more than that of poky writers.”

I’d already decided to do the Dunham serial a couple of weeks ago, so I did feel as if I were actually taking action and could prove to be a boon. We shall see, but at least I was trying something different, doing something with the words I’d written that otherwise wouldn’t see the light of day for another year. I’d also already decided to rebrand the Dunham series with new covers and new classifications and unveil them all next year with the release of Dunham.

So between the time I announced the serial and the time I got to Cliff’s post, I had spent hours revamping my websites, which I find oddly relaxing. And because I do like this thankless, background, zero-revenue activity so much, I slowly came to the realization that writing novels and the act of publishing them is a hobby. Given that I hold my hobbies sacrosanct, this wasn’t a step down, but a step up. In that respect I also decided to get out of the business of publishing other people. I needed to let go of the pressure of selling, the pressure of sales (or lack thereof, as measured against those of the snake-oil salesmen of our business), and the pressure of bookkeeping. I needed to rejuvenate my love for creating and disseminating my own work. The constant marketing of myself and publishing other people is not part of the hobby and not part of the love.

So now it’s Friday. Nothing about the situation has changed except that I feel as if I have taken some action AND changed my outlook. My frustration level is way down and I can once again stop to see what I have: a wonderful family, a good job that pays the bills, a nice house with a gorgeous porch* upon which I sit with my Tax Deductions and discuss the nature of God—and a hobby I’m mad about and am excited about sharing over the next year.

That’s far more than a lot of people have.

“A book a year is slacking.”

Moriah

This sentiment got some traction in writerland a couple of weeks ago, but since the beginning of this digital publishing surge, it’s been a (sometimes unspoken) maxim. No, actually, it’s been around a long time. Way back in the day when I was a member of RWA and went to all the chapter meetings (MARA), there were two prolific category writers in my chapter. They worked for both Harlequin and Silhouette and put out three titles a year minimum. Then you have the James Patterson-type book mills wherein a team of ghostwriters is assigned to an idea and a title and off they go. I now know of many writers, especially erotic romance and erotica writers who espouse this view.

It begs some questions, of course, the main one being, “How many pages/words do these books have, anyway?” Come to find out many of them are short stories. Many are novellas. Some are category-length (the size of a Harlequin Presents, or about 50,000–60,000 words). Never mind the fact that I do, actually, write that many GOOD words every year. (Good words meaning ones I want to keep. I throw out as many words as I keep.) As far as I can tell, nobody’s writing longer works at the pace of one title per year. (“George RR Martin is not your bitch.”)

I sure as hell am not. What’s an epic writer who is NOT, in fact, George RR Martin, to do with this business when she’s lucky to be able to put out one title per year? This, combined with some other book news that I will not belabor because it’s been belabored quite enough, has got me thinking about what I write and how I write it. How can I capitalize on the fact that I do write the equivalent of three category-length titles per year?

There was only one answer to that. It’s not a new idea. It’s not even an idea I necessarily like because it involves a way of reading I don’t care for. But other people do like it. A LOT. If it works, it’ll keep my name out there for the next year until Dunham is released (July 4, 2013—save the date!) and, hopefully, build excitement. If it doesn’t, no harm done. (I don’t think.)

Cover of the serialization of the first third of my novel DUNHAM, a sailing tallship in a storm.Beginning July 4, 2012, I will be posting one unedited chapter of Dunham per week, every Wednesday at 6:00 a.m. US Central time, for one year. I’ll offer them as free downloads here, at Smashwords, and at All Romance eBooks, and send email reminders to those who request one. It will be the serial equivalent of an Advance Review Copy (ARC).

Fifty-two chapters! you say. That’s a lot! Yeah. It is. In fact, it’s approximately 140,000 words, which (for my fans) is half the length of The Proviso, longer than Stay, and nearly as long as Magdalene. It’s also somewhere around 70% of the finished book. Oh, hey, it’s a swashbuckler with lots and lots of angst, set during the Revolutionary War. They have ships! They go places! They blow things up! So of course it’ll prop a door open! (Eh, but that’s the beauty of digital, innit?)

Hopefully, by the time July 4, 2013, rolls around, you and a gazillion other people will want to know how it ends and buy the book to find out.

I’ll be frank: This is a marketing ploy. I hate marketing. I suck at marketing. So do the most of the rest of us. I also can’t put out two or three titles a year to do my marketing for me. I’m not asking for any money via tip jar or a Kickstarter campaign. I’m offering a free hit and hoping you will get hooked and, in turn, you will hook your friends. Please hook your friends!

Some details:

  1. The cover is for the serial. It will not be the cover for the finished book. I thought it would be utterly gauche to go without a cover.
  2. Remember, this will be unedited. The finished novel will be professionally edited and available in print as well as digital.
  3. Though the serial is offered only here, Smashwords, and All Romance eBooks (of necessity because neither Barnes & Noble nor Amazon will allow me to offer it for free) (fuckers), the complete book will be offered at all the normal retail outlets.
  4. Even if you opt in for the email reminders of a new installment, I won’t keep track of your email and I won’t spam you. I just don’t work that way (which is why I suck at marketing!).
  5. Each installment will be available for download in DRM-free EPUB, PRC/MOBI/Kindle, and PDF. I’ll even post the text itself online at theproviso.com/dunham (not live yet).
  6. Hopefully by the time the serial begins, I’ll have come up with back-cover copy that reflects the story accurately and does not suck. Until then …

It’s 1780. He’s an earl acquitted of treason and out for revenge. She’s a pirate planning a suicide mission. Their first kiss sparks a tavern brawl—and then things get interesting.

Men who hate women

Moriah

A still shot of Rooney Mara in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. She has a very short black haircut with a straight line of bangs, and piercings on her face. She's wearing a black scarf and jacket.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.

mraynes at Exponent II has an excellent post up about the exposition of misogyny in the book/movie.

Ironically, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo phenomenon is a prime example of how our society hides from the culture of violence against women. In the original Swedish version, Stieg Larsson titled the book “Man som hatar kvinnor” or “Men who hate women.” Believing that such a title would turn readers off, American publishers renamed the book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, changing the emphasis away from violent misogyny to the physical body of the (anti)heroine. This alone speaks volumes about our society. Instead of dealing with the discomfort that in fact, some men do hate women, publishers felt that the only way to sell books was to objectify and sexualize the female protagonist.

Please read the whole post.

This brought to mind a blog post by a Cale McCaskey, ostensibly ripping on romance novels, but really ripping on women, and after I read mraynes’s post, I realized: This is the mindset. Taken by itself, his opinion is irrelevant and he’s a woman-hating man who is single and likely to remain that way.

However, how many WOMEN have I heard over the years say the same thing with regard to romance novels and the women who read them? To hear WOMEN talk about the women who read romance novels, we’re all a bunch of fat Peggy Bundys who, instead of earning advanced degrees, becoming Important People, tending to our hearths with the efficiency of Martha Stewart or a Mormon cupcake baker on Ritalin, or fighting against [patriarchy, white privilege, male privilege, rape culture, insert philosophy of choice].

It is not rapists and abusers alone who silence and hide victims. It is we, society, in our unwillingness to stare evil in the face, name it, and confront it. Until we acknowledge culpability within our culture of violence against women, our daughters, sisters and ourselves will be at risk.

Some men hate women. But so do some very vocal women. Women need to look to themselves concerning their own misogyny.

Monsters! Mormons! Not necessarily synonymous!

Moriah

The cover of MONSTERS & MORMONS, in oil painting impressionist style, with two women in skirts/blouses, with knives, fighting off purple tentacles.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.

When I got it done and Wm liked it (Theric was not my editor this time), I had second thoughts. Considering I’m kind of, you know, responsible for its publication, I figured there would be seen some sort of “in,” or conflict of interest. Theric and I discussed it and decided I’d withdraw it, but Wm thought my withdrawing it was a bad idea. So, okay. Onward.

What has resulted is the most wonderful collection of tales of the supernatural and bizarre. Supernaturally bizarre. Or bizarrely supernatural. Whatever. Including! Get this! TWO graphic novels!

So here’s a little taste of my story, of a Mormon self-styled “nun” packing nuclear weapons powered by cold fusion to zap demons left and right.

If you like science fiction, fantasy, paranormal, zombies, werewolves, ghosts, goblins, and things that go bump in the night, go get the whole collection! It’s available in the Kindle store, but print is forthcoming in the next couple of weeks.