Skip to content

Month: January 2015

State of The Trout: “Stuff that’s happening” edition

Posted in Uncategorized

Hey there Troutlanders. OMG THAT IS WHAT WE SHOULD CALL OURSELVES IF WE ARE IN TROUT NATION BUT ALSO WE LOVE OUTLANDER.

Ahem. Speaking of Outlander, I received this awesome box just before Christmas:

IMG_20141222_175147854_HDR

I won it through a twitter contest and I’m fucking stoked about it, but I don’t think there’s been a State of The Trout post where I could share it. There is a kilt in the box. I’m going to see Mr. Jen in a kilt. ROWR.

Chapter eleven of The Afflicted is up. You can read it here.

Speaking of favorite fandoms: This is my very new tattoo, moments after the artist (Katrina Kateri, Old Anchor Tattoos, Portage, MI) finished it:

IMG_20150113_182034113

D-Rock took that picture. She said, “Dude, you look so tough now.” I think the puppy on my stripey sweater agrees. Doctor Who tattoos make you look hard as fuck.

Want another free read? My New Adult novella, Choosing You, is free on Amazon until January 17th. This story was originally included in the If Ever I Would Leave You anthology from last year.

My next book release, you ask? I’ll have a contemporary romance novella, Bad Boy, Good Man, in the Bad Boy Next Door digital box set. More details to come.

More writing in general? As part of a blogging thing, expect to see occasional posts inspired by songs and photographs. The Wednesday Bloggers came up with the idea. I’ll basically be writing fanfic of my own stuff, so you’ll be getting micro-stories about characters that are already out there.

I was quoted in the NYT! In an absolute first for me, I was quoted in a major national publication. The article is about Meghan Trainor, and the author references my objections to the cultural appropriation in the video.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print!

 

Wednesday Blogging: My Anti-Bucket List

Posted in Uncategorized

I haven’t Wednesday blogged in a long time, because I’m lazy. But also, because I have all sorts of other stuff I like to do on the blog (like update links pages…which never, ever happens. Not ever), a lot of which I’d like to do on the weekly. When I found out this week that  the topic is “your anti-bucket list” I was like, “Bitch, what is an anti-bucket list?” And Bronwyn Green was like, “It’s a list of things you don’t want to do before you die.” I immediately thought of about five thousand really grim things, like “experience surgical awareness,” “get cancer,” or “have one of my kids die.” And then Bronwyn was like, “Cool your jets, it doesn’t have to be like that.” And I thought of some much better ones that aren’t, you know. Common fears.

So here is my anti-bucket list:

Meet Anthony Stewart Head. So many well-intentioned Trout Nation citizens have tried to convince me to go to a con and meet him, because it would be funny and make a good blog post. They’ve tried to entice me with details like, “He smells so good,” and “He’ll totally hug you,” and “He’s really nice, honest.” I’m sure he’s super duper nice, and while my knees go positively weak at the thought of knowing what he smells like… dudes. Come on. I’ve written four books of graphic sex with a main character who looks and sounds nearly exactly like him in my head. There is no way I could be comfortable being in the same building as this person, let alone actually speaking to and having a picture taken with him.

Have to use pepper spray on anyone. I mean, I don’t carry pepper spray, but I’m really afraid that sometime, somehow, I’m going to have to pepper spray someone. I can see this going down one of two ways:

1. I am in a horribly scary, life threatening situation in which the use of force is necessary to prevent injury and/or death to my person.

2. I am not in a scary, life threatening situation in which the use of force is necessary to prevent injury and/or death to my person, and I have just maced somebody on accident.

Neither of these scenarios appeal to me, so I’m just gonna make like Bartleby in this situation and prefer the fuck not to.

Go into space. I realize that I’m already in space, flying around on a little hunk of rock in an infinite, mysterious void. I don’t want to leave this little hunk of rock, because fuck that. Space is scary as hell. If The Doctor showed up in fifteen minutes and was like, “You wanna?” I would be like, “yeah!” But he’s the only person I would trust to take me into space. And I don’t care how brave Katrina was, I’m not blowing myself out an airlock for him. Space is out there. But back to my original point: space is freaky and I don’t like knowing it’s out there, so I’m not going to go there.

Swim next to a whale. What the fuck is wrong with you people? Do you not see how big that thing is? Why would you? Why?

Age gracefully. Because that’s just bullshit. It’s bullshit to expect women to not take advantage of the miracles medical science has provided us, while at the same time torturing us in a culture that prizes our beauty and youth above all. And then we deride women when they try to fulfill that cultural expectation through surgical means. That’s bullshit. I speculate that by the time I am seventy, I will look something like this:

Lady_Cassandra

You know why? Because with all the tattoos I’ve put on my body, and all the holes I’ve punched in it (though I don’t wear my piercings anymore), I cannot be morally above becoming a bitchy trampoline in my golden years.

Have any kind of dangerous, life changing adventure. You know what? If a bunch of dwarves start showing up at your house? You don’t have to let them in. You can sit in your safe, cozy hole, smoke your pipe leaf, and put your hairy little feet up. Which is exactly what I would do. Fuck you Bilbo. This ain’t amateur hour.

Tell me what you’d put on your anti-bucket list, and check out the lists from these Wednesday bloggers:

Bronwyn Green • Jessica Jarman • Kris Norris • Gwendolyn Cease • Kellie St. James

One of these things is not like the other. TW: Rape

Posted in Uncategorized

I’m not going to make this long, and I’m not going to call out anybody or name names or anything. I just feel like this needs to be said, and I don’t want to add fuel to the fire that resulted in me needing to make this post, and I want it to come across as sensitively as it possibly can. I keep feeling like it reads like a scolding, and it’s not meant to be one. It’s just bursting to get out.

In 2001, I went on a date with someone. Somebody I thought I could trust, because he was friends with someone I trusted. He was really nice and sweet and we’d talked on the phone a couple of times, and we decided to meet for drinks. We hit it off, and at some point, I got up to go to the bathroom and I left my drink on the table.

I probably don’t need to go into anything further than that. You get it. And it wasn’t even the first time a guy did this to me. Almost every woman I know has had this happen to her. If this has happened to you, I don’t care if you’re my worst fucking enemy in the world, I don’t care if you hit my dog with your car, if you lived through this, I’m so sorry that it happened to you. But I read something in which someone described a situation they were currently in, an intensely emotional and fraught situation, as feeling similar to when they were raped. And while I don’t want to police the feelings of other people on the subject of their own experiences, it struck me as an inappropriate comparison. But it happens all the time. I know I’ve done it in the past, before I realized that it’s impossible to separate what happened to me from what’s happened to lots of other people. Before I realized that survivors can victimize each other, no matter their intentions.

This is one of those rare occasions where I debated whether or not to post, because I’m so afraid of what will be said to/about me about something this personal. But no one seems to be talking about this. Even people I admire, whom I know must have noticed. And I know for a fact that there are other people who were similarly triggered by this comparison. So I had to get it off my chest.

There’s a potential for emotional injury here, so that’s why the comments are closed. This isn’t for gossip, it isn’t for discussion. It’s just something I had to say. No matter who you are, no matter what your experience was, no matter what you’re feeling, or how similar it feels to your experience, remember that you’re not the only person who has had that thing happen to them. When you compare something to rape, you’re comparing it to someone else’s rape, too, minimizing and trivializing their trauma. And if you accidentally compare someone to your rapist, you might be comparing them to their rapist. The psychological harm that causes a person… I can’t even imagine how I would feel if someone did that to me.

So, that’s it. Just please don’t compare stuff that isn’t rape to rape. And I’m sorry that it happened to you, too.

Merlin Club S04E10, “A Herald of The New Age” or “I feel like I’ve seen dripping children before.”

Posted in Uncategorized

merlinbanner2

Merlin club is a weekly feature in which Jessica Jarman, Bronwyn Green, and myself gather at 8pm EST to watch an episode of the amazing BBC series Merlin, starring Colin Morgan and literally nobody else I care about except Colin Morgan.

Okay, I lie. A lot of other really cool people are in it, too.

Anyway, we watch the show, we tweet to the hashtag #MerlinClub, and on Fridays we share our thoughts about the episode we watched earlier in the week.

The Joelist Book of The Dead, pt. 2, “The River of Dreams”

Posted in Uncategorized

In case you missed part one of this series, you can find it here. This post will make more sense in context. As with “Lullaby (Goodnight, My Angel),” I have not sought out other analysis from either Billy Joel or other sources.

Apparently, a common theme in dreams (human dreams, at least) is trying to cross a bridge or a river. I have this dream a lot; sometimes I can cross the bridge, other times my car blows off into the river (one of my worst fears and the reason I dread crossing the Mackinac bridge every year). On the occasions I’ve made it across the dream-bridge, I’m usually then involved in some kind of incidental meeting with a dead relative. I was shocked when I relayed this dream to Bronwyn Green and she told me she’d had similar dreams, and that pretty much everyone has them, like the naked at school dream or those dreams where all your teeth fall out.

Can we talk about that for a minute? Because I always have way more teeth in those dreams than normal people should have in their mouths.

Anyway, when listening to Billy Joel’s “The River of Dreams” one day, I began to make some connections between my river dreams, the river dream he describes and, well, everyone’s river dreams. And as the song comes directly after “Lullaby (Goodnight My Angel),” a song I previously analyzed to be a message about immortality and a connection between the world of the living and the dead, I began to think of “The River of Dreams” as a universal interpretation of life, death, and the collective human consciousness.

Let’s consider the lyrics:

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
From the mountains of faith
To a river so deep
I must be looking for something
Something sacred I lost
But the river is wide
And it’s too hard to cross

Here we have a poetic description of a dream, a journey from “faith,” a belief so strong as to become reality to the faithful; here I’m interpreting it to mean knowledge of the waking world, and trust in what our conscious mind shows us. Moving from the conscious to the subconscious, the traveler begins a journey for knowledge of something that escapes upon waking. The source of the knowledge, however, is made unobtainable by an obstacle, i.e., the river.

And even though I know the river is wide
I walk down every evening and I stand on the shore
And try to cross to the opposite side
So I can finally find out what I’ve been looking for

This is a reoccurring dream, and so familiar that the dreamer has begun to consciously see a pattern. They are aware that something lies beyond the river, and that to learn that knowledge they have to cross over.

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the valley of fear
To a river so deep
And I’ve been searching for something
Taken out of my soul
Something I would never lose
Something somebody stole

In our waking thoughts, fear of our own mortality might prevent us from speculating on the nature of our souls, but in the subconscious world of our dreams, we are free to meditate upon it. The sense that something has been taken from the dreamer, something that they should be able to access, but can’t, is perhaps because of the manipulation our cultural beliefs have in forming our thoughts.

I don’t know why I go walking at night
But now I’m tired and I don’t want to walk anymore
I hope it doesn’t take the rest of my life
Until I find what it is that I’ve been looking for

When conscious, the dreamer is frustrated at the lack of easy answers, without realizing that it won’t just take the rest of their life, it will take the end of their life to understand their place in the collective conscious. More on that after the next verse:

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the jungle of doubt
To a river so deep
I know I’m searching for something
Something so undefined
That it can only be seen
By the eyes of the blind
In the middle of the night

“The jungle of doubt,” here could mean doubting the existence of a life after death. Likewise, the “eyes of the blind” can be interpreted as the knowledge gained by the dead in the world beyond. “Blind” and “unseeing” have been used to describe the dead in literature and spirituality, especially in Christianity, where Jesus “opened the eyes” of Lazarus in his tomb. Hence my earlier assertion that only through death can we truly “cross the river.”

I’m not sure about a life after this
God knows I’ve never been a spiritual man
Baptized by the fire, I wade into the river
That runs to the promised land

Christian theology points to baptism of fire to refer to the trials and tests faced by Christ and his disciples. So, baptised by the tests of life, the dreamer once again tries to cross the river to gain entrance to the land beyond.

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the desert of truth
To the river so deep

The “desert of truth” refers to absence of divine spiritual truth in our conscious lives.

We all end in the ocean
We all start in the streams
We’re all carried along
By the river of dreams
In the middle of the night

The final verse leaves us in ambiguity; is the “promised land” a conscious state that exists only in dreams, a world we access upon death (our permanent sleep)? If so, that means that the life of each soul is entwined in the “river of dreams,” that forms one collective human experience in some kind of universal subconscious.

From this song, I’ve formed the Joelist belief in an afterlife built around the familiar locations in recurring dreams. When we die, we cross the river of dreams, and enter into communion with the thoughts and minds of others. Until then, our subconscious self still tries to unite us with that collective consciousness, even though we can’t cross the river yet.

The next part of the Joelist Book of The Dead will be “2000 Years,” a song that details the evil and the divine in human nature, and the eventuality of fate.

Don’t Do This…Ever?: (an advice column for writers): “Crowd Funding” edition

Posted in Uncategorized

The internet book world has been abuzz with discussion about the ethics and logistics of crowd funding books.

Well, not books, really. They’ve been talking about crowd funding an author’s career.

When author Stacey Jay’s publisher declined to contract the next book in her YA series, she took to Kickstarter to fund the project. This isn’t uncommon, on both fronts. Many authors have crowd funded books, and many authors–and readers–have seen a series they loved discontinued by a publisher due to poor sales. It sucks for everyone, and I should know; it happened to one of my books.

Bear with me while I tell this tale.

Back when I was writing as Jennifer Armintrout, the sales of my Lightworld/Darkworld series were definitely not enough to earn out the $50,000 per book advance I’d received for them. When it came time to contract my next book, I had what my agent referred to as a “bridge” contract, a single title contract that offered a lower advance (I believe I got $35,000). The idea was that the sales of my next book would be enough to lead into my next contract.

They were not.

Although American Vampire was critically well received, it sold for absolute shit. In four years, it has not earned out. In fact, I think at last count it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 short of earning back the advance. Unsurprisingly, Harlequin wasn’t interested in another book in that series. Meanwhile, readers kept asking me if American Vampire was a series, that they wanted another book, and would there be any more books in my Blood Ties series. At this point in my career, I was writing as Abigail Barnette and making about fifty bucks a month. That’s quite the income drop from $50,000 per book, in case you were wondering. Nothing I sent out was selling. I proposed a spin-off novel about a popular character in my Blood Ties series, offering to write it without an advance for Harlequin’s Carina line of e-books, and was turned down.

In short, my career had taken a nosedive.

Things are obviously going better now, but had Kickstarter been a viable option back then, I might have undertaken a campaign on my own to self-publish a novel or two. When the state is paying for your heat, you can’t afford to self-publish. I would have asked for money for editing, for cover art, for professional design, probably even for advertising. I would have done it in a heartbeat.

So, what is it that rankles me about the Stacey Jay controversy? Well, several things, and hardly any of them have to do with Jay herself.

Foremost, I’m really uncomfortable with the stance her defenders have taken. Many have claimed that what Jay did with her Kickstarter was simply obtaining an advance in a non-traditional way. But it just…isn’t. An advance is money a publisher gives you before the title is put on sale. The idea is that the book will “earn out,” and the publisher will make that money back. It’s a risk they take, and as Jane Litte pointed out on twitter:

 

On the other side of the issue, people defended Jay by suggesting that those who questioned her campaign simply didn’t value an artist’s time or money:  


But it isn’t that simple. Writing isn’t “work.” It’s a business. If I own a ketchup factory, that’s running a business. If I work at a ketchup factory, that’s work. The owner of the ketchup factory assumes a financial risk in putting their product out there. They have to produce the product and pay the workers. The workers get paid for the work they do, the raw ingredients get paid for, and at the end of the day, if the business owner has money left over, that’s profit. This isn’t a business model that should be alien to anyone.

But supporters of Jay don’t see it that way. They see complaints from readers, bloggers, and other authors as an attack on Jay and a denial of the need for compensation:

 

No one cares what Stacey Jay spends royalties or advances on. No one expects writers to starve. I’ve seen readers called “entitled,” as though they’re demanding free product. No one has, to the best of my knowledge, asked Stacey Jay to write a book without being paid. What people have been objecting to is that a writer is asking readers to provide them with profits before the product has been delivered. That is not the responsibility of the consumer. I cannot ask customers who bought my ketchup in the past to fund my factory so that I can continue making product I can profit from.

As for Stacey Jay, she has posted a public apology and declared that she won’t be writing YA anymore. And again, there are authors, bloggers, and readers who are furious, insinuating that Jay has been forced out of the YA community or that disagreeing with her business model is akin to a personal attack, but that’s disingenuous. Jay decided to take down the Kickstarter and announce her retirement from YA. And you know what? If she feels that’s a sound business decision, I won’t argue with her. I have two series that at the moment I don’t have immediate plans to finish, because I won’t make as large a profit from them as I will working on other projects (don’t worry, they’re not either of my current series). It sucks for readers, in the same way that it sucked to see GCB cancelled, or like how every time I find a moisturizer I like, they fucking discontinue it. If publishing is a business, then business decisions are being made. If they’re personal or emotional, that’s not the fault of the consumers. The consumers are voicing objection to a business model, not saying that they want free ketchup, or to intentionally bankrupt ketchup companies world-wide. No one, not one person, has asked Stacey Jay to write for free. She has simply rejected the idea of writing on spec.

Stacey Jay is a talented writer. Read her Night’s Rose, written as Annalise Evansand you’ll see another example of the true unfairness in publishing; she should be more well-known than she is (or was, I guess, since this is spreading like wildfire). But that’s not how it works out, a lot of the time. More people buy Heinz than exquisite gourmet ketchup (that’s a thing, right? “The fanciest dijon ketchups?” BNL would never lie to me). And no writer is guaranteed to be paid for their projects before they complete them; it’s really nice, but it’s not owed. And these days, it’s almost become the golden ticket (if Willy Wonka were about ketchup instead of chocolate. I’m not rewriting the whole damn post to make that metaphor work).

Readers asking not to bear the cost of a work’s production in advance aren’t asking for anything for free. They were just surprised and insulted to be asked to pay for the production of the supply before the demand was fulfilled. They were further insulted by the excessively dramatic predictions of authors starving with their children in the streets, made by writers who had the gall to say the objectors were the ones acting entitled. That behavior isn’t making a case for authors, and it certainly isn’t helping to support Stacey Jay.

No matter how much we love our books, writing isn’t a job. It’s a career. You’re running a business. And nobody is responsible for making the ketchup but you.

Tense Tooth Fairy Negotiations

Posted in Uncategorized

The last time my daughter, Wednesday, lost a tooth, it was at the dentist’s office.

“Are you going to leave that for the Tooth Fairy?” the dentist asked, moments after he wiggled the super loose tooth from her head.

She shook her head, looked him in the eye, and said, “No. She only gives you a dollar for your teeth. My teeth are worth more.”

The kid wasn’t joking. She didn’t leave her tooth for the Tooth Fairy that night, and she still has it put away somewhere for safe keeping.

Yesterday morning, she lost another tooth. Or, I should say, night before last. She woke up, frowned, and spit a tooth into her hand. This one, she informed me, was going to go to the Tooth Fairy, but it would be the last one if her financial demand wasn’t met: “If she doesn’t give me a hundred dollars this time, she’s not getting another damn tooth.”

We went about our ritual of sealing the tooth in an envelope and putting it in the Barbie Dream House for the Tooth Fairy to find. This morning, however, included in the envelope of money with a crudely drawn sigil of a tooth and a dollar sign, she received this letter:

tooth fairy

We read it together. She thought it over. Finally she said, “Okay, I get it. But I still think my teeth are worth more than a dollar.”

I guess my six-year-old is looking for someone willing to buy her teeth, is what’s happening here.

UPDATE: Wednesday just came home and said, “You’re the tooth fairy! You are!” I asked her how she figured it out, and she said, “Because you have money.” She’s very pleased at how smart she is, and she sounds like a detective in a television show: “At first I couldn’t figure out how you got the money in there… then I realized, you were sneaking into my room the whole time!”

 

The “Force Jess To Finally Watch Labyrinth” watch-a-long!

Posted in Uncategorized

If you were a youngster in the 80’s, there is a very high likelihood that one movie, and one movie alone, caused you to first be aware of the power of raw, forbidden sexuality.

LabyrinthBallroomscene

 

Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, a monument to fantasy, puppetry, and snugly packed male genitalia was the movie that made me first aware of the hotness of age gap dynamics. Bronwyn Green and I love this movie. We even have this friendship test for new people we meet: if someone doesn’t like Labyrinth, it is unlikely that we will have much else in common.

So imagine our horror when we found out that Jessica Jarman has never, ever, in her entire life, seen Labyrinth.

This is a situation that must be rectified. What better way than with a Twitter watch-a-long. And what better time than to celebrate David Bowie’s 68th birthday?

The “Force Jess To Finally Watch Labyrinth” watch-a-long!

Thursday, January 8th, at 9 P.M. EST

Hashtag: #MagicBulge

Hop on Netflix or start your DVD (or VHS. You know you own it on one of those formats) at 9 P.M. EST and tweet to the hashtag #MagicBulge. We can all share our fond memories of the vague discomfort caused by David Bowie’s tights.

Call for links re: Leelah Alcorn

Posted in Uncategorized

Yesterday someone left a comment on my rebuttal to Sarah Ditum suggesting it would be more helpful to post links to writing by transgender women on the subject, and I was like, “Hey, that is a great idea!” and said I would do that today. However, I find myself in a precarious mental health state this morning (probably all the holiday stress catching up to me) and I just can’t tackle the task. If you have links to posts, articles, etc. written by transgender women in rebuttal to Ditum’s piece, please post them in the comments section. Or, heck, anything you’ve read from transgender women regarding Leelah Alcorn, go ahead and post it here.

I want to stress that this isn’t because I don’t care, but because I have mental health issues that crop up at inconvenient times (and I feel like an asshole for even bringing it up in conjunction with this topic, I swear I’m not trying to make it all about me although I’m sure it comes off that way). I recognize that I have the privilege of walking away from a topic that doesn’t endanger me personally, but I am trying to avoid a full-blown mental health crisis and I feel that reading about suicide isn’t safe for me at this time.

But we do have a wide readership here, so signal boost away in the comments!

Merlin Club S04E09 “Lancelot du Lac” or “I get it, Lancelot from the Lake. That’s clever.”

Posted in Uncategorized

merlinbanner2

Merlin club is a weekly feature in which Jessica Jarman, Bronwyn Green, and myself gather at 8pm EST to watch an episode of the amazing BBC series Merlin, starring Colin Morgan and literally nobody else I care about except Colin Morgan.

Okay, I lie. A lot of other really cool people are in it, too.

Anyway, we watch the show, we tweet to the hashtag #MerlinClub, and on Fridays we share our thoughts about the episode we watched earlier in the week.