Category: Uncategorized

Feels like a long time, doesn’t it?

One of the interesting things about being a writer is determining the genre that your book falls into. For instance, if it’s erotica with vampires, it pretty obviously goes into the vampire erotica category. Sometimes it’s very easy.

Other times, it’s more difficult. Maybe it’s a drama, and yes, here and there a vampire might pop up, and perhaps if the mood is right and the lights are low and there’s music playing, some erotica just happens to peek its head out. But the drama is the main part, not the erotica and certainly not the vampires. What’s the pile for that book?

So my book is technically historical fiction, meaning that it is fiction that takes place in history. But, of course, history is ongoing. It doesn’t stop, it just keeps riding the wave of time until time itself stops and then history gets to take a break.

I guess we consider it historical if it doesn’t take place right now, but that also has its own pitfalls. Right now isn’t right now. In fact, by the time I write this sentence, it’s in the past. And now you’ve read it and it’s even further in the past. You see the problem. There really isn’t any clear definition of what is historical other than a subjective feeling that someone has. For me, the 1960s are historical, but for my dad they probably feel about as current as the 1990s are for me (he would also tell you that things were better in the 60s, but I digress). So where’s the cutoff?

Then you put yourself into the feet of authors who wrote in different periods. Mark Twain was writing contemporary fiction, but history and time have trod upon that and now it’s historical. Sorry, Mark.

And yes, I get it: it’s a story where the author isn’t writing about their own time. That’s simple, and it makes sense. But the most important thing about it is that it isn’t fun to be quasi-outraged about, and that’s the real point I’m making.

It wasn’t my intent to be some kind of strike buster, wielding my novel like a bat against folks who are rightfully trying to effect change at Amazon. That would have required forethought on my part whereas the main thought in my head was, “I’m done, it’s actually done.” A few clicks later (and about 231 cover upload revisions) and there’s a book on a website with your name on it. Pretty surreal.

Of course, any writer will tell you that if a book does feel done, then that may be a dangerous warning sign. But at some point you’ve revised the prose so much that you probably reverted back to whatever you had initially and, for better or worse, the work is what it is, and the best thing you can do is set it free to be ravaged by the slings and arrows of anonymous Internet reviewers with names like “BooKiller823”, who has never met something he couldn’t give a two-star review to. You breathe, you let it happen, and you move on.

Now the boycott of Amazon is a very good thing in general, even if it’s inconvenient for indie writers and small businesses and anyone else who’s donned their peasant clothes to work Amazon’s fields in order to modestly enrich themselves and greatly enrich Amazon’s shareholders. Someone might make the argument that, “You know, maybe it was a bad idea to allow one company to become a single marketplace for every product in the world,” but those people are always unceremoniously shouted down, thrown off of tall castle towers and/or pantsed.

But this is the reality we live in, at least until someone invents a trans-dimensional gate, in which case I think we’d all move to the reality where trans fats are beneficial to our health and nobody ever heard of reality television. We’re stuck in a place with delicious terrible fats and a lot of shows with people who, apart from extreme plastic surgery or a modicum of fame thirty years ago, are fairly unremarkable.

I’ve lost the point, which is that lots of folks have been using the Greater Evil for a while for publishing and have the wherewithal to be able to move to different platforms as public opinion has turned against Amazon. And that’s okay. And I hope it’s okay that I also used them. In my haste to let people read the book I erred in figuring out where to distribute it, but that can be corrected. And after the boycott is over hopefully there will be a turn towards the light from the company or renewed interest in keeping monopolies from existing, but I am skeptical of it happening. So we depend on the assumptions of good intent from our peers, and help to make sure that we’re pulling each other along to the best possible choices that we can make.

In the meantime, I’ll be known as the dumbass who published a book during a boycott.