An unexpected holiday

Usually I wouldn’t talk about controversial issues here, but on this topic I already show my support in my books, starting most clearly toward the end of Sacred Honor with mild hints in Sacred Blood.  If discussing support of equal rights will alienate readers and potential readers, oh well.  It’ll happen now or later. 

I was in California watching the election coverage when Prop 8 passed, this, on top of the wrongly-named “Defense” of Marriage Act.  I felt like I’d been sucker-punched.  All my gay friends had just been dealt the blow that in California, the state with San Francisco and the center of gay culture for the US, they were second-class citizens undeserving of equal rights because some people think homosexuality is icky based on the bible.  These are people who save lives in hospitals, educate children in schools, and fight in wars so that the rest of us can practice our religions (if any) for ourselves, and there they were, being told their love doesn’t matter and they aren’t free to marry the consenting adult of their choice.  It was a dark, painful night, and the days that followed were brightened, though so barely, only by the Sarah Palin memes and the hope that soon-to-be-president Obama might help effect change to give LGBT people equal rights.

We’re glad to take the services and protections these people offer, but our laws were refusing them EQUAL protection.

Two inaugural speeches later, second-tine-elected President Obama stated his support for our gay brothers and sisters and he has refused to help uphold a discriminatory law that has hurt countless people and destroyed so many families.  DOMA, at its base, was about defending the idea that marriage should be “traditional” and according to the bible – one man and one woman.  Additional state bans on it just kicked people who were already down.  Defenders of bans have claimed that this is an issue for the states while ignoring that this issue, unlike a speeding ticket, has ramifications at the federal level.  

This morning I woke up to the news that the US Supreme Court had ruled DOMA unconstitutional, in effect opening up federal protections and rights to millions of same-sex couples, and struck down California’s Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriages.  Leave it to people like Scalia to whine that it’s not right for judges to overturn voted-on laws.  What people like him forget is that women’s right to vote and equal rights for non-whites weren’t granted by votes, but by the courts, and that rights put up for public vote become privileges rather than rights.  Some argue that same-sex relationships are no one’s business, so why have equal rights?  By the thinking that relationships are private, why have marriage at all?  And some people have argued that marriage is for making babies.  What about infertile people and those who don’t want kids?  No marriage for them?  No protections and rights under the law to medical decisions, inheriting property, etc.?  These questions ignored, California went on to a landmark election cycle in which same-sex couples and their supporters were dealt a swift blow to their hearts.

After Prop 8 passed, which many, including myself, thought would fail by a landslide, and with the conservative on the SCOTUS, I didn’t take it as a given that DOMA and Prop 8 would be struck down today.  But they have been, and all day I’ve been so close to tears of happiness.  If the floodgates open, I’ll be a mess.  This ruling is incredible, and it’s about time it happened.  Those who fight in wars and give their live protecting us stateside will be entitled to the same benefits as opposite-sex couples.  For many couples, it’ll mean paying more in federal taxes since the exemption goes up 50% over one person, not double.  This means more income between two working people that can be taxed.  They will be allowed to bring their foreign-born spouses to the US instead of being apart nine months out of every year.  There are more than a thousand rights that opposite-sex couples take for granted to the point of not even realizing it.

Today a dark, heavy veil has been lifted.  Let’s get rid of it altogether.

How to list a giveaway on Goodreads

I’ve had several people ask how to list a giveaway on Goodreads.  It’s actually very easy.  Too bad the page to list isn’t the clearest on what you must do to post a giveaway.  You must first create an author account.

On top of that, you need to have an ISBN for your book.  Goodreads doesn’t negotiate on that.  Even if you’re an indie publisher or indie author (the former also funds the cost of printing up front and keeps stock to ship immediately to buyers whereas the second has buyers buy through sites that connect to print-on-demand services), you must have an ISBN.  If you’re using Createspace or something similar, you can get a free ISBN.  In the US, Bowker is the one and ONLY agency through which you can buy personal ISBNs, and this looks more professional.  I will be doing this soon and updating on Goodreads.  You must have a physical copy of the book to send to the winner, or winners.  You can choose how many.  If you plan on also making ebooks available, you must have an ISBN for each format.  Print paperback, print hardback, .pdf, .mobi, and epub will mean five ISBNs.  For the giveaway, you just need the paperback one.

After you have that, you just post your giveaway.  Here is where you decide how many copies (remember shipping is on you) and how long to have it run.  It won’t post right away.  They do have people vet the submissions to make sure they meet the guidelines.

Beyond that you just promote, promote, promote.
ENTER HERE if the links below don’t work.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Sacred Blood

by Alys B. Cohen

Giveaway ends August 01, 2013.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

The Twilight Effect and “Why doesn’t Juliette just leave her abuser?”

I’ve received a couple of anonymous expert reviews of the first thirty pages of Sacred Blood. Honestly the only real helpful information between the two is just how much two people could vary in their opinions so drastically.  If scores were grades in high school, one would have failed me and one would have given me an A.

Now I don’t expect to hear only favorable things about what I do.  In fact, when I only hear positive, I start wondering if anyone’s really paying attention.  However a couple things he said have been weighing heavily on me.

The first is what I call the Twilight Effect.  I’ve noticed this in regard to many other books.  Readers tend to try finding similarities between male protagonists and Edward Cullen, and will declare them to be the same even when the only similarities are that they’re the same sex.  I’ve questioned readers on how characters such as Sir Lancelot, Pyramus, and even the real life Prince Albert, can possibly be like Edward.  Well, they’re men who fell in love.  Okay, but that doesn’t mean anything.  Most men fall in love.  We won’t say they’re all the same for it.

I’ve found my own Tristan compared to Edward, and the only actual comparisons have been that they’re superhuman men who fall for human women who both have moments of seeming sad.  Sometimes the superhuman aspect is left out.  Always left out is that Edward didn’t know anything about Bella, and his moping was because he wanted to literally eat her and took that to mean they were destined to be together.  Tristan, on the other hand, got to know Juliette, started to love her slowly, and his sadness was due to her being hurt by her boyfriend.

However, thanks to the Twilight Effect, readers keep comparing male characters to Edward and glom on to any similarities, no matter how small, to think of them as the same.  The ironic exception to this seems to be Christian Grey who is a fan fiction version of Edward.  I suspect the difference is because fans of Fifty Shades are defending the origins of the Fifty Shades books by claiming they’re significantly different than the source material.

I’ve asked several people how to prevent a comparison to Edward, and the answer, when there is one aside from “I don’t know,” has been to not have the guy and girl fall for each other in any way.  So does this mean Stephenie Meyer now owns the romance genre, however tenuous her claim to be a romance writer is at all?

The other thing this reviewer said that has been bothering me is actually upsetting.  He (I’m convinced that reviewer is a man) asked why she doesn’t just leave, and said it’s not believable that someone in a bad relationship would stay where there don’t seem to be any redeeming qualities in the abuser, and went on to question why she continued packing his sports bag instead of getting medical care when he dislocated her shoulder.

Just let that sink in a moment.  I had to.  I sat in my car a good five minutes trying to grasp the meaning of the words.  They’re a baby step away from victim-blaming.

When I was 18, I was a Juliette.  I was a young woman in a bad relationship with no resources of my own and nowhere to go.  I wanted to leave, but couldn’t.  Well, I supposed I could have if I was willing to walk out the door and go right to the street.  But what kind of person would use that to say someone can always “just” leave?

Juliette’s in a bad situation, one tens of millions of American and British woman have been in.  Realistically, what do you do?  What do you do when you don’t have the money to just get another place and most government resourced for battered women give priority to those with young children?  You either stay and hope things get better, or you leave and likely will end up homeless, hungry, and in danger from strangers.  Sometimes the danger you know is less frightening than the danger you don’t know.  This is why I think the reviewer is a man.  Men don’t have to worry that every person they meet in the darkness at night will want to rape them, so leaving home to strike out alone isn’t quite as terrifying as for a woman who will be a target.  This doesn’t even touch on the effects abuse can take on a woman’s self esteem and sense of value, things that many victim-blamers won’t even try to understand.

Claiming a woman should just leave is so close to blaming her for her abuse that it’s hard to argue that it’s not outright blaming.  This is different than asking why a woman is staying with a man who hurts her.  That is asking for information.  Asking why she doesn’t just walk out the door is blaming her and making that decision seem so easy that she only has herself to blame for staying.

I won’t even type out my mental response to that reviewer because I’m trying to keep this blog PG-rated in language, and my response involved the only word that the MPAA will give an R-rating for even absent violence, sex, or adult situations.  Oh how I envy those who’ve never experienced abuse and haven’t had a loved one go through it (that they know about).  For those who don’t understand, the easiest way can I think of to get them to understand is to imagine being the one in a relationship without income and no way to get a job because you’ll be harmed if you do.  Now take your lack is income and go try to find an apartment and hope a manager will just trust you’ll get a job soon.  Try to find one while having no current address to put down.  No address, no job.  Go, find a place to live.  That is literally what women in abusive relationships without resources of their own are told to do.  Juliette not doing this makes her not believable as a character, and her abuse is her fault for not walking out.

I don’t know what to do about that Twilight Effect.  It’s become the archetype against which all other romances and romance-types are being compared.  I suppose all that can be done is to hope that readers won’t care that a male protag is “like Edward” for having an interest in a woman.

As far as the second, in addition to wanting to smack people like that reviewer with a rolled up copy of my manuscript and hope some good sense seeps of its pages and into the reviewers’ brains, what we can do is to keep pushing forward.  No one who doesn’t already blame women will start, but those who do may come to understand.  I’ve had one pan contact me and tell me he finally understood after just one chapter.  Those of us trying to combat the victim-blaming and who fight for empowerment of oppressed woman will slowly chisel away at the boulders in our way.  It’s hard and slow work, but we’re working toward a good cause.

The Power of Words Both Said and Unsaid

For many decades kids grew up with the old saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me,” and applied it to negative things that are actually said rather than including positive things that are never said.  This saying removed power from words too.  Very often these days I read comments about how stories are just words and they can’t mean anything.  Ignore those who tease you because teasing is just words and words can’t hurt you.  Forget about never hearing “I love you” and other sweet things because they’re just words and anyone can say them and so they don’t matter.  Ignore a book trying to normalize abuse/make eating disorders seem safe/attempt to make unwanted suffering be considered as noble because they’re just words and, once again, words mean nothing.

This is bull.  It’s all wrong.  All of it.  Words have tremendous power, whether said or unsaid.  Who in this world has formed an opinion on something, whether it’s abortion, doctor-assisted suicide, or the Westboro Baptist “Church,” with absolutely no words being spoken or written or signed?  Whether the delivery method is a mouth or a film or a book or sign language (how is this so different than a different language you don’t understand?), words sway people, and oftentimes the reader/listener doesn’t even realize it.  

If you, like most people, find Westboro abhorrent, you probably didn’t sit down and think about what you heard about them.  You probably heard they praise their idea of a god for dead soldiers and dead children because it’s their deity’s punishment for American starting to accept gays.  You weren’t consciously aware of your opinion being formed by the words you heard and read.  It just happened.

Paul Ryan, a fairly unpopular politician for those of you who don’t keep up with American politics, was so swayed by Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead that he required all his staff to read the book.  He was so influenced by her writing that many news articles hinted that she may as well be a co-candidate and share his political position.  Other politicians could not deny that he was obsessed with the influence of her books, even calling it disturbing.  But you know what?  The words in her “obviously really bad fiction” obviously really influenced the guy right up to being a contender for vice resident of this country.

Way back in ancient times Plato was concerned about the influence fiction had on people to the point that he considered the writings to be “lies” that need to be banned.  He was convinced that the power of fiction could so thoroughly cloud the mind that the only defense is to disallow it altogether.  Probably most people today think this is an overreaction, though it does show that over 2,000 years ago the influence of the written word was known.

Whatever your religion, if you have one, you probably consider the texts of other religions to be nothing more than fiction and your own to be the truth.  Someone else will think yours is the fiction and theirs the truth.  Regardless of what is and isn’t, the words between the covers of the Christian bible, the Muslim Q’oran, and every other have been used to influence extremists, and sometimes not so extremists.  We’ve all heard of the Holy Crusades, King John famously riding out onto the battle field to defend Christendom.  We’re all painfully aware of Bin Laden and 9/11.  To tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people around the world, the texts influencing these people is fiction.

David Mark Chapman was obsessed with certain books, most notably Catcher in the Rye, and their influence led him to murder John Lennon.

So how can anyone argue that words can’t cause harm, that they can’t influence people to do bad things?  No one argues that the bible can influence people to help the poor and sick, or that a biography on Nikola Tesla, just words, can influence young people to go into science, or even that The Babysitters Club books could encourage youngsters to try setting up their own small neighborhood businesses to earn some extra money.

You can’t have it both way.  Either words can influence bad as well as good, or words have no effect at all and we can all have no opinions.

Now another type of words that doesn’t get the attention it deserves is the type that are unsaid in any format.  We’ve all known a woman who feels ugly because she so rarely hears she’s pretty, or the child who feels unloved because, while the parent(s) may make sure the material needs are met, the simple utterance of “I love you” is coveted and elusive.  Perhaps ironically, asking to hear needed but unsaid words can render their receipt meaningless.  How genuine can an “I love you” or “You’re beautiful” or “I think your work is fantastic” be only given in response to being asked?  Their lack can influence, no, directly result in a loss of self-esteem and self-worth.

Yes, dear readers, even an absence of words can hurt.  Some lucky people can believe that hearing nothing negative means to assume the positive.  If only we could all be so lucky.

If you’re in the camp believing that words have no power, please enlighten me as to how this can be.  Please tell me how you’ve managed to be completely unaffected by words on every way, and how it would impact you to never again receive a compliment.  After all, they’re just words.

If you are not in this camp, please stop for a moment and ask yourself when you last gave a  compliment that wasn’t requested and you thought should just be implied with a smile or “just known” to begin with.  A measly two second to compliment someone, even a stranger in passing whose hair or jacket you admire, can be the boost someone needs.   

To all critical of the power books, especially fiction, can have, please take a moment to think about how they are words, and how words have shaped out world since the first beings became capable of communicating.