I found out about Katie Babs/KB, who is doing something about the recent rash of teen suicides due to bullying and cyberbullying. She’s made a post about them and has pledged that for every comment she gets, up to five hundred, she’ll donate a dollar to an organization dedicated to helping kids.
500 comments = $500.00.
To quote her:
$250 will go to The Trevor Project, “the leading national organization focused on crisis and suicide prevention efforts among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) youth.”
$250 will go to the Matthew Shepard Foundation, [which] was founded by Dennis and Judy Shepard in memory of their 21-year old son, Matthew, who was murdered in an anti-gay hate crime in Wyoming in October 1998. Their mission is to “educate and enlighten others on the importance of diversity, understanding, compassion, acceptance and respect.”
I commented in support, and I hope that the rest of you will do so as well.
A couple of people have now sent me a copy of what was written in Rolling Stone magazine and I feel I owe the reporter an apology. It turned out not to be an article so much as just a mention, and it went like this:
Hot Broken Paperbacks
M/M Romances
Around 2007, amateur online scribbler and UK housewife Alex Beecroft discovered a burgeoning small-press genre called “M/M Romance” – books in which men fall in love, get it on and get it on some more in assorted historical settings. Today, Beecroft (alongside writers Erastes, Laura Baumbach and Donald Hardy) is one of M/M’s premier authors, and women just like her abound in her audience. Says Beecroft, “There are straight women who just don’t connect with society’s construction of what it means to be a woman.”
And apparently was illustrated by a picture of the cover of Tangled Web by Lee Rowan.
The line that I objected to so strongly, in the Hot List 2010 about m/m romance being “Man on man porn for straight women,” was not actually the title of the article. The reporter, therefore, was telling me the truth when he said he wouldn’t use that as a title, and I apologize unreservedly for thinking otherwise. Furthermore, he says “women just like her abound in her audience,” and this is entirely true, and does not imply that there are no other sorts of people who read m/m romance. Donald was mentioned too (and his name spelled right!) So it seems I went off half cocked in being insulted that GBLT readers and writers were being deliberately excluded.
I can’t say I like the description of the genre, which appears to have been lifted entirely from the Out magazine interview and ignores the many different heat levels and different sub genres (it really isn’t all historical!) of m/m romance, but I can’t expect too much of a single paragraph. And I did actually say what I’m reported as saying, so that’s good too.
I stand by my annoyance at the “Man on man porn for straight women,” thing, but I’m a lot happier now that I’ve seen that the article itself was not guilty of that. I feel I was listened to after all, and that’s something for which I’m grateful. I’m also grateful to see the genre get a mention in such a huge thing as Rolling Stone magazine, and I can only assume that whoever wrote the introduction on the Table of Contents was not the same person I talked to at all.
Has anyone seen Rolling Stone magazine this month? They interviewed me a couple of weeks ago. I told them in no uncertain terms that I didn’t write porn, that (from what I could tell from my fan mail) more than half of my readers were gay men, that I didn’t write for straight women only and wouldn’t know how, that there were gay men and women of all sexualities in m/m romance, and that of the four authors of Running Press’ m/m romance line, I was the only straight woman. They seemed interested and surprised about this last fact, so I thought for sure that bit of information might make it into the article. I asked them to assure me that they would not put the article out under a title that suggested m/m romance was gay porn for straight women, and they said that no, of course they wouldn’t.
I haven’t seen the resulting article, so I can’t tell whether any of that got through or not, or whether I might as well have saved my breath. Despite asking if I could see the article before it went out, that never happened. I can’t subscribe to the online magazine in order to read the article because it insists I need an American address and post code. But the title of the article appears to be “Man-on-man porn for straight women” so I don’t hold out a lot of hope. Is it as bad as it sounds? Read the rest of this entry »
will be deleted when finished.
So please ignore this post.
I’ve blogged over on the Samhain blog today on the subject of research for historical novels and why it’s really not as horrible as it sounds:
http://samhainpublishing.com/blog/2010/09/30/research-a-perk-of-the-job
I think I should perhaps do a follow-on blog about “fascinating people I’d never heard of (but really should have.)” 🙂 The main drawback of research, as far as I can see, is that you so rarely have anyone else to enthuse to about it.
September 30th,2010
research,
writing |
3 Comments
One of the blogs I follow regularly is Shrinking Violet Promotions (subtitle – Marketing for Introverts,) who are always interesting and provide a much welcome contrast to the rather extrovert advice I get elsewhere. Today for some readon the RSS feed sent me two of their posts instead of one, and I thought I’d pass them along because they’re both things I’ve seen people getting depressed and stressed about recently.
This one is particularly encouraging, addressing the reasons why an author can suddenly find that they just can’t take this writing life any more:
http://shrinkingvioletpromotions.blogspot.com/2010/09/for-those-we-lose-along-way.html
And this one ties in to that, I think, in that sometimes all the energy expended on promotion can be one of the reasons you don’t have any left over for writing:
http://shrinkingvioletpromotions.blogspot.com/2010/09/i-will-be-your-friend-but-i-will-not-be.html
With another cause for writing fatigue being the deluge of promotion for other people’s books. (I shouldn’t be saying this immediately after my last post, should I?!)
As someone who always scores 100% Introversion on these personality tests, these ladies are talking my language, and I’m very glad they are 🙂
Massive apologies to anyone who was hoping to get this book for Halloween last year, but the good news is that it’s out in perfect time to get it for Halloween this year 🙂
The Mysterious Anthology
Containing:
Shadows in Time by Laura Baumbach: Trying to avoid ruin and disgrace, young naive Neal Clifton, wealthy heir to a sizable Boston family fortune faces the illicit and dangerous complication of his first affair with man–a scheming, unscrupulous man with influence and power that reaches beyond the grave. Neal vows to never give into his own unnatural desires again but finds his only hope for escape in the hands (and arms) of stoic silversmith, Peter Wade.
The Wages of Sin by Alex Beecroft: Charles Latham, wastrel younger son of the Earl of Clitheroe, returns home drunk from the theatre to find his father gruesomely dead. He suspects murder. But when the Latham ghosts turn nasty, and Charles finds himself falling in love with the priest brought in to calm them, he has to unearth the skeleton in the family closet before it ends up killing them all.
The Dark Farewell by Josh Lanyon: Newspaper man David Flynn knows a phoney when he sees one, and he’s convinced the Spiritualist Medium Julian Devereaux is as fake as a cigar store Indian. And he’s absolutely right. But when Julian begins to see bloodstained visions of a serial killer, the only person he can turn to for help is the cynical Mr. Flynn.
Hee! I’ve finally achieved my ambition to be in an anthology with Josh and Laura 😀 I’m so honoured and chuffed. I can’t wait for my author’s copies to arrive so that I can gloat over them in private 😉
Quick excerpt under the cut:
Read the rest of this entry »
Or maybe just a plan. The trouble is that I can’t help but suspect that if I post about my plan something will occur to make sure it doesn’t happen. However, I’m going to take that risk.
This year has been a year of things not getting finished, so I want to end the year by completing some writing projects. To that end, my plan is (God willing):
Finish the space opera novella I’m currently writing, before the end of October.
Use NaNoWriMo to finish Under the Hill.
If I can do that, I can end the year with two, possibly three (Under the Hill could easily split in the middle to become two novels) manuscripts to send out early next year. If I can’t do it, my state of “OMG, I’m such a has-been!” will carry over to next year, and I really don’t want that to happen.
Kicking off Talk like a Pirate Day by linking to the special pirate/age of
sail post over at SPEAK ITS NAME
http://speakitsname.com/2010/09/19/ahoy/
Once you catch an eyeball of that you'll be right up for chatting on
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SpeakItsName/, if only to purge the horror!
