Normal service resumed

*g*  Well, the girls are back to school and the launch of FC is over, so it’s time I was at work on something else, though it’s not helping that my calves are murder today 😉

As always after the holidays it’s really hard to get back to some sort of productive routine, and today was not an exception.  Mind you, I did find some great morris dancing videos on YouTube, so I count that as a win.

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April was in March (and so was I).

So, I have survived my first ever dance-out!  Woohoo 🙂  We were set to start at 11.30 in the market square of a town called March, which I had never visited before.  They were having their St.George’s Day fair and wanted some attractions, and the Ely and Littleport Riot women’s morris side had been employed as one of these.

We didn’t know where to meet.  ‘In the market square’, I’d been told, but I didn’t know where the market square was, and the town was much bigger than I thought.  Fortunately, however, we bumped into some jingling ladies in the car-park, so the whole meeting up thing was accomplished with no difficulty.

Here we are lined up about to start off with Ely Stars:

Which is a stick dance for 6 people

As you can see, I gave it my all:

My all is not very much at present, but I’m hoping that with enough practice it will increase.  I also started a diet yesterday with the aim of eventually being able to close my waistcoat without the extra stomacher!

And then we did several more dances including Pottersbury, Goose Green, Country Gardens and finished off the set with Padnall.

It ain’t over until the fat lady dances!

After that we wandered up the high street, passing organ grinders and jesters and people riding penny farthings

and donut stalls and cheese stalls etc etc, stopping to do one or two dances every 500 feet or so.  By half one we called it a morning and went to the pub for lunch.  And unfortunately after that I had to leave because Ailith needed to be taken to a birthday party, and Rose wasn’t feeling well, so needed someone to be at home with her.

I messed up only one dance, and even in that one I managed to find my place again without disrupting anyone else.  So, the duck is broken and I’ve done it once now (returning home with a celebratory rosette 🙂 )  I’ll feel a bit more confident on this coming Thursday when I’m dancing out again at 7pm in the evening in Whittlesea.

And now for something completely different

Morris

Wish me luck!  I’m going on my first dance-out with the Ely and Littleport Riot Morris dancing side in an hour.  Eek!  I’m terrified.  I have my waistcoat, I have my hankies, I have bells on my shoes, and sticking plaster on my heels because the shoes still murder my feet if I let them.  But I’m still making very basic mistakes in every dance, and I only know three dances all the way through.

It’ll be a disaster!  So if anyone is near March in Cambridgeshire and fancies coming to see us dance in March town square, we’re on at 11.30.  Will report back later with photos, if I’m still alive 😉

Somali Pirates

As may be apparent from False Colors, I don’t buy into the romance of pirates.  But having said that, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.  For example

http://shewhohashope.livejournal.com/143545.html

Positive results of Amazonfail

1. Huge amounts of inadvertent publicity for False Colors, Transgressions, and The Filly, in particular, and the existence of gay romance as a genre in general.  Ironically enough, in trying to keep it invisible, they’ve managed to publicise it all over the world.

2. We’ve become aware that censorship on Amazon is an ongoing problem:

Additional Reasons to Not Forget #amazonfail

and hopefully we’ve become aware that while one huge company retains control over the visibility of books in general, there is always going to be a threat that the thought police could disappear entire segments of writing, thoughts and information, just by de-ranking them and taking them off the search facility.

What can we do?

1. Make an effort to buy from somewhere else.  Currently I’m all for supporting Barnes and Noble with my buck, because they have been brave enough to begin shelving m/m romances in the ‘Romance’ section as well as the gblt section.  Pretty much the opposite of what Amazon was doing.

But, rather than buy on the internet from the USA, I’m also going to make the effort to go into my local town, where there is a little, independent bookshop, and I will be ordering most of my new books through them in future.  Not only will this help them survive, but once they’ve seen the level of my demand for gay books, maybe they’ll actually start stocking them as a regular thing!

If you’re in the USA, this website will help you find your local independent book shop.

2. If you’d like to return something to the GBLT community in lieu of the total lack of any kind of apology from Amazon, consider buying

I Do: An Anthology in Support of Marriage Equality

(Dear Author’s review here)

all the proceeds of which go to helping Lambda Legal fight the legal battle for equal marriage rights for gblt people in the States.

Why did Amazonfail grow so big so fast?

*g*  Well, they banned Stephen Fry’s autobiography, ‘Moab is my Washpot’.  That on its own would have been enough to piss off the entire UK, where he’s considered something of a national treasure.

Stephen Fry on the relationship of the British to their language here:

(Beverage alert 😉 )

The EBook has landed!

Available now in Sony’s ebook store

False Colors

http://ebookstore.sony.com/ebook/alex-beecroft/false-colors/_/R-400000000000000157378

And Transgressions

http://ebookstore.sony.com/ebook/erastes/transgressions/_/R-400000000000000157379

no cheaper, alas, than the real thing, but considerably more electronic 😉

AfterEllen.com on Amazon

Copied from a post on AfterEllen this afternoon:

~*~*~*~

Amazon’s “Glitch” Myth Debunked
by Francine Saint Marie

CONCLUSION: Censorship was clearly built into Amazon-Kindle’s digital-text-platform years ago when it was programmed to constantly crawl itself for new content and trip the automatic censors whenever it found certain keywords that Amazon’s leadership had designated as forbidden.: Publishers and customers need to be aware that those dirty words (like “gay” and “lesbian” as well as “erotic” or “sexuality” or “adult”) will still cast you into the great Kindle abyss for all eternity and that missing sales rankings are really only the tip of the censor’s iceberg. Moreover, even though sales rankings appear to have been restored throughout its site again, now that Amazon has also introduced this program code into its paperback listings, it’ll take awhile for them to completely clean up their system.. That is, if they really want to.

http://www.afterellen.com/node/48877

Edited at 10.30 to say that the article linked to seems to have disappeared! Sometimes it’s hard not to see conspiracies at work!

Edited at 10.50 to add this link to the meta_writer community, which has saved the whole post.

After AmazonFail, Readers!Win :)

It’s nice to see people’s sales ranks returning even in far flung regions of Amazon such as Amazon.co.uk.  It meant that I could turn to worrying about pleasanter things like how well False Colors was doing.

Today has even had a lot of squee in it, after the large doses of OMG!WTF of the weekend.  I must say I’ve missed my squee!

Causes of joy today:

Meanwhile, False Colors and Transgressions launch :)

And possibly not coincidentally to Amazon fail, False Colors and Transgressions had their official release yesterday.  Huzzah!  From my own POV, I’m torn between thinking I ought not to talk about them while this much larger issue is going on, and thinking that I ought to talk about them more because this larger issue is going on.

False Colors and Transgressions, after all, represent an attempt by m/m romance to storm the fortress of m/f, ‘mainstream’ romance fiction.  An attempt to get same sex love stories to be treated the same way opposite sex love stories are treated; not hidden, not shameful, not classified as ‘adult’ just because they are a love story between two men.  If anything, Amazonfail just proves that we are up against something much bigger than we thought, and the right wing are prepared to pull out all sorts of unexpected tactics to stop the attempt from succeeding.

So as part of my resistance to Amazonfail and to anti-gblt prejudice in general, I *am* going to talk up these books.  When m/m, f/f and trans romance is occupying the same shelf space in every bookshop, that will be the time to be modest 😉

So please come and read about the launch of False Colors and Transgressions, those first rate battleships of the m/m romance war:

Here at JesseWave’s blog

On Monday, April 13 as part of its ground breaking new line of gay historical romances which tap into a growing market of Male/Male stories marketed to straight women as part of an attempt to introduce m/m romance into the romantic mainstream, Running Press Book Publishers is proud to announce the release of Transgressions and False Colors

A lovely review of False Colors by Christian Otto

So, altogether this is stunning and brilliant book, one of those essential reads if you are interested in historical stories.

On Friskbiskit Erastes and I chat about the allure of the 17th Century, and why I like filth so much 😉

M/M Goes Mainstream Today

And on Jeanne Barrack’s The Sweet Flag blog, you can see me being a bit prophetic (I wrote this post about three weeks ago, before any of this struck 😉 )

What is going on here then? Well, simply this; Running Press are making a bid to make m/m romance mainstream – to make it as respectable as m/f romance. No more confining m/m fiction to a little ghetto on the internet where the uninitiated can remain ignorant that it exists at all. No more being treated as second class citizens by RWA and Romantic Times because we don’t fit their notion of what is a ‘traditional’ story about people falling in love with one another.

AmazonFail round up. What to do if you’re still delisted.

What a weekend!  I couldn’t keep up with it, especially as I spent Easter Monday in a field, out of range of internet connection.  However, now that I’m back, this is my understanding of the situation at present:

#amazonfail twitter thread, started by storm_grant spreads to be a world wide phenomenon

Numerous blogs, newspapers and TV stations pick up the story and run with it: this is just a sample:

• CRAIG’S POP LIFE: Is Amazon.com Homophobic?

It appears on the TV in the UK (fast forward to 8 minutes in)

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1529573111?bclid=19074616001&bctid=19406704001

(and spot the appearance of ‘Captain’s Surrender’ 🙂 )

Amazon claim it was just a mistake:

Amazon calls mistake ’embarrassing and ham-fisted’

and start re-ranking the de-ranked books.  Various internet hacks come out and say hahahaha!  I did it for the lolz.  But as the code they claim they used does not actually do what they say it would, their claims seem doubtful.

Amazon’s ‘it was all a mistake’ gets this response from Slashdot

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/14/0057203

which I think says it all.

I personally fail to see how any kind of mistake or glitch could cause gay-positive theology like John J McNeill’s “The Church and the Homosexual” to be de-ranked as an adult title, but leave right wing anti-gay theology like “Can Homosexuality be Healed” by Francis MacNutt’s sales rank intact, catapulting it and its like to the top of the bestseller list.

That’s a mighty selective and convenient mistake!  That’s a mistake with an agenda to push.  An agenda that’s willing to silence anything that it doesn’t agree with.  I’ll come out and say here that I think it’s hideous.  McNeill’s book saved my faith when I was questioning the church’s stance on homosexuality.  Without it, I would not now be a Christian at all.  I can’t imagine how many gay people’s lives it must have saved, giving them hope that God doesn’t hate them; that they might actually be made right, and be loved.  To de-rank that book as if it was some sort of obscenity is itself an obscene act of hatred and suppression of honest theological and moral debate.

Because it’s such a staggeringly bad move even from a sheer economic POV for Amazon to make, I’m willing to agree with them that it was certainly a mistake on their part.  What caused it, I don’t know.  Some Christianist fundamentalist inside the organization taking the chance to push his own agenda?  I don’t know.

But in the light of Easter, and the message of resurrection – of God bringing good out of evil and life out of death – I find it rather wonderful that all Amazon has achieved by this ‘mistake’ is to bring massive publicity to all the GBLT books on its website, and to get gay romance as a genre into the pages of the NY Times, the UK’s Guardian newspaper, and the mainstream media as a whole.  We could not have bought better publicity if we’d tried.  Good out of evil – it’s very appropriate for Easter Monday, and lets hope it continues 😀

However, although many books have had their sales ranks restored, some have not.  It’s premature to celebrate too much while some books and some people are still being discriminated against.

If your book is still de-ranked, consider joining #stilldelisted, #glitchmyass, and #amazonfail on twitter

and post your book name and Amazon URL on

metawriter’s Are you still Delisted?

Let’s keep the pressure on until everyone has their rankings back!

Amazon confirms homophobic policy

Sales Ranks disappearing on Amazon?  What is going on?

Copied from

storm_grant ‘s LJ

On the issue of Amazon suddenly stripping sales ranks from m/m, f/f and erotica, actual facts have been obtained.

Amazon is protecting is general readership from the evol gay and the pr0n. Read here: http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15293.html

http://vashtan.livejournal.com/490173.html

asknosecrets is collecting links here: http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11560.html

storm_grant

got #amazonfail going on twitter. Go tweet and protest! Think of it as signing an e-petition, only with 140 characters to express your outrage!

vashtan is compiling a list of books that have been affected, here: http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11992.html

What can you do?

Copied from erastes LJ

1. Sign the petition

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-protest-at-amazons-new-adult-policy

2. Write to the CEO

Jeffrey Bezos.
1200 12th Avenue South,
Seattle,
Washington 98144-2734,
United States
Phone: 206-266-1000
Fax: 206-622-2405

3. Contact info for Amazon for calls, emails, faxes letters

http://clicheideas.com/amazon.htm

Also, if you have a book or books affected by the censorship, add their names to the list on meta_writer above.
Inform your publisher.
Write to any gblt paper you may be associated with.
Change your buy links for your books so they no longer link to Amazon.
If you were thinking of buying a Kindle, don’t!

Also Smart Bitches, of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books suggest a Google Bomb, where, by the magic of the internet, you post this link on your site/blog

Amazon Rank

and Amazon get instant bad publicity 😉