Crimes Against Nature

Tags

Alabama, law, legal, russellville, sodomy

In 5th grade, I learned the phrase “Crimes Against Nature” from the Alabama penal code and/or the state Constitution (I don’t remember exactly), which we were reading through as a class. My teacher, Mrs. Goss, wouldn’t tell me what this phrase meant.

“What do you think it means?” she said, finally — I think she thought I was just messing with her to get her to say something dirty.

I took her seriously, though. I pondered long and hard. Eventually I decided it must mean stuff like clearcutting, polluting, littering, and strip mining. Turns out it was actually a reference to homosexuality!

Boy, did I feel stupid!

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Freedom of Speech. Let’s Understand It!

Tags

boycott, ender's game, gay, NOM, orson scott card

Freedom of speech, as enshrined in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, means that the government itself is not allowed to impair your ability to say whatever it is you want to say — within certain boundaries laid down by various Supreme Courts over the years. The government can prosecute you for shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater (um, maybe), for example, or for uttering ‘fighting words,’ whatever those are.

Ender’s Game

Freedom of speech does not mean that you can say whatever you want to say without consequence. It just protects you from legal consequence. Non-governmental consequences often follow controversial or inappropriate statements. For example, if you smart off to your cranky old grandmother, she might slap you in the face. If you submit a plagiarized story to your editor, you might get fired from your job as a reporter. If you make up stuff in your memoir, you might make Oprah angry. In none of these cases will you go to jail.

More to the point: if you are a prominent and raging anti-gay activist, I’m not going to pay money to see your movie, even if the movie has nothing to do with your anti-gay activism or your rage. The government isn’t involved in this decision of mine. The First Amendment doesn’t apply. I’m also going to be encouraging everybody I know to Skip Ender’s Game, which is my own exercise of my own free speech rights! Ta da! See how it works!

Speech has consequences, because speech matters. It would be a terrible world to live in if the things we say were completely irrelevant all the time, because they were “just words” or “just opinions” or “just” whatever. There’s no “just” about it. Words and opinions are powerful; they matter, and like anything that matters, they have consequences. There would be no reason to speak at all, otherwise. A world where anything can be said because nobody cares is a world where nothing is really said — and that’s the opposite of a world with free speech.

I don’t understand why this is a difficult concept for Orson Scott Card or his whiny-ass fans to understand.

Everything You Need to Know About Promoting Your Projects with Social Media

Tags

advice, kickstarter, marketing, promotions, self-publishing, social media

If you are:

a). a Facebook friend I don’t remember actually having any relationship with, online or off, and

b). you send me a link to your Kickstarter or your Amazon author page, or even a request to “like” your website,

c). by private message, and

d). that’s the only contact we’ve ever had since we “friended” each other, then

e). I will unfriend you.

If that was the desired outcome of your promotional activity, then we are golden! But I suspect it was not.

Self-publishers and other indie artists have simply got to learn how to properly promote their brands and their personae online. It’s not about sending random, unsolicited pitches to people you hardly know, if at all. You can’t just hit me with a spam and expect any kind of happy response, even if you “apologize” for spamming in your spam. Extra demerits for

f). typing your message in all caps.

It’s not that I’m angry. I just don’t have time for this kind of “friendship.”

Kickstarter has done a lot of good. But it is also largely responsible for turning an entire generation of artists and writers into spammers. Same goes for ebook self-publishing platforms.

Using social media to promote yourself and your projects is not a bad thing in and of itself. Using social media clumsily and stupidly is the problem. Spam is spam, whether it comes from a multinational conglomerate, a Nigerian scammer, or Suzy Hipster who just finished her first novel, of which she is very ironically proud.

And spam doesn’t work. It is, in fact, one of the most inefficient promotional methodologies ever conceived. Those penis pill people do it because they can sell a couple of dozen units on a couple of hundred million emails, cheaply. If you’re not operating at that capacity, reaching that many people, you don’t have a chance. (And if you are, then you may be looking at a federal investigation, so I’d lay low).

Good, non-spammy social media promotion takes a light touch. It takes sincerity, and believability, and it has to go both ways. Make real friendships. Show genuine interest in your online friends’ projects too, for example — or in whatever else they’re sharing with you (their photos, their thoughts, their political rants). Don’t just collect a bunch of “targets” to push your stuff on. Again: not for any moral reason, but because it just doesn’t work.

In other words, good social media promotion takes a great deal of time — both in the sense of your butt in the chair working it, and in the sense of elapsed time — which is why so many fail. Everybody wants an instant fix. That’s the spammer’s mentality. You have to cultivate your relationships for years, and build strong and meaningful ties to the people you’re talking to online, before you can expect anybody to have any interest in your projects, especially if you want those people to turn around and promote your stuff to their own audiences — and even more especially if you’re charging money for your projects.

Sorry, but that is the way it works.

In Defense of Loose Language Like “Like” and “So”

Tags

english language, grammar, language

Written language is (should be) carefully refined, looked over at least once after completion and tweaked.

Spoken language is (should be) extemporaneous and loose, or else the speaker sounds like a liar or a robot or both. That’s why things that are not acceptable in written language — like using “like” or “so” as stalling tactics while your brain catches up to what you want to say — are perfectly reasonable, even effective communication devices, in the context of spoken language. (The unspoken but meaningful subtext is often: “I said ‘like’ or ‘so’ because the next part of what I want to say is a little difficult to formulate, and communicating that to you is part of what I am communicating overall.”)

I have a lot of friends and acquaintances, especially editors and writers, who expect spoken language to be as well-tuned and elegantly tricked out as a New Yorker piece. In particular they decry stalling words like “like” and “so.” Or at least they claim to. I don’t know if the use of these words in these ways really bothers them, or if, like most “pet peeves,” their complaint is just a convenient gambit to have handy in case conversation lags — a sort of intellectual tchotchke designed to make its owner look more interesting. I suspect the latter. I sometimes run with a fairly pretentious, persnickety crowd — and I love them for it! I’m a bitch, too, just in other ways.

The English language is not settled science, subject to the rules of logic and consistency that pedants wish to impose upon it. It is a performance, subject only to the context in which it is presented and the needs and expectations of the speaker and the audience. The pedant’s “proper English” is appropriate in formal contexts, even when speaking. Let’s say you’re addressing the United Nations. You’d want to avoid “like” and “so” as stalling words. But I’m not going to use subjunctive verb phrases when talking to my mom, though, nor will “whom” (nor “nor”) ever cross my lips when I’m hanging outside with a bunch of silly queens at a gay bar, unless I am making fun of pretension itself. I’ll use other words and speak in other ways at other times.

Like so.

Yesterday I Witnessed a Pedestrian vs. Vehicle Accident

Tags

accident, car wreck, derby festival, derby week, traffic

I was sitting in standstill traffic on Oak, the street I live on, a narrow two-lane near downtown that has been around for hundreds of years. Traffic coming toward me was flowing smoothly, but my side was the one headed in the direction of the Interstate onramp, and a lot of people needed to get to the Interstate after the Derby Festival parade, I guess. I wasn’t in a hurry. Had my windows down, my radio up.

Out of the corner of my right eye I saw a young woman running toward the street. She was a fat girl. I say this not to make fun of her or shame her but to impress you even more with what happened next. She maybe stood 5 feet tall, and probably weighed about 300 pounds. She was heading directly toward the gap between me and the car in front of me at a full tilt.

Out of the corner of my left eye I saw a car coming toward us in the other lane doing about 60 miles an hour, which is crazy for that area, a combination of low-income residential and retail.

All of this happened way too fast for me to do or say anything.

The girl didn’t stop. The car didn’t stop.

She did manage to make it almost across the street, though. The hood of the car (it was a low-slung Mazda sportscar type dealie) caught her in the right thigh as she was almost out of its range. She did a complete head-over-heels flip in the air and landed on her hands and knees, right outside my open window. I looked at her. Then, like a Hong Kong movie protagonist, she said, “Son. Of. A. Bitch.” Stood up. And walked into the liquor store which had been her original destination, without even so much as a limp.

She was gone before I could think to say anything. It was the weirdest thing to see her flip over in the air like that.

The car, of course, didn’t stop.

Everybody else in traffic started getting out of their cars at this point and yelling, “Hey, is she all right?” to each other. Turned out there was a Sheriff’s deputy in one of the cars, so he turned his lights on and did a U-turn and pulled into the liquor store parking lot, presumably to check on her.

Life in Louisville.

How Not to Promote Your Book

Tags

promotion, self-publishing, spam

There are a lot of self-publishing writers who are really, really, really bad at promotion.

I’m saying this because I just looked at my Goodreads inbox for the first time in months. I was just going to repost my Meg Wolitzer review over there (might as well find readers where they are), but I got distracted by the fact that I had 74 “emails” in my Goodreads inbox! Oh boy! Reader responses! Old friends who have found me! Something cool, surely!

But no.

The majority were very literally nothing but a link to a self-published book — and when I say literally, I mean literally. Open the email, and find link, period. No salutation, no explanation of why the author thinks that this would be of interest to me in particular, hardly even any indication (other than the fact that the url goes to a bookseller’s website) that this is a book, or that the book in question was authored by the person sending the email. No, that would be too difficult. Too time-consuming! All these people are sending is just a raw, naked http:// link. That’s the majority. I shit you not.

The rest are form letters, from people who at least took the time to copy/paste. “Hello JOEY MANLEY nice to meet you here on GOODREADS, please allow me to introduce myself,” with, yes, a link to a self-published book following that salutation. No indication that they have any idea who they’re talking to. No reference to anything about me. No attempt to make a real human connection, just a transparently pathetic attempt to fake same.

Here’s a tip: if you are a writer, do not use the same “online outreach” strategies to promote your book that penis enlargement companies use to promote their sugar pills! Your potential readers are out there, and approaching them one at a time is surely one way to find them, but you have to seem like an actual human being trying to make an actual human connection. No, strike that. You have to be an actual human being trying to make an actual human connection. This is work. But it works.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Data

Tags

big data, kroger, medical, pharmacy, prescriptions, privacy, rewards cards

I’ve been using the pharmacy at my grocery store. When paying, they want to scan my rewards card — not because I’ll get a discount, but for “gas points” (this grocery store chain also has gas stations). I don’t think saving a couple of cents on a fill-up is worth giving up privacy around my prescription history. Do you? The thing is, the first few times, I just handed my card to them, unthinking. Actual hospitals and doctor’s offices have to follow very strict laws when it comes to releasing any information at all about a patient’s medical conditions and/or the treatments they have provided. Grocery stores, as far as I know, are not subject to those laws.

I’ve heard horror stories about grocery store rewards cards already, in fact. People in divorce cases whose access to their children was taken away because they were proven, via their grocery store rewards card records, to smoke cigarettes, or drink beer, or whatever. I don’t know if I believe these stories, but I also don’t know if I don’t.

It’s possibly all academic. The privacy cat may have already left the bag, in my case. I’ve been more open than most people about stuff. I mentioned on Facebook that I have psoriasis, and now I’m getting ads for some high-grade pharmaceutical to treat it (and weaken my own immune system and maybe kill me). I mentioned that my house had recently been broken into, and ads for LifeLock and ADT started sprouting out all over the place — not just on Facebook, but on most of the websites I visit. This post itself is an example of me living my life in public. That’s what I’ve done for years. I was an early adopter, you might say, of the social media lifestyle.

So maybe I should just hand that Kroger card over when I pick up my prescriptions. They’ve already got me trapped anyway in their web of data. I guess I should just relax and enjoy it. Right?

Somebody Stole All My Apple Products, and I’m Like Blah

Tags

Apple, burglary, ipad, iphone 5, macbook pro, replacement, stolen, theft

Last week a burglar stole all my Apple products — except for my Apple TV! Ha! — while I was sleeping upstairs. If you’d have told me this was going to happen about a month ago, I’d have told you that life without my MacBook Pro, iPhone 5, and (especially!) my retina iPad would not have been worth living. Post break-in, looking hard at the $1000 deductible on my insurance policy, I’ve decided to economize, and maybe leave Apple behind, at least for some of the replacements. Maybe, post Steve Jobs, the Reality Distortion Field is slowly releasing its hold on me.

For example, I’ve already replaced my iPad ($399 $499) with a Kindle Paperwhite ($119), which I love, love, love. I’ve had an iPad of every iteration except one since the week they came out. I used to use it a lot when I was a busy entrepreneur in NYC. I used it for stuff like games and note-taking, but never for very long. I’d pick up a game, play it about 1/10th of the way through, then stop. Note-taking was something I always intended to do — I’d pull it out, attach the keyboard, type a few things, blah, then never look at the notes.

Lately all I do with it is read Kindle books, and the Paperwhite handles that task in a much more efficient and pleasant manner. The only thing that I can’t do that I might want to do is read my Comixology comics, which I still was doing from time to time (rarely) but lately I’ve been gravitating back to print (trades and hardcovers) for comics reading anyway.

Meanwhile, the Paperwhite’s reading experience is so much better than the iPad’s for prose books, I’m actually making fast progress through China Mieville’s The Scar, a massive misfire by one of my favorite authors, which I hadn’t been able to choke down for the past four months of trying to read it on my iPad. Flawed but brilliant book plus flawed reading experience made for very slow going.

The MacBook Pro is a different situation. I don’t really need a laptop anymore, since I’m not commuting or jumping across town to meetings or whatever, and I hardly ever work at coffeeshops now. So I was thinking I’d get a desktop instead, to replace the crappy one I’ve got now (more on that in a second). While I’d love to have one of those gorgeous iMacs, there’s Windows computers that I can buy for less than a road-trip or a pair of concert tickets. I don’t use Photoshop or Premiere or the Flash authoring environment anymore at all. Mostly I just use the web. I don’t even need Office: the desktop I have right now (which the dude did not steal) has been running Ubuntu Linux for over a year and a half, not because I’m a fan of Linux, or some kind of super-technical wizbang, but because the Windows installation on it was so corrupted with whatever (I think a Java vulnerability allowed for backdoors to be installed) that it took an hour and a half to boot.

Um. Which is a point about Windows computers. The iMac I bought my mom in 2007 is still running strong. Maybe I will get an iMac after all.

The only thing I need a new computer for is printing and scanning, neither of which the Ubuntu machine does (or, at least, neither of which the Ubuntu machine does with my particular printer/scanner). That’s all I was using the MacBook Pro for, there at the end. I do a lot of low-level scanning (legal documents, tax stuff), so something will have to be done about the loss of the laptop, but maybe I’ll just get a cheap Windows box, put Ubuntu on a partition for daily computing, and keep the Windows partition unused except when I absolutely need to scan or print something, so that it will be less likely to get corrupted or sickened with viruses. Maybe? Or maybe I’ll just buy a new scanner/printer that works with Ubuntu. Hey!

The printing/scanning functionality of this machine is also why I can’t really see myself getting a Chromebook, but it’s not the only reason.

But, but, but. iMacs are about $800 cheaper than the replacement cost of the MacBook Pro that was stolen, which almost covers the deductible. Hm. Decisions. I dunno yet.

The only Apple product I actually still can’t imagine living without is my iPhone 5. I’ll be replacing that, thank you very much. Right now I’m using an old iPhone 4 that I found in my kitchen drawers. It won’t do. Nor will Android. There’s no conversation to be had about this one. The only problem is that I didn’t buy the Apple replacement insurance, and I didn’t buy the AT&T replacement insurance either, so my homeowner’s insurance adjuster will have to swallow the fact that we’re going to have to buy one of these babies without a contract in order to replace it (I just got that iPhone 5 a month and a half ago when I signed a new contract!), and they’re expensive without a contract. To say the least. I spoke to him about this and he didn’t raise any objections, but we’ll see if he tries to balk.

Meanwhile, if you see a black iPad 3 (the so-called “new iPad” that they don’t sell anymore) with a white button (the screen had been replaced), a 2007 MacBook Pro with a huge dent in the side where I dropped it on the steps at SPX 2008, or an iPhone with … well, the iPhone wasn’t distinctive at all, being new … anyway. Let me know. I doubt you will. I think I know who has them but I can’t say anything about that right now. But let me know anyway.

Take Me To Another Place (Tennessee)

The only reason for a law forcing teachers and counselors to out gay teens to their parents? Increase suicide among gays. That’s the only possible outcome. “Mainstream” Republicans, when you stand with these people, these hateful, vile, people, you stand directly against me and my friends, against our lives and our livelihoods, so don’t expect me to cut you any slack. You want small government and low taxes? Fine. Disavow the religious right — work within your party to limit its influence, even if that means you lose some electoral oomph in the South — and I will take a look at your agenda with an open mind. Meanwhile, you are in bed with hate, depending on pandering to the worst in our society to win elections, so you can’t expect to be taken seriously except by those who also hate.

 

Gay Hints at Virginia Military Institute in the 1950s

Tags

1950s, cadets, homosexuality, VMI

One of the characters in my next novel attended Virginia Military Institute during the 1950s. I chose VMI specifically because all of their old yearbooks are available online, at the Internet Archive. The 1950s were a strange time, especially, I guess, at a southern military school with a tradition of conservatism. In the course of reading through these yearbooks, I can’t help but see all kinds of weird, and, yes, frightening, little (and sometimes big!) references to homosexuality. \

Here’s a subtle one, the description of one of the graduating cadets under his formal picture, in the 1957 yearbook:

Although not a “ladies’ man” by VMI standards, Bill was never one to turn down a trip to Hollins or Randolph-Macon. Not one to be easily shaken from what he believes is right, Bill has nevertheless endeared himself to cadets in all four classes by his gentle, easy-going manner, no matter how trying the circumstances may be.

If you’re not gay, or if you didn’t grow up in a place where homosexuality was a taboo subject, only permissible on the edges of the conversation, you are probably shaking your head in confusion. But I can’t help but think there’s something queer about Bill, and that that’s what the author of this description was trying to tell us. How, precisely, did his “gentle, easy-going manner” endear him to all the cadets, and why describe his circumstances as “trying?”

“You’re reading too much into it, Manley.” I can hear you guys now.

So try this on for size. It’s also from the 1957 VMI yearbook:

Even more interesting is how closely this image, from 55 years ago, mirrors this one, from 7 years ago, also from the Virginia Military Institute (though they didn’t put this one in their yearbook):