In the comments on my post on how difficult it is to harass people by mistake, people are branching into the cosplay discussion. It's still pretty mild here, because y'all are awesome, but I've seen it get fairly intense elsewhere. IE, "That girl over there who's dressed up like Black Widow is inviting me to stare at her, so how can the same rules of harassment apply to her?"

Well, first, the same rules of harassment apply to her because she's a goddamn human being, and all human beings, regardless of what they do or do not choose to wear, deserve to feel safe and be free from harassment. Second, the same rules of harassment apply to her because we're human beings, or alien anthropologists who know damn well where the standards for human behavior lie, and once we're old enough to buy convention memberships and book hotel rooms, we should know better. (We should know better before then, too, but that's a matter for our parents.)

I have several friends who do cosplay, both at general science fiction conventions and at larger genre conventions, such as San Diego Comic Con. This means that they are going out in public in outfits they have spent a lot of time and energy making, which may or may not be as concealing as standard street clothes. (One of my friends regularly cosplays Emma Frost. Another has won awards for a Na'vi costume which consists largely of incredibly well-applied body paint.) This also means that they are inviting a certain amount of looking at them: no one puts that much effort into looking amazing when they don't want to be looked at.

Note that "look" and "leer" are not the same word.

What is appropriate? Admiring a cosplayer's costume. Admiring how well they fit the character. Asking if you can take a picture (providing they're not in the middle of doing something else at the time, like say, trying to inhale a hot dog before their next panel, running to the bathroom, or otherwise being a biological creature in a material universe). Asking if you can take a picture with them. Asking about the workmanship that went into the costume's design.

What is not appropriate? "I really love it when a girl with decent tits dresses up as [character]." Trying to take pictures of disembodied lady pieces, like butts or boobs (also inappropriate: disembodied dude bits—they're just rarer). Quizzing them on whether or not they even know who they're dressed up as. (Spoiler alert: anyone who spent ninety hours making a picture-accurate Illyana Rasputin costume probably knows who she is, and if it's someone who, say, joined a group costume to make their friends happy, but prefers DC/spends too much time gaming to read comics/is really happier in the SCA, how is that hurting you any? There is no such thing as a fake geek.) Asking if they'll give you a spanking. Asking how much they charge by the hour. Asking if you can touch them.

There is something magical about meeting a really good cosplayer dressed as one of your favorite characters. They're avatars. Watch a small child meet someone dressed as Iron Man or Aang and see them stare in open-mouthed awe. Hell, watch me meet a really good Tinker Bell at a Disney park. Costuming is a form of magic. It makes the unreal concrete and tangible. It deserves respect.

But those Tinker Bells that I meet at Disneyland have handlers, people who will immediately step in if anyone crosses a line or makes the pixies uncomfortable. What's more, those Disney pixies are paid to be my fantasy, as long as that fantasy remains G-rated and friendly. Cosplayers? Not getting paid. They are people, and they have a right to the ball. They also have the right to say "please take your hand off me" or "please don't take pictures of my ass" without getting told "well, you shouldn't have dressed like that if you didn't want the attention." Wanting attention and wanting to be harassed are very different things.

And as a note: cosplayers are not harassing you by walking around being attractive, or semi-clothed, or interesting to look at. They are not "teases" or "gagging for it" when they put on something skimpy. They are not here to be anyone's private walking skin magazine. They are people.

(Yes, this means they can be inappropriate too. We had an issue at one of the comic conventions a few years ago with someone dressed as Deadpool inappropriately touching female attendees, and then running away. He couldn't be distinguished from the eight or so Deadpools not being giant sacks of asshole. Last year at Emerald City Comic-Con I observed two woman dressed as Jean Gray saying such nasty things about a woman dressed as Emma Frost that she was virtually in tears. None of these things were, or are, appropriate.)

Cosplay makes our conventions more visually arresting. It's a powerful form of expression. It's a hobby and a passion like any other. But costume does not equal consent.

Again, if this is something you can't trust yourself to grasp, maybe you need to stay home.

So we're talking a lot about harassment in the science fiction and fantasy community right now, and that's a good thing: that's a thing that really needs to happen. Much of the conversation has centered on sexual harassment, but it has also touched on racial harassment, religious harassment, social harassment, and plain ol' bullying. John Scalzi has put forth a convention harassment policy policy (not as redundant as it sounds), and a lot of people have co-signed to indicate that they, too, will refrain from attending conventions without good, public anti-harassment policies. Sounds good, right? I mean, "play nicely with the other children" is the building block of most people's educations, and none of us wakes up in the morning thinking "I'm gonna harass somebody today."

(Well. Maybe some people do. And fuck them.)

But as always happens when this conversation gets started, some people are standing up and shouting "THOUGHT POLICE!" and "Well I don't want to go to a convention where wearing a T-shirt could get me banned for harassment."

Oh, honey lambs, I'm sorry the world is so hard. Let's talk about harassment a little more, shall we? Wikipedia (which is not the most 100% reputable source, but is easy to copy and paste) defines "harassment" as "behavior intended to disturb or upset, and it is characteristically repetitive." It goes on to say that "In the legal sense, it is intentional behavior which is found threatening or disturbing. Sexual harassment refers to persistent and unwanted sexual advances."

Intentional. Intended. Persistent. What does each of these words mean? Let's look at definitions taken from real world experiences.

Intentional. If you run up to me in a public place and scream "I'M GOING TO RAPE YOU, YOU FAT BITCH!", you are harassing me. It only took one sentence to cross that line! Why is that? Well, because a specific threat was made, and even if there was no intent to actually cause physical harm, anyone who makes that statement clearly intended to disturb and upset me. This is harassment, and yeah, it's probably going to lead to my making a report to convention staff, and no, I'm not going to feel bad if someone gets kicked out because of it.

On the other hand, what if I'm just walking through the convention lobby and I hear some guys making dirty jokes in the corner? Is that harassment? No. It's in poor taste, but it's not harassment. I may still say something to convention staff, because most cons include children, and public space is not the place to be crossing certain lines.

Intended. But what happens if, after I tell convention staff "Hey, those guys over there are telling dirty jokes loudly in the lobby, maybe it would be a good idea for them to stop" those same people figure out that I was the one who reported them and spend the rest of the day following me around the hotel, telling dirty jokes loudly to try and get a rise out of me? What if, say, they follow me into my panels and ask questions that are really set-ups for filthy punchlines? Is that harassment?

Yeah. They intended to upset me. They wanted me to feel unsafe and unwelcome, and they did a very good job of it. But what if it was a T-shirt that made me go "ew," and not a bunch of joke-tellers? Well, if the convention doesn't have a "clean language" policy (which some cons with lots of underage attendees do have: they want Grandma to be able to look around the lobby and feel like little Timmy is safe), that's not harassment. Hell, even if there is a "clean language" policy, it's not harassment, it's just a rule violation. Running into the person in the inappropriate-to-me shirt several times over the course of the day is not harassment, it's happenstance.

I have seen costumed individuals harass people with their attire. The most upsetting incident involved someone in a bikini and bodypaint trying to force an individual whose religion forbade him to stare at uncovered women to look at her. Was the man committing religious oppression or harassment? No. He never said, at least in my hearing, that she needed to cover up her sinful, sinful body. He just didn't look at her. Was the woman committing harassment? Yes. But look at her actions: she intended to do what she did. It was intentional. Lots of women wearing as little or less walked by, and none of them were harassing him with their presence. Just the one who was yelling and touching his arms and generally being intentionally problematic.

Persistent. I've seen several people say that anti-harassment policies are the end of convention hook-ups and no geeks will ever get dates again oh noes we're going to die out. And that's where persistent comes to the party.

"Hey, you're nice, wanna have coffee?"
"No."

Not harassment!

"That dress could make a good dog break his leash."
"Crude but points for The West Wing reference."

Probably not harassment!

"Wanna fuck?"
"No."

Maybe harassment, maybe not, depending on what came before it.

"You're hot."
"Thanks, I'm with someone."
"Aw baby don't be like that."
"Please excuse me."
"Your ass is just...mmm."
"I'd really like to go over there."
"I'll come with you baby."

Harassment! Look: no one is saying "don't ask people out" or "never talk to a person you find attractive again." We're saying "no means no." We're saying "if she's trying to get away from you, let her." We're saying "if you follow him through the hotel, you are being inappropriate." We're saying "unless I have asked you to touch me, touching me is not appropriate."

Studies have shown that people are much better at picking up on "no" than they want to admit, because admitting it would mean acknowledging it. So learn to pick up on "no," both verbally and non-verbally. Watch body language. Back off. Listen.

Having a bawdy song filk circle is not harassment: it's in the program book, it's labeled, and anyone who comes to that circle and gets offended by the circle in general is looking to get upset. Singing a dirty song during open filk while staring at the girl who says she's uncomfortable with that sort of thing and going "Ha ha Olga's probably pretty turned on" is harassment. You have singled her out. You are making an intentional choice. You are persisting.

Cat and I do this panel called "In Conversation" that's sort of like "An Evening With Kevin Smith" with more boobs. We always provide a program book description that says, flat out, that we will swear, that we will answer all questions, that no topics are off the table. So no, you don't get to attend our panel and then say we harassed you with our swearing. But if we have that same conversation in the lobby, and won't stop, and get louder when asked to stop, you are right to involve the convention staff. You have a right to feel safe. You have a right to be allowed to participate freely in your community.

I've used "you" throughout this post both to avoid gendering the subject, and to make this point: If you, the reader, think that a convention where you can be asked not to make rape jokes at panelists, not to lay hands on people who have asked you (either aloud or with their actions) to leave them alone, and to treat everyone else as a human being who has a right to the ball, if you think that this convention sounds like political correctness gone awry and something you want no part in, good.

Stay home.

The current SFWA shouting match about sexism and harassment and "OH MY GOD I AM BEING OPPRESSED BY FEMINISTS" is leading to a lot of the very predictable "Help help bad people are trying to take away my freedom of speech."

Here's the thing: No one involved in this fight is saying "you should never use your freedom of speech." Not to anyone, not at all. We are, after all, not the government. What we are saying is "you didn't buy the 'freedom from consequences' expansion pack." And really, that's what's being requested here: not freedom of speech, but freedom from the consequences of speaking.

"Sure, I called another professional in my field sub-human because I dislike their race/religion/choice of ice cream flavors! But I'm allowed! I have FREEDOM OF SPEECH."

"Sure, I told that fatso urban fantasy author to lose some weight and brush her hair so that we could take her seriously as a writer! But I'm allowed! I have FREEDOM OF SPEECH."

"Sure, I misgendered another author for funsies, refusing to acknowledge the reality of their existence! But I'm allowed! I have FREEDOM OF SPEECH."

Nope.

Nope.

THE NOPETOPUS RIDES AGAIN.

If someone chooses to say sexist, racist, bigoted shit, that's on them: that’s theirs to deal with. I will not restrict their ability to say it. But there will be consequences. Maybe consequences as minor as me not wanting to have a conversation with them; maybe consequences as major as an editor choosing not to work with them, or an agent declining to sign them, as they would be bad for the agency’s image (and hence bottom line).

These "rabid weasels" (term coined by Mary Robinette Kowal, the voice of Toby and a glorious voice of reason) are HARMING SFWA AS A PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATION. Not just by taking time and energy away from writing—which, gods know, is a thing we all need to be doing more of—but by making us look, in public, like this is what all believe. They’re very loud, those weasels, and while they have the right to say whatever they want, we’re the ones choosing to allow them to do it inside our house.

I use my freedom of speech: I use it to say "that ain't cool" about a lot of things. For my trouble I am called a bitch, a whore, a slut, a cunt, a stupid cow, a pig, too dumb to rape, and a lot of other things. Those are the consequences of my speech. And the consequences of those words are simple:

I refuse to stop pointing out the people who use them.

All right, here are the basics: in the latest issue of the SFWA Bulletin there was an article essentially saying (among many other problematic things) that if I say that taking about my gender as if it somehow makes me an alien creature makes me uncomfortable, I am censoring and oppressing you, rather than just asking that you, you know, stop doing that shit if you want my good feeling and respect. jimhines has collected links to a wide range of responses and rebuttals. You don't need to read them all, but they're still a good, overwhelmingly unhappy view of a bad situation. I recommend reading at least a few of them, because it'll help you understand what's going on, although for many people, the important points are:

1. This article came after several instances of sexism in the Bulletin.
2. The Bulletin is the official publication of SFWA*, which makes it look like organizationally condoned sexism.
3. It's 2013, for fuck's sake.

One of the things that Resnick and Malzberg, as the authors of the piece in question, objected to was that people were unhappy that they were defining their peers as "lady authors/editors" and "gorgeous." These are, after all, factual definitions! A female peer is a lady peer. A beautiful woman is a beautiful woman. Don't women like being told that they're beautiful? Aren't we supposed to be precise when we talk about people? And to this I say sure, except that your precision is unequal and belittling. "Bob is my peer, Jane is my lady peer" creates two classes where two classes do not belong, and humans are primates, we're creatures of status and position. Give us two things and we'll always start trying to figure out which is superior to the other. Right or left? Up or down? Peer or lady peer? What's more, adding a qualifier creates the impression that the second class is somehow an aberration. "There were a hundred of us at the convention, ninety-nine peers and one rare lady peer."

No. Fuck no. "Bob and Jane are my peers." Much better.

As for the appearance thing...yeah, people often like to be told when they look good. But women in our modern world are frequently valued according to appearance to such a degree that it eclipses all else. "Jane was a hell of a science fiction writer...but more importantly, she was gorgeous according to a very narrow and largely male-defined standard of conventional beauty." All Jane's accomplishments, everything she ever did as a person, matter less than the fact that she got good genes during character generation. You don't think that burns? You don't think that's insulting? "Bob knew how to tell a good story, and he did it while packing an impressively sinuous trouser snake." What, is that insulting? How is it more insulting than "Jane could really fill out a swimsuit"? It's the same thing. If my breasts define my value to the community, you'd better be prepared to hold up your balls for the same level of inspection—and trust me, this is not sexy funtimes inspection, this is "drape 'em in Spandex and brace yourself for a lot of critique that frankly doesn't have a goddamn thing to do with how well you write, or what kind of human being you are." Don't like this idea, gentlemen of the world? Well, neither do the ladies.

It's very telling that you'll get people saying, again, "author and lady author are just true facts," but then getting angry when you say that fine, if they want divisions, it needs to be "male and female author." No! Male is the default the norm the baseline of human experience! How dare you imply anything different!

I, and roughly fifty percent of the world's population, would like to beg to differ. It's just that women get forced to understand men if we want to enjoy media and tell stories, while men are allowed to treat women as these weird extraterrestrial creatures who can never be comprehended, but must be fought. It's like we're somehow the opposing army in an alien invasion story, here to be battled, defeated, and tamed, but never acknowledged as fully human.

Does that seem like a lot to get out of the phrase "lady author"? It kinda is. But that's what happens when the background radiation of your entire life is a combination of "men are normal, human, wonderful, admirable, talented, worth aspiring to," and "bitches be crazy."

Am I disappointed that these sentiments were published in the official Bulletin of the organization to which I belong? Damn straight. It shows an essential lack of kindness on the part of the authors, who felt that their right to call me a "lady author" and comment on my appearance mattered more than my right to be comfortable and welcomed in an organization that charges me annual dues that are the same regardless of gender. Maybe if I got a discount for allowing people to belittle and other me? Only then I would never have joined, because fuck that noise.

At the same time, SFWA is a wonderful organization that has done and is doing a great deal to help authors, and moves are being taken to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. My membership is up for renewal at the end of this month, and I'm renewing, because change comes from both without and within. I am an author. I am a woman. I am not going to shut up and slink away because I feel unheard; if anything, I'm going to get louder, and make them hear me. (Please note that I absolutely respect the women who are choosing not to renew their memberships; voting with your dollars is a time-honored tradition. But everyone reacts differently. For them, this is a principled stance. For me, it would be a retreat. I am the Official SFWA Stabber, and nobody is making me retreat.)

One of the big points of the Resnick/Malzberg article was "anonymous complaints." Fine, then: I am not anonymous. My name is Seanan McGuire. You can look me up.

(*The Science Fiction Writers of America.)

I am not in the habit of cut-tagging my crankiness, but in this case, I will, because I'm going to be discussing the sexual abuse of women, and I try not to be triggery when I don't have to be. This is your notification, and your warning.

( This is a cut tag. On the other side of the cut tag? Wolves.Collapse )

Which of these things is not like the other:

* Surviving IN SPACE.
* Surviving IN THE DESERT.
* Surviving BEING BITTEN BY VENOMOUS REPTILES.
* Surviving YOUR SUDDEN AND INEVITABLE POP STAR LIFE.

I...what?

A little context for you, because context is to my crankiness as the Great Pumpkin is to the Sacred Patch: yesterday was Wednesday, better known around these parts as "Seanan goes to the comic book store" day. We went to the comic book store. I picked up my books (new issues of The Boys and Hack/Slash, new trades of Chew and American Vampire), and prowled the shelves, looking to see what else had arrived.

In the "family friendly" section, I found two books I hadn't seen before: Boys Only How To Survive Anything, and its natural mate, Girls Only How To Survive Anything. They were, naturally, somewhat pink and blue, but I don't have a moral objection to pink, and if they were going to be all gendered about things, I supposed having "gender appropriate" colors made sense. I picked up Boys Only and flipped through it.

Surviving disasters, natural and man-made. Surviving conflicts and accidents and on the space shuttle and monsters. Surviving, you know, shit that can kill you. Works for me. I put down Boys Only and picked up Girls Only. Where I learned to survive...

Breakouts. Becoming a pop star (and the inevitable carpal tunnel from signing all those autographs). Saying I'm sorry (with homemade lip balm). Identifying a frenemy. Surviving, you know, shit that generally doesn't leave you dead.

Can you guess when I started seeing red?

Now look. I get that we're a culture that thinks boys and girls should always like different things, and that we start reinforcing that from a very early age. I get that to some degree, on average, boys and girls do like different things. It's by no means universal, but things like the Brony movement aside, you do have gendered majorities for many activities and interests. Fine. But you know where that breaks down? When we tell girls, through implication, that they shouldn't know how to survive in the desert. Knowing how to handle, gasp, pimples is so much more important.

Not every girl needs to know how to deal with venomous reptiles, just like not every boy needs to know how to base jump. Because of differing interests and activities, I could have believed as much as 40% deviation between the books. Teach the boys how to tie a tie, and the girls how to fix runs in the nylons, fine. It's cisgendered and assumes so much, but it makes societal sense, if you're dividing the books by gender (and I'm almost in favor of that, just so that they don't give all the action illustrations to boys, and all the pretty or panicked illustrations to girls). Understand that gendering is problematic and try to be reasonable.

But we are talking 95% deviation. The only activity they had in common? Escaping from a zombie. Because...fuck, I don't know. Because zombies are the only truly gender-neutral threat in the world, apparently. Deserts only fuck you up if you have a penis. Frenemies (how I hate that word) only endanger your reputation if you have tits. But zombies? Man, they will fuck you up, no matter what you've got.

I hate this increasing insistence that boys and girls are alien species, coming together only to do icky romance dances of ickiness, and make more boys and girls to never understand each other at all. Girls can like snakes. Boys can like looking nice for dates. And that doesn't mean a damn thing but "we are all individuals, we will all like and want and do different stuff."

At least we're all allowed to know how to fight zombies.

Hey, look! I'm in an anthology! River, from Dark Quest Books, edited by Alma Alexander. It's a book of stories about, well. A river. My story, "Lady of the Waters," is about a ship called The Jackdaw, her centaur captain (no, really), her faintly annoyed crew, and some giant catfish. I quite like it.

Oh, and hey, the audio books of all the Toby Daye adventures are still available at Audible.com, including Late Eclipses and One Salt Sea, which periodically appear as customer favorites. I find this awesome, and you should totally check it out if you haven't already listed to the fabulous audio narration. Or even if you have. I'm not picky.

SCIENCE CHEERLEADERS. It's like a beautiful dream. With pom-poms. There was no earthly way not to share.

...and because that last link may have restored your faith in humanity, here are some insanely depressing "rules for girls" collected from Twitter. The next time someone asks you why I keep threatening to ignite the biosphere, this is why. We can't have nice things until we've burned out all the stupid.

The title of this article right here is "How Amazon Kills Books and Makes Us Stupid." Again, destroying faith in humanity through the aid of my link file. You're welcome.

So it's a mixed bag today, but it includes SCIENCE CHEERLEADERS and CENTAUR SHIP CAPTAINS, so I'm going to call it overall a positive. Your mileage may vary.

A good chunk of the internet is blacked out today to protest SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP). If you have somehow managed to miss this, you must not visit any news or geek-culture blogs, read very many web comics, use Google or the Firefox homepage, or access Wikipedia. (Also, if you have somehow managed to miss this because you don't use the internet for any of the things I've cited above, I am a little bit afraid of you. What do you use the internet for? How did you even find this page? Are you a robot?)

How has the blackout impacted me? This is my morning routine:

1. Get up, get ready for work.
2. Internet! FOREVER! Okay, for about fifteen minutes. First up, web comics.
3. Second, toy collecting sites.
4. Thirdly, io9 and Television Without Pity.
5. Wikipedia, to both check facts about things I'm writing (do parrots eat meat?) and to confirm which shows I follow will have new episodes tonight (for some reason I trust Wikipedia more than I trust the TV Guide site).

This is my morning routine after SOPA:

1. Get up, get ready for work. Because everything else is blocked, removed, or under attack.

This is a broad-strokes "protection of copyright" that actually goes so far above and beyond the call of duty that it's like getting a pack of trained attack basilisks to keep those damn kids off your lawn. Basilisk crap is going to wind up getting everywhere, but who cares? No more kids on the lawn!

Now, I am a creator of things, and I appreciate and enjoy making money off of them. It enables me to do silly little things like keeping the power on and feeding the cats. I appreciate and enjoy it even more when people don't steal from me. But you know what doesn't steal from me? Book reviews. But SOPA could make it a crime to post book covers or quote inside text, something my favorite book reviewers often do. Hell, SOPA could make it a crime for me to maintain my own website, since I use art that is technically under copyright to either my publishers or the original cover artists, and if someone wanted to be a real dick, they could report me for posting pieces of my own books.

You know what else doesn't steal from me? Fanfic. The legal arguments about fanfic and fan art are huge and complicated and a matter for another day, but I can honestly say that I have received email from people saying "I encountered this piece of fic about your work and so I read the originals." I haven't received email saying "I encountered this piece of fic about your work and it was so bad that now I am stealing all your shit forever." Whatever impact fan works may have on my sales, and whatever the legality behind transformative fan work, it isn't stealing from me. It isn't internet piracy. But under SOPA, you could totally rat out fanfic archives and most of DeviantArt for violating copyrights, and watch the pretty, pretty fires as they burned.

Piracy pisses me off. I don't feel that I have wasted my time when I got upset about piracy and copyright. But there is such a huge difference between "I will now protect you from piracy" and what these bills will do that isn't even funny. Don't believe me? I mean, why should you? I am, after all, not a lawyer or anything like that. But I do have access to the internet, and to the smart people it currently contains, the ones I am allowed to communicate with freely and without fear of being slapped for violating a law that seems a bit too broadly written.

John Murphy would like to talk to you about SOPA. Better yet, he does it very intelligently and coherently, with good, clean information.

Still not convinced? The folks at reddit have actually dissected the text of SOPA, and point out some terrifying potential abuses. If you want to get your legal language on, this is the place to go.

And the ever-fabulous and profane Chuck Wendig has also pointed out some of the major issues with these anti-piracy measures. Like me, he's approaching it from a writer's perspective. He just says "fuck" more.

You know what? Fuck SOPA. Fuck PIPA. Fuck the idiots who think that they can control the internet. And fuck them twice for forcing today's internet blackout, because I still don't know whether parrots eat meat.

Fuckers.

I haven't been blogging about my cats recently.

Some of you may have breathed a sigh of relief when you realized that you had entered a relatively feline-free zone. "Finally," you said. "She's going to talk about something that doesn't meow." Others may have been concerned. (I've heard from the concerned contingent, not from the relieved, but I have no trouble with the idea that both sides exist. Honestly, I don't demand that anyone be interested in everything I have to say, and that includes my cats, machete collection, horror movies, the X-Men, and candy corn.) Even more of you may well have been confused, given how focal cats have traditionally been around here. But I haven't been blogging about my cats.

John Scalzi has just made a lengthy post about the shit female bloggers get that he doesn't get. Go and read it. I'll be honest: after more than a decade on the internet, I find his experiences to be pretty spot-on. I make a controversial comment, I get death threats, comments about my weight, accusations of bitchiness, comments about my weight, offers to "fuck the stupid" out of me, comments about my weight, insults, comments about my weight, and, best of all, people swearing up, down, and sideways that I deserve whatever I get. It's been a few years since I've had a really bad troll problem, but when I had one, it was...

It was bad. It was "Kate monitored my journal and deleted comments before I could see them" bad, with a side order of feeling sick every time I considered getting online. I didn't sleep, I didn't eat, and I was scared all the time. It's invasive, and it's scary. Cracks about my weight aside, I'm not that big, and if someone wanted to fuck me up, they could. Easily. (Is this a motivator for my large and oft-discussed machete collection? Possible! Anybody comes to my house with the intent of doing me a mischief in the woods, they will not be thrilled by the results.)

And I haven't been blogging about my cats recently.

I'll be honest: I understand people being dicks for the sake of being dicks. We're all a little mean when we've had a bad day. My mother used to snap at me, even though she loved me. Sometimes I pick fights with my friends, or snarl at my co-workers. Human nature sometimes trends toward asshole, and no matter how hard we work to control it, it's going to happen. What I don't understand is why being a dick towards a woman on the internet so often turns into a) threats of violence, b) sexual insults, c) threats of sexual violence, or d) comments about perceived attractiveness/weight. Or violence toward the things that woman loves.

I haven't been blogging about my cats recently, because someone has been sending me email, from dummy accounts, threatening to kill my cats. In graphic detail. They know what my cats look like, thanks to the amount of blogging I have done in the past, and they've been able to get really, really specific in what they're going to do. Why? Because I got my cats from a breeder, and not from a shelter, and that means I need to suffer in order to understand the suffering of the cats waiting for adoption. "Bitch," "cunt," and "whore" feature heavily in these emails, which is always a nice seasoning for my rage and terror stew. It's all very gender-specific.

And they're threatening to kill my cats.

So no, I'm not going to talk about them right now; not until this email stops, not until the trolls find something else to chew on. And yes, I realize that making this post may reawaken some of my old trolls (and oh, Great Pumpkin, I hate it so much that I even have to take that into consideration), so I'm going to be watching comments carefully. Anything insulting will be deleted. Anything malicious will result in an immediate banning. I mean that. I am not going to let that shit stand.

We need to stop acting this way toward one another. We need to remember that there are humans on the other side of all those keyboards. We need to be decent human beings, because otherwise, everything is going to fall apart.

And none of this changes the fact that if the fucker who's been telling me what he's going to do to my babies comes anywhere near them, I will probably be going to prison for assault.

Some days I hate being a girl.

First, go and read this post from Wil Wheaton. It's okay. I can wait.

You're back? Cool. Okay, so...

The San Diego International Comic Convention (and really, any of the large media conventions, but SDCC more than most) is simply crawling with famous people, ranging from your stealth famous (most directors, producers, and writers) and formerly famous (the obscure character actors and aging child stars selling autographs near the rear of the dealer's hall) to your currently huge famous (the cast of True Blood) and your geek darlings (the cast of Eureka). Where someone falls on this scale during the convention may have absolutely no relation to where they'd be on the scale out in the non-convention world, although it mostly works as an enhancement of fame, not a reduction. Britney Spears would be mobbed at SDCC, no matter how few fans admit to liking her music, but I doubt Felicia Day is going to get stalked by paparazzi if she tries to go out for a burger.

If you attend SDCC, the odds are good that you will see famous people. Buying breakfast at the deli! Crossing the street! Trying in vain to get some shopping done in the exhibitor's hall! Walking really, really fast toward the nearest bathroom! Standing on the sidewalk with a stranger's arm around their shoulders, smiling graciously for a camera! This is going to happen. It is unavoidable. And I, from the bottom of my heart, make this request of you:

Don't go batshit because you're breathing the same air as a famous person.

Nathan Fillion is awesome. He's a funny guy, he's nice, he's considerate, and he worked on one of my favorite horror movies. He does not, however, give off a chemical signal in his sweat that causes my ladyparts to explode and my brain to stop functioning above a third-grade level. Stephen King is one of my personal heroes, and wrote three of my five favorite books. That does not mean that he intended Annie Wilkes from Misery to be taken as an ideal of fan behavior.

I am, by the standards of any media convention, a fourth-string celebrity at best. I'm a writer, which makes me invisible; I don't wear miniskirts or preach controversial opinions or have a TV show based off my work; I'm relatively new on the scene. I'm a very small fish, and I appreciate that, because even at my current, erm, fish size index, I've been stopped while walking someone, interrupted while very clearly doing something, and, my personal favorite, grabbed—physically grabbed, by people I do not know, and did not consent to being grabbed by—on my way into the bathroom.

Now, I don't know about you and your strange Earth ways, but on my planet, when someone is walking briskly toward a bathroom, they probably intend to do something involving bodily wastes and a toilet. Consider that I drink roughly four liters of Diet Dr Pepper a day during the average con. Now consider the danger of grabbing me while I'm on my way to make some room for more soda.

And there are people who say "well, you signed up for this" when a famous person, regardless of fish size index, has issues with being grabbed or interrupted or otherwise poked at in public. But at the end of the day, no one, no matter how famous, no matter how big of a fish, signed a contract saying "anyone who wants to can now grab you at any time, have a nice day."

These are the circumstances under which it is acceptable to touch a stranger:

1. If they have a hornet or something on their shoulder and you're brushing it off.
2. If you're shoving them out of the way of a Martian ray gun blast.
3. If they're standing on your foot and you need to tap them in the shoulder to get them off you.
4. If they just dropped, like, their wallet or something, and shouts of "Sir? Sir!" or "Ma'am? Ma'am!" aren't getting their attention.

There may be others for this list, but you get the idea. These are the circumstances under which it is NOT acceptable to touch a stranger, regardless of whether they're famous:

1. Because you want to.
2. Because they're there.
3. Because you feel like you have a personal connection to them, even though you've never met.
4. Because then you can tell your friends about that person you touched.

...again, there may (will) be others on this list, but you get the idea. Saying "Excuse me? Mr. Whedon? I love your work, could I get your autograph?" when you see him in the hall is cool. Following him into the men's room is not. Camping out in front of his hotel, also not. And the coolest thing of all is taking "no" as a legitimate, and understandable, answer.

Please, treat everyone with the same respect you want applied to you, whether they're famous or not. Do not separate people from their friends and family, or grab them, or stop them from getting to the bathroom. If you wouldn't let someone do it to you/your significant other/your kids, don't do it to someone else.

Don't let proximity to fame make you batshit, and these conventions will be a lot more fun, for everyone.

Every year in July, I go to the San Diego International Comic Convention. It's huge, it's crowded, it's complicated, it's messy, and it's still, for all its faults, one of my favorite conventions (the other being OVFF). I love SDCC. I've been going since I was a teenager, and if the con has changed, well, so have I. I can be happy there. I feel like the rest of the world gets to wait a little while.

Which is not to say that the con is without its problems. One, that's been getting more extreme with every passing year, is the issue of THE COMICON EXCLUSIVE (dun-dun-DUUUUUN). These are toys made for and offered solely at the con. They can't be obtained anywhere else. There have been My Little Ponies, special perfumes from the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, and action figures, action figures, action figures. Oh, the action, oh the figures, without end. Collectors swarm the exhibit hall the second it opens, rushing to get the exclusives on their list.

I, it must be said, am no different. I went to SDCC 2011 with the following exclusives on my list: diamond form Bishojo Emma Frost, Waid-era Bishojo Susan Storm, the SDCC 2011 My Little Pony, and the Deadfast cosplay Ghoulia Yelps. I got there early on Wednesday, and hit the floor while the throngs were at their lowest pre-Sunday ebb, ready to stand in lines, fork over cash, and get my goodies. There is nothing wrong with being a collector of things. I have been a collector of things my whole life. Some of the things I collect now, I started collecting when I was four years old. Four years old. My ability to throw stones at collectors died a long damn time ago.

That being said, there are limits.

People were getting mean this year. There was a weird sort of mass hysteria sweeping the floor, where totally reasonable, rational people that I would normally enjoy having a chat with suddenly became consumed by the crazy-pants need to be at THE FRONT OF THE LINE RIGHT FUCKING NOW. Part of this may be due to the steady increase in toy scalpers, people who come to SDCC just to buy the exclusives and resell them on eBay at a hefty markup. Think I'm kidding? Look at eBay. The Monster High doll I bought for twenty dollars two weeks ago now has a base "buy it now" of sixty dollars...and people are paying it. The market has stabilized, and the people who bought as much as they could carry at the convention are reaping the benefits.

Because the scalpers were clearing things out as quickly as they could, the people who wanted those toys for their own collections acquired a new sense of urgency—suddenly, it wasn't "walk briskly," it was "run." And when the scalpers started running, too, "run" turned into "stampede."

Saturday, after being asked to pick up a Monster High doll for a friend, Amy and I went over to the Mattel booth to get in line. The line was...ugly. Basically, a single guard was doing crowd control at the mouth of the actual line, and letting people in one at a time, right to left. Amy and I were on the far left; four people literally shoved past us to get into the line before we could. Shoved past us. But we were there for girl toys (which always sell slower than boy toys), so we waited until we could get past the guard, and we got into the lineup without major incident.

About six people behind us in line (and thus right next to us, due to the amusement park ride setup being used for people moving) was a mother and her seven-year-old daughter. The daughter was pretty clearly upset. The daughter was also dressed as Draculaura, one of the major characters from Monster High. I asked what they were in the line for, and guessed that it might be Ghoulia. The little girl, still looking miserable, confirmed.

I asked her mother what was wrong.

"We've tried to get into this line four times," she replied.

Why so many tries? Because people were pushing her child. People were stepping on her child. So when the crowd was crazy, they had to withdraw—no doll is worth injuring a little kid, period. And the girl was, naturally, very concerned that she wouldn't be able to get her toy.

I asked the mother if they wanted to go ahead of me. She looked stunned. She asked, several times, if I was sure; Amy and I both affirmed that, if one of us was getting the last Monster High doll, we wanted it to be the little girl. (None of the six people between us and the kid were there for Monster High toys; like most collectors, they wanted the "boy toys," which always sell out before anything else.) We let the girl and her mother go ahead of us...and the mother's level of gratitude was so far out of proportion with the cost of the gesture that it made me want to go around yelling at people. Don't step on kids! Cheese and crackers, that's just common sense!

Most of the kids at SDCC are very well-behaved, possibly because they're too terrified by the size of the crowd to do anything else. It's pretty easy to believe that the bogeyman will get you if you're bad when you can see the bogeyman, he's right over there and he's buying comic books. Maybe he needs a snack! It could be you. So they're pretty cool, those con kids, the next generation of our species. I mean, unless someone in a giant Perry the Platypus costume has just walked by. There are limits.

And I'm not saying kids get everything. I didn't give the girl my toy, I just let her go ahead of me to get hers. But there are moments where you really need to pause and ask yourself "is my eBay profit worth stepping on this little girl?" And if the answer is ever "yes," maybe it's time for some serious soul searching.

Here's a goal for all of us who are planning to attend San Diego Comic Convention 2012: let's not be dicks. And when we're buying cool stuff, let's make sure we're buying it for ourselves or our friends, not for our burgeoning eBay business. Okay?

Cool.

So I'm a crazy toy collector. This is not news. I spend hours upon hours stalking toy stores and flea markets and auction sites; I follow toy news blogs and read all the latest developments in the world of little plastic people. I'm a play-with-it collector, rather than a leave-it-in-the-box, look-at-it-smugly collector, and my room is basically the one I used to fantasize about when I was a little girl. The biggest scolding Thomas has ever received is when he whacked Draculaura off the shelf to see what would happen. (What happened? He got yelled at and felt bad. He has not repeated this offense.)

Being a crazy toy collector means, among other things, that I wind up acquiring and treasuring some things which are limited, and some things which are no longer available through anything but the action figure black market. It's all part of the game. And that includes the limited dolls made for the San Diego Comic Convention, or for the various Tonner Doll Conventions.

I have a point, I swear.

While I was in New York, I missed the 2011 Tonner Doll Convention, because, well, BEA. Several people on my Evangeline Ghastly Doll Collectors mailing list attended the Tonner convention, and were excited to get the convention-exclusive dolls. They started lining up at 7AM to get them. Supplies were exceedingly limited, and not everyone got a doll. There was much wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth. And the first dolls started showing up on eBay less than twenty minutes later.

Now, these are dolls which cost $150 new. Not cheap, but understandable for a limited-edition vinyl ball-jointed doll. And they went up on eBay at $450 each. Why? Because people would pay it. The same thing is happening right now in my Monster High community. People who can't get to San Diego are ordering dolls from eBay scalpers who promise them the exclusives at three or even four times the original purchase price. (These are people who don't even have dolls yet, mind you; they're selling doll futures, the promise that they will go to the convention and somehow find a way to obtain all these toys.) It isn't limited to exclusive dolls, either. Toy scalpers regularly clear the shelves of "new and hot" toys, listing them on auction sites at two to four times original purchase price.

This bothers me. I understand supply and demand. I understand "I bought this doll and now I don't want her and I'd like to make back my purchase price," or even "I bought her and I want my purchase price plus five bucks for me standing in line." But there's something that just seems faintly scummy about going into a collector situation and buying things to resell at that kind of markup when you know there are other people in that line. Saying "I'm doing it for the people who can't be here, I have to charge extra to pay for my time and effort" doesn't really wash for me unless you're doing it at the last minute, after all the people who are there have had the opportunity to get the toys for themselves.

I wish we didn't do this sort of thing to each other. I wish we'd share, and say "I need one for me, and you need one for you, and maybe if there's some left over, I'll take an extra for selling later," instead of forcing the conventions to put tighter and tighter restrictions on people, because they feel like we just can't be trusted. Maybe they feel that way because we keep proving, over and over again, that we can't be.

And it sucks.

Allentown, Pennsylvania. July 26th, 2014.

The people outside the prison could pretend that the dead weren't walking if they wanted to. That sort of bullshit was the province of the free. Once you were behind bars, counting on other people to bring you food, water, hell, to let you go to the bathroom like a human being...you couldn't lie to yourself. And the dead were walking.

So far, there hadn't been any outbreaks in Brandon's wing, but he knew better than to attribute that to anything beyond pure dumb luck. Whatever caused some people to get sick and die and then get up again without being bitten just hadn't found a way inside the building. It would. All it needed was a little more time, and it would.

Brandon was sitting on his bed and staring at his hands, wondering if he'd ever see Hazel again, when the door of his cell slid open. He raised his head, and found himself looking at one of the prison guards—one of the only guards who was still bothering to show up for work.

"You've got a visitor, Majors," said the guard, and gestured roughly for him to stand. Brandon had learned the virtue of obedience. It was practically the first lesson that the prison taught. He stood, moving quickly to avoid a reprimand. Never doing anything to earn a reprimand, that was the second lesson.

There had been other lessons since then. None of them had been pleasant ones.

The guard led Brandon through the halls without a word. Some of the prisoners shouted threats or profanity as they passed; Brandon's role in the Mayday Army was well-known, and was the reason he was given his own cell, and not allowed to mingle with the general prison population. As the situation got worse, his future looked more and more bleak. Outside the prison, he would probably have already been lynched. As if it was his fault somehow? That bastard Kellis was the one who built the bug. He should be the one getting the blame, not Brandon—

The guard led him around the corner to the visiting room. There were only two men standing there. One was the warden. The other was a slim, dark-haired man Brandon felt like he should recognize. Something about him was familiar.

"Brandon Majors?" asked the man.

"Yes?" Maybe he was from the governor. Maybe he had come to pardon Brandon, and take him away from all this; maybe he understood that it wasn't his fault—

"My name is Alexander Kellis."

Hope died. Brandon stared at him. "I...you...oh, God."

Alexander looked at Brandon—the little ringleader who had managed to bring about the end of the world, the one whose name was already dropping out of the news, to be replaced by Alexander's own—and said, very quietly, "I wanted to meet you. I wanted to look you in the eye while I told you that this is all your fault. History may blame it on me, but neither of us is going to be there to see it, and right here, right now, today, this is all your fault. You destroyed my life's work. You killed the man I loved. You may very well have brought about the end of the world. So I have just one question for you."

"What?" whispered Brandon.

"Was it worth it?" After five minutes passed with no answer, Dr. Kellis turned to the warden. "Thank you. I'd like to go now." They walked away, leaving Brandon standing frozen next to the guard.

That night, Brandon's cell was somehow left unlocked. The next morning, he would be found dead in the hall. None of the other inmates saw what happened. At least, that's what they said, and this one time, the warden chose to believe them. It wasn't his fault, after all.

***

Please return to your homes. Please remain calm. This is not a drill. If you have been infected, please contact authorities immediately. If you have not been infected, please remain calm. This is not a drill. Please return to your homes...

When will you Rise?

Allentown, Pennsylvania. July 13th, 2014.

After six days of snooping, bribery, and the occasional outright lie, Robert Stalnaker had finally achieved his goal: a meeting with the college student who blew the whistle on the leaders of the Mayday Army. It had been more difficult than he expected. Since the death of Dr. Kellis's husband—something which was not his fault; not only did his article not say "break into the lab and free the experimental virus," it certainly never said "beat the man's lover to a bloody pulp if you get the chance"—the security had closed in tighter around the man who was regarded as the state's star, and really only, witness to the actions of the Mayday Army. Robert carefully got out his pocket recorder, checking to be sure the memory buffer was clear. He was only going to get one shot at this.

The door opened, and a skinny, anxious-looking college boy stepped into the room, followed by a uniformed campus security guard. Stalnaker would have attempted to convince him to leave, but frankly, after what had happened to John Kellis...these were unsettled times. Having an authority figure present might be good for everyone involved.

"Thank you for meeting with me, Matthew," he said, standing and extending his hand to be shaken. The college boy had a light grip, like he was afraid of breaking something. Stalnaker made a note of that, even as he kept on smiling. "I'm Robert Stalnaker, with The Clarion News in New York. I really do appreciate it."

"You're the one who wrote that article," said Matt, pulling his hand away and sitting down on the other side of the table. His eyes darted from side to side like a cornered dog's, assessing the exit routes. "They would never have done it if you hadn't done that first."

"Done what, exactly?" Stalnaker produced a notepad and pencil from his pocket, making sure Matt saw him getting ready to take notes. The recorder was already running, but somehow, that never caused the Pavlovian need to speak that he could trigger with a carefully poised pen. "I just want to know your side of the story, son."

Matt took a shaky breath. "Look. I didn't—nobody told me this was going to be a whole thing, you know? This girl I know just told me that Brandon and Hazel could hook me up with some good weed. I was coming off of finals, I was tense, I needed to relax a little. That was all."

"I understand," said Stalnaker, encouragingly. "When I was in college, I heard the siren song of good weed more than a few times. Was the weed good?"

"Aw, man, it was awesome." Matt's eyes lit up. Only for a moment; the light quickly dimmed, and he continued more cautiously, "Anyway, everybody started talking about revolution, and sticking it to the Man, and how this dude Kellis was going to screw us all by only giving his cold-cure to the people who could afford it. I should have done the research, you know? I should have looked it up. It's contagious, see? Even if we'd left it alone, let Dr. Kellis finish his testing, we would have all been able to get it in the end. If it worked."

Something about the haunted tone in Matt's voice made Stalnaker sit up a little bit straighter. "Do you think it doesn't work? Can you support that?"

"Oh, it works. Nobody's had a cold in weeks. We're the killers of the common cold. Hi-ho, give somebody a medal." Matt shook his head, glancing around for exits one more time. "But he didn't finish testing it. Man, we created an invasive species that can live inside our bodies. Remember when all those pythons got into the Everglades? Remember how it fucked up the alligators? This time we're the alligators, and we've got somebody's pet store python slithering around inside us. And we don't know what it eats, and we don't know how big it's going to get."

"What are you saying?"

Matt looked at Robert Stalnaker, and smiled a bitter death's-head grin as he said, "I'm saying that we're screwed, Mr. Stalnaker, and I'm saying that it's all your fucking fault."

***

The trial of Brandon Majors and Hazel Allen, the ringleaders of the so-called "Mayday Army," has been delayed indefinitely while the precise extent of their crimes is determined. Breaking and entering and willful destruction of property are easy; the sudden demand by the World Health Organization that they also be charged with biological terrorism and global pollution are somewhat more complex...

When will you Rise?

Manhattan, New York. July 7th, 2014.

In the month since his report on the supposed "Kellis cure" had first appeared, Robert Stalnaker had received a level of attention and adulation—and yes, vitrol—that he had previously only dreamed of. His inbox was packed every morning with people both applauding and condemning his decision to reveal Dr. Alexander Kellis's scientific violation of the American public. Was he the one who told the Mayday Army to break into Kellis's lab, doing thousands of dollars of damage and unleashing millions of dollars of research into the open air? No, he was not. He was simply a concerned member of the American free press, doing his job, and reporting the news.

The fact that he had essentially fabricated the story had stopped bothering him after the third interview request. By the Monday following the Fourth of July, he would have been honestly shocked if someone had asked him about the truth behind his lies. As far as he was concerned, he'd been telling the truth. Maybe it wasn't the truth Dr. Kellis had intended, but it was the one he'd created. All Stalnaker did was report it.

Best of all, he hadn't seen anyone sneezing or coughing in almost two weeks. Whatever craziness Kellis had been cooking up in that lab of his, it did what it was supposed to do. Throw out the Kleenex and cancel that order for chicken soup, can I hear an amen from the floor?

"Amen," murmured Stalnaker, pushing open the door to his paper's New York office. A cool blast of climate-controlled air flowed out into the hall, chasing away the stickiness of the New York summer. He stepped into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him, and waited for the applause that inevitably followed his arrival. He was, after all, the one who had single-handedly increased circulation almost fifteen percent in under a week.

The applause didn't come. Bemused, he looked around the room and saw his editor bearing down on him with a grim expression on his face and a toothpick bouncing between his lips as he frantically chewed it into splinters. The toothpicks had been intended as an aid when he quit smoking the year before. Somehow, they'd just never gone away.

"Stalnaker!" he growled, shoving the toothpick off to one side of his mouth as he demanded, "Where the hell have you been? Don't you check your email?"

"Not during breakfast most mornings," said Stalnaker, taken aback by his editor's tone. Don never talked to him like that. Harshly, sure, and sometimes coldly, but never like he'd done something too wrong to be articulated; never like he was a puppy who'd made a mess on the carpet. "Why? Did I miss a political scandal or something while I was having a bagel?"

Don Nutick paused, forcing himself to take a deep, slow breath before he said, "No. You missed the Pennsylvania police department announcing that the ringleaders of the Mayday Army were taken into custody Friday afternoon."

"What?" Stalnaker stared at him, suddenly fully alert. "You're telling me they actually caught the guys? How the hell did they manage that?"

"One of their own decided to rat them out. Said that it wasn't right, what they were doing." Don shook his head. "They're not releasing the guy's name yet. Still, whoever managed to get an exclusive interview with him, why. I bet that person could write his or her own ticket. Maybe even convince a sympathetic editor not to fire his ass over faking a report that's getting the paper threatened with a lawsuit."

Stalnaker scoffed. "They'd never get it to stick."

"You sure of that?"

There was a moment of silence before Stalnaker said, reluctantly, "I guess I'm going to Pennsylvania."

"Yes," Don agreed. "I guess you are."

***

While the identity of the Mayday Army's deserter has been protected thus far, it must be asked: why did this man decide to turn on his compatriots? What did he see in that lab that caused him to change his ways? We don't know, but we're going to find out...

When will you Rise?

I am, to a degree, a public figure. I know that. I am also a low-level enough public figure that I am accessible, unlike, say, anyone who's actually famous. That means that some of the things I do and say will be judged in ways that will seem unfair to me. I know that, too. I've basically come to grips with the fact that if I want to be an author, and if I want to make my living doing this, I'm going to have to deal with people judging me. That being said...

Don't you ever, ever insult my cats. Don't you ever, ever imply that I own them because they're "status symbols," or because I am in some way taking pleasure in the knowledge that other cats are being put to sleep right now. Lilly, Alice, and Thomas are my companions. They are my friends. They are the closest I intend to come to having children, and while I may be up for judgment, they are off limits. Leave my cats the fuck alone.

Why do I get my cats from reputable breeders, rather than from the local shelter? A whole bunch of reasons.

I do it for the health of the cat. When I visit a reputable breeder, I can not only meet the kitten I'm hoping to take home with me, I can meet their parents and grandparents. In the case of Alice and Thomas, I met their great-grandfather. I want to know that my cats have a good genetic shot at a long, happy life.

I do it for the temperament of the cat. I have had incredibly sweet, loving shelter cats in my life. I have also had bitter, terrified, xenophobic shelter cats who couldn't be integrated into a household, because they were too damn scared. I want a kitten that has been socialized and loved, and that has been bred to have a good personality to go with those good genes. I want a Lilly, an Alice, a Thomas, a Ripley, a Toby, an Alligator.

And yes, I do insist on kittens whenever possible. At best, I'm bringing home a new cat to an adult who isn't sure about the situation; at worst, I'm bringing home a new cat to two adults who already think there's no room at the inn. I am loud. I move quickly. I go away for long periods of time. I do things the way I do things, and a lot of adult cats can't adjust to me, no matter how hard we both try.

There are cats in shelters. There are cats in rescues. There are cats in need of homes. But I am not in the market for an adult rescue, and the kittens don't need me to be the one that saves them; kittens stand a much better chance than adults. Why do I know this? I know because I have volunteered at shelters and rescues and free clinics since I was twelve years old. Just like I know that I want as complete of a genetic profile as possible on my cats, because I buried so damn many of them when I was bringing them home from the pound.

My cats are not a zero-sum game. Bringing Thomas home from Betsy's didn't kill a kitten somewhere in the world that was waiting for my love; if it hadn't been Thomas, it would have been no new cat at all. Do I wish that there were no cats anywhere in the world waiting for their forever homes? Yes, I do. But that doesn't mean we shut down the breeders, abolish the breeds, and become a Domestic Shorthair and Domestic Longhair-only world. It means we breed responsibly. It means we support the shelters. It means we spay and neuter our pets.

And it means that my cats are not fucking status symbols. They are not somehow less worthy of love and comfort and a place to sleep than cats who have been abused or abandoned. They are exactly as worthy of all those things. And they are getting them from me, as will all the cats in my future.

If you can't be nice to my cats, you leave them the fuck alone.

Allentown, Pennsylvania. July 4th, 2014.

The streets of Allentown were decked in patriotic red, white, and blue, symbolizing freedom from oppression—symbolizing independence. That word had never seemed so accurate. Brandon Majors walked along, smiling at every red streamer and blue rosette, wishing he could jump up on a bench and tell everyone in earshot how he was responsible for their true independence. How he, working in the best interests of mankind, had granted them independence from illness, freedom from the flu, and the liberty to use their sick days sitting on the beach, sipping soft drinks and enjoying their liberty from the Man! They'd probably give him a medal, or at least carry him around the city on their shoulders.

Sadly, their triumphant march would probably be interrupted by the local police. The Man had his dogs looking for the brave members of the Mayday Army, calling them "eco-terrorists" and making dire statements about how they'd endangered the public health. Endangered it how? By setting the people free from the tyranny of big pharma? If that was endangerment, then maybe it was time for everything to be endangered. Even the Man would have to admit that, once he saw how much better the world was thanks to Bradley and his brave compatriots.

Brandon walked toward home, lost in thoughts of glories to come, once the Mayday Army could come out of the shadows and announce themselves to the world as saviors of the common man. What was the statue of limitations on eco-terrorism, anyway? Would it be reduced—at least in their case—once people started realizing what a gift they had been given? Maybe—

There were police cars surrounding the house. Brandon stopped dead, watching wide-eyed as men in uniform carried a kicking, weeping Hazel down the front porch steps and toward a black and white police van. The back doors opened as they approached, and three more officers reached out to pull Hazel inside. He could hear her sobbing, protesting, demanding to know what they thought she'd done wrong.

There was nothing he could do.

He repeated that to himself over and over again as he took two steps backward, turned, and began to run. The Man had found them out. Somehow, impossibly, the Man had found them out, and now Hazel was going to be a martyr to the cause. There was nothing he could do. The pigs already had her, they were already taking her away, and this wasn't some big Hollywood blockbuster action movie; he couldn't charge in there and somehow rescue her right from under the noses of the people who were taking her away. Her parents had money. They would find a way to buy her freedom. In the meanwhile, there was nothing, nothing, nothing he could do.

Brandon was still repeating that to himself when the sirens started behind him, and the bullhorn-distorted voice announced, "Mr. Majors, please stop running, or we will be forced to shoot."

Brandon stopped. Without turning, he raised his hands in the air, and shouted, "I am an American citizen! I am being unfairly detained!" His voice quaked on the last word, somewhat ruining the brave revolutionary image he was trying to project.

Heavy footsteps on the street behind him announced the approach of the cop seconds before Brandon's hands were grabbed and wrenched behind his back. "Feel lucky we're arresting you at all, and not just publishing your name and address in the paper, you idiot," hissed the officer, her voice harsh and close to his ear. "You think this country loves terrorists?"

"We were doing it for you!" he wailed.

"Tell it to the judge," she said, and turned him forcefully around before leading him away.

***

The ringleaders of the so-called "Mayday Army" were arrested today following a tip from one of their former followers. His name has not been released at this time. Brandon Majors, 25, and Hazel Allen, 23, are residents of Allentown, Pennsylvania. Drug paraphernalia was recovered at the scene...

When will you Rise?

Allentown, Pennsylvania. June 11th, 2014.

Hazel Allen was well and truly baked. Not just a little buzzed, oh, no; she was baked like a cake. The fact that this rhymed delighted her, and she started to giggle, listing slowly over to one side until her head landed against her boyfriend's shoulder with a soft "bonk."

Brandon Majors, self-proclaimed savior of mankind, ignored his pharmaceutically-impaired girlfriend. He was too busy explaining to a rapt (and only slightly less stoned) audience exactly how it was that they, the Mayday Army, were going to bring down The Man, humble him before the masses, and rise up as the guiding light of a new generation of enlightened, compassionate, totally bitchin' human beings.

Had anyone bothered to ask Brandon what he thought of the idea that one day, the meek would inherit the Earth, he would have been totally unable to see the irony.

"Greed is the real disease killing this country," he said, slamming his fist against his own leg to punctuate his statement. Nods and muttered statements of agreement rose up from the others in the room (although not from Hazel, who was busy trying to braid her fingers together). "Man, we've got so much science and so many natural resources, you think anybody should be hungry? You think anybody should be homeless? You think anybody should be eating animals? We should be eating genetically engineered magic fruit that tastes like anything you want, because we're supposed to be the dominant species."

"Like Willy Wonka and the snotberries?" asked one of the men, sounding perplexed. He was a bio-chem graduate student; he'd come to the meeting because he'd heard there would be good weed. No one had mentioned anything about a political tirade from a man who thought metaphors were like cocktails: better when mixed thoroughly.

"Snozberries," said Hazel, dreamily.

Brandon barely noticed. "And now they're saying that there's a cure for the common cold. Only you know who's going to get it? Not me. Not you. Not our parents. Not the kids. Only the people who can afford it. Paris Hilton's never going to have the sniffles again, but you and me and everybody we care about, we're just screwed. Just like everybody who hasn't been working for The Man since this current corrupt society came to power. It's time to change that! It's time to take the future out of the hands of The Man and put it back where it belongs—in the hands of the people!"

General cheering greeted this proclamation. Hazel, remembering her cue even through the haze of pot smoke and drowsiness, sat up and asked, "But how are we going to do that?"

"We're going to break in to that government-funded money-machine of a lab, and we're going to give the people of the world what's rightly theirs." Brandon smiled serenely, pushing Hazel gently away from him as he stood. "We're going to drive to Virginia, and we're going to snatch that cure right out from under the establishment's nose. And then we're going to give it to the world, the way it should have been handled in the first place! Who's with me?"

Any misgivings that might have been present in the room were overcome by the lingering marijuana smoke, and the feeling of revolution. They were going to change the world! They were going to save mankind!

They were going to Virginia.

***

A statement was issued today by a group calling themselves "The Mayday Army," taking credit for the break-in at the lab of Dr. Alexander Kellis. Dr. Kellis, a virologist working with genetically-tailored diseases, recently revealed that he was working on a cure for the common cold...

When will you Rise?

Just last week, I announced that I would have a story in the YA anthology Wicked Pretty Things. I was extremely excited; this was going to be my first young adult publication, and I really, really want to start publishing some of my YA (werewolves and movie stars and sociological experiments, oh my). It seemed like a great opportunity.

Then I heard that one of the authors, Jessica Verday, had pulled out of the anthology. Which seemed a little odd, given how late we were in the process.

And then I found out her reason. To quote her blog post on the subject (originally posted at http://jessicaverday.blogspot.com/):

"I've received a lot of questions and comments about why I'm no longer a part of the Wicked Pretty Things anthology (US: Running Press, UK: Constable & Robinson) and I've debated the best way to explain why I pulled out of this anthology. The simple reason? I was told that the story I'd wrote, which features Wesley (a boy) and Cameron (a boy), who were both in love with each other, would have to be published as a male/female story because a male/male story would not be acceptable to the publishers."

...uh, what? That's not okay. I mean, really, that's not okay. I began, in my slow, overly careful way, to get angry. Then I saw a statement from the editor, saying that the decision had been entirely hers, and had been in no way a reflection of the publisher's views. I sat back. I thought very, very hard. And I decided that, barring any additional developments, I would stay in the anthology, rather than hurting the other authors involved with the project by pulling out.

Naturally, there were additional developments. In light of the ongoing situation, my own discomfort with this whole thing, and the fact that discriminating on basis of sexual orientation is never okay, I have withdrawn my story from the collection.

And here's the thing. There is absolutely no reason to censor a story that was written to the guidelines (which dictated how much profanity, sexuality, etc. was acceptable, as good guidelines should). If Jessica had written hard-core erotica, then rejecting it would have made perfect sense. Not that kind of book. But she didn't. She wrote a romance, just like the rest of us, only her romance didn't include any girls. And she didn't get a rejection; she got her story accepted, just like the rest of us. Only while we got the usual editorial comments, she got "One of your characters needs to be turned into something he's not." And that's not okay.

Books do not determine a person's sexual orientation. I was not somehow destined to be straight, and led astray by Annie On My Mind and the Valdemar books. I was born with universal wiring. I have had boyfriends and I have had girlfriends and I have had both at the same time, and none of that—NONE OF THAT—is because I read a book where a girl was in love with a girl and I decided that being bisexual would be a fun way to kill a weekend.

But those books did tell me I didn't have to hate myself, and they did tell me that there was nothing wrong with me, and they did make it easier on everyone involved, because here was something I could hand to Mom and go "See? It's not just me, and it's not the end of the world, and it's not the only thing that defines me." Supposedly, ten percent of people are gay or bi with a tropism toward their own gender. It stands to reason that there should be positive non-hetero relationships in at least ten percent of YA literature. And they're not there. And things like this are why.

I am not withdrawing from this book because I'm not straight. I am withdrawing because of my little sister and her wife, and because of my girlfriend, and because of my best friend, and because of all the other people who deserve better than bullying through exclusion. Thanks to Jessica for bringing this to our attention, and thank you to everyone who has been supportive of my decision to withdraw.

I am sorry this had to be done. I am not sorry that I did it.

What's happening in Wisconsin right now scares the hell out of me.

I won't pretend to have an absolutely perfect view of the political situation; most of the information I'm getting is either from Internet news articles (which slant very pro-union, pro-education, and pro-not being total assholes) or from people who are actually in Wisconsin. But from where I'm sitting, it looks like the new Governor of the state took a budget surplus, turned it into a budget deficit by granting tax breaks to corporations and extremely rich people, and is now trying to take the balance out of the public school system. And maybe succeeding.

I keep hearing the phrase "personal responsibility" being thrown around in discussions of Why This Is The Right Thing To Do. We need lower government spending, including lower educational spending, and if you don't like it, that's what private schools and home schooling were invented for. Um. Okay. You know who doesn't have much personal responsibility? A kindergartner. When I was in kindergarten, my idea of "personal responsibility" pretty much began and ended with remembering to leave room for lunch in my schoolbag, which was otherwise packed with My Little Ponies. I wasn't very consistent about this. Does that mean I shouldn't have been allowed to go to a decent school?

Little kids don't know rich from poor. They don't learn racism, or sexism, or religious intolerance until we teach it to them. They just know that when they go to school, they want the teacher to be fun to learn from, the crayons in the art cabinet to be unbroken, and the library to have books worth reading. They want to learn. Bad schools beat that desire out of them, and underfunded schools, unfortunately, often turn into bad schools. Not because the teachers don't care. Not because the parents don't care. Because the resources aren't there to do anything more than just get by.

I grew up in California, so far below the poverty level that sometimes, there was no heat in our apartment. We moved at least once a year, because that was what the eviction notices required, and every time we moved, we wound up somewhere smaller, and uglier, and scarier than the place before. And through it all? Through it all, I went to great schools. I attended Sequoia Middle School, a magnet school for college prep kids. It was Nerd Prep, and I loved it there. I took Drama and Art and Computers, and I got the exact same classes as the kids whose parents made six figures a year. I attended College Park High School, the college prep high school, and I took Drama and Ceramics and Art and AP English, and I learned.

Did I get picked on for being poor? Yeah. My clothes were old and often ugly, my haircuts were unfashionable, when my glasses got broken, I glued them back together and wore them for another year. But I got to learn. I had access to teachers and books and librarians who knew what they were doing. If I had been forced into an underfunded school with teachers who had to work a second job at night to keep their own heat on (and teachers are already pretty poorly paid, especially when you consider that they're educators, role models, mentors, impromptu counselors, and half a dozen other things besides), that wouldn't have happened, and the person I am today wouldn't be here.

People like me cannot exist if we stop prioritizing universal access to good schools, good teachers, and classes that do more than force every student through the same cookie cutter curriculum—something that becomes necessary when you have more than thirty students to a teacher. If we start making education a matter of "personal responsibility," then we're really saying that poor children should have one more disadvantage added to the heaping tower of things already stacked against them. Not every parent can home school. Not every smart child can afford tuition, or be the one to win the scholarship. Not every child has choices.

My tax dollars fund schools. If I were allowed to decide where my tax dollars went, all the dollars currently funding guns would fund schools. But I don't get to do that, so all I can do is hope that people who benefited from our public school system, or have ever known anyone who benefited from our public school system, will say "You know what? I don't need another tax break on my five billion dollars a year. Let's buy some desks."

What's happening to the Wisconsin school system is wrong. And I'm terrified that it's going to work, and the people who think it's a good idea will start trying to do it everywhere else in the country. Children don't need personal responsibility.

Children need to learn.

So far this morning, I have deleted seven spam comments, and blocked the commenters from posting in my journal again. I have also deleted five spam emails submitted through my website contact form (which proves, I think, that we're training spambots to pass Turing Tests, since you have to prove humanity before my website lets you email me).

I read a web comic called Skin Horse, and pretty much daily, the comment section is kudzu'd by spammers, until one of the admins comes along and deletes the offers of cheap drugs, hand bags, imported wives, and free money from a bank in a country that doesn't exist. So far as I know, none of the readers of Skin Horse really want any of these things.

My message boards are in a continual state of "behind" when it comes to approving users, because we have to work so hard to not approve spammers.

And through it all...I don't know anyone who has ever purchased something from a spammer. Most people are so anti-spam that they reject perfectly legitimate purchases, because they've decided that they're "spammy." (This did not happen to me, thankfully, but a friend of mine was told, on their own journal, "I will never buy your books, because you're SO SPAMMY about them." Said friend pretty much confined talk of books to that journal. The journal is gone now. Because that's how much we fear being slammed for spam.) All spam seems to do is waste our time and make us paranoid about clicking things. It's like the TSA of shit you encounter on the Internet.

I do not want .jpgs and spam. I do not want them, Sam I Am.

I thought fairly hard about whether or not to make this post, as I generally try not to say negative things that can't be veiled behind a lovely shimmering curtain of "no details here." In the end, I decided that the details I had were vague enough to be borderline-generic, with a few careful omissions. And this is an important "please don't be this guy."

On Sunday at Arisia, I was on a panel called "Fanfic As Writer's Workshop," for discussion of how the skills and techniques learned from writing fanfiction can be applied to writing original fiction. (Yes, Virginia, you can learn how to write by writing fanfic. But that is another post for another day.) I was, at the time, incredibly sick, due to exposure to mango (which I am highly allergic to), but I was determined to soldier through. It's probably a good thing that I was as sick as I was, since it prevented my becoming annoyed enough to shout. See? Vomiting has value!

The panel consisted entirely of women (myself, three other writers, and Diana). The room, while small, was quite well-filled, with a nice mix of people who wanted to discuss learning about writing through, well, actually writing. And, in the front row, was That Guy. He was fairly large; fairly unkempt; had not brushed his hair; appeared to be wearing basic black for its stain-concealing properties, rather than out of any goth sympathies; and was, when first sighted, vigorously picking at his teeth.

Please don't be That Guy, part one: If you're sitting in the front row of a panel, in full view of the panelists, please don't pick your teeth. If you must pick your teeth, please use a toothpick, or something, rather than using your fingers. We'd really rather not watch.

The panel began with enthusiasm, as each panelist explained their views on our topic, and we began taking questions from the attendees. That Guy stopped picking his teeth, which was a mercy, and began, instead, picking his ear. With the same finger.

Please don't be That Guy, part two: Sometimes we have itches. I get that. I, too, am an itchy person. But if you're sitting in the front row of a panel, and have already been seen to be picking your teeth, please do not stick the same finger in your ear. It makes the panelists very uncomfortable.

More questions from the audience. This is the point at which That Guy began truly interacting. "How do I get more readers for my fanfic?" he asked. "I wrote an alternate universe [SHOW] [SEASON], where instead of [MAN] killing [WOMAN], he rapes her."

Cue horrified silence. The fanfic community is largely female, for better or for worse, and that sort of statement is rarely going to go over well in mixed company. Diana, who was by that point far more diplomatic than I, tried pointing this out, along with the note that maybe, if he wanted people to trust him writing about rape, he needed to get them to trust him writing about other things, first. He countered with the fact that he had received good feedback from women. We moved on as quickly as possible.

Later in the panel, the topic of porn came up. Porn is, after all, the stereotypical reason people write fanfic, and that's not entirely a bad thing. So all of these women are now saying the word "porn," with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Please don't be That Guy, part three: If you think there is ANY CHANCE that you might become visibly aroused by live women saying the word "porn," please DO NOT sit in the front row at a panel on fanfiction. They're going to say it, and what's going to happen is going to happen, and then I'm going to have to fight the urge to eject you from the room.

That Guy attempted to drag the panel back to a recounting of the plot of his fanfic several times, to the point where I actually asked him "How is this relevant?" (If you've ever been on a panel with me, or attended a panel with me, you'll know that I'm not opposed to topic drift, so long as it remains interesting and vaguely tangential. If I'm the one shutting you down, it's because you're so far off topic that you're no longer even in the topic's time zone.)

So please. This is a plea for everyone, male and female, who attends conventions and goes to panels: Please don't be That Guy. Don't sit to take up three chairs, sticking fingers in your facial orifices, and try to engage women in discussions on how rape in literature is awesome and not inappropriate in the least. Don't look offended when the panelists don't want to hand the panel to you, so that you can tell us about your magnum opus and why we all need to read it. And please, please, don't be creepy. For the rest of the weekend, if I saw That Guy, I moved to another elevator.

Let's play nicely with the other fans, and only creep them out with their permission, okay? I've done my best to be general here, but this one specific incident really drove home why this is something that needs to be said. No one was touched, cornered, or specifically harassed, but I had three people who attended that panel tell me how uncomfortable That Guy made them. Beyond that, I know how uncomfortable he made me.

I'm just saying.

ETA: Because this has come up twice, and is hence distracting: "please don't take up three chairs" does NOT mean "please don't be fat at a panel." You may be as fat as you do or do not wish to be, and as long as you're happy and healthy, I'm happy for you. But as I say on a regular basis, your backpack does not deserve a chair of its own. Neither does your leg, unless you are injured and require elevation. Neither does your arm. And if you're taking a chair each for your leg, torso, and arm, you have perhaps crossed a line.

My last day in Australia dawned bright and disgustingly early, as I needed to be at the airport while the birds were still trying to figure out what the fuck was up with that big shiny "sun" thing. Jeanne and Mal drove me to the airport, where they dumped* me summarily on the curb and sped off into the sunrise. Jerks.

In I went, to check into my flight. I had made a point of arriving hours and hours early, since I needed an aisle seat. Bad back + seventeen hour flight + middle seat = removed from the plan by the EMTs, because I would no longer have been capable of moving my legs. As it was, by requesting an aisle seat at the absolute rear of the plane, I was able to get what I needed, and nobody had to get hurt. On I went, to security!

Security lines are so much faster, nicer, and less like being trapped in a really fucked-up post-cyberpunk horror movie when they're not controlled by Homeland Security. I'm just saying.

I wandered around the airport for a little while, buying breakfast, soda, and cheesy souvenirs for the people who would mug me at home if I didn't bring them anything, and managed to use up the last of my Australian currency. Then apologetic airport employees chased us all away from our gate, as Homeland Security requirements forced them to comply to American security standards...which, apparently, meant "make everybody mill and get frightened because you won't tell them what's going on." Yay! But eventually, there was a plane.

The actual plane ride was fine. I slept, I read the new Terry Pratchett (I Shall Wear Midnight), I watched a lot of movies, I finished the September Sparrow Hill Road story, I drank more Diet Coke than was strictly good for me. Because this flight was heading for America, land of the free, we were not allowed to congregate near the restrooms or be out of our seat for any "unnecessary" reasons. Like, you know, not becoming one gigantic muscle cramp due to sitting down for seventeen hours. I'm in favor of safety, America, but did it ever occur to you that crippling tourists hurts the economy? I'm just saying.

The plane landed. Ker-thump. And the fun part began.

See, in order to get to my flight from LA to SF, I needed to clear Customs. In order to clear Customs, I needed to clear Immigration. I was on a very tight transfer, so I was very grateful for the existence of citizen and non-citizen lines...until I got there and no one was respecting the damn signs, making all the lines a mixture of people returning, and people coming in. Why was this a problem? This was a problem because all visiting aliens must be photographed and fingerprinted and grilled at length, and this makes processing glacial.

I fidgeted. I squirmed. I tried not to panic. I passed through Immigration, trusting that someone on the other side would know what was going on, since I was exhausted, jet-lagged, and barely staying on my feet. I picked up my suitcases, asked several people where to go, and was pretty much shoved out of the terminal to sink or swim on my own, as was everybody else. A sign outside said to go right; I went right, because I obey signs when exhausted.

Sadly, the sign led to a large and very confusing airport terminal, with lots of lines and contradictory signs and people. I asked a pilot how to get to Gate 31. He pointed. I went. I went, and...there was no Gate 31. So I, exhausted and jet-lagged and not sure where my feet were anymore, started crying.

To the airport security employee whose name I didn't get, who helped a crying blonde girl with pink camo luggage by getting her to the correct security line, to the front of the line, and to her gate five minutes before her plane was supposed to take off: thank you so so very much. I hope you get many good things in this world, because you are all that stopped me from having a massive panic attack in the middle of LAX.

And after all that, of course, my plane was delayed. I sat down at the gate, plugged things in, and called people to let them know I was home, with periodic calls to Mom to update my projected arrival time in San Francisco. Eventually, they let us board.

I do not remember the flight from LA to SF. I passed out as soon as I sat down.

Mom met me at Baggage Claim in San Francisco, and answered the question of whether she'd heard about the Campbell by bringing me balloons and crying all over me. I gave away most of the balloons to small children at the carousel, with Mom's blessing, and then we finally, finally went home.

With a stop at the comic book store on the way. A girl's gotta have her priorities, after all. And that, oh best beloveds, was Australia.

I can't wait to go back.

(*By "dumped" I mean "respectfully off-loaded, and hugged me a great deal, before tearfully leaving." Isn't precise vocabulary fun?)

So here's the thing:

Sometimes I have bitchy days. Sometimes I've been woken up repeatedly during the night to arbitrate disagreements between the cats, or it was too hot to sleep, or I have lots of deadlines I need to take care of, or I just have a really painful zit in my ear. Whatever. I am a person, I have a right to the ball, and that ball includes the occasional bitchy day. Sometimes, I am not a happy little bundle of sunshine and zombie puppies, ready to spread my pathogenic joy across the world.

On those days, I tend to stay mostly in my room (or the nearest available equivalent), working industriously on whatever pisses me off the least, and interacting only with people whose response to my being snappy is "Yes, yes, dear, aren't you cute when you try to bite me, here, have a rawhide chew." I don't answer email unless I have to, because it's never nice to take somebody's face off just for asking when the next book is coming out (An Artificial Night, 9/10; Late Eclipses, 3/11; Deadline, 5/11, by the way). At that point, if you pursue me into my hole, well...

The reason I bring this up is that I've seen a tendency to write off female characters who aren't always sweetness, light, and the joy at the end of the sunshine tunnel. Jean Gray may destroy planets, but she does it while baking cookies, while Emma Frost saves the world and sneers. Jean is thus clearly the better heroine, more deserving of love and compassion and all that other wacky stuff. Wolverine, on the other hand, is an unremitting bastard, and that makes him cool. That makes him edgy. Because he's bad, see? He's bad.

I once had a proofreader return a scene from one of the Toby books with the note that Toby was being a real unbearable bitch. I wrote back, and suggested that for every instance of "October Daye," they substitute the male protagonist of their choice (they went with Harry Dresden) before looking at the scene again. The complaint was summarily withdrawn. To which I can only say, seriously, what the hell? Why is it tough and cool and all that other stuff from a male protagonist, but incredibly bitchy and hateful and awful from a female protagonist? Why do we all have to be Pollyanna, all the time?

Now, I am a natural Marilyn Munster, which means that ninety percent of the time, I'm happy and bubbly and ready to slather you in plague-carrying bats. But that doesn't mean that the Wednesday Addams girls are somehow less valid, or less deserving of their own stories. And it doesn't mean I'm not allowed to have a grumpy day once in a while. I'm just not allowed to use my grumpy day as an excuse for immuno-depressant smallpox.

Hmmph.

The other day, I needed to go to the mall to acquire a new bra. This happens periodically. It's a normal thing. I go to the mall for my bras because that's where the Lane Bryant is, and they make the best bras for my particular body type. What's more, I already know which of their bras will work for me and which won't, which takes a lot of the sting out of shopping. I've worked very hard to get to a place in my life where I could say "I need a new bra" and follow it up with "Let's go to the mall," rather than "Let's repair the old one with some safety pins and maybe a strip of duct tape, and I can buy the new one next month." This doesn't mean that I want to spend an hour digging through the racks, looking for the one that's Just Right. I want to know my options, I want to know what I'm buying, and I want to just do it already.

"Isn't this the store that made that ad?" Mom asked.

"Which ad?"

"The one they wouldn't show on TV."

"Oh. Yeah."

For those of you who managed to miss this whole thing, Fox and ABC refused to air a Lane Bryant commercial, saying that it was inappropriate, despite the fact that both networks air commercials for Victoria's Secret. Now, I've seen both commercials, and if you want to talk comparative nudity, well. The new line from Victoria's Secret is actually called "Naked." The Lane Bryant lingerie, on the other hand, covers a lot more, while committing the dual sins of a) being made for plus-sized women, and b) being reasonably attractive. That's obscene! We can't show that to our children, especially not during Dancing With the Stars, a show that features women wearing costumes that are closer to rumor than reality! That would be wrong! That would be...that would...

Wait, what?

Of course, the networks insist that this isn't a comment about Lane Bryant's lingerie being worn by plus-size models, even though, well, it's either that, or a comment on the immorality of wearing bras that come in colors. Rainbow Brite should be ashamed of herself. Meanwhile, over in Victoria's Secret-land, all the models are modestly wearing undies the exact color of their skins, making them look totally nude if you're not paying close attention. Much more modest.

"Why?"

"Because the models were fat, Mom."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"But that doesn't make sense."

"Tell me about it."

The current culture of fat shaming isn't just depressing; it's outright scary. It's dehumanizing. Fat women are "whales" and "cows," not just, I don't know, fat women. Women come in all shapes and sizes! Women are healthy at all shapes and sizes! My youngest sister weighs about fifty pounds more than I do, and she is smoking hot, like a plus-sized Betty Page gone tattoo model. She dresses like she's hot, she walks like she's hot, and you know what? She's hot! She's also healthy, active, smart, and all those other things that some people think "fatties" aren't allowed to be. She looks better at her current weight than I ever would, because she's built that way.

This may be a bit of a shock to some of the folks out there deciding what is and isn't "decent," but not all bodies were created from the same template. If Kate and I were to eat identical things and do identical amounts of exercise for a week, we would not lose identical amounts of weight. If Vixy and I were to each gain ten pounds, they would not distribute themselves in identical places on our bodies. I know people who can gain weight on nothing but broccoli and lean meat, and people who can lose weight on a diet of chocolate bonbons. Fat shaming solves nothing. It doesn't make the world's plus-sized population disappear in a puff of Twinkie-scented smoke; it just makes teenage girls develop eating disorders, grown women lie about their weight, and small children tell their mothers they don't want dinner because they're scared of getting fat.

"That's just stupid."

"I know."

"Those people should cut that out."

Also, on the practical side of things...women are more likely to go out in public, and exercise voluntarily, when they're wearing good bras. This goes double for plus-sized women, who are (surprise, surprise) more likely to have large breasts, and thus need the support and stabilization of a good bra. So if the goal is really making all the fat women into thin women, they should be getting government bra service as an incentive to get out and move around more. Not that exercise is the absolute answer for everyone—that's another can of worms, and goes back to my "not all bodies were created from the same template" point—but hell, it would be a start. Saying "ew, that's indecent" doesn't do anybody any good. Except maybe the viewing public that gets spared the sight of all those "fatties," and well. I'm not so concerned about them in this particular situation.

"I wish they would, Mom."

"Tell them that."

"Okay."

People are talking a lot about eBooks right now. It would be impossible not to talk a lot about eBooks right now, given the recent mess with Amazon and MacMillan.* Before this, people were already talking about eBooks, for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons was what people are calling the "nuclear option": a tendency by some readers to go to Amazon.com and other review sites and post one-star reviews of products because those products are not available to them. The book you want isn't available in the country where you live? Give it a one-star review! That'll show 'em!

...except no. Not really.

People are talking a lot about book covers right now, and the fact that sometimes, the people on them don't actually look anything like the people inside the books. Sometimes they're bad. Sometimes they're terrible. And sometimes, yes, they're inaccurate enough to be insulting, presenting characters as the wrong race, gender, weight, sex, or species. (For a nice round-up on some recent cover issues, check out this excellent post by the always-charming jimhines.) This leads, periodically, to groups of people deciding that the best response is a boycott of the books in question—the classic "voting with your dollar" method that works so very well in other arenas.

...except maybe this one.

Authors have a surprisingly small amount of control over a lot of aspects of how their books are presented to the public. I say "surprisingly" because when I was a kid, I ranked "Author" as a position of power just below "Doctor Who," "The Great Pumpkin," and "God." Most people knock "God" off that list by the time they reach their teens (I did), but still, there's this innate assumption that the author has a lot of control over where their work goes and what it does.

...except no. Not really. Check out these lists for details.

Things the Author Probably Controls

* Whether the book gets written.
* Which publishing houses the book gets sent to.

Things the Author Probably Does NOT Control (unless the author is Stephen King)

* The cover.
* The title.
* The publication date.
* The format of the book.
* The cost of the book.
* Whether there's an eBook edition.
* Whether the book is published anywhere outside the US.
* Whether the book is published in more than one language.
* Whether there's an audio edition.
* Which stores, including Amazon, carry their book.
* How many copies are printed.

Who You Are Punishing If You Boycott the Book or Review It Poorly Because of Format, Not Content

* The author.

Who You Are NOT Punishing

* The publisher.

Now, I don't want my publisher punished, for anything. Both my publishers have been amazingly good to me. I love them like I love candy corn and fluffy little blue kittens, and I want everything they touch to turn to gold, because then maybe they can start paying me in remote islands and genetically-engineered dinosaurs instead of boring dollars. Plus, people take very poorly to being punished. If you hit me because I didn't bring you the sandwich you wanted, I'm not going to go and make you a fresh sandwich. If, however, you say "I'm sorry, I really wanted tuna," well, we can negotiate. The message you send when you pan a book for not being available in the format/language/region you want isn't "I really want this but you won't let me have it"; it's "this sucks." Remember, that nasty review is only going to be seen if someone takes the trouble to read it. Most people will just see what amounts to an announcement of "this is a bad book."

If there were a mass boycott of Stephen King or Tom Clancy, the odds are good that the publishing world would notice. Those are, after all, some damn big numbers. Most authors are not in that neighborhood. Most authors can't even get an invitation to that city. So for us, losing ten sales actually matters. For us. For our publisher...not so much. The message sent by a boycott is not "I am offended by this choice," it's "I am not a fan of this author." If enough sales are lost, the author won't be able to get another book contract, and will need to find another job. The publisher will keep publishing. Some of these choices don't punish the people you're trying to punish, and their side effects can be killer.

So how do you get your point across? Pick up a pen. If you're actively offended by a book's cover, try buying the book and mailing the cover back to the publisher, along with a letter saying something like "Thank you so much for publishing a book that was so well-suited to my interests and desires as a writer. Unfortunately, this cover is unsuitable, because..." Indicate that you wanted the author's work, but not the poorly-chosen cover art, and that you would love to see the book issued again with a better cover. Don't punish the author. If you wonder why a book hasn't been printed in a literary region other than the one where it was originally printed (so American books in Germany, German books in France, etc.), it's probably because the local publishers don't realize that interest exists. Write to them! Say "I am a huge fan of Author T. Author's work, and I was wondering if you planned to print their latest book." They might not know they want the work if they don't know there's a market. But don't hit the author for things that are entirely outside of their control. It's just not nice.

(*If you somehow missed the mess, here's a very quick-and-dirty summation: MacMillan said "we want to charge more for our books than you do. We also want to charge less for our books than you do." Amazon said "no." MacMillan said "but they're our books." Amazon de-listed all MacMillan titles, without telling anyone that they were going to do so. MacMillan got upset. MacMillan authors got upset, since the loss of Amazon as a retailer could potentially mean they can't afford cat food anymore. Non-MacMillan authors got upset, because dude, there but for the grace of the Great Pumpkin go we. Everyone did a lot of shouting. People who want cheap eBooks called MacMillan a bully. People who want authors to be able to sell their books called Amazon a bully. There are some very good accountings of the whole mess floating around the Internet; I recommend you go read John Scalzi's post if you want a solidly-researched starting point. This is not that starting point.)

Well, it's finally started: Rosemary and Rue is now showing up, with some regularity, on the various pirate sites. (No, I won't link to them, and no, those torrents don't stay up for very long; as soon as I find out about them, I report them to my publisher, who has them taken down.) I find this somewhat upsetting. Not because I hate the Internet. Not because I think that books should only be available to the wealthy. But because, at the end of the day, pirated books are really, really bad for my career.

Multiple studies have been done on the people who pirate music, and they've found that, on average, people who pirate buy more music than people who don't. That makes sense, if you stop and think about it, because music has a very high replay value. I discovered one of my favorite bands, We're About 9, when my friend Merav gave me a mix tape—the oldest form of music piracy—with one of their songs on it: I've since purchased several albums, including the one with that original song. I don't tend to listen to the full albums very often, but every time the individual tracks come up in my iTunes shuffle, I remember that I want to buy more music by these authors. It's music piracy as a form of private radio, and most people—not all, but most—understand that if you want to keep hearing things you like on the radio, you need to support the artists.

Just about everyone I know has at least a few pirated songs. I recently acquired a pirated copy of Freddy's Greatest Hits, a parody album featuring none other than Freddy Kreuger himself. It's been out of print for twenty years. I do not feel any shame about listening to this rare treasure from the horror graveyard...although I'll definitely buy the actual album, if I ever find it.

Book piracy is different, because the way people interact with the media is so different. According to my iPod, I've listened to the Glee cover of "Don't Stop Believing" over two hundred times. Two hundred times. Of course I paid for it. That song is part of the soundtrack of my life now. Looking at my bookshelves, the single book I've probably read and re-read the most times is Stephen King's IT, where I lost track at eighty. I'm a dedicated re-reader. I re-read IT at least once a year, and frequently more often than that. And I'm only up to eighty. Many people don't re-read the way I do, and very few people re-read immediately. So if I download a torrent of the new Ikeamancer novel, I'm pretty unlikely to run right out and buy myself a copy...and if I want to re-read the book six months later, I may just dig the file out of my hard drive, because it's there. Never underestimate the power of instant gratification.

Past experience tells me that this is the point where someone says "Does that mean you hate libraries/people who loan their books to friends/used book stores?", and the answer to all these things is the same: No. In all of these cases, someone has bought the book. In the case of libraries, the number of copies purchased by a given branch is determined by the number of people who request the book, or check it out once it's in the system. Yes, ten or twenty people may get to read a single copy, but with a pirated book, that number is a lot higher, and that initial sale may not have happened. If I loan a book to a friend, the book comes with a high recommendation ("Here, read this"), and even if my friend doesn't buy their own copy, we're looking at one sale for two people, not one sale (or one OCR of a library copy) for some unlimited number. Even used bookstores are limited by the size of the print run, since they can't get more copies than were initially sold, and are thus a vital part of building the readership for ongoing series. They're part of the natural ecosystem.

People complain about how slow some publishers are to adapt the e-book format, but honestly, the concerns over piracy are a really, really big deal, just because of the impact it can have on a book's overall sales—especially for a beginning author. No, I'm not saying that best-selling authors somehow "deserve" to be pirated, but piracy is likely to be a much smaller overall part of the book's footprint. Dan Brown is not going to be told not to write another sequel to The DaVinci Code over piracy. The author of the Ikeamancer books...might.

Publishing is changing. E-books are, and will continue to be, a big part of that. But unless people remember that book piracy isn't exactly the same as music piracy (and hence culturally viewed as "try before you buy," but almost always leading to that eventual purchase), they'll also continue to be a problem.

Recently, I picked up a book that looked interesting. It hit many of my "sweet spots" for plot, description, and cover blurbs from people I trust. The cover didn't do it any favors, featuring, as it did, a generic Urban Fantasy Hot Girl standing in a Playboy circa-1984 pose, but I've enjoyed books with way worse covers. I entered the text in good faith.

By page two, I was ready to fling the book across the room. Why? Because the author had chosen to scramble the spelling of a common-to-the-genre word in a way that made it look not only pretentious, but difficult to read. This is a personal bug-a-boo of mine, since I really do feel that spelling was standardized for a reason, and while I managed to soldier through, it colored my ability to sink into the text for several chapters.

(As an aside, seriously: not all words become more interesting and mysterious when spelled with a vestigial "y." The worst example I've ever seen was in a YA series full of "mermyds," and the fact that I made it through all three volumes is a testament to the power of raw stubborn.)

One reader of Rosemary and Rue posted a lengthy, positive review, more than half of which was taken up by complaints about the pronunciation guide. Specifically, I didn't write down the correct pronunciation of "Kitsune." It's a fair cop—if you pronounce the word as written in the pronunciation guide, you'll be saying it wrong—and it's been corrected for A Local Habitation, but it was, for this person, as bad as if I'd spelled Toby's name "Aughtcober" and then claimed it was pronounced just like the month. Bug-a-boos for all!

Kate recently delivered a long and eloquent diatribe on "back cover buzz-word bingo," which I really wish I'd had a video camera running for, because it was awesome. The summation is that she watches the back covers of books for certain "buzz-words," and, if the book works up to a magical bingo score, she doesn't read it. I do something similar with bad horror movies, since there are specific buzz-words that mean "soft core porn" and "gratuitous torture," and those really aren't what I'm watching the movie to see.

So what are your bug-a-boos? Terribly twisted spelling? Pronunciations that you don't agree with? Buzz-words oozing off the back cover and getting all over your shoes? How about heroines with ruby hair and emerald eyes who aren't appearing in an Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld fanfic epic? Inquiring blondes want to know!

With Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxies] approaching its official release date, and with my evenings spent neck-deep in The Brightest Fell, aka, "Toby five," aka, "the book I am writing partially as a form of informing the universe that it really needs to give me the sales to sustain a long series," it's only natural that my thoughts should be turning to reviews and promotion. I have Google spiders set to tell me whenever my name or the title of my book get mentioned—they aren't perfect, but they do pretty well—and I try not to let myself obsess too much about my Goodreads ranking or Amazon sales number. (These are not easy things to avoid obsessing over. I admit that. But a girl can still try.) This has led, of course, to contemplation.

Do I like reviews? Well, yeah. What author doesn't like reviews? Especially since I'm a shiny new author, which means reviews will have a genuine impact on my sales—I'll read the new Kelley Armstrong regardless of what the reviewers say, because I know she does what I like, but I didn't pick up Jeri Smith-Ready (who is also made of awesome) until I started hearing people I trusted saying good things about her. I especially appreciate the fact that, now that we have the wonders of the Internet, everybody can be a reviewer. I mean, yes, that means that people like me, whose credentials are questionable at best, are allowed to express our opinions with apparent authority, but it also means that there's a range. I'm a lot more likely to trust a product whose reviews have a range than I am a product only discussed in the most glowing of terms. At a certain point, the "does your book cure cancer?" blinders kick on.

Which brings me to today's actual topic: what constitutes "going too far" where reviews are concerned? I regularly solicit the readers of this blog to post reviews, and while I'm not going to hunt people down and make sad eyes at them if they post something really negative, the odds are pretty good that if you're here, you're well-inclined to like my writing, or at least play nicely. (Not always, mind you. No one is nastier to my favorite authors than I am when I feel like they've lost the thread. At the same time, because they're my favorite authors, even before I adopted my "post no negative reviews" position, I was likely to not say anything at all.) Now, I don't think this is being uncool. It's not like I'm paying people, and it's not like I can actually force anyone. Also, I told my mother she's not allowed to post a review. I have done what I can.

At the same time, there are ways that some people really abuse the review system. Let's take a hypothetical book called Mary Sue Goes to Mordor. It's published through a small press, but it has Amazon distribution, and the author—like all authors—has the understandable desire to see the book succeed. Without a major press, it's very unlikely that there will be many review copies kicking around, and almost certain that there won't be a big press campaign. So it's all word-of-mouth and Amazon reviews. It's natural that the mind might turn to thoughts of upping those numbers, just a little...just to even the playing field, as it were.

So now Mary Sue Goes to Mordor has fifteen reviews, all of them five-star, all of them heaping praise on the book in a glowing manner. Often mentioning not only the author in superlative terms, but also praising the publisher for "doing it again," perhaps in hopes that this will lead curious readers to click through to other titles by the same publisher. Where does the line lie beyond which the reviews are simply impossible to trust? How many "reinventing the world of fantasy" comments can be taken before the book crosses the line into "not with a ten foot pole"?

No, Mary Sue Goes to Mordor isn't the title of a real book, although it sounds like it would be similar in concept to The Wizard, the Witch, and Two Girls from Jersey, which was a disturbing amount of fun. So if I saw Mary Sue Goes to Mordor on the shelf, I'd probably give it a read. This question basically comes from a combination of a) chasing my own reviews around the Internet, watching to see what critical response will actually be, and b) seeing several books take the hypothetical approach above—the one where half the reviews just read like they were written by the same guy changing accounts as quickly as he could.

There are lines. The lines are funky. I'm going to quote David Edelman here, and say: "Don't post glowing reviews of your books on Amazon under assumed names. Don't start up your own fan websites. Don't go through the phone book and call bookstores anonymously asking if they stock this amazing new book you've just heard about. In fact, any time a marketing activity involves the use of pseudonyms, that should raise a red flag."

And now I'm going to link to his fantastic essay, A Guide to Ethical Self-Promotion.

And now that I've thought my thinky thoughts for tonight, I'm going to go to bed.

A brief primer for those who don't live in the San Francisco Bay Area:

The Bay Area is actually very large. Yes, there is life outside San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland. I realize you may never have heard of any cities or towns outside these major population centers, but I promise you, it exists. Thousands of people live in places with names like "Albany," "Pleasant Hill," "Los Gatos," and "Hercules." I, myself, live in a city called "Concord," which used to be called, at various points in its history, "Canterbury," "Todo Santos," and "The Ass-End of Nowhere." The Bay Area contains mountains, small forests, inconveniently-placed hills, and lots of other quirky geography. Because of this, our roads and bridges are occasionally very odd, and do things that make little to no actual sense.

There are a multitude of ways to get around the Bay Area. If you're in the South Bay, you have CalTrain, a swift series of, well, trains that can get you to San Francisco. If you're in San Francisco, the odds are good that you never actually leave San Francisco, so your transit options are "car," "bus," "taxi," "foot," and "magic carpet." If you're in the East Bay, there's a good chance that you work in San Francisco or the Oakland/Berkeley area, and there is hence also a good chance that you depend on a magical thing called "BART" to get you to work each day.

BART stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit. It's the train system that covers most of San Francisco and the East Bay. It's also a contributing factor to Bay Area residents paying more per mile for public transit than almost anyone else in the world. I pay, quite literally, ten dollars a day for the privilege of leaving my house and going to work. (This assumes I'm not taking any buses, something that isn't always true during the rainy season.) And oh, right, they increased fares and cut back on service earlier this year—something most of us took with grumbling but no real complaint, because the economic realities of California are what they are. The system needs money to keep running. The money has to come from somewhere. Happy? No. Resigned? Yes.

Except now the union is threatening to strike Sunday at midnight. Happy? No. Resigned? No. Royally pissed off?

Oh, yeah.

The union isn't striking for fair working conditions, human rights, or the other things that unions tend to justifiably strike for. The union is, near as I can tell, striking for the right to pretend that we're not in a recession while the system continues to reduce services and hike costs in order to pay for the concessions the union is demanding. I'm a union girl. About two-thirds of my family has or has had union jobs. Unions are amazing things, and without them, the conditions under which the average worker has to labor would be a hell of a lot worse. Even if you're in a non-union job, the odds are good that you've benefited from the unions of the past. If nothing else, unions are at least part of the reason you get things like "breaks" and "bathrooms." All that being said?

Screw you, BART union. I've read all the documentation I could, trying to find a way in which this wasn't an insane thing to do, and I haven't found it. Even my cousin who works for BART has no clue what the hell this is supposed to accomplish, beyond possibly getting a few station agents lynched by their neighbors. Because there is genuinely no way for people who live where I live and don't have access to a car to get to San Francisco without the train. The closest bus route I can put together would take four and a half hours just to get me to the point of being able to transfer to the Transbay Bus to fight the traffic caused by dumping the 350,000 daily BART commuters onto our already over-taxed bridges.

I'm lucky. I probably won't lose my job, even if the BART strike prevents me from getting to work for a few days. But the people who are temping? Working minimum wage janitorial jobs in the city, because they can't afford to live closer, and can't find work anywhere else? Flipping burgers, making smoothies, and doing the things people who can afford to live in San Francisco can also afford not to do? Those people are going to get fired if they can't reach the office because the trains aren't running.

Strikes are good. Strikes are necessary. But maybe striking during a recession when you're already making a living wage and aren't being actively abused in some way is a dick thing to do. And maybe doing it when you know it's going to cripple local transit and lose a lot of people their jobs is a double-dick thing to do. Just in case you were wondering.

Beware. For today I wear the cranky pants.