Note to Jeff Bezos: #glitchmyass

My tweet of the day:

Note to Jeff Bezos: #glitchmyass, we deserve more explanation & apology than that for #amazonfail. Do you really want to regain our trust?

Things have really snowballed. In fact I'd say it's a snow-boulder now, what with the Twitter hashtag #amazonfail, the online petition which is now at over 17,000 signatures, & a Google search on Amazon Rank now brings up as first result the satirical definition coined yesterday by Smart Bitches Trashy Books. (They've now got the definition in the Urban Dictionary too.) Trolls are taking advantage: one Livejournal blogger claims to have written code that brought the delisting about, only to be exposed by another Liveblogger as a metatroll with bad code. I'm only surprised that there's not a Wikipedia article about it, though the Wikipedia entry on Amazon.com now has a section on the delisting (currently subtitled "Deranking of erotic, LGBT, feminist, progressive and sex-positive content").

A huge public relations nightmare for Amazon.com. As well it should be. So far their only public statements are to the effect that #amazonfail was caused by a technical "glitch" which they are working furiously to resolve. But I have a hard time buying that as anything other than, as others have noted, a "templated" cover story as they try to resolve the issue internally. There's too much data provided by bloggers researching the delisting for it to have been merely a glitch: how else explain why a search on "homosexuality" bring books about "preventing" or "curing" homosexuality to the very top of the search results, to the almost complete exclusion of the numerous other non-homophobic books on the subject?

Reports from the disabled community that Amazon also delisted books on disability & sexuality which news needs to be shared more widely.

I do think it possible that some enterprising homophobic souls within the Amazon hierarchy took it upon themselves to interpret a policy about "adult books" rather more widely than top management had intended. But that remains to be seen. For my part, I am looking for something more than weak babble about a software glitch. I want a public explanation & apology from someone at the very top levels of the Amazon hierarchy — preferably Jeff Bezos himself — on top, of course, of correcting the problem itself. They've lost a lot of trust, & they're gonna have to work pretty hard to regain it. I've seen plenty or reports from people saying they'll never buy from Amazon again, even if they do fix the "glitch."

This, for me, comes on top of having learned a month or two ago (after I'd already purchased my Kindle) about their monopolistic actions with regard to their print-on-demand service BookSurge. This is currently in antitrust litigation — see the Small Publishers Association of North America page on the lawsuit and the Amazon Booksurge Antitrust Lawsuit Clearinghouse.

I know there are alternatives to Amazon, but I'm also a hoping-to-be-published writer, so this has relevance to me also as someone who recognizes Amazon as one of the most important places to have one's books listed in order to be able to make a living at it.

There are signs that Amazon is making progress in relisting the delisted books, but it's slow — & still no public explanation or apology besides the inadequate & mealymouthed "glitch" explanation offered so far.

Amazon Rank - Google bomb 'em!

Yep, it's true. Amazon.com has decided that all any any books about or by LGBTA folk are "adult content" -- the equivalent of pornography. Hence, they've removed the sales rankings for those books. Hence those books are tougher to find when searching for books on Amazon.

This is regardless of the books' sexual or any other content.

So I'm joining in the Google bombing on Amazon Rank. Read about what a Google bombing means in this post about this stupidity at the Smart Bitches/Trashy Books blog. Include the hashtag #amazonfail in your Twitters. Read how it's affecting LGBTQ authors at Kelley Eskridge's & Nicola Griffith's blog and the other pages they link too. And let those idiots at Amazon know how you feel.

Mercy

For the Scheherazade Project, on the theme of you, the killer. The theme calls for "(hopefully) fictional stories about you killing somebody else. It could be accidental. It could be deliberate. It could be a complete stranger. Or it could be someone that you're intimately familiar with."

Some prefatory remarks are in order. The speaker in this piece is a fictional character I created some time ago for a collaborative work between a friend and me, which I very much hope we'll take up again. While fictional, Kadu, who later becomes Yksin, holds a lot of me in her, or I hold a lot of her, or both — enough that for years I've used Yksin as a username in various venues, & enough that I can call this a "fictional story about me," of sorts. I wrote a narrative account of the events described in this piece three years ago, but in third person. The writing below is entirely new, describing the same events, but from Kadu's ("my") own perspective. This is the only time, actually, that I've written her in first person. Adrienne Rich once said that the formalism of her early poetry was like "asbestos gloves" that "allowed me to handle materials I couldn't pick up bare-handed." Fiction has a similar shielding effect. Especially, for me, when written in the third person. But the gloves of a first person POV are a lot less impervious to heat. This hit it me a lot harder in the writing than I thought it would.

Mercy

You can't absolve me. Leave off trying, please, just let it go. I've heard all this shit before. All the excuses and justifications — it's just shit. Let it go.

No. No one else. You're the first. She knows, of course she does, it's the official reason I'm outlawed all through the Empire — but me, I've never talked with anyone about it before. Unless maybe to the gods, if any even exist. No, the gods never said a damn word to me — it was me I heard all that shit from. How many times do you reckon I've thought about it, anyway? Can't even say it's been times — you can't separate it out like that. It's continuous. It's always there in my mind, always, and my mind has served up those excuses time and again, and they never work. They're shit. I'm guilty. That's all.

The fuck of it is he's not even the real reason I'm outlawed. That's just the official reason, the one they put in the wanted bulletins. And... well he... his name was Sask. Sask. He was just, gods, just a servant, maybe a slave... but of course I wasn't much more than that myself. Just a soldier, yeah, in the Imperial Army, but... so stupid. She saw me and she fancied me, the very crown princess herself fancied me, and I was stupid enough to think I was lucky. At first. Then I figured out... I was something less. A toy, and she was just gonna play with me until she broke me. That was the whole game, you see. To break me, little by little. Make a hole in me and empty me out. That's how she plays with her toys.

I wasn't the first, you know....

Once, when I still thought I was lucky, somebody — actually it was ha'Jar, iha'Iag's cousin — listen to me, I'm still calling them by their titles, like they really are somebody. So... try again. Jar, her name is — Jar saw this soldier and you know, she stopped us there, where this soldier was working, so she could talk with her. She was laughing. No, not the soldier — Jar was, laughing at how this woman flinched, so scared of her. She thought it was funny. That's what they're like, her and iha— her & Iag, I mean. That whole lot. Royalty, hell. Jar was laughing, playing with this soldier's fear, just a simple private soldier, but empty, you know? Hollow. Like all the spirit had leaked from her. So hollow that even the way she was scared of Jar, and she was scared all right, just rang empty, like echoes in an empty house. Nothing lived there. Then we rode away. I was infantry, but I was so special and I was so lucky, and lucky special me, Iag had me trained in horsemanship, advanced fighting techniques, right — so yes, I was riding that day, and we rode off, and Jar says to the lieutenant, but she said it real loud so I knew she wanted me to hear, she says, That's one of Iag's old toys. And she laughs, so funny.

I wondered then why she wanted me to hear. Took me awhile to do the reckoning. I was so stupid. But when I did figure it out, I remembered that day, and I knew why she said it so loud. She wasn't warning me, exactly. More like taunting me. That's what's gonna happen to you, Kadu, that's what she was saying. That's gonna happen to you, and I'm gonna laugh at you just as much. I'm gonna laugh at how you flinch when I even just notice you. That's what she was saying to me. I figured that out, and I figured out the training, the advanced sword technique, all of that, it was just so Iag could feel more challenge as she took me apart piece by piece. She liked that resistance, it was so fun for her to overcome it and pare it down, bit by bit, until it was finally all gone. Then, when she'd completely broken me open and poured my spirit into a flagon and drank it down, she'd just send me back to my unit, and every once in awhile she'd ride by, or one of her retainers, just to have a laugh and remember how she'd hollowed me out. Yeah. That was what was in store for me. That's what Iag had planned for me.

She still does. Catching me is just another part of the game.

So yeah. I'm just... a toy. A big nothing. To them, at least. But I reckon — I deserve better than that. See, that's what I'm saying. Sask, even if all he was, was hecho'Vichelu's servant or slave, whatever he was, he deserved better.

He was just trying to save his life that night, just like I was. And what did I do? He was innocent. So was I. But not after that night. Not ever, ever again.

Even so, even after his blood... his blood all over that veranda, oh gods... even after that, that's not why I'm outlawed. Not for murdering him. The real reason is because I ran away from her. That's what she thinks my crime is. I ran away, before she could do that to me. It was just convenient for her that I killed him, so she could have them put murderer on the bulletins, and regular folk would see me as a criminal too.

Yes. Yes, that's what I am. Murderers are criminals, aren't they? I'm a murderer, aren't I?

Well yes. Of course she would have killed him if I hadn't. Didn't I say that? She might be the iha, but she's a murderer, she's a criminal. Worse than I am. All of them are, the royals, a lot of the nobility too. But that doesn't make me not a murderer.

No. You can justify it all you want, that just doesn't cut it. Didn't I say lay off it? Okay, I'll tell you why. It's because... because of....

It's because of how he... he looked at me. That night, on the veranda, it was dark, but I swear I could see into his eyes. It doesn't make sense I could see his eyes — I was behind him! I had my knee in his back, I was holding him down and my knife at his throat! But I could see them, I swear it, and they were like... they were like my mother's eyes, just before... when I was little, and the captain's soldiers — she was pleading — his eyes were like that, and then... then his eyes were like hers were after her pleas ran out and there was no life in them anymore. Like my father's eyes, too, they killed him first. I don't know how I remember that. I was only, I don't know, three years old? Four? And the captain took me? And loved me? That's what he claimed. After he had his soldiers do that...?

That's what his eyes were like, Sask's eyes. That's how I know I'm a murderer.

He pleaded with me... he said, don't run, please, she'll kill me if you escape. Oh, he knew that about her. Our sovereign iha. But she'd do a lot worse to him before the kill. He wouldn't have to die if I stayed. But then, I knew what would happen to me. It was him or me, you know? Him or me. I guess I gave him that small mercy, that I was his murderer, instead of leaving him for her. I just... slit his throat. Quick and clean. And his eyes went dead. Like my mother's and father's.

Oh the blood. It spread under him, but it's like it entered me, a kind of lukewarm hollowness, it entered my guts and spread like a stain. Can you smell it? I can.

I had to hide his body, just enough so hecho'Vichelu's incompetent night guards wouldn't spot him right away next time they came around the house. I had to hide him just well enough that I could get away first. His clothes were very fine white linen, it was bright in that dark night, even they wouldn't have missed that if I left him where he was. And they were carrying lanterns. So I rolled him on his back so he wouldn't bleed even more all over the porch, and I dragged him, I used his body like a sponge, his own fine white linen clothes to sop up his blood because it was black but it would be red as soon as they shined any light at all on it. There was still a stain, a big long paintbrush stain, but it wasn't all in a shiny black puddle. I dragged him across his blood... hid him behind that planter wall, those exotic plants from Greater Teguma that Vichelu kept, all the water he wasted on them in that arid climate. Showing off his wealth. But thank the gods we were in the provinces — it was just as the war was starting, and Iag was guesting at his estate. I never would have escaped from any place that was really hers, or without all the confusion of the war starting. I think that's what had interrupted her with me — an emergency meeting about what was happening on the border.

I didn't have any real coins, just the wood pieces they give us to use in commissary. That's all the funeral I could give him. I closed his eyes. One token on each eyelid, and one between his lips. It wasn't enough. It never can be.

... No. I won't ever give myself up, not to them. I'd murder you, if I thought for one minute you'd put them on to me. I would kill you, don't think I wouldn't. I'd carry that guilt too. But never, never, never, no... not to them, not to them, not ever to them. They can't judge me. They could never give him justice.

But you.... If you yourself... if you were the judge. You'd give him justice. You could judge me, you could even be the one to put the noose around my neck, and slap the horse so it'd run out from under me and leave me dangling. If you would do that.

But you won't, will you? You give me mercy. It confuses me. I don't deserve any.

Breaking through on Ophelia

The last couple of days have been very productive with writing. Not so much with direct writing, as in breaking through a problem so that I can write. No offense, Ophelia, but that problem has been you: needing just a bit more backstory on you to finish writing the story of you for MoW. But thanks to all my thinking & writing about you before in my thick blue notebook, & the reading & writing about issues of madness, so-called schizophrenia, hearing voices, psychosis & its onset — I finally broke through to some fundamentals about how you came to go a little crazy, so that you got locked up in a loony bin, & ultimately came to co-create the Questors Fire world with Dice.

For those who aren't Ophelia & don't know what in hell I'm talking about, understand that Ophelia is an important character of my novel-in-progress Mistress of Woodland, as centrally important as Rachel/Henkimaa & her household gods. Because Ophelia, who in the Real World is locked up in a psych ward bearing the label of "schizophrenic," decided to follow the advice of another inmate: to find a "delusion" — a story — that is safe for her. Thanks to her belief in Luck — aka Dice, the spirit of luck who is Ophelia's household god — such a story has come about, that is working not only for Ophelia, but for the other questors who find their way there, by whatever means.

In other words, it helps one helluva lot that I've made this breakthrough, because now I know the direction in which to write. And I'm writing.

Momentum through Mystery

It's probably apparent just in how little I've written in this writing blog that I've not been writing as much as I would like to. In part due my mother's death last November... in part lots of focus on my own health since... but in part just having had a terrible time getting some writing momentum going again.

I have been making a bit more progress lately, however. I think that just as with exercise (something I'm getting a lot of these days, for once in my life), writing can be difficult & painful to begin, & takes effort even once you do — but once you do, it becomes its own reward, & it's easier to keep going.

But it's also about tapping into the Mystery.

From an email I just wrote, responding to someone who reported being challenged by going beyong the ideas, the beginning, even the middle of a novel, to the end:

I don't know if I've got any suggestions per se... I'm sorta wrestling with the same issue, though from a slightly different direction. With the main thing I'm working on, a fairly complex novel called Mistress of Woodland (MoW for short), I've had the basic plot for several years. It started out as my portion of a shared story that I wrote primarily to write my way through a really bad part of my life. When I got done with it as "shared story," I realized I had the raw makings of a novel. So I've been working on reshaping it since.

That meant tackling a whole host of writing problems, including the use of a couple of characters that didn't belong to me & other "proprietary" issues regarding the shared story world I'd originally written in; creating new characters to replace other people's shared story characters that I don't want to use; stylistic considerations; folding in necessary backstory about the main plotline that hadn't been necessary in the original story (because that was all covered by other posts I wrote on the email list I'd been on where the shared story was written).

I'm pretty happy with what I've done with it, but I find it hard to keep up the work sometimes when I already know the end. The secret for me in keeping my enthusiasm alive, not to mention the writing itself, is to be able to keep discovering stuff. If I know everything that's going to happen in a given scene before I write it, the scene goes flat, & it's just plain uninteresting. So I always have to find something in it that is new to me as I write. That can be tricky.

Well, maybe that would be a piece of advice then. If you have problems with getting through to endings, and maybe sometimes middles, might it be that somewhere you're losing that sense of discovery? What is it that excites you about the ideas when you first get them, that carries you through the beginning of the novel, & when & why does that excitement get lost? It's got to do something with losing the feeling of "what's gonna happen next? what's gonna happen next?" that carries a reader right through a good book, & I think really needs to carry a writer through the writing too, even the hard sloggy bits. So how can you restore that sense of Mystery, & you as the uncoverer of Mystery?

I'm not talking just detective novel Mystery, though that too. Really, isn't it all about that? Whether it's a detective novel or science fiction or fantasy or mainstream (whatever that is), or a love story, or whatever in hell, whether it's character-driven or a plot-driven, or even whether its a novel or a short story or a poem or a nonfiction piece of whatever length, if there's no sense of Mystery that you're tapped into, what's the point?

What's really cool is that when I tap into that sense of Mystery as I write, I am usually able to retain it in the editing & the re-reading as well.

Hiisi

(For the Scheherazade Project, on the theme of fear. Constructive criticism always welcome.)

Last night I told Rozz, I'm not always at the edge of the pit, but I'm never far from it either.

She said, That thing you call the pit is there in you all the time, it's part of you. She said this with that earnest look in her eyes, not cute earnest but bedrock earnest, the kind of earnest that is Rozz when she is conveying what to her is uttermost truth, something she really wants me to pay attention to. It's part of you, she said, you've got to love it, you've got to shine a light on it. You're afraid of it, but you've got to love it. You've got to go there. Find the cool breeze in it.

Cool breeze: that's what I feel in me when I'm at ease in the world. There is, of course, no cool breeze in the pit.

I can't remember what order she actually said these things, or even that these were the exact words she used. When I asked her today to repeat her exact words, she said, Sorry, I guess you should have written them down. I didn't have a pen handy, it was bloody 3:00 in the morning when she said all that, and we should have been in bed, but we'd gotten detained by one of her late night questions. One of those questions so profound or difficult or just so confusing that she should never expect an answer from me, not with the late hour leaching all sensibility from behind my eyes. I can't even remember with what question she started things with, just that somehow we ended up in the artificial bright of the bathroom, me sitting on the toilet lid, her on the sink counter, talking. Not idle stuff. Stuff about us, for us, vital. My pit was just one part of it.

When she said I had to go there, to the pit, I thought, fuck no, that's the last place I want to go. If there's a place I fear, and I do, that place is it. Shine a light into it — is that even possible? Love it? — this demon that's dogged me all my life, sucked my into itself like my own portable mini black hole, devouring me alive from the inside? Shining a light into a black hole will not illumine it: a black hole is a voracious mouth, never satiated. Anything that falls into its gravity well is caught there forever. It never emerges. It becomes one with the black hole, its mass accruing to the black hole's substance to become one with it — increasing, by the very fact of being consumed, the black hole's monstrous hunger.

So how, then, having been trapped in that gravity well at least three times in my forty-seven years, and skirting its event horizon too often to count — how then am I still here to speak of it? I should have been extinguished long ago. I should have become single with the singularity, folded in upon myself, incapable of generating the speed of the sounds of my voice, much less the speed of the light in my eyes.

I can speak of it because every metaphor is, finally, inexact.

The pit. The black hole. The deep well. Drowning. Hell. The steaming whirlpool of Tuonelanjoki, the river of Death's land. The void.

Any of those words or phrases, however inexact, are more apt than the clinical phraseology of shrinkdom: depression. Better is the other D-word, the existential term that makes no pretense of scientific objectivity: despair.

But Rozz is right, of course.

Despair, my dear traveling companion: I must shine a light upon you. I must love you. Embrace you. Oh despair, my beloved friend!

Why not? Because it has been with me all this time, duct-taping me to the walls of the whirl around its silent eye of destruction, carrying me unwilling as much as I have carried it. Its as much a household god as the others whose names I've been much readier to call upon. Mielikki, my dearest desire. Lemminkäinen, the wayward impetuous wanderluster. Väinämöinen, the steadfast, tietäjä, Eternal Singer. Meet, the three of you, my other long-time companion: Hiisi, the Demon. My demon, my despair, my dread.

It's not easy to write about, this thing, this phenomenon at the root of my own personal phenomenology. That's why the metaphors, the words and images I inadequately wield that never anyway become more than just markers pointing the way to the pit where I live, where none else may enter. None except the gods, when I ask them.

I can tell you the stories of the three times I lived inside the pit: my youth of distrustfulness and self-hatred; the Days of Terrorism when a nine-year-old boy brutalized by parental abuse and neglect unleashed his terror and anger on me who had never done him harm, and tore me to pieces; the months when I believed the one I love had betrayed me, flushing all the meanings of our relationship unceremoniously down the porcelain-lined whirlpool of the nearest toilet.

Or I could connect the dots as I did for myself, pulling together all my speculations of how this dread and fear and despair took roothold in the heart of who had once been a smiling and joyful little girl (what in hell happened, why was she taken from me?), that unselfconscious Self who has so long been lost to me, more mysterious and unreadable to me than god.

But if I embrace Hiisi the demon... maybe Hiisi's mask will melt away, and behind it I will find her again, that little girl I once was, innocent and loved.

Pomegranate tea

Pomegranate tea
Originally uploaded by yksin.