Ran into the neighbors on our daily walk around the neighborhood, and yanno, I think we’re all finally getting comfortable enough to be really friendly.  Now, their kids are grown up, so naturally, they’re a bit older than we are, so it’s not surprising to see them moving around a little slower than usual.  But at least they’re friendly.  They insisted that tonight, they really want to have us for dinner.  What a terrific neighborhood!

In my weekly cruises around the intert00bz, I came across this worrisome little gem, posted several places, but I found it here on PubRants. Apparently Simon and Schuster wants to take your rights and have them slowly digested over a…thousand years.

What do I find wrong with this as an author? Just about everything.

The majority of the time an author sells a story, it’s to a publisher who intends to put it into print and sell it for as long as they can, to the benefit of author and publisher (and reader, as well–books going out of print means they can’t reach audiences who may have missed them before). In most cases, a publisher releases the rights back to the author when sales fall below a certain level. It’s no longer worthwhile for the publisher to stock the title, and releasing it back to the author makes it the author’s choice as to whether to pursue a possible new/secondary market for the title.

What S&S wants to do is to keep your rights…forever.

The new contract would allow Simon & Schuster to consider a book in print, and under its exclusive control, so long as it’s available in any form, including through its own in-house database — even if no copies are available to be ordered by traditional bookstores.

So that’s it. S&S wants your book ’til death do you part.  And even afterwards.

And make no mistake, there will be authors who don’t have the benefit of knowledge from RWA or the Author’s Guild, whose books will live and die with this conglomerate.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m something of a maverick when it comes to publishing.  I’m published with a small e-press, I have no agent currently, and if I have a single unit of what’s considered “clout” in the publishing world, then I’d reckon “clout” is measured in atomic mass units, and still in the single digits.  But my publisher and I have an understanding–I will write a book to the best of my ability, and they will sell the book to the best of their ability.  If they can’t do this, or after a certain, finite period of time passes, then I can ask for my rights back and try to sell the book to another publisher, who will also try to sell it to the public to the best of their ability.  But if S&S has its way, then once I would sign a contract with them, they would be free to sit on my book and never allow it to see the light of day, and there would be nothing I could do to stop them.  Because technically the book would be “available.”

How are they supposed to make money if they don’t sell books?  Unless their only goal is to keep other people from making money on those books. Seems a bit daft, shooting yourself in the foot like that, but what do I know?  I’ll be paying attention.  I find their lack of threshold…disturbing.

PS - Bonus points for those who correctly guessed that it’s the Star Wars 30th Anniversary.  Hence the metaphors.  I am geek and I am proud.

So my pal Roxy Harte, who has been a good friend for TEN WHOLE YEARS now (remember that ‘97 conference where we met? How far have we come, girl? And damn, ain’t things the same-old, same-old, too ), has tagged me for the “Eight Random Facts About Me” meme. So here goes:

1.) I’m a belly-dancer. I’ve been trained in Raqs Sharqi, which is “Eastern Dance” and refers to the Egyptian style of belly dance, and is also referred to as “cabaret” because of the majority of venues in which the dance is performed. And yes, I have performed. In fact, I performed while five months pregnant. It’s on tape somewhere, too, recorded for posterity. I own a set of bedlah (the spangly bra-and-belt combo) that I can still sort of fit in, as well as numerous tribal bellydance garb options. While the tribal style of belly dance has the appearance of being the older, more “authentic” style, it is actually a modern fusion dance style. The modern cabaret style, for all its glitz and glitzy terminology, actually predates tribal by over a century. I love to dance, and even though I haven’t been “in the circuit” for several years, I can still shimmy like nobody’s business!

2.) I’m a brown belt in Kenpo karate. I was thisclose to taking my black belt test when I had to suspend my training because it’s really hard to perform “Tiger and Crane” with morning sickness. My lineage is through Tracy’s Karate.

3.) I’m a high priestess in the Cult of the Sacred Brewed Bean. If I don’t get my coffee in the morning, destruction of biblical proportions occurs.

4.) I have HDTV, and one of the HD channels is GameSpot, and I’m not ashamed (okay, I’m sort of blushing a bit) to say that I’ve spent the last few Saturday nights on the edge of my seat, watching the Guild Wars World Championships. Yes. I’m a g33k. I *watch mmorpg gaming on TV.* Since my piddly little guild consists of me and Mr. Xandra, we have no hope of ever competing at the level of the average American college student, much less the pros in Korea (and yes, there are professional gamers out there. Bet you didn’t know that. Bet your world was a much more comforting place before knowing that, and it will now forever be a place of much less innocence for knowing that. Ha ha, I am the destroyer of innocents. ph34r m3!). But it’s still fun to see hawt PvP action.

5.) I costume. I’ve been a purple twi’lek two years in a row, and I’m going for three this year at the Con circuit. I have a closet full of SCA garb, and Hallowe’en is a national holiday at Casa de Xandra. I never grew out of playing dress-up and now I have better stuff than my mom’s old disco threads.

6.) I had a homebirth. With a midwife. Because I didn’t want to have to drive to a hospital while in labor, and because while my house may not be the cleanest place in all the kingdom, no one’s ever gotten flesh-eating bacteria there. Six guys from the city were bush-hogging in the ditch behind my house at the time and waited around to find out what I had. The neighbors called the cops because I yelled so loud and the windows were open. It was all very exciting and I think I freaked the Town’s Finest because when they asked, I said, “yeah, I did this on purpose.”
7.) I watch cartoons. Some of them are the best shows out there (Avatar, I’m looking at you. Now come back already! I need a Zutara fix).

8.) I laughed LOL’d for ten whole minutes at this. I’m still laughing ridin’ the lollercoaster.  Or the ROFLcopter.

My backyard, such as it is, isn’t really so much a yard as it is the cleared-out space before the Wall o’Woods that stretches back over most of our property. Other fine features of the Wall o’Woods include the Dead Thing (that’s still there, stripped of everything but loose fur and bone–even the hide is gone), Little Crick, Big Crick, and Bigger Crick (and yes, I pronounce them that way), and a numerous amount of flora and fauna common to the American Midwest, like coyote, deer, and skunks. One new addition is something I didn’t expect to see, even out here in The Sticks.

Friday morning, Mr. Xandra’s enjoying a peaceful day off playing Evil Genius when he emerges from the Bat Cave (aka his study) and stage-whispers orders for everyone to beat feet to the Treehouse (aka the toy room). Usually a directive like this means there’s something interesting to be seen out the windows, and sure enough out under the trees at the edge of the Wall o’Woods, where the runoff ditch makes a respectable little stream on a wet day (and a swamp when we’ve got a damp stretch), there’s this giant…thing out there. Pecking at the straw over top of the grass seed we’ve finally had laid after three months of waiting for it to warm up.

“It’s a turkey!” Mr. Xandra whispers, as if the fowl in question could hear us all the way down there from the top of the house and from behind closed windows. Hell, it probably could. We spent several minutes, watching the turkey’s stately progress along the edge of the straw bed, where I’m sure it was making a nice snack out of my Kentucky Bluegrass/Zanzibar Fescue mix. I ran for the digital camera, moving cautiously because the study was also in the bird’s view. I had just enough time to snap off one picture before the bird, like its Jurassic-villain ancestors of yore, continued its ghostly, measured march into the trees and disappeared from view.

What impressed me was the hugeness of the thing. I mean, I’ve seen frozen turkeys at the store–bought ‘em, thawed ‘em, stuffed and cooked ‘em. Hell, I even bowled a halfway respectable game with them my freshman year in college. But seeing them with feathers and “on the hoof” so to speak, brings home that the turkey is one big motherfarkin’ bird. Probably could have looked one of my kids in the eye.

So after a call to the grandparents and two excitedy kids yelling, “Turkey! Turkey! Turkey, Nanna! Turkey, Pap!” for two whole minutes while my bewildered mother went temporarily deaf from telephonic interference, the first thing she said was, “So, I guess Thanksgiving’s going to be at your house this year.”

This week, last year, my first full-length erotic romance, Alien Communion, was released from Liquid Silver Books.

The reception for Alien Communion surprised me. I was honestly pleased to receive very good reviews for it, and solid sales (which indicate people were interested in reading it). It still makes me smile to have the reality brought home that people are actually –gasp– interested in reading one of my stories.

I’ve always been one of those “writer’s writers” - I write because I love the structure and framework of story, of rooting around in the thesaurus to find just the right word, and of the thrill of stringing a story through from start to the high of typing the words “The End.” And for those special times when the characters take over and I’m just the stenographer (and not all my stories are like that, so I value very preciously the ones that are).

That I can share the products of my love affair with prose is an honor and a privilege. If you have read my stories, thank you. If you’ve just found your way here through a link or a whim and are reading these words here, thank you, too. You’re part of the world that allows me to live my dream. If you’ve reviewed one of my stories, I also thank you, deeply and from the bottom of my heart. No matter how you felt about the book or story, the fact that you took the time to share your opinion is a gift I value.

HAPPY “BIRTHDAY” XANDRA

You’re probably also aware, if you’ve been reading this blog, that ‘Xandra Gregory’ is a nom de pixel. Xandra is actually around three years old this week. When I submitted Alien Communion, I knew I couldn’t publish it under my own name for several reasons, the most pragmatic of which is that my name’s just not that sexy. So I “exoticised” some family middle names by running them by my critique partner. Xandra Gregory is the result.

Among my non-writer friends who know who I am and what I write, at least two of them have asked if I have a different “persona” as Xandra. The answer to that is both yes and no. If you know me, you know that in person, I’m a lot more goofy than the image of an erotic romance writer whose first name begins with an X. Writing is my job (and I love my job), and when I’m Xandra, I’m “at work” so to speak. So when I’m Xandra, I’m a bit more…professional. So far that means I haven’t embarrassed myself in public. Here’s to hoping that streak continues. Other than that…I’m pretty much a WYSIWYG person, and I’m a lousy actress. The real me is hard to suppress for very long. I toyed with the idea of trying to cultivate the whole glamorous “erotica writer” persona–I remember reading something in my teens about Barbara Cartland lounging on a divan in a glamour gown and dictating her novels. Because primarily, I think it’d be kickass-cool to have a divan. Glamour gowns inevitably require pantyhose, and don’t respond well to small, often-sticky hands constantly touching. Plus, my life goes too fast for me to sit down during the day, much less lounge. But I wouldn’t make it five minutes without blowing it, so Internets, you get the real me, a little more polite, when you find Xandra.

Pseudonyms have their practical uses, too. I love making those sweeping ‘X’s at booksignings, and I’m comforted in knowing that folks aren’t walking around with bookmarks or CD cases that have the same name I sign my checks with.

They say on the Internets, you can be anybody. But sooner or later, you can’t help being who you are. Xandra and I, we’re pretty tight. So the least I can do for the old girl is give her a birthday wish. She and I, we’re a lot alike, except she has better manners. And flatter abs. Yeah, definitely flatter abs.

I’ve been asking myself genre-defining questions by the bucketload lately, in an attempt to better understand the stories I want to write and their place in the grander scheme of things, and one question that keeps popping up in my mind is one about Worldbuilding.

I’m not afraid to say that I lovelovelove worldbuilding. I love developing cultures, and spinning out the worldviews that become the lenses through which the characters experience the events of the story. I love threading through the evolution of the strange-to-us becoming the commonplace to the characters. I love exotic situations where the expected is turned on its head. I love making myself, as the author, shift my own worldview to adopt that of the character’s. I’ve always been a fan of the “walk a mile in another’s moccasins” philosophy, and it holds twice the meaning for a character in a world of my own making–I learn not only about the character, but about the world itself.

And the wackier the world, the better. I write futuristics, and I find the thought of a future world that’s pretty much the same as ours, only with more batteries, depressing (even if it is more probable than the ones I come up with). One of the reasons I first started reading SF back when I was a youngling was that the worlds were so exotic. So different and strange, and hella more exciting than living in Mundania, USA. But the books I liked weren’t what appealed to my romance-reading friends. Now I admit, back then we were just as interested in scouring the Johanna Lindseys and Janet Daileys and Penelope Neris (and loads of others) for the smutty parts as we were reading them for their story value (but we did read them eventually. After we’d dog-eared all the love scenes). We read the stories and we all liked the stories of handsome warriors and headstrong women with traitorous bodies betraying them (yes, it was the 80’s and yes, we were teenage girls).

At the same time we were googly over Raistlin Majere. and we all wanted golden Pern dragons of our own to ride. But while most of the other girls in our little gaggle wanted the dragons and the wizards to come here, some of us wanted to go there, wherever “there” happened to be. I spent hours imagining down to the last detail of what it would be like to wake up every morning and go feed a dragon, read a magic spell book, or clump along the corridors of an alien habitat composed entirely of sentient jelly that only responded to commands given in song.

What appeals to you in an SF story - the weirdness of it? The differences between the SF world and the contemporary world? Or the keys of commonality? The similarities?

In surfing some erotica-writing sites, and re-reading my copy of Susie Bright’s “How To Write a Dirty Story,” I keep coming across the idea that one of the purposes of writing and reading erotica is to stretch your boundaries. Erotica that is described as “edgy” or “pushes the envelope” seems to be the thing to strive for. When I really think about this, I’m puzzled and conflicted. Mostly because reading erotica stories that push the envelope often leave me wanting to send the thing back to the post office.

I realize that everybody’s boundaries are different, and I’m certainly no vanguard when it comes to adventurous sexual themes. But I find myself wondering at a piece of my writing and remembering how much passion I put into it and then realizing when I look at it that, well, it ain’t that new. But I read it, and if I’ve done it properly, when I read it again, I still feel the same heart coming through the writing.

Romance as a genre is partly predicated on the fact that there are certain conventions–reader expectations, so to speak, that need to be present in order to make the story more enjoyable. It creates a conundrum, then, when I look at what I’ve written and it doesn’t seem unsettling. It didn’t make me nervous, or challenge my sense of boundaries…but it made me feel content that those characters were in a better place from where they started out. I put the piece down and I’m happy that the characters have grown into something better, or happier.

But when I read some of that boundary-pushing erotica, I finish the piece without that happy, contented feeling about the characters. Like Story of O. I finished the piece wanting to rewrite the last half of the book to show O discovering mutant superpowers, kicking the boyfriend in the jaw, and burning the Chateau to the ground. And then finding a nice, respectful man who would worship her to settle down with. Or at least, stop being a damn dishrag. Oh, sure, later on, I thought, “Wow, what an amazing commentary on the psychology of submission, and how interesting it is that a person can feel fulfilled by allowing their self-determination to be subsumed by someone else’s desires. And wow, I think I used ’subsumed’ right but I’m not totally sure. Oh, look–shiny!”

So the question that begs for an answer is this–how do the expectations of romance intersect with the deliberate absence of expectations in erotica? What kind of balance does an author strive for between the emotionally comfortable and the thought-provoking squick?

So I’ve moved house, into our new and beautiful home surrounded by woods and fields, and nature just drips from the eaves with redolence. Our first morning in the new house, we spotted an 8-point buck that had come to the stream to drink. Memo to self: do NOT mention to any hunter friends, else I might discover blinds in the trees in the near future. Two days later, we spy his harem of five does a-wandering in the empty lot next door. One of them, with a black stripe down her back, I recognize later when she’s sauntering across the road I’m trying to drive on. Two days after that, when we go stomping through said woods on a family walk, it becomes a Very Special Episode.

There are many times in my life where a freezing walk has resulted in a major life event. The first night Mr. Xandra and I spent together was in rundown, ought-to-be-condemned student housing in college during a snowstorm, without functioning heat. We didn’t really notice though, as we were young enough and randy enough to make our own heat. :3 Then in another February, eleven years ago in fact, Mr. Xandra and I took a walk out onto a frozen fountain where he got down on one knee and asked me to set a date.

But this year, in addition to giving me a beautiful home with enough closet space for all my old manuscripts and a woods full of natural inspiration for my muse, Mr. Xandra gave me magickal communion with nature. And that magickal communion with Nature just wouldn’t be complete without a confrontation with the far curve of the Circle of Life in the form of a half-eaten-down-to-the-bone DEAD-ASS CARCASS!

“Holycrapwhatthehellisthat!” says Mr. Xandra while on our walk. Attracted by the bleach-white bone and bright red bloody meat, he plunges off the path and into the brush by the stream, brandishing a convenient and hastily acquired hunk of tree branch, because you just can’t have a dead body around without wanting to poke it with a stick. Number One Son goes haring off after him, and I’m left on the path with The Girl, both of us staring down at the severed and frozen-bloody limb I just noticed I was about to step on before the detour, and me noticing the tufts of bloody hair and tissue dotting the trail like an amateurly-plotted CSI episode, showing how the body was, at one point, dragged downstream, only some parts seem to have made it further than others.

“Wow, neat! Look, Dad!” shouts Number One Son excitedly. He’s just been given a precious gift of Something Really Gross that will keep the entire preschool class enraptured for weeks. Poor Miss Debbie. I don’t envy her this. I can only imagine the parent-teacher conferences resulting from the artwork generated by this one. Every mother in the class will undoubtedly hate me for this.

“Don’t let The Boy near that thing!” I shout. “It’s full of germs!” Even though attending preschool has pretty much inoculated The Boy against most forms of rampaging creeping crud out there. But I still don’t want him dragging dead carcass cooties into my brand new house, where his little sister will likely think the Best. Game. Ever. involves putting something of it in her mouth.

“It’s too cold for germs,” Mr. Nanook of the North says.

“It ain’t too cold for gross,” I retort.

“It’s the circle of life,” the Mister insists, then proceeds to show Number One Son just how the ribcage protects–or in the case of dead things and highly motivated and hungry scavengers, fails to protect–the innards of an animal.

I’m really grateful that we decided to take this walk in the below-freezing temperatures. At least when your nostrils are frozen shut, you can’t smell how old the dead thing might be. Or how fresh.

I’m sure that Elton John sure as hell wasn’t thinking about this when he was writing for the Lion King. Although I bet with lions around instead of just coyotes and raccoons and the occasional carnivorously feral squirrel, that carcass would have just been a skeleton and a lot less…meaty.

I love Nature!

So…I’m moving to the Boonies (TM) next week. We didn’t originally call it The Boonies, and it really isn’t as full of Boonie-goodness as it could be. I mean, we still get city water and the trash gets picked up. Plus, we got us one of them indoor-outhouses. More’n one, in fact.

Now, life in a small town just outside a major city is a pleasant dichotomy of rural practicality and easy access to big-city culture. I can get sushi in my local grocery, along with farm-fresh bacon that still oinked last week. And within city limits, my town was one of those rare small towns who wanted to attract the exurbs, so in addition to having little old ladies who still give you free trashbags when you pay your utility bills, and an automatic subscription to the weekly newspaper, we also had a killer telecommunications department, which included digital cable, HDTV channels, and broadband internet through the city utility commission.

Now it is exactly five miles from my old doorstep to my new doorstep, two and a half of which are still within city limits. So last week, when I arranged for Internet services at the new address, you can imagine my surprise when I was handed the welcome package of two Dixie cups and a string. It’s kinda scary to realize that even the Borg Time-Warner won’t really venture out to where I’ll be living. My nights are now being filled with nightmarish scenes from “Scream” where I’m the big-busted babysitter who’s just discovered that “ZOMG the killer is in the house!” and I have no way to Instant Message anybody about it.

But perhaps I should count my blessings. I saw someone else leaving, who lives further out, carrying firewood and wet blankets…

I think that soy ginger noodles that come in little plastic, nukable bowls are probably one of the nicer things in life, especially when they come with their own fork.

Sharing them with a half-pint who slurps them up and makes kissy noises at you makes them even better.