Proper Blog – The Electric Ink of Ada Maria Soto http://blog.adamariasoto.com Thu, 01 Jun 2017 02:49:25 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8 82374571 The All Romance Ebooks Meltdown for The Readers http://blog.adamariasoto.com/?p=952 http://blog.adamariasoto.com/?p=952#respond Wed, 11 Jan 2017 22:06:22 +0000 http://blog.adamariasoto.com/?p=952 If you read romance novels with any regularity you’re probably aware of the shutdown of All Romance Ebooks. If you’re not here’s a quick summary. One of the largest retailers of romance ebooks outside of Amazon went dark on December 31 giving only three days notice.

For authors and publishers this has been, what can only be described as, a cluster fuck. A letter went out to all the independent authors saying they would only get paid 10 cents on the dollar for the Q4 royalties and only if they promised no legal action. As I’m sure you can imagine the lawyers have descended. In the last 12 days, all kinds of ugly has been dug up. There are reports that Lori James (who writes as Samantha Sommersby and as part of a pair under the name S.J Harper), may have used some really nasty tactics to push out her partner in 2014. There are questions as to the accuracy of accounts since then. There is speculation she might be behind some copywrite claim jumping on Amazon. And authors are being encouraged to make complaints to the Florida AG and even the DoJ. I’ll put the links to all this stuff at the bottom of the post because everyone needs one more thing to be angry about.

While writers, some of whom are out thousands of dollars, and publishers out hundreds of thousands, have circled the wagons I know readers have been asking questions and feeling a bit screwed over as well. Readers were only given three days to download their libraries, some of them containing thousands of books (bless you), while the site was crashing and publishers were yanking their books down. As a reader as well I know nothing hurts like losing a book. If you bought one of mine (thank you so much) and weren’t able to save it Dreamspinner Press is replacing lost books and honouring presales of their works if you send them proof of purchase. You can contact them at office@dreamspinnerpress.com. Give them a bit of time to get back. They’re a little swamped. I’ve heard Less Than Three, Riptide, and a lot of the other smaller presses are doing something similar so it won’t hurt to ask.

In the more long-term I’ve heard ‘Where shall we buy our books now I don’t want to but from Amazon?’

I get that. I really do. I feel guilty every time I click that little button, unfortunately I live in New Zealand where bookselling is a sad business and I sort of have to go where I can get the best shipping deals. There is also google books, kobo, and ibooks, but again these are the Big Guys.

Now I know money is tight for a lot of people. Oh god do I know this. There are maybe a dozen writers on Earth who don’t worry about money. And we all appreciate that some money is better than none (unless we’re getting offered ten cents on the dollar), but if and only if you believe you can afford it please consider just buying direct from the publishers. I know it’s not nearly as convenient, but even when you’re buying a sale item more money is going to get to the author which will get them closer to quitting their day job so they can write more books for you.

Most publishers have a mailing list of some sort as well as social media accounts that will keep you updated as to sales, pre-orders, and special deals. Dreamspinner gives you a free ecopy of any book you buy in paperback. If an author you like has a mailing list that can also be a good way to know when their new stuff is coming up.

The ARe fiasco has given the entire romance writing community a nasty kick, financially and emotionally. We are hurt, angry, and hell hath no fury like a writer screwed out of royalties. If you are a reader of any kind of romance we thank you. It’s often mocked and not considered socially acceptable in many places. In the past there have been conflicts over the lines between writers and readers but this is the point when we all need to band together. Even if you can’t afford to buy books any place but the bargain bin please take a couple of minutes to leave ratings and reviews. Those little stars on Amazon and Goodreads can actually have a solid impact on our bank accounts. Recommend authors you like to your friends. If your local library doesn’t carry them suggest that they do. And when people make fun your reading choice stand up for it. Those assholes probably don’t read anyway.

~
Court Documents Regarding All Romance E-Books’ Disturbing Business Practices Surface

Authors Be Warned: The Ongoing Impact of the All Romance Ebooks Debacle

Business Musings: All Romance Ebooks & Visions of The Future: Part One

Publisher All Romance Ebooks: Closing Hits New Low In Stealing From Authors

Florida Attorney General e-Service Information Page

United States Department of Justice REPORTING COMPUTER, INTERNET-RELATED, OR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY CRIME

P*ssed Off (former) ARe Authors Facebook Group

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The Passing of a Proper Woman http://blog.adamariasoto.com/?p=897 http://blog.adamariasoto.com/?p=897#comments Sun, 07 Aug 2016 02:21:28 +0000 http://blog.adamariasoto.com/?p=897 My grandmother passed away two weeks ago. We buried her last Thursday. She was 96, her mind was mostly gone, and she’d been given two weeks to live fifteen months ago. She took a couple of deep breaths in her sleep then just stopped. There are worse ways of going.

I’d like to say she lived a grand exciting life, that she had flown airplanes, climbed mountains, or written ground breaking work.

She didn’t.

She lived a very proper life. She grew up in Canada. Played field hockey in high school. She married her high school sweetheart. During the war he flew bomber missions with the RCAF. When he got home he married her then they immigrated to the US where he got a job in the petroleum by-product lab at Standard Oil. Ever used Pledge furniture wax? He helped invent that. They moved into a lovely planned post war suburban home in a lovely planned community where the men dug out the community pool and the wives made lunch.

She had two children and was a full time mother until the children were in school then worked as a secretary at a school. She was always home before her husband so she could have a drink and the evening news paper waiting for him. She wasn’t much of a cook but she used the ingredients she was supposed to. Miracle Whip, Ready Whip, Campbell’s Soup, Betty Crocker, Land o’ Lake, Dryers Ice Cream, Nestle, Stouffer’s, Folgers, Coke, not Pepsi. Don Draper would have loved her.

She went to church every Sunday. A nice respectable Presbyterian church. She was as a deacon, baked cakes for every event, drove around the little old ladies of the church until she became a little old lady. She was in the bowling league because in the 1960’s bowling is what good families did on Friday nights. Played bridge, tended garden. She was part of a local womens’ group. Not the kind that marched on protest lines for wage equality or victims’ rights. It was the kind that had bake sales and proudly gave out 200 dollar scholarships completely unaware that 200 dollars barley covers a single text book these days.

And when she lost her husband because he was too manly to have chest pains checked out, she drank a little too much for a bit, but in a very proper fashion. A little something extra added to the orange juice at dinner. The house was always perfectly tidy. Decorated for every holiday. She wrote letters and donated to charity but not too much. Voted for Nixon and Reagan and read Readers Digest.

As a grandmother she remembered every birthday and holiday. She would talk about us taking a train trip across Canada but that never happened. She tried to knit. She did absolutely everything society and the media told her she should do as a woman at the time and she did it perfectly.

And there must have been a reason.

That level of a ‘proper’ life takes work, and discipline, and there must be a reason for it that I never quite worked out. I heard her cuss, once. It wasn’t even hell or damn. It was the F word. There were a few obvious lies that she repeated so many times I think she believed them. There were funny stories that weren’t funny once you thought about it. There were stories that completely contradicted each other and stories about her own childhood that were just a little too perfect.

She always told us her husband was in the Battle of Britain. When we were going through some stuff earlier this year we found his medals and war record. He was part of a bomber crew but it wasn’t in England, it was in a far more dangerous campaign in North Africa. I’m not sure if he lied to her for some reason. If she lied to us, though there would have been no reason, or if she rewrote her memories over the years. By the time we had questions she wouldn’t have been able to give us answers.

There’s a saying that goes around, Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History. My grandmother was very well behaved. I don’t think she always wanted to be. She had the ability to swear. She had a freakishly high pain tolerance. When she broke her hip in a grocery store parking lot she drove herself home and didn’t go to the doctor until the next day when a friend came to visit and noticed she was limping. My partner once heard her make a dirty double entendre. I once saw a picture of her high school field hockey team and they looked like a tough bunch. She managed to forgive my aunt for being a lesbian. Never quite forgave my mother for marring a Mexican but grandchildren went a long way towards mending that relationship. The first/last/only time we talked politics was when she randomly mentioned she had concerns about some of Bush’s choices for cabinet.

There was something under that perfect post-war housewife. A different woman who never got the chance to run and I think I will mourn the woman I never met as much as I will mourn the one I knew.

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Warning: This Blog Post Has Not Been Spell Checked http://blog.adamariasoto.com/?p=545 http://blog.adamariasoto.com/?p=545#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2015 03:04:40 +0000 http://blog.adamariasoto.com/?p=545 Warning: This blog post has not been editied in any way. I have not right clicked on any squggly red lines or had this post read back to me by the computer to search for missing words. I haven’t even let Word autocorrect anything.

I am dyslexic, this is about my life as a dyslexic. My dyslexia is a fact that is not only in my offical bio but blatantly obvious to anyone I trust enough to read the raw versions on my work. This is a problem (and I do consider it a problem) that has been dogging me since day one. In might not have been such an issue, I might have gotten help or suport if I had standard dyslexia but I had to go and have special dyslexia that was only named a few years ago.

My mother (and I am aware how many blog posts I write with those words) worked in the learning resources section of my elementary school. It was her job to test and help kids who were dyslexic or had other problems. I never ended up in this groupe because I could read, I just had lousey handwritting, couldn’t read out loud, and couldn’t spell.

When I was 25 I ended up part of a research study where I was diagnosed with having dysgraphia and phonlogical dyslexia. Then the researcher had me lay down in an fMRI machine and took pictures of my brain while I looked at shapes and letters. They got very excited. Apparently I perfectly represented their hypotisis. The part of my brain that should have been reading, the left frontal lobe, was doing nothing. However the rear part of my brain designed to recognize the difference between a triangle and a hexagon was going nuts.*

Here is where I made some scientists very happy.

Here is where I made some scientists very happy.

My family is full of readers, the house was always covered in books, there was no question that I would learn how to read and I did. My brain adapted so I processed words the same way I would process a stop sign. What sound does a stop sign make? It doesn’t. How do you spell an octagon? You don’t. But you see that red octagon and you hit the breaks. You don’t read the word STOP then break. So up to a certin level I can read very quickly with excelent reading comprehention. As long as was I’m reading is in particular fonts. The more complicated the font the slower I go until there is no point.

I can tell one shape from another.

I can tell one shape from another.

But obviouslly I must have failled all those tests in elementary school because I wasn’t trying hard enough and the sloppy handwritting was just lack of focus. Thursday nights in my house were screaming and tears as I failed one practice test after another.

How were you taught how to read? Someone at some point probubly said ‘sound it out’. Fuck that. I can’t sound it out. That bit of my brain just doesn’t compute. I can know a word, use it, on a good day even spell it but then comes to moment to read in front of the class. I swear public education systems were designed around the concept of public humiliation. Maybe if all your classmates laughed at you and called you an idiot you would try harder because all your problems come from being dumb or lazy. Can’t be anything else wrong. I’m okay sounding out words like cat and dog but once you get into sion sounding exactily like tion or gh and ph sounding like F. Then add in the words stolen from the French and you get a whole special nightmear. If we could perge the English language of French spelling I’d be so happy.

For many readons, not the least of which was being informed I was either lazy or stuped repedidly, I gave up somewhere before high school. I got three Ds in English. I kept transposing numbers in math and science. Occationally there would be a teacher who would ask why I hadn’t been offically tested so I could get help and extra time, and I’d explain that it was an expensive test, that I’d taken some of the unoffical tests and passed (because I can read), and I was a district trasfer and in order to avoid going back to a school that had metal detectors I needed to not make waves. I was to fail as quietly as possible.

I did get into a four year college that had full open admission but I didn’t tell my school counsilor that. I got my mother to edit my essays for those four years. I had a Freshman English teacher tell me that she could guess the exact reading system I had in elementry school by my first essay. She pegged it exactly because my writing was good and interesting but the spelling and gramer needed work. I really liked her. I brought her coffee when she got divorced mid semester and she gave me a coby of Shrunk and White.

I got through college and graduated with honors as a theater major. My ability to spell was not as important as my ability yell at actors about the importance of being on time.

Then came the great job hunt. I read somewhere recently that most women will only aply for a job if they meet 100% of the criteria where as men will aply if they reach 60%. I’ll leave the analisys of that for another blog but I had an extra weight. There were and are to this day tons of jobs I am incredibly qualified for and would be good at except under communication skills there is often a line about spelling and puntuation. In my last job one of my more minor duties was to write up the graphics that pop up on the tv screening tell you what you’re watching and what show is next. I sweated bullets over this every damn time.

It turns out that in the state of California in order to become a substitute teacher all you need to have is a baturlars degree, a clean background check, and a blood test. This explains so much about the substitute teachers I used to have. I also learned that the worse and more dangerous the school district the better the pay. But again with the crushing imbarrisment of public education. Writing end of day notes to the main teacher in my aweful chicken scratch and spelling that only hits a seventh grade level on a good day. Not being able to read half the kid’s names at roll call.

After a year of the soul crushingness that is substitute teaching I decided to take a swing and apply for grad school. Fuck knows how I got in but I did. I had my first script teacher send me up to the disability center to get a script spell checked. They told me they didn’t do that there and I had to be listed as having a disability. I managed to beg and the nice lady there fixed a couple of errors and told me she liked the script. Here’s the thing, it’s not just about spelling a word, it’s about spelling the right word. Tinny or tiny. Wich menas something small and which means a particular type of sound. Run a spell check and immagine that you can’t tell the difference between the list of correctly spelled words on offer. I had one senior professor call me illiterate to my face in front of another student, teacher, and staff member. And this is at a world ranked university in a top program. This is how little respect you get in life if you can’t spell. I was reading college level books in sixth grade but because I regurally mixed up college and collage I was an idiot.**

It's not always easy telling one word from another.

It’s not always easy telling one word from another.

But I’m a writter now. A real live publishing compney is publishing my work and have paid me money in advance for it. How can I be a writer putting out the mess you see above? I finally clued in that writting isn’t about the spelling it’s about the story. The spelling is for good friends who are willing to do a once over before you submit it in exchange for knitting. Then spelling is for the editor picked by your publisher. When the editorial department and Dreamspinner Press got a hold of me I explained my problems and suggested that they work time for an extra spelling and grammer pass into the production schedule. They actually thanked me for the worning and made sure several different people went over my manuscript for spelling problems, then my senior editor went through the marked spelling errors and made sure they were replaced with the right word so I wouldn’t be stuck trying to work out which one was right. For the final go over where it is suggested I read aloud the manuscript I got the Speak feature on Word to read it for me.*** And every time I get a royalty check, even a tiny one, I think ‘fuck you’ to a whole list of teachers over the years.

There are still problems despight a bit more confidence. There are glaring mystakes in my blog or on facebook posts. Twitter is evil about misspellings. There are still jobs I don’t apply for. I have a kid now and I live in fear of the first time I need to quickly write a note to a teacher. I’m also dreading the day I have to read The Hobbit or Harry Potter aloud. I’m doing okay wiht Hop on Pop and can even manage Oh Say Can You Say if I’m awake enough but I don’t want my kid to assume that my poorly sounded out complete misspronceations are correct. And for all manner of reasons I hope she inharited her father’s left front lobe and not mine.

 

 

 

 

*The left front of the brain is also a prblem area for bipolars like myself. Someone should really do some research on that.

** I really hate those things that pop up on the internet sometimes demanding that people learne the difference between your and you’re. It assums that everyone on the net speaks English, that they speak it as a first language, that they haven’t been fucked over by a crapy public education system, that they have full ussage of their eyes and hands and aren’t using a speach to text program, and they have a fully funtioning left frontal lobe. If you reblog one of those things you really need to go fuck yourself.

***There is nothing as boaring as a sex scene read out by a computer.

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