Final Friday: Contract Negotiation 102, or You Only Get What You Ask For.

One of the most exciting times in a writer’s life is when a contract arrives.  Long form, short form, reprint, big money or small… it’s still Exciting!  And a lot of time, especially when we’re still new but even when we’re Old Pros™, the impulse is to skim and sign. Sooner it’s done, sooner we can crow on social media about it/collect the check, right?

Stop.  Take a deep breath. Put down the (virtual or otherwise) pen.  Now go back and look at the contract. I’m going to assume you’ve already checked to make sure the essential pertinent details (name, title, payment) are all correct, that’s Contract 101. And you’ve already made sure that they’re not claiming any rights you didn’t previous agree to/know they were going to ask for, right?  (Right?)

Now take another breath, and look at the contract again. Read all the clauses. And if you see something you don’t particularly like or seems even slightly hinky, do NOT just shrug and sign. Seriously.  Fucking don’t.

Herein begins the lesson.

Recently I received a contract from a small press for a short story to be included in a Kickstarter-funded project.  I’d agreed to the length, due date and payment, but hadn’t seen the rest of the contract. So when I got it, I read through the thing carefully.  Which is when I noticed: Continue reading “Final Friday: Contract Negotiation 102, or You Only Get What You Ask For.”

Author Interview: Joyce Reynolds-Ward

I love chatting with other writers!

Joyce Reynolds-Ward and I met in the pre-pandemic days when I regularly traveled to conventions in the Pacific Northwest. She’s warm, funny, endlessly curious, and a fantastic writer. And a knowledgeable and enthusiastic horse person. So when I heard she’d just put out a new book, I couldn’t wait to find out about it.

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?

Joyce Reynolds-Ward: I’ve been making up stories to entertain myself since I was little. At first, they were about books I’d read or TV shows I watched. Then I started writing stories off and on, starting with my junior high literary magazine continuing through the present day. I’ve gotten somewhat serious about writing since the late ’00s, however, and have been writing regularly since 2008 or so.

 DJR: What inspired your book?

JRW: My most recently published book, A Different Life: Now. Always. Forever. was an attempt to write something light. Um. Well. Maybe. It’s set in what I call the Martiniere Multiverse, a spinoff from my main series, The Martiniere Legacy and the People of the Martiniere Legacy.

When writing A Different Life: What If?, I half-toyed with the idea of writing about my main characters, Ruby and Gabe, from the perspective of Ruby’s best friend in college, Linda Coates, who Ruby hires to be her executive assistant. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea, and I figured that it would make a nice, light little story, which was what I needed to think about after several years of Covid and my worries about the 2022 election.

Things kinda happened from there. The book took a more political tone after the reversal of Roe v. Wade, with Linda’s brother-in-law becoming a rising reactionary political leader who has nefarious designs involving Linda. But there are still light moments, and we have a bit of biobot action where Ruby and Linda release the latest version of Ruby’s bots that are intended to counter climate change by helping plants absorb and retain moisture better. Plus–Linda’s reaction to living in an Art Nouveau palace in Paris, France. That was fun to visualize.

DJR: What authors have most influenced your writing?  What about them do you find inspiring?

JRW: My influences come from several very odd and unusual places, especially for a writer in the speculative fiction genre. One of my earliest influences was Mary O’Hara, of My Friend Flicka fame. If you have only read the first book, especially in an abridged edition considered suitable for children, you miss a LOT of the deeper undercurrents of O’Hara’s writing. The other two books in the trilogy, Thunderhead and Green Grass of Wyoming, delve into spirituality (O’Hara had become involved with early versions of Eastern mysticism) and conflicted, difficult marital relationships. Writing this, I suddenly realize that my character Gabriel Martiniere owes a little bit to O’Hara’s Rob McLaughlin. Not a lot–but there’s a little bit of Rob in Gabe.

One thing to consider, though, about O’Hara, is that she was one of the original script doctors in Hollywood during the silent film era. While she only cites a few instances where she got called in to work on scripts gone wrong, it’s enough to make me wish that she had written a memoir about that Hollywood experience. Nonetheless, her life story (as related in Flicka’s Friend) is quite fascinating.

John Steinbeck is another literary influence that I frequently cite from my early days of writing. One of my high school English teachers used his Travels with Charley as a textbook for her advanced writing class. From Charley, I moved on to his Journal of a Novel, drafted while he was writing East of Eden. Then I went on to read all of his books. Steinbeck, along with O’Hara, taught me a lot about the use of settings in my work that I think really still shows up.

Otherwise, there are many writers who have influenced my work and made me think more about the process of writing and what I was doing while writing. Obviously, I read widely and well beyond the genre. Recent influences include C.J. Cherryh, Beverly Jenkins, Aliette de Bodard, Kate Elliott (especially her so-underestimated Jaran books), Craig Johnson, N. K. Jemisin, Mary Robinette Kowal, and many, many more. I am always eager to discover a new writer and new works. My ebook library card gets a LOT of use these days.


DJR: 
Why do you write what you do, and how does your work differ from others in your genre?

JRW: Originally, I started writing what I do because I wasn’t finding the books I wanted to read. I wanted to read about more strong women, but I also wanted to read fantasy in settings that weren’t quasi-medieval Europe, as well as science fiction that wasn’t set in Southern California or New York. I wanted to see more work that included the things I was interested in, including realistic horses, the inland West as a setting, examination of political power that didn’t make me want to throw the book across the room, and other things.

 I write politics from my training in political science and the nearly two decades I spent as a political organizer. Some writers in genre have that knowledge and understanding, but many don’t. While my understanding is more on the state and local level, it’s enough to extrapolate for larger settings. Additionally, because I spent many years as a corporate wife at the middle management level in sales, I know somewhat more about some of the stuff that goes on in that realm than most people. The ins and outs of management fads, the degree to which certain things get done, the internal politics…all of that. I focus on multigenerational privately-held corporate entities rather than larger publicly-held companies because that’s easier to control in a story.

The inland West as a setting as opposed to the Southwest is also a way that I’m different from many writers who might set stories in the North American West. I have always been drawn to the juxtaposition of mountains and prairies, such as you find around the foothills of the Rockies, both the east side and the west side. The western prairies get much less awareness than the eastern prairies, because they’re smaller. But the land of the Palouse, both in Oregon and Washington, is just chock-full of story potential. While I grew up in Western Oregon and have some work set in Willamette Valley-esque settings, including the Cascades, the Plateau country of eastern Oregon holds a fascination for me. The Blues and the Wallowas are considered to be the westernmost extensions of the Rockies in the Northwest.

DJR: How does your writing process work? Continue reading “Author Interview: Joyce Reynolds-Ward”

Recovering

I’ve had a fascinating last few days. I’ve attended Boskone and the Historical Fictions Conference and had a wonderful time at both. I’ve seen two friends for the first time since COVD began. I’ve even watched the first episode of Picard. I’ve done all this with a badly broken tooth, a dead fridge, and a slew of things that kept going wrong. I stopped counting things going wrong after six, and that was on Saturday.

I have a new (much smaller but much more reliable) refrigerator. The insurance came through and it didn’t cost me that much. Delivery was full of things going wrong, but it’s done and all I have to do is sort out the tail end and things are better. I have more exercises to deal with some of the physical pain, as I spent this morning physiotherapying (if that is not a word it should be).

The rest of today is mostly catching up with the work I missed doing when life went awry. And resting. And drinking water, because we’re nearing an end of a heatwave here. (Of course my refrigerator broke on the hottest day of that heat wave – this is perfectly normal, as well as it being normal that every source of help was closed for the weekend). Tomorrow I begin sorting the other things that went wrong, including the tooth.

This is, therefore, an excuse for a post, and not actually a post.

If you’ve also had things go wrong during the last week or so, please feel free to share them. We can them sympathise with each other and all feel just that much better.

My good news from the physio is that my sense of balance isn’t as far gone as I feared and I will get it back in no time. I now have exercises to ensure this happens. My good news from the conferences is that I got to enjoy myself… and that I don’t think I embarrassed myself.

Getting Sick

I got sick a couple of weeks ago. Nothing very serious, as near as I can tell. Not Covid — the symptoms were wrong plus I tested just in case because if it was that, I wanted the antiviral.

Mostly my joints were aching and I felt off and blah, but then I checked my blood pressure one morning and not only was it up, but my resting pulse was way faster than usual.

That scared me enough to go see a doctor (and thankfully I could get in to see someone on Friday afternoon, not something I would ever count on). I recounted my various symptoms and while she offered to refer me to a specialist if I wanted one, in her opinion it wasn’t anything serious and would resolve on its own.

Now in truth, those are pretty much the words I always want to hear from a doctor, especially as I get older. The last thing in the world I want is for a doctor to think it sounds serious and send me for a bunch of tests that will probably just lead to more tests and maybe they’ll find something that isn’t even what I was worried about when I called the doctor.

I mean, I’m OK with medication if it’s clear what I need. But in truth, when I get scared enough to check with doctor, I am really hoping for “it’s nothing to worry about.”

I walk a thin line between “ignore it and it’ll go away” and “what if I miss something that will kill me if I don’t get treatment now?”

I was talking with a doctor friend over the weekend about my experience and she said that it was a tricky line for a doctor, too. You don’t want to dismiss a patient’s experience, but sometimes it does seem that there really isn’t anything that needs to be done.

Interesting from both points of view. There are, of course, many people whose health issues have been dismissed for years. That is another, important issue, but it isn’t mine. Most of the time I know my body well enough to know what kind of help I need — I’ve become a big fan of physical therapy — and I only get nervous when something new happens.

I wasn’t very sick, but I felt lousy for a week. While I often have 24-hour bugs, this is the first time in years when I’ve been sick for days.

It left me with this reaction: Why don’t more people want to avoid getting sick? Continue reading “Getting Sick”

Shedding a Layer of Protection

Like almost everyone I know, I have a lot of books. A few fewer since the minor flood in the garage took out a couple of boxes that were stored in anticipation of getting new bookshelves, but generally a lot. For pretty much my entire life, from before I could read, I have believed, somewhere deep in my heart of hearts, that books are a form of wealth. It’s only lately that I realized they were also a form of… insulation? protection? I feel safe when there are books. The more books, the safer. (I have no idea what I need protection from. Boredom? A lack of reading material?)

So yeah. I like having books around. But I have also reached a point in my life where I realize that I have a lot of stuff. Emphatically including books. I don’t seem to be able to keep from accreting them, but I’m being a little more deliberate about which books I keep. I am still giving house space to all the plays I read and studied in college. And my Chaucer textbook (because sometimes I want to re-read the Wife of Baths Tale or something). All the paperback Georgette Heyers I ever bought, and so many many of the paperback science fiction and fantasy books I bought from the spinner racks at the drugstore in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where I spent my high school years.

Lately, with a sense of bemused sadness, I look at the stacks of books and realize that I’m never going to want to read some of them again. It’s hard to contemplate getting rid of some of them because they were such one-hit wonders, books I don’t think will ever have a digital edition. If I get rid of those books, who will ever know of them? On the other hand are the books I have replaced more than once due to loss or wear and tear–finally I got e-copies. You never know when the need to re-read Murder Must Advertise or the Jane Austen canon might overwhelm.

These days I read a lot on my phone. It’s less to carry, and I never run out of things to read. I also read paper books, of course. Especially before I go to sleep, when I’m trying to get the blue light of the day’s screens out of my brain. Truth be told, I still prefer paper. But paper is heavy, and if I need to carry more than one book (because I’m nearing the end of one and God forbid I should find myself book-less) it’s less to schlep. The luxury of getting on to a plane and knowing that–barring battery problems–I need not be stuck at 30,000 feet with nothing to read, is significant. And if-and-when we downsize from our current house to something a little smaller, I’m going to have to get rid of a good number of my books.

So these days, as I walk around the house, I find myself picking out some books–you. And you. And you. And adding them to the “donate” list in my head. The public library, or the Little Free Libraries of my neighborhood, will get a modest donation. A series of modest donations over the next few years. Because, as safe as it may make me feel, I cannot be Madeleine’s Home for Forgotten Books forever. Better that they find new homes with people who have not read them and may find them a source of delight. And I will learn to live without that particular layer of insulation.

 

 

 

 

Easter in 1903 and the importance of listening

Hot cross buns are being promoted all over the place right now, which means that Easter looms. I say ‘looms’ because Easter holds an amount of darkness for me. My family mostly doesn’t talk about it, but it is the moment when my family was told by its patriarch to flee. “Children, run!” he said (but in Yiddish).

I think it’s time we talked about this.

My great-great-grandfather was one of the 500 people hurt (with intent, with malice, with much antisemitism) in the Kishinev pogrom. I don’t know what other damage was done to the family. All I know about it was that he was hurt and saw the writing on the wall for Jews in his home town and that he told his children to run.

The anniversary this year is just before Easter. The pogrom was intentionally during Easter. It’s an historical thing in the Christian world, to hurt Jews on Christian festivals. This is why I strongly suggest that those who want Jews to have Christmas trees or eat hot cross buns should not press it if they meet “I don’t do this things”. You may be touching on hurtful ground if you’re talking to someone who still has that memory of the pain. Also, do not ask us, “Do you remember exactly how your family got hurt on Easter/Christmas?” I’m telling you here, about my family. Let the story of how my family fled across the world because it was unsafe to be home, during Easter save other Jews from that question.

The blood libel played a part in the pogrom, but it was a lot more than that. Nearly half of Kishinev was Jewish, so it wasn’t a small minority being hated by the majority. It was literally people saying, “Let us destroy half our neighbours.”

The blood libel was an excuse. False accusations of murder of a Christian child.

As I interpret it, the pogrom was organised with the help of a newspaper and in a somewhat similar way to the January 6 event in the modern US. I’m reliant on translations and everything hurts to read, because my family was damaged. So… I suggest you read about it. I’ll have links shortly, and one of those links leads to a book on the subject. One day I must obtain that book and read it and understand … today is not that day.

Ironically, the first time I heard about the whole linking of Jews to blood thing was during Passover (near Easter, but that year, not quite the same days) when I was in primary school. I’d brought extra unleavened bread into school because some other children like to try things and assuaging curiosity has been, for me, a good way of reducing the antisemitism.

One child shouted at me, “I can’t eat that, it’s got the blood of babies in it.” I tried explaining kashruth because if one understands kashruth then one understands just how offensive the ‘Jews drink the blood of babies’ statement is. It goes against so much of who we are. That didn’t help

The next day, I brought the rest of the box of matzah in and ask the other child to read the ingredients.

“Flour, water, salt.”

“Which of those is babies’ blood?” I asked. She tentatively nibbled a bit and agreed there was no blood in it and lo, for the rest of primary school I was safe from that particular accusation. To replace the blood of babies, the group she mixed in all decided that I had personally killed Jesus. At age nine. They told me so.

Being a science fiction person already, I asked if that meant I invented a time machine. They were flummoxed and refused to let me play with them. I was flummoxed and started dreaming of things I could do with a time machine. This is when I knew for a fact history was going to be part of my future. And that murdering people was not something I wanted to do. Ever.

Anyhow, back to the 1903 pogrom that destroyed my family’s very middle class life in a major city on the other side of the world…

Here’s a summary. I chose this one because the man in the white hat in the top picture, looks very like one of my uncles: https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-a-small-pogrom-in-russia-changed-the-course-of-history/

It was important historically, as this article suggests. Japan had already begun its road into imperialism, but the inefficacy of the Russian leaders in preventing the pogrom led it to think about the rules of war in unexpected ways. To me, this also suggests that Pearl Harbour was part of a pattern: https://besacenter.org/kishinev-pogrom-russia-japan/

Why am I talking about it now? Because I offered to answer questions about antisemitism in a couple of for a now that it’s getting bad again. I want to do my bit to make it hurt less.

This is why.

I am mostly of refugee descent. At the heart of the way I view the world is always being told that I’m an outsider, that I don’t have full human rights, that I don’t belong.

This has taught me that I need to be public about antisemitism. I need to talk with people about it, even if it gives me pain.

If someone says they hurt because of prejudice, listen to them and hear what they’re saying. Then do some homework before explaining things back to them, trying to solve problems, or telling them someone else hurts more. All of today’s post is about the reason just one branch of my family fled. It’s fine to take learning about these things one step at a time. What is not fine is ignoring or explaining back or assuming we are at fault for the bigotry of others.

This whole post was triggered by it being Easter soon, and by someone telling me that I hadn’t factored in other bigotry when I was specifically talking about antisemitism.

It’s one of those years. I’ve had them before, but… they exhaust me on so many levels. Be gentle to anyone from a minority background. Jews are the canary in the bigotry coalmine. If we’re hurting, you can guarantee the bigots are out in force and attacking other people as well. If you can’t think of anything you can do that will help, try listening. Listening and hearing are such big gifts.

Time to Fix the Police

Maybe twenty years ago, a man who had nowhere to go was sleeping on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. He had duct-taped a knife to his hand.

My memory’s vague on this, but I think he had some trouble with his hands, which was why he used the tape to keep the knife handy. I know why he had a knife: he was living on the street and trying to keep himself safe.

Park police officers came along and woke him up, probably not gently. He jumped up, likely disoriented, knife in hand. He didn’t attack anybody, but he waved the knife.

The cops yelled, “Drop the knife,” but of course, he couldn’t drop it.

So one of them shot him. Killed him. Killed him for nothing more than sleeping in a public place and being prepared to protect himself.

I imagine the cop who shot him was scared that the man might attack him or someone else. I doubt this was a case of a cop killing someone just for the hell of it; it sounded more like the case of a cop who didn’t know what else to do.

The cop had a gun. He’d been trained in the use of a gun. He really didn’t know how to respond with anything but a gun.

Remember the old adage about how to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail?

To a cop with a gun, everything looks like an excuse to shoot somebody.

(I wish I thought that last sentence was an exaggeration.)

The reason I remember so much about this story is not because it was unique. It wasn’t unusual even then. I read such stories, get outraged, and then let them slip into the vagaries of memory.

But I remember this one because my Aikido teacher in D.C., the master instructor Mitsugi Saotome, was outraged by what happened. Continue reading “Time to Fix the Police”

Where Gillian Whispers to Trees

Today is one of my favourite Jewish holidays. It’s the birthday of trees. When I was a child, we planted a tree in the backyard. I used to find a really nice tree and hug it and wish it happy birthday. This latter wasn’t due to any religious proclivities – I loved hugging trees when I was little and this was the perfect excuse. If I had time and could find a good paperbark, I’d take a bit of the paperlike bark and write a poem to trees, on their birthday. Luckily for the world, none of these poems survive. I don’t think I showed them to anyone, either. They were between me and the birthday celebrants. I once made a magazine using paperbark, but that had nothing to do with the birthday of trees.

These days, I donate a sum of money that has symbolic significance and someone plants trees for me, in a place that really needs them. Every year I do a bit of an internet search to decide on which organisation should get my money. I donate, then promptly forget how much money and which organisation. The trees will be planted, that’s the important thing. I may, however, quietly whisper a “Happy birthday’ when I press the ‘donate’ button.

Because the old Jewish way of counting used the alphabet, every word in Hebrew has a numerical value. The word I chose for trees today was “Life.” I didn’t have enough money to plant that many trees, but I had enough to spend that amount of money on planting trees somewhere they were needed. I forgot, however, to whisper that happy birthday. If I were still that tree-hugging five year old, I’d wonder if they missed me. (Let me make up for dereliction and whisper right now…)

I’m back. I even sang trees the birthday song this year, because it’s midnight and midsummer in Australia and it seemed appropriate.

One of the small mysteries of my life is that so many people tell me how important Chanukah is. I know this is because it’s closeish to Christmas so it’s considered an acceptable festival by many non-Jews. Tu B’Shvat (today) is only a little further away, and it’s all about trees. Why can’t the secular world choose it, instead?

I may never truly understand why the non-Jewish world favours the festival when we gamble above the festival when we plant trees.

Our next important festival is the one where it’s obligatory to get drunk. I have my own version of the Purim story. If any of you are interested in it, let me know and I’ll put it up here when the time comes.

Watching Old Movies and Asking Questions

I watched The Sting the other night, not for the first time, but for the first time in a long time.

It’s a 50-year-old movie set in 1936, but given the power of the myths and stories that it’s built on, it doesn’t feel particularly dated, unlike a number of other movies that I enjoyed in the 1970s but find unwatchable now.

I always did like Paul Newman/Robert Redford movies, though I tried to watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid awhile back and found I couldn’t get into it. I’m not sure why The Sting still works for me and Butch Cassidy doesn’t, since they’re similar stories based on Anglo American mythology. Might just be that I can handle gangster stories better than westerns.

There are some reasonable criticisms of it. Robert Earl Jones (James Earl Jones’s father) plays a magical Negro role — the mentor to Redford’s young white grifter. He is, of course, murdered early on, setting up the reason for the revenge sting.

He and his family and one other guy are the only Black people in the movie, but they are portrayed well and treated with respect by the good guy white people (all grifters). It could have been worse.

Still, this is very much a movie about white men. There are a couple of women in key supporting roles, but this movie does not pass the Bechdel Test. That said, and in spite of the fact that one of those women is a madam as well as Newman’s lover, it doesn’t feel directly misogynist. Women are just mostly irrelevant in this world, even women who themselves are grifters.

I enjoyed myself, but since I wasn’t sitting on the edge of my seat — it’s a movie with a lot of twists and surprises, but I knew what they all were — I found myself thinking a lot about the underlying mythology and the various stories we’ve all been fed that purport to tell us our history.

To start with, this is a story about grifters with a heart of gold. After suffering through a grifter in the White House for four years, I’m not as inclined to believe good things about grifters as I used to be. Continue reading “Watching Old Movies and Asking Questions”