London, 1818

Or, Even The Google Isn’t Helping with These Details

One of the funnest (read: most annoying for a stickler short on time) parts of researching a historical period is having to extrapolate the details you need from a variety of sources.

In this case, I need the exact dates of the London social season for 1818. I have seen various references to the season starting after Easter, or running from May-July, or running from April-June, or coinciding with Parliament, which sat from January until sometime between June and August.  Almack’s was open for 12 weeks at the height of the formal season.

Here is what I know for sure:

• The season (as defined by the 12 weeks of Almack’s) started no later than April 15, based on a letter dated April 16 that mentioned going to Almack’s the night before.
• Parliament sat until June 10 that year.
• Easter was about as early as it can ever be (March 22).

From all of this I am extrapolating that the season of 1818 was April through mid-June. It’s possible it started the last week of March (although doubtful, as ladies would need more than a couple days to travel down to London if they really didn’t leave the country until after Easter), and it’s possible that it kicked off mid-April (with the 15th being the first assembly) and ran to the end of June, Parliamentary sessions or no Parliamentary session. But, lacking any solid research to contradict my most educated guess, I’m calling it as getting into full swing in early April.

It’s not a big thing, really, because my heroine is not a debutante (or even part of polite society–she’s on the fringes), but she would be very aware of the season because it directly impacts what she is doing with her life, and it affects the hero, as well, because he is still part of le bon ton.  Still, it’s important for me not to be blatantly wrong, especially on things I could easily look up and ascertain. In this case, if I’m wrong, at least it won’t be by more than a couple weeks, and after making a legitmate effort to find out for sure….

Point: Tipped

I’ve blogged before about the tipping point of writing a story, about getting lost in the middle third, about how hard it is to keep all the strands of a novel in my head at once, and about the “sophomore slump” that had to be conquered to get this first novel underway.

I am happy to report that I have finally, at long, long, long last, reached the tipping point for my novel. The one I’ve been writing since September, that I tried to finish for NaNoWriMo 2011, that has been novel-length since January, and from whose mushy middle I finally emerged triumphant back at the end of February. It has taken over eight months and 80,000 words for me to reach the point where this story has my full concentration whenever some other part of my life is not demanding it. And “demanding” is the right word there…till now it has been very easy for something else to seduce me away from working on this novel. Now I have to be forced away from my keyboard and Word doc.

I am so thrilled about this. I can’t even describe how exciting it is to be fired up everytime I sit down to write. Jimmy is back in my mind, convincing me to give another scene a go when I finish one and feel mentally drained. Worst case I go ahead and stop; best case I get another 300 or 500 words, another scene started or even finished.

I don’t know if I will meet my self-imposed deadline of finishing by May 21, but prognosis looks good for finishing by the end of the month at the latest. I hope I can keep my momentum going, that this is not a flash in the pan but the real tipping point where the finale is so close the words just spew forth at high velocity until the story is done and I have nothing left to say. It feels like I am at that point. And considering I am 10-20% of the way from the end, I am at the right point in the narrative for that to be so based on when it happened with my novellas.

The Anniversary Statistics

It’s a year since I put up my first substantive post here (May 7 was the first real one, which makes tonight day 365).  It’s been a good year for a blog started by someone no one’s ever heard of.

209 posts – that means I’ve averaged about one post every two days. Wow. That’s more than I thought. No idea on the total word count here, though. I don’t think I want to know.

4296 views – most of them either the same 10 or so people who legitimately follow my posts or random Google searches

I’ve had I think 4 articles or maybe even 5 get linked by someone with a lot of traffic (mostly by the Passive Voice but Kristine Kathryn Rusch liked my post about not getting exploited enough to Tweet it), so a good 4-500 of the views were also legit strangers interested in the same things I am

20 followers (via WordPress or email subscription) with another 80 or so via Twitter (which I really don’t use much except for linking to my posts)

Somewhere in the range of 100 books sold (combined total) for my pair of Twelfth Night novellas. I think it probably amounts to about 70 unique sales, as most of the time I think people buy both (which is gratifying!) but not always. Not a high number but better than leaving them sitting on my hard drive collecting dust while I pounded away at a novel in hopes of getting a publisher and then getting offered a place in an anthology where one or the other of my masquerade babies might go. No. They are better off roaming the wilds of the interwebs finding proper homes.

Interestingly, since I redid the descriptions (not the covers…yet), I have seen an uptick in sales. The numbers had been pretty steadily about six per month (so two each-ish) until after Christmas, when it went down to like three per month.  Last month I had double-digit sales, the first time that happened since last summer, so I was pretty thrilled. I’m halfway there for May and it’s only the first week. I hesitate to call it momemtum, but perhaps a trend, at least.

I am especially pleased to have found a few followers of this blog whom I don’t know in the real world and who consistently pop in to comment or “like” posts. It feels great to know my words aren’t sinking unheard into the void, so thank all of you who come back for more!

I have big plans for Year 2–release my first novel and two to three related but independent novelette to novella length stories, and hopefully the first story or two from the erotica dark fairy-tale world I’ve started building just to have something totally different to work on when I need a break from historical romance.  Actually, all of that is just the first half of Year 2, since those are my goals for calendar year 2012. Following that, in 2013 during the wind-down for Year 2, would hopefully be publishing another novel.

And the goals are not just pipe dreams, as I’m 80% finished with the novel and have mostly outlined and definitely started sketching scenes for all three connected shorts (and the erotica). I’ll say this for my ADD, if I can just stick with all of them long enough to finish, I’ll have a nice little stable ready to go in a short span of time, which I’ve heard is one of the best ways to get hooked into the sales beget sales loop. I’ll keep that updated once I get there.

Transparency, baby. And now, Year 2.

Confessions of a Romance Hero: I’m Not Giving up My Booze or My Smokes

Maybe this should be

Confession of a Romance Author: I Am Not the Kind of Woman Who Would Ask You To

This rant is going to be a bit rantier than my usual confessions posts, in that it has less to do with me being a writer of romance and more me being a reader of romance.  Also it’s about the war on drugs, inside the romance genre, my feelings on which are more of an opinion and less of an objective reality than the observations I often make.

I was reminded of this issue in romance during a re-reading of Liz Carlyle’s One Touch of Scandal, wherein the hero, a man born and raised in India and now living in London, who suffers from insomnia and regularly smokes hashish to calm his mind, tosses his stash down the latrine shaft after one night of sex with the heroine and her magical, insomnia-curing hoo-ha. 

The worst part is this is after the heroine has already judged him (in her mind, at least) for smoking too much. So, you’d rather he not smoke and not sleep ever than get some chemically-assisted rest? Yeah, drug crusader, you’re really looking out for everyone’s health and best interests there. 

Actually, no, the worst part is she judges him for this habit AFTER she has taken advantage of his inebriation to seduce him. So, basically, she’s like “Oh, he smoked so much hash it’s like he roofied himself? Score. I’m going to tap that while I can.” And then she’s all, “Hey, hero, I know you totally weren’t ready to have sex with me, and I just took advantage of you…but you should let this date-rape be a lesson about why you shouldn’t smoke or drink or anything!”

(Okay, to be fair that’s a bit of an exaggeration of her attitude in the context–the part about gleefully date-raping him, I mean–but that really is the lesson I took the author to be giving us about smoking the marijuana in any form.)

The scene (well, really I mean sequence, as there are several scenes involved)  is one in a long and glorious tradition of hero who drinks too much or does drugs giving it up once he finds out how purifying the love of a good woman is.  Let’s be honest, that’s just trading one addiction–or habit, as almost none of the heroes I’m discussing here have actual clinical addictions, just habits the heroine (cough *author* cough) doesn’t like–for another; that is, trading getting his high from drugs or alcohol to getting it from the seratonin and endorphines falling in love and banging the heroine give him. Because we all know that is the healthiest role to play in a relationship:  His Heroin (pun and Twilight reference both intentional).

Honestly, it just annoys me when the heroine gets all judgy about someone’s habits (sometimes hero’s, sometimes just a minor character’s), especially weed smoking.  Like…are half the romance authors out there narcing for the DEA?  The authors rarely write anything as overt as “that’s so bad for you,” but part of the happy ending is that character choosing to stop using and then giving a speech (or a soliloquy) about how much happier and more fulfulled they are now that they’re clean.

Every time I’m just like…why? Why was this an issue, and why was it part of the story? Is part of the requirements for traditionally publishing a romance being stridently anti-drug? Ha, ha, sorry, fail that test. I am stridently anti-drug WAR, but that’s not the same thing, is it? At least with self-publishing, if I ever write a hero who came back from India with some sweet hashish to calm his raging ADD or PTSD or something, he won’t have to give that up to calm down a hysterical editor who believes drug references are only okay if the person doing it sees the error of their ways within 300 pages. Go read some Hunter S. Thompson and then tell me whether my mentally fragile hero who uses it to escape the cacophony in his mind that is slowly driving him mad, for like an hour at a time, is really such a public menace. Sheesh.

It’s just funny, because it hits home to me that a lot of people who write romance probably are pretty traditionally conservative people–and I say this as someone who is an unabashed libertarian, AKA more liberal than liberals or more conservative than conservatives, depending on the issue–and for traditional social conservatives, especially those over 35 or so, drinking to excess and drugs are probably still Very Bad Things.  It’s just funny to me that writing erotic romance is totally okay with that morality as long as there’s No Drugs Or Alcohol Abuse…at least not in the Happily Ever After segment of the story.

Anyway.

I just don’t think it’s realistic to ask heroes to give up all their vices for the heroine. I’m not saying all romance heroes should be users, but I think unless part of his character arc is coming out a true addiction or a spiral of self-destruction, that the subject of him cutting back shouldn’t come up at all.  Do we really think Mr. Darcy gave up drinking because he married Elizabeth? Please.

And she didn’t ask him to.

“I’d rather give it away than be exploited”

Or, Why One Year Later I’m Still Not Interested in a Traditional Publishing Contract

I had the conversation with my husband over drinks a few nights ago about why I feel like self-publishing was the right move for me, and why I have no interest in a traditional publishing contract right now. A bit less than a year ago, I decided to put up a couple novellas as an experiment, to see if I could and to start taking actual steps to make my dream happen–to move it from a dream to a goal I was actively pursuing.

The upshot of the conversation was that I’m happy with my choice, despite having made only about $30 so far, because I would rather give my work away than let someone exploit me.

My issue with traditional publishing is that I think the money-sharing is extremely unequal, with the publisher taking the lion’s share of the profits. It reminds me of Shark Tank, where entrepreneurs have to choose between financing their dream for the price of losing the controlling share of their company, or not securing the money they need to make their dream a reality.  That is the deal traditional publishers offer most authors: they’ll pay an advance that is not anywhere approaching the glamourous live-off-one-advance-a-year level most people thing writers get, and that’s the part of the sales you get 50% royalties for. Everything after the advance–AKA, everything after the point where the publisher has made back their money–they offer something more like 17% (because it is 25% of net, AKA cost after distributor takes their cut).  While I understand the idea that if the publisher put up the money to put the book together and distribute it to the public, they deserve to make a nice profit, the fact that they would pay LESS on the pure-profit part of the book than on the paying-back-its-expenses part just raises my hackles. That feels predatory, and I do not take attempts to victimize me particularly well.

With ebooks the justification of physical costs is ripped away to expose the predation for what it is. I’ve run the math on what an ebook actually costs a publisher (well, assuming they can function with any modicum of efficiency as a business, which may be assuming way too much, but that it is scarcely my problem if they have a bureaucratic overload of employees and rules). The break-even point is fairly low, and once the advance has earned out (since earning back the advance is generally the only part of sales where an author can get 50% royalty) the publisher doesn’t even have the costs of creating and shipping the physical artifact to obfuscate their greed. Nope, they just sit there literally doing nothing else and getting 75% of the profits?

No.

Not just no, but hell, no.

I really would rather give my work away than let someone else get paid the bulk of the money for my work. It’s what I’m doing right now, practically, with my first two ebooks being priced at 99 cents.  I’m okay with it as long as no one else is making the money if I’m not.

I would not be okay with 35 cents for an ebook that was earning a publisher $1.70–almost five times as much for them as for me.

See, for me the issue is really less about money than it is about respect. I don’t feel respected by anyone who buys from me at a pittance and then makes a 500% profit on the venture. I work for a middleman in the real world, and our upcharge is no more than 30% and sometimes less. If a publisher were only going to upcharge 30% AND their expenses had to come out of that…AKA what Amazon KDP offers, and what Smashwords offers…I would be willing to do business with them. I am not saying I would need my publisher to not make any profit on my work; that’s as unrealistic a business arrangement for them as their current terms are for me.

The problem is that I believe in free markets and the idea that capitalism works because it’s not the exploitation of one person for the benefit of another, but rather mutually profitable arrangements that benefit both parties. Right now, with trad-publishing ebook terms being for-life-of-copyright and at less than 50% of cover, publishers do not offer a mutually profitable arrangement; they offer the illusion of one and laugh all the way to the bank. Publishers are literally doing what the anti-free-market types THINK all businesses are in the business of doing!

The businesswoman in me rebels at that. I would rather get all of no profits than a pittance of real profits, especially because right now I am not depending on making money, any money, from my work. I already have a job. I write on the side, because I love to write and feel like I have something to say with my words that other people might enjoy enough to pay for. I’m not going to stop writing just because I’m not making money. The money is a side benefit. But that doesn’t mean I will let anyone else make money in my stead, just because the money isn’t why I’m doing it. No. Either I make money, or no one does, the end.

And God bless Amazon and Smashwords and all the other ebook retailers who have leveled the playing field for self-publishing who have given me an option besides going voiceless or being exploited.