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Angela Korra'ti

Publishing

Jane Litte and Dear Author Defense Fund now active

As has been announced today at Dear Author as well as Smart Bitches Trashy Books, Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches is now administering a defense fund to support Jane Litte and Dear Author in the Ellora’s Cave v. Dear Author case.

So if you have any interest in this case and would like to help support Jane and Dear Author, there’s now a way to do it. Check any of the links for Sarah’s announcement on the matter, and what their expectations are as to how to handle the money. There’s a bit of data as well as to what Jane herself is doing to pay her attorney–who, being a pretty high-profile lawyer, is not cheap, even though he’s discounting his hourly rate for this case.

I’ve donated, and will continue to keep an eye on this case myself. More news as I have it.

October 3, 2014 by
Comics

Comic review: Thor #1, by Marvel

This is the year I’ve been steadily increasing my digital comics reading–and now I’ve got yet another subscription to add to my growing list of female-led titles I’m following from Marvel. Namely, the first of the new Thor series, introducing a female Thor.

Goddess of Thunder

Goddess of Thunder

I don’t have much familiarity yet with the Asgardian mythos as depicted by Marvel, at least in the comics–I haven’t been following the current Avengers line, or the Thor titles that’ve led up to this. My experience so far was with a couple of complimentary digital issues that came with the Blu-ray of the second Thor movie. So I was coming into this issue pretty much cold.

To my amusement, my immediate reaction as soon as I started reading was to observe how much Thor, at least as drawn by this artist, looked suspiciously like Chris Hemsworth. For the record, I am on board with that. Because yum. And in general, I liked the art, though the font the letterer uses for the Asgardians’ speech is a trifle hard to read. I get why they’re doing it–it’s a visual cue to signify how their speech is more formal and archaic than that of us modern folk of Midgard, I expect. But it’s still a bit of a hitch to me as I try to read the dialogue.

As a more or less new reader to Marvel’s Asgardian mythos, with enough familiarity from the movies to recognize the characters, I felt like I didn’t need any prior backstory to know what was going on. The story sets it up for us pretty clearly: the Avengers were in a great battle upon the moon, and Nick Fury whispered something to Thor that threw him into a morass of despair. Ever since, Thor’s been on the moon, desperately trying to lift Mjollnir again, and unable to do so. We are not told what this whisper was, and there’s great consternation on the part of Odin and Freyja as they try to rouse the despondent Thor.

We’re also told that Odin has returned from being away, and that Freyja has been ruling Asgard in his absence as the All-Mother. Odin accuses Freyja of coddling Thor, only to discover that he can’t lift the hammer either, and in his anger he snarks at Freyja about remembering her place now that he’s back to rule again. Odin, Odin, Odin. How long have you been married to your queen? Haven’t you figured out yet that pissing her off is unwise?

Meanwhile, OH HEY LOOK FROST GIANTS FROM UNDER THE SEA. And Dark Elf Malekith makes an appearance, and I have to say, I rather liked him. (But then, I’m rather partial to snarky Dark Elves, as anyone who’s read Faerie Blood could figure out.) It’s this that finally rouses Thor from his despair, and even if he doesn’t have the hammer, he puts up a valiant battle against Malekith. Which does not go well.

I’m a little bummed that we don’t see the new female Thor until the end of the story–but it was rather nifty nonetheless to see the mysterious figure picking up the hammer, and to see the inscription on it shifting pronouns from ‘he’ to ‘she’. I’m given to understand that there will be several suspects for who the new Thor actually is. And so far, I’m definitely on board for finding out.

Bring it on, new Goddess of Thunder! Let there be lightning!

October 2, 2014 by
Boosting the Signal, Publishing

Ellora’s Cave v. Dear Author update! Also, Boosting the Signal!

It seems that the Ellora’s Cave v. Dear Author lawsuit has started getting traction on other major Internet sites as well as mainstream media. Jezebel has picked up the story here, and Liberty Voice has a post up here. And as I reported yesterday, the L.A. Times picked up the story too.

Meanwhile, for those of you who may have missed it on either Dear Author or the Smart Bitches site, Jane has put out a call for authors, cover artists, or editors who are willing to testify in the case. (People associated with EC, obviously.) Relatedly, Courtney Milan has an offer up to help people who may be afraid to testify and break anonymity. (Another reason why Courtney Milan is awesome, and I’m happy to be a reader of her work.)

So things do appear to have proceeded past the filing stage, and the romance genre’s presence on the Net continues to be heavily focused upon this. More as I hear about it.

Meanwhile, I do have one EC author who’s pinged me to take me up on the offer of a Boosting the Signal post. While Boosting the Signal is still technically on hiatus, I WILL be running her piece–as well as a piece this Friday from fellow Carina author Sheryl Nantus, AND a piece from long-time online-and-local author pal Chrysoula Tzavelas. Be on the lookout for these to come. I’ll be having some pieces forthcoming from Dragonwell Press as well.

October 1, 2014 by
Television

Holding out for a hero

The last Doctor Who reaction post I did was for Listen, and y’all may have noticed I didn’t do one for the episode that followed, “Time Heist”. There’s a reason for that, one that pretty much bubbled right up to the fore with this past weekend’s episode, “The Caretaker”.

Which is to say, I’m starting to really not like this season of Who. Dara, Paul and I all watched “The Caretaker” last night, and none of us liked it. Dara calls out her reasons why over here. And to what she has to say, I’ll add this.

As many of you know, I came into Who fandom with the new series. I’d been half-assedly paying attention over Dara’s and Paul’s shoulders when they watched the classic-era episodes on our local public access station, but when the series revived in 2005, Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper made me sit up and take notice. And yeah, I’ll say it right out: I really liked the relationship chemistry between Nine and Rose AND Ten and Rose. I’m a romantic sucker. This is known.

But I’ll also note that just because I am a romantic sucker and I greatly enjoyed the love story with Rose, this does not mean I am incapable of appreciating Who in a non-romantic context. I have since gone back to enjoy quite a great number of the classic-era episodes, particularly in the eras of Three and Four, with nary a love story to be seen.

Let me emphasize this: I do not need the Doctor to be a love interest for him to be interesting to me.

But with all due respect to the considerable acting powers of Mr. Capaldi, y’know what I also don’t need him to be? A screaming asshole to everybody in sight. Here is a short list of things I am now really tired of in this season of Who so far:

One, the Doctor’s rampaging anti-soldier bigotry, which appears to have exploded from out of nowhere. I speculate that this may be a leftover from his experiences on Trenzalore, but I don’t know, because we haven’t been given any justification for it so far. Dara points out correctly that the Doctor does have a history of being contemptuous to the military, but for me as a viewer, it seems like it’s been ramped up to 11 in this series, and for no good reason at all. It can’t just be a reaction to Danny, either, because he was starting this pretty much right out of the gate. “Into the Dalek” had it too, and the Doctor specifically, sneeringly denied Journey Blue a chance to come with him in the TARDIS because she was a soldier.

Two, the constant derisive remarks about Clara’s appearance. I’ve counted at least one per episode, and this is starting to become seriously NOT OKAY. Yes. I get it. The Doctor isn’t Clara’s boyfriend! But he’s supposed to be her friend, and friends don’t say shit like that about each other.

Three, the Doctor yelling “SHUT UP” at everybody. This has grown really tiresome, and it’s presenting Twelve as an arrogant asshole without something to legitimately balance it out. It’s making the Doctor come across as not giving a damn about anybody else having a voice in what’s going on–and that’s another thing, this whole notion of the Doctor “not caring”. I don’t like this idea of Clara as his emergency backup conscience. The Doctor’s supposed to be a champion of humanity, and while sure, there’s some amusement value in the snark of him calling Earth the Planet of the Pudding-brains, if he keeps this up, you have to start wondering why he’s still bothering to do anything on humanity’s behalf. “Because Clara is making him do it” doesn’t cut it as an answer to that, either.

Trevor on the Doctor Who Podcast, which Dara and I follow, has been talking in recent episodes about how in this season, he’s just not finding the Doctor heroic, and he’s really having a hard time understanding why Clara or anybody would want to travel with him. And I’ve got to back Trev up on this.

Because right now, the Doctor I’m seeing is not a Doctor I would want to travel with. I don’t care if he’s got a time machine and can go anywhere in the cosmos. If he said shit to me like what he’s been saying to Clara, particularly this past episode’s line of “you explained me to him, but you haven’t explained him to me”, I’d tell him to stuff his sonic screwdriver where the suns don’t shine. Because that, that right there, encapsulates the problem in a nutshell. My immediate reaction to that line was “hey asshole, she doesn’t owe you an explanation for her love life!”

And I really do not want to be thinking of the Doctor as an asshole. It makes me sad and it makes me cranky all at once.

I don’t need the Doctor to be a romantic lead. But I do need him to be a hero.

I need him to be the Doctor.

September 29, 2014 by
Publishing

Updates on the Ellora’s Cave vs. Dear Author lawsuit

For those of you who may have missed the news as it exploded over the weekend, Jane Litte and the Dear Author site are being sued by Ellora’s Cave. As you might expect, there was a great deal of brouhaha over this, not only on Dear Author, but also over on Smart Bitches.

However, there are new developments as of this morning. Jane reports on Dear Author’s Monday news post that she’s now retained the services of Marc Randazza, a story also picked up by The Digital Reader.

It’s very worth noting that a bunch of Jane’s commenters were urging her to go talk to PopeHat, and that the guy she’s now hired is spoken VERY highly of on that site, calling him a First Amendment badass. This is promising news indeed.

Meanwhile, I’m seeing the #notchilled hashtag springing up on Twitter, and several of the authors I follow are speaking out passionately on it.

Like Courtney Milan, about whom I’ve posted before as one of the small but growing set of romance novelists whose work I REALLY like. Courtney’s letting Ellora’s Cave have it with both barrels on her own blog as well as on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/courtneymilan/status/516592408289898496

Fellow Carina author Ella Drake ALSO has words to say about this–because SHE’S had some experience as an EC author, too:

And with Ella in mind, I’ll make an open offer to any Ellora’s Cave authors whose sales are impacted by EC’s implosion and by readers backing out of buying their work: if any of you have non-EC titles you’d like to encourage people to buy instead, come talk to me and I’ll run a piece for you on Boosting the Signal.

ETA: Couple more links as people continue to post about this:

The Book Pushers have proclaimed that, moving forward, they won’t be reviewing Ellora’s Cave releases and invite EC authors to submit non-EC titles for review instead

Novelist and blogger Barry Eisler is deeply unamused at EC’s behavior, along with the rest of the Internet

Jenny Trout has choice, pungent words for some individuals who’re pleased that DA is getting sued

Bad Menagerie posts about how they’re exactly the small-time bloggers that many are suspecting EC is trying to intimidate

Wendy the Super Librarian breaks out her Little Miss Crabby Pants persona, and goes into detail as to why EC’s behavior is a problem for everyone

Book blogging site KBGBabbles expresses its concerns

Deirdre Saoirse Moen has an EC Author Exodus Support thread

And OH YES: the LA Times has picked up the story

More to come as I find it.

September 29, 2014 by
Ebooks and Ereaders

B&N and Kobo stomping on user ability to download books

I’ve been noticing lately that Kobo has been stomping on the ability to download certain books from user libraries–and at first I thought this was simply a passing glitch. But then I started noticing it happen on books where it was particularly puzzling, i.e., releases from Tor.com. Which are DRM-free and which should not have any restrictions whatsoever upon them.

I saw this happen when I tried to pre-order John Scalzi’s Lock In, and when I sent Kobo’s CS people cranky mail about this, they told me something that made no damn sense whatsoever: that because the book was in epub3 format, that meant I couldn’t download it. I’d also noticed it happen on a free book from Tor–Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Lady Astronaut of Mars”.

Reasons why this made no damn sense:

1) A book’s format does not dictate whether you can download it. All downloading is is copying data from point A to point B. If there’s something that’s getting in the way of the data moving, that’s DRM or some other form of restriction.

2) I was able to go over to my B&N account, go find Kowal’s novelette, and download the exact same thing in the exact same format with no problems whatsoever.

So I sent Kobo additional cranky mail about this, and was told that if I wanted the book in another format, then I should complain to the publisher. And that pissed me off because the CS person didn’t understand that I wasn’t complaining about the format–I was complaining about the inability to download the thing onto my computer so that I could keep a backup copy of it around. Which I should have been able to bloody well do as I wished, because it had no DRM on it.

Meanwhile, though, B&N has trumped Kobo completely on this, because according to this post on The Digital Reader, now B&N has removed download links for ALL books in user accounts. Apparently, they’re stopping support for sideloading, according to what the poster was told in tweets.

And this just makes me crankier. Dammit, B&N, I started buying ebooks from you because Amazon was pissing me off. And Kobo, I started buying books from YOU because B&N was pissing me off, and additionally, because I wanted to support moves to partner up with independent bookstores.

But if BOTH of you are going to start denying users ability to download their damn books, all this is going to do is drive me off to find out whether Google Play will let me do this. And it’ll make me way more interested in buying books directly from publishers and from authors as often as possible.

Dammit, all I want to do is buy books, keep master copies on my computer, and put them on devices to read when I want to. This should not be difficult.

And yet.

September 27, 2014 by
Publishing

Today in disturbing publishing news

News has broken since yesterday that Ellora’s Cave has sued Dear Author, specifically over the post DA did here, talking about the publisher’s history and how they appear to be imploding now, and basically asking WTF. EC is suing DA for defamation. Jane Litte of DA, being involved in the suit, cannot really post about it in depth. But Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches posts about it here.

There is a great deal of WTF to be had here, in no small part because Jane Litte was reporting on Things That Actually Happened. This used to be called “journalism”. But if this suit has its way, it could now be called “defamation”.

I’m not an Ellora’s Cave author, but I do know folks who are, and who have been deeply worried about developments with that publisher. That there are EC authors who are not getting paid for the work even though their work continues to be on sale concerns me deeply. So does EC authors being afraid to speak out publicly about what’s been going on.

And now DA is being sued?

This is, in a word, bullshit. I know from following the Dear Bitches Smart Authors podcast that Jane is herself a lawyer, so she’s got background to understand the level of bullshit involved here. But I really hope that the Ohio courts will smack this down, and if Jane winds up calling for help with a legal fund, I’ll be throwing her what bucks I can spare.

ETA: I’ve been linked to! So here, if you’d like to see other links cropping up on this matter:

Her Hands My Hands stands up to join the Streisand Effect starting to spread about this.

The Digital Reader reports on the matter, including an explanation of what SLAPP is (note: Jane Litte reported a lack of anti-SLAPP laws in Ohio, which could prove to be a problem).

Vacuous Minx reports on how EC has bailed on a prior lawsuit before, and speculates on likely outcomes of this case.

And although this is a post from earlier this month, prior to news of this lawsuit, Writer Beware reported on the EC implosion and warned writers off of submitting new work to them.

Pete Morin has a link off to the actual complaint filed. Which I have now read, and it’s interesting to note that EC is specifically stating that the assertions that EC authors aren’t getting paid are false, and they seem to be trying to make a case for the DA post being a cause for EC authors having a panic rush–rather than oh, say, EC authors themselves reporting that this shit is going down and DA’s post reacting to that.

The Passive Voice has a post up also linking to the complaint, and some analysis of what will be happening now both in the post and in the comments.

More links as I find ’em, folks.

September 27, 2014 by