On Writing Books in the Age of Oligarchy

It's a weird time to be a human with a platform that involves public speech.

I'm a small fry compared to a lot of people. My published works are generally less pointedly problematic (unless we're talking about Dominionists or Christian Nationalists, at which point I become an author of heresy on MULTIPLE levels pretty fast.) Anyone whose paying attention knows I don't shy away from issues of human rights (trans rights are human rights!), religious freedom, and injustice on the whole. If you've followed me on social media for any length of time you know I worship at pagan altars and think ICE should be abolished and I support team Universal Basic Income (I have a plan for it!) and Nationalized Healthcare. All of those positions are things that could land me in a hot seat if someone HAPPENS to notice me or my books suddenly spike in sales.

But even as I write this (after turning off copilot which has worked its way even into the ultra basic program of freaking NOTEPAD. ARE YOU SERIOUS, MICROSOFT? STOP TRYING TO STEAL MY WORK!), I recognize that my position as a nobody won't protect me. That at some point in the very near future it won't matter how big or small I am, because even BEFORE the book banning bills, the obey-in-advance bend-the-kneee billionaires controlling basically everything upon which the modern framework of publishing exists will start pulling my books out of distribution for containing the wrong string of words fed into some AI bot set to search and destroy. People usually think I'm being dramatic when I talk about this. When I suggest that my career exists on the edge of a knife blade and could disappear at any moment--No, they say. That will never happen! That's ridiculous!

Fam, it already happens. 

It has BEEN happening. EVERY author publishing their own work is already living this life on the edge, waiting for some bot to suspend their account for ??????????????? reasons. If the feds tweet or truth social some EXUBERANT support of any kind of bookbanning on moral or anti-pornography grounds, it is going to be OVER for so, so, so many of us. 

Do you know how I know?

Because I can already lose my account for things I am not responsible for and cannot control, completely arbitrarily, and for basically any reason at all. All it takes is someone pirating one of my books that's supposed to be "exclusive" and putting it up for distribution at whatever the pirate-site-of-the-week is, and if an Amazon bot finds it, I'm done. Or even someone reporting my content for typos or explicit materials or whatever too many times. There's no real appeal system. The terms of service were violated (not even by me!!!!) and suddenly the biggest bookstore in the world has banned me from their shelves. At this point, too, they'll abscond with any unpaid royalties--between 60 and 90 days worth of income/sales. Even big name authors have run afoul of this nonsense--and only their big name author platform has saved them. 

I don't have that. There won't be any giant social media outcry saving me.

If Jeff Bezos is willing to roll over the editorial department of the Washington Post and dictate what will be published there, you think he's going to shed a single tear for self-pub authors when it's our turn? You think he'll even consider our existence at all, should he receive some benefit (like, I don't know, Tariff exemptions for the rest of his businesses?) for dropping us all into the circular file? Nah. We're small. We're disposable. We're no one.

Those of you howling the loudest about free speech won't even notice when the titles get pulled off your kindles. Because you only paid for a license--you don't own anything anymore, either, thanks digital revolution!--and they reserve the right to take it back.

My point is: Billionaire Mega Corps have already stripped away A LOT of my ability to exist as a creator outside of their terms of service contracts. 

I can't tell people my books exist without paying SOME piper. I can't even get my books PRINTED without playing by their rules. 

Nook Press rejected my files because I put a price on the cover, okay, fine, I removed the dollar sign. Lulu rejected my files because of rogue, invisible Times New Roman line breaks that wouldn't embed--sure, okay, I purchased and learned an entirely new formatting program so I could MAKE SURE there was no TNR anywhere in my files. Microsoft Word is making me jump through hoops to prevent Co-Pilot from chowing down on every word I write and feeding it into their Generative AI models (LITERALLY THIS IS MY IP WHY ARE YOU MAKING THIS SO HARD TO OPT OUT). Meta already helped themselves to my already illegally uploaded/distributed books for theirs--some of which were, you guessed it, under digital exclusivity contracts which now puts me at even greater risk. Patreon flags anything I post for review if it contains the word Spanking. (Sorry Kate and Sully, you and Nic and Will are going to be the first to go. Followed by Eve and Thor, probably.)

It doesn't even have to make it to actual legal law before my career goes up in smoke. It could happen TOMORROW with no warning and no recourse. So if you're out here telling anyone they're being overly dramatic about the situation right now, that they don't have to worry about the feds coming for them, I want you to know you have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what you're talking about. You are living in complete and utter ignorance of what the status quo ALREADY IS. Because it hasn't hurt you, right? So obviously it's not a real problem.

I sit here and STILL have to field nonsense about Dr. Seuss being cancelled when THE ESTATE ITSELF MADE A PERSONAL DECISION TO PULL THE BOOKS IN QUESTION, and publishing CONTINUES to privilege cis white male books and voices, but where are you when indie authors get swept up in overactive bot purges and book banning bills criminalizing librarians are brought to the floor? When the Government itself is ALREADY banning ENTIRE SWATHS of scientific and sociological research areas because a bot found a word prefixed by "trans" and it doesn't know the difference (as if that's even a reason to begin with.) You think that isn't censorship? That it's not an attack on free speech because something something YOUR TAX DOLLARS? 

Sure, Jan.

You're so worked up over some singular white guy getting deplatformed for being legitimately monstrous but nobody cares that Oligarchs already have a stranglehold on the speech and creative expression of the entire creative class, and are looking to tighten the noose even further through the wholesale theft that is Generative AI. 

If GOVERNMENT were doing its job, it would have stepped in to stop this before we got to this point--but as always, we're prioritizing corporations and profit over lives. Over FREEDOM.

Your Tax Dollars should be protecting speech, NOT helping to ban it and propping up Mega Corps.

The time to start organizing over this was a decade ago or more, when we stopped caring about monopolies and mergers and market regulation. The next best time to start yelling is now. While it's only the Oligarchs holding the sword against our creative necks and not, YET, the feds. 

Because I can tell you with certainty from my red state and our current legislative session, those regulatory book bans are coming. There are people in power who are DESPERATE to purge out works that contain any kind of push back against the Christian Conservative Agenda and they have never been in a better position to enact these kinds of laws. They're coming for us--and corporations like Amazon, etc? They'll be only too happy to help it along if it buys them a free pass to do ALL THE OTHER BUSINESS they want.

And being no one? It just means it will all be that much easier to snuff us out.

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Building Your Author Platform (A Twitter Thread)

I have been living this authorlife for nearly 15 years, friends, so when I say this, I hope very much you will take it to heart, because it is a lesson many of us had to learn the hard way--and there is no reason you should have to!

When you are building an author platform, keep in mind you want your audience to be READERS.

It is great to connect with other writers! You need writer friends! But you cannot JUST be talking to other WRITERS on your platform, you need to be building an audience of READERS.

Look, I get it. Writing is what you do, it's what I do, so it's easy to talk about! Of course!!! and to a limited extent, readers are interested in process--the behind the scenes look at what's happening that results in a novel. But that's only AFTER they have read and loved your work!

FIRST you need to persuade them that you have something WORTH READING.

Engage on topics that are thematically related to your work! Engage on topics where the interests overlap with what you're doing in your books!!! Engage with people who are INTERESTED IN THOSE THINGS!

You can talk about writing and process, you can even poke a little at craft but ALWAYS REMEMBER that your audience SHOULD NOT be primarily other writers. Your audience should be READERS.

Other writers, on the whole, aren't going to buy your books. If you're lucky, they'll support your books with some retweets and shout outs on whatever social media service they prefer, but if you want your book to have legs, it has to reach READERS.

READERS READERS READERS.

"But Amalia," you say. "Writers are readers too!"

YES WE ARE. (Or at least some of us are, anyway.) BUT.

We all have a lot of writer friends and it is flat out impossible--IMPOSSIBLE--to support all of them by buying and reading every one of their books.

We see THE MOST BOOKS. We are INUNDATED with books we feel like we have to read or want to read to support someone we love or are desperate to get our hands on because it looks amazing because we are EXTREMELY PLUGGED IN to what is RELEASING all the time!!!

Your fellow writers are going to be the hardest people to sell your book to, the hardest people to impress with your work, the hardest people to win over as fans because there are just SO MANY BOOKS CLAMORING FOR OUR ATTENTION, including our own!!!

Focus your efforts on building an audience and a platform OF READERS and save yourself the struggle of having to figure out how to retrofit the platform you've built to support your releases later.

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Tips for Writing Dialogue (A Twitter Thread from 2022)

It is BETTER to have TOO MANY dialogue tags telling readers who is talking than TOO FEW.

Too many--a reader's eye can skip over them as they're reading and they'll fade into the background.

TOO FEW and a reader is pulled out of the story with "Wait, what? Who said this??"

ALSO be cautious about breaking up your dialogue of a single speaker into multiple paragraphs without dialogue tags to indicate that the new paragraph is NOT someone else responding. Yes, you can have an unclosed quotation mark--but if the previous paragraph ends with internal narration or action, then the reader doesn't have anything to clue them in without a tag. You don't HAVE to start a new paragraph after an interjected internal thought/staging.

I totally overuse tags. I will "said" my way through every dang line of dialogue even when I have an action that will work for the beat/cadence pause I need instead. But the word "said" becomes invisible--excessive dialogue tagging is a risk you SHOULD take for clarity. (And something you can always pare back later in editing if it really is too much.)

One more dialogue tip:
It works best at the beginning and the end of a paragraph. Framing it inside a sandwich of action/thoughts/staging can result in the dialogue getting lost to the reader. Sometimes you need it, like if someone's frazzled or tripping but use sparingly.

These thoughts brought to you both by my current writing in which I am trying to rein myself in and let my action beats do a little more of the lifting, and also revisiting an old friend favorite read that lost me in the weeds of poorly framed dialogue this round.

A good, compulsive story with good characters/chemistry who you are rooting for desperately might overcome the technical issues in the actual writing as someone speeds through a book but--there's no reason to give readers an excuse like that to put it down, you know?

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Revisiting Forged by Fate, and Show vs. Tell

I'm revising FORGED BY FATE right now, for... well... reasons, and this book--there is so much of this book that I still love desperately, but in coming back to it twenty years after I started writing it, I've noticed some things that my baby authorself was doing, thinking it was THE RIGHT WAY TO WRITE that, well. Were kind of the opposite of helpful in getting my points across.

Let's talk about Show vs. Tell.

As a baby author, I was clearly determined to show everything! Instead of telling people how a character was feeling, I used physical responses. He hesitated. She closed her eyes. He tightened his jaw. She shifted away.

Listen. These kinds of small physical movements are all well and good--but there's a problem with relying on them as the sole means by which you communicate emotion. And that problem is this: By themselves they don't actually communicate the underlying emotion at all.

In Chapter Eight of FORGED BY FATE, there's a moment when Eve is still new and still struggling to understand the world and the people around her. She's with Adam in a cave where he and the other residents of the Garden have taken shelter, and he is--well, imposing himself on her, really.

 Eve shivered at his touch, and that seemed to please him. He raised his hand to her face, cupping her cheek and drawing his thumb along her cheekbone. She forced herself not to look away. Not to move. But everything inside her twisted. She wanted to crawl away into the darkness, but there were no shadows now to hide her. His face was so close she could feel his breath on her lips.

“Lord Adam!” She jumped, though the voice was familiar. Reu.

Adam closed his eyes for a moment, then turned his head slowly. “What is it?”

Now, Eve is new, so there's a certain amount of grace I need to give myself here, because trying to write someone who literally was only just created and is still in the process of understanding literally everything around her is AN UNREAL CHALLENGE to start with. But. Read that last line again:

Adam closed his eyes for a moment, then turned his head slowly. 

What is it actually telling us about Adam's response, emotionally? I mean, we might guess, as readers, what past me was trying to convey. Maybe he's tired. Maybe he's annoyed by the interruption. Maybe he's actually angry. Maybe he's just power-tripping, making Reu wait on principle. You, the reader, cannot actually know. BUT. Eve does. And the reason she knows is that he's touching her, and we know already from the text that when Adam is touching her, whether he realizes it or not, his feelings and thoughts bleed through the contact.

So why was baby author me holding back? 

Because of the age old mantra: Show, don't tell, a rule I was foolishly trying to live by to my detriment.

But showing, by itself, is IMPRECISE. I'm not communicating effectively what's happening, I'm leaving my readers to guess. And while there's nothing wrong with that, in the right circumstances--when the point of view character is guessing too, for instance--in this one, I was letting a mantra get in the way of clarity.

Eve shivered at his touch, and that seemed to please him. He raised his hand to her face, cupping her cheek and drawing his thumb along her cheekbone. She forced herself not to look away. Not to move. But everything inside her twisted. She wanted to crawl away into the darkness, but there were no shadows now to hide her. 

His face was so close she could feel his breath on her lips.

“Lord Adam!” She startled, though the voice was familiar. Reu.

Adam closed his eyes for a moment, then turned his head slowly, his body stiff with impatience. “What is it?”

Impatience. Now you, the reader, know precisely what emotion is motivating Adam's physical response, just like Eve. His patience is reaching a limit. Time for her is running out. Am I telling, by including that word? A little bit. But in telling, in giving that word to the reader, I'm making the passage STRONGER. My writing is clearer and more effective and Eve's response afterward, is given more support.

(And yeah, I changed Eve's jump response, too, because she didn't jump. Her response was small, a start of surprise. But baby author me hated the word startle and bent over backward to avoid its usage--again, to the detriment of clarity.)

Show, don't tell is a valuable piece of advice for writers. ALL TELLING is boring as heck! We all know that! But it isn't a hard and fast rule that we need to contort ourselves to accommodate. Let it be a MODERATOR, sure, but when it gets in your way, like almost every other "Rule" of writing--it's okay to throw it out.

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Glad Yule, friends!

Tune in next year for some fun announcements regarding what's coming down the pipe--or join me over on Patreon, and for as little as a dollar a month, you'll find out before the year is up :)

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A Note about the "Present Day" Timeline of Fate of the Gods

It occurred to me while writing Concealing Fate (Pre-Order Now!) that I probably needed to clarify the when of Eve and Garrit's courtship a little bit more precisely. Things have changed so much, so quickly--the way we meet one another, the means by which we communicate. Even five or ten years makes a huuuuuuuuge difference to a story set in the now. And the now of when I wrote something and the now that is NOW, when it is released into the world are--well. Always going to be different. A lag of between a few months and several years, at least.

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I started writing Forged by Fate in MY present day of 2002/2003. Garrit and Eve would have been a handful of years older than me, then, because they'd both graduated from college and were living their Adult/New Adult lives. That was when I STARTED it. But when I FINISHED it, finally figuring out how all the pieces should fit together into a whole novel, and then a whole trilogy, it was 2009.

There is a lot of difference between those two sets of years, technologically, socially, maybe even culturally. The biggest one being that I'd caught up to Eve and Garrit, age-wise. And since they were my contemporaries then, I just went with it, and kept the book in what was ostensibly a present-day setting--contemporary to me.

Of course Forged by Fate didn't release until 2013, several MORE years after that. I fudged some of it with Eve being, by nature, more of a traditionalist. When you've lived however many thousands of years, adapting to technological change probably gets a little exhausting--and both she and Adam show a preference for the physical over the ethereal of the digital in a way that's not so different from the gods who cling to the trappings of the times and periods when their power was at its height. (But now I digress.)

Fast forward to the year 2019, and I'm writing Concealing Fate, a prequel to the "Present-Day" timeline of Forged by Fate, which probably actually begins in 2009, four years prior to its publication. This is the story of Garrit and Eve in college together--at University, in Paris--and, if Forged by Fate starts somewhere around 2009, that means Concealing Fate begins at least two years earlier, in 2006/2007 or so.

More than a decade ago.

I don't know about you, but by that time in my life I'd gotten a cell phone finally, but only just, and after fighting with my parents about the need for one--to put behind me the endless gifts (and purchases) of phone cards for long-distance calls to avoid having to worry about paying for long-distance service in my dorm room (I can't tell you how many times I would call one of my siblings and after they answered, we'd hang up, and they'd call me back on THEIR long-distance service to save me the minutes) and then to avoid having to have a landline in the apartment I shared with my roommate, who had embraced the cell phone life years prior. I was late to that game, and Eve is slightly later, still--too poor in Paris to afford a cell phone even if she'd wanted one.

(Remember when we paid for long-distance calls by the minute? Now it's all bundled into your service unless you go out of your way to refuse it, even on a landline.)

There's no texting in Concealing Fate. No Facebooking--though there could have been, I suppose, since Facebook opened to anyone in late 2006 (it isn't clear that French Universities were included before then from my research), but if you're Garrit DeLeon, you probably went out of your way to NOT be on it, regardless, and Eve being Eve... I think it's fair to say she probably wasn't an early adopter.

In Concealing Fate, the question of identity--and revealing one's self to a romantic partner--is pretty central to the story. Could Garrit have attempted to Google Eve as Abby Watson in 2006? Looked her up in some student directory? Sure. And probably he did, giving into temptation at some point--off-page.

If the events of Concealing Fate had happened TODAY, it wouldn't even be a question. The history of their lives would have been all over the internet to be found by one another. They'd both have cell phones, almost certainly, and texting would probably be a foundational pillar of their communication and engagement with one another--or at least Garrit would make the attempt even if Eve wasn't entirely all in on responding. They'd be connecting on Instagram and Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook. And that's the difference more than ten years makes. The reason why I needed to write this post to clarify--

In Concealing Fate, the "Present Day" isn't now.

It hasn't been for a long time.

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From Asgard, With Love (Plus Cover Art!)

I had one goal for myself in November--because I knew I didn't have 50K in me after the hyperproductivity of the summer, and going into the holidays is always kind of a mess for getting anything done on this end, in addition--I wanted to finish FROM ASGARD, WITH LOVE before the end of the month.

Now, you should know that when I added this project into my calendar for the year, I thought it had maybe 10,000 words left in it. It was supposed to be a novella. A companion to POSTCARDS FROM ASGARD, but not a true sequel. Nothing too heavy or intensive. (And before THAT it was supposed to be a short story--but I digress.) Just an easy thing to finish and release. (lol lol lol!)

When all was said and done and I typed The End this month, this not-so-light, super-intensive, definitely-not-a-novella had cost me an additional 56,000 words. So yeah. As usual, I'm delivering a much longer than anticipated installment in a series that wasn't supposed to be a whole lot of work for me.

(I should really stop pretending I have any idea of what my stories are going to become, length-wise.)

I have been poking at FROM ASGARD, WITH LOVE for going on six years now. Six. Years. This isn't something I'd normally pay that much attention to, but this particular project's beginning sticks in my mind a little bit more, um, hauntingly. You see, just after I'd started writing it, after moving into my grandfather's house, he had a stroke. And after the very intensive months of his recovery from that stroke, he had another. That one, he didn't ever recover from, and a matter of weeks later, he'd passed away.

As you can imagine, and you'll understand more completely why when you read FROM ASGARD, WITH LOVE, I had to put it on hold for a while after that. I'd come back to it every year, write a couple thousand more words before I needed to set it aside again. Sometimes because I was under contract and on deadline for another project, and sometimes because I just couldn't face it or the memories it brought.

But this year? This year, for the first time, I felt like it was time. Like I was ready to face it and finish it and get it out into the world. I needed to write it, and the writing of it had to be completed HERE, in the house where it had all begun.

And Grandpa--this one is for you.

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FROM ASGARD, WITH LOVE is coming to you in 2019!

This is a companion to POSTCARDS FROM ASGARD, taking place some time after it, and with a peek at Thjalfi and Gwen living their happily ever after, but it's not really a true sequel. Thematically--Well. Let's just say it's not quite so light and fluffy. I hope you'll love it anyway!

If you're subscribed to The Amaliad, you got to see this cover first. You even got to read about how this book made me metaphorically bleed all over the pages! (Yes, this is me suggesting that if you haven't subscribed already, you should do so! again!)

Don't worry, I see you out there, you dedicated Orc Saga readers desperately awaiting news on Orc3. Wondering why/how I could write this without writing that first. There's a real and legitimate reason--but that's a whole other blogpost for another day. Just know I haven't forgotten you and I'm still working on Orc3, too. And in the meantime, grab THE QUEEN AND HER BROOK HORSE. I know not all of you have read it yet :)

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Branching Out

It's funny how things turn out.

Newsletter subscribers already know I've been writing some contemporary romance--it started as a just for fun, and just for me project that I poked at during my downtime while I was working on By Helen's Hand. An idea that just wouldn't let me go, with characters who were electric and alive, and I couldn't entirely ignore.

Well, nearly three years later, I finished that manuscript, finally and at last. It became my burn-out recovery just for fun, just for me project--the project that I kept returning to, that kept calling to me, because it was just so much FUN. And after Daughter of a Thousand Years, I needed something fun. Something just for me, without any pressure or expectation.

In a lot of ways, writing Daughter of a Thousand Years felt like ripping myself open, but writing Kate & Sully, my first contemporary romance, and poking at its sequel, has been like stitching myself back up again. Healing the wounds that had been left open to fester.

I'm SO PROUD of Daughter of a Thousand Years. I worked HARD on that book, and I'm glad that I wrote it--definitely I think it is one of the most important books I've written, and it was valuable to me personally if nothing else--but I am LOVING writing these contemporary romances.

I forgot how much fun writing could be, and writing romance gave that joy back to me.

But never in a million years would I have thought I'd be here, deriving so much pleasure from writing in a genre that was so divorced from the things I loved--mythology, history, fantasy. If you had asked me in 2013 if I would ever consider writing a contemporary romance (without any kind of fantastic element) I would have laughed at the idea.

But when I look at my other work--Postcards from Asgard, Fate of the Gods, and Daughter of a Thousand Years to name just the ones that are published--maybe it isn't so strange. It's not THAT big of a jump from writing contemporary stories with mythic and fantastic elements to writing contemporary stories without them, after all. And I can't deny that Postcards from Asgard is absolutely a romance. I can't deny that Fate of the Gods has an epic love triangle at its heart as well as a significant contemporary story. And Emma's half of Daughter of a Thousand Years is unquestionably contemporary, too.  So maybe it was only a matter of time before I found my way here.

This doesn't change anything in regard to Orc 3. It doesn't change anything about my plans for this year, really, except that a little bit more is happening in the background while I try to find the path forward for this new side of my authorself. It's just going to be another facet--because I still love myth and fantasy. I still love Bolthorn and Arianna and the world I built for them. I still love all the things I loved before, and I imagine I will absolutely want to come back to them, that I will never actually leave them at all, judging by the number of projects that are not contemporary romance in my writing spreadsheet right now.

But I have found something new that I love. Something new that is feeding me something I desperately need right now. And I hope that maybe, when and if, it might be something you'll love too.

The author journey is always evolving, for me, it seems. And I can't tell you how grateful I am for all of you who have been journeying, all this time, alongside me! I hope you'll follow me on this new adventure, too.

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