This is how bad laws get through without a vote. Someone gives a middle manager power in a bureaucracy to make up his own rules without getting upper management to approve the plans, and without checking to see if those rules contradict anything else on the books about, say, human rights or civil liberties. And now that it’s in place, it will probably take a lawsuit and court order to get the ruling struck down.

The law just recently went into effect, and as of yet, no reports have surfaced of it being enforced. But it would be great if ya’ll Canadian readers might ring up your local MP and ask them to look into why the Ministry of Transportation has chosen to discriminate exclusively against trans people.

I hope that using DLC works for Nintendo to rebuild fan loyalty, and my first thought was how on Twitter, I tweet what games I’m playing. Once I’m done with a game, there’s no reason to keep promoting it, so digital content adding to the original game is one way to get me to continuously promote old games. It’s a case out of sight and out of mind, so the DLC plan helps keep the names popping up n my Twitter stream. As an example, new DLC packs for Forza 4 keep me buying new cars, so I still have new reasons to play the game, and thus to tweet: “I’m playing Forza 4 again.” In this way the product stays fresh even after it should be considered stale.

I’m already in the habit of tweeting a list of my top 8 artists as compiled by Last.FM, and as my listening is all done on my phone, pretty much my whole music day is tracked. (Sometimes I shift to the Zune Player on my desktop, or I forget to activate the scrobbler while I’m listening.) So I’m promoting music both on Twitter and through my Last.FM profile every day. It may have been a long time since I reviewed Janelle Monae, but I still promote her albums every day thanks to these listing tweets.

Thinking about that got me thinking about how I promote books, which is not the same thing as WebLit. When a WebLit friend has a series, every chapter or episode is a promotion, and if I’m online and catch it, then sure, I’ll retweet that. So the serials have a built-in method of generating word of mouth, if the quality of the serial is good enough to warrant excitement. (Or if the writer has other writer friends willing to help them promote.)

But whether we’re talking print or ebooks, I don’t tend to bring up a book title after I finish it. This is true of good books and bad, and the only exceptions are the books that were SO GOOD, I had to keep promoting them even months later. There’s a few books that spring to memory that qualify for the distinction, and I’m happy to say there’s as many indie titles as there are pro titles from big name authors. But if a book is merely good instead of mind blowing, it gets relegated to the same status as the books I despised. Either way, I’m like, “Let us never speak of this again.”

So this gets me thinking, how do indie authors find a way to make their product “fresh” past, say, six months? Reviews dry up after the initial rush, and even people who liked a book forget to keep promoting the title after some time goes by. So what’s the DLC-like answer to interest people in talking up older titles? This is not so easy a question as “how do you promote a title?” This is more complex, how do you convince someone who read and liked the work to keep mentioning the book even after they’re done with the product?

One possible answer is the series, which is to say, each new book gives the old readers a chance to promote over again. But ideally, the idea would be that you’d want readers to be tweeting or posting a Facebook status like: “Man, I cannot wait for this guy’s next book to come out! More people should check out the first book.” This is easy right after they finish the book, but what would convince them to say the same thing a few months down the road, even though the next release is months away, just to help the writer out?

As a reader, I know I should do more to help the authors I read. I do tweet updates for their books throughout my slow reading periods. So they are getting more than one tweet, for sure. But aside from posting those tweets and my final reviews, I’m much like the next reader in forgetting to keep up the long term marketing efforts, even for my favorite authors. So there has to be some way developed for writers to occasionally remind fans to spread the word without doing regular begathons.

As a writer, I’ve never found a compelling incentive to get folks to promote my stuff, and as a reader I draw a blank on what method might help remind me to keep pimping a standalone fiction book after I’m done with it. I do not think better incentives or bribes are the answer. It’s my opinion that if I have to resort to bribing readers to get them to promote, the title is probably not very good.

This is not to say incentive programs with active fan bases cannot be successful. But this sort of thing works a lot better with a free online serial story than it does for a set of books bought at a vendor. And while I respect a lot of WebLit writers for the amount of work that goes into their free efforts, I find it sad that their readers often hold opinions like, “Even though you’re giving me the story free, I still expect you to pay me in some way before I will promote you.” The writers give so much, and yet the fans still want a better reason to promote besides helping the artist to find a larger audience. But then this isn’t about the artist or their welfare. An incentive program in exchange for promotions always puts the readers in the position of asking “what’s in it for me?”

You mean aside from the hours of free entertainment you’ve been getting? Do writers have to give much more to earn a brief show of support? Do they need to resort to regular bribes to keep your affections?

But again, this is a problem beyond just getting a promotion. This is a question for someone who has already promoted on their own out of the goodness of their own heart and without them knowing the author. That same person who loved the book is highly unlikely to still be talking up the book in six month’s time. This is normal. But how can we flip the script and make this abnormal, so that reading fans still promote older titles just to help keep the fan bases growing?

Or put another way, how the hell do book authors keep a fire lit under my ass to promote for them long-term without resorting to some ridiculous method of bribery? Is there a way to keep reminding me to say “I loved Frankie and Formaldehyde by M. Jones,” or “Rot by Michele Lee is still one of the best zombie novellas I’ve ever read, and it still made me cry on a third reading”? And if there is something that can be done, how do we take advantage of it without overusing it and burning out readers with promotion fatigue?

The thing is, there’s a streaming copy of the film online, with endorsement from…interesting sources. Anywho, I RT’ed the link and set aside the url to work on some editing, and then I sat through an hour of the two hour and eighteen minute documentary before I had to pause and take a break. I missed the actual intermission by twenty minutes, so my high limit for shock was met about twenty minutes before the director was ready to give me a rest. This film is an endurance event for all the travesties on display, but during this survey of loss, the director also captures the way people try to cope with life in an ongoing war zone. There’s moments of theater, a comedy, even, and many readings from poets. These are also interspersed with the lyrical chants of the resistance fighters, and with the military’s continued efforts to try and win the Kashmir people over despite all the harm their occupation continues to cause.

I won’t rant at you that you have to see this or you have no soul. This film is very hard to watch. But I really want to help the filmmakers as a show of support for an important film, and to protest religious censorship, in all its ugly forms. I disagree with the critics that this documentary was anti-India. It’s a condemnation of solving any social problem with military occupancy. That’s a sentiment I very strongly agree with, and so I feel the need to link you to the original article, and to the film itself. Whether you choose to watch the video is up to you, but I’d politely request that you check out the article and see how religious intolerance is able to effectively stifle a film for being “divisive” when what it’s really saying is “What’s been tried in the past isn’t working, so why can’t we talk about alternatives yet?” So, even if you can’t give the film a viewing, please check out the article. It’s like a ten minute read if you’re real slow like me, but for you faster folks, that’s more like five.

Oh, and I can’t offer a star-type score for this film. It’s an important story that transcends scores. Is it pleasant? No. But is it important? Yes, and this is going to stay with me for a while.

If it sounds too violent or graphic for you to handle it, it’s cool. But I wanted to get this link out and help spread awareness. Standard rants and rambles will return later.

No, I’m not really sure why they just gave up all our rights so callously. But I’m angry enough about it that I’m willing to join an an organized protest. So I’m staying off of Twitter for one day as part of #Twitterblackout. It won’t change anything, and I’m sure Twitter is seeing no appreciable dip in the flow of scheduled tweets from people hucking their wares, as well as the assortment of people who didn’t get the memo that Twitter has embraced censorship on the grounds that “We have to follow the rules.”

Twitter did this right after a protest was organized to blackout web sites all over the world in protest of SOPA and PIPA. (You may recall, my sites were all blacked out that day.) The folks at Twitter think that in spite of all these protests for free speech, what’s in their best corporate interests is to comply with any take down order from ANY government authority. Trial? No, not needed. Twitter will voluntarily silence dissidents as a fucking courtesy to the evil dictators. Hey, just a side effect of doing business in a global society. Sure, it means embracing censorship wherever a government justifies it, but hey, it’s not like Twitter is a global news source of human right violations or anything.

This isn’t what pisses me off, because big businesses are always capable of pointing at a rulebook to justify cruel and inhumane policies. No, what pissed me off was watching another blogger comment that she didn’t see a reason to be upset, because this isn’t about America. It’s about other countries. This right after the Occupy protests and your press being forced into “press pens” so they couldn’t wander around and actually report on the abuses the police were making on civilians practicing their constitutional rights to protest and practice free speech. And now the company who helped Americans report on all those police abuses when the media did not, JUST VOLUNTEERED TO WITHHOLD TWEETS FOR ANY GOVERNMENT.

Yet, this other blogger is able to practice cognizant disassociation to keep up her deluded views that this isn’t something that will affect her in America. It’s only foreign countries with dictatorships that will abuse this request system. And besides, this isn’t about people being abused by governments. This is about Twitter needing to grow as a corporation. And they can’t flourish if they don’t agree to help certain governments with voluntary censorship. Therefore, even if she’s agreed that censorship is very bad, here it only makes sense for Twitter to make a policy that no one had yet asked for, nor had the right to ask for yet. Because removing any possibility of due process for Twitter’s clients is good for business…somehow. Anywho, censorship of this sort could never happen in her country, in her opinion, so there’s no reason to feel outrage. Why? BECAUSE IT DOESN’T AFFECT HER.

And this is why I keep losing my shit and asking “What’s wrong with you people?” Even when a threat is presented to you in very clear terms, it’s not a really real threat unless I can make it about you. So I can tell you how anti-gay countries will request Twitter to shut down the accounts of gay activists a few weeks before they’re arrested and killed quietly, their voices voluntarily stripped by a corporation who promises “transparency” in explaining their reasons for censoring. I could tell you about dictators who will shut down political activists and send them to prison for life, simply for asking for the same human rights that Americans piss away day after day with no sense of concern.

But unless I can tell you “This is how Twitter’s policy could bite you in the ass,” you don’t care. I just pointed out how it could still happen in America, probably to shut down the next version of the Occupy movement before it can properly organize on Twitter. But that will not affect you, only a few “malcontents.” To make you concerned enough to get off your lazy asses, I have to come up with a reason for you to be worried about yourself. Every problem has to be boiled down to your personal narrative, or it’s not worthy of time on the ol’ attention radar. “Can’t hurt me? Hell, that’s not even a blip.”

And that’s how your governments on both sides of the aisle have been flying under the radar for years, stripping your rights while you were watching TV or surfing on Facebook. Because even as they’ve taken rights away from people, you can’t see how removing these rights from a few folks means we’ve all lost them. Until it happens to you, it doesn’t count as a real travesty. Which means the vast majority of people ignoring these problems are sociopaths who still won’t stop calling themselves the good guys.

So turn your head away from the minor protest over nothing, again. Ignore the people who aren’t on Twitter today, and just keep pretending that these policies won’t be used in your country to silence critics of your abusive class-based society. But of course, those people will be minorities anyway, not real people either. So if they go away, they weren’t in your followers, and it doesn’t affect you.

It’s just another day in paradise, right?

Then you’re either naive or in denial. Because what really happened is, people started sending threats to a teenage girl because she’s an Atheist and had a prayer taken down out of her school. Separation of church and state? Whatever, hippie chick, there are traditions to be respected! (Traditions made by organized religions after that pesky idea about separation of church and state, and traditions that romanticize conformity and oppression as actually being nurturing and educating.)

(EDIT: The more I think about this, the more this real life event SCREAMS for a YA author to spin it into a courageous tale of a non-believer standing strong against Christian persecution. A 16-year-old protagonist, clearly in the right, being brave in the face of tradition and righteous indignation. You don’t even need no romantic angle to make this into a solid book with a great heroine. Come on, writers. I know one of you is bold enough to cover this story and give Atheist teens a book to rave about. Please, make this happen.)

And you say, “Well but that’s a few religious fanatics.” Nuh-uh, this girl has to be escorted to class by cops because EVERYONE hates her. Forget a “few rotten apples,” because this whole place is full of rotten sentiments posing as religious devotion. I find it sad how many people demonstrate their love of God by making threats against other people. It’s even worse coming from people who supposedly believe in turning the other cheek. But being honest, the day I see morally incensed Christians actually practice what they preach about turning the other cheek, I’ll be flabbergasted and speechless.

But let’s move on to story two, where a blogger is attacked as “the worst person in the world.” Pretty freaking harsh, so what did they do? Did he advocate genocide or make a case for eating baby seals in front of their sobbing mothers? No, he didn’t provide links to the HELLO KITTY items he was blogging about, and the fans of the merchandise are flaming him with comments like: “I don’t know how your wife can put up with you. I think it’s utterly disgusting and you’re not fit to live on earth the way you treat us.” (emphasis mine)

REALLY? For not linking to a mass-produced item that you can fucking Google in 3.6 fucking seconds from the search window of your browser? And what the fuck is wrong with people that every day they take first world shit and turn it into a reason to be rancid inhumane shitheads? The first story shows how religious dogma can turn ugly even as people preach about wanting to earn God’s love. But the second story is more disturbing because the “religion” that this man ran afoul of is the Hello Kitty fandom. And they’re wishing death on him with just as much venom as the people threatening the teenage Atheist. Neither group has a valid excuse, but looking at the second story, how can any fan not cringe and say “Okay, that’s taking our fandom too far?” So how come this poor guy is getting comments like this regularly? In short, what the hell is wrong with you people? Why is it that you can turn your first world problems into the worst travesty that ever happened, ever, but you can’t recognize when real travesties have occurred?

And really, I don’t care if you have a defense. I shut off comments so I don’t have to deal with “You don’t understand the power of Sanrio, heathen! We are legion, and you will respect our authoritai!”

What I understand is, some of you nerds have taken getting incensed to a whole new level of crazy. I rant and rage all the time, but I never go to any blogger’s site and wish death on them. I never tell someone stupid shit like “you’re the worst person ever!” Because there’s Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and quite a few other competitors who come in my mind before Joe Blow, Hello Kitty blogger who doesn’t link items.

And since we’re covering threats, an Atheist teenager who doesn’t want religion shoved in her face is also not the worst person ever. In fact, that chica ought to be getting the key to the city for her bravery in the face of religious intolerance. (Yeah, you read right. Intolerance to a lack of faith is still religious intolerance just as surely as Christians locking Muslims or Jews out of a community is.)

People, you have got to stop getting pissy with everyone over little shit. And no, don’t come to me that my rants are little shit. I speak for a group with depressingly high suicide rates who suffer from physical assault and rapes. In addition to this group, I also speak about racial and gender inequality, and about child abuse. All of these topics are real problems with deep long-term side effects for the victims. People are left emotionally scarred by real discrimination and abuse. You want examples? Well, I can think of one teen girl who may now need therapy, off the top of my head. (Or at the top of this post, for those of you with short term memory loss.)

Before you fly off the handle about someone not respecting you or your cult, stop and ask what the harm of their infraction against you is. Religious people, you REALLY need to adopt this policy, because there is no excuse for your intolerance to disbelief. I believe in God, and I promise you, God has never suffered a broken bone from an Atheist saying “I don’t believe.” I believe this so much, I married an Atheist, and I never try to convert him or his sister. I can respect their beliefs without making a big deal out of mine. Can you? You may say you can, but the actions of a lot of you make your vows of tolerance hollow, at best.

Some of you may claim that society will fail if we don’t respect your views. I disagree. I think you want to exclude everyone from society who does not share your views, and I think your excluding and shunning are much more harmful to the fabric of society than the Atheists who just want to be left alone. They aren’t the ones trying to pull away from the weave of society because no one else is good enough to live by your standards. (Standards established by racist and sexist men who thought women were property and people were cattle who needed to be corralled into behaving.)

And as for you Hello Kitty fans…seriously, how can people who love an emblem of fluffy cuteness and sharing and friendship still be as thoroughly toxic and vile as a member of the CCC? If you can find reasons to call other Hello Kitty fans “the worst person ever,” then you should seek therapy. Probably look into anger management too.

There’s nothing wrong with being angry for a good reason, but some of you sheltered people need a reality check in the worst way.

“Every woman artist has to kill her own grandmother. She perches on our shoulder whispering, ‘Don’t embarrass the family’.”
~Erica Jong

You regular readers know I hate writing advice and writing rules lists. I think of them as make work for writers who’ve run out of interesting things to say and are instead trying to find something to offer out to cover their awkward silences. So you wouldn’t expect me to come up with a list of guidelines for writerly success. But today, I have some advice for women writers: do not be ashamed of your voice, and do not be afraid to say things in public that would offend your mother.

This runs counter to the advice of about a billion social media gurus, most of whom only have one book, and that’s a writing advice self-help book. All of these people have a non-fiction book, and they advise fiction authors about how to succeed, as if the methods of marketing in the neurotic world of self-help will work exactly the same in the world of fiction writing. They won’t, and if you’re a fiction writer, most of their advice will hamper your efforts, not help. But of all their lousy advice, their comments to women may be the most damaging and useless.

Lots of women social gurus will tell you “Don’t say anything on social media that you wouldn’t want your mother to read.” But let me pose a question to you: if you’re a romance or erotica writer, and your writing persona is a milquetoast presentation that would make mother so proud, what kind of image are you sending to your readers? “I baked cookies with dear hubby and read to my two dear sweet children, Nathaniel and Thadeus. Please, buy my book Whipping Princes Leia’s Cooter!”

Now if you’re selling Christian fiction and want to be seen as the female equivalent of Ned Flanders by readers, then okily-didyum-dokily, you go on and be a mealy mouthed good girl and make your momma proud. But if you’re a horror author whose last book contained gruesome and gory acts that made your mother queasy, then why would you want your writing persona to be so out of phase with your writing voice?

More to the point, do you think the men in your field are practicing self-censorship like this? No freaking way are they letting momma control their mouths, and neither should you. In fact, if you want to compete with the men, then you’ve got to get that polite bit out of your mouth and unleash your inner bitch to come close to the audacity and bravado of male authors. If you come to their literary forums talking meek and polite, these guys won’t even hear you over the sound of their own gladhanding. You have to speak up to break into the old boys’ network. Firmly, and maybe even using some words that would make your mother gasp.

I’m not saying drain a bottle of rum and drunk post a list of things that piss you off. That’s my shtick, so you need something to help you stand out. But seriously, this self-censorship isn’t helping your creativity, and it isn’t helping you to differentiate yourself from all the other women in your field with near identical presentations.

And if you don’t think it’s a problem to have a voice close to someone else’s, just look at what happened with me and that other Zoe. We talked so much alike about all the same topics that when I wrote a bad review on a romance book, the writer’s fans attacked the other Zoe, thinking we were the same people. Even when we were BOTH saying publicly “We’re not the same people,” some folks were still insisting “But look at how similar you are!” And, that’s a problem.

We’ve sorted that out since then, I think. But it’s because we no longer talk about the same things, and only the most unobservant reader would mistake my blog for the blog of the other Zoe. And that’s what I’m telling you to think about. What makes your author personality different from all the other women writers? Do you try to stand out and be different at all? Or do you follow the social media guidelines and try to fit in? Because if you’re fitting in, you’re also blending in, and readers are losing you in the crowd. Politeness, then, is not a mask to help you sell more copies, but a camouflage that makes readers lose your unique message. You’re just another polite tree in the forest of indies, and instead of looking for new “trees,” readers will look for familiar names and voices that stand out.

Which is why you need to do something besides follow the advice of some lady whose only literary success came from exploiting the uncertainty of other authors. That lady is selling to an entirely different market than you are, and her advice probably won’t apply to your field. Which is not to say you can’t pick up a few of their ideas, but the kind of ideas you want to avoid are any which will stifle your voice in the name of social politeness.

And ladies, there’s another facet to this. Look at the writing world, and look at how many fields are dominated by men. Look at how many men make comments that they can’t find any women in the field who “really stand out.” Part of that is most assuredly gender bias making them deaf to women’s voices, but women authors don’t need to help that perception by never speaking up or saying anything that risks causing offense. Talking like that will lead you into obscurity as surely as writing a lousy book will.

One more thing. If your mother is on your friends feed and she’s commenting that some of your updates are making her feel uncomfortable, tell her to back off. Do it politely if you’re on good terms and want to stay that way. But be your own person and ask for your own creative space. If your mother truly respects you, she’ll understand and leave you be.

If you’re an adult and you still let your mother tell you what to think, then the field of writing is not for you. This is an art field where the whole point is stepping out on your own to find your voice. If your writer voice is always dictated by your mother’s wishes, then you’re a failure as an artist, no matter how much sales success you find. Just as every man has to step out of the shadow of his father, you women need to let go of your mothers and be your own women. And please, don’t worry. You’re modern women, so you’re plenty strong enough for the task.

Have faith in yourself, and don’t be afraid to step on a few toes on your way to greatness. That’s my advice to you new women writers, and I think it’s a lot more valuable than “Don’t embarrass your family.”

But I’m assessing my previous pace and goals, and I don’t want to go back to that. Hell, when I have the revved up days of blogging or typing, it hurts my wrists when I’m only going for 2-4 hours instead of my old 8-14 hour schedule.

I really don’t know what projects I’m going to work on after completing the current crop of titles, but just what I have on my plate makes contemplating the rest too hard. I can only mentally juggle so much and still have time for casual reading and gaming.

But it seems nothing can kill certain stories in me. Some characters aren’t willing to give up, even if I was. They want to tell their stories, and they pick at me worse than my nicotine addiction ever did. I have to write them, even if no one wants to read my crap. But….but, some people do want to read my crap. Some people even open their wallets and pay for that crap. I have no idea how to handle promotion to you folks, and so I still won’t. I know this is harder on readers waiting for random releases when there’s no hint from me that this or that book dropped. But this is still just my hobby, and with all due respect to my regular buyers, once my previous promotions stirred you to get a copy, everyone else still ignored me. And man, if you six or so regular buyers ever abandon me, I am so, so fucked.

For the record, I have a lot, lot more readers than those six. Sales could always be better, but I’m still getting orders at both Smashwords and Amazon. (Nothing from Lulu, but that’s almost always true.) Every quarter, Smashwords sends me some money via PayPal. Not great money, but certainly not bad for a complete nobody. If anything, the continued sales even without my pushing shows that some titles can carry their own weight.

I wish I had more confidence, so I could make some grand proclamation about how my future releases will validate me as a real artist. It isn’t that I don’t view my stories as art, but I expect around the same level of success for all my future projects. Which I suppose is why I came around to the idea of sometimes writing bad books on purpose, like I did with my NaNoWriMo efforts. (Two of which got favorable reviews. The third is unmarketable, apparently.)

But I’m no good at the whole “I’m the greatest writer ever” spiel. I don’t write in any one field, so I can’t claim dominance or proficiency in any of them either. I’ll never be “the queen of ____,” and nothing I’ve published seems worthy of blockbuster status. I’ll tell you a secret: nothing in my head or my trunk is worthy of a mainstream bestseller either. I got no spy novels, no noir mysteries, no timeless romances; there’s no mainstream story I’m sitting on that’s going to make me a hundred million dollars. Don’t think that doesn’t frustrate me. And don’t think I didn’t try over and over to do stuff that was more mainstream. I did, and man, did that shit suck ass. Like Dan Brown, but less interesting.

But maybe writing mainstream is asking for too much from me. There’s so many writers covering the tropes that matter to the mainstream. So maybe asking me to also write the same kind of characters to please the market is missing the point of my protest. I want to write the stories that mainstream publishers won’t touch. I want stories about people like me, and about other people who feel shut out of the mainstream.

I won’t be popular because of what I want to write. Sometimes that will be because people don’t want to put up with my trans main characters. Other times it will be because I skip the romantic triangle and go for advanced romantic geometry. I’m planning more gay characters, and that’s an instant no for a large percentage of straight readers. Finally, there will be times when I’ll be unpopular because I do things with fictional minors that make readers uncomfortable.

But then that’s my point all along, to push you out of your comfort zone. If you don’t like being challenged and you can only read books that validate your opinions, then I am totally not the artist for you. But if you really mean all of that “rah rah support the little guy” cheering you do, then is there any harm at looking through my less offensive titles? Sure, I probably wrote one or two books that you’ll hate, but not everything I wrote has the same tone or message. I’ve done sci-fi, comedies, fantasy, horror, and even the occasional bit of literary fiction with no genre influences.

And if you still can’t find anything in my collection worth reading, well, better luck next year. But if you’re turning down EVERYTHING from my collection, odds really aren’t good that you’ll like my future releases. Cause I’m not going to start covering more palatable characters or topics. In fact, as my writing progresses, I’ve started poking around in some ugly places that few people want to explore. But somebody has to, because way too much writing is dedicated to the pleasant and banal reinforcement of mainstream beliefs. Even if nobody buys my shit, I believe there is still a need for indie-alternative writing. Someone has to write from the other side of the tracks, even if so few people cross the tracks to visit my rickety digital bookshop. (Right next door to Alice’s Internet Café.)

I just…sometimes, I wish someone with mainstream literary clout would say, “I think Zoe is right!” Sure, it wouldn’t do much for my sales, or even for my self-esteem. But then I could say, “Well, at least ____ _____ knows where I’m coming from.”

And also? I hope they can get my last name right. Cause it would suck if they name dropped the other Zoe, and they were talking about me.

If what I had in my mouth was small and mostly liquid, then it wasn’t so gross to swallow because it’s like having a mouthful of thick saltwater. Really not that bad. But some mornings I’d suck back a huge patch of leather booger PLUS a huge wad of viscous snot with an irony taste of blood and pus. This is going in a toilet, cause no fucking way is that crap going into me for digestion. I don’t care if it’s mostly protein, I still don’t want it. I feel confident that most people would agree with me if said nasty clot was in their mouths. Semen is actually nicer, and I spit that out too. (Sorry guys, I’m no swallower. That shit is nasty.)

So, back about two years ago, when cold season hit, I started taking Vicks. I’d done it before, leading to a one year addiction, and quitting wasn’t easy. That’s because without Vicks, breathing through my nose requires constant playing with my nose to clear it. So I can sit there and pick stuff out or snort water and let the water loosen stuff before I blow it out. Either way, I’m still sticking my fingers up my nose. So lady-like, right? But with Vicks, I spray, wait, and sploosh, one minty booger to play Spit or Swallow? with. And as an added bonus, for the next six hours, no boogers at all. How could I not want to be addicted to breathing free without picking my nose all the time?

All this talk of snot and boogers is actually a segue into my real topic, making people uncomfortable. I’ve had some reviews, both public and personal lately, where people said they wouldn’t read my stuff because it made them feel awkward, and they don’t read anything that pushes them out of their comfort zones. More recently, though, I was talking to a sci-fi writer who was complaining about fantasy books showing up in his precious sci-fi category at Amazon. I reminded him that some writers were fusing fantasy and sci-fi, and his reply was he knew, and all of those books were “unreadable crap.”

This isn’t true. What’s true is, this writer has a personal comfort level for his genre, and nothing outside his market is worth his time. I would question the quality of a writer who can only draw experience from one writing field, and who as a reader refuses to acknowledge the talent of writers in other fields.

I do not consider myself a writer of any one field, but when it comes to my reading, I’ve always been evenly split between fantasy and horror. I’ll also read romance, teen romance, YA of many flavors, and yes, sci-fi. A lot of great white hype tropes in all of these fields are dull to me, so I look for books at the fringes of these genres, the fusion stuff that other people go, “Oh, that? That wasn’t a real fantasy/horror because of ____.”

Which is how I found Anne Rice, because lots of people said her vampires weren’t horror. They aren’t. It’s totally a dark fantasy, and people calling it horror were judging the series by the wrong standards. It isn’t written to scare the shit out of you. It’s written to keep history buffs turning pages. And it’s really great history until you realize that it’s ALL history lessons told by whiny privileged white men. (Even Pandora was a man. Yes, he was. Go back and reread his book. He says he was a man in a woman’s body. So there were NO female narrators in the series…from a series written by a woman. Is Anne trying to say something without admitting it to…himself? I KID, really! Or, DO I?)

Um…anywho, the thing is, I’m not saying read stuff that bores you. If you’re reading a book and it puts you to sleep, then the problem isn’t with the writing’s challenge level so much as its level of engagement. I’ve put down books unfinished many times due to boredom with the story or the characters, so if Anne Rice isn’t your thing cause you think the stories are dull, I can accept that. Some of Anne’s later books bored me cross-eyed, even though I enjoyed most of her series and standalone novels.

No, what I’m talking about is if you stopped reading Lasher because Mona Mayfair seduces Michael easily, without him trying to say much to resist a little girl. Then it isn’t that the story is boring, but that it’s saying something ugly about people during an intimate moment between two people that the reader doesn’t want to see together.

I’ll give another example from Piers Anthony’s Firefly. There’s a woman in that story who details her introduction to sex at the hands of a molester when she was five. The story jarred me hard when she started talking graphically about the experience, and it triggered a lot of uncomfortable memories for me. Each time the book talked about sexuality in this way, it hit me hard, and it made me seriously consider putting the book down. But I didn’t, and I made it all the way to the bleak ending. Ever since then, I’ve wondered how other people took that book, and whenever I’ve brought it up, reactions have been pretty much against it. All of those scenes were “unnecessary” according to most readers. Even though most of the story revolved around this character and her past.

Sex and reproduction were also major themes in the story, so why the scenes were really deemed unnecessary is because they make the reader extremely uncomfortable. And this is the case whether you’ve experienced abuse or not. Seeing abuse happen, no matter how mild, should be a discomforting moment in a book. So part of the reasons the scenes are there is to jar the reader and make them feel ill. As far as I was concerned as a reader, Mission Accomplished. It’s the same for most readers who dared try Firefly, but a lot of those readers then deny that that was the point. Instead, they insist that the writer is evil, and that the book and even the topic are “unnecessary” in fiction.

In another horror story, The Hollower by Mary Sangiovanni, there is a character who is sexually abused as a child, but the story only shows that a man with a bear came to her in the park. Nothing else is shown, so when the evil monster shows her a bear and she breaks down, there’s nothing to really emotionally connect me as a reader to her reaction. The same is true of all the abuse in the book. Another character was abused by his father, beaten for every little thing. But again, the abuse is only implied. It was alluded to, but actually showing abuse in a horror novel, a book meant to discomfort and horrify, is taboo. Why? Because you don’t abuse kids. Ever. Not even fictional kids, and not even if your whole point is to talk about abuse.

Compare that to It, in which Stephen King details the abuse of every main character, even touching on racism through Mike and explaining Henry’s behavior through narration about his abusive father. At the end of the book, King has the kids reconnect psychically by having sex. This is for most readers an “ick moment,” but I read the book at 12, and as a victim of bullying AND a sexually active child, that was the most honest writing I’d ever seen in my whole life. It was the book that made me want to write. And the thing is, the consensual nature of the minor gangbang made it less discomforting than the scene of abuse in Firefly, which I read at 16.

The tone of the writing makes the scene less vulgar and more about the redemptive qualities of intimate contact. Where as in Firefly, the act is one of molest, an exploitation of a young child even if she thinks she’s the one in control. Her willingness to go along with her abuser’s desires makes me want to skip pages and get as far away from that moment as possible. The same is true when she tries to defend her molester and ends up getting him sent away anyway. Both stories cover the same topics of sex and abuse, but King’s version shows how the victims support each other, and the sex in their story is transformative. But while the same can be said of the sex in Firefly, that it is transformative, the resulting adult is so flawed that she openly contemplates showing her son how to masturbate. It’s a difficult scene, but there is a point, to show the side effects of sexual abuse in spite of early intervention. Everything in the book was needed, but that doesn’t mean it’s something you’re supposed to agree with or feel validated by. Quite the opposite, you should be going “My God, this is awful.” Because it is. BUT, there is a point to it, even if you don’t want to see it.

Let me switch gears and talk about Lolita. For years, I went to bookstores and went to find this book, only to stare at it and wonder what mystical power it had, that everyone knew the book, but no one would actually read or discuss it.

Years later, while writing Little Monsters, I decided to look the book up in Project Gutenberg, allowing me to get the book without admitting to anyone that I had done so. And…I was severely disappointed. I mean, I get why Humbert was talking so obliquely about his chosen topic, because he’s on trial, and he’s testifying and downplaying what he did. But his crime with his young lover pales in comparison to what Humbert does to her mother. He has her locked away as hysterical so he can go seduce a little girl. Meanwhile, his romantic interest has already been deflowered by a boy near her own age, and what Humbert has to offer doesn’t look so hot with experience for comparison.

But the thing is, for all the power Lolita has in talking about pedophilia, NOTHING HAPPENS. The sex scene you’re all avoiding is “And that was that.” That’s the whole sex scene. Really, you can uncover your eyes now. Before that, the only other thing that happened in the book is Delores and Humbert dry hump while reading a magazine together. And I had to read that passage twice to confirm that something illicit had just happened. Again, I understand why Humbert is erring on the side of discretion, but I don’t understand how a book with nothing in it can have so much power over so many people.

I see a lot of people who call themselves avid readers who still only read from one field, and who only read stuff that confirms their views. Part of me is tempted to blame this on the Internet and our ability to filter out what we don’t want to know about. But then I think about Lolita, and about how people know the book exists, but no one has the guts to read it and find out what a snoozer it is. So, how did it sell so many copies if no one has ever read it? Obviously, lots of people must have, and must still do, because there’s always a print copy in any store I go to. So why is it that no one talks about it? Because no one talks about child abuse. Ever. It’s like you honestly still believe in the fantasy “maybe the problem will just go away if we ignore it long enough.”

You can’t make problems better by avoiding the topic, and if you avoid it in your fiction just because it makes you squirm, then you’re being willfully ignorant in every facet of your life. Which may allow you to remain a qualified armchair therapist, but it still leaves you woefully equipped to deal with reality when it’s someone in your family or you who is the victim.

Please, push your boundaries and your comfort zones in your fiction reading selections. Read about something that makes you anxious or upset. These are genuine emotions, and if the author is making you feel anxious for a fake character, then they are doing their job right by making you feel something. You can’t always feel validated and happy while reading. Choosing to only read for escapism is embracing ignorance and calling it truth. It’s intellectually dishonest, and it’s depriving you of the chance to grow as a person by experiencing discomfort and, possibly, enlightenment.

Black women have been defining ourselves since before Sojourner Truth made her infamous 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, black women tell, no scream, about our humanity, complexity, legacy, pride, sisterhood, spirituality, money problems, romantic desires, bone-deep sadness, moral conflicts, sexuality and joy. Some of us are dying for a “Sunday Kind of Love.” Some of us think we’re cute and “Cleva.” Some of us aren’t that damn deep. The problem isn’t that black women haven’t defined ourselves for ourselves. It’s that mainstream media DON’T LISTEN.

And that’s the problem for all minority groups. It isn’t that people aren’t talking about how oppression works. It’s that the people who still actively oppress others don’t listen to anyone. The real problem with black women isn’t a white male-dominated media marginalizing black women’s voices into a stereotyped view of a whole race. NO! The real problem is, black women just aren’t talking enough to define themselves.

This same type of dismissive technique is used on women in general, on blacks in general, and on any fringe group that the established white media doesn’t want to acknowledge. To give you an idea of how easy it is to marginalize someone in the media, even someone supposedly empowered, during the 2008 elective cycle, Yahoo put any and all references to Hilary Clinton in Queer News. It didn’t matter if she was talking to gays or talking about jobs to unions, Hilary was a de facto queer to Yahoo. Obama was more hit or miss, but half of his articles also got flagged as queer, this despite his stated religious intolerance of gay civil rights. Meanwhile, anything said by the GOP, no matter how trivial or petty, was put in Headline news. A white man says it? Damn, must be front page news! A woman said it? Back to the back page with the homos and blacks.

The excuse that minorities aren’t writing enough of their own stories doesn’t fly either. There’s lots of writing online about these issues, but the mainstream media still chooses to present a white-centric view of the world. Any article that attacks or merely questions the white male status quo is not published. And if it isn’t vetted by a “real news source” it’s even easier for other whites to marginalize the impact of their continued racism. How can there be a racism problem, if it’s never mentioned once on the evening news?

The fact is, ANY PRIVILEGED PERSON WHO WANTED TO EDUCATE THEMSELVES COULD, simply by going online to look at the blogs of minority writers. But you don’t want to hear how you’re still bad people, so you lock out any and all voices of dissent that don’t fit in with your personal narrative. You stick with white news sources to make sure everything you read fits in with your view of the world. But you’re not really racist, just interested in “maintaining personal harmony,” or something.

I could turn this around and talk about all the times I’ve tried to talk to people about being trans, or about the times I addressed the cyclical nature of child abuse without success. But examples specific to me aren’t needed to illustrate the scope of this denial problem. The problem is, white people are GREAT at shifting blame from themselves for the commission of a crime (because discrimination is a crime, you know) to their victims for letting it happen. Then you say “Well those people should be more aware. And why aren’t they speaking out on this if they really think it’s such a problem?” Only, they are speaking out, RIGHT NOW, and you’re marginalizing their complaint, at the same time erasing all the similar complaints that came before it. You never personally heard a complaint before now, so using only your anecdotal evidence, there must never have been a problem until the uppity minority decided to make a big deal out of it.

Bam, racism erased. Never happened at all, and it was just the black “misunderstanding.” (A backhand slap that implies that blacks are too stupid to know whether they’ve been prejudiced against or not, and they NEED a white to explain why something is or is not racist.) It’s that easy for white people to ignore every minority problem, even if a problem is widespread. Just look at Arizona, being blatantly racist in making law enforcement and education policies, and yet the white people in Arizona seem almost mute about the issues. Why? Because…they’re racists. If they weren’t, the governor would have been recalled. If they weren’t, none of these bills banning books and idea would fly. These policies fly because the white voters of Arizona WANT THIS. To suggest anything else is to make excuses for racism while at the same time continuing to marginalize and erase people.

Black women have been speaking to their problems for a long, long time. Problem is, their articles are dismissed or ignored, while the white writer gets away with making statements like “The problem with black women is, they haven’t defined themselves yet.” Yes, they have, and so has every minority present on the civil rights battlefield. The only people who don’t recognize that are our common enemy, the white privileged people who remain willfully ignorant of how they help perpetuate oppression.

Black women have defined themselves, but it’s up to white people to actually read what black women have to say and stop pretending there’s no discussion on this topic. There’s plenty of discussion. You’re just tuning it out because you don’t like the message they’re sending. But whose fault is that? Theirs, for spitting truths in your face, or yours for being incapable of listening to the truth?

One such example came last night on Twitter, a tweet made by @profsusurro (sic):

Oppression makes me rage & that rage is an engine but radical love has to be it’s fuel

And this, I think, sums up just about everything about me. I’m not just committed to freeing my people from oppression, but in freeing all people everywhere from this tired system of control. I get angry because we as a people are not making progress. In fact, looking at the current governments and their schemes to disassemble free speech using copyright laws, I think we’re losing ground to our rich oppressors.

But despite the amount of hate that goes into oppression, I don’t want to turn the tables or make anyone into my servants as revenge. I’m not motivated to act based on a need to return the favors done to me in the past. I’m motivated by the hope that a new generation of kids like me will grow up never knowing the hatred I suffered daily at the hands of “good people.”

My enemies will always try to flip this around, claiming that I am trying to destroy society and everyone’s way of life. And this has the partial ring of truth to it, which is why the message sticks and works with so many fearful privileged peoples. I do want to destroy your oppressive society, and if I could succeed, the world would never be the same as you previously understood it. But it would not be an evil world. It would be a world full of love and acceptance instead of grudging tolerance. (Which some of you claim is the best you can offer to anyone who doesn’t share your exact same views.)

But in that new world, there would not be prisons full of white people serving time for their racism. There would not be a court of homophobia leading witch hunts to find out which straights were still intolerant of sexual diversity. There would be none of the CCTV cameras mounted on every pole like there is now. There would not be police harassment of anyone, not like we see with the cops when dealing with POC today. The world I want to see without oppression has no punishment cooked up for the people who willfully helped enable oppressors to keep working unchecked for centuries.

I don’t really believe I’ll see a world without oppression in my time. Far too many people are busy using false victim cards to claim that they deserve the right to oppress others. They’re just “returning the favor,” and the fact that the oppressed have done nothing at all to the person using this logic is irrelevant. It can’t be your fault that opression is still going on, so it must be the fault of minorities, for making a big deal out of “little things.” If us uppity minorities would just learn our places, you claim, then the world would be perfect. But I can’t help but notice how your perfect world still includes rampant slavery, fear mongering, and a steady supply of wars to keep the world populations in check.

You people who practice willful oppression of minorities rage about the unfairness of losing even a little privilege, and the fuel for your engine is unreasoning hate. You have no reason to hate other people, but you do anyway.

I have reasons to hate. I’ve had bones broken, had my will crushed and oppressed in the name of gender conformity. I’ve had people who claimed to love me tell me that they would prefer it if I remained unhappy, because they were happier with my false gender than they were with me being myself. To them, they saw no big deal in attacking my choices and pushing me to conform, even if it would make me miserable. Their happiness and need to oppress comes before my right to pursue happiness.

I have very, very good reasons to hate, but I don’t. I am angry, a lot. I get outraged by watching “good people” attack others who are beneath them, simply because they can. I get angry that these same people feign innocence or ignorance of their crimes when called on it, and then turn around and use being called out as a further sign that they’re “the real victim here.”

People like this actively oppress, and then deny that this is what they’re doing. So I have very good reasons to be angry at these inhumane, lazy, stupid people. They could educate themselves to stop being stupid. They could work to overcome their laziness and inhumanity. But their conditions are willful, and anyone like me attempting to point this out will be attacked. Why? Because none of you wants to admit that you’re the problem. Oppression isn’t your problem. It’s for some elected officials to fix, someday, perhaps after the budget is balanced and all white people have good jobs. But it has nothing to do with you people, even if you are actively oppressing someone and living in denial about it.

But I don’t hate you. I don’t want to turn the tables and make you as miserable as you’ve made me over the years. I just want you to stop hurting others. I want you to accept that you are harming others, and I want you to strive to be as humanitarian as you claim to be when pressed about your privilege. And if loving you and expecting better from you is wrong, then people, I don’t ever want to be “right” with you.

All we need is love. It’s already my fuel of choice, so maybe you should think about changing from your current fuel over to something that can really change our world for the better. Hate and fear have always shaped patriarchal societies, so perhaps when we convince the men to share the role of leadership, we can also convince them to drop their favorite weapon of FUD.