Ye Olde Randome Stuffe

I’m going in a bunch of directions today, because none of the stuff I’m reporting on can make a full blog on its own. Together, though, they should make up an entry long enough that you’ll figure you’re getting your money’s worth. Wait a minute, this is free. Yeah well.

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Freedom of speech was fun while it lasted. The other day I tried to get onto my publisher’s website and discovered the library system’s onerous content filter is back in operation. Once again the system is determined to protect my innocent eyes from lascivious content, including the smutty books I myself wrote. I didn’t check, but I’m pretty sure the filter still allows people onto the site that shows you how to make pipe bombs. So sex is verboten but acts of terrorism are fine. Glad to see Lancaster County’s priorities are firmly in order.

This couldn’t come at a worse time, because—drum roll—I sold that book I was working on! It’s the smuttiest of smut, with a dominant woman who buys a pair of slaves for, um, personal entertainment. You know, juggling and card tricks and stuff. Hey, kids could be reading this. Gotta watch that content filter.

Anyway, I sent it out last Thursday evening and got the acceptance email on Tuesday. Siren’s nice in that regard; they don’t make you wait months and months for a reply. Some publishers don’t respond at all. “If you don’t hear from us, we’re not interested.” Yeah, well, you won’t be hearing from me again, because I’m not interested in you. I can publish books on my own now. Or I’ll be able to once I learn how. I think I’ll write straight-up porn and self-publish on Amazon, which skates right by the library’s content filter and has all sorts of nasty stuff right out there in the open for everyone to see. So there.

I wish I knew why descriptions of adult fictional characters enjoying themselves get so many people in a tizzy. And don’t try to tell me, “We must protect the children!” The children aren’t going anywhere near these sites. They’re playing video games that let them blow stuff up and save the world from the zombie apocalypse. You know, practical life skills. You keep your hands to yourselves, you zombie menaces! We’re watching you!

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Having finished a book, I’m now faced with the usual problem of having to start another one. Looks like the winner this time around will be a Talbot’s Peak book, which means self-pubbing because not all the characters or concepts are mine. I was able to bypass that with Jessalina’s Pets because even though the initial post appeared on Shapeshifter Seductions, it’s not set in our fictional town and doesn’t use any characters created by anyone else. Ditto for one of the M/Ms I’ve got on the back burner. I transported the main characters to Philadelphia and created a whole new background and supporting cast. I can’t do that with this one. Better familiarize myself with formatting.

I’m not that concerned with the text of the book. It’s the cover that’s got me worried. In spite of working in the typesetting industry off and on for several years, I don’t know the first thing about fonts and typography and Photoshop and creating a cover. I’ll probably have to pay somebody to do that. This is why I’m still subbing to regular publishers. I’m just here to write the book. Let someone else worry about all the technical crap. That’s what they’re gobbling down half the royalties for. Dammit, I knew I should have taken art classes when I was in school.

I wonder if I have Photoshop on the laptop? I’ve got a ton of programs just sitting on the hard drive that I never even look at because I bought this for Internet and email and to serve as a typewriter. I could probably be a publisher if I knew how to work this stuff. Maybe I can teach myself. That’s what the library’s for. It isn’t for researching erotica publishers any more, that’s for damn sure.

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Let’s start the learning curve by attempting to make a link. If I did this right, you should be able to reach the blog post that became Jessalina’s Pets by clicking here. If I didn’t, it’s at October 9, 2013. I’m going to miss paper when it finally goes out of fashion, even though typing on a computer is so much faster and easier. And nobody cares if you make mistakes because you can correct it on screen. I guess that guy from the Monkeys, whose mother invented Wite-Out, doesn’t get royalties any more. Them’s the breaks, fella. Time marches on.

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I put food out for Stray Kitty this morning and he let it sit again. A neighbor told me he doesn’t like fish, and this had tuna in it. Talk about picky. I hope he likes the taste of no food. I’m sure somebody else will slip him something, or else he’ll catch a bird or a squirrel. We know he’s not fishing in the creek. And I’ve reached a decent word count, so we’ll wrap on this finicky note. See you next week!

All Hail Freedom of Speech

Before we get into this week’s blog, I’d like to devote a few lines in tribute to Harold Ramis (shown above, right, with Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd), who passed away earlier this week. If you don’t know the name, you know the movies he wrote or co-wrote: Animal House, Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day and Analyze This, among others. If you went to a movie comedy in the late 1970s-early 1980s, you probably either saw him or heard his dialogue in the mouths of John Belushi, Rodney Dangerfield or Bill Murray. He was a member of the legendary Second City comedy troupe and, as time has demonstrated, a writer of comedy classics. Thank you, Dr. Spengler. You were a man of rare talent and you will be missed.

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As you may remember, a couple months back, before all the snow closed the roads, I conducted an experiment in localized censorship by visiting libraries in different counties to test what their content filters deemed too “adult” for me to look at. This was sparked by Lancaster County’s library system blocking my publisher’s site, shielding my innocent eyes from “adult content” I myself had written. Because we’ve got a large, conservative religious population of Amish and Mennonites in the area, it didn’t surprise me at all that Lancaster would block anything with even a whiff of the nasty on it. The system still allowed me access to a site that showed me how to build a pipe bomb. I suppose as long as you don’t try to have sex with it, the filter considers that okay.

Well, talk about your 180s. The other week I discovered, quite by accident, that the ban has been lifted. I doubt if customer protests or First Amendment rights had anything to do with it. Lancaster County recently upgraded their library computer system. I’m betting the content filter had to be reset, and hasn’t caught up with all the dirty sites yet. It even let me onto Ellora’s Cave! That proves the filter’s not working. It’ll probably get back to blocking erotica publishers eventually. Until then, I’d better do a lot of research and download a ton of submission guidelines. And look at porn, but I can do that on my laptop. The library doesn’t need to know.

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I’m almost done with my reread of all 1100+ pages of Stephen King’s It. That’s the one about an evil entity lurking in the sewers beneath a small New England town, killing children and promoting all things malevolent. (Which got me to wondering what’s lurking in the sewers under Peyton Place. Anybody want to write that one?)

What does a ten-pound horror novel have to do with freedom of speech? I’m glad you asked. This book, written and published in the more lax era of the 1980s, features a character who freely uses a certain word with, shall we say, negative racial connotations. Because even alluding to the word in question has resulted in legal action in the past, I’m not going to repeat it. I’m pretty sure you can guess which one I mean.

Now, I’m sure Mr. King is not a racist or a bigot. If he is, he knows enough to keep his mouth shut on the subject when in public. But he is a writer, and writers feel compelled to tell the truth as they see it. The truth is, people like the bad guys in It (at least the human ones) do exist in the real world, and they’re going to use that word, or similar words, against the people or groups they don’t like, regardless of political correctness or racial/sexual/whatnot connotations. You know, like what happened with Duck Dynasty.

Here’s what I got thinking about: my edition of the book dates back to 1985, before political correctness tightened its stranglehold on freedom of expression. Have modern editions been cleaned up—filtered for content, if you will—to protect the sensibilities of the modern reader?

That’s my next mission. Next time I’m in a bookstore, I’m going to look for a more recent edition of It and see if the book still exists the way King originally wrote it, or if it’s been cleansed for modern consumption. I should check current editions of Huckleberry Finn while I’m at it. That book ran into problems over the same word a while back. Wonder what it looks like today? If I own an early, pre-PC edition of Huckleberry Finn, am I in possession of offensive material?

One thing I’m certain of: the words bitch, cunt, cooze and fuck will still be in there, in all their offensive glory. Y’know, I’ll bet if the B-word ever becomes as big of a no-no as that other word, it’ll mean the end of literature as we know it. Half the movies in existence will be yanked from the shelves, and rap music will become extinct. And what will the women on almost all of Bravo’s reality shows call each other? We really need some unisex, ethnicity-neutral insults. Any writers out there up to the challenge?

Oh, and hey, Amazon: I understand depictions of underage sex violate your terms of service. It has a scene where an 11-year-old girl does the deed with all six of her little buddies. Plan on deleting one of Stevie’s bestsellers from your catalog any time soon? Look on the bright side: she doesn’t use the no-no word. Trying to earn a living as a writer gets trickier every day.