Here's how a train of thought steams and puffs through the landscape of the subconscious.

A friend sent rdeck a link to a TRULY cheesy ad (I'm still not sure what precisely they were advertising, but the thing was full of beefcake - the muscly male variety - mostly stripped to the waist showing shiny sweaty abs you could break rocks on and one of them purporting to be a fireman holding a fire hose in an intensely suggestive position which... oh, never mind, you get the picture...) which used, as soundtrack, the "I've had the time of my life" final dance from "Dirty Dancing". So naturally when You Tube finished playing the cheesy ad it stuck up other things it thought you might want to watch, and one of them was a link to your ACTUAL final dance sequence from "Dirty Dancing" with Jennifer Grey and a young Swayze - and you have to remember I saw that movie when it first came out and most people my age, gender and generation who saw that movie thought that Swayze was a young GOD, and dammit, we wished we could dance like that, just once, with someone who *knew how*.

Here comes the train of thought, pulling into a stop.

Dancing. I love dancing. I learned from my Daddy when I was a little girl, and I have an innate sense of rhythm anyway, and I grew up into a young woman who could do practically anything at all with any kind of music so long as I had a partner who could give me a strong lead.

One of my fondest memories is attending an office party at a company where I worked briefly - I had not been there long, and knew few people, and I was new to the whole area anyway and had no partner to bring so I kind of just turned up anyway. The party was supposed to be on a 70's theme, but with a kind of weird inevitability I listened to the DJ start slipping backwards. First from mid-seventies to early seventies, then to 1969, 1968, 1965... and before long we were having pure old-fashioned joyful rock-n-roll, disco be damned. I was standing by the side of the dance floor at one point, tapping my feet, and beside me was this complete and utter stranger - a guy whom someone else had brought and abandoned. We stood for a while, side by side, watching others gyrate, and then he caught my eye and gave me a wry grin.

"Want to dance?" he said.

"Sure," I said.

We stepped onto the dance floor just as the currently playing song died. We looked at each other and laughed, and waited - and the next song began. And we started to dance.

AND HE KNEW WHAT HE WAS DOING. He knew how to give me a subtle signal about what was about to happen next, and I knew exactly what to do and when to do it. We danced that song, and then that ended, and we danced the next - and only towards the end of that did I become aware that the dance floor had emptied to give us room, that people were standing around the sides clapping, and the song ended as he kind of ended the thing with a flourish and a dip and then we stayed there for a moment alone on an empty dance floor amidst tumultuous applause.

He helped me back to my feet again, and gave me a crooked smile.

"What was your name, again?" he said.

We didn't even know each other's names. We had never spoken before, let alone danced together before, let alone practiced dancing together before. And yet all the ingredients had been there - the right rhythms, a man who knew how to lead, a woman who could read the signals and responded by instinct. We might have been pros.

His partner - the one who had abandoned him - probably claimed him quickly after that display. I can't see a woman NOT doing that. I don't remember ever seeing him again. But for that one moment - well - he was my Swayze. And I danced.

This story delights my beloved husband... but, alas, only as a theoretical idea. This is a man who says he can't hear the one-two-three in a WALTZ. Sigh.

And yet here's me again, long before the rock-n-roll magic, at my Debutante Ball (oh, don't laugh. So I went to one. It pretty much depended on gathering money for charity, and I got to dress up in a ball gown and go to a ball, and WHAT?! I was going to pass that up...?) There were maybe a dozen of us girls, ranging in age from 18-ish to about 26 or so (I was on the upper edge of that spectrum at this point). We were supposed to open the ball with a Viennese waltz, us and our partners - the idea was that we would be there on the floor standing in a loose semicircle, couple by couple side by side hand in hand, and then, as the opening bars of the waltz sounded - "DAH-dahdahdah-dahdahdah-dahdahdah-dah-DAH...." and on that last beat we girls were supposed to turn smoothly into our partner's arms, and step out into the waltz.

Only I was the *only person there who could waltz at all*. We had an instructor who was supposed to teach us how to do this impossibly complicated task of counting to three, and everyone kept fluffing their timing, and time and again he would drag his hands through his hair, which was already standing on end, and reach out for me, and yelp, "For the love of GOD - one more time - like THIS!" (And it would be perfect. And he'd let me go. And we'd do it again. And the ditz at one end of the line or another would come in on TWO or not at all, and off we'd be again, round the mulberry bush...) We made a ragged little line at the opening of the ball but we did accomplish it somehow - and yet it was a chore for all those girls, something they had to LEARN, whereas for me it was a breath of melody and a touch of music and my feet would just GO and do the right thing at the right time...

It isn't as though dancing is completely instinctive. I still remember the time that one of our older family friends who fancied herself a great dancer had the brazen cheek to ask a visiting dignitary - who happened to be the Brazilian Ambassador - for a tango. The diplomat, being a diplomat, stood up with a small regal bow and accepted... except that within ten seconds of the tango our friend was woefully aware of just what she had done. This was a guy who knew how to dance the tango. The REAL tango. And she was about to look like a stork on stilts.

The expression on her face was completely stricken, when she thought the Ambassador wasn't looking, her eyes round with a horror so profound that it was comical. She didn't do TOO badly, everything considered, but several of us had to leave the room because we could not give way to our helpless giggles right there, and the corridor outside the hostess's living room was crowded with people weeping with laughter. I suppose it wasn't very kind of us. But GOD, she was asking for it - the TANGO, no less! - and it was a scene straight from a movie, still glittering in my memory as though I had watched some great comic actress pick up the woman's part, a Lucille Ball or a Goldie Hawn or even perhaps a haughty Katharine Hepburn needing to be taken down a notch or two from a self-raised pedestal.

But oh... dance. The floating on top of the music, like a leaf dancing with the wind.

On that note, then - shall we dance...?

So, after a really BAD night (no, you DON'T want to know. Trust me.) I finally crawled back into bed for another bit of shut-eye at something like 5:30 AM... and then fell asleep as though somebody had poleaxed me, and woke up HOURS later.

This isn't to brag about sleeping in. It's to clue you guys in that I was still pretty raw and woolly-headed, otherwise I might have been faster on the uptake - but - anyway - I got up, and went into the upstairs office, and the cats and rdeck, who had all been up for hours, seemed happy to see me emerge... and then, just as I was attempting sane sequential conversation, I heard a THUD. Like you hear when a bird flies into a window. And then I heard faint bird cries.

I came out of the office and stepped out of the corridor, to where I had a clear view through the French doors opening out to the deck from our dining room.

The first thing I saw was one of our pretty thrushes, on the deck. Okay, bird into window. I was right.

And then I realised that there was a second bird there.

For a moment I thought, oh, I didn't think they travelled in pairs, I didn't think that one would be so solicitous about another which was hurt...

And then I REALLY looked.

And what I saw, and what I finally brought into a coherent frame with those bird cries, was not another thrush being helpful or sorrowful, standing over the one that had fallen. What I was seeing was two birds, indeed - except that the bottom one was the thrush... and the one on top... was a hawk with its claws sunk deep into its kill.

Less than a foot outside my window.

The cries I heard had been the triumphant call of the hawk - Food! Food! I live another day! But underneath the hawk the thrush's eyes were closed and it was lying very still. And its own cry into silence was My time in the sky is over. My day grows dark with the final night.

I watched the hawk spread its wings, its curved beak open, still crying its triumph, and take off, the thrush clutched in its talons.

It left behind a scattering of down and feathers, stirring in the breeze, and a small smear of blood where it had made the kill.

And then there was nothing. Just silence. And an empty feeder in the woods, where the critters who usually throng there were conspicuous by their absence.

I did not hear the hawk again.

I still haven't swept up the feathers, or cleaned up the bloodstain on the cedar deck outside.

The creatures that eat at our Fast Food Joint out on the feeder have become bold enough to return, even if they avoid the place where the remnants of feathery down still cling and wave.

One fierce bird heart beats somewhere. Another, gentler, one is stilled for good. And the sky is empty and cold.

Editor jennifer_brozek reports that its' now available for pre-order.

THIS anthology:



It's got some pretty damned cool people in it.

Stories are coming, folks. Pre-order 'em NOW.

I did an interview with Ivana Maric - she sent in the questions, check, I sent in the answers, check, and then "spellspam" struck and her computer suffered a grievous collapse...

Well, but, anyway, it recovered, at least for a short window of opportunity, and you can see the interview here.

I, um, promise it isn't catching... [grin]

wolflahti pointed me to this presentation.

Here's the thing. I clicked on the link. I went to the site. I suddenly realised that the video was EIGHTY SIX MINUTES LONG. And my first response was, "hell, no, I don't have time to spend eighty four minutes sitting here watching a video..." and then I started watching it, and it was all about how much harder it is getting for the cyber-generations (I am, as someone pointed out in the video, an immigrant to this nation, having come to it as an adult but there are natives - kids of 4, 5 years old who are practically BORN knowing how to use a mouse and cannot imagine a world without WiFi) to concentrate on something LONG, something FOCUSED, something that doesn't necessitate having three or four windows open on the screen. I was suddenly aware of a serious and almost physical response when, in the midst of the presentation, there was a "ping" that told me that a new email had landed in my inbox... and of how hard it was, how close I came to admitting it was almost physically IMPOSSIBLE, not to simply bounce over into my email client and just *check*, quickly, you know. Multitasking.

I can do it. We can all do it.

And we can quit any time.

Uh huh.

I've quite a bit to think about, from this. And it connects up (does EVERYTHING, in the last few days?...) to the e-book kerfuffle and the future of publishing and of reading. Because THESE are the kids who will grow up to be both writers and readers, these kids in the video who are going to schools where learning is accomplished by video game, these kids who probably could not sit down and get lost in a good book if the world depended on it, like I used to when I was their age, because their brains are already differently wired right now from what mine must have been back then. As a writer, as a teller of complex tales, I find myself mourning that, a little. And yet, being cyberminded myself NOW, I can completely understand it.

Perhaps that is where we are going with this. Perhaps the next generation of books are not going to be physical objects at all. They are going to be fully interactive experiences, where you'd put on a "book" and immerse yourself in it in full Sensurround... or even Star Trek's famous holodeck.

I can't help wondering when that world is coming. I can't help wondering if I will still be around if and when it arrives. And I can't help wondering, a little fearfully, if half-cyber creatures like me will have a place in it at all or whether it's going to be a place where my own slower dreams and memories of an older and slower world is going to be superceded and discarded.

I wonder if the next generation, or the one after that, will be in a position of sitting in a cyber-world next to a cyber-river where cyber-sunlight glitters off the surface of the cyber-water in cyber-sparkles... and never stopping to miss the reality of the real riverside, or the fact that somebody, somewhere, once used actual WORDS to paint that picture inside someone else's head, words which painted the sunlight on the water with a lyrical power. WIll we lose the individuality of that vision (read a scene that I wrote about sunlight on water and I'll be thinking about the Danube, and you'll be thinking about the Mississippi, and that guy over there will be thinking about the Volga, or the Amazon, or the Nile. If all of us were sitting in that cyber-image of the river... we're all seeing the absolutely same thing, and there will be no way for any of us to imagine anything other, bigger, better, uglier, wilder, richer, darker, brighter - anything that belongs to ourselves alone and to no other mind in quite the same way.

That's why I write - because painting those pictures in words, taking people to places which may be QUITE different in their own heads to the places I was seeing when I was writing the scene, that's something... huge. It's breathtaking. It's a relationship between me and a stranger's mind, and across that river, that reader sitting on the bank of one and me sitting on the bank of quite another, we can still stretch out our hands and touch across that common water...

Eh. It's been a long day, and I'm rambling.

But let me ask you this.

What kind of world are YOU living in...?

This time it's MY publisher...

I might wake up tomorrow morning with my own books missing from Amazon, if their tactics remain the same for this second prong of the attack.

Heeeeere we go....

Tangentially related to the whole Amazonfail fiasco - jaylake is depressed.

Here's why:

Finally, some things I've learned about authors from reading what ebook-buying consumers from the pro-Amazon side of this dispute are saying.

1. Authors are greedy

2. Authors are rich

3. Authors hate ebook readers

4. Authors control pricing

5. Authors control what their publishers do

6. Authors should be punished for what their publisher does

7. Authors are taking orders from their publishers' PR departments

8. Authors should self-publish, because they'll make lots more money that way

9. Authors don't know what they're talking about

10. Authors aren't necessary

11. Authors are bullying Amazon

This depresses me immensely, and reinforces what I said before about us authors looking greedy and short-sighted to consumers for whom we are the main public face of publishing.

I don't blame him. I saw the same comments. I am equally saddened by them.

Here's the thing that is glowing at me in dire neon day-glo orange from all the things I've seen said in comment threads across the Internet this weekend: "If I can't have the e-books I want (by the authors whom I enjoy) CHEAP and INSTANT, then I'll just go look for other CHEAP and INSTANT e-books (by implication, the author doesn't matter)"

It links with Jay's point #10.

I'm a writer. I've always been a writer. This is my passion, and my burden, and my gift, and my joy, and my sorrow, and my frustration, and my dream. I like to think that, if I write well, if I tell a story in a memorable fashion, if I spin wonder and enchantment into a tale to hand to others to enjoy... I deserve, at least by those who liked my offering, just a smidge of loyalty to my own voice and my own stories as distinct from anybody else's.

This is how I *READ*, wearing that other hat. I have writers whose books I'll simply take off the shelf and take to a cash register if I see a new one that I haven't read. Ursula Le Guin. Guy Gavriel Kay. Sharon Penman. China Mieville. And others. I also am willing to look at a book by a writer whose name I don't recognise and, if the title and the idea of the work catch my eye, take a chance on the new voice. If I can't afford to buy the hardcover first editions when they come out, I wait until the new books by the writers I love hit the paperback racks and I'll acquire them then.

What I do not do, what it would never occur to me to do, is to simply pick up a new book by an author whose work I've loved and admired in the past and look FIRST at the price sticker - and then decide that the price is too high, and that hey, it doesn't matter, if I can't have the new Guy Gavriel Kay I'll just buy books by some generic fantasy hack instead. It's an equivalent of saying that if I can't have Tolkien then it's just FINE to read some bland generic fantasy which looks like was cooked up in a blender - a touch of Elves, a pinch of Orcs, equal parts Dark Prophecy and Lost Heir To Enchanted Kingdom Returning, a stick of Ent, and half a spell of Gandalf - and it doesn't matter in the least that the two are utterly different on every level or that the latter could not possibly nourish the spirit of imagination and the sense of wonder in me that the former has done.

How is it possible that anybody who calls themselves a "Reader" is capable of making this sort of culling decision?

I have heard many people swear passionately that they "will NOT pay $15 for an e-book". That's fair. Neither will I. (That's because I don't DO e-books, of course, which is a different matter entirely - but okay.) The point is that the authors of these books - be they hardcover, paperback or e-book - have zero, zilch, nada, influence on how much their work is eventually sold for. I would hope that readers would find the work of certain writers, whose work they like and are willing to support, valuable enough to get a few compromises hammered out in the industry so that those writers can actually... you know... continue writing. And eat at the same time, and possibly have a roof over their heads while they do so. Trust me, we aren't getting rich on any of this unless we sell 8 million copies in 24 hours - but there is only one Harry Potter. Would you have paid $15 for a chance to get an e-book of THAT, at midnight, the same time as the hardcovers came out? A bunch of people would have else they would not have been standing in round-the-city-block queues at midnight on the day of release to get their mitts on the first books to be released into circulation.

I'm a writer. I WANT you to read me. Honest, I do. That's what the stories are for.

I give some of those stories away, in certain circumstances. I cannot afford to give ALL of them away - because not only is the production of an e-book far from free (others have addressed the price structure better than me (go look at Tobias Buckell's blog or his article on the SFWA website) but an e-book, like ANY book, begins in one place. An author's heart. An author's mind. An author's imagination.

Without those, NONE of this would be an issue.

Readers... we write for YOU. If your only criteria for reading is how much you are paying per word, then you are treating our books as sacks of potatoes or a bag of coal. They are not. They are individual and unique, like the individual and unique persons who dreamed them up. We aren't interchangeable. If you have found a writer you love, don't toss that writer aside in a fit of pique because his or her publisher has set a price on their books with which you do not happen to agree. I appreciate that the economy is in the toilet and there are other things that want your dollar, and that you might have to think twice about tossing your hard-earned money at a book - of ANY kind - dead-tree or electronic edition. But please - ask yourself, why do you read. And if the answer to that is ANYTHING other than the price on the sticker, then stay the course. If you want a book, wait for a cheaper edition, if you have to. But don't just throw a writer's heart and soul into the dumpster because a couple more dollars are more than you think you want to pay.

I read because I love the word. I read the writers I love because I love the way they use the word. If I have to forego an expensive latte a day in order to afford a book I love, then that is what I will do (and for those of you who know me and my relationship to coffee you will KNOW how much this means).

Why do you read?

And how much are you willing to offer in order for the authors who sit and dream stories for you over there in the shadows to continue to provide you with those tales?

Yes. I know. The readers owes any individual author precisely nothing - a story stands and falls by itself, out there in the big wide world. But if you've ever loved a story, don't reject the act of its creation by refusing to pay an extra dollar or three for it. You give more than that for a tip when you grab breakfast in a cafe.

Don't hate the writers. We are not the enemy. We are not greedy - if we were, most of us wouldn't have to be working two jobs and/or have married money in order to keep doing what we love. We don't "have it in" for e-books. We're mortal souls with one foot in faerie, and we're trying to make it out there, any way we know how. If you won't help... at least don't heap the brushwood of blame on our thresholds and stand out there waving torches. We are doing what we can. Meet us half way.

Oh, just because this SO needs to be shared...

Okay, I'm done now. I've got other things to do. I'll be keeping an eye on the net for the fallout of the tempest-in-a-teacup, but I'm done commenting on the whole mess. Scalzi just summed it up for me, BRILLIANTLY. Go read.

From Amazon's own site:

The Amazon Kindle Team says:
Dear Customers:

Macmillan, one of the "big six" publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it's reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don't believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

Thank you for being a customer.



So, they didn't wait until Monday. So it wasn't a "mistake" this time - it really was a genuine and complete hissy fit on Amazon's part.

But holy cow what a feeble response this is to the whole mess.

Let's deconstruct just a little bit:



Macmillan, one of the "big six" publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

Yes. Read that again. For E-BOOK BESTSELLERS AND MOST HARDCOVER RELEASES. As in, premium time-sensitive product. I seem to recall Macmillan's own letter talking about a sliding scale, where the price of the self-same e-books eventually drifts down to WELL below Amazon's price ceiling. Gets complicated, this - but possibly it's the possibility that it might leak out that Amazon insists on charging $9.99 for e-books which have been around for a while and which Macmillan has now priced at $5.99 that's worrying Amazon far more than the overwhelming need to protect their customers against paying "more" for an ebook initially. And that "regardless of our viewpoint" - what does that mean, exactly? Take it into negotiation. Negotiate your little hearts out. Sic your lawyers at each other if you need to. But sitting in the corner weeping and knuckling your eyes with your fists like your average kindergartner who is throwing a fit of the sulks is not the adult thing to do here. The Supreme Court has recently ruled that corporations are people. God help us if they're ALL petulant five-year-olds.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles.

Read "We have something to discuss concerning a brand-new business model (ebooks haven't been around THAT long) so we'll just yank ALL your titles (be they fiction, non-fiction, textbooks, whatever) in whichever format you could possibly put them out in, to make our point." Classy, Amazon. Really.

We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.

Oh can you count the passive aggressive ways? Can you see Pauline in Peril standing over there with hand theatrically on brow - "We will HAVE to CAPITULATE..." - "Prices NEEDLESSLY high for E-BOOKS" - "but we will WANT TO SELL THEM TO YOU", even at "those" prices...- and - Amazon - you're pulling the monopoly card? Like, SERIOUSLY? I have to tell you, you keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. If actually being the publisher of any given book means you have a "monopoly" over your own titles... I think I have a headache just trying to parse out what Amazon thinks they mean by this.

Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it's reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book.

Yes, sweetie. They will. That's the POINT.


We don't believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan.

...or what - you'll yank their catalogues, too?...

And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

...BLINK.

Amazon. Honey. Do you really want to set yourself up as a clearing house for the hundreds of thousands of self-published authors whose books MAY or MAY NOT be remotely good enough to read never mind being an "alternative" for people vetted, published and edited by publishing house who have had experience in the process and have a certain knowledge of, and a vested interest in, the level of how much a given book sucketh...? And are you setting your cap at independent presses and self-published authors because... um... they will be easier to keep under Amazon's thumb than the big conglomerates...?

No. Really. *REALLY*.

It always WAS about control. This little love note is all about how much they are suffering, all for the love of books and their readers, but there isn't a line in there that doesn't scream wounded ego and loss of control. They can do what they like - it's their company - but I have seen a BUNCH of people declare publicly that they're pulling their dollar and their buying power from Amazon, over this. And NOTHING in this letter is calculated to bring ANY of those people back.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

And writing is a business for me. I never expected it to be easy, either. I just never expected it to be as hard as it's turning out to be when the big players are so concerned who gets a bigger slice of the pie that they don't even worry about the little people who BAKED it. Come what may - Amazon's tactics or Macmillan's - there are people out there talking seriously about "pruning their reading lists" because of issues with e-books which the writers hitherto on those reading lists have had nothing to do with whatsoever. So the ultimate outcome...? Let the big boys fight it out. In the meantime, cull the authors.

Thank you for being a customer.

I like the convenience of Amazon. I like the fact that I can go to my computer and get the things I want to read. But seriously - it's a BOOKSTORE, and when a bookstore ceases to sell the kind of stuff I want to read or attempts to "protect" me from "predatory practices" while all the time perpetuating predatory practices all by its little self - well, that trumps convenience.

Keep the Kindle, thanks. There's got to be another way.

...this song hasn't left me all day, for some reason.

Just sharing.

There's still love and joy and family and laughter.

Nothing's gonna change my world.

Yesterday's news - Amazon pulls all Macmillan books off its site.

All. Macmillan. Books.

I don't know that much more than that right now, and I'm waiting to see what plays out - so are others, like

But jaylake is mad,; John Scalzi weighs in, and so does Marie Brennan, and so does Cat Valente, and so does Jim Hines, and no doubt others whom I have missed. Tor books are affected by this and TOr publishes any number of people I call colleagues and friends.

For now I'll follow the cautious route taken by a number of all these writers, and wait for more info - but a couple of points need to be made now:

1) This isn't the first time Amazon tried to pull a fast one just in time for the weekend, when media is slow(er) and it can get away with more of murder than it might have done mid-week when everybody's antennae are up. Remember the mysterious vanishing of the GLBT books a little while back - blamed on a mysterious "database malfunction" when the working week started a couple of days later? All I can say is, if Amazon tries to pull a "database malfunction" excuse again, all I have to say to that is, you guys are RAKING in money, use it to hire more staff to babysit your databases through their fragile weekends. This is becoming a pattern, and a disturbing one.

2) When two giant bullies square off in the schoolyard, it's the little people underfoot who are collateral damage. Amazon's reason for existence - its ORIGINAL reason for existence, anyway, before it started selling razorblades and TV antennae and movies and groceries and vacuum cleaners - is to *SELL BOOKS*. Macmillan's is to publish said books. The price charged for those books is something that, if there is a problem, the publisher and the retailer should settle between themselves, out of the public eye. And WITHOUT slamming every single author who ever had the misfortune to be published by one of Macmillan's subsidiaries. We the authors have done nothing to warrant being punished by our books being yanked out of circulation while the bean counters at the publisher and the distributor hammer out a deal that gets THEM the biggest slice of the pie. Folks, let me just point out a small truth which you may have overlooked. WITHOUT YOUR WRITERS YOU WOULD NOT BE IN THIS BUSINESS AT ALL.

3) This is what happens when too much power is concentrated in too few hands. Amazon is close to becoming the equivalent of "Google" in the sense that these days "I googled something" means that you searched for it online and "I bought it on Amazon" is becoming a sort of a euphemism for "I bought it online". Amazon is a great hulking behemoth looming over everything else in sight - but apparently that doesn't mean that it's anything more than a petulant if larger-than-average baby who is prone to throwing tantrums and tossing its toys out of the pram if anyone doesn't do precisely what it wishes. And as far as publishing conglomerates are concerned, it's instructive to note just how MANY imprints are affected when "Macmillan" is taken off the table.

I'm waiting until Monday to see how it all falls out. But right now... it doesn't look good. Doesn't look good at all. Particularly since this doesn't seem to be an isolated occurrence. We've seen this sort of thing before.

I kind of knew already that I would never own a Kindle (not if the books that I "bought" and paid for, loaded on it, could be yanked without warning, as Amazon had proved that it can and WILL do, in a previous kerfuffle. But am I to understand that I am no longer to trust Amazon as a retailer at ALL? A retailer of anything? Because if it can simply close up shop like this - well there are people I know published by the Macmillan group who have their titles coming out in only a handful of weeks whose books were on PRE-ORDER on Amazon - how does this fiasco affect THEIR sales?

Why are they, the authors, being asked to pay the price if Amazon's bluff is being called by the publishers? Why is this attitude of "Well if *I* can't have a monopoly then nobody can have the books at all" being even tolerated?

I'm sure that more writers will weigh in. This... this is too big. Some of us may not be with Macmillan, or may not be with Macmillan right now, but once they come for those of us who are can the rest of us ever rest easy again?

Isn't this publishing boondoggle hard enough to start with, without the threat of a retailer simply pulling your books out of their stock if they have a squabble with your publisher...?

Remember them.

One of the proudest moments of my life was when NASA requested to use one of my poems in their tribute to the Mercury 13, the early women astronauts who blazed the way for others to follow.

I wept when I received that letter. Because in some small way it took *me* to the stars, too.

( This is not that poem. )

The stars, our destination... and while we wait, remember those who went there before us, in our names, who laid down lives for a dream. Remember them.

...and make me homesick for it. Make me yearn for it and believe in it and love it and miss it as though it once belonged to me and I still carry it in my heart.

I've been thinking about this ever since I watched a particular Doctor Who episode. Gridlock, to be specific. I actually went looking for it on You Tube, just on the off chance, and lo, they had the very scene I wanted:



Listen, particularly, from the 1:55 minute mark to the end.

I've never been to Gallifrey. I can't have ever been there. It does not exist any longer - the Doctor said it's been destroyed - but the bigger picture is that it never REALLY existed at all, outside the story, outside the Doctor's own mind and heart and memory. And yet some part of me thrills to the "burnt orange sky", and the mountains that shine when the second sun rises

It's easy - well, easier, anyway - to write about a place one had personally known and loved. I have done it not too long ago, in this very journal, talking about the Danube and the way I feel about that river; I've done it about the places of my childhood, peppered as memories throughout this journal over the last couple of years.

But can I be homesick for a place I have never been, can never go? Is it possible for an Earthbound human to be homesick for a planet called Gallifrey, or a wood known as Lothlorien? Is it possible to be homesick for some patch of this our own world which one has never seen or visited?

For instance...

Oh, the moment in which the sun is not yet quite risen, not yet quite ready to pour itself around the shadowed crags in their veils of mist, but the day has started - and the light is pearly and nacred, shifting and shining, and the mists flow and coil around their great standing rocks and islands as though they are saying farewell to a lover. And the sky is lost in a brightening glow and the silhouettes of stones sharpen into individual sharp edges, and trees, and in between all there is the river, and the water is starting to change from darkness to a dull pewter glow which echoes the pre-dawn light to the glitter of sun on water as the first fingers of sunlight touch the ancient river and wake it into day once more, another day. And already there are boats moving, and men silhouetted against the sky, and the faint shimmery lines of nets being cast into the water where the fish are waking, too, and waiting to offer themselves in the daily act of love and sacrifice that feeds the people of these crags, of this river. And the shadows are black, and the crags are charcoal gray and deep deep green in the faint light, and the water is turning golden and the sky is turning a faint blue, like the delicate shell of a bird's egg, and soon the sun will come and the water will blaze with glory...


This is the place I am thinking of - the Li river, Guilin, China:






I've never been there. I've never seen this, outside of pictures.

And these particular pictures... I went looking for them AFTER I wrote that paragraph above. I went looking for images that matched the view from my mind's eye. I wasn't describing the pictures; the pictures were found later to match and illustrate what I had already described...

And yet it's there in my mind's eye. And I can make myself homesick for it by letting the image live in my mind.

Perhaps it is possible to take a soul to Gallifrey. And make that soul love a place never seen, impossible to reach, a place that may never have existed outside the mind and heart of a character in a story...

- what have I been up to today?

Well, chasing these:









Along the road we caught what jaylake would probably call a Zen Moment:



On the way home we stopped for lunch in an interesting place:



The cafe had a taxidermically enhanced bear parked inside, with an information card that the bear in question had been shot on a local road in 2006 adn weighed 385 pounds - a respectable specimen of black bear. I was later told by the young waitress that the bear had in point of fact been shot in somebody's BACK YARD. Boy. We live a stone's throw from wilderness...

And then, after lunch, we stopped at a place we'd never visited before. It's called Mirror Lake, and here's a handful of reasons why:











Eagles and bears and mirrors, oh my.

And now I need to stop crowing about the wonderful place I call home, and get back to work...

This dog... is just something.

And so's that kid.

...in the meantime. March, Me New York. Anybody out there wants to meet up?...email me directly to coordinate...

I feel an insane urge to lift one Spockian eyebrow and intone, "It's life, Jim, but not as we know it..."

...vexed questions, these book trailers. Do they or don't they help anything? Do they annoy so much that they hinder? Is a bad book trailer or an unprofessional one worse than none at all?...

Well, possibly I'm coming in after this trilogy's ship has already sailed, as it were, with the third and final book being available for a year now. But it never hurts to remind people, and this particular video trailer I can actually stand behind and be proud of. I think the folks who did the trailer (all contact details at the end of same, and if you need such stuff I can recommend them) did a wonderful job of it. It's been seen in my presence by people who have squealed in delight, or else told me three times afterwards how much they liked it. So on that fundamental level, it works. Make up your own mind. If you like it, pass it on...

They need all the help they can get.

There's a LJ community called Help Haiti (sorry, I don't know how to do the community linky thing, it just comes out screwy when I try it) where there's an on-going auction with lots of goodies on offer.

And kateelliott suggests a group called Partners in Health

Here's the update as of yesterday on PiH's web page:

Update: January 13, 2010, 4:00pm
PIH teams in Boston and Haiti organizing earthquake relief efforts

Over the past 18 hours, Partners In Health staff in Boston and Haiti have been working to collect as much information as possible about the conditions on the ground, the relief efforts taking shape, and all relevant logistics issues in order to respond efficiently and effectively to the most urgent needs in the field. At the moment, PIH’s Chief Medical Officer is on her way to Haiti, where she will meet with Zanmi Lasante leadership and head physicians, who are already working to ensure PIH’s coordinated relief efforts leveraging the skills of more than 120 doctors and nearly 500 nurses and nursing assistants who work at Zanmi Lasante’s sites.

We have already begun to implement a two-part strategy to address the immediate need for emergency medical care in Port-au-Prince. First, we are organizing the logistics to get the medical staff and supplies needed for setting up field hospital sites in Port-au-Prince where we can triage patients, provide emergency care, and send those who need surgery or more complex treatment to our functioning hospitals and surgical facilities. To do this, we are creating a supply chain through the Dominican Republic. Second, we are ensuring that our facilities in the Central Plateau are ready to serve the flow of patients from Port-au-Prince. Operating and procedure rooms are staffed, supplied, and equipped for surgeries and we have converted a church in Cange into a large triage area. Already our sites in Cange and Hinche are reporting a steady flow of people coming with medical needs from the capital city. In the days that come we will need to make sure our pharmacies and supplies stay stocked and our staff continue to be able to respond.

Currently, our greatest need is financial support. Haiti is facing a crisis worse than it has seen in years, and it is a country that has faced years of crisis, both natural disaster and otherwise. The country is in need of millions of dollars right now to meet the needs of the communities hardest hit by the earthquake. Our facilities are strategically placed just two hours outside of Port-au-Prince and will inevitably absorb the flow of patients out of the city. In addition, we need cash on-hand to quickly procure emergency medical supplies, basic living necessities, as well as transportation and logistics support for the tens of thousands of people that will be seeking care at mobile field hospitals in the capital city. Any and all support that will help us respond to the immediate needs and continue our mission of strengthening the public health system in Haiti is greatly appreciated. Help us stand up for Haiti now.

If you are not in a position to make a financial contribution, you can help us raise awareness of the earthquake tragedy. Please alert your friends to the situation and direct them to this webpage for updates and ways to help.

Pass it on.