AngiePen's Journal
Monday, November 23, 2009
12:24PM - A Hidden Magic
Hey all! [wave]
This is just a preliminary heads-up to let you know that I'm working on revising A Hidden Magic for publication, and in fact I'm close to finishing. I have a verbal agreement to get it submitted by Thanksgiving, and I still think I can make that, or close. [crossed fingers]
What that means is the clock is ticking on Hidden Magic 1.0. Once version 2.0 is finished, I'll be taking 1.0 down, so if you want a copy of the original fanfic version, grab it soon.
So, what next?
( Read more... )
Saturday, November 14, 2009
4:50AM - No Pledge of Allegiance
...until there actually is liberty and justice for all. That's what ten-year-old Will Phillips says, and he's acting on it, declining to stand for the Pledge at school because his family has gay friends who aren't being treated equally under the law -- who are being deprived of the right to marry, or to adopt children.
Predictably, Will is being harassed for his stance, first by a substitute teacher and (of course) by some of the more nasty and ignorant students at his school. (Although to be fair, this is only elementary school and I'd bet cookies that the students who are taunting and harassing him are just reflecting the views and behavior of their parents, so the shame is on them for not setting a better example.)
Will's parents support him, though, and got the school administration to admit that he's not required to stand for the Pledge, that he does have the right to sit through it.
And what about the substitute teacher who tried to bully him into participating, even threatening to get his mother and grandmother (whom she knew, although obviously not very well) on his case? Since he hadn't broken any rules in refusing to stand for the Pledge, Will's mother asked when they could expect an apology from that teacher. Well, the principal didn't see that as "necessary." Of course not. [eyeroll]
Will has an excellent sense of right and wrong, though, and I applaud his stand, and also his parents for supporting him in doing what's right. Read more about Will and the Pledge incident in this Arkansas Times article, and more commentary by John Brummett, a columnist with the Arkansas News. If nothing else, Mr. Brummett's suggested alternate Pledge is entertaining, and unfortunately apt.
Thanks to Indigene on The Phade for the original link.
Angie
Friday, October 16, 2009
4:29AM - Is YOUR Senator Pro-Gang-Rape?
Yeah, that's pretty inflamatory. I'm feeling pretty damn inflamed right now, so I think that's appropriate.
In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones, a twenty-year-old employee of KBR -- at the time a subsidiary of Halliburton, and hey look, they're hiring -- was working in Iraq. Her co-workers drugged her, gang-raped her, abused her so badly her breasts were disfigured permanently, then locked her in a shipping container for twenty-four hours without food or water. She was told by her employer that if she left Iraq to get medical attention, she'd be fired.
According to an ABC News post:
Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.
"I said, 'Dad, I've been raped. I don't know what to do. I'm in this container, and I'm not able to leave,'" she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.
"We contacted the State Department first," Poe told ABCNews.com, "and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen" -- from her American employer.
Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones' camp, where they rescued her from the container.
Also:
( Read more... )
Sunday, October 11, 2009
5:07PM - Another Plagiarist
My apologies if this is already all over the place; I'm behind on this Flist. I had to post about this, though.![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
gwendolynflight, over in the Merlin fandom, decided that she didn't want to do the work to learn to write and refine her technique and develop her own style. She wanted hugs and pats and e-cookies for her wonderful writing right now. So instead of writing a novel of her own, she grabbed a copy of Jordan Castillo Price's (jordan_c_price) first PsyCops book, Among the Living, did a bit of editing to change the names and the setting and such, and posted it to her journal as a Merlin fanfic. And of course, she got a lot of applause and e-cookies for it, because it's a very good story. (Jordan isn't a particular friend of mine, I don't even have her journal friended, but we both publish with Torquere Press and I have Among the Living -- it's a good read.)
Of course someone figured out what was going on -- 'cause there are fanfic readers who also read original m/m books, who knew?! -- and after some incredibly lame excuse-making, the plagiarist took the story down. But check out this screencap and read through the comments. :/
I love the part where gwendolynflight assures a commenter that "it is completely and fully beta'd." Umm, right, because the real writer polished it, then sent it to a publisher where a line editor and a proofreader went over it. [eyeroll]
And then lower down where she actually admits that the story is a "fusion" with Price's PsyCops series. o_O This is where I get the idea that she's actually just that stupid, rather than a bold-faced thief. Not that being a moron is an excuse, but you know, it's something different to smack her for.
Then a few comments later where she's talking to a reader about how dark the story is, and mentions that Book Two is particularly dark, and she's glad that isn't turning the reader off. So she fully intended to go on doing this, through the whole series? Once she'd ripped off all the available novels, since she seems to think she's doing absolutely nothing wrong, I wonder whether she'd have had the balls to, like, write to Jordan and nudge her about hurrying up on the next installment. :P
Finally, about 2/3 of the way down, throwawayreview calls it what it is and clues poor gwendolynflight that this isn't a "fusion," it's not fanfic, it's plagiarism. And of course Ms. Gwen has all sorts of excuses, because plagiarism is "a social concept" and not absolute. And later on she says that "plagiarism isn't an inherent moral wrong - it's an issue firmly bound up in economic and patriarchal issues." Umm, right. It's a weapon of the Patriarchy. So her stealing the actual words of another woman writer and posting them as her own and accepting praise and credit for writing the words another woman actually wrote, is actually Ms. Gwen sticking it to the Patriarchy. Wow, good to know. [eyeroll]
Note that Jordan has no problem with fanfic. She said, in her reaction to this situation:
( Read more... )
Thursday, October 8, 2009
3:27AM - Bullies Get Butts Kicked By Cross-Dressers
Gacked from a few places around the net. :D
A couple of homophobic thugs in Swansea, Wales, attacked two men who were walking down the street in short skirts and high heels. The two cross-dressers turned around and wiped the sidewalk with the jerks. It turns out the cross-dressers were a couple of cage fighters -- talk about picking a fight with the wrong guys! LOL!
Someone named CJ in comments to the above linked article suggested "Give these 2 badges and cuffs and get them out on the streets everynight dressed that way to attract idiots who only attack people (seemingly) weaker than themselves." I'd chip in for that, seriously. [evil snicker]
Angie
Friday, September 11, 2009
2:21PM - Irony, Thy Name Is Government
Also incompetence, but it's the irony I'm mainly appreciating here.
This morning at around ten, the Coast Guard carried out some exercises on the Potomac near the bridge where President Obama's motorcade passed by on his way to a 9-11 memorial event. Unfortunately they didn't think to, like, maybe notify any other agencies of what they were doing, so the exercise resulted in CNN reporting ten rounds fired at a suspicious vessel, and departures from the nearby Reagan International Airport being held for almost half an hour while the FBI scrambled to respond to the hostile incident.
Oops.
Good to know our tax dollars are being used wisely in these harsh economic times, to say nothing of the government's great respect for the time, money and feelings of its citizens (especially on this day -- come on, people!) who get caught up in this sort of fiasco, whether they were near the bridge and worried that they were going to be killed, or were stuck at the airport being made late for meetings, missing connections, etc.
The gold standard of irony is toward the end of the article, though, where it says:
The Coast Guard is part of the Homeland Security Department, which was created in response to the 9/11 attacks. The massive reorganization was designed to promote sharing of information within the department and among other law enforcement agencies.
Umm, yeah. I think they need to work on that.
Angie
Saturday, August 15, 2009
1:02AM - Making Amends
Icarusancalion over on LJ has posted an explanation/apology/amends for something she did, attacking and slandering a Buddhist temple and its Lama over a period of years because she couldn't face her own responsibility for her failures as a nun and a Buddhist.
Her hateful and lying words from the past have been used by others to hurt this temple and her old teacher, and she hopes that her confession and explanation will rise high enough in Google rankings that when people go looking for information on the subject, they'll find her post to mitigate the lies she helped spread, which are also still out there, propped up by others with similar issues.
Aside from this being a pretty awesome melding of ancient tradition and 21st century technology, I think this is a worthy cause and then some, so I'm linking in all my personal fora. I encourage everyone to read this (it's not that long) and if you agree that it's a worthy cause, to link as well. Thank you.
Angie
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
10:46PM - Trying to Read a Fic
I just saw an interesting looking fic that's almost twenty chapters in. There's no summary [sigh] but the title is suggestive of a trope I find intriguing, so I clicked through anyway.
Chapter Almost-Twenty. No links. No tags. No nothing. The only way to find all the pieces would be to go on an Easter egg hunt through the journals where it's posted. I won't do that even if it's just someone's personal journal, but just to ice the cake, this person is posting directly to the (very busy) fic communities, so there'd be even more stuff to search through than there would be in a personal journal.
Umm, no. Sorry. I've said before (and various other places in comments) that if a writer can't be bothered to make it easy for me to read a story -- all the way through, from the beginning, even if I'm not there as they post each chapter -- then I can't be bothered to click and search and hunt around to find all the pieces so I can actually read it. I don't care who the characters are or how intriguing the header seems; even if I had the time to go on said Easter egg hunt, which I don't, this sort of thing just pisses me off.
I can only assume this person doesn't want readers, except perhaps the ones who were there when they started posting and have been there all along (sorry, no vacations allowed). And I can also only assume that this person isn't interested in being nominated for any fic awards, since it's clearly not fair to expect people doing a writer the favor of nominating, or people doing fandom the favor of running an award cycle (a thankless job if ever there was one), to take the time to go combing through the underbrush collecting however many pieces of a novel-length fic into one place so that it can be nominated, when the writer could've done it so easily as they posted but chose not to bother.
So, whatever. Maybe it's a great fic, but I'm scrolling on. [sigh]
Angie
Monday, July 27, 2009
5:58AM - Pirate Humor, and a Challenge
The funny first. I was checking hits on my blog and I saw that someone was querying Google for "chasing fire by angela benedetti torrent" recently. Yay, someone else looking to steal one of my stories.
Except I've never published a story called "Chasing Fire." :) Nor even written one. And when I checked, it doesn't seem there's anyone else named "Angela Benedetti" who's written a story by that name either. (Although there are a couple others of us; one's a meteorologist who publishes a lot of scholarly papers, and the other is a lady who works with children in Bogotá. So far as I know, neither one writes fiction.)
So it looks like this is one confused pirate. :D Not that I'm complaining or anything -- confused pirates are the best kind. Hey, dude? If you can find a torrent copy of a story by me called "Chasing Fire," go for it, with my blessing. [wave]
Moving on to the subject of slightly more competent pirates, someone finally did find a copy of "Learning to Love Yourself" and got it up on a torrent site back around the end of June. I sent a takedown note and, credit where it's due, the site took it down. It was up for however many days, though, and a bunch of people got free copies.
( Read more... )
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
10:29PM - More Rice Paddy Art
Remember when I posted this about a year and a half ago? The husband forwarded a link to some more, from this year -- check it out.
Isn't that incredible? I love the pics showing how distorted the actual plantings are to give the right perspective; scroll down toward the bottom for those.
Angie
Friday, July 3, 2009
3:23AM - Twenty Years
Over the 4th of July weekend in 1989, I got on a plane and flew down to Anaheim to meet a guy for the first time ever in realspace. We'd met met in an online fantasy RPG called GemStoneII, on the old GEnie network, and had become close over the previous few months. We were both sort of nervous, but he didn't turn out to be an axe murderer or anything ;D and the trip worked out well. It wasn't a huge, swooping, love-at-first-sight sort of thing, but that was twenty years ago and we're still together. We've been married now for thirteen years come August, so I'd say the gamble of taking that plane trip -- which all the flailing hysterics who are terrified of the evil internet will tell you to Never Ever Do!!! in this fearful age -- was a pretty good gamble. :D
In about twelve hours Jim and I'll be getting on a plane and going up to San Francisco, where we'll be touristing around for a week. We've done it before and both love the place; the weather is great and the food is better, and we're just going to hang out and relax and revel in having known the love of our lives for twenty years, which is pretty darned good these days.
I'll be taking the laptop but probably won't be reading blogs/journals/etc. all that much. If anything cool happens, or you post something you think I'd be particularly interested in, feel free to e-mail me or leave a link here.
Don't crash the internets while I'm gone! ;D
[wave]
Angie
Thursday, June 25, 2009
7:56PM - GLBT Bookshelf and Some Press Weirdness
Mel Keegan has pulled together a site called the GLBT Bookshelf to act as a clearinghouse for independent writers, publishers, artists, editors, reviewers, etc., of GLBT books, so that censorship elsewhere won't have the power to cut us off from the rest of the world again; we'll have our own place out from under the umbrella of any larger organization which might want to shove us back into a corner, or off a cliff. The inspiration was AmazonFail, of course, and the site, which is a wiki, has exploded with pages since it was thrown open for people to join and start building. There are so far a few hundred writers, a bunch of publishers, with lists and categories and cross-links so you can wander around and find whatever you might be into. And it'll only get better as more people come on over and add their info.
Here's my main page for anyone who's interested; there are links to pages about each of my published stories, with buy links and links to two free stories, which are sequels to two of my commercial stories.
Mel's also planning on adding a Booklover's Lounge too, specifically for readers. I'll let you all know when that happens.
The first publicity campaign is starting and we've got a press release out to a few sites, which is pretty cool. Hopefully the site will get a nice wave of people wandering through.
The weirdness, though, came just a few minutes ago. Mel Keegan e-mailed all of us who've signed up on the site about the press release, which says in part:
Frustrated by the infamous "AmazonFail" fiasco of early 2009, in which the online retail giant was suspected of attempting to deny GLBT literature the benefits of its promotional systems, Keegan conceived of an online community in which all such systems were circumvented -- replaced by "community promotion" with direct links to authors’ and publishers’ pages.
There's another mention of "AmazonFail" later on as well. But Mel mentioned that one of the sites to which the press release was submitted, PR.com, would only run the story if the mentions of "AmazonFail" were removed. o_O Umm, excuse me? None of the other sites minded the mention at all; "AmazonFail" was big news a couple of months ago and mention of it will only bring more traffic. So one has to wonder whether Amazon might not own a chunk of PR.com, and be trying to squelch mentions in the news of their more embarassing moments. Only speculation of course, but it's definitely suspicious.
Angie
Saturday, June 20, 2009
1:05AM - To the Person Posting as BUGCHICKLV on Demonoid
Thanks for expressing interest in my story, "Learning to Love Yourself," as well as a number of my colleague Mike Shade's stories. It's great to know there are people out there who want to read my stuff.
But seriously, dude, it costs $1.29. You can buy a copy right here for, like, a quarter of what a cup of coffee costs these days.
Now I'll admit that with the many, many stories which were passed around on that particular Demonoid thread, you ripped off saved quite a lot more money than that. I'm afraid I can't find it in my heart to admire your frugality, however, since it comes at the expense of my own earnings and those of other writers I know.
If you're really that strapped for cash, there are plenty of legitimately free stories around on the internet. There's some great stuff in fanfic fandom (look for rec lists) plus a lot of published writers have free stories on their web sites. Archives like Nifty are free and specialize in gay erotica. Oh, and there are also places called libraries where you can borrow books for free -- I'll bet there's one near you.
But you know, the pirated e-book thing? Please knock it the fuck off. Thank you.
Angie
Sunday, June 7, 2009
4:35PM
Title: A Lost Boy
Author: AngiePen
Pairing: Liam Neeson/Orlando Bloom, minor Liam/Johnny Depp, plus a few other pair-ups among the supporting characters.
Rating: NC-17 overall
Summary: Slave Orlando's been taken and the kidnappers aren't interested in ransom. And of course Master Liam's thundering rage is only at the personal insult, that someone would disrespect him by daring to touch his property.
Disclaimer: I don't own anyone you recognize. I know nothing about their social lives or sexual activities, more's the pity. This is fiction, period. It is done as a labor of love and I make no money from it.
Notes: 1) Set in LJ PoisonTaster's Kept Boy universe -- FAQ here. See Chapter 1 for more notes.
2) I'm not promising anything regular at this point -- I have some committments with my commercial writing that I couldn't put off any more, and I'm still in the middle of working on those -- but I wanted to get something up for Liam's birthday. Enjoy!
Previous Chapters: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen, Twenty, Twenty-One, Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three, Twenty-Four, Twenty-Five, Twenty-Six, Twenty-Seven, Twenty-Eight, Twenty-Nine, Thirty, Thirty-One
The e-mail came from Parker on Monday, before noon, even. Orlando was in body-slave training, which was... better and worse, both. Liam had to admit that he was selfish enough to want Orlando back completely. He knew that what he should want was what was best for his boy, and that was to be back safe at home as soon as possible, with as little abuse and trauma as possible. And part of him had wished for that, the part that knew Orlando was unusually old for a "new" body-slave, and hoped that he'd be passed over for that reason.
( Read more... )
Friday, May 22, 2009
9:29PM - At a Convention
So I'm up in Santa Clara at BayCon with my husband. We come every year; I used to live in this area before I got married, I've been to every BayCon and worked the first twenty-some of them. It's a cool con and I get to see friends I don't see anywhere else, which is always great.
I was particularly looking forward to this year, though, because Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon are co-Writer Guests of Honor. I've liked their work for twenty-some years, and though I don't fanatically grab every single thing they publish nowadays the way I used to, they've still produced some of my favorite fantasy and urban fantasy books and stories. Misty Lackey and Charles De Lint are the reasons I like and write urban fantasy, in fact. I even brought a book with me -- a hardcover copy of Black Gryphon -- to get autographed, and I hardly ever do that.
Well, we just found out at dinner that Misty and Larry aren't actually here. :( Misty has the flu, so they couldn't come after all. Massive suckage. The Fan GOH already couldn't make it, so we're down to the Toastmaster and the Artist GOH. [laugh/flail] Talk about bad luck! And of course it'd have to be one of my favorite writers who gets sick just when I was all jazzed up to meet her.
I'm sure I'll still have a great time, just because I always do, but... crud. :/
Angie
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
1:10AM - All In One Place For Your Convenience
...we have racism, ablism, classism, plus a Hey, let's all laugh at the fat people! Wow. Check out the WalMart Bingo Card. [eyeroll]
Oh, and down in the comments there's someone taking a swipe at those outrageous women who actually breastfeed in public! [exaggerated look of horror] Wow, wouldn't the world be better without them? To say nothing of the people with eyepatches, and the white women with multi-racial kids? [I have to wonder whether women of other races with multi-racial kids are somehow less offensive to whoever made up this bingo card, or whether this person just thinks all brown people look alike and therefore has never noticed a woman of color with multi-racial kids. It's racist and offensive either way.]
I guess if nothing else, this is a great example to show that people who are bigoted against one group of people tend to be wide-spectrum, equal-opportunity jerks. Because clearly seeing someone who's missing a limb shopping in the same store as you is just as offensive and objectionable as seeing that someone has left frozen foods thawing on a random shelf somewhere.
Good grief. :/
Angie
Sunday, May 17, 2009
9:05PM - Earthquake
Holy sheep, that was big. O_O Unless the epicenter was in our basement, that was definitely a doozy. All the other Southern California people okay?
I was downstairs napping on the couch when suddenly everything was moving and rattling. It went on for probably around 20-30 seconds, although it's hard to tell looking back to huddling in a doorway with my husband; once your heartrate goes up, time estimates tend to go kind of off-kilter. [wry smile]
EDIT: The USGS entry just came up -- it was a 5.0 right in LA. It felt stronger, but probably because it pretty much was in our basement. [laugh/flail] I hope everyone else is okay.
Angie
Thursday, May 7, 2009
2:27PM - Sean Tevis is Back
Remember the guy who ran the internet campaign for state representative in Kansas? He lost the election after the opposition spent a record amount to oppose him (according to his web site) and some unknown party voice-spammed voters with a robocaller over the phone claiming to be from his campaign. Someone put in a lot of time and effort to cheat him out of votes.
So he wants to run again.
( Read more... )
Monday, April 13, 2009
3:56AM - Amazon Update
Amazon is trying to sidestep the publicity nightmare by claiming that this is all a glitch and that they're working on fixing it. Umm, sure.
Jane at Dear Author looked up the metadata for a number of books, both ranked and de-ranked, and it seems the stripping of sales ranks might've been done in accordance with the metadata, looking for "Gay & Lesbian" or "Erotica" in the metadata to choose what to strip. Books like A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality weren't stripped of their ranking because, despite being clearly about homosexuality, they don't have "Gay & Lesbian" in any of their metadata.
That explains how this could have been done automatically. There apparently is a consistent keyword-type search which could've been used to strip rankings on books which all had metadata features in common by someone typing in a command. I still don't buy the "glitch" story, though, because that doesn't explain why writers like Mark Probst were told straight out that the de-ranking was done by Amazon, per their policy of removing "Adult" material from searches and listings. Why would anyone have said, "Yes, we do this, it's policy" if it was actually a glitch? Sorry, Amazon -- I'm still not buying it.
Note also that someone came up with the tag Amazonfail and people have been applying it on Amazon to books which had their ranking stripped. This isn't something that's going to force Amazon to do the right thing; they can and likely will delete the tag as soon as they notice it. I'm willing to spend some time tagging and confirming tags just to be annoying, though; have fun if you have some free time.
I did notice that some of the books which have been used as counter-examples ("Why were those books de-ranked and not these?!") have been included in the Amazonfail tagging. I didn't confirm those; I still think that all the books should have their rankings and be included in searches and listings. No matter what I personally think of some other books (the historical manual on dogfighting, for example) I oppose all censorship and suppression of books and won't even suggest suppressing books I disapprove of, any more than I approve of anyone else censoring books I like. That's just me, though.
Angie
Sunday, April 12, 2009
6:59PM - Amazon Is Protecting YOU From Naughtiness!
What? You say you're an adult and don't need a nanny when you're shopping for books? Too bad. Someone thinks you do, and whoever that someone is obviously has a lot of pull at Amazon, and has a particular axe to grind when it comes to GLBT books (that's books, not just fiction) and also some het erotica.
( Read more... )
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