Done with it

By which I mean Twitter – but maybe more.

I’ve been sitting on the sidelines of the writing business for a while. If I’m perfectly honest, the flop of my last book has weighed heavily on me. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Sidetracked, and based on the handful of reviews for it, readers have loved it too. But I never cracked the visibility code.

Sidetracked is not as trope heavy as most of the successful holiday romances. Romance is a trope focused business. Even though the “Grump and Sunshine” trope is popular at the moment, my “Grinch and Holiday Train fanatic” don’t fit the mold. I’m trying to figure out where my writing fits. The scraps of story I play with these days fall under mystery, fantasy, women’s fiction and more. The only thing I know for certain is I am not writing Amish fiction.

This brings me to Twitter. I joined Twitter years ago because I loved the writing community I found there. Romancelandia on Twitter was brilliant and fun and insightful in 140 characters. Producing a good tweet provided a certain intellectual challenge. You could engage with anyone, but really, the romance authors were the best. But those days are all in the past.

I became disenchanted with Twitter when it switched to longer posts and paid algorithms, but there was still enough fun to be had, insights to be gained, and connections to me made. Then came the hate and haste. It was one thing for people to post content that showed what an idiot they were. Continue to follow the wrong person for an hour after their scandal broke, and you could find yourself blacklisted or blocked without knowing why. Context became irrelevant. Instead Twitter functioned as a social hierarchy so complex, ever shifting, and mysterious that if you missed an hour, much less a day – you could look like an ignorant buffoon, and there was no shortage of people ready to call you out, both publicly and in your DMs. It got to the point where I pretty much quit writing tweets. I just went for the memes.

The assumption on Twitter was you did everything with intent, but intentionality on Twitter went away when the tweet size doubled and bots took over with the sole purpose of getting attention. Accounts you had no connection with would tag your name with their questionable product so it looked like you had endorsed something. I stayed on because Twitter is where the writers are, but I engaged less and less. It didn’t matter. I saw less of what I wanted to see (cute animals, bad weather, clever authors) and saw more politicians screaming, more public shaming (which does serve a purpose, but only when it allows for a growth mentality), and more dick-pics sliding into my DMs. It’s only gotten worse in the last month.

Twitter isn’t fun anymore. Finding photos of Buffalo under six feet of snow should not have so hard. Instead I had to wade past the bot driven irrelevant posts, or worse – ones spouting harmful messages – before getting into the good stuff, like opening garage doors and puppies frolicking in the snow. I have no time or life energy to waste on wading through the anger and hate. I’m deactivating my account -as soon as I archive it. Until I find something better, I’ll be on Facebook.

PS – If you are looking for something fun, Sidetracked is going on sale Nov 25-29th. Pick up the ebook for $1.99.

Advertisement

Earth Day 2020: The Covid-19 edition

Reusable shopping bags are now biohazards. Plant based cleaners don’t necessarily kill viruses. Recycling has stopped in some communities. I’ve had to quickly unlearn habits that took years to master.

It would be so easy to use Covid-19 as an excuse to give myself a pass on taking steps toward sustainability, and to do nothing to recognize the 50^th anniversary of Earth Day. And yet the steps I’m taking to protect myself, my family, and my community have brought food and my personal food waste into much sharper focus. That wrinkled red pepper that I once would have composted because no-one would eat it is a precious building block of a stir-fry. That soft apple gets cooked into a quick applesauce. The strawberries my kids thought were over-ripe were perfect for strawberry-lemon cupcakes. The fresh spinach that accidentally froze was fine in soup.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how to keep food fresher longer. I used to buy asparagus to use within 48 hours. But that is too many trips to the grocery store. I kept two pounds fresh for a week by storing the stems in water and ice.

The silicone Stasher bag that the kids no longer use for lunch have proven themselves handy. They are the best way I have found to keep an avocado fresh. When the kids start school again, they won’t get their Stasher bags back. Plus they are dishwasher safe.

I’m not sure who to credit for the tip of storing lemons in the fridge in a sealed plastic bag, but it’s worked like a charm. My sister sent me a box of lemons five weeks ago. The one we used last night was as fresh and juicy as the one we used the day they arrived.

Covid-19 and the accompanying stay at home orders and devastating loss of lives and livelihoods is overwhelming. Someone in my local paper mocked those of us who had to give up our reusable bags as “proof” that those bags were foolish “feel good environmentalism.” Personally, I need those “feel good” moments more than ever during this Covid-19 crisis.

With so much feeling out of my control, trying to reduce my food waste and limiting trips to the grocery ARE actions I can take and, yup, feel good about.

What are your favorite ways to keep food fresher longer and to reduce food waste?

P.S. – Wash your hands.

P.P.S. – I dislike the block editor – Getting pics to line up right takes WAY too long. My newsletter is more aesthetically pleasing. Sign up here.

Don’t open the invoice email

Dear readers,

I’ve been hacked. Someone got hold of my Mailchimp newsletter mailing list and sent out a whole bunch of invoices in my name. I am livid and I bet you are too.

PLEASE Delete the emails and above all do not download any files.

The hackers have broken my promise to you the reader to protect your information and use it only for my quarterly newsletter. They have destroyed my integrity with some of you and made me lose some of you.

I apologize from the bottom of my heart. I sincerely regret any inconvenience this has caused you.

DO NOT CLICK ON ANY LINKS IN THIS EMAIL

Plagiarism vs. Romance

If you’re on Twitter, you may have noticed #CopyPasteCris trending and wondered (as I did) what the heck is going on. In a word, PLAGARISM. I’m livid as an author and as a reader, for reasons I’ll explain below.

First an overview (as I understand the issue). Best selling “author” Cristiane Serruya got busted for stitching together books that contained large swaths of words originally written by Courtney Milan, Tessa Dare, and Bella Andre, among others. It gets worse. She blamed the ghost-writer she found on fiverr for the “error.” Romance Writers of America and a slew of lawyers are on the case. You can go to twitter and read through the thread to see both how blatant the rip offs were and how fierce romance writers are.

Author me is pissed that this person made the best seller list by buying up other people’s words and then somehow further gaming the system to get on list. Someone who would misrepresent their work in such an egregious way would likely have no ethical problem paying a bot-farm or some such other nonsense to download enough books to get on a trending list and get enough attention that unwitting readers buy the book in good faith. Author me knows how hard it is to get a book noticed. I cracked the Amazon top 250 ebooks list once, in a bundle with six other books. Author me also knows how often I’m solicited with offers to “guarantee” me a “bestseller” for $XXX dollars. I don’t click. I have ethics. So do most working authors.

Author me is also irritated by voices in publishing shouting that you can’t make money unless you publish a book a month or better yet two. I can understand putting out 3 books in 3 months if it is a trilogy with a long lead time coming up to it, but very few authors (if any) can put out a quality, full length book in a month. Readers buy these books on the “can’t miss” pre-order sale, but I have to wonder how many sit unread on the e-reader or how many are abandoned due to quality issues.

As a reader, I’m angry about this plagiarism, too. I didn’t buy any of Cris Serruya’s books, but if I had, I’d demand my money back. I don’t typically return books because I appreciate the amount of work that went into a book, even if I don’t like it. Cris Serruya stole money from both readers and my fellow authors. I’m angry that someone got paid for a cut and paste job and that the “author” with her name on the cover didn’t care enough about “her work” to look at it, because it was all in the name of the increasingly meaningless “bestseller” tag.

If I spend my money on a book (which I often do), I want the money to go to the people who pulled it all together, the writer, the cover designer, the editor. I want a clean product, where the character names don’t change half way through and the story is coherent. As a reader, I’ve fallen for authors that start off with a strong series (I read a lot of cozy mysteries), and then they get another idea, and another idea, and soon they have three series each kicking out a book a month and there is no quality control and the writing differs so much from series to series that you have to assume they are ghost-written or maybe—in light of recent incidents—copy-pasted for speed. I have a growing list of authors I will not read because they have poisoned their brand in pursuit of speed and fame. As a reader, I’ve become jaded and less willing to take a chance on an unfamiliar author, especially one self-pubbed.

That last point hurts. If you want to know why I have not had a new release in the last two years it is because as a reader and a writer, I want to put out a quality product. I have completed manuscripts making the rounds with publishers and agents. I may self-publish the one that has had full manuscript interest from multiple parties but no room in anyone’s publishing calendar. But there’s one problem. I don’t earn enough from my books full of my blood and tears and ethics because plagiarized crap and unprofessional “writers” are stealing money from all of us.

Thanks for reading my rant. These words are free to read, unprofessionally edited, and from the same source as all my other words—my heart, my head, and my fingertips.