I pretty much expected it. I was ready for it. This is what I told myself last night, when I finally went to sleep.

But I am thoroughly depressed by what I, in theory, expected, so obviously I had silently hoped for a different result. I don't live in the US, and I don't live in CA. I live in Ontario, in Canada, where gay marriage is a simple fact of both law and daily life. Prior to the advent of legal marriage for gays, I knew a number of people whose SO's were in the hospital dying of AIDS -- and who were denied the ability to be with their SO's in their last days because of the narrow-minded and ultimately evil (really, truly, imho) decisions of the rest of their family, even though, right up until the point that hospitalization was required, they were the ones who were physically caring for them -- a right that could not be denied a legal spouse.

Pointing to the ways in which a "separate but equal" commitment does not detract from daily life misses that single point. Think about it: If your SO's mother is denying you all access to her son because you aren't kin, how exactly, in CA, are you going to prove that you have the right to access? What are you going to say to the hospital staff? You can argue that you are, in fact, legally entitled to visit and to be there -- but what are you pulling out of your pockets to drop on the staff's desk? When you are already reeling in shock and pain, how are you building up your bureaucratic arsenal to be there to comfort the dying -- and to gain, for yourself, possibly the last hours you will ever have with the living?

No cut-tags here, because, honestly? CA, I do not get it. I understand the ways in which the Supreme Court was hampered -- but they should never have been hampered that way in the first place. To those who voted for prop 8: I don't understand your fear. I don't understand your bigotry. I don't understand your hatred. No one is telling you what to do. No one is telling you who to marry. Or who to sleep with. No one is pointing their mocking teen-age fingers at you and calling you gay. Okay? (I may, at this point, be calling you a whole host of other things, but my fury is not entrenched in law.)

It is not as if the lesbian and gay communities are asking for something outrageous. They are not asking for your jobs, your homes, your children, or your money; they're not demanding equal sexual time with you or your spouse; they're not trying to secede. What horrible and agitating thing are they struggling to achieve? They want to get married. Wow. That's it. They want to be able to get married. I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around why this is considered so ultimately terrifying because if you actually unpack the fear... there's not a lot there. They want the chance, in front of friends, family, and their entire community, to put their money where their mouth is: to make the public commitment.

I am, absent obvious racial characteristics, as middle-of-the-road as one gets. I am married, I have two children, I have a mortgage. My husband works full-time; I work part-time and write. I hate housework. My parents are in and out of my house all week. I am not writing from any radical fringe or any radical mode of thought. My marriage, and my family, are not lessened by gay marriage; they are more threatened by a society that continues to attempt to entrench bigotry in its constitution. I understand bigotry. I know what my parents lost--as children--in the internment camps of the second world war. I know what their parents lost, as adults with families they couldn't even keep together, so I understand bigotry. I understand the costs.

There is enough loneliness and unhappiness in life that denying people the chance at a public, successful marriage seems petty, small, cruel. Will all of the marriages survive? Probably not; many marriages don't. But the profound hope and promise of the beginning is one of the ways one gets through the storms and the upheavals. We promised. It was witnessed. It meant something. Denying people this happiness and this hope just spreads misery and isolation.

Please, do not do this. Do not continue to do this.

I did not delete Chapter One of all my older novels. Although by the time I was into the newer novels, I'd reached that point of frustrated editing mode in which the new ones weren't entirely safe, either. I'm hoping to be able to post a chapter of Cast in Silence sometime soon, as a sort of teaser. I unfortunately asked about Cast in Chaos because I tend to use the title of whatever I'm working on now as the "current" new book.

The website is here, and I'm now, once again, asking about possible short stories to put up on the site here.

Several helpful people have pointed out the ways in which my own web-perusals are not necessarily the norm, so I'm taking suggestions for short pieces--for download--that might actually give some sense of my over-all writing. Because I'm on the inside of the story and can't honestly objectively tell. So please feel free to wander over and leave a comment or suggestion. Or, you know, put one here.

I have good news and bad news.

The good news first: DAW is buying three more Michelle West novels!

The bad news: the 1st of those three is actually the second plot arc of the book I've been working on for the last fifteen months.

( explanations, which are a lot like groveling, behind the cut )
ETA: articles. Because articles are good.

fiction_theory said:
Keeping all these things in mind that you have said, are there things that a first time, unpublished novelist looking for an agent should be doing to help themselves out in the search for an agent?

Meaning: are there mistakes the first timers make that hold them back from being able to make a deal with an agent? Are there things they should be doing that they aren't?

The obvious mistakes are ones that anyone who does a little research can avoid; they can submit in the format that the agent requests, they can make sure they're submitting to an agent who is open to what they write, etc. I am absolutely certain that no one who is reading this would send a Western to an agent who primarily handles romances, or send hard copy to an agent who has decided to accept only e-submissions, or address a letter to "Nate Brandsford", for example.

And, as usual, I hit that little thing that says: Too many characters when replying.
( The rest of the answer, which is not as long as the previous one, honest, here )

rowyn said:

I agree with you that editors and agents have interests that align pretty well. I'm curious about the utility of agents, though. Do you think they're providing a valuable service for publishers or writers, in the case of first-time authors? I can see the benefit of agents to established authors; I'm hazier on how they help unpublished ones, or what they do that the publishing house couldn't do cheaper with their own readers or interns.

I broke this out of comments because it's a two part question, and at least one part is something I'm often asked. For anyone who knows the answer, or who doesn't feel like reading mine, I've answered the question behind the cut. To your complete lack of surprise, it's not really a short answer.
( Read more... )

I assume that everyone has read this very unhappy rant. I know that a lot of people have commented on it, and I wasn't going to, but I started a response to someone on my flist and realized that it was long. Very long.
( some thoughts on this behind the cut )

ETF lack of quotes in cut tag

Yesterday, I made an annoyed post about an amazon.com seller who was listing Cast in Silence for sale. Used. When, until I'm finished AAs, it doesn't even exist in galleys for ARCs yet. I was very irritated.

The proprietor of the on-line store responded in comments, and in the interests of fairness, as everyone had a chance to read my snit (granted, it is my journal, but still), I am pulling his comment out of the thread and putting it here in full, no changes, so that people who read my comment can also read his explanation.
( TSCBOOKS response to my post, here )

( My comments, as promised, beneath the cut )

I have always hated page proofs. I am reading the Luna version of page proofs now -- and by this I mean the last thing I'll see before I get my hands on the actual book. This is the last chance I have to catch all the mistakes I made before the book goes into production.

( More below the cut, but there is whining here )

So... I am sitting in front of my computer, making a post instead of continuing to work on them. This, sadly, is the fine art of procrastination. I also created a Twitter account. Because, yes, procrastinating. I updated my very under-updated web page. Someone elsewhere used the word "multi-crastination", and I find myself living up to it...

Copy this sentence into your livejournal if you're in a heterosexual marriage/relationship (or if you think you might be someday), and you don't want it "protected" by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

I am of the opinion that if other people living their own lives can easily threaten your marriage, there are issues that need to be worked out that have little, in the end, to do with said other people. I don't really understand -- I truly don't -- why this is such a big issue for people. It's not like having legal gay marriage is somehow going to force you to suddenly switch your sexual preference. Look, on a purely pragmatic level, happy, committed couples are more likely to have a stake in the community in which they live. Happy people usually want other people to be happy. They are just much more pleasant to have as neighbours.

So...do the people who hate this idea so much live in a crabby, enclosed little space in which they're unhappy enough to assume that everyone should suffer?

I know that some people point to children as a reason why gays shouldn't be allowed to marry (they can't, on their own or without intervention, have them). But no one seems to care if a heterosexual couple chooses not to have children, and I fail to see how this is fundamentally different.

So, I may have mentioned in a prior post that I've been experimenting on the writing front.

Not with style, and not with voice, or viewpoint (when I want to do that, I often dip my toes into shorter pieces), but rather, with part of the process. I've been working steadily, and without break (well, okay, 4 days off, total, since February), on House Name (which I think will possibly have to be changed, as a title, but that's what I call it right now).

But I've also been working on an entirely different project at the same time. It's a novel, and the idea came up when someone asked me if I had a novel of a specific kind available to submit. Which is to say, the idea existed, and I thought it would work in that context. I wrote two chapters, and realized that it was not quite what they were looking for -- but I really wanted to write it, and since I occasionally daydream about writing a book for which there are no deadlines, I kept going.
( Thoughts about writing two novels concurrently beneath the cut. )