A sense of impending doom . . . .

Today -- Friday, 10 January 2020 -- has not been one of my better days.  Maybe that's why I'm back here, after a long and not entirely voluntary hiatus.

I wrote a long time ago that I wouldn't be doing book reviews here.  I thought about setting up a separate blog for reviews, and in fact so much time has passed that maybe I actually did that and have just forgotten about it.

The truth is, I don't write a lot of reviews of current fiction.  Most of the reviews I do write and post on BookLikes are of books I didn't like, didn't finish, didn't get past the first few pages.  There's a reason for that, and it's not a good reason.

My budget is severely limited.  More or less retired, I live on Social Security and some supplemental self-employment income from my writing and from the sale of various arts & crafts products I make.  My Social Security benefits are reduced because I elected to start them earlier than full retirement age.  The supplemental income is not reliable, and it has been made even less reliable by my inability to shake off various stressors.  Anxiety is not profitable, but it is pervasive.  I do not write as much as I should.  I do not make as much jewelry as I should.

I do not make as much money as I need.

Therefore, my reading material tends to fall into certain distinct classifications:

1. Physical books I already own, which number about 5,000.
2. Kindle books, mostly freebies and therefore many self-published
3. Non-fiction library books, whether physical copies or digital borrows.

It's that second category that ends up being "reviewed" on my BookLikes blog.  Sadly, many of those author-published books just aren't very well written.  But I did try them.  I really did.

My longer, more analytical reviews were saved for those favorite personal classics, books like Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar and Leslie Turner White's Lord Johnnie.  I loved these books when I first read them more than 50 years ago; rereading them for the purpose of close analysis was just as much fun.

The past few weeks have been filled with the drama surrounding Romance Writers of America, a scandal of sorts with its roots in racism, lack of diversity, and lack of transparency in dealing with those issues.  I'm not going to rehash any of that, or bring up my very tangential involvement, except to say that my fifteen or so years of active membership in RWA meant I made a lot of connections with other writers.  Friends? Um, not all of them, and only a tiny few of those connections have survived.  But it still means that reading a book by someone I knew back then brings in an automatic bias.  So I haven't posted reviews of many books by people I know or knew.

Let me be clear:  I would never, under any circumstances, direct an author to a review I had written of their work*.  Reviews are for readers.  But I don't have any way of knowing, unless they post it in front of me on Twitter or something, which authors routinely search for reviews of their books.  It's not likely that I'd post a really bad review of a book by someone I've had a positive personal relationship with -- whether in person or just through social media -- but even minor criticisms might be taken the wrong way.  I really do appreciate my online contacts, and I would rather not review a book written by a cyber-friend than risk that friendship.

(*I did recently inform an author with whom I've interacted on social media  that I reviewed one of their books 30+ years ago. I no longer have a copy of the review.)

But BookLikes has become more problematic today than it has been for a while.  I think I started to take it for granted again, but it's been down for 24 hours now with only a brief Facebook notification that they're working on it.

So, what to do?

Well, I have a website that I haven't even looked at for a year or more.  It's due to renew in February, and I actually thought this morning that I might let it all lapse.  Could I convert it to something more attuned to books and book blogging?  I don't know.  That's not my area of expertise; I wouldn't even know how to start.

But it's been six and a half years since the Great Purge at Goodreads, and so many of us have found a home at BookLikes.  We like the freedom, even if we don't like the spammers.  We like the platform, even if we don't like the silence from the operators.  Most of all, however, we like each other.

If the platform returns, I'll be backing up as much of my material as I can.  Some of it may end up here.  Comments may be lost, but at least the core will be saved.  Again, that's if the platform can be resuscitated.  And I'll add links to it for this post, too.  If it comes back.

I'm committed to doing what I can -- within the constraints of time and budget -- to keep the community alive, regardless.



 

When the only words are "How cool is that!"

I don't believe in omens. Seriously, I do not believe in omens. I know I keep saying it, but it's true. I don't believe in omens.

We will forget about all the omens that led me this past April to pick up a book I'd started in 1996 and start writing on it again, a process that resulted in the publication earlier this week of that book, The Looking-Glass Portrait, on Amazon.

 

 

I immediately began work on a new book, which I have only the vaguest idea where I'm going with. The opening scene is of the main character, one Iola Fairfield, taking leave of her old life in Indiana and heading out on her own. She gets into her car, starts the engine and . . . . 

 

"Satisfied that everything looked in order, I put the key in the ignition and turned the car on.  I knew that as soon as I pulled out of the parking lot, I would never look back.  There was nothing here for me at all.  Instead of looking back, I looked at the clock.  Ten minutes after eleven.  I waited another minute before shifting the Suburban into gear.  Eleven had always been a lucky number for me, even though I wasn't particularly superstitious, and it seemed fitting to begin this journey at the auspicious moment of 11:11."

Now, this may seem trivial to you, and in reality it is. There is eventual significance in the novel, but that's not what this post is about.

 

This post is about baseball.

 

I am not a fanatic baseball fan, the kind who remembers stats and so on with an encyclopedic memory.  And I'm certainly not a personally athletic person by any means.  But I am a Chicago White Sox fan.

 

In seventh grade, in Bill Kyger's social studies class at South Junior High School, we studied Illinois and Chicago history.  We had to do "projects," some kind of 3-D construction of something depicting Illinois or Chicago culture.  I'm sure there were the usual models of Fort Dearborn and maybe someone constructed a model of the Water Tower out of sugar cubes.  I made a model of Comiskey Park.

In the spring of that same school year, my buddy Sue S. and I decided we would enter the Chicago Daily News batboy contest.  As I recall, entrants had to write 200 words (or some such) on why they wanted to be the White Sox batboy.  Two boys would be chosen, one for the home team and one for the visitors, but every entrant would receive an official baseball.  And yes, of course, in 1961 this contest was open only to boys.  That didn't matter to me; I was determined to enter anyway, and I thought Sue was, too.  I wrote out my little essay, forged my mother's signature to the entrance form, and sent it off.  Sue chickened out.  But it didn't matter; I was apparently disqualified for being a girl -- or for doing a bad job of forgery? -- and never even got my free baseball.

Girls couldn't play Little League then, and my high school didn't even have girls' softball.  Not that I probably would have made the team anyway, but it would have been nice to know I wasn't automatically excluded.  Oh, well, I could still be a spectator.

Did I have a favorite player?  Oh, of course I did.

One morning in the spring of 1996, the phone rang.  I answered it, and it was my son Kevin calling from Tempe, where he was attending Arizona State University.  

"I'll bet you don't know what day it is," he taunted.

"Of course, I do," I replied without any hesitation whatsoever.  "It's the 29th of April, which means it's Luis Aparicio's birthday."

Aparicio was the star shortstop for the Go-Go White Sox in the late 1950s and 1960s.  Everyone in the family knew he was my favorite player.  His uniform number, as you can see above, was 11.

Then there was the Mother's Day a year or so later when Kevin walked in the house with a gift for me from -- if I remember the name correctly -- The Glass Cage, a sports memorabilia store.  The baseball autographed by Luis Aparicio still sits on top of my piano.

I missed watching the opening game of the 2005 World Series between the White Sox and Houston Astros, when Aparicio threw out the ceremonial first pitch, but I watched the next three games as the Sox swept the Astros to their first championship since 1917.  I remembered the 1959 series and the loss to the Dodgers; 2005 was special.

There's other stuff, tangential stuff, irrelevant stuff, the weird stuff that gets tucked into a writer's head to be pulled out when some bit of weird stuff is needed, whether it's an old house with plastic tulip shade pulls or an auspicious moment for a character to embark on a new life.  So it was that just a couple of days ago, my fictional Iola Fairfield hopped into her car and waited to leave the parking lot until 11:11.

But wait!  There's more!

That same son who teased me about Aparicio's birthday and brought me the autographed baseball is now raising his own son to play baseball.  This week Kevin and Andrew are making a pilgrimage to Cooperstown, New York, to the Baseball Hall of Fame.  This morning, Kevin sent me a picture on Facebook.

How cool!

(And yeah, at this point I was already thinking about that auspicious start to a journey at 11:11 and dismissing it all because I really don't believe in omens.)

Shortly after receiving the Facebook post, I heard the whistle on my cell phone that indicates a text message.  "Ok" he wrote.   "So are you ready for this????"

Followed by

And

How cool is that???!!!!!!!!!

But I still don't believe in omens.  Really and truly I don't.

Where the words came from

Very, very, VERY long background on the project that has occupied me for the past two months (and four days).

Let me start out by saying once again that I am NOT superstitious and I do NOT believe in "omens." I do think, however, that our brains latch onto things from deep in our subconscious that trigger connections we sort of forgot about until that subconscious throws them in our faces again.

That's what happened back in April with a shared Facebook story about a duplex in Toronto that was basically unchanged from the time it was built in the 1950s or so.

It looks like a typical '50s duplex, very similar to the one my aunt and uncle built shortly after my cousin was born, which was 1956. The three of them lived in the downstairs unit, and my aunt's widowed mother, whom we called Aunt Petie even though her real name was Gertrude, had the upstairs. 

 

My Uncle Dick is my mother's brother, so Aunt Shirley was only related to me by marriage. Her dad, Cornelius Stryker, was a commercial artist, a career my aunt also followed. She was an only child, and in turn only had one child, my cousin Connie. Connie also went into the arts; she and her husband Paul have a graphic arts and printing business in the Chicago suburbs.

You'll understand all these details . . . . eventually.

We were a very small and geographically close family, so holidays were spent at the in-laws' homes as much as the family's. My dad's family, the Wheelers, also lived in Edison Park not far from the Strykers, and his sister, also Shirley, was friends with Shirley Stryker who married my mother's brother. In fact, the Wheelers' house on Owen Avenue was not more than a few blocks from the Strykers' on Olcott. My dad and both Aunts Shirley went to the same grade school, Ebinger. Thus I was relatively familiar with the Stryker house, where Aunt Petie lived until 1957 or so, when I would have been nine years old. And that's old enough to remember things.

As the oldest of the five cousins born in that time period -- my brother and sister are half a generation younger -- I was eventually granted special privileges when visiting the Stryker house, the biggest of which was to use the upstairs bathroom. It was a marvelous, mysterious blue, totally unlike any other bathroom I had ever seen. The stairway was beautiful polished dark wood, with a large landing in the middle where it turned 180 degrees. On that landing was a glass fronted case containing my aunt's collection of dolls from all over the world, gifts from a family friend. I was also the only one of the children allowed to sit on the landing and look at the dolls.

I loved the house. And over the years, even after Uncle Neil Stryker died and Aunt Petie moved in with my Uncle Dick and Aunt Shirley, certain details of the house remained absolutely crystal clear in my memory, as clear as the crystal knobs on the interior doors in the house. I remembered the very modern chrome and glass end tables in the living room, the dining room, the closed-in back porch where we kids played, the white painted brick fireplace with its never burned white birch logs. The back yard with all the tulips -- the Strykers were Dutch and the yard had hundreds of tulips -- and the kind of creepy basement, too, all stuck in my memory.

 

 

 

There was another creepy thing about the house.

During the Depression, Cornelius Stryker worked as a window dresser for some of the department stores in downtown Chicago, and he supplemented his income by making plaster of Paris figurines which he then painted and sold. I still have a set of five little puppies that my aunt gave me after he had passed away. But one thing that he had made scared the crap out of me. It was a head, maybe of a person or maybe of a frog or maybe of something in between, and it was painted green and it had its mouth wide open. The inside of the mouth was painted red. The whole thing was about as big as the palm of your hand. It was used to hold a pot scrubber, such as an SOS pad or whatever, and it sat on the counter in the kitchen, and I was terrified of it.  Absolutely terrified.  I can still see that thing in my mind's eye, creepy as hell.

I have other memories of the house that may not be quite as clear or may not even be memories so much as they are products of my imagination.

On the other side of the kitchen from the counter where the plaster thing was, I recall a little breakfast nook, pretty much like a booth in a restaurant. The two benches and the table were painted bright red enamel, and there was a window overlooking the back yard and garden. That window faced east, and to block the morning sun at breakfast time, there was an ordinary pull-down window shade. The pull on the shade was a little red plastic charm of tulips growing in a wooden shoe. I have no idea why I was so fascinated by that red plastic shade pull, but I was, and I remembered it with absolute clarity.

As I said, Uncle Neil died in the mid-1950s, and Aunt Petie sold the house in Edison Park and moved in with Uncle Dick and Aunt Shirley and Connie, somewhere around 1957.

Fast forward 40 years or so, to 1997. My career writing historical romances was in the process of dying, but I am a compulsive writer, as you may have noticed, and so I kept on even though I knew I would never publish anything again. I got an idea for a contemporary gothic -- similar to what Barbara Michaels wrote -- involving a house modeled on. but for various reasons not identical to, the Stryker house. As I began to write it, the details I remembered about the actual house came more and more and more into play. I hadn't originally intended to be quite so exact, but it seemed as if my subconscious was writing parts of the story around some of those details.

Unfortunately, there were certain things I didn't remember. I thought I'd just write around them, or make up something, but nothing fit right. So one Saturday, I called my aunt to see if she could refresh my memory. She had, after all, grown up in the house.

This was in the days -- 1997 -- when long distance calls still cost some real cash, so it was quite an investment for me to call from Arizona to Illinois, but we had a long and delightful conversation. She was pretty surprised at how much detail I did remember, especially the crystal door knobs, the evil grinning scrubbie holder, and the plastic shade pull. She offered to draw me a floor plan and send it to me, so I'd have the details of the layout, in particular of the second floor, since I had never been up there very much. (Only the bathroom!) The floor plan diagram arrived a couple weeks later, along with a most truly bizarre extra.

To my surprise, the floor plan did not include the breakfast nook that I remembered so vividly, but, well, I apparently misremembered.  To this day I don't know where that pseudo-memory came from.

I continued to work on the novel, incorporating some of the details she had told me about, but 1997 was a traumatic year for me for a wide variety of reasons. It was also a financially troubling year, more so even than all the other financially troubling years I'd been through. In 1998 I put virtually all my fiction writing aside and made the bizarre decision to return to college; I got my BA in 2000, then stuck around for a master's in 2003. Those five years were filled with more trauma, emotional as well as financial, but I got through it. Just when things should have been leveling off, my husband was diagnosed with lung cancer, and died 10 weeks later in 2005.

I've dabbled with fiction through all this, but haven't really done much. I have gazillions of files on the computer, plus notes and sketches written longhand and filling a fat folder in the file cabinet. Every once in a while I get the folder out and transcribe some of those notes in an attempt to put everything in digital format, but I usually get discouraged and quit.

Several years ago, I picked up that particular novel and thought I'd work on it again. Self-publishing via Amazon's Kindle had given me the opportunity to put some of my historical romances out there again, and I thought it would also allow me to bypass all the trauma of dealing with editors and agents and the attendant bullshit, and I figured what the heck. I hit up good ol' Google to see if I could get some exterior pictures of the real house just for inspiration, and as luck -- or omens? -- would have it, the house happened to be for sale at the time. One of the real estate sites, Trulia or Zillow or whatever, had a whole portfolio of interior pictures as well, and I greedily gobbled them up and tucked them in the digital file folder. One of those photos was of the kitchen counter, exactly as I remembered it except for the grinning mouth figurine. The breakfast nook with its window and shade and plastic tulips was nowhere to be found.

But alas, for whatever reasons I never went any further than collecting the photos. The book itself continued to languish.

Until this past April.

The article about the Toronto house, frozen in time, brought all of that back, for some reason or other. Maybe it wouldn't have except for the fact that my daughter in New Jersey bought a house last summer that in many ways resembles the interior of the Toronto house. There's a lot of pink in Rachel's house, a lot of decor left from the 60s and 70s which the original owner from whom they bought it never changed. Ultimately, though, those subconscious connections all led back to Aunt Petie's house in Edison Park and the gothic novel I had started 20 years ago.

Again, I do not believe in omens, just odd coincidences. But maybe that's what it took to start me writing again, writing on that particular novel, writing until 1:00 a.m. and then dredging up the original text files -- still dated 1997 -- and going back to work on it.

Because there was that little bonus gift, that bizarre little extra in the envelope Aunt Shirley sent me back in 1997.

She told me that the house had been sold again a few years before our conversation, and somehow the new owners had contacted her to try to put everything back the way it was structurally at least when Neil Stryker built it. So the white paint had been removed from the red brick fireplace and the chimney opened to make it functional again, and the two stained glass windows that flanked the chimney had been uncovered. (They were boarded up sometime in the 40s; I never knew they were there.) The original kitchen cabinets had never been changed, though the blue bathroom was gone and there had been other alterations over the years.

As far as I know, she never went in the house again after our conversation, but I don't know that for sure. Still, 1997 was 40 years after her mother had moved out, and insignificant little things don't usually last 40 years.

What she had included as a gift with her drawing of the floor plan was the red plastic shade pull from the kitchen nook window. There was no way she could have known in 1956 or 1957, when the house was sold, that such a tiny thing would have any meaning to me at all. Maybe it did to her as well; I don't know. But why, of all the things in the house, did she still have THAT? And why, of all the things in the house, did I remember THAT??

That first night last April -- it must have been the 25th -- I wrote about 1000 words on the book, and the following evening I compiled all the separate chapter files into one document on the computer. It desperately needed proofreading and there were other details that needed to be fixed. The whole timeline had to be brought forward 20 years, and the technology as well.

But I was amazed as I skimmed through a brief synopsis I'd written that there were certain very creepy details, things that I had planted in the plot of the novel that foreshadowed events in my own real life over the course of the subsequent 20 years. I've wanted to go back to writing -- gee, can you tell? -- for a long time, but life seems always to intervene. I'm not at a point where I can financially devote myself to it fully, but my anger and frustration over certain other things need an outlet.

And the little plastic shade pull with the tulips and wooden shoes was still in the file cabinet, along with the floor plan of the house in Edison Park.

I honestly didn't expect anything to come of it. But night after night, morning after morning, afternoon after afternoon, I continued to add words to it. What began as something like 13 chapters and 44,000 words grew, and grew, and grew. I hit horrible snags in the plot that I thought would put an end to the thing, but somehow they seemed to get worked out. A subplot that I was very fond of couldn't get itself resolved because it meant veering off from the main thread, so I made the painful decision to just do away with it.

 

The fictional location is not, of course, Edison Park. And I've made some major alterations to the floor plan of Aunt Shirley's house to better fit the story. None of the characters are based on anyone I actually know.

I haven't decided on the title. It has always had a working title, and I happen to like that title very much, but it may be too much of a spoiler, and I'm not sure if it will be commercially viable. There's plenty of time to worry about that, however, while I do the editing and rewriting needed for a project that went on hiatus for 20 years.  And I have to find cover art, one of the tasks a self-publishing author has to take over from the vampire publishers.  (Can you tell I don't like them?)

 

When I hit 100,000 words, I could hardly believe it. My first complete novel, written when I was 15, ran to about 115,000 so it wasn't the raw number that surprised me. It was that after all these years I had stuck with it that far. I honestly thought I had lost my touch, that I was too old, that my other books had been flukes.

A couple days ago, I hit another snag, one that was looming as insurmountable. I didn't want to take a day off from it, because I literally had written every single day since the bug bit me. Most days I added around 1,000 words, but sometimes it was over 2,000. And it was so much damn fun. So I made myself write, made myself think, made myself create, and the block passed and I got through the insurmountable problem.

By Sunday, 26 June, I was down to the last "action" scene. I had hoped to get through at least half of it that day, maybe finish it the next, then write the mop-up denouement. In the middle of this last scene, my mind went blank. An absolutely crucial detail just plain wasn't there. I was well over 134,000 words by this time and I couldn't believe the final confrontation was going to fall flat.

I've always been one of the writers who plots everything out, writes a detailed outline/synopsis to start, and who doesn't like surprises. This book has been a surprise from the very beginning, or at least from its "new" beginning two months ago. The sketch has always been very clear, but details have seemed to fall into place on their own. So why was this one detail not showing up?

I don't know. I don't know where it was or where it came from, but it finally made an appearance and made everything make sense.

It doesn't have to be perfect, it only has to be finished.

It's far from perfect. In some places it's not even good! And it wasn't really quite finished just because that scene worked out. There were more small revelations to be made, but those were backstory details that had already been worked out. On Monday, 27 June, I finished the last action scene, and on Wednesday, 29 June, I wrote the final lines.  There is still a lot of editing to do, but it's finished.  It's the first novel I've completed since 1995.

And I'm damn fucking proud of myself.

The first words of the rest of my life

I do not believe in omens.

Really, I don't.

What I wrote a few weeks ago was a tale of connections and coincidences, nothing more. 

At about the same time as I wrote that blog post, I gave notice of my intention to quit my day job.  The reasons were many, some practical, some irrational.  I had been doing this work for six and a half years, and that is longer than I had ever remained at any other paid employment.  My tenure was not due to the lavish pay (I can't even laugh at the absurdity of that notion) or working conditions (I worked at home); I stayed as long as I did because I needed some income and because this was a job where I never had to interact directly with real people.

I do not always get along well with real people.

Perhaps that has been one of the attractions writing has always held for me, too.  In the world(s) I create, I can control the things that are uncontrollable in the real world, and I do not have to deal with the frustrations that sometimes overwhelm me here.

So today was my first day after the end of the day job.  I still feel overwhelmed by how much there is to do in my real life that I had not been able to do because of the day job.  I feel as if I want everything done, right now, today, and yet I know that isn't remotely possible.  One day at a time, I remind myself, because I'm no longer rushed, no longer trying to squeeze ten hours of productivity into two hours of free time.

I began this morning much as I always do:  Rising early and checking the email.  But early is no longer the crack of pre-dawn.  I got enough sleep and didn't feel the pressure to get right to work.  I did have an Etsy shipment to take to the post office, so I packaged the orders and set out shortly before 9:00 a.m.  And because the post office is just around the corner from the local municipal complex, I finally -- eight and a half years after moving here -- got a library card.

My personal collection of reading material is more than enough to keep me occupied.  What I've lacked, though, is the time to read.  It doesn't matter that there are 2,500 books in the house, 3,300 more on my Kindle, another 800 or 1,000 in boxes stored in the workshop.  There is no such thing as having enough books, let alone too many.

But it takes time to get a library card, time to go to the library, time to browse the books, time to check them out, time to read them and then return them.  I didn't have the time.  Now I do.  So I got my library card and checked out two books.

Then it was home to the work of having a life again.  I had more listings to post to Etsy -- that will be a major on-going project -- which meant photos to take and edit.  I didn't have to rush through the process, however, because there will be more time tomorrow, too.  I can experiment with light and backgrounds, indoors or outdoors.  I can edit the descriptions of my wares rather than slap something together and post it as "good enough."

Did I address the cleaning that needs to be done in my studio?  No, not yet.  Maybe tomorrow.

Did I even look at the mountain of sewing that awaits?  No, not yet.  Maybe tomorrow.  Or the next day.

Did I read?  A little bit.  Not much, but I'm in no rush.

Did I write?  Ah, that's what the evening is for!

Secret Places, Secret Words

This one is gonna ramble.  Sit back and relax.  ;-)

After a particularly stressful week, I finally got a good night's sleep and feel almost human again.  Last week-end was our local Artists' Studio Tour, which I participated in, and while it's a lot of fun and I actually make some money at it, it's also exhausting.  Monday was back to the day job and all the other routine, so I'm just now really recovering.

One of the first chores on my List of Things to Do Today is calculate my annual budget.  As I contemplate the very real possibility of quitting the day job and trying -- trying -- to enjoy a productive retirement, I need to know if the finances will permit it.  I can tell you right now, I won't be surviving on the strength of my book sales! 

Well, at least not based on past performance.  But when I came back to the writing something over three years ago, I had no illusions about that anyway.  I came back to it because I had always loved it . . . and because I needed the creative respite from the stultifying boredom of the day job.  Though I've not been as productive directly on the writing in that time, it has given me the creative balance I'd been lacking.  And that's a good thing.

Quoting Martha Stewart is also a good thing for reasons somewhat connected to yesterday's post about the cultural silencing of women, especially women perceived to be uppity or just more successful than men. 

Martha Stewart doesn't have to worry about a budget; most of the rest of us do.  Many of us are so caught up in the daily grind, plus a constant cascade of mini-crises, that we don't have the luxury of even thinking about how to find a way off the vicious carousel.  Even if we did think of a way, we don't have the time or the energy to implement it, let alone the financial means.  In our frustration and desperation, we blame everyone and everything else for why we can't have nice things, because we just don't seem to be able to do anything else.

Many of us also have responsibilities to others that can't be shrugged off.  Sometimes it's very difficult to maintain any kind of balance when there are contrary demands that simply cannot be ignored.

So today I am grabbing for myself the luxury -- and it shouldn't be luxury but it is -- of sitting down and examining exactly where I stand financially and what I need to do going forward.

I know that I have certain assets that have lain idle because the day job has prevented me from putting them to work.  Though I have no way of even beginning to calculate how much income these assets might generate, I do know that they are not generating any at all right now.  One of those assets is, quite literally, a box of rocks.  And that's not as dumb as it sounds.

Something over twenty years ago, my husband and I sort of stumbled upon a rock hunting location that apparently hadn't seen very much activity.  We had actually gone looking for a different location and ended up more or less lost, in the sense that we knew where we were but it wasn't at all where we had set out to go.   Having neither cell phone nor GPS nor even a good topographical map to figure out if we had made a mistake or the information that had been given to us was wrong, we decided to explore the area we were in rather than get more lost, then retrace our route home.  The particular type of material that we'd gone in search of was nowhere around, but we found a few pieces of something else that looked promising. 

As it turned out, those few pieces produced some very nice cabochons that I made into jewelry and ended up selling.  Life being what it is, several years passed before we had the opportunity to try to find this place again and perhaps acquire more of the material we'd found there.  I felt confident that I remembered the roads we'd taken.  It was just a matter of whether or not the roads had changed!  For once, my confidence was well founded; I navigated us right back to the spot without a single wrong turn.  We turned off the road exactly where both of us remembered having turned the first time.

What we found, however, was not what we expected.  We didn't find any of the material we'd gone in search of, which we'd only found a few pieces of before anyway.  Instead, we were amazed at the abundance of another type of rock, not only in quantity but quality.  Why hadn't we seen them on the earlier visit?  They were literally just lying on the ground!  Everywhere!  Despite the temptation to pick up every piece in sight, we took only those that looked most likely to yield jewelry-quality cut stones. 

Over the next several years, we cut and polished a lot of those rocks.  I made them into jewelry and sold them.  And we went back for more. 

We never told anyone precisely where they came from.  "Somewhere in Arizona" was the extent of the information we gave out. 

As far as I've been able to determine, the site is not listed in any rock hunting guidebook nor has it been written up in any magazine articles or on any websites. 

I still have a box of those rocks.

Last week-end, during the Studio Tour, one of the visitors to my studio wanted to buy one of the rocks.  I have certain pieces that I use for display to illustrate the original material from which the jewelry is made, and those pieces are not for sale.  The lady tried very hard to get me to sell it, but I wouldn't.  In a way, it's one of those "nice things" that I do have and don't want to part with.

But it's also more than just a "nice thing."  It's a part of me, a part of my personal experience, my memories, my knowledge.  The secret of its source is my secret, even if someone else has by now been to that particular place and found those particular rocks.

I could drive out there now, today, and probably find more of them.  Google Earth tells me the roads are still where I remember them.  No Panoramio photos have been posted, which suggests few people have gone out there even to take pictures.  I see no new dirt bike, four-wheeler, or hiking trails so indelibly etched in the desert that they are visible from satellites.  Perhaps, my husband being gone almost ten years now, it's still my secret.

Does that secret have a value that can be part of the budget calculation?  Can I use that secret, that knowledge, that experience, to break free of the daily grind and crises?  At what point does the secret lose its value simply because it's a secret?

At last week's Studio Tour, I sold two pieces of jewelry that had been especially dear to me.  I'm not sure why, except maybe it's that "nice things" syndrome.  I hated to part with them, but I also knew that I myself was not personally ever going to wear them.  They might as well provide me with a little bit of income and provide someone else with some enjoyment.  So I let them go.

One of the issues I've railed on frequently throughout this blog is the failure -- at times I'm tempted to call it the refusal -- of the writing community to set and then enforce some kind of quality control standards regarding digital publication.  I know that it's difficult for some people, maybe even most people, to stick their necks out and be critical, even when they know the criticism is warranted.  Their reasons are many, and often valid.  My own experience this past week may have reinforced some of their caution.

Back in the days when writers were scrambling for the limited number of spots on publishers' lists, there was a sense on one hand that those of us who had made it owed it to our fellows to help them up the ladder, and yet on the other sense that we were foolish if we trained our own competition.  As I've said before, I served my time as an RWA contest judge; I saw the horrible writing, the flat characters, the transparent plots.  I bit my tongue at critique group meetings where other members just plain didn't get that they had to learn proper grammar and basic writing skills.  In the end, though, it didn't matter.  Those writers were never going to be published.  They were never going to be my competition.

Today they are both.

Today, as I work on my budget to find out if I can even begin to survive without the day job's income, I understand that certain secrets will lose all value if shared, but certain others have no value unless they are shared.   Last night I completed a book review that I had started over a year ago.  I have no illusions that my review is going to make this particular novella any better.  Even though I pointed out very specific problems with it, others have done so, too, and the book remains in digital print.  It also remains an example of some of the worst writing imaginable.  I read three pages and that was more than enough.  The review is not kind.  It is honest.  It is brutally honest, because the book is brutally bad.

Is it possible that the author will read that review and be hurt?  Yes.

Is it possible that the author, her friends and family and fans, will be angry with me and seek revenge?  Yes.

Is it possible that some other writer will read that review and learn something?  Yes.

Is it possible that some reader will read that review and learn something?  Yes.

I'm willing to risk the first two for the sake of the second two.

I'm never going to be the kind, gentle, nurturing soul who pats the author of a badly written book on the head and says, "But you tried and that's what counts,"  and then slaps a big gold star on it.  (Yes, "it" may refer to the book, the author, or just the author's head.  Take your pick.)

Nor am I going to give hours and hours and hours of my time to angry, self-entitled authors who think I owe them free editorial services to ameliorate the effects of my scathing reviews on their tender egos.

But I will share my secrets, my knowledge, my experience, with those who are willing to learn and then willing to work with what they've learned, because now they are in my marketplace and they are competing with me.  I owe it to myself to contribute to the professionalism of my profession.

Just don't ask me to tell you where the rocks come from.

The only two words that matter, really matter . . .

. . . at least to certain people.

Two adjectives, each of four letters.  One is a "good" word, the other is a "bad" word in terms of how an individual, any individual, is perceived and treated.

The first is something you should be, the second is something you should not be if you are going to be accepted and respected.  Both apply much more to women than to men, in that gender almost always serves to mitigate the impact of both words when the subject is male, but there are other factors that can actually serve to aggravate the effects.

The words are "nice" and "poor."

As Leo Durocher famously stated, "Nice guys finish last," implying that a bit of ruthlessness perhaps is not necessarily an unwanted trait in someone who wants to succeed.  It's okay for guys to be a little less than "nice" if they want to win; in fact, it's almost imperative.

For women, however, niceness is the standard.  You must be nice, you must be nice . . . or else.

What you must not be, regardless of gender, is poor, but even so, the effect of poverty on perception is different for men than for women.  A poor man can use his poverty as both a motivator and an excuse.  Poverty can serve as an opportunity and a challenge, and the man who defeats poverty is generally acclaimed for his ability to rise above his beginnings, often regardless how he does it.  That ruthlessness referred to above can excuse some less-than-ethical means he might employ and even bring him praise for using them.

Women, on the other hand, are often not only defined by their poverty but limited by it in ways that men are not.  And of course these are sweeping generalizations, but bear with me.

If a woman dares to try to rise above her station, she can only do so at the sacrifice of her niceness.

In other words, there is no way for a poor woman to win.  She is condemned to poverty if she doesn't fight it, or she is condemned for fighting it and not being nice.

We see this played out in two of the 20th century's most popular historical novels, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber.  Neither heroine "wins" by the cultural standard:  Both Scarlett O'Hara and Amber St. Clare end up abandoned by the men they love the most.  Whatever other successes they achieved, and both of them achieved much through their determination and ruthlessness, they failed at being properly "nice" women.  Therefore they are -- they must be -- denied the ultimate prize of marriage to the man they love the most.

Some of this changed in the 1970s with the publication of the sexy paperback historicals of Kathleen E. Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers, authors who were of the generation to have been most influenced by the two previously mentioned books.  Written in a different part of the century when feminism was evolving a different, more militant aspect, their novels took characters very similar to Scarlett and Amber, put them through the same types of adventures, vicissitudes, trials and tribulations, allowed them to be (slightly) more assertive and ruthless, and in the end granted them the prize of True Love, Marriage, and Happily Ever After.

Certain underlying concepts, however, did not change.  The female character still had to prove herself worthy of that happy ending; the reader took for granted that the male character, by virtue of his being desired by the female, was already worthy.  If he had to slay any dragons or villains, it was only because they were obstacles; defeating them was not necessary to earning his stripes as a worthy hero, since that was predetermined.  Many heroes, in fact, were far from "nice," but were deemed heroes simply because the heroine loved them.

Much more important, however, was that the real life counterparts to these fictional attitudes did not change.

In the U.S., white women entered the paid work force in unprecedented numbers in the middle decades of the 20th century, first out of personal necessity during the Great Depression, second out of political necessity during the Second World War, third out of personal choice during the social changes from the mid-1960s on.  Women of color had worked outside their own homes for generations, often in menial domestic capacities, and often because wage work for men of color was unobtainable.  The shift of white women working for wages had a huge impact on both the economy and the American cultural scene.

But cultural norms still treated women differently, and the basis for that different treatment lay in those two words:  nice, and poor.  Women were still expected to be nice:  If they chose to work as teachers or nurses, those were acceptably "nice" occupations suited to their gender.  They were expected to follow the norm and seek marriage and family as their first choice of "occupation," therefore they didn't need to make as much money as men who would be supporting families.  Even if they did the same work, women could be paid less.  And if they were poor, then they could be paid less as well, because they were expected to be nice and take what was so generously given to them . . . until their niceness won out and they landed a suitable husband to support them.  Working their own way out of poverty was not an acceptable trajectory.

It would be encouraging to think, as we are well into the second decade of the 21st century, that attitudes have changed.  They have not.

One has only to look at the way Hillary Clinton is demonized for her political aspirations, and Sarah Palin is not.  Palin is criticized, to be sure, but she is not demonized; and the criticisms she gets are not based on her ambition.  Her looks and blatant sexuality are conflated with "niceness," behavior suitable for a woman.  Clinton is demonized for having ambition and not being appropriately "nice," meaning sexy, about it.

As Janet, a reviewer and contributor to the Dear Author website, noted in July 2012, women who review books are still expected to be "nice" about it.  Those who aren't nice enough, who dare to be honestly critical, will be excoriated.  Because women read more than men and often have more opportunity in the digital age to "natter on the net," as Dale Spender put it, more women write more reviews online than men.  And women who write critical book reviews come under more fire for it than men.  Way more.

Those reviewers dubbed as "bullies" by a certain website are almost all women; they dared to write and post critical reviews.  Nearly all the reviews purged by Goodreads in September 2013 were written and posted by women.  The most notorious of those reviewers whose accounts have been terminated by Goodreads since September 2013 are women.

Women are not allowed to not be nice.

Especially if they are poor.

As we've seen in the recent unfolding of events involving a well-connected (meaning, connected to wealth) debut author and her harassment of a female reviewer, failure (or refusal) to be appropriately nice is permissible if the woman in question is rich.  Lacking similar economic resources, the reviewer is effectively silenced; her stalker is defended, commended, praised, and exonerated.  "She wasn't nice enough," is the judgment often passed on the reviewer.  "She got what she deserved."

Some other authors even went so far as to imply they approved of what the stalker did and wished they had had the gumption to do it themselves to their own critics.  They, of course, were too nice to do so.

The same is said of far too many victims of domestic violence:  If only she'd been nicer to him, he wouldn't have had to hit, smack, beat, bludgeon, or kill her.

All women must be nice, but poor women must be especially nice, or they run extra risks.

I am poor, and I am not nice.  I know the risks.  I have taken them with eyes wide open, sometimes even with the eyes in the back of my head that many women are expected to have.

I am a reader and a writer and a passionate lover of books, of all forms of the written word.  (I can be as critical of the lines a bad actor is forced to speak as of his bad acting.)  Because I am not nice, I do not hesitate to voice my criticism of bad writing, and I do not always couch my criticism in nice terms.  If the book is crap, I do not hesitate to say it is crap.

Sadly, because I am poor, I do not have the disposable income to buy well-written books.  Is it impossible to find free or inexpensive well-written books?  Actually, no, it is not.  But personal economics is a matter of time as well as cash.  I am poor, and so I must work, and the nature of my paid work is such that I do not have hours of leisure time for relaxing with a book or an electronic reading device.  (In my case, that device is primarily the Kindle for PC app on the computer from which I do my paid work.)  I read, when I have a few minutes, and I must be careful not to become too immersed in my reading lest I devote too much time to it and not enough to the paid work.  This means I frequently sample the free offerings on Amazon during breaks from my paid work.

Do you see where this leads?  It leads to my reading a lot of bad writing.  But am I supposed to read it and not comment on the poor quality, because it is all I can afford and beggars cannot be choosers?  Or am I supposed to read it and -- instead of complaining -- offer free proofreading and editorial services because I am a woman and I'm supposed to be nice?  Or am I supposed to say nothing at all?

When readers, individually or collectively, voice their complaints about the poor quality of free or very low priced digital books published by independent or self-publishing authors, they are often told they should not complain about free merchandise.  There is an implication that the self-publishing author has no obligation to present a quality product, under the rubric "you get what you pay for."  Since it's free, the consumer has no right to complain.

Since it's free, the producer has no obligation to provide a quality product.

Even when the book is not always free, if the reader obtained it free, the above conditions apply.  Obtaining the book without paying for it -- offered free on Amazon, borrowed from a library, advanced review copy from author/publisher -- is an admission of poverty; poor people, and especially poor women, are not allowed to complain.


I made the mistake of complaining, apparently too much, and for that I am no longer allowed on Goodreads.  Yes, I'm banned.  Yes, shitgrubbers (you know who you are), you may dance now, for a while. 

But this does not mean I am silenced.  I may not reach the same audience here with this little blog, but I will not be silent.  And because my blog will no longer feed directly to Goodreads, I am no longer prohibited from expressing my more direct thoughts.

Perhaps that's what Goodreads is afraid of.  Really, it's just plain silly to think that Goodreads and/or Amazon is afraid of me personally.  I have no power, no authority.  They had the power to erase me and everything I wrote from their sites, which is what they did.  So why should they be afraid of me?  I am no one.  I am, in the grand scheme of the Amazon megalithic empire, less than nothing.

And yet, if I were nothing, they would have no need to erase me.  Why erase nothing?  Why bother?

Let's face the reality of the situation.  I am not selling hundreds of thousands of copies of my books via Kindle Direct Publishing; many of my online writer friends are selling waaaaay more than I.  I do not have a popular book blog.  Thousands of fans are not following me on Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest and whatever other social media is out there.  What, then, made me so dangerous that Goodreads had to terminate my account?

Was it because my critical reviews had become too painful for some people?  Was I getting too close to some secret information that someone in power didn't want known?  Was I disrupting the sales of commodities that someone was handsomely profiting from?  Or hoped to profit from during the busiest shopping season of the year?

I did not commit any of the sins for which members are traditionally terminated. 

I did not spam.  Indeed, I almost never talk about my books, do not plug them or push them or hardly even mention them.  Even though I have a new little book available on KDP, I didn't advertise it even where I could have.  So it wasn't because of spamming.

I have no sock puppet accounts, and never did. 

I have never taken any money to post a review.  I've never even entered any of the giveaways on Goodreads, so I got no free books that needed to be disclosed.  I won one book on Booklikes, and fully disclosed it.  I don't have an account at fiverr.  I do disclose whether I purchased the book, obtained it free, or based the review only on a sample.

I've never responded to anyone who reviewed my books, not negatively, not positively.  I do not go around posting statuses thanking each and every person who shelved or rated my books; I really do believe that authors should not do that, and so I don't.  I've never flagged a review of any of my books even though I suspect there are some that are worthy of being flagged, only based on what I've been told by others.   I do not look at my reviews or ratings, period.

I've never attacked another reviewer in their review space.  I've participated in some discussions, even heated discussions, that arose in other reviewers' spaces, but even those have only been very rare, and generally I've done so to support the original reviewer.  If I don't agree with the reviewer, I just ignore them.

But I insisted on posting negative reviews, and I insisted on standing up and talking back to The Powers That Be on Goodreads.  I guess, like butthurt authors themselves, they couldn't handle the criticism.

I had plenty of criticism of Goodreads management, primarily for their failure to police the site regarding massive sock puppet account creation, paid reviews and "like" votes, and the various other schemes authors employed to boost visibility of their books and, they hoped, boost sales as well.

I suspect, however, that the real reasons for my banning are three specifics.  I don't expect anyone from Goodreads to confirm or deny; I know that I am essentially a non-person to them now.

First,  I did not mince words when it came to the recently instituted policy of Goodreads to add advertisements, in the form of "editorial content," to users' real-time update feeds.  Despite assurances from "Emily" that the insertions were not advertisements and that the editorial team was entirely separate from the advertising team, it seemed abundantly obvious to me that Goodreads users were being spammed by Goodreads.  Two books were advertised in my feed, and I promptly placed both of those books on a new shelf: Special Treat.  I already had a shelf titled "Treat," which was my code word for spammed books and spamming authors.  ("Treet" being the Armour version of Hormel's Spam.)  Did Goodreads decipher my sooper-seekrit code and decide that shelf was unacceptable?  It certainly didn't violate any rules about shelving based on author behavior since the authors weren't involved.  I had had the "treat" shelf for several months.

But I had also been very vocal(sic) about the ongoing problems Goodreads had with sock puppet accounts and other spammers.  Other users were fighting the good fight about the spammers in the Quotes and Quizzes departments of the site, which I never used.  The site's IT "developers" were supposedly working on ways to eliminate and/or block the literally thousands of non-U.S. spam posts, which was certainly a needed administrative function.  But there were other problems that vexed users and which seemed to get no attention at all.  One of those issues was the inability to flag so-called "naked" ratings posted by apparent sock puppet accounts. 

These accounts had come to my attention in late fall of 2013, shortly after the major purge in September.  They were posting 5-star ratings -- without reviews, thus "naked" -- to the books identified as being written by one Jennifer Smith.  The books had been originally published by Noble Romance Publishing, a defunct publisher, under the bylines of Rie McGaha and Reese Johnson.  At times there were more than 100 of these ratings posted to these books, first with bizarre screen names that were just numbers, then with other combinations.  Avatar pictures were lifted from the internet with no regard for copyright.  Eventually, whoever was behind the socks evolved the program to populate the accounts with fashion pictures, hence the moniker "socks in frocks."

The socks in frocks accounts also began posting 5-star ratings to some obscenely over priced ethics books for children with titles like I is for Integrity or some such.  The prices on Amazon were in the neighborhood of $16 for a 7-page "book."  They showed no actual sales rank, but the same socks that were rating the Jennifer Smith books were doing likewise for these books.  Anywhere from one to ten new accounts were added daily.

No matter how often they were reported and removed, more returned, almost like the apprentice's brooms.  At one point, "Emily" bragged in a Feedback thread that they had finally been removed and the problem was solved.  Within minutes, they were back.

I wasn't the only one to complain about them; LobsterGirl did, too, and in fact she was the one who started the entire thread about them.  But LG remained an active reviewer of many books, a top reviewer, a top librarian, and thus an asset to Goodreads.  I didn't have the time to do that; I was not an asset.

Second, I spent a lot of time -- which I really couldn't afford to spend -- on the ferreting out of information to identify Goodreads users who were actually members of fiverr.com who were selling review services.  For $5 per "gig," they would write a five-star review and post it on Goodreads, Amazon, or anywhere else the author wanted it posted.  Some would charge $5 just to post a review that the author herself had written!

Some of these fiverr shills had hundreds of reviews on Goodreads.  Virtually all were 5-star ratings.  Michael Beas, before his removal from Goodreads, had 388 ratings, 351 reviews, with a 4.90 average.  He was ranked #97 Top Reviewer.

Some of the fiverr shills were also Goodreads authors.  Beas was one.  Cheryl Persons was another.  Pat Hatt, author of many, many children's books, is a fiverr seller.   Hatt is also one of the very few fiverr sellers to actually remove his reviews from Amazon.  After much of the evidence documenting Hatt's career as a paid reviewer was posted on my Booklikes blog, he changed his name on his Amazon account, then proceeded to shut it down.

I carefully documented the accounts of the fiverr shills, took screen shots, compared dates and texts, and dutifully reported to Goodreads.  I reported a few to Amazon, too, but when nothing happened there, I quit.  I didn't have enough time.  But Goodreads really did seem to care, at least at the beginning.  Accounts were removed, and I received little email notes from "Emily" and "The Goodreads Team" thanking me for identifying them. 

A chance contact with another Goodreads user led to the development of a master list cross-referencing the buyers of fiverr services with their Goodreads accounts.  To date, that list containes over 500 accounts.  Does this mean all of them have purchased fake reviews for Amazon and Goodreads and other review sites?  No, it doesn't.  They may have purchased other legitimate services also offered by fiverr sellers, such as proofreading, blurb-writing, and so on.  There are, however, fiverr gigs for "likes" and other "votes" that will move a book up or down in the Amazon and Goodreads rating system.  An author can buy Listopia placements, for instance, or votes on Listopias. 

As this other person and I compared and combined notes, we uncovered a sock puppet "ring" that was responsible for over 2,550 5-star ratings on Goodreads, and uncounted "likes" of those ratings.  The leader of the group was a professional book promoter, as well as a Goodreads author.  Her account and all the sock puppet accounts were removed; when they tried to set up new accounts, those, too, were documented, reported to Goodreads, and removed.

Because I couldn't report on this activity publicly on Goodreads -- it would have been considered "calling out" an individual author and that's against the Terms of Use -- I turned to Booklikes, where I pretty much duplicated the evidence I'd presented to Goodreads.  I showed how it began with a chance discovery that a re-issued book by Parris Afton Bonds had some very suspicious reviews.  A Goodreads friend had pointed out that one of the reviewers stated in her Amazon profile that she was a fiverr reviewer . . . and that's how it all started.  But as I began to post this information on Booklikes, I attracted the wrath of some of the reviewers and authors.  Michael Beas showed up to defend himself -- but couldn't.  Author Ralph Smith showed up, too, and tried the same arguments.

No matter how many reviews and accounts were removed from Goodreads, nothing happened on Amazon, and I probably should have taken that as a warning.  I didn't.

I believed I had the support of Goodreads, that they truly cared about the integrity of the reviews and the value of them to readers.  I really should have known better.

Some of the shills tried to set up new accounts at Goodreads.  Many of those accounts were identified and removed, some literally within minutes of reporting.  The master accounts at Amazon, however, remained intact.  Names were changed, often more than once, but Top Reviewer rankings (a draw for selling fiverr reviews) remained.

I made mistakes in some of my research, and the accounts didn't get removed.  Sometimes I got notes from Goodreads about it, sometimes I didn't.  Even though I had documented Pat Hatt's identity as a fiverr seller and even though he removed his account from Amazon, Goodreads gave me an explanation as to why nothing had been done to his account there:  They had "back end admin" information that didn't match.  I thought this was suspicious, but there wasn't anything I could do.

Then came the issue of Kelsey McBride, owner of Book Publicity Services, Inc.  She was reviewing her clients' books, giving them 5-star ratings, on both Goodreads and Amazon.  Even though statements had been made in public forums on Goodreads that publicists' reviews were in violation of the no commercial reviews rule, McBride's reviews stayed.  She even came to Booklikes and posted on my blog there . . . and she did so while having two operating accounts at Goodreads and at least one suspected sock puppet account.

I tried and tried and tried to get a clear statement from Goodreads about the legitimacy of a publicist's account, but couldn't, and in the end McBride's account remained, along with all the 5-star ratings.

Through it all, I thought I was doing what both Goodreads and readers wanted:  To have honest reviews, good and bad, and get rid of the frauds.  I thought wrong.

Third, I wasn't nice enough to the other authors.  The negative reviews were one thing, but it was the comments in the various discussions that weren't nice enough.   I didn't call anyone names -- though I was called names by other Goodreads users often enough.  I didn't tell anyone they were stupid or untalented.  At worst I told them their books were poorly written.

Sometimes they insisted I  was wrong in my assessment, because they had after all paid for professional editing and/or proofreading.  In some cases they had paid hundreds or even thousands of dollars for these professional services.  And yet, eventually, when I and others on the forums pointed out the books' errors, the authors ultimately agreed.

Perhaps I should have been nicer.  Perhaps I should have let them persist in their delusions.  What do you do, though, when someone begs for reviews and the book is just poorly written?  What do you do when the book has a glaring typographical error on the cover?  On the dedication page?  In the first sentence?  And the second, and the third?

I suppose the "nice" thing to do is keep it all private and cozy and polite.  Send them an email or a private message and point out the error.  Don't embarrass them, but don't let anyone else know that there's a problem. 

At what point do reviews then become editorial services?  Are readers required, obligated to provide this for free to the authors?  Are authors more deserving of niceness and politeness than readers?  Do readers not deserve to be notified that a given book is loaded with factual inaccuracies, messed up punctuation, and syntax so shattered it's all but incomprehensible?

I had forgotten, forgotten, completely forgotten.  Oh, not really forgotten as in it was totally out of my mind, but forgotten in the sense of not allowing the concept to govern my actions.  I'd forgotten that Goodreads was an arm of Amazon, and that regardless any protestations to the contrary, Goodreads was intended to function as a selling tool for Amazon products.  Goodreads was no longer for readers; Goodreads was for Amazon.  Reviews were no longer for readers; reviews were for selling Amazon products.  Authors therefore were not to be discouraged from publishing, not to be discouraged from advertising, not to be discouraged from providing review content that would sell books.

All roads must lead to Amazon, and I had forgotten that.  "Nice" really means "nice to Amazon."

It did not make any difference -- to Amazon -- that these badly written books would probably not sell.  As long as the authors were allowed to believe that it only took more and better reviews, as long as authors were willing to pay fiver shills to buy their own books, Amazon came out ahead.  Amazon got free content.  Amazon made a few sales.  Authors were just mindless, soulless producers, and readers were just mindless, soulless consumers.  If a crappy book sold 10 copies, or 20 copies, Amazon made a cut and they were happy.

And it was okay to dumb down the readers, too, because then they wouldn't know the difference between gold and dross.  They'd buy the dross as readily as the gold.  And if the poor people who couldn't afford the gold got instead a steady diet of dross, well, who cares about them anyway?  They aren't buying anything, they aren't contributing to the Amazon coffers, so who cares?

I made the mistake of caring.  And not only of caring but of caring passionately.

Passion isn't one of those acceptable words.  It tends to shove "nice" to the side, especially if one is poor and passionate.

Scarlett O'Hara was a  bitch.  Some might say she was a selfish bitch, but in her selfishness she also sacrificed for those around her, and she lost much.  Amber St. Clare was ambitious, but she was reviled for it because she was poor.  Both of them, however, were victims of circumstances beyond their control and they were never able to escape.  I don't think they understood -- and yes, I'm granting them the autonomy and self-awareness of real human beings even though they are only fictional characters -- how manipulated they were by those circumstances and, by extension, by their creators to fit into the proper expectations.

Kathleen Winsor, author of Forever Amber, years later wrote a semi-autobiographical novel titled Star Money.  I read it long before I read Forever Amber, because my dad's membership in the Doubleday Book Club had put a copy in his collection.  But I read it before I was old enough to understand the implications, the connections to the earlier novel and to my own aspirations as a writer.  I've acquired replacements for most of the books in that collection -- Lord Johnnie and The Hepburn and Wine of Satan and Jubilee Trail and Caravan to Xanadu and The Walls of Jericho -- but I never went looking for Star Money.  It's now on my list of books to find.

One book I didn't have to replace was Edison Marshall's The Infinite Woman.  I took that one right from the shelf before my parents downsized and the books became yard sale merchandise.  (This was years before I stole a copy of Stand By for Mars! from a Phoenix restaurant.)  My copy still has the "From the Library of Don Wheeler" bookplate in the front.  Marshall based the character of his first-person narrator heroine Lola Montero on the life of 19th century dancer, courtesan, and eventually countess in her own right Lola Montez, who dared to be ambitious.  But Lola Montero's story of rebellion and self-awareness and ambition was written by a man, just as Ashton Pelham-Martyn's tale of a lifelong search for justice in a society that hardly knew the meaning of the word was written by a woman.  Ash got his happy ending, or at least the promise of one, in The Far Pavilions without being nice; Juli got to come along with him on that happily ever after because she had had her ambitions but remained nice.

There is much more of Scarlett and Lola Montero and Ashton Pelham-Martyn in me than even I am comfortable with.  But neither can I deny that it is there, that it is me.  Would Scarlett have been the character she is, the cultural icon that she became, if she had recognized at the start how worthless Ashley Wilkes was and how much more worthy Rhett Butler was?  Would Amber have been embraced as a true heroine if Bruce Carlton had respected her as a human being and married her instead of seeking just a fortune?  If Marilyn French had written Forever Amber, would she have had her heroine walk proudly away from the man who had abused her or, like Marshall's heroine, taken matters into her own hands at the end and never looked back?

There remains a part of me, therefore, that would like to be liked, that would like to have the approval an acceptance that others seem to enjoy without much or any effort on their parts.  It's not going to happen.  I am what I am, what you see is what you get, and all the other bullshit.  The Terms of Use are mine to determine now, and "nice" is not among them.