An Opinion Piece

by

Jardonn Smith

These days it seems anybody can hang a sign on their web address door and proclaim themselves to be reviewers of books.

Many are book lovers who shell out the bucks and are inclined to express their likes/dislikes, regardless of their abilities to coherently analyze reasons for their likes/dislikes.

Others have signed up at review sites so they can get free books to read, their purchase price being their agreeing to review the books, again regardless of their abilities to coherently… (see above).

Still more have a hidden agenda, either to purposely promote authors in their little clique, or purposely denigrate authors not in their little clique. Some of these reviews are written by authors themselves with an agenda impossible to hide: trashing books written by their competition.

What are the poor readers to do? How do they determine which review sites are truly giving them honest opinions, so they can decide where to shell out their hard-earned money for books they will enjoy? It’s a crap shoot, no doubt, but I can honestly vouch for one specializing in male on male erotic romance.

Elisa Rolle’s My Reviews and Ramblings

Not only is this classy lady from Padua, Italy a reader of manlove romance titles, her appetite for them is voracious. Ms. Rolle devours an incredible number of books weekly, and not only does she gain keen insight from what she’s read, she shares her thoughts via her self-written book reviews. Elisa favors no particular publishers or authors. She has no rating systems for books she reads. Her reviews are detailed, well-organized, and invaluable to not only her fellow-readers, but the authors as well. I’ve lost count of the comments I’ve seen on her site from authors who tell her she found personality traits in their characters even they didn’t recognize existed. I am no exception. Ms. Rolle’s review of my Danube Divide taught me much about the men in my own story.

So, any manlove fiction lovers out there looking for ideas on what next to read, Elisa Rolle’s site is a must-visit-daily for you, and as if reviews weren’t already enough, lately Elisa started what she calls The Inside Reader where authors and readers list their all-time favorite LGBT books.

That’s where one of our own comes in. Just check out the names on this list which includes William Maltese.

The Inside Reader: Geoffrey Knight

Yes, we claim him. William is ours. One of our MLR Press authors, and we intend to never let him go.

 Los Dias de Los Muertos:  Los Angelitos, Los Muertos, Los Santos.  The days of the dead run from the switching of the day from October 31—Halloween—to November 1 – All Saints Day through Midnight November 2.

Don’t fear dying, fear not having lived. ~anon 

Today, Nov.1, is All Saints, known in Mexico as La Dia de los Angelitos, the angels. It is the day to honor the dead children.  The dead come home to be feasted by their families, graves are cleaned, painted and dressed with marigolds, and the lives of those before us are remembered.

It is far from a mournful tradition.  Families picnic in the grave yards to be near those they love.  Skulls and skeletons are not gruesome objects of fear but reverent icons to remind us that this is just one world and another awaits.

The path back to the living world must not be made slippery by tears. ~anon

Originally the festival was Aztec in origin, took a month and was held in August.  That month and the celebrations were in honor of Mictecacihuatl – she who died at birth, the Lady of the Dead.  When the Spaniards came, the Catholic Church moved the celebrations to All Saints Day under their “if you can’t squash it, subvert it policy.”  They sanitized out the goddess and put in all their saints. 

Guess what, she’s back.  In the great Mexican tradition of the Cult of the Virgin Mary and the technique of subversion learned so well there is a new Lady of Death.  La Santisima Muerte: the Most Holy Lady of Death, incarnation of the Virgin Mary and heir to the throne of Mictecacihuatl. The worship of her has spread across the urban areas of Mexico and into the US to be assimilated by other Latin American communities as well.  She is considered the patron folk-saint of drug dealers, prostitutes and cops.

And she, La Huesuda (the Lady of Bones), and Los Dias De Los Muertos figure prominently in my recent release Personal Demons. 

Here’s an excerpt from Personal Demons:

Without much warning, Chase came face-to-face with the scene. Rodrigo, Chase recognized his mug from the pictures, lay on his stomach, head turned to the side, and one arm flopped across his back. The other flung out to the side and rested across the ring of marigold blossoms that circled his body. Flies crawled across glassy eyes, and crosses in white and red painted Renaldo’s face and down his arms. Each line ended in a dot, an arrow or a fork.

Well-rehearsed, the LAPD team of specialists did their dance around the body. At the periphery, a coroner’s crew waited with their bright blue body bag to take custody of the corpse.

A woman, her hair pulled tight back and wearing a better suit than her male counterparts, caught sight of them. In fact, she and Chase were the only two wearing actual suits, everyone else barely qualified as business casual. She said something to a trio of techs before picking her way toward Chase and Enrique. After introducing herself as Detective Wyatt, exchanging the brief necessities of rank and protocol, she filled them in. “We figure he was shot first over there,” Wyatt waved one manicured hand back the way Chase’d come. “About fifteen feet and crawled back this way. They shot him twice more as he crawled. The last bullet, the one to his head, likely killed him where he ended up.”

“Why do you figure a they?” Enrique spoke the question Chase’d been thinking.

Wyatt glared, like she thought Enrique yanked her instead of just asking the first obvious question. Her response was clipped with the efficiency of a woman used to being treated as slightly inferior to the men she outranked. “Rodrigo’s a big guy, a bad ass, ballsy guy. One man wouldn’t have been enough to intimidate him into coming down here. Drag him down, neither.”

This time Chase, keeping his tone as neutral as possible, asked the question. “What if he walked down on his own?” Or they had enough guys to make it impossible to fight.

“Hard to see someone who doesn’t want to be down here,” Enrique folded his arms over his chest, “being dragged down here.”

“Think he was meeting someone?” Chase asked the question of both detectives.

“I’d bet on that…” Wyatt’s mouth went tight. “Not a hundred percent thing, but damn good odds.”

Enrique paced a few steps, looking at the body from various angles. “I think someone he trusted lured him down, maybe.” Looking to Wyatt, his tone said he was asking her opinion, not overriding her. Careful not to disturb the ring of flowers, he squatted near Fuertes. “Or maybe someone he didn’t trust, but that he had to meet even if he didn’t want to.” Enrique turned his attention back to the corpse.

“So, Ochoa,” Wyatt studied Enrique as he studied Fuertes. The cool, calculated once up and once down echoed a woman used to sizing up co-workers as potential opponents. “What’s with the flowers? And the X’s all over him? You know about this shit right?”

“Some of it. The marigolds are a Mexican thing. Americans leave roses on graves, Mexicans leave marigolds. Why they’re with Fuertes, I don’t know.” Enrique’s gaze flicked up. “Those,” he traced the air indicating one of the marks on the dead man’s skin, “are the symbols of Eshu.”

Without thinking, Chase responded with a, “Bless you.”

That rated Chase a glare from Enrique and a snort from Wyatt. “I didn’t sneeze.” Enrique coughed. “Eshu, also Exu, Echu or a bunch of other variants, is a deity in a lot of Afro-Caribbean religions.”

“Eshu?”

“Eshu is the devil…sort of.” Standing, Enrique crossed his arms over his chest and thought for a moment. Slowly, like he felt a little embarrassed at knowing what he knew. “Okay, the quick and dirty version. Religions of the Caribbean come from slave religions that got all mixed up with Catholicism. The master said pray to his god, and he was likely Spanish or Portuguese. So, his god had saints who all meant something and you prayed to them. It wasn’t so hard to say this saint of water is this god of water, at least if you didn’t want to get beaten for praying to your old traditional gods. Stick their statues in with your symbols and everyone thinks it’s cute that the dumb slaves like the statues.”

“And Eshu is the devil?” Wyatt didn’t sound like she was buying.

Without seeming to take offense, Enrique shrugged. “Eshu is like Lucifer because he’s always in conflict with Ologun the creator. But in many Caribbean religions Eshu is also the only one who speaks directly to Ologun. If you want something done, you ask Eshu…” he smirked. “Just be careful of what he asks for in return.”

You can buy it here!

The site should’ve been an author’s dream. All these threads talking about books, places to get them, the excitement of waiting for new releases, discovering something new. Hours after a book is released, there’s a good chance you’ll find it there.
The problem is, the people who frequented the site have no intention of paying for the books. They’ll click on the links, go to fileshare sites, and download the books.
As one of the members once said, “…why pay for the books when you can get them for free?”

Walking the e-plank

Whether published in e-format or print, there’s a good chance many writers will have to deal with piracy.
For Ginn Hale, author of Wicked Gentleman, the problems have been twofold.
“The first is the amount of my creative time that has been wasted by the endless cycle of having to write and request that a link be taken down only to have it pop back up under a slightly different name,” said Hale. “This can go on and on for weeks, until I just give up in frustration.”
“My second problem is that it’s made my first experiences with the readers of digital works a very negative one. I want to believe that most readers of e-books and electronic works are honest people, but being constantly pirated — and being told that I should be happy about it because it’s promotion — hasn’t done much to buoy my optimism.”
Like Hale, other authors have been frustrated by the pervasive links. (continue reading…)

It’s the trick or treat season so for October’s In The Flesh at Hustler Hollywood we’re giving you some scary tales and some gothic stories to get you in the mood for all those parties where you can wear the stuff you’d like to wear every day because to quote Ministry – Everyday Is Halloween (which I’m sure I’ll be playing as I spin some mood-setting music while you munch on some tasty sweet samples from the Hustler cafe) – oh and just in case you really need a sexy little outfit or toy Hustler Hollywood has the goods.

As does In The Flesh – we have Eden Bradley reading from The Seeking Kiss, James Buchanan reading from Personal Demons and Stan Kent reading from the Shoe Leather series which features Halloween as a key night in the saga along with shoes of all kinds.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 8pm I’m IN THE FLESH in the City of the Angels…and what better place to be in the month of dark tricks and treats!

Come stop by for some Steamy, Creepy reading in honor of Halloween.  Anyone who knows me, know this is my favorite time of year. And, because it’s MC Stan Kent’s Birthday week there will be Hustler giveaway bags for the people wearing the coolest fuck-me shoes. I’ll have Halloween Treat Bags for the first 20 people that show.  Plus, I may drag along a naughty Birthday Cake for the Birthday Boy!  There’s nosh, there’s music and there’s smut…what could be better?

In The Flesh: L.A. is a monthly reading series held the second Wednesday of every month at Hustler Hollywood.   Hustler Hollywood is located at 8920 Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood, CA 90069.  Tel: (310) 860 9009. Free underground parking on-site!

The Little Lost Lamb(da)s

Some thoughts from Victor J. Banis

The recent brouhaha regarding submissions for the Lambda Literary Awards had my computer smoking for a day or so, with posts back and forth, some of them reasoned and some silly, some of them angry and some of them, frankly, downright ugly. Now that the dust has settled a bit, I want to take a further look at the subject and at some of the points that were raised.

First, for those of you who weren’t in on the follies, word got around that the Lambda folks had changed their submission guidelines to exclude submissions from heterosexual authors—a move interpreted by many (I suspect correctly) as an attempt to bar the women writers of today’s M/M fiction. A number of these women announced that henceforth they would not be submitting nor in any other way supporting the foundation.

Fair enough. I certainly wouldn’t expect Laura Baumbach (MLR Press) to continue to support this organization the way she has in the past, which is certainly generously, though I confess to be dismayed to think that she will not be submitting either the I Do anthologies or the soon upcoming The Golden Age of Gay Fiction. In the first case, I think even the Lambda people would have to give it a nod, it’s in such a great cause. In the second instance, that Golden Age doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in a Chinese kitchen, I just think it should go in on general principles. But, maybe the editors can submit these books? I’ll pay the fees, if you do the paperwork, fellas.

Some of the posts I got were funny, if bitterly so. One individual who described himself as “in gay publishing in NYC” and whose name I won’t divulge, was surprised to realize that there was so much ill-feeling abroad toward the Lammies. Uh huh. Welcome to the real world, Mr. When Did I Fall Asleep and Where Did I Wake Up.

And in his innocence lies a problem that afflicts the world of gay publishing muchly. If the New York publishing world is a small town (and it is, very small), the gay publishing establishment is more like a Native American village. These people haven’t a clue what lies beyond their tent poles. (continue reading…)

I write books. I think I’m pretty good at it. A lot of people have told me they like my novels, and a few publishers have put their money on the line believing the same thing. But that’s the extent of what I offer in the process of making the actual book. When I hand my finished ms over to my editor I know it’s not done. In fact, this is only the beginning of the journey. My editor will go over it and send it back to me with observations on what does or does not work. It’s up to me then to work on fixing or making it clear why I don’t think something should be changed. Then the ms goes to my copyeditor who looks at a lot of issues and also offers suggestions for change. All of these people have one goal in mind, to help me produce the best book possible.

While this is going on a cover is worked on. I have very little to do with this beyond making some suggestions on what I want the book to look like. I make no attempt to design the thing, or create any of the graphics or title text or layout. I enjoy the chance to collaborate with the chosen artist, but this is not my area of expertise. I’m a firm believer that covers are key to book sales – especially if you are an unknown name. J.K Rowlings doesn’t have to worry about what her covers look like, she has only to put her name on it. Few of us have that luxury. So I want the best cover possible.

A few authors who take on the roll of editor, graphic artist, publisher and book marketer are successful at it. The vast majority are not. They waste their money and the paper used to print their books on. The world is full of more badly written, badly edited books today than ever in the history of publishing. Why? Because anybody can publish a book today. Harsh words, but true. Everybody who owns a computer has some kind of word processing software. Having the software does no render the user capable of creating good fiction. Owning a web cam or movie making software does not make a person a film maker. Owning desktop publishing software does not make someone a graphic designer. Like bad books, I think there is a surfeit of bad book trailers out there on YouTube.

I’ve spent the last month or so studying the trailers that people are producing and had pretty much decided not to bother trying to make one. Almost all the ones I saw were simply not exciting. They didn’t catch my attention and I couldn’t see why they would create any kind of interest in the book they were selling. Then I saw some that did work, and when they did, they were phenomenal. I’m now sold on book trailers as another marketing tool, IF THEY ARE WELL MADE. No, maybe there’s no quantitative statistics on how much they boost book sales. But then I don’t think there’s any data on how much anything we do boosts sales. Ads in the New York Times don’t sell books, TV ads don’t sell books, book tours sell a few books, but I doubt if any of them pay for the travel expenses. Reviews alone don’t necessarily sell books. In fact no one know what sells books. Not the big publishers, not the book stores, not the man on the street. I use all the tools available to me in my price range to get my name out there. In the end though, all I can do is write a damn good book and hope it finds its readers. I’ll leave all the other tools I want to use in the hands of the experts who know what they are doing.

Pat Brown’s latest release Geography of Murder is now available in ebook from MLR Press.

The biggest falsehood told to new writers is the phrase, ‘Write what you know.’ If I was to follow that maxim you would read nothing from me but boring tomes about small town, small minded middle class Canadians – or rather you wouldn’t be reading them since such books would bore even me to tears. If writers didn’t stretch their literary wings past the realms of what we know or have experienced over half of the great and not so great literature of today wouldn’t exist.

I very much doubt Stephanie Meyers ever met a vampire, let alone fell in love with one. Or that Douglas Adams ever had dinner at the restaurant at the end of the universe (though it sounded like fun) I doubt Isaac Asimov traveled to distant planets or knew any humanoid robots, good or bad. And I certainly hope no one thinks Thomas Harris ever dined on anyone’s body parts. And does anyone believe that Laura Baumbach and Josh Lanyon were major drug dealers in Mexico before they wrote Mexican Heat? If they were, I’d like to hear that story! (continue reading…)