azn_jack_fiend

It could be months before we get any information about publication, but we've gone ahead and put up a website for the book, and we're going to be blogging semi-regularly. Check it out the beta version of our website at www.knockmanovel.com. Knockma (there are many alternate spellings) is a real place in Ireland, like almost all of the places in the book, and if you'd like to see it for yourself that inspired us, you can explore it virtually at this link. So we decided to associate our books and stories with Knockma, even though we're not sure if the eventual title is going to remain The Hollow Hill.

We're also starting to blog steadily. Our plan is to have Writing Wednesdays, Folklore Fridays and perhaps some theme on Monday that we haven't decided on yet. Do you have any suggestions?

If you have a blog you want to promote drop us a line and we'll link you up! We're just starting to build up a thank-you list and blogroll. 

Right now we're working on the query letter, last-stage editing and bondage porn tie-in story, in roughly that order.

And let me introduce to you my pen name and scowling photo. I need to get a more professional one done at some point, I know!


VIOLETTA VANE

Apparently I look very butch :-) But I don't want to confuse anyone on purpose. I'm a cis straight woman and not genderqueer. I've just liked to dress and present androgynously since I was a teenager. I originally starting doing it as a break from constantly getting hit on by gross men with yellow fever, and I just kept it up. Now that I don't have a corporate job I'm going back to my older clothes more.  I also like to get glammed up with lots of makeup and high heels on occasion, so it's not my 24/7 style. I used to get mistaken for a man a lot, but it doesn't bother me unless it's hostile. Anyway! Awkward explanation out of the way, I'm very excited about my new pen name and think it strikes the right balance between porny, poetic and Googleable.

Please hop over to the website, and maybe leave a comment on our blog (just go to the website and click on Author Blog). We're not going to go on a huge promotion kick yet, but we'd appreciate any feedback, comments or questions! Thanks for taking a peek!  Also, if you're on Goodreads, please friend me? You can find links on knockmanovel.com.

I'm feeling a little bereft of human warmth this morning!

( Read more... big spoilers. )

I usually don't do signal boosts simply because I have a focused and not-very-large f-list. But I thought this one was worth doing. It's pretty depressing and awful and has to do with rape so I'm putting most of it behind a cut.

If you don't click on the cut however, just take this one thing away: watch out for kynn / keeva on Dreamwidth.

( contains discussion of rape and victim-blaming )

I'll take this post down immediately if I get a PM from moofable asking me to, of course. Otherwise I'm not really equipped to deal with feedback or more questions -- I don't know anything other than what I've linked to and mentioned in this post -- so comments are off here. As with anything public on which I turn comments off, feel free to PM or link or do anything you want about it.

On my second to last post the note about Darren Criss reminded me to do this post, which I've been kicking around for a while as an illustration of the difference between race and ethnicity. People grasp the difference intuitively when it comes to white people. It's taken for granted that white people have different ethnicities. You can be Irish-American, Scandinavian-American, Cajun, etc. But for people of color, being racialized tends to collapse our race and ethnicity together. I like to make it clear that mine are quite separate.

Here are some examples of Japanese-Americans:

Let's start with an easy one! George Takei.



Pioneering Hawaii politician Patsy Mink. Note the Anglo name. 


Jero, who has a career singing a very traditional style of Japanese music. He was raised in the US and has a Japanese grandmother; that's how he learned to sing Enka. He's racially black, and ethnically African-American, and I consider him also ethnically Japanese-American. I don't believe one necessarily takes away from the other.


Scott Fujita, football player. He was adopted by a Japanese-American family and grew up in Berkeley. Just based on that last fact, he has probably had more contact with Japanese-American communities and culture than I have, and I'm not embarrassed to say that. He has spoken out about issues like internment remembrance. Racially, he is Whitey W. McWhiteperson, but I totally consider him ethnically Japanese-American.


Dean Cain. I don't know that much about him, or how he identifies. I just know he has some Japanese-American ancestry. I would call him multiracial and multiethnic and white.  I don't know if I'd call him Japanese-American or not, unless I heard that he identified as such.



Here are some examples of people who are NOT Japanese-American. They are weeaboos. Just trust me on this, OK?





I believe ethnicity is not about proving, or establishing a level of cultural competence. I would never demand to know anyone's particular level of identification. It's their right to communicate that or not. Ethnicity does, however, have a lot to do with claiming. Some people have a choice as to whether or not to claim ethnicity -- this is a choice that almost never exists for race, which is a much more externally enforced social category heavily dependent on visual markers.

I had a belated birthday present from my mom last week: free eyeliner tattooing due to some half-off internet group coupon thingie (it's complicated, but my mother's on more social media than I am). I was looking forward to it. I already have some big-ass tattoos, so I figured, how painful could a tiny little line be?

( CUT FOR THE PAIN )

( My Captain America review (has spoilers) )

Other than that, it wasn't really awful. But there was so much missed potential.

I'm going to try to switch to Deepest Sender from now on to write (I'm sick of LJ's godawful interface that eats half my posts) and post to Dreamwidth so it gets pushed out to LJ. I'm not interested in abandoning LJ yet, despite the horrendous problems of last week, and I'm just backing things up. I'm already very familiar with Blogger and Wordpress and I'd rather stay here for a lot of my stuff. However, I'm starting up a bunch of new social media accounts under My Awesome Pen Name which is still sort of secret until we go live with our book website. I've decided to go the Google Sites plus embedded free Wordpress blog for that. I know enough graphic design to make simple sites look decent, I want to keep our initial investment low, and there are also huge time-saving advantages when it comes to going the hosted route.

Right now we're edited 75% of the book, and we've started on the synopsis. We're also working on alternate titles. We should be ready to start submitting within the next month. It's pretty exciting.

Good news here, by the way... Raquel Nelson is free! Thank you everyone who signed that petition I linked! I want to stress that she was not acquitted. A jury (NOT of her peers) actually found her guilty. But the judge used good judgement and didn't sentence her, and is even giving her the chance for a new trial to clear her name.

I'm doing a lot of political stuff this weekend, and on Monday, on the budget debate before the final deadline. I'll just say I'm terrified of either Medicare or Medicaid being cut and I am doing everything I can to prevent that.

Lastly I would encourage anyone interested in the Oslo terrorist's connection to global right-wing extremism to visit the SPLC Hatewatch blog. They always have really good coverage on this stuff.

I wish I had a pained, puffy-eyed David Bowie mood icon.

TORCHWOOD EP FOUR TONIGHT OH YEEEEEAAHHHH. I saw a pic of Gwen with an updo and a tight dress, and she looked amazing.

My son is dying to see this move, of course. I'm incredibly paranoid about taking him to see big blockbuster movies because of messages about violence, women and race. For example, he can watch Transformers cartoons, but the movies are completely out of the question.

WWII is a difficult subject for my family, mainly because half of them were on the right side and the other half weren't. My grandfather died on a Japanese battleship sunk by the US Navy.  I do love super-realistic takes on the period, but sometimes they overwhelm me emotionally. I've never seen Grave of the Fireflies, for example; I just don't think I could handle it. And I actually had to walk out of the theater halfway through Letters from Iwo Jima. Not because I disliked it, it just affected me too strongly. Plus I spent a lot of my childhood having other kids blame me, personally, for WWII.

So I was doing some research on the new Captain America movie, because I'm understandably nervous. My first stop is usually commonsensemedia. Nothing about race, or if there are any Japanese at all. Then I checked angryasianman and found this: captain america trailer: kenneth choi, howling commando. What a relief. I can take my kid to see this movie after all, and even use it to teach him something positive about Asian-American history. 



As a side note, it doesn't bother me in the slightest that a non-Japanese-American is playing a Nisei soldier. This kind of cross-ethnic casting has never bothered me. It's my opinion that there are few enough roles for Asian-Americans that we shouldn't have to deal with particular restrictions that actors of white ethnicities don't have to deal with.  Go Kenneth Choi/Jim Morita!

My favorite quotes from Torchwood in Ten Minutes this week:

 

( Read more... ep3 spoilers (funny ones) )

 

Thanks to everyone for putting up with my anti-HP spasm yesterday. Things have been moving quickly and mostly I'm feeling very positive. The attack on Oslo is horrible news though, and I'm on the edge of my seat about the budget debate. Medicare and Medicaid are pretty much the number one political issue for me because the lives of several family members really depend on them, and I don't support cuts to them in any respect and I've done my best to make that clear to all my political representatives up the chain to Obama.

In SDCC news, I used to get a good funny feeling in my stomach when I looked at shirtless pictures of Jason Momoa (are there any other kind?) But after his "joke" at SDCC, that's turned into a bad bad bad funny feeling. I'm so disappointed in him. I don't hold actors to higher standards of behavior, but by any standard of behavior what he said was fucking disgusting. I'm not even going to repeat it -- it's Googleable -- I'm so disgusted by it. Damn it.

However, I'm super excited about MD tonight. And because we FINISHED OUR NOVEL last night, I feel like I really have enough mental space to enjoy it properly. Not only did we finish our novel last night, this afternoon we solved a vexing editing issue with the dynamic of our problem Chapter 19.

I saw the super secret special trailer today for MD, and ( vague spoilers )

I'm going to turn comments off on this just because I'm feeling cowardly and approximately 99.99% of my f-list are massive Harry Potter fans.

And no, I've never read the books and I've only seen snatches of the movies. But since joining fandom I've learned tons about HP passively and nothing, absolutely nothing, that I've learned has made me the slightest bit interested in finding out more.  And this piece by Sady Doyle kind of sums up all the reasons. Maybe if I got into it when I was at the right stage I would enjoy the redeeming stuff about it, but now at my cynical age, having read enough special chosen boy narratives... nope. Just can't deal with it. Sorry folks.

I think some people who love HP also have loved this piece, so you might want to give it a chance. I like Tolkien but I also like stuff that rips into Tolkien, so as they say, YMMV.