25 Things About Me

I spotted this game on one of my interweb haunts tonight, and considered doing it. But since no one on forums really reads anything but their own posts if they're longer than a paragraph, I decided if I was going to do it, I should make a blog post.

So, here it is: 25 Random Things About Me...

1. I have been described as "very Canadian," but I have no idea what that means.
2. Recently, I've been inordinately fascinated by Victorian postmortem photography.
3. My least favourite thing about teaching, aside from the marking, is anything relating to disciplinary stuff. This was the main reason I went for university teaching instead of high school. Yes, you would think that there would be less of that at the uni level, wouldn't you?
4. I prefer the version of Spiderman who shoots webs out of his wrists, somewhat spider-like. I find the whole canisters of web stuff, though more "canonical," slightly lame.
5. I don't always eat BBQ chips, but when I do, I prefer Lays form, because they taste sweet.
6. I'm finding writing 25 random things much more difficult than I anticipated.
7. I used to hate pink as a child, but now I find it cheerful and pretty, and I like to punch my usually sedate and/or black wardrobe with touches of hot pink.
8. I once had a stranger toss a toonie into my cup of coffee thinking I was a panhandler while I was merely waiting for a bus. I used that toonie to replace the ruined cup of coffee.
9. I am a vegetarian, and a bit of a green freak.
10. I am a proud non-driver, and I walk or use public transit devotedly.
11. I insert my favourite foods into all my books, so if you were to read them all you'd be able to track my culinary tastes to a fair extent.
12. I have a great fondness for pink peppermints.
13. I wouldn't say I'm a coffee addict. More like a coffee devotee.
14. I admit I am very reluctant to travel, and I do as little of it as humanly possible. A number of people have expressed dismay over this: "How can someone not like to travel?" they ask in horror. I'm not sure about other non-travelers, but I can assure you at least one exists, and she's me.
15. I write all of my story outlines and a lot of my first drafts (or portions of them) long hand in coil or hardback notebooks, which enables me to write on buses, outside, and in waiting rooms.
16. I do most of my writing at night or very early in the morning, which means I have learned how to type very quietly.
17. I have a strong hatred of noise. Loud sounds physically hurt me, and droning sounds make me kind of crazy. I contend that no sound should be made unless it's nicer than the silence it breaks, and very few sounds qualify.
18. Perhaps due to #17, I find television irritating beyond belief, use the radio sparingly, and am becoming less and less inclined to use the telephone. Yet, I still love music - weird, huh?
19. When I'm stressed, I colour in colouring books or I do puzzles. (Good thing I have a four year old to make these things seem legit!) I eat ice when I'm tense, unwell, or frustrated.
20. I have a strong interest in politics, but a great dislike of discussing it. Same goes for religion, unless it's a historical, philosophical or anthropological discussion.
21. I am a movie fiend. I own thousands, and recall a lot of detail from every one I've seen. I can never identify my favourite film, since it changes constantly, but if you're ever so inclined you can see my Top 100 List. (I like lists.)
22. I love water - being near water, in water, around water. Being landlocked makes me claustrophobic. (Oh yeah, and I'm also a claustrophobic.)
23. One of my favourite books of all time is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, and it sits on or near my desk most of the time. I find the "will to meaning" to be more significant to me than the "will to power" or "will to pleasure" theories of motivation. I think most of the world's problems could be solved it more people had (1) a sense of purpose, and (2) resources and some hope that they can achieve this purpose.
24. I have a general policy about stating my opinion only once. Beyond that, and you run the risk of argument, and argument is not really worth it. No one's mind is usually changed, but bad blood can arise.
25. I love plants - flowers, veggies, trees, and so on. If I could, I would spend my life growing things. I worked the family food plot as a kid, and I now have potted plants for my son to help tend. While I love the convenience of apartment living, and am adapting to urban life, I regret not having a real garden, and would like to rectify that some day.

There! 25 very random things, in the order in which they popped into my head. What are some random things about you? Stop on by the comments and tell us - got five, ten, twenty-five things?

If you'd rather do it on your own blog instead of in the comments, go ahead and then post a link (or link to me) so I can read them!

My New Haunt

I just wanted to stop in for a moment and recommend a site that I have been loving recently.

The Romance Reviews: If you haven't gone there before, you should.

As the title suggests, they have plenty of reviews - they also have chat areas, author pages, and oodles of contests. They cover all forms of romance and erotica, both m/f and GLBT, and do indie/small press and mainstream. I highly recommend this site, especially if you have limited net time and are looking for a few romance fan sites that offer a lot with one membership.

As both a writer and a fan of romance, I have enjoyed it a good deal!

You can even visit me there!

Help! Another Identity Crisis

I've seen these two terms chucked around, "Indie" and "Traditional." Now, I know these terms are rife with some controversy, since they were (according to interwebs lore) first coined by a shady vanity press in order to glamorize their scam. Yet, regardless of how the categories started, they have been widely adopted in the "writing world" - or, at least, in that corner which I haunt.

I have always understood it to be a matter of scale.

"Traditional" publishers, in my understanding, included the Big Companies - the brick-n-mortar, advance-granting, agent-oriented, paperback-lovin' companies that market/sell internationally and make big bucks, and all those mid-range companies run on this model in hopes of being one of the Big Publishers. We can all name several of these off the top of our heads, no doubt.

"Indie" (short for "independent") publishers, I assumed, included the small scale publishers - micropresses and self-published authors who have a smaller distribution and privately-seeded marketing budget, no agents and no advances, but royalties from sales alone. Largely, these days, this means epublishing.

This week I ran into a handful of blog comments that claimed "indie" doesn't include self-published. But, this sentiment I easily disregarded as indie authors who, foolishly, have bought into the idea that self-published means vanity publishing and terrible quality. These comments were, after all, left on a now-fairly-famous so-so review to which the regrettably deficient self-published author under review left some awful, immature and petty ravings, involving the senseless repetition of expletives. I can see why people were scrambling to distance themselves from her.

However, I then came across something a little more puzzling, and not exactly unique - and from a source I can't so easily dismiss. From a NY Times bestselling author and writer of "how to write" pieces, Bob Mayer, it was hard to ignore. This quote, which was not the gist of his point (just what struck me), is from the June 12th post on his blog Write it Forward:

I use the term indie for one who self-publishes and trad for those who are published via a traditional publishing house. I’ve copyrighted them and you need to pay me any time you use them. Joking.

True, Mayer is clearly expressing his terms as he sees them for the purposes of his post, which is an otherwise considered and useful editorial. Yet, he is not the only person defining these terms this way, and I am confused.

I consider myself an "indie author," though it seems many people do not grant me this category. However, I am not really published through a "traditional" venue, either. So, what the hell am I?

First off, why do I consider myself "indie"? Well, frankly, my publishers thus far have been pretty independent - without a big corporate source of money, no advances, requiring no agents, not having a publishing "house" as such, and focusing largely on ebooks, they seem to me to be small-scale and, therefore, not the same as those commonly recognized as traditional. They are, I believe, independently owned and operated by individual publishing entrepreneurs. I don't even think they have investors beyond their owners/managing editors.

And why am I seemingly not "indie"? Because I do publish through companies not belonging to me that employ editors not controlled by me, and, especially, because I do not "self-publish." I guess. (Insert "head scratching" emoticon here.)

Now, I suspect the easy argument is that these companies could become traditional-scale in time, and that Harper-Collins might have started out as a micropress (I really couldn't tell you if it did or not, actually). Also, more obscurely, the concern might be that these publishers, be they ever so humble, might be creatures similar to the "gatekeepers" that indies dislike so strongly, and that signing with these epubs might be "compromising my artistic vision" in a way that self-pubbed writers don't have to. Finally, I reckon the royalties thing is the kicker - as long as a middle man is getting a cut, I guess (according to some) I am not truly "independent."

Well, colour me confused. I can understand the arguments and points above, but they never occurred to me naturally. I had to ponder them.

But, the point of all this is - Even if I concede that I am not "indie" (which I don't, really), I am left with a dilemma. What am I? In this recurring rhetoric of "indie" vs "traditional"... which am I? Am I an "us" or a "them"? In a greyzone, worthy of the attention of neither?

True, we shouldn't think in those terms of narrow categories, but such is what we have to work with in the seedy underbelly of starving author forums. So, where do I land?

It would just be nice to know.