A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

ETA: This has been fixed now! Thank you all for your help.

If you have Twitter, please help me out. I need as many people as possible to retweet this Tweet from my Zoe Chant account and @ Amazon.

There's a longer explanation in the link, but here's the short version. Zoe Chant is a group of authors writing under the same pen name. Amazon is aware of this, as are our fans. This is not illegal in any way. What's going on is that Amazon randomly banned the fifth book in a series by the same Zoe author, claiming she was not Zoe Chant and had no right to publish it. We sent them multiple forms of proof that she was Zoe Chant and it was an authorized Zoe Chant release, including a signed contract, a link to the book on our website, and an official copyright registration.

Amazon published the book, then yanked it two hours later and terminated the author's entire account on Amazon. It pulled ALL her books off Amazon, said she was permanently banned from ever publishing on Amazon again, and sent her a notice saying that they would keep all the money that had already been paid by readers of her books!

We have been unable to get through to anyone at Amazon who we can actually talk to. From the absolutely nonsensical content of the emails we have received, we believe that this entire thing may have been handled by an AI.

We are looking into all avenues of redress, but at the moment our best chance seems to be stirring up a social media shitstorm. Please help us do so by retweeting the Twitter link and/or posting on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and any other places known to Amazon. Tag Amazon and Zoe Chant.

Please no "I told you so" or "Well you shouldn't publish on Amazon" comments. We are not personally responsible for living in a world dominated by giant evil corporations.

There's a funny bit in Biggles Fails To Return in which Ginger, impersonating a Spanish onion-seller in Monaco, shares some bread and an onion with a local. The local nearly spits out the onion, appalled at its sharpness, and asks Ginger where the heck they came from. Ginger is forced to quickly come up with an explanation of why he has English onions rather than the presumably sweeter Spanish ones.

I've been reading books for more than forty years, and this is the first time I realized that when characters take nothing but a loaf of bread and a raw onion as journey provisions, or eat bread and a raw onion for lunch, they're eating something like a sweet Vidalia onion, not the onions that make your eyes water and would be torture to eat whole and raw. I did vaguely wonder why they were always eating raw onions rather than, say, a raw turnip that at least wouldn't be actively painful to eat, but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!

This made me think about other bits in books that make more sense with context, whether that context is new information, other books, or just more life experience.

In The Once and Future King, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is going on and on about the glory of fighting. Merlyn argues with him, then "seems to change the subject" and asks Wart which he had liked better, the ants or the wild geese. The chapter ends there. When I read the book as a child, I took that literally: Merlyn was frustrated with the Wart and changed the subject.

When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized that the geese were peaceful and didn't believe in national boundaries, and the ants were totalitarian and had the motto "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Merlyn wasn't changing the subject, he was winning the argument... but the Wart, like me, missed the point.

More recently, I listened to Watership Down on audio, read by Peter Capaldi. I had mixed feelings about his performance, but while listening I suddenly understood something that I never had before, and I must have read that book twenty times.

In the warren of the shining wires, Silverweed recites a poem. It's quite beautiful and initially seems fantastical, with a rabbit asking to accompany the stream and become rabbit-of-the-water, accompany the falling leaves and become rabbit-of-the-earth, accompany the wind and become rabbit-of-the-wind. Finally, he openly asks to join Frith and die. Fiver is horrified at the poem (the others don't understand it) and says it's taking something true (all rabbits must die) and making it into something twisted and perverse (making the pursuit of death seem beautiful).

I always wondered about that poem. The final verse is straightforwardly what Fiver says the whole poem is about, but the earlier verses aren't clearly about death - they seem much more in the vein of other rabbit legends where magical things happen. I had puzzled over it, and finally decided that they're in the real world, so asking to be a magical being like a rabbit of the water or a rabbit of the earth was asking to go to the magical realm after death. But that never felt quite satisfactory to me.

Then, listening to Capaldi read the poem, I suddenly understood. Silverweed is talking very poetically about something that isn't a fantasy or metaphor at all. When he says he wants to go down with the leaves and be rabbit of the earth, he means that he wants to die and have his body decay and literally become part of the earth, and eventually, as it breaks down more and more, the water and the air. No wonder Fiver was horrified!

Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?

I'm excerpting some comments from the discussion on my post about Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family series. Some context that's known to those of us in the subthread but isn't explicitly stated, is that Sydney Taylor's series about a Jewish family in turn of the century New York City is very autobiographical, to the point that the characters are not only based on her real family, but with one exception (the baby brother) keep their real names.

Lirazel wrote: "The writer of the autobiography talks about how much the children's market had changed between the 50s, when the first three books in the series were written) and the 70s, when Taylor wrote Downtown and Ella. Taylor's style and subject matter worked brilliant in the 50s, but by the 70s, publishers and children's librarians were looking for more issues-based fiction. Taylor's books had always kind of...smoothed over the uglier parts of growing up poor in early 20th century New York (in a way that reminds me of Laura Ingalls Wilder's tendency to do the same), and that just didn't really fly anymore by the 70s.

So from what I remember, the publisher wanted her to write something a little grittier, but she didn't want to alienate all the readers who had loved the original books that were gentler. That's why Guido was introduced--he could be suffering from poverty in a more realistic way, but it wouldn't "taint" the characters that were already beloved. I think it was phrased more gently than that, but that's the impression I got of why Downtown is so different than the previous three books."

Rachel wrote: "It's funny how we think of realism. The first three books are classics because emotionally, they're incredibly realistic. I remember experiencing those same emotions as a kid, even though the details of the circumstances were so different. Taylor had to have been very faithful to what it felt like to be a kid, because so many of us find the books so relatable.

Downtown has more gritty poverty, but to me it feels less real/true than the books that were less realistic about social issues, but more realistic psychologically."

This reminded me of the endless debate over what's "realistic" in fantasy novels loosely based on medieval Europe. The rape and subjection of women is often considered a keynote of realism. But widespread premature death due to disease is not considered a necessary thing to include for the sake of realism, even though that was at least as much of a fact of life. (Imagine Game of Thrones if Cersei, Jaime, Joffrey, Arya, and Ned had all died of cholera or plague in book one.)

Or, going back to the original example, which is more "realistic," the events and emotions that stood out in Taylor's memory when recalling her childhood, or the dire poverty that was all around her, but wasn't how she personally experienced her childhood?

Starting around the 1950s, a number of books in English for children had the message that magic isn't real. Helpfully for the historical cause, many of them won Newbery Medals or Honor, so they are very easy to come across.

The basic plot is that Protagonist Kid meets a kid (Tragic Kid) who claims that magic (elves, etc) is real. The kids do magic spells, make elf homes, etc. Protagonist Kid usually isn't sure that the magic is real, but wants to believe that it is. At the end it is revealed that magic is definitely not real, there are no elves, and Tragic Kid was making it all up to cover up for the fact that their father is abusive/their mother is an addict/they have no parents and are living alone/etc. Protagonist Kid is sadder but wiser.

There are variants on this, such as Bridge to Terabithia, in which no one ever believes that the magic is real - it's explicitly a game - but it ends in tragedy anyway.

I recently came across an example of this, published in 1996, and realized that it is the most recent example I can recall of the genre. Am I missing examples of it, or did they stop getting written or published?

The thing that has always struck me most about this genre is that it's a solution in search of a problem. Kids believing in magic and elves and so forth is not actually a big social problem, but the books treat it as if is. They are written as if the belief must be broken with a devastating shock, when in reality, most kids gradually learn that their parents are Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, without the need for a dramatic revelation.

Those are also beliefs which are over way before kids are old enough to read the "there's no such thing as magic" books. The books aren't teaching kids there's no such thing as magic, because by the time they're old enough to read them they already know that. They're actually teaching them that if they read a book hoping that it's fantasy, it may in fact be a book about how fantasy isn't real.

Anyway, the genre thankfully seems to have died the death. But that made me wonder about some things. Why was this ever considered worthwhile to begin with? Why is it always fantasy book-style magic that needs to be dispelled, rather than the sort of supernatural things that people really do believe in as adults, like crystal healing and possession by demons and magical-type conspiracy theories?

The book I'm writing right now has brother and sister puppies. They need to be different colors, but clearly from the same litter. They don't need to be purebred, but I'd like to describe them by referencing a dog breed people are familiar with or can look up, i.e., "They resembled Labrador retrievers..."

With that in mind, what breed of dog has the most adorable puppies? Please support your case with photo evidence.

I've been working nonstop on the release of Defender Raptor and other writing-related business since waking up. It's 1:30, I haven't showered or dressed, and I'm nowhere near done. Taking a break to shower and vote in the primary, then back to work.

I thought some of you might be interested to know exactly what sort of work that might entail. If you don't, don't click. This is just what I've done today - it doesn't count everything I've done yesterday, etc - so it's a snapshot rather than a complete picture.

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I pulled this comment of mine from a locked entry on my f-list on "hopepunk," which linked to some articles on it. After reading the articles, I wrote:

Apart from the impossible-to-pronounce name, hopepunk is a weird movement because it seems so utterly undefined as anything but "not grimdark," which is also a useless term as nobody agrees on what that even is either. One of the articles says The Handmaid's Tale (novel) is hopepunk because Offred is resisting inside her mind, but lots of others would say the book defines grimdark.

You can't have a movement without a set of media that everyone agrees exemplify it, but there doesn't seem to be a single example of something everyone can point at and say "it's hopepunk." If you take steampunk, there's tons of things that everyone can point at and say, "Those are steampunk." I think "punk" should be limited to things with a clear aesthetic that includes visuals - which was also the case for originalpunk.

The most interesting possible definition of hopepunk, IMO, would be this:

- Stories involve communities rather than lone individuals.

- Great change requires communal effort.

- Communities are not inherently bad, though some may be.

- People are not inherently selfish and cruel, though some may be.

- Compassion, kindness, and idealism is more likely to lead to good rather than bad consequences.

- Protecting only yourself or only your own loved ones at the expense of the Other or strangers is wrong.

- Meeting strangers is more likely to lead to interesting conversations, trade, or relationships than fights to the death.

- Even if the society contains prejudice, from the point of view of the story, all people are equal. Even if a story takes place in a racist and sexist society, the story itself will not marginalize those characters.

- Non-racist, non-sexist, non-homophobic (etc) societies are common in these stories.

- The visual aesthetic is pretty/beautiful/intricate/fun, with multiple cultures represented. There is an effort to make even ordinary items fun to use and pleasant to look at. Clothing is colorful and individual. The aesthetic is that things are both for use and for pleasure, showing that life is not only for survival.

Black Panther would be a good example of this, I think. Everything ever written by Diane Duane and Sherwood Smith.

Osprey Archer writes in reference to Susan Coolidge's Clover, You know what is wrong with modern-day books? Not enough picnics. It’s like at some point someone said “You know, people find it really boring when the characters have a good time,” and therefore good times were banished from books FOREVERMORE, even though really picnics and tea parties and canoe excursions is often exactly what I want.

I also enjoy many old and old-fashioned books like Clover for that exact reason: they have picnics. Picnics, and rambles in the woods, and decorating one's house, and long conversations that are not arguments, and other scenes which are not based on interpersonal conflict. These books generally also have interpersonal conflict. But they have long stretches without it.

Osprey Archer's point about picnics struck me because I had recently had a long discussion over email with Sholio regarding romance novels. We were giving someone notes on their romance novel, and we'd both thought that the balance of interpersonal conflict to the couple having fun together and enjoying each other's company needed to be shifted away from the former and toward the latter.

I realized that this is a thing that writers are often taught not to do. Everything in the story must advance the plot or it should be cut! Every scene must contain conflict! You can't just have characters hanging out together and that's the entire purpose of the scene!

But in a lot of romance, the engine that drives the story isn't conflict, it's relationship development. And conflict (including internal conflict) is not the only way to make that happen. Play is another one: the couple engages in some form of fun shared activity together, character is developed and bonding occurs through that, and the relationship is moved forward. That can also happen based on increased knowledge (getting to know you conversations, or meeting other important people in your loved one's life).

If you're not used to reading romance or have only experienced the high-conflict, slap-kiss type, this can feel very counter-intuitive as a writer and weird as a reader. It feels like you or the writer is doing it wrong. They're not. They're just doing it differently.

The "secret garden" genre, which is a personal favorite of mine, is even less conflict-based than romance. That's the one where a sad, lonely, troubled, or unfulfilled person discovers a garden or some other private space, renovates and spends time in it, and finds their psyche blossoming along with their garden. This genre can have external conflict, and often includes some element of "can I keep this space?" But it's not the primary driver. Neither is internal conflict: the character is typically not conflicted at all about their desire to explore their garden and nourish themselves. The driver of this genre is emotional healing, environmental exploration, and character development.

Conflict is not the only way to build a story. Some stories are primarily driven by other factors, and that's okay. Even in a conflict-driven story, you don't necessarily need it in every scene. (If your book feels exhausting, maybe you need a break from all that conflict; if you want the conflict to count, giving it a rest rather than belaboring it may help.)

I wish more writers felt free to write picnics.

Dear Chocolate Box Writer or Artist,

This is my first chocolate box! Thank you for writing or doing art for me. My likes, DNWs, and requested fandoms (The Magnificent Seven (2016), Dragonriders of Pern, Gentleman Bastards, and Nirvana in Fire are below the cut.)

If you haven't heard of Chocolate Box, it's a fic and/or art exchange, vaguely similar to Yuletide but lower pressure (300 word minimum), focused on relationships; you sign up with This Character & That Character for a non-sexual/romantic relationship, or This Character/That Character for a sexual or romantic one. Sign-ups are still open today and close some time tomorrow; Explanation and rules are here.

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Because why not.

Also because yesterday was even more spectacularly horrible than usual for completely unrelated reasons, involving a really bad thing that happened at work which I can't discuss because confidentiality, followed by four hours in the ER with my cat culminating in the vet coming in and saying, "Well… it could be a little scratch that got infected… or IT COULD BE CANCER." (I don't think it's cancer.)

Beneath the cut, I am going to put a bunch of prompts for stories, fanfic or original, in case anyone wants to pick one up and cheer me up.

I like hurt-comfort, worldbuilding, adventure, action, heroism, self-sacrifice, hard choices, camaraderie, luscious descriptions of food and landscape, loyalty kink, trauma and recovery, military settings, bands of brothers (or sisters, or brothers and sisters) and a strong sense of place. I'm fine with original characters. I enjoy gen, het, femmeslash, and slash, and I enjoy relationships of any variety, from friendships to epic romance to hot sex. I prefer happy or bittersweet endings to doom and despair.

I could write epics on what I like about hurt-comfort, but I think the key is tenderness. So many individual elements that I like - characters helping each other to walk or eat or bathe, stroking hair, cuddling, etc - come down to that. I also like the opportunities for glorious melodrama, such as desperate stumbles through the woods in search of aid, bedside vigils, delirious confessions of long-held secrets, stoicism, soldiering on with a task until total collapse (possibly while concealing an injury), etc.

Things I find hot: fantasy prostitution where it's consensual and totally a fantasy of being able to simply point your finger and get the exact sexual experience or partner you want, like the Kushiel books or that hot short story Ellen Kushner wrote in "Sirens." Strong men and their muscles, especially if they're stocky/wiry but not tall. Strong, lean, boyish or butch women and their muscles. Voluptuous Venus of Willendorf women. Slim petite women with wings. Collarbones. Breasts. Hands. Long, graceful feet. Jeremy Renner's arms. Eyes of any color, from ordinary to ridiculously exotic. Long flappy leather coats. Elaborate clothing with ribbons and complicated ties. Masquerade balls. Carnival masks. Venice and fantasy cities with canals. Passionate sex up against the wall. Corsets. Half-clothed sex. People really getting into each others' bodies. Writing on bodies.

Quiet men with still waters running deep, like Le Guin's Ged. Wizards, artists, craftspeople, medics, soldiers and warriors, chefs, musicians, DJs, dancers, acrobats, pilots, martial artists, physical and psychotherapists. Really determined people. Happy people, especially when they have not had easy lives. People with scars or disabilities, mental or physical. Found families. Friendship. Misfits finding a home. People who love their jobs, especially if they're not very glamorous. Telepathic animals. Rats. People with beautiful wings. Myth and folklore. Nicknames, formalized or not. Shapeshifters. PTSD. Hard-earned happy endings. Loyalty against all odds. Lovers on opposite sides of a war. Conflicts of honor.

Settings where everything is lush and beautiful. Settings where everything is trying to eat you. (Or both!) Deserts. Lush forests. Big bustling cities, Hostage or imprisonment scenarios. Desperate last stands. Clever escapes. Con artists. DRAGONS. Portals. Wish-fulfillment that's earned. Mist. Mountains. Journeys, into the known or the unknown. Ships or portals that will take you somewhere, who knows where, or make you vanish forever. Space explorers. Space Marines. Trapped in an evil lab. Psychic kids (or adults.) People with powers who aren't costumed superheroes. Boarding schools. Boot camp. Riding anything. Dragon hatching, cub bonding - anything where people bond with animals, that is my favorite thing ever.

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