Category: Uncategorized

New plans for the blog

I’ve been revising my business plan lately, codifying a lot of things I’ve tried over the past year into a coherent, unified strategy. It feels like I have all the pieces now for a successful writing career, but I just need to figure out how they all fit together. That’s the goal.

One of those pieces is this blog, which has unfortunately fallen into a state of chronic neglect. I haven’t abandoned it entirely, of course, but I haven’t been focused as much on it as perhaps I should have. Instead of using it to support all the other things I’m doing, I’ve treated it more as a thing unto itself, which makes it a distraction instead of an essential part of what I do.

That’s going to change soon, because I think I’ve figured out how this blog fits in with everything else. But that also means that I’m going to make quite a few changes.

First, I’m going to post a lot more book reviews. Ideally, I’d like to post one every week. I’ve read a bunch of really good books over the last month, so once I sit down to review them I should have enough content for the next several weeks. In this way, my blog can reinforce my reading goal (50 novels per year) while also sharing something of immediate value to my readers.

Second, I’m going to experiment with pop-ups on my blog pages to get more email subscribers. I know, I know, everyone hates those things, but they do work, believe it or not. My email list is the centerpiece of my marketing plan, and if this blog is going to be more than a thing unto itself, I have to integrate it into that plan.

I’ll do my best to keep the subscription forms from being too intrusive, like having them only pop-up after you’ve scrolled to the bottom of the page, or only have them pop up on the first page you visit.

Third, I’m going to be a lot better about posting whenever I have a sale, a new release, or a featured book. I already have book pages for all of my titles, and it’s not difficult to post the links in the sidebar, or embed them in a blog post.

Fourth, I’m going to be a lot better about posting updates on WIPs, publishing projects, and other things that I’ve been up to. I already include those updates in my newsletter, but I could do a lot better at putting them here.

I want this blog to be both a platform for connecting with my existing fanbase as well as a vehicle for gaining new fans. So that’s what the content here is going to be geared toward. I’ll still include my personal reflections on various subjects from time to time, and I’ll probably put a few more blog series together, but I’m going to be more careful about keeping my readers in mind.

This isn’t a writing blog anymore—indeed, it hasn’t been a writing blog for the past several years—but I’m not going to put too many restrictions on what I blog about either. We’ll just have to see how it unfolds. As for the more controversial stuff like politics, I’m not going to hide from it, but I’m not going to wear it on my sleeve either. As much as you love it when authors of escapist fiction rant at you like your batshit crazy uncle on Facebook, it would seem that niche has already been filled many times over. </ snark>

There’s a bunch of other stuff I’d like to try out, but let’s stick to this for now. Book reviews, more frequent updates, and better integration with the email list. It’s going to be a great new year!

Tarnsman of Gor by John Norman

I’ve been meaning to read this book for a while, since I heard that it’s a classic of the Sword and Planet subgenre and I’ve really liked the other Sword and Planet books that I’ve read. (Princess of Mars, The Dying Earth, etc. Come to think of it, I haven’t done a review of Princess of Mars yet, so that’s as good a reason as any to reread it!)

Besides the association with Sword and Planet, the Gor books have also spawned a subculture of BDSM, and for good reason. On Gor, slavery is not only normalized, it’s romanticized. A typical marriage ceremony consists of the groom binding up his bride, carrying her off on a giant bird, and throwing off her clothes to “show her people what had been the fate of [such and such girl].”

I don’t swing that way, but I thought I’d give the first book a try. I’d heard that the bondage fetishism doesn’t take over until the fifth or sixth book, and while it’s definitely there in Tarnsman of Gor, it wasn’t enough to make me put the book down.

As a swashbuckling action-adventure tale, I thought this book was pretty good. There definitely was no shortage of action, and while the plot twists were fairly predictable, they were also enjoyable and interesting. It’s a fun, if brutal book.

There were a lot of lengthy info-dumps, though, which wouldn’t have been so bad except that I had problems with the world. In general, it felt like the author had come up with a really cool world but not sufficiently thought it through. For example, if humans aren’t the apex predator on Gor, how are there so many human cities? If the caste system is maintained by deliberately sharing false information with the lower castes, how is that system long-term stable if the caste isn’t something you’re born into?

The general impression I got was that this world is a brutal, savage place where everyone is broken in some way, a lot like Mad Max. The thing is, I’m not sure that that’s what the author was going for.

That may just be an artifact of the time this book was written, though. A lot of older books that invented the tropes now seem stiff and wooden—not because they weren’t innovative for their time, but because we’ve seen those tropes so many times that we already know what to expect. Tarnsman of Gor was written back in the sixties, before role playing games and chihuahua-killing fantasy tomes had made world-building so important. Back then, it probably was enough to say “here’s a really cool world” without first thinking about all the ways to break it.

Again, that wouldn’t be so bad if all this book attempted to be was a swashbuckling adventure on another world. But at several key points, the narrator steps back from the story to explain some aspect of the world that was only tangentially related to the plot.

All in all, I give this book three stars. It’s worth reading if it interests you, but it’s not a must-read.

Christine Blasey Ford raped me

As you may have heard, the congressional hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have been thrown into chaos late in the eleventh hour by shocking allegations of sexual misconduct. The accuser is a certain professor Christine Blasey Ford from Palo Alto, California. According to her, when Kavanaugh was around seventeen (I say “around,” because she doesn’t actually remember the year), he forced himself on her and tried to rape her.

She doesn’t remember where it happened. She doesn’t remember what time of year it happened. She didn’t tell anyone about it, until after she was married and seeing a therapist, and the story she told her therapist is materially different than the story she’s telling now. Also, all of the people she claims were witnesses to this act have vehemently denied, as has the accused.

But that’s not why I’m writing this blog post. I’m writing it because I have a confession to make. I haven’t come out with this story yet, because frankly, I’ve been afraid. But now is the time to come out and say it.

Christine Blasey Ford raped me.

From 2003 to 2005, I served in the California San Jose Mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I spent time in Sunnyvale and Cupertino, just a few miles from Palo Alto, that added up to almost a full year. While knocking doors one day, we came across Mrs. Ford and one of her friends. She was just visiting from Palo Alto, but they agreed to take the missionary lessons together. We came back three or four times, and struck up something of a friendship. Then, I was transferred to my next area.

I can’t remember the name of the friend, or where the friend lived. It was somewhere in the area of Sunnyvale or Cupertino. I also don’t remember which year this happened, or what time of year. In the Bay Area, all the seasons kind of blend together.

It was definitely Christine Blasey Ford, though. I remember her quite well.

Fast forward to April 2006. I had just finished my first semester at BYU, and had arranged to take a road trip to the Bay Area with one of my freshman dorm-mates, in order to visit my mission. When we arrived in Concord, I rented a white Ford Taurus from a local Enterpise and drove down the 680 to good old San Jose.

There were so many people from my mission that I wanted to meet, and Mrs. Ford was one of them. I still had her number, so I gave her a call, and we arranged to meet at the In’N’Out in Mountain View, along El Camino Real.

At first, I was happy to see her. She’d listened so intently to the missionary lessons, and I wanted to know what had happened to her after I’d been transferred. I knew that she’d lost contact with the missionaries, but I felt certain that once we were back in touch, her interest in the gospel would quickly be renewed.

While we were eating our burgers, I left to use the bathroom. She must have slipped something in my drink, because my memory gets a little fuzzy after that.

When I came back to myself, I was sitting in the passenger side of my rental. The car was parked in the back of an empty parking lot somewhere in Sunnyvale (I forget exactly where). To my horror, I discovered that my pants were down by my ankles. My crotch was wet and sore.

On the dashboard, I found a note. It said: “Thanks for the blowjob, Elder! <3 <3 Christie.”

I was mortified. I was ashamed. I didn’t know what to do. I was no longer a missionary, so I didn’t have any of that support structure to fall back on. And because I was traveling alone, there was no one I could really tell.

I never saw or heard from Mrs. Ford again.

For the last twelve years, I’ve lived in shameful silence. It just didn’t seem that anything good would come from going public with this. But now, it’s a burden that I can carry no longer. I deserve to be heard. My story needs to be told.

But wait, you say. What’s your evidence that any of this actually happened? How do we know that any of this is true?

I admit, I have no witnesses or evidence to corroborate my story. If pressed to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, I probably couldn’t do so.

But before you rightfully dismiss everything that I’ve just written about Christine Blasey Ford, consider the following:

First, my story has more specific, verifiable details than Mrs. Ford’s accusations of sexual misconduct against Justice Kavanaugh.

Second, I’m a fiction writer. I tell lies for a living.

Draw your own conclusions, America.

Trying out a new blog theme

I just switched blog themes from WordPress 2016 to WordPress 2017. If it isn’t working or you have strong feelings or opinions about the change, please let me know.

I know I’ve been sparse about posting on this blog, but that’s hopefully going to change soon. I’m gradually putting things in order to allow me to post more frequently, and not just whenever I have a new release or some group promotions or something. It helps that I have a more permanent living situation now, that isn’t so ridiculously stressful.

Some of you have asked me to blog about my outlining process, so I will be posting that within the next week. Until then, take care!

I did a podcast!

The guys over at the Sci-Fi Shenanigans Podcast recently had me on for an interview, and now it’s up for your listening pleasure! We talked about a whole bunch of geeky stuff, including Halo, Star Wars, the Vorkosigan series, the Drenai saga, and some of the classics by Orson Scott Card, Robert Heinlein, and Ursula K. LeGuin. We also talked all about my Star Wanderers series, which was lots of fun.

Check it out!