TALYN Party

But while we’re here (and simultaneously live on Twitter) meet my other guests, hold conversations with each other, and ask me whatever you’d like.

I’ll happily answer questions about my books, both in-print and upcoming, my move to self-publishing, do writing neep, whatever.

I won’t give spoilers, but I will give hints.

There may be a lag in seeing your FIRST post appear; if you haven’t posted here before, I have to MANUALLY approve your post (which does pretty well keeping spam off my site). But once your first post is approved, the rest will show up right away.

I’ll be splitting time between answering posts here and Twitter, and will be around from 10 AM to 3 PM Eastern Time.

We may get crowded. If by chance we crash my site, I’ll still be on Twitter. Join me there.

Follow @hollylisle

Thank you for coming. I’m delighted to have this reason to celebrate, and delighted you’re here.

The OFFICIAL party is now over. But I’ll still be answering posts and questions here over the weekend If you have anything you’d like to know about books or courses or writing or whatever, I’ll be here tomorrow and Sunday after I get my words on WARPAINT.

Party on Friday

You don’t have to do anything special to participate on the weblog, but if you want the live feed, you’ll need to create a Twitter account, and then follow me.

Twitter is here:

http://twitter.com

My Twitter name is:

@hollylisle

I’m taking the day to just hang out online and talk to people, eat virtual chocolate, drink virtual champagne, and litter the place with virtual confetti.

Why?

Because for more than six months, I’ve been requesting rights reversion on TALYN, which has been out of print for quite a while.

And AFTER more than six months had passed, I received notice that Tor would not be reverting the rights; that they had decided to print ebook versions of both TALYN
and HAWKSPAR.

At which point, Robin and Beth got all the necessary paperwork together, and informed Tor that it had passe its six month grace period, and that their position was
the rights belonged to me.

There was a long, painful silence between last week and this week.

And then today, I received the rights reversion from Robin and Beth.

TALYN, which I consider the single best book I’ve written to date, once again belongs solely to me.

I’ll send you a reminder either late Thursday or early Friday. And a link to the party page.

I hope you’ll join me. We’ll have fun.

Cheerfully,
Holly

Here’s the latest.

Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about

Note that the article, while pointing to no increase in temperature since 1998, also notes that the folks who brought out the data say that even though temperatures are dropping, they think “man-made carbon dioxide” will be sufficient to keep everyone warm.

If that’s true, China will have the best temperatures around: it has much of the world’s heavy industry and air you can cut with a knife. The US, with relatively clean air, won’t have that spiffy man-made carbon to keep it warm.

Note also, however, that there’s debate over the release from the Met office—that scientists aren’t all falling in line with the thought police’s “carbon is more important than the sun” mantra.

Here’s the thing. The sun has regulated temperature on this planet since there was a sun. And a planet. Temperature increases in the late last century fit with the planet’s relationship to the sun. And those increases were nowhere near as great as pre-industrial increases.

The planet’s temperature cycles. It does this without out us. It did before there were humans, with much more variable swings than we’ve experienced in the last 200,000 years. It will continue to cycle without us, and not just in the next ten years or hundred years. We’re not experiencing carbon warming. Or carbon cooling. Or whatever the power-hungry decide to claim as the next great crisis.

We’re experiencing weather. Weather changes. Invest in coats and greenhouses.

(Thanks to Jim Woosley for the link.)

And for the much, much more I’ve written about this over the years, use the search button on the right side of the navigation bar, and just type in “global warming.”

Ignore Google’s ads at the top. You’ll fine a long list of my stuff.

I was wrong. Now I'm sheepish.

You start by saying, “I was wrong.” So I’ll start there.

Last week, I looked at the EULA for a piece of software called iBook Author, and based on reading the EULA and on reading the interpretations of the EULA by folks better at this than I am, and based on the understanding that iBook Author was designed to be the creation point of original work, and not as a formatter of work created on other platforms, and with that understanding seeing in Apple’s EULA a serious and unethical rights grab, I pulled my own work from Apple’s website on principle, and informed my students that I could no longer recommend iBookstore as an ethical market for their work.

While the comments I received were primarily emotional posts about hating Apple or opinion pieces based on nothing, I also got several quiet, reasoned comments about how the software was NOT a word processor, but was in fact a software packager, a creator of interactive software designed specifically for use on the iPad.

So I downloaded the software.

And the folks who said, “It’s not a word processor” were right. It’s not software for novelists. It’s pretty nice software for taking courses you’ve created and adding interactive media to them. It creates software, and that software is only usable on the iPad.

I would not present a novel in this software, or software like this for other platforms. But iBook Author would be one way to create a version of my How To Write A Series course, for example, which depends heavily on video, with transcripts and worksheets. And paying Apple to sell the course on its site truly would be no different than paying Apple its commission for selling my books through its bookstore.

Apple has done nothing wrong with either the software or its EULA. Folks who misunderstood the nature of the software, including me, got it wrong.

My  actions and final recommendation, then?

ACTIONS

• I’ve put my books for sale on iBookstore again.
• I have sent an email to my students and readers explaining the error I made, and where my error lay.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• If you use iBook Author, make sure that you have created your work in a word processor that will allow you to preserve formatting, pagination, headers and footers, footnotes, bibliographies, etc. in a form you can easily copy and paste INTO iBook Author and other
• I recommend iBookstore as an acceptable market for writers, along with Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, and CreateSpace, all of which follow open accounting practices with your work, pay regularly, and currently offer favorable terms to self-publishers.
• I strongly support presenting your work equally and simultaneously in multiple markets and formats, in order to keep competition strong among bookstores, and in order to keep the terms of each bookstore most favorable to the individual independent writer. Don’t give any market special treatment or exclusivity: Doing so will permit that market to kill competition, and eliminate your ability to work for favorable terms.

Thanks to those of you who took the time to point out what the software actually is, and to show me by example where I made my mistake. I am pleased to be able to correct my error.

1-25-2012
ADDED LATER:

I added the following in reply to a post by Scrivener, and have added it here in case later replies move that post off the page:

Okay, let me run through this for you in specific detail, so you understand why I reversed my previous position.

From Apple’s EULA including a definition of “THE WORK”

IMPORTANT NOTE:
If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.

Understand—I’m not a lawyer. I am a writer who has pored word by word over every contract I’ve signed with every publisher I’ve ever had, and over the changes my agent made before that contract hit my hot little hands. So I have experience reading contracts that apply to me. A lawyer might take my interpretation here and tell me I’m full of shit. But I’ll take that chance.

THEM: If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”),

ME: If you are charging people for the product you create with our product

THEM: you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore)

ME: you may only sell or distribute THE WORK YOU CREATED ON THIS SOFTWARE through Apple.

This is where understanding definitions comes in handy, and why I require people writing on this weblog to post their definitions when using words in ways that don’t fit the real definition of the word.

It’s also why it matters that this is a single-platform, limited-use ebook formatter, and NOT A WORD PROCESSOR. A word processor creates something that is intended to be used for original creation of original content. Such a clause on a word processor would be a rights grab.

In the first part of the sentence, “THE WORK” is defined as “that which has been created on this software.” That is its sole and limiting definition. It does not apply to any version of the work created on other software. You have to hold both parts of that clause together. You cannot separate them. If you separate them, you misunderstand the clause. As written, it is a single, self-limiting clause that makes clear the version to which Apple claims an interest in is the version created on their software—and their software creates a version that can only be used on one specific platform (the iPad) which they have created and own.

THEM: and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.

ME: If they’re going to pay you, you have to sign their contract. Which you have to do to sell ANYTHING on ANYONE’s platform.

THE LONG VERSION:

Here’s the clause:

B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:

(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.

And then the next paragraph is bold-faced, just so you don’t miss it:

Apple will not be responsible for any costs, expenses, damages, losses (including
without limitation lost business opportunities or lost profits) or other liabilities you may incur as a result of your use of this Apple Software, including without limitation the fact that your Work may not be selected for distribution by Apple.

Here’s the guy who found, dissected, and posted about it, along with his dissection, and it will save us a BUNCH of time if you read his article.

So what’s the problem? You’re not going to use the damn software anyway!

Nope. I’m not. But I had ten books up on the iBookstore, which I put there using iTunes Producer, which is software. I do my epub versions of most of my books in iWorks Pages, which is software. And I work on Apple computers, an iPad, and an iPhone, all of which use Apple software. OS X and iOS 5 at the moment.

And the rule of software is this: Software does not get to dictate the use of output. Period. Software does not get to tell you WHERE you can sell what you’ve created, only that you have the right to sell it (in the cases where software requires a commercial license if you are producing for profit).

Software does not get to tell you, “If you create this work on our software and we don’t want to distribute it, we own the rights to the version our software created, and if you want another version, you will have to disassemble this one, and rebuild it from scratch on other software.”

The purpose of purchasing and/or using software is to make your work easier.

It is not to have the software claim ownership of any part of what you have created with it.

There is no difference—except in number of people affected—between a company claiming ownership of the rights to something you created with its ebook publisher, and something you created with its OS.

The principle is identical.

(Apple is not claiming to own rights to your work if you work on OS X. My removal of my own work from their site is on principle, not because my own work is affected.)

And there is no number of people affected that is insignificant. The smallest minority is the individual, and minority rights protect the rights of the individual because those are the only rights there are.

So THAT is why I pulled all my books from distribution on the iBookstore, why none of my further books or any of my writing courses will be going to the iBookstore, and why I can no longer recommend the iBookstore to my students.

And this in spite of the fact that Apple makes my favorite products in the world, and I hate like hell having to do this.

And if they remove their damn clause and respect the purpose of creative software and the rights of the individual, I’ll go back.

COMMENTS have now been closed on this post.  Please read the follow-up post, and if you choose, comment there.

Join the PIPA/SOPA Strike Tomorrow

All three of my sites: http://hollylisle.com, http://howtothinksideways.com, and http://writingcoursesnow.com will be blacked out tomorrow during the strike.

I am a writer, and my work is currently being pirated on a number of sites. I have done everything I can to have the pirated works taken down, so please understand that I am NOT a fan of piracy, and furthermore, I am one of the people these laws are ostensibly supposed to help.

PIPA and SOPA are bad laws.

They will NOT help me. They will not help anyone. They will simply give the US government and other governments that follow suit a way to break the Internet.

Please join me in protesting these laws, and use the links provided from any of my sites during the blackout to contact your representatives and tell them that you do not support these laws, and consider support of them an infringement of individual rights.

Grant Money

When I closed down comments on the slavery post, I got a lot of irate emails from folks who did not read closely, and who were under the impressions that I thought ALL taxes were slavery, that ALL grants were evil, and that anyone who accepted any sort of grant was a slaveholder by degree.  I’ll get back to taxes at a later date, but for now I want to talk about Grants.

What I always hope is that people will read what I wrote, but most people don’t. And they reply to what they think I said, rather than to what I said.  What I said was that government-funded grants were funded by slave labor. I was very specific about that.

I think grants funded wholly by individuals or their businesses who want to help writers and artists are a fine and lovely thing. I even think those folks who fund grants should get a legitimate tax write-off for their grant-funding, since they are in effect paying someone else to work—creating some part of a job—and that ought to count for something. I don’t care what sort of works these folks want to support: If you love something (that isn’t criminal), you have every right to spend your money to make more of what you love available.

At one point I considered—to the point of figuring out which works of mine I would funnel profits from in order to fund it—creating a Romanticist grant, a fund to be given annually to one writer of my choice who was working on a piece of Romantic fiction (Romantic fiction being that which presents the world as it could be and should be, and that stresses individual achievement, heroism, and villainy: in other words, the sort of fiction that does not EVER receive grants from anyone else).

I value Romanticist fiction.  It’s what I write, it meets my strict criteria for fiction that is worth my time, and the good stuff is damn hard to find. It would be worth funding.

Then I realized that in order to create this grant, I would have to read a whole lot of applications, and that I did not have the time to do so. And I further realized there was no one else to whom I would be willing to hand over responsibility for choosing grant recipients. I knew what I wanted to reward, and knew at some point I would be unhappy with a work chosen by anyone else.  So the grant idea died.

But my point here is that grants given voluntarily by people who value what they are funding are a wonderful and magnificent thing. They are Good, big G, on the scale of Good and Evil.

Grants funded by me (or you) with money taken at gunpoint by the government are Evil, big E. The government gives my money to agencies run by individuals who fund works I do not value (fiction from the school of Realism, deconstructionist crap, and other work I consider an utter waste of my time and money), which I would not voluntarily pay for. I don’t object to those works being created. I object to them being created out of MY effort, which has all been funded by ME.

And speaking now specifically to the folks who so kindly told me if I objected to having my rights voted out from under me and I didn’t like having my money forcibly extracted from me for uses I do not approve of, I could always leave…

Yes. I can. Taking a couple of jobs other than my own with me—jobs I have created and that I pay out of my own pocket because I am someone who knows how to create jobs. I’m sure the folks I pay will thank you for telling me to go away.  If I do, you need to realize that I’ll be late to the party.

You folks have been inviting folks like me to leave—folks who do not wish to have our rights voted out from under us—for about half a century now. Amazingly, you do not realize how many have already done so, taking with them the jobs you bitch about not having, and putting those jobs in India, China, the Philippines, Mexico, Pakistan, and anywhere else in the world where folks who create jobs are appreciated rather than punished. (For now, anyway.)

If you insist on punishing the people who make your lives and your work possible, and if you do not actually know how to create jobs yourself, or are not willing to expend the effort, risk, money, and frequent failure that someone who creates jobs incurs, you might want to rethink this strategy of yours. Voting away the rights of the people who create jobs doesn’t seem to be working out too well for you.

I will support my position, and if you disagree with me you are invited to debate, but to debate, you MUST follow the blog rules.

First, let me define terms.

individual: A human being. All human beings are individuals.

individual rights: Every individual on this planet is born with the following inherent rights (and only these rights), which exist independent of any grant or external source, by virtue of the fact that the individual is alive:

• The right to life—that is, the right to sustain his or her own existence.
• The right to liberty—that is, the right to choose to take such actions as permit the individual to sustain his or her own existence, so long as these actions do not infringe on the rights of other individuals.
• The right to the pursuit of happiness—that is, the right to pursue any work or activity that the individual finds rewarding or pleasurable, so long as his rights do not infringe on the rights of other individuals.
• The right to self-defense—that is, the right of the individual to respond with force to preserve his own existence when faced with the threat of force used against him or her. No individual has the right to initiate force against another.

No matter where you live, no matter what sort of government you live under, these are your rights as a human being, by virtue of your existence as a human being, and these rights may not be taken away from you ethically or legitimately for any other cause than that you have initiated force against another human being (Example: You attack someone to steal his money.), or have caused such force to be initiated. (Example: You hire a hit man to kill someone, so you bear equal guilt for murder with the person who physically killed him.)

ethical human being: An ethical human being acknowledges individual human rights as the origin and underpinning of all rights, deals only voluntarily and consensually with all other human beings, and uses force against another individual only in self defense. No human being who deals with individuals in any other way is an ethical human being. Ethical human beings are rare, and have to work hard to remain ethical, but do exist.

ethical government: Any government that exists under constitution as the servant of the individual, with its laws created to protect individual rights and with individual rights reserved equally for all individuals, and that exists only to protect the individual from the use of force against him, either within or without, and which is paid voluntarily by the individual to provide the services free human beings require:

• A military force to protect individuals and their rights from force originating outside the nation’s borders,
• A police force to protect the individual and his rights from force originating within the nation’s borders.
• An impartial judicial system held to the same standard of law it enforces, charged with ensuring that laws protect the rights of the individual, which will enforce contracts and decide objectively and without bias in support of individual rights when disputes exist, and which is held accountable for every decision made by the individuals who serve within it.
• A representative executive system made up of individuals chosen by the vote of all those individuals represented, where the representatives must live under the laws they create, and who are charged with and entrusted with the making of laws to preserve the rights of the individual—and NO other sort—and who are held accountable for and will be judged for the laws they create.

An ethical government is the only entity which has the right to initiate force, and may initiate force against individuals or nations who have used force against its citizens or who intend to. Because it is the only entity that may legitimately initiate the use of force, ethical government must be closely controlled by ethical human beings: those who hold the preservation and protection of individual rights as their sole standard, and who do not seek to turn human beings into slaves. At present, I am unaware of the existence of any ethical governments in the world.

slavery: 1) Outright ownership of one human being by another human being or by a government, OR 2) outright ownership of the products of the labor of one human being by another human being or by a government, OR 3) the involuntary removal of the products of labor of one human being by force for the enrichment of another human being or a government.

Involuntary and by force in the definition above are actually redundant because they mean exactly the same thing, but because most people accept one of the two above as acceptable, but not the other, I’ve included both.

There is no such thing as the right to enslave.

Now I’ll give examples, by sections of my definition of slavery.

Form 1—Outright ownership: If you walk down to the corner slave market and buy Bob so that you claim a right to force Bob do whatever you tell him to do, you are a slave owner and Bob is your slave. Same thing if you stick a gun to his head and take him into captivity so you can claim the right to force him to do what you tell him to do.  If you hire an agent of the government to capture Bob and give or sell him to you so that you may force him to work for you, you are a slaveholder, and Bob is your slave. If your local, state, or federal government sends an agent into Bob’s house to claim ownership of him so that it may force him to work, the government is a slave owner, and Bob is its slave—BUT if you are the beneficiary of the spoils of Bob’s forced labor, YOU are also a slaveholder, and Bob is YOUR slave as well as the government’s.

Form 2—Serfdom: If you don’t actually own Bob, but claim the right to force Bob to give you everything he makes (either in terms of money or physical goods), you are a slave-owner and Bob is your slave. If you hire an agent of the government to take everything Bob works for to give to you (either in terms of money or physical goods), you are a slave owner and Bob is your slave. Likewise, if your government lays claim to the products of Bob’s work, even if it does not claim to own him, the government is a slaveholder, and Bob is its slave. AGAIN, however, if you receive any of the spoils of Bob’s stolen labor, YOU are a slaveholder along with your government, and Bob is YOUR slave as well as the government’s.

The euphemistic term for a human being who is not owned by an individual or government, but who does not own what he produces, is serf, but in truth, serfs are slaves.

Form 3—Enslavement by degree: If you don’t own Bob, and don’t lay claim to 100% of his production, but do claim the right to stick a gun to Bob’s head to force Bob to give you some percentage of his production for as long as he produces, (whether in terms of money or physical goods), then you are a slave-owner and Bob is your slave to the degree of the percentage of his production that goes to you. If you hire an agent of the government to force Bob to give you a regular percentage of the results of his productive efforts for as long as he works, you are a slave owner, and Bob is your slave by degree.  If the government claims the right to force from Bob a percentage of his productive effort for as long as he produces, then Bob is a slave of the government to the degree that what he has created is taken from him—AND if you receive any portion of the products of his forced labor, you are a slave owner by degree, and Bob is your slave by that same degree.

You as an individual are free to the degree and percent that your individual rights are protected and observed by your government and other individuals, and that the products of your effort to sustain your own existence belong to you.

Some of you are looking at instance #3, and thinking, “Wait a minute, that’s, um… familiar. She doesn’t really mean that.“

Yes, it is familiar, and yes, I do mean that.

Enslavement by degree is the version of slavery most people actively and enthusiastically support for exactly as long as they can pretend that it’s not really slavery.

I had my one brush with attempting to be a slave-owner back in the early nineties, when I applied for a grant from a government-funded arts council. I was writing a book outside my normal genre, and doing it on spec, and I thought it would be nice to have a little extra money to live on while I took the chance on a book I couldn’t be sure would sell. I hoped it would sell, of course, but I couldn’t be sure, and we were hurting financially.  (I think the book I tried to get the grant for was a very early version of what became MIDNIGHT RAIN.)

I applied for the grant, waited a long time, and eventually heard back from the council. My grant application was turned down…but the reason it was turned down was both fascinating, and—when you take the time to actually think about it—horrifying.

My work did not receive a grant because it was deemed to be commercial fiction.

Okay.  What is commercial fiction?

Commercial fiction is any fiction that one human being voluntarily purchases from another human being.

The act of volition, of having one person say, “I think this is good enough that someone will be willing to pay me for it,” and of having another human being say “I like that enough that I’m willing to pay for it,” makes a work commercial.

If just one person is willing to pay you voluntarily for your work (not donate to you: pay you—in that you set the price, and your reader purchases the right to read your work), then you are a writer of commercial fiction. If you cannot make a living from one reader, you are STILL a commercial fiction writer. The right to the pursuit of happiness does not guarantee that you will be able to make a living wage from whatever you love and pursue. It simply grants you the right to pursue it, and if you don’t make a living wage at it and you wish to be an ethical human being, you’ll have to support yourself with a second job, the way all ethical writers start out, and the way many ethical writers continue for as long as they create.

HOWEVER, I was, back then, still screwed up enough that I was willing to look at money without questioning too hard where it came from. Before that rejection, I would have happily taken the grant, and I would not have looked at the price other people paid for it to exist.

That incident—and trying to figure out the standards by which the individual handing out the grants was using to select work—forced me to look at where the money DID come from, and by what standards it was being handed out. If commercial work—work people would happily pay for—was not considered appropriate for government-funded grants, then what work was considered appropriate?

And the answer was: Only work that the individual handing out the grants decided no one would pay for voluntarily, and that individuals should be forced to pay for, whether they liked the work or not.

Take a moment and think about that, and think about the horror that underlies it. Government money is being taken at the point of a gun (and if you would debate this point, first try not paying your income taxes, then call me from prison to let me know how that’s working out for you), and it is being taken to give to people who have not earned it.

In the case of government-funded writing grants, the money taken at the point of a gun from individuals who work to support their own existences is being given to those who are creating works some individual has decided no one would pay for voluntarily. Because that’s what non-commercial work is.

Non-commercial work is work people are not willing to pay for voluntarily, and government grants are the means by which governments force people who would not willingly buy a work to pay for it anyway.

I’ve rephrased that same statement three times, and I apologize for the repetition, but this matters.

So what sort of ethical government grants exist?  None.

If you are a writer and you accept a grant funded by government taxation, you become a slave owner. You are a person who has willingly participated in the forcible removal of the products of another individual’s production, which should by right belong solely to him to support his own existence. And, because you used an agent of the government to apply force against another human being for your benefit, you have walked away from being an ethical human being.

Any human being can regain his ethics. To do so, you agree that never again will you be party to the use of force against any other human for your benefit, that you will only deal with other human beings voluntarily and by mutual consent, theirs and yours. And that you will resist in any legal manner you have available to you the use of such force against yourself.

Remember, the right to enslave does not exist.  Not for anyone, not for any reason.

I apologize for the lack of navigation within the weblog, and I have a call out for help to get me back up and running again.

As for the blogroll, it’s well and truly gone, so I’m debating the best way to link out to other sites I find helpful. At least I finally realized it went missing. If you have some websites you’d like to suggest that offer great reader or writing content, recommend them below.

But in a ruling that defies belief, the EU just ruled that drinking water cannot be advertised as the best way to prevent dehydration.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/284426/EU-says-water-is-not-healthy

So.

There’s stupid.

And then, there’s “Holy shit, what drugs have you guys been DOING?”

And a tip of the hat to Jim Woosley, who sent me this remarkable link.