episode ten

episode ten



by v.j. chambers

Chapter Ten

I don't usually share my visions in this forum, considering I feel that visions are a personal experience, generated mostly for my own spiritual growth and edification. However, since there has been so much talk about the vision I received years ago, especially recently, I want to detail it here.


In my vision, I saw a teenage boy who had been raised by the agents of Order to take over the world. I saw this boy rise to power. I saw him take away the rights of choice and decision from countless numbers of people. Then I saw a girl, filled with the spirit of Azazel, come from the depths of the woods. She carried with her a spear of fire. And she smote the agent of order, and Chaos reigned again in the world.


(c) Michaela Weem, www.thegreatgodazazel.com




Trees streamed by outside the window of Toby's truck as I struggled against the rope he'd tied my hands with. Toby drove recklessly fast, his mask still on. I didn't think he could see with it over his eyes. I strained, yanking my wrists away from each other as hard as I could. But the rope held. I wasn't doing anything except giving myself rug burn.


I glared at Toby. "Where are we going?" I asked. Was this some kind of practical joke? If it was, it wasn't funny. I really wasn't enjoying it.


Toby just laughed from behind his mask. He didn't answer.


"What are you doing with Jason?" I asked.


Nothing from Toby.


I was flabbergasted when Toby pulled his truck into my driveway. He was taking me to my house? Why were we here? Toby got out of the truck and came around to my side. Roughly, he pulled me out. I stumbled as I tried to keep my balance while he yanked me forward. Behind us, I could see the car that Jason was in. He was getting similar treatment. The football players, still wearing their masks, were dragging Jason along with them.


"Toby, what is going on?" I demanded.


Toby cocked his head at me. From behind the mask, he looked so blank. "Oh, come on, Zaza," he said. "We're going to consummate our relationship. Isn't that what you've wanted all this time?"


I winced at the ugliness of his voice. And what the hell was he talking about? If Toby thought I still wanted to have sex with him after what had happened, he was a mental patient. I didn't want to look at Toby ever again, let alone touch him.


He dug his fingers into my arm and tugged me forward. I had to go with him. If I resisted, I'd just fall down.


The lights in my house were all off, but the kitchen door was open. We all went inside. Toby led the group of masked madmen through my dining room and living room, to the door to the basement. He opened it.


The soft light of candles greeted us. Our basement wasn't much. It wasn't finished. It was just a concrete hole in the ground. It always smelled musty down there, and no one went into it except to get our washer and dryer.


But someone had been in the basement recently. A tea light candle blazed on each step of the stairs leading down into its depths. Toby forced me onto the first step. I tried to resist, but he was strong. Carefully, we descended into the gaping mouth of the basement, one step at a time. As I got lower and lower, I could see that the entire basement was covered in candles. They were clustered in every corner. They sat on tables, which surrounded the room. Each table was covered in a black velvet tablecloth. The washer and dryer had been similarly covered in black velvet, and candles of various heights and widths placed on them.


All of the candles were black.


On one of the tables, many silver chalices sat next to a decanter of wine. There was also a loaf of bread next to them. It sat on a silver platter. In the center of the basement, there was a bed. It was covered in black silk sheets. From the steps to the bed was a trail of black rose petals.


I nearly gagged. What was this? What had Toby planned? It was like an inversion of everything he'd ever said to me. Black rose petals? A bed with silk sheets? Me tied up? Half of the football team?


I was started to feel very, very frightened.


"We're a little early," said Toby to the rest of them. He pulled some rope from his pocket and tossed it to his friends. "Tie Jason to that pole," he ordered, gesturing with his head.


The football players dragged Jason to the pole and began lashing him to it. His arms. His feet. His neck. Jason caught my eyes. I looked back at him. I could tell he was trying to figure out a way out of this.


"I'll get Azazel ready," said Toby, his voice cruel and determined.


Toby took me to the bed. He made me sit down. I realized that not everything silk on the bed was a sheet. There were also two black silk hooded robes sitting next to us. They looked like something off the cover of a death metal album. What was this? What was going on? My heart beat in my chest loudly. It pumped blood against my temple. I was freaking out.


I tried to smile at Toby. "Okay," I said. "This was funny. I'm laughing. You can stop now, though. Really."


Toby sighed. "It wasn't supposed to be like this Azazel. I didn't want to have to tie you up. But after you heard Lilith and me, I didn't know what else to do. The ritual has to go on as scheduled, whether you're willing or not."


Ritual? What ritual? I was terrified.


"I'm going to have to untie you for a minute," said Toby. "But you can't try to run away or anything, or else I'm going to have to get some of the guys over here to hold you down. And I really don't want to do that."


Okay. Maybe I wouldn't run.


Toby fumbled in his back pocket for a pocketknife. I shied away from it as he opened the blade. But he just cut the rope holding my wrists together.


Toby surveyed the marks on my wrists that I'd made trying to get free from the rope. He touched them almost tenderly. "You shouldn't have struggled," he said. "You're just hurting yourself." He looked into my eyes. "This is really an honor, you know. You're going to become so powerful."


Powerful? Honor? Hadn't Toby said something about an honor in the restroom earlier? Oh God. There was more to everything than just Toby and Lilith having sex. They'd said all kinds of weird things. And they both had said things about not being allowed. This was connected to that, somehow. Somehow.


But how?


Toby reached around me and put his hands on the zipper of my dress. He started to unzip it. He was going to take my dress off?! In front of everyone?!


"No!" I said. I put both of my hands on his chest and pushed him as hard as I could. He grabbed my wrists, irritated.


"Don't struggle," he said. "I'm just trying to put the robe on you."


"Toby, don't," I begged suddenly. "Don't." I looked deep into his eyes, and shook my head, trying to find some piece of the boy I thought I knew in there.


"Don't look at me like that," he yelled. He dropped my hands and took a step back, disgust all over his face.


I pressed my advantage. "Toby, you can let me go," I said. "You can just let me go. I won't tell anyone. I'll just walk away, and I'll—"


"It's not supposed to be like this," he said.


"Please Toby," I said.


He reached over and balled up one of the robes in his hands. He shoved it at me. "Put on the robe," he said, his voice shaking. "Just take everything off and put on the robe."


A little sound escaped my mouth. Take everything off? I didn't want to—I couldn't think about what was going to happen to me.


Jason looked at me from where he was tied to the pole. His face was unreadable.


"Do it!" Toby screamed.


I couldn't. I couldn't just take off my clothes.


Toby turned around. He glanced over his shoulder. "Don't try to run," he warned me.


The other guys on the football team were standing around Jason, watching Toby and I.


"Turn around," Toby ordered them.


Silently, they did.


"And Jason," said Toby. "Close your eyes."


Jason closed his eyes.


But I couldn't move. I looked at the crumpled robe in my lap, and I couldn't move.


"Hurry up," growled Toby.


And because I didn't know what else to do, I did it. I unzipped my dress. It fell off me, pooled around my feet. There I was in the lingerie I had put on for Toby to see. I nearly gagged in revulsion. But I took it off. And I put on the robe. It buttoned up, and I buttoned every button, but I still felt very, very exposed.


"I'm done," I whispered.


Toby turned around. He looked me up and down. "Good," he said. Then he tied my hands again. He walked me over to the football players, threw me into one of their arms. "Hold her," he said. "I'll be back with the rest of the coven to do the Invocation."


Toby swept up the stairs. One of the football players had me in a bear hug. There was nothing between my skin and his body except the stupid, flimsy robe. I started to think about what was happening to me, to speculate about the near future. Then I decided it was a bad idea, and so I stopped. I just concentrated on breathing.


In a few minutes, the door at the top of the steps opened and a long line of people in black robes like mine came down the steps. Their hoods were over their heads and they stared at the floor. I couldn't see their faces in the scant candlelight.


They formed a circle. One of them came for me, pulled me into the center of the circle.


Now that he was close, I could see it was Toby.


"Why are her hands tied?" asked one of the hooded people. The voice sounded familiar, but I was sick of identifying voices tonight. I knew who it was, but I didn't want to know, so I just tried not to.


"Complication," said Toby. "Let's just get on with it."


"Untie her," ordered another hooded person. I knew that voice too.


No. No. No.


No.


I struggled for other thoughts, and there was only one. No.


Toby fumbled with the knot at my wrist. I had started to shake. My teeth were chattering. I couldn't believe this was happening to me. I couldn't believe it. Maybe, if I tried hard enough, I'd just faint. Couldn't I just faint? Couldn't I just make this not real, somehow?


One of the hooded people advanced to help Toby. I could tell from her hands that she was a woman as she deftly untied the knot at my wrist. I purposefully didn't look at her face. I tried so hard not to, but...


She cupped my chin in her hands. "Zaza, it's okay," she said.


And then I lost it. I started sobbing. And I said the only word I knew to identify the woman with. The only thing that sprang to mind. My voice broke with the betrayal of it. "Mommy," I sobbed.


My mother gathered me into her arms. "Why are you crying, sweetie?" she asked me.


Why was I crying? Was she insane? My own parents had set me up to be in some sort of cult ritual where my boyfriend...raped me, and she wanted to know why I was crying?


Still, I clung to her as my body was wracked with sobs that I thought would tear me apart. She was the only ghost of comfort left in a world that had been completely and utterly turned upside down, ripped apart, ruined.


My mother clutched me, stroking my hair. She turned to another hooded person. "Daniel, I told you she wasn't ready," she said.


My father lowered his hood. He looked at us sympathetically. "It has to be tonight," he said helplessly. "The next night of power isn't until the solstice. We can't wait that long."


My mother nodded. She turned back to me, wiping at my tears, brushing my hair out of my face. "Okay, then, Zaza," she said. "You're just going to have to be strong, okay? Can you do that for me? Can you be my strong girl?"


No, I couldn't be strong! What did she want from me? I just shook my head violently, back and forth. I couldn't do this. I couldn't do this.


Around me, all of the hooded people were lowering their hoods. Lilith. Sheriff Damon. His wife. The principal of my high school. Mrs. Clem, the dean of students. Mrs. Zimmerman, my French teacher. Sherry Astor. My older brothers, Noah and Gordon. I knew them all. I gazed around the circle, and I saw the pillars of society in our town. I saw people from my high school. They were all part of this. Whatever this was. I didn't know. And I didn't think I wanted to know.


"This is all going wrong," said Sheriff Damon. "What did you do, Toby?"


Lilith stepped forward. "It’s not Toby's fault, it's mine," she said. "Let me talk to her." She walked up to me and took my hand. "Upstairs, Zaza," she said.


Confused, I let Lilith drag me upstairs.


Once through the basement door, she shut it after us. She looked down at herself. "God, these robes are so unflattering," she said. "You'd think they'd at least let you wear a bra under them, you know? But it's all, 'The host has be defiled through sexuality, blah, blah, blah.'"


What was she talking about?


"You're probably wondering what's going on," she said.


That was an understatement.


"It's weird, I know," she said. "When it happened to me, I was totally freaked out, too."


"This happened to you?" I asked in a small voice.


"Well, sort of," she said. "It's supposed to happen on your eighteenth birthday, and there's supposed to be a little more lead up to the whole thing, like a couple hints and a test."


"A test?"


"Not like on paper, but someone from the coven like grills you on choice and chaos and junk. You didn't get that because you've been chosen from birth to be the vessel or whatever, and they had to rush the whole thing, because Jason showed up, so they have to do the Invocation and the Entering of the Circle all on one night. Which incidentally is almost over. We've got like fifteen minutes until midnight, so I've got to talk fast."


"What?" I said. But I was starting to calm down. Sort of. At least Lilith seemed like herself still.


"We're Satanists, Azazel," said Lilith.


Satanists?! I considered bolting for the door right then. But I was only wearing a flimsy black robe, and practically everyone I knew and would ask for help was already in my basement. Besides I couldn't leave Jason down there with them.


"I mean, kind of," said Lilith. "We worship Azazel. The demon you're named after."


"Oh God," I moaned.


"Yeah, don't say that. That's like blasphemy," she said. "Okay, so, see Azazel is an incarnation of what most people would identify with Satan. But we worship Satan, or Azazel, because he symbolizes the ability of people to have free will and to be individuals. We worship Chaos because it isn't stifling, and it doesn't assume that people need order enforced upon them to function properly in society."


She sounded like she was reciting something.


"So we reject the incarnations of order, including Christianity and other organized religions, because they impose a set of rules and values onto people which is...stifling. You following me?"


"Kind of," I said.


"Okay, so, when you're eighteen, you Enter the Circle by participating in a Black Mass. Which is like a perversion of a traditional Mass. So we take the host—or communion or whatever—and then everybody has sex."


"Eew," I said.


"Not in front of each other. And usually with their husbands or wives or boyfriends. Usually. And the initiate—in this case you—has sex with someone in the room with it all set up like it is."


"Why?" I said.


"It's just a ritual. I don't know. I think because everyone in town is horny," she said.


"And the initiate is a virgin?" I asked.


"Not usually. I mean, I wasn't. Most eighteen-year-olds have gotten it on, you know what I mean. But you like had to be, because you're the vessel. And so, they made Toby date you and not have sex with you, so that you'd be pure."


"But you said that you and Toby started dating after eighth grade," I said. "I thought you didn't find out about this stuff until you were eighteen."


"Our parents bribed us," said Lilith. "They gave Toby that truck so he'd date you. And my parents gave me my computer. It was important that you didn't have sex."


"This is gross," I said.


"When you think about it, it's not really that much grosser than thinking communion wafers turn into someone's body in your mouth," she said.


That was gross. "But what do mean, I'm the vessel?" I asked.


"Oh," she said. "That. Well, see this other Satanist chick who runs this online forum or something had a vision of Jason, like seventeen years ago, before he was born. And in her vision, a girl filled with the power of Azazel vanquished him. I'm not sure how they know this, but she confirmed that was you, after you were conceived. So, they're gonna do an invocation to Azazel, and the spirit of Azazel will fill your body, and then...you'll kill Jason."


"What?!" the words exploded out of me.


"I know," said Lilith. "I mean, I'm kind of on board with the whole let's-be-free-and-have-lots-of-sex thing. And the black robes aren't even all that bad. But this is kind of...I don't know. I mean, they say that Jason really isn't a person, because he's an agent of Order or whatever, and he's destined to like enslave the entire human race, but...I mean, didn't they say that about Jews during the Holocaust or black people when they were lynching them?" She looked very thoughtful. "I don't want to go against the coven, but I just kind of feel like it would be...wrong to kill someone."


I covered my face with my hands. Lilith was stupid, I realized. I had no idea how we'd been friends for as long as we had. Had I never noticed what an idiot she was? But I had to get Jason and me out of here. Somehow. Because there was no way I was killing him. "So," I said, "what order is this going to happen in? I mean, Invocation first or Entering the Circle first?"


"Invocation," she said. "We have to. It's practically midnight. So, I figure, they'll invoke Azazel, then everybody will get it on, and then we'll all get back together so that you can kill Jason."


"Okay," I said. I could work with that. So they were going to invoke the spirit of Azazel into my body, huh? I could handle that. Especially since I didn't believe Azazel existed. While they were doing that, I was going to have to come up with a plan that didn't involve my getting it on with anyone and also involved my getting both Jason and I out of here alive. "Let's get this over with."


"Really?" said Lilith. "I didn't think you'd want to kill Jason."


I shrugged. "I'm the vessel," I said. "I guess some part of me's always known this is what I was born to do."


Lilith shrugged back. "Cool." She smiled. "That didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would." She paused. "Oh, and Zaza, I'm really sorry about sleeping with Toby. I really am."


"Save it," I snapped. "We'll talk about that later." If I'd actually been planning to stick around, I would never have forgiven her for that.


Lilith led me back down the steps triumphantly.


"I'm ready," I said.


My mother put her hand to her chest and breathed a sigh of relief. "Oh thank Chaos," she said. "I was so guilty, Zaza. I really didn't want to push this on you."


"It's fine, Mom," I said. I'd think about the fact that my mom was a demon worshipper later. Right now, I had to save Jason.


He was still tied to the pole. Hoping no one would notice, I winked at him. If Jason saw, he didn't acknowledge it with his face.


I rejoined Toby in the center of the circle. They all raised their hoods again, so I did too. Toby took my hand. Oh yuck. I did not want to hold Toby's hand. But I had to play along, at least for a little while.


Suddenly, everyone in the circle began intoning some kind of chant in a language I didn't understand. I peered out from under the edge of my hood. Weird. Creepy.


My father stepped forward. He approached me and lifted his hands up to the ceiling. "Great God of Chaos, Azazel, I invoke thee," his voice rang out, echoing off the walls.


He nodded at me. "Repeat that," he said.


Sure, whatever. I raised my hands questioningly. My dad nodded. "Great God of Chaos, Azazel, I invoke thee," I said and really hoped my voice didn't sound sarcastic.


My mother approached, holding an ornate silver chalice. She handed it to my father. He held it in front of me. "Fill your vessel as this liquid fills her body." His voice still had that ringing quality. It was kind of scary.


My father handed me the chalice. I took it. "Repeat," he said.


I hesitated for a second. What if I was wrong, and Azazel really was real? What if I really did get filled with the spirit of a demon?


I chewed on my lip, undecided.


No. There was no way that demons were real.


"Fill this vessel, as this liquid fills my body," I said. This time, there was definitely a cocky edge to my voice.


"Drink," said my father.


I put the chalice to my lips. I drank.


"Finish it," said my dad.


I didn't really know what I was drinking. It tasted alcoholic, but it wasn't beer. Was it wine? I chugged it, grimacing from the taste.


Silence.


Well. Nothing was happening. Maybe they'd done it wrong.


But everyone seemed satisfied. A hooded person, I couldn't tell whom, was gathering the less ornate silver chalices I'd seen on the way in and handing them to each person. Behind them, another robed person offered them the loaf of bread. Each person silently ripped off a hunk of bread. Once they had bread and wine, they started up the steps in pairs. I guess this was the defiling of the host part of the Black Mass. All in all, I was finding it pretty anti-climactic.


Finally, there was no one left but Toby and me. We were each handed a wine glass, and we each took our bread. Then the people who'd given it to us also went up the steps. Toby and I were alone, except for Jason, who was still tied to the pole.


Toby stuffed the bread into his mouth and chewed. I did the same thing. Then he drank his wine in one gulp. I drank mine too. That was definitely not the same stuff that had been in the chalice. What had I drunk? I desperately hoped it wasn't something disgusting like animal blood.


Now, here was the problem. We'd done the Invocation, and were somewhere in the middle of the Entering the Circle, and I still hadn't come up with a plan to save Jason.


Toby advanced on me.


Great. What was I going to do? What was I going to do? I glanced around the basement, hoping for inspiration. All I saw were candles and Jason.


I made a face at Toby. "Do we have to do this with him watching?" I asked.


Toby looked over at Jason.


I didn't think. I just acted. I grabbed onto Toby's shoulders and kneed him as hard as I could in the crotch.


Toby howled, doubling over in pain.


I ran to Jason, fumbling with the knots behind his hands. I couldn't get them undone! What was I going to do?


Toby was still bent over, moaning.


I dashed over to the washer and dryer and grabbed a candle. Back behind Jason, I used the flame to burn the rope.


Jason made a noise when I burned him.


"Sorry," I said.


But he snapped the rope that held his hands.


Toby was gagging on the other side of the basement.


"My neck," said Jason. "Get the one at my neck!"


I held the candle higher. Jason held the rope away from his skin so that it was easier for me to burn it. The smell of burning rope filled the room. Jason pulled at the rope. It snapped too.


Toby was getting up and lumbering towards us. Apparently, he'd recovered from the kick I'd given his balls.


Panicking, I knelt down to get the rope at Jason's feet.


Toby advanced.


Jason knelt down too, holding the rope in the same manner as he had before.


Toby came closer. He reached for Jason.


Jason balled up a fist and punched up into Toby, catching him in the stomach.


Toby stumbled backwards.


Jason yanked hard on the rope at his feet, and it broke as well. He was free.


But Toby was on his feet again and coming for Jason.


Like the time in the alcove, Jason moved fast. He punched Toby's face twice, hard—one-two. Toby's nose started to bleed, but he kept coming. He threw a punch at Jason, which Jason easily sidestepped.


Toby's punch left his midsection open. Jason's fists collided with Toby's stomach again. Toby fell back again, and tried to grab at Jason, use his momentum to topple both of them.


Instead, Jason kicked Toby's feet out from under him. Toby hit the floor hard. Jason didn't stop, even though Toby was down. He kicked him in the face. Once. Twice. Three times. He kicked until Toby stopped moving.


Then he looked at me. "You're okay?" he asked.


I nodded. "Mostly," I said. "You?"


"Never better," he said tightly. He looked around the basement. "Where'd the others go?"


"They're busy," I said. I didn't even want to think about it. Yuck. "Come on," I said, reaching for his hand.


I pulled us up the steps and out into the living room. There were robed people lying horizontal on the couch. I didn't look. I didn't want to know who it was.


We raced through the dining room. There were robed people on the dining room table. Oh, gross, gross, gross!


They noticed us flying past. "Hey," said a male voice.


We darted through the kitchen and outside. We ran up the driveway. Then I realized the hole in my plan. How were we going to get away? And where were we going to go?


I stopped, but Jason dragged me forward. There were tons of cars in the driveway, all belonging to people who were inside, I guessed. Jason started trying door handles. They were locked.


"Help me," he said.


I went to the first car I saw and yanked on the door handle. Locked. Second car next to it. Locked.


"Got one!" Jason called. I looked up. He was several cars down from me, standing next to the open door of a glossy black Nissan. I ran to him, opening the passenger's side door.


"You know how hotwire a car?" I asked.


"I do," he said, "but lucky us, the keys are in the ignition." And he started the car.


As Jason backed the car out of the driveway, robed people began filtering out of the house, running towards their cars.


We pulled onto the road, and Jason sped away from my house, going as fast as he could around the curves. I reached for my seatbelt. I hoped we weren't going to die in a car wreck. "They're going to follow us," I said to him.


"Yep," he said. "And that's not our only problem."


"What?" I said.


"I'm still wearing the goddamned ankle monitor," he said.


"Fuck!" I exclaimed.

Carpe Corpus

I just finished Carpe Corpus, the 6th book in the Morganville Vampire Series, and I've got to say, I really enjoyed the series. And I'm done. I know that there's another book in the works, but I also know that the series was originally intended only to be six books long. And that felt like the end to me.

This is one of the things that I hate the most about the publishing industry. They're only concerned with money. A series is making money? Great. Keep churning it out. After all, we know people will buy more and more of these books. And...why? What would be the point of stirring up Morganville again. The themes are explored. The characters have made their arcs. It's like when they renewed The X-Files for more seasons than it needed. Let good things die. Let good things go out when they're good. There's no reason to repeat them ad nauseum.

My favorite thing about the Morganville books was the way Rachel Caine handled the vampires. There was lots of moral ambiguity. They weren't necessarily just blood-sucking monsters. They had depth and compassion on occasion. But overall, they were simply cold. I think that, truthfully, that is what living forever would do to a person. It would eventually make you jaded and unfeeling. And I particularly enjoyed her insight into vampires, especially at a period of time when vampires are really done to death.

I'm not sure what to read next. I've really been enjoying my foray into YA fiction. It's really been like discovering that there were all these authors that I didn't know existed, like a hidden treasure trove of delights. And YA fiction is good stuff. It gets to the point, pumps up the drama, pumps up the action, and is always just, well, fun. Send any recommendations you might have my way.

I'm really not sure how to end my own YA trilogy. I've been agonizing over it for weeks. I think there's a lot more pressure these days. Before, it was just me and my keyboard. And I could hardly force my friends to take the time to read a whole novel on their screens. Now Jason and Azazel have a bit of an audience. A few hundred people who are reading their current exploits, believe it or not, on computer screens, without compulsion. And I really don't want to let those people down, because I know that I form strong emotional attachments to characters I read about in books. But whatever is going on in my head, my muse seems to have left the building, at least for now.

Sigh.

Lord of Misrule (Morganville Vampires 5) and Female Teenage Sexuality

So, I'm about 3/4 of the way through Lord of Misrule, the fifth of the Morganville Vampire series, which I've been obsessively reading since I got out of school two weeks ago. (That's four books in two weeks. I'm slipping! I so used to read faster than this!!)

I suppose we can excuse my lack of speed reading because I've been slogging away at getting two novel manuscripts ready for publication. I had a flash of burning insight sometime Saturday night, in which I realized: IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE TO HOLD OFF PUBLISHING BREATHLESS UNTIL AFTER THE SERIALIZATION ONLINE IS OVER.

I mean, seriously. I think I have maybe 200 readers of Breathless. Maybe. It's really hard to get accurate numbers, because I have to go from page hits, and since some people are obviously reading the pdf version, they show up as being on the site for less than a second in the reports. So I figure that if I publish the book version halfway through the serialization, at least 50 of those people will be willing to fork over $12.99 to find out what the heck happens to Jason and Azazel. Maybe. We'll see. So I fast tracked the book to createspace, getting the interior and exterior files ready in one day. (exhausting, let me tell you.) I'm in the agonies of waiting for proof copies currently, and I'm not a very patient person.

So, again, Lord of Misrule. I had a hard time with the beginning of this book because it was very different from the others. At this point in the series, Morganville has been attacked by some weird old vampire dude and so everything turns chaotic fast. There are riots and buildings being burnt and all of the characters are separated for a long time. At first, it kind of threw me off, and I was jonesing for more Claire-Shane time.

Being as I am not patient, I stopped and read some reviews of the book at this time, which promised there would be some nice moments for the couples. So I kept reading. And I wasn't disapppointed. There were definitely some nice romantic moments in store. I haven't quite finished the book. That's probably what I'm going to do for the rest of the evening after I finish this.

Finally, I did get a nice Claire and Shane scene. Well. Sort of. See...I explained that at this point, Morganville is burning and everything's chaotic and people are dying. Plus, we as readers have no real idea where Amelie, the Founder and protector the town is. And, well, things look pretty bleak. So Shane and Claire take some time to themselves, where, freaked out as they are, they engage in pretty heavily making out in Claire's bed.

At which point, Shane then stops himself and leaves.

Now...here's the part where I start to get a bit confused. Okay, first of all Shane is 18 and Claire is 16. Now, at some point in the first few books, Shane promises not to "take advantage" of Claire, who really technically is jailbait or whatever. This is all fine and good. But the series portrays Shane and Claire (in an earlier book) as sharing a bed and not having sex.

Which, as you might remember, is a pretty heavy factor in another teenage vampire series, namely Twilight, where the guy is also a "little" older than the main character.

In both of these books, the girl is jonesing for sex, but the older, wiser guy holds back for both of them and says, "No, we have to wait."

Listen up, teenage girls: BOYS LIKE THAT DO NOT EXIST.

Furthermore, if you are in a relationship with a boy who you want to have sex with and he doesn't, for whatever reason, want to have sex with you, it's probably NOT going to be a healthy relationship.

Teenage boys think about sex all the time. (Most teenage girls probably do too. I did, anyway. I can't speak for my gender.) If for some reason, a guy DOESN'T want to have sex with you, there's probably something wrong with him, (emotionally or psychologically. Seriously. That is very abnormal) or he has beliefs about sex that aren't lining up with yours (that is, if you want to have sex and he doesn't). Either way, unless this guy is far and away your soul mate (which let's face it, rarely happens in high school), he's not worth it.

Next, I want to be very clear with you all about one thing: Several times in my youth, I have slept in a bed with a guy I was attracted to and who was attracted to me and who said he did not want to have sex with me. "We'll just sleep," we said. I have never once been able to achieve this just sleeping thing. If you get in bed with someone and the two of you are mutually attracted to each other--you're going to have sex. Do not believe these books that try to tell you that you can sleep in bed with a guy and just kiss. You can't.

Finally, I guess I'm just kind of confused about what sort of messages these books are sending about feminity and sexuality. The idea that a girl wants to have sex, but her boyfriend, the older and wiser male, holds back because he doesn't think she's ready (besides being unrealistic) is sexist. It assumes that boys know better than girls in relationships. They don't. Nobody really knows better. Healthy relationships should be partnerships. In healthy relationships, people should trust their partners to know what's best themselves, not decide for the other person and then withhold a certain activity. Withholding sex is actually a way that some abusive men control their partners. It's not cool. It's creepy.

On top of the sexism and unequality, I'm just not sure why everybody gets their panties in a twist about teenage girls and sex. You know, my grandmother got married and had her first kid when she was seventeen. And that was only about sixty years ago, and it wasn't atypical. It was normal. We have decided to push back the responsibility of adulthood into the midtwenties. That's fine. It's nice to have time to figure out what you want to do with your life and to explore your options and be young. But if you think that just because you're not ready for a career until you're twenty-two, you won't be ready for sex until then either, you're fooling yourself.

We can adjust as humans socially, but we can't adjust ourselves biologically. Girls enter puberty earlier than they used to (possibly due to nutrition, possibly due to hormones in meat--jury's still out : ) but are expected to wait years and years after puberty to be sexually active. Contrast this with the average woman getting her first period at sixteen and getting married at eighteen.

Why is our culture frightened of teenage female sexuality? Why? Is it because things have changed, and women are no longer financially dependent on men? Or is it simply that we can't let go of the idea that women and girls are not fragile beings who need to be coddled and protected, but equal beings who need to be educated and taught to take care of themselves?

I don't know. I didn't intend Breathless to be such a sexually charged book when I conceived it, but it's become that, especially in the third book where I've somehow got myself in the awkward position of exploring the ability of teenage girls to have orgasms. Why do I do this to myself? It's hard enough to sell books when you're spouting conservative values.

I guess it's just that I couldn't write a book about teenagers without portraying sex in the most realistic way I could. And I sometimes wonder if writers like Rachel Caine, who by my estimation graduated from high school in the late seventies, have any idea what sex is like for teenagers today.

Lest my post come off as all doom and gloom, I would like to say that (at least my upperclassmen--11th and 12th graders) do seem to be pretty mature about sex. They don't have problems talking about it candidly, and I don't get the impression that they're being stifled or taught that they're sexual feelings are wrong or innappropriate. This, in my opinion, is progress, and it's a far cry from what it was like just ten years ago when I graduated from high school. So...things are changing for the better, actually. Kudos to the new generation. You guys kick ass. (Just don't listen to people who write young adult fiction. Except me. Okay, no, wait. Listen to everyone. But use your brain and draw your own conclusions.)

True Blood, Se2 Ep1

It's been a while since I read the second Sookie Stackhouse book, so this morning I spent some time refamiliarizing myself with the plot. Once I started watching the season premiere this morning, I noticed some pretty big differences. First of all, I guess I never realized that the Tara on the series is waaay different from the Tara in the books, who apparently didn't appear until sometime in the second or third books and was never, like, Sookie's best friend. Which is fine, though, because I like the character of Tara in the series. She's spunky. And besides, for a show set in Louisiana, it would be absolutely weird if there were no African American main characters.

Oddly enough, they've decided that the body in the car that is discovered at the beginning of the book and the second season is not Lafayette in the series. I'm unsure as to why they did this. After all, part of the reason that Lafayette got killed at all was because he was going to these sex parties in the book. Having the voodoo lady from the woods killed is kind of weird, because I just can't picture her at sex parties...

Hmm. We'll see what they do with that. Overall, I guess I'm glad Lafayette isn't dead. He's a superfun character. I think it's weird that he's being held captive by Eric, though. WTF??

I'm guessing that the lady that Tara is staying with is the maenad from the book, but time will tell about that as well.

I'm also unsure as to why there's this new character of the new vampire that Bill has to take care of. I don't remember her from the book either.

I read an interview with the show's creator, where he said that the second season would probably be less faithful to the book than the first season was. In some ways, I'm a little disappointed by that. On the other hand, for the most part, the departures that the television series has made from the book so far have been pretty solid. I really enjoy the television series. It's smart and sexy.

(Although, I got to say, I was a little weirded out by Sookie kissing Bill after he bit her and getting her own blood in her mouth. I mean, I've got no problem with kissing after oral sex, but blood... Eew. And messy. Messy, messy, messy. Of course, while we're on this subject, I want to know why no one ever talks about menstruation in vampire stories. Maybe that's gross too, but I just brought up vampires and oral sex in one paragraph. I think it was a natural progression.)

Overall, I'm excited for this season. It's very cool to have an awesome show with new episodes in the summer. Hooray!

Morganville Vampires and True Blood

What could I possibly be doing that's more fun than blogging? Doing? Not so much. Obsessing? Maybe, just a teensy bit.

So...Breathless is going on its third week of serialization, and I've been on summer vacation from teaching for exactly five days. What have I accomplished in this time? Well, I've been working on getting the novel's episodes, or chapters, into pdf format. I'm up to chapter 11 at this point, so that's at least one tangible accomplishment. I created some t-shirts. I also made a linkable banner which I posted on the site and on myspace. So, those are also some tangible accomplishments.

Today, I started really looking into putting the darned thing into print. I'm using Createspace, which is Amazon's P.O.D. service. It looks like it's going to be pretty simple. I started formatting the book files in word (they'll have to be exported to pdf at some point), but then I realized that formatting should probably be the last step and that I should really make sure I had done a final edit of the book for sentence issues, spelling and the like. That sounds about as fun as root canal, so I abandoned the project for now.

Instead, I decided to focus on the cover, because designing a cover sounds like way, way more fun. I just spent about an hour collecting jpegs of covers of current YA books so that I could get a feel for what the designing trends are like these days. Sadly, books no longer feature covers with tons of images floating into each other like they did when I was a kid. It's too bad, because when I was a teenager, I spent hours creating covers for my stories, and they always looked like that.

Today, most covers feature a dominant image, and disturbingly enough, it's generally a female body part. I think this must have started with Twilight and the hands. Still. Nearly all of the covers I looked at featured a girl's face or her hands or shoulder or her back. I'm torn. I could certainly go this way with the cover for Breathless. Heck, I've even got an idea, featuring a certain necklace that Azazel's mom gives her in like episode nine. I'd have to dig up a necklace like that, of course. Still. I'm not sure why women's bodies are used to sell like everything. Men's magazines. Women's magazines. Beer. Makeup. Cars.

It's ridiculous. If I'm going to use a body part, I'm toying with the idea of using a guy's. That's right, Aaron, prepare to be my cover model. Mwah ha ha!! Besides, I really like my boyfriend's hands, and I already did use his eye for a Trembling banner.

Blegg. But who cares about my writing, right? I mean, everything I read about blogging says that if you're trying to use your blog to attract readers, you should not talk about yourself, because, let's face it, if people don't know who you are, they aren't going to google you.

Which brings us to the title of the blog. Right.

Um, kay. So, I'm in the middle of reading Rachel Caine's Morganville Vampires series, and I am absolutely blown away. It is super awesome and fabulous. I love the moral ambiguity she's weaving through the story. I love the fact that the vampires are actually scary (they are monsters, remember?) and I really like the fact that it's set in Texas. I only lived in Texas for two weeks, but I really enjoyed my time there.

And I'm learning tons about the way to construct a love scene (minus the, uh, love since it's a teen book) from her. She writes such sexy, sexy...let's call them makeout scenes, shall we? I am absolutely drooling over Shane.

And, I'm ridiculously excited about the new season of True Blood. I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of Charlaine Harris. She the best thing that happened to vampires since Laurell K, and the only adult vampire series I read anymore. (Despite the fact that she has weretigers. I mean, really, come on! Whoever heard of weretigers????)

The first season was great. I think the television show has a little bit of a different tone than the books. It's not quite as funny. But it's good stuff. It's one of the best vampire shows on TV.

I won't be able to watch it until tomorrow, since I watch all my TV online. No cable. It's the wave of the future, really. But I plan on writing a blog about the first episode and all my impressions.

Ta ta for now. (And really. I'm going to get better about this blogging thing. I swear.)

The Vampire Diaries

I'm not really posting blogs very often, am I? Not cool on my part. I think that once summer starts, and I'm no longer teaching, I'm going to try to get in a rhythm of posting at least one or two blogs a week.

Anyway, I saw some teasers for The Vampire Diaries, a new show next fall on the CW, based on L.J. Smith's book series from the early 90s of the same name. I'm actually kind of excited. Two things I think this series has going for it which mean that it might actually be good:

One is writer Kevin Williamson, who wrote both Scream and Dawson's Creek. The other is Ian Somerhaulder, who is going to play Damon. Effing gorgeous. Also, his character is the kind of wicked sexy that you can't get enough of. Think Spike meets evil Angel, with a little Logan thrown in for fun. (!!) (That's Logan from Veronica Mars.)

I had my doubts about this show when I attempted to read the source material. I picked up the first book in the Vampire Diaries series, but never ended up finishing it. In a word, the book was bad. Not only did it suffer from the most purple prose I've run into in a long time, (Adverbs out the whazoo and over adjectived like crazy.) but it was full of really pretty, really snobby people who I couldn't actually bring myself to care about.

The main character, Elena, is the most popular, most beautiful girl in the school who swears she'll get any boy that she wants. She wants the new boy: Stefan--Italian, gorgeous, and brooding. (and a vampire. duh.) After a few missteps, she gets Stefan. However, there's a twist here. Stefan has a really evil brother named Damon, who actually likes being a vampire. (Unlike Stefan, who drinks the blood of animals.) Oh, and did I mention the fact that the only reason Stefan is interested in Elena is because she looks exactly like the vampire chick who brought him over and who he and Damon fought over? This is the point where I stopped reading, I think.

The biggest problem for me with the book, despite the fact it was badly written, full of overly used cliches, and not the least bit romantic or creepy, was that I really didn't like Elena.

It seems the CW has taken some steps to change this. First off, I notice that Elena isn't blonde. She's a brunette. (For some reason, we can identify better with brunettes as women. Why is that?) Secondly, she seems to have some depth. And she doesn't seem snobby and spoiled. All good things.

Stefan himself is blah. The actor is attractive, but compared to Somerhaulder, he fades away into relative good-looking-ness.

As long as we can keep Kevin Williamson from having his teenage main characters tell their parents exactly what is wrong with them in long psychobabbly terms, I think the show will rock. Bring on the fall!

(Wait. No. I don't mean that. I want this summer to last forever.)

Barnes and Noble Ate the Midlist, or why I'm Thinking about Self-Publishing

As I've begun to gather friends and fans on myspace for my book Breathless, I've discovered and a large number of them also are writers. Since I've been seriously considering opting out of traditional publishing and going the indie book route, I wanted to let them (and other authors know) some of the reasons why I'm thinking of chucking the mainstream.

Basically, the traditional publishing industry has changed, owing mostly to big chain stores like Barnes and Noble and Borders and to the internet, which has changed the way we read and communicate. These days, it's a lot tougher than it used to be to get published, because less books are getting published and marketed and because more people are trying to get published.

When they first appeared, people were frightened chain bookstores would change the way people bought books forever, and so these stores have. Because chain stores make decisions about books centrally, individual branches have little say on what is stocked. "When chains order, Corporate Buyer orders a number of copies ... for the entire chain, and these are distributed per a computerized formula to the various stores" (Lisle "How"). So various stores get a certain amount of copies which are then sold in the store. "Frequently, chains will only get one or two copies which will be spined out, dooming them to invisibility. Even if they are not, though—even if Local Chain receives seven copies and sells six, Local Chain WILL NOT REORDER THE BOOK unless it sells above a set number chain-wide" (Lisle "How").

So, big deal, you say. What does that mean? Well, say you're an author whose book gets five or six copies put out at a local Barnes and Noble. If all six sell, wouldn't you want more to appear on the shelves so that you could sell more? Instead, however, your books are gone, and a casual book shopper cannot "stumble" across them. Worse, however, the chain bookstores don't always order enough books for the book to ever hope to make to the re-order number (Lisle "How").

It gets worse, however. When an author's next book comes out, the big chain will order only the amount of books that the author's last book sold, dooming it to even lower sales numbers (Lisle "How"). The chains, you see, are looking at numbers sold, not percentages. If the book sells 90 % of the books ordered, that's a great percentage. But if that's only 900 books out of 1000, unlike, say J.K. Rowling's or Stephenie Meyer's numbers, then that book doesn't look like much of a good investment for the big chain.

Because big chains are looking at what sells well on a global level, they miss books that are selling well on a local level, or even books that are selling adequately on a global level. With no nurturing or attending, these books are squeezed out of the market. They don't make any money for the publishers, and they don't make any money for the authors. Eventually, these books (and their authors) disappear.

This model, over time, leads to a mass-market product. With very little competition, the big chain stores eventually only sell what they want to sell--big-name, big-selling products. This leads publishers to be less likely to want to publish books that are not going to be big-name, big-selling products, because they can't sell them at big chains (and the big chains have squeezed out all the small, independent stores) and therefore, they can't make money off these products. "There are no industry statistics that calculate how many midlist books are published annually, but publishers say it is obvious that the numbers are dwindling because houses are pruning their lists for publication in a time of declining hard-cover sales" (Carvajal).

Midlist books are books that are not front list. Books that sell "less than 15,000 copies" (Carvajal). Midlist authors are the authors that write these books. If the current model continues, there will eventually be no midlist. It will appear that the midlist died because there was no market for it and because it couldn't sell.

How does this affect the author trying to get published today? As mentioned above, there aren't really industry statistics that prove that currently less midlist books are being published. There was a study done by the Author's Guild, way back in 2000, by a guy named David Kirkpatrick (New Rules Staff). Kirkpatrick found that, in 2000, just as many midlist titles were being published as had been in the past (New Rules Staff). However, since then, things have changed a lot.

Back in 2000, I had no idea who J. K. Rowling was. Sure, I knew my younger brother was reading some book about some guy named Larry or Harry or something, but other than that I was clueless. In 2000, The Da Vinci Code hadn't been published. In 2000, Twilight hadn't been published. In short, the blockbuster book as we know it today didn't really exist yet. These kinds of crazy success stories are a product of a globalized, centralized distribution point--the result of Barnes and Noble and Borders and others of their ilk.

(A brief aside about Stephen King, clearly the first and forerunning blockbuster writer who was selling books way before Barnes and Noble appeared. Stephen King wasn't made by Barnes and Noble. Barnes and Noble got the idea for the blockbuster writer because of Stephen King.)

Am I saying books don't get published by authors who aren't bestsellers? Of course not! After all, bestsellers have to start somewhere. And the publishing industry publishes an enormous amount of books per week. Books are still getting published. All the time.

However, it's clear that if the current distribution model continues, the midlist won't continue to exist. I think that we're seeing a recognizable difference in terms of how many books are published and what kinds of books are published.

We definitely have seen a difference in the way first-time authors get published. It wasn't so long ago that major publishing houses had what were called slush piles. This meant that an author sent their manuscript directly to the publisher (what a concept, right? Send your book to the people who ACTUALLY publish books) and these manuscripts languished (sometimes for years) in the publishing house until someone read them and rejected or acquired them for publishing. Pretty much no major publishing houses do that anymore. Instead, they rely on agents.

So, if you're trying to publish a book these days, you send it to an agent. There are a lot of people claiming to be agents, but there aren't very many who are actually good ones. They also have their likes and dislikes, and will only represent certain kinds of books. In my experience, for any book I've written, I've usually ended up with a list of 20-30 possible agents (with about half of them being long shots.) Agents receive hundreds of submissions a day. They can't possibly read that many books.

So, you don't actually send your book to an agent. Instead, you send a query letter, a synopsis, and maybe the first few pages of the book (if you're lucky). What's rejected then, is not your manuscript, but your query.

I'm not proposing that Barnes and Noble is responsible for major publishing houses not accepting slush anymore. I will say that a tightening number of books that publisher can publish certainly couldn't have helped that situation, however.

No, this brings me to the second part of my discussion. Why is the world different? The internet.

Recently, the number of submissions to agents seems to be going up, according to Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency. I've also seen various agents comment on this on their blogs. Why is this? Well, no one knows. Most people are blaming the economy, because that's the hot thing to blame these days. I'm blaming the internet.

Okay, so flash back fifteen years to 1994. You're an author who wants to write a book. Okay, great. You maybe have access to a personal computer (after all, you're an author, right?), or maybe not. After all, who really needed personal computers before the internet? If not, maybe you type the manuscript on a typewriter. You know nothing about how to write a book, except what you've picked up from reading them. Maybe you think that's enough. (Maybe it is.) Maybe, however, you think it's not.

How are you going to find out how to be a better writer? Well, you'll have to buy a book. That's right. Go out to a store and look for a book about writing. How will you know if it's a good book? Where, indeed, will you even find a list of books about writing? In a magazine? (Augh, thinking of this dark age is making me depressed. Of course, maybe it's because I was thirteen at the time and pretty much depressed about everything.) Point I'm making here is that it required a concerted effort to find out how to write better.

If you finally did finish the thing and decide you wanted to send it out, you'd also have to go buy a copy of Writer's Market, and then go and buy a book teaching you how to write queries and synopses. Lots of effort. Not to mention postage. No email submissions, remember? You had to actually mail the darned thing out. It also required a concerted effort to send out a book and even more of an effort to send it out right.

Just thinking about it is discouraging. Most people probably didn't bother with that effort. Therefore, most of the books that were sent out were probably bad. There were also probably less of them.

Okay, it's 2009 again. (Yes, breathe a sigh of relief everyone. Yick, life sucked before the internet!) Now, say I want to write a book. Great. How do I do that? Um, google "write a novel." (Do it. Really.) Loads and loads of FREE, EFFORTLESS information appears in seconds. Now, google "query letter." See where I'm going with this?

In 2009, it's easier for people to find out how to write a novel well, and how to submit it to the right places in the right formats. It's easier, and it's cheaper. It follows that more people are going to write novels, more people are going to write better novels, and more people are going to submit novels in a better format.

This would be fine if there was an expanding market for novels. However, because less novels can be published and less novels can be sold at high numbers due to chain stores, we have a problem.

It's harder to get a book published than it used to be because there's more competition for less spots.

Well, I've created quite a dull, dismal picture for the aspiring novelist, haven't I?

Before all aspiring writers everywhere give up with a collective sigh of defeat, let's examine things a little further. Some people would say that the reason that there's less of a market for books is that people don't read as much as they used to. If it were the 1980s, I would agree with them. The 80s were the age of video. Everything was video. Want to listen to music? Watch a music video. Want the news? Watch TV. And no one wrote letters anymore, because there were telephones.

Now, however, people read all the time. On the internet. And people write all the time. Email, texting, blogging, twitter, social networking. People are reading. But they aren't reading books.

Is it because people don't want to read books?

If people don't want to read books, then why are Harry Potter and Twilight as popular as they are?

People want to read books, and they'd read other books besides the blockbusters if Barnes and Noble weren't squeezing out the midlist.

So...where can the midlist go? I've got several ideas. The first is the idea favored by most authors today. They say that you persevere until your book gets an agent. (This process, most of them tell you, will take years and years and years. There will be lots and lots and lots of rejection. You should get used to this, however, because it's what everyone has to go through, and by God, if I did it, then so should you, and when I was your age I walked uphill five miles to school barefoot in the snow.) Once you've got an agent, the agent gets you a publishing deal (this also takes a really looong time). Okay--now that you're on the shelves, you begin your crazy marketing campaign to take down the chain stores. Create buzz for yourself. Have a website. Have a blog. Join myspace. Plug your book endlessly. Your book will become so popular that your readers will go to Barnes and Noble and beg them to get more on the shelves.

This isn't an awful idea. In fact, it's probably the best thing you can do if you want to go the traditional publishing route.

What are my other ideas to save the midlist? In a word, self-publishing.

Yeah. I know. The word used to make me cringe too. What's wrong with self-publishing? (I'm going to forgo a discussion on vanity presses vs. PODs here. If you're interested, google it. Suffice it to say, when I say self-publish a tangible book from here on out, I'm talking about POD.) Self-publishing means that you decide your book is good enough and make it available to the public without it ever being accepted by an agent or a publisher or ever being professionally edited.

Generally, most people are of the opinion that self-published books are bad. Most people think that if a book got rejected by agents and publishers, it's not good. And you know what? It might be.

But...bad is kind of a subjective term, isn't it? Is what I think is bad the same thing as what you think is bad? And how many times (as a writer) have you wailed to someone over the "crap that gets published these days" when no one will publish your stuff? Aren't many published books "bad?"

Or...to put it another way, just because a book is published doesn't mean you'll read it, does it?

My radical idea is this: if a book is bad, people won't read it, whether an agent liked it or not.

My radical idea is this: why do we need gatekeepers to tell us what is good to read? Why can't we decide for ourselves whether it's good or not?

My final radical idea is this: if you have a burning, itching desire welling up inside you, telling you that you HAVE, HAVE, HAVE to write a story, then you're a writer. You aren't someone who wants to be a writer, you are a writer. If you write, you're a writer. And because you have that need to write, you deserve to have the opportunity to let people hear your story. (You maybe don't deserve to make a living off your writing, but you deserve the opportunity to find an audience. And NO ONE, not an agent, not a publisher, not your best friend, not your worst enemy, should be able to stop you from getting that opportunity.)

But here's the problem with self-publishing. If you put your book out there, without any kind of marketing campaign whatsoever, the same thing that's happening to the midlist will happen to it. Because no one will ever hear about it, and you can't even get it in Barnes and Noble at all.

So the public will have no idea whether or not the book is good because they will never read it.

This brings me to my final idea for saving the midlist: Online publishing. For free.

If you're like me, you don't just buy books on a whim. You buy a book for one of the following reasons: a) someone recommended it to you, b) you've read other things like it or by the same author, or c) you've read it already and want it forever. I audition books and authors using the library. I can check a book out for free, read it. If I like the book, I'm much more likely to buy a book by that author.

So, to build an audience as a writer, you need to let people read your book for free. Sure, you could self-publish the book and put copies of it in libraries all over the country. Or you could try to use the techniques authors use to market their published books to gain an audience, and then let them read your book for free online.

If people like it, you can then self-publish tangible books. You can sell e-books. You can sell merchandise using café press. You can be your own publishing company. (And keep all your royalties, but that's a discussion for another time.)

If it sounds like I'm pretty much sold on the idea of self-publishing (or indie publishing, as I like to call it), it's because I pretty much am.

I have no idea whether or not my book is good or not. But I'd like to find out. And I think the only way I will be able to is if I let people read it.

Works Cited

Carvajal, Doreen. "Authors With Less Than Stellar Sales Are Unwanted by Big Houses." 18 Aug. 1997. 22 Apr. 2009 .

Lisle, Holly. "How to Kill a Career in Three Easy Books." 22 Apr. 2009 .

New Rules Staff. "Chain Bookstores Squeezing Out Midlist Titles." 1 Aug. 2000. 20 Apr. 2009 .