We’re reaching back to the early days of the Indie Author Spotlight to shine a light on Noah Bodie.
I feel honor-bound to give everyone their turn even if it’s been weeks (months? sorry!) since their profile in my author newsletter (which you can always join here for free books and other cool stuff.)
The next installment of the Desert Rose Saga follows Simon and Andreas as old wounds are reopened, and they’re forced to confront their growing feelings for one another.
What awaits them as they leave the city of Sebree eight months after being sent into isolation? Will Simon be able to confront his inner demons? Will Andreas uncover answers to a surprising revelation about his family? What challenges lie ahead as new foes emerge and a hidden piece of the world’s history claws to light?
From the author’s bio:
Noah is a queer author and illustrator living on the east coast. He’s a proud parent to a teenager, two cats, and a dog. He’s been praised for his world building, emotional storytelling and ‘swoon-worthy’ male characters.
I just read a post on That Subscription Site Full of Fash (not linking to it, see under Full of Fash), where the writer argued that writing isn’t art because we sell it like a commodity.
I’m sorry, what?
Books (e-books & print) are reproductions of a larger piece of art. Saying books aren’t art is like saying a lithographic print isn’t art. Just because it can be replicated and sold in small, affordable versions doesn’t lessen its artistry. The original art – the carved plate – will never be seen by the public, just like a manuscript will never be seen by the public.
The art of a book is in its totality, from the first draft to the cover design to the font choice. Art isn’t special and should not be treated like some far away thing that only clever people do while us plebian slobs consume it. Art is everywhere, everyone can be an artist, and getting over the Big-A art concept is important to undo this idea of virtuous consumption that comes with it, this idea that calling it Big-A Art elevates it above our mortal plane. I would argue that selling things at a price only wealthy people can afford is a moral failure. You’re catering to the literal worst people on earth. Anyone who can drop a million bucks on a single piece of art? Must be nice, now fund a library or go away.
Sorrynotsorry but if you sell it, it’s a commodity. Big, expensive art that exists as a singular piece is still a fucking commodity. You expect money for it. You didn’t do it for fun or for your mom but to sell. It’s art but it’s still a commodity.
Modern authorship is a make-your-own-rules kind of game. Self-published, mainstream, hybrid, neither (ask me about subscriptions to The All-Hearts Cabaret) and it’s up to you, the author, to decide how you want to play it.
Me, I’m doing my freaking best under the weight of my neurodivergent, gender-baffled self-awareness. I want to be/do/know/have/eat/encompass everything that exists, and this is a real problem when it comes time to make decisions.
And yet…
On Tuesday I visited one of the very nice nurse practitioners at my doctor’s clinic. No knock to the NP, y’all are keeping Western Medicine functioning, but this poor child doesn’t know me from a hole in the ground. So she went ahead and prescribed me medication that I (and many of you) expect will make me want to unalive myself.
Baby…I don’t do speed.
I just don’t. That class of drugs is Bad For Me. And when the popular literature tells me that no one knows *why* this particular drug works,? No. Just no. I’m not that messed up, TBH. I *like* my neurodivergence for the most part. It’s fun to have this many ideas. Maybe I could do better at keeping appointments and finding my keys, but the last time I tried this class of meds was a nightmare. I made a vast number of bad choices, while totally ignoring the work I needed to do, and ended up sobbing under my desk more days than not.
So…fuck you.
Fuck this.
Please, please don’t take my experiences as advice. You do you, as we say, and decide for yourself. Me? I’m going to just learn how to be this shambolic, well-intended, heartfelt and whole and every now and then problematic neurospicy genderqueer who gives no f’s for ordinary people’s comfort because I’m having too much fun.
I toddled down a rabbit hole this morning. I say toddled because I got myself out so quickly instead of losing 2 hours to doomscrolling.
I was following a series of increasingly strident flags declaring that THIS is “the great gay American novel.” And I mean, I like great novels and gay people and am interested in America and anyone who has the nerve to lift the curtain. But like I always do, I started by reading the worst reviews. That’s where the gold is, the truth, the ick, or in some cases “this was too horny for me and had too many queer characters” in which case it’s a one-click buy. But sometimes it’s:
“FUCK. THIS. BOOK.”
That’s a one-click read, that review. If it inspires such vitriol then either it’s a masterpiece or a steaming turd.
Ah. The latter.
Because I’m absolutely not a little bit sorry, but The Great Gay American Novel is not allowed to be a goddamn Kill-Your-Gays trope. Not a fucking chance.
We’ve heard those stories. They’re called queer history. Despair, isolation, mental illness, and often the only defence is to destroy all human feeling in your soul so you don’t have to cope with the fact that if everyone knew you for who you are, they wouldn’t just hate you, they would want you dead.
Boring.
Boooooooorrrrrrrring because it’s horrible and spiritually deadening and it still happens in real life all the time and so we don’t need a 700 page novel about a loser who spends the whole book being awful to everyone and experiencing zero emotional growth but he just happens to be a gay man in a book about gay men so that makes it THE GREAT GAY AMERICAN NOVEL. It just feels like more trauma porn: look, here’s a walking, talking tragedy, let’s zoom in closer on all his faults. Now closer. NOW CLOSER.
Look, I haven’t read this book and under no circumstances will I ever read it (ok, a million dollars but I get half in advance.) I am basing my opinions on one review and the blurb of the book. And an interview in which the author said they didn’t believe in psychology and that people who were broken should essentially just stay broken.
That’s when I realized I’d *never* read the book, nor probably anything else this author has written. The way to help someone who is broken is to see them, hear them, love them, help them. “I see your pain. Your pain is real. Pain ends. I trust you. I believe you.” You don’t shrug and then take character notes. I refuse to read 700 pages about someone who refuses to grow, who gets no help, and whose main characteristic is being an irredeemable piece of shit. Just sounds like a novel about straight people.
This poem is part of an ongoing dialog with identity and self-knowing. I’ve been buying a lot of new Canadian poetry at independent book fairs and am struck by its precision. A descriptive poetry, emotional but not instructive the way I find a lot of modern poetry can be. The poetry I like the best says “here we are, you and I, and this is what that’s like for me.” And the “you and I” can be anyone: you and everyone, you and no one, you and the world, you and yourself.
You maybe don’t have to love yourself. You can maybe just be satisfied with yourself and that will be enough for now. You don’t have to love toast but you might happily eat it every day. The heart is a muscle and all muscles need training. Even when the heart is metaphor for the locus of all your emotions, it must still be trained. If you want to move mountains, you start with one stone.
It is possible to exercise love for all creation by annihilating the self, but the empty vessel is itself a conceit, an opportunity only afforded in a society of abundance. If we are all Buddhists, who fills our begging bowls? Most of us must wade through the muck of our attachments–to spouses, children, parents, life–but to do this well requires an open, active heart. Brave-heartedness, the will to show love despite the countless reasons not to, will be key to our survival in the coming decades. Shallow, angry thinking cannot save us from our selves. We need more and stronger love.
Way back in the wayback, I started this blog by talking about Cory Doctorow. He really is a smart person, and in this guest blog for indie author legend Brian Sanderson he brings his ethics and intellect to bear on how Amazon is ripping everyone off.
The problem with Audible is not that it makes a wide catalog of audiobooks available through a convenient app. The problem is that Audible uses technology, accounting fraud, and market power to steal vast fortunes from creative workers and the audiences who love their books.
Disclosure: I’m an author who uses Amazon as a sales platform, but in this insular space I feel safe in expressing my deep concern that we have let a single corporation insert itself into so much of our daily lives. I’ll let Doctorow himself speak to that.
I don’t have any audiobooks for sale. Authorship and publishing take so much attention that I haven’t had any to spare for yet another aspect of it, so I can’t add much commentary. But Doctorow has nothing to gain by refusing to list his audiobooks on Amazon. In fact:
my agent tells me that it cost me a fully paid-off mortgage and a fully funded college savings account for my daughter.
w
If more big-name authors were prepared to starve Audible of their content, would Amazon cave to pressure and make the deal fair for everyone? Or is it going to take another few election cycles before President Warren (don’t laugh) demands the break-up of this predatory company?
Until then, I’ll keep listing my books on every platform I can. There is another way. We can and must find it. For everyone’s sake.
A holodeck and a human actor: a best-case scenario for AI filmmaking. Human actors reacting in human ways to whatever scenario the filmmaker invents, which is not much different from what goes on now.
The thing is, you can’t fake human, and maybe it’s not worth trying. Everything else in filmmaking—sets, props, locations, eldritch horrors—can be represented artistically and therefore generated with digital imaging. It’s the people you can’t fake.
Consider: we pay people to do nothing but be good at emoting. Certain people emote i.e. act more skillfully than others, and we make them millionaires and give them gold statues and big parties and all our attention. One individual, idiosyncratic human with their asymmetrical face and personality quirks and gut biome, singular among all other humans currently alive, can win the hearts of millions. You’re telling me a calculator (which is what a computer is, writ large) is going to be able to fake that any time soon?
AI research has over the years taken up billions of dollars, and we’re still nowhere near faking people. Maybe it can’t be done. A computer as intricately modeled as the human brain might need to be either the size of a mountain or be an actual biological brain, grown in situ.
We are clever soup. But we are like nothing else. We’re cheap to make, easy to teach, endlessly inventive. Why bother trying to mechanically replicate what’s already so abundant?
You know the feeling that someone is standing nearby watching you? What if they were doing that not to make you afraid but because they love you?
I generally like all my characters. If I’m going to spent fifty thousand words or more with someone I have to like them, right?
Then there’s a few who get inside your heart and never leave…
But that’s the thing with love: it’s not always up to us. Sometimes love comes out of nowhere and takes over. Makes you want to take chances. Do things you never thought you could.
And yes, romantic love does this, but so does true friendship. So can mentorship when given with a pure heart, in the spirit of service. So does love for yourself.
That’s all my characters are. Little bits of myself I set loose in worlds I created.
That I can feel such love both for and from these unreal avatars of my unconscious is part of the mystery of the human mind. I’ll take it, though. Unconditional love? We should all be so lucky.
[edit] Look, I don’t mean for this to sound like a complaint, a “I did a cool thing and no one noticed, boo hoo” entitled little sulk. I’m just baffled. I haven’t had *crickets* in ages, maybe never. So let’s stir the pot. Will someone go back and read this?
Interestingly the post had a lot of meaning for me. The next day, I tossed together a stream of consciousness poem and posted it right away, and boom, views. And you would not believe how common that is across the creator-sphere: the thing you pour your soul into gets barely a glance, and the piece of fluff you made for a laugh goes viral. Which is really justification for making as much art as you can. Who knows what will get noticed?
The Post FKA: “The Ides of March? Never Met Him. What’s He Like?’
Three years ago, I self-published my first short story.
Two years ago, I had fourteen titles on sale, was writing a few novels, and felt like I was figuring things out.
Last year, I went over the edge.
Any old edge will do. How about this one? (photo by Alan Tang on Unsplash)
Up till then it had felt like I was doing everything right. I don’t think I knew how depressed I was, which is something my mother said in reference to the same time in her life.
Taking medication was me making a sensible choice for a goddamn change. A grown up, self-disciplined decision to rein in my worrisome habits of thought and behaviour and become (what the hell was I thinking?) a productive member of society.
The results were predictably bad. You may recall that I am manifestly incapable of doing anything directly. Plans adjust themselves, reality reorganizes, and my intentions never end up aiming at my goals. I must approach all challenges and opportunities sideways: improvise, adjust, create new ways in the midst of living them. This is a very durable feature of my personality, and it affects everything I do, including taking medication to regulate my brain function. I’m sorry, but my brain function is a bratty queer with a glitter gun and the first six rows of the audience *will* *get* *wet.* Trying to rein this in leads to wildly unregulated emergent behaviour, and it was bad.
While high on legal speed, I did not buckle down and focus on my writing, which I was suddenly unable to do. Nor did I get really organized and plan my next year, down to the hour. No, in between the bouts of tremors and sobbing into the carpet, I decided to start another blog, devoted not to writing but to (honestly, what the hell was I thinking?) historical menswear.
I swear it made sense at the time. A distraction from the stress of a publishing career and encouragement to do more sewing, and if I was lucky, a back door into being known for anything at all, which somehow optimism and fairy dust would turn into a book career. It became one more task looming over me, one more chore to neglect. I needed to write books, not faff on about cravats on a blog no one would read without me promoting it like crazy.
I took the medication for a week. I quit when they wanted me to up the dosage. Once I recovered from my inadvertent meth bender, I wrote a novella in which a doctor gets punched. I’ve done plenty of drugs under my own recognizance, and if I’d paid a schemy 22-year old in a nightclub bathroom for a pill that did to me, I’d hunt the little shit down and get my money back.
The blog lasted six months.
edit: This blog? This blog I do nothing to promote, that doesn’t sell my books, that does nothing for anyone? It’s coming up on two years. 152 posts. See? It’s just like I said. Sideways or not at all.
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