Archive for November, 2009

  • 09 Nov

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    Guarding His Body in print!

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    Well, today my most recent release, Guarding His Body, is out in print at Total-E-Bound. (Er, that is, if “today” is 9 November, mid-morning UK time.) This has been a bit of time coming, considering my first ever release was published in April 2007 (The Commander’s Slave by New Concepts Publishing), but I only have myself to blame as I only wrote novellas up to this point.

    Guarding His Body cover

    But, before I go any further, some shameless self-promotion:

    Yves de Saint Nerin is a man in trouble. Hounded by a vengeful business associate who has no qualms about attacking his family, he visits Australia in a bid to escape Leonid Alexandrov’s ruthless tactics. But, not leaving things to chance, he also hires a bodyguard and gets more than he bargains for in the form of accomplished martial artist, Helen Collier.

    I can’t remember exactly which blog it was that mentioned that female kick-arse heroines tend not to practice or sweat or do any of those icky things. Well, the first time we meet Helen is at the end of a training session where she admits to herself that she probably stinks. She exercises. The hero, Yves, is well-built, but doesn’t step into the breech to disarm the villain or get him into a sleeper hold. That’s because Yves hasn’t been trained to do it. That job belongs to Helen.

    I like the alpha hero, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let him have all the fun. Thee challenge in Guarding His Body was to keep the hero strong and capable yet aware of his own failings. And, for all that Helen knows how to manipulate a body in order to subdue it, underneath it all, she’s tender-hearted and vulnerable. Here’s part of the scene where they first meet:

    But he was not here to run an admiring glance over his supposed bodyguard. He was here to prove that she simply didn’t have what it took to take care of him. There was nothing personal in the thought. He didn’t mind women around, of course, but in their proper places—and with one so attractive, on a hair-trigger as she walked by his side, there was no such place. But maybe, after he convinced her that they could not deal together, she might still be open for dinner as a consolation prize. While he was determined to remain in Australia till the police had time to thoroughly investigate Leonid Alexandrov, nobody said the time he spent here had to be celibate.

    He smiled disarmingly as he faced her, but nothing so much as flickered behind those cool, assessing eyes. D’accord!

    He moved with a panther’s grace, feinting in one direction then stepping in another, and had the satisfaction of seeing sudden surprise on her face before it was quickly masked. He didn’t have time to wonder why such a thought gratified him before he lunged at her again, this time catching her wrist in a vice-like grip. He expected her to scream, to say something, to stop, but she kept moving as if it didn’t matter that he held onto her in the kind of hold, he was sure, she could not break.

    To his own surprise, she angled around to his back and he felt a stab of pain in his kidneys. He had no choice, he had to let go of her hand—the strike to his back both stunned and hurt him—and he felt a quick kick to the back of his knees.

    He was still surprised as he felt himself falling, her hand on him—touching him, moving with him like a lover—as he fell through the air and hit the carpet. When he opened his eyes, she was crouched above him. Her hand tightened against his throat, fingers like steel cables against his neck, and one of her feet pinned down his right arm. He knew he could play the macho man now, and sweep her aside just as she’d managed to demonstrate her skills without hurting him too much, turning the tables on her and sneering in her face. Something in her face told him she half-expected him to do exactly that, and he was ashamed that she thought so little of his gender.

    He relaxed his body, ceding defeat, and tried smiling up at her. This was no mean feat, considering she was still pressing her fingers against his windpipe, but it was enough, and she relaxed her hold and swiftly moved away from him, rising to her feet.

    “Would that be enough of a demonstration, Monsieur Nerin?” she asked, unable to keep the silkiness out of her voice.

    “Oui,” he replied, although he had the urge to cough. “You’re hired.”

    So, if you’ve ever wanted to read a twist on an old classic, with a female bodyguard this time guarding a very male body, please be sure to try Guardiing His Body. I hope you like it.

  • 06 Nov

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    And if you’re in Singapore this weekend….

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    Oops, I meant to post this before the other one. Just a quick update.

    If you’re in Singapore tomorrow, Saturday 7 November, get along to Fleatique at the Singapore Art Museum. Lance Ng, owner of Renaissance Publishing in Singapore, is having a giant giveaway of Renaissance books. Yep, FREE BOOKS! As Lance puts it, all must go. Go here for a list of his publications.

    Have a good weekend all. Catch you Monday.

  • 06 Nov

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    Let’s talk about … millions of Kims & Parks

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    Following on from Wednesday’s post on a recent party incident, I would hate for anyone to think I’m deliberately targetting old white guys for my ire. Let’s go … hmmmmm, how about … South Korea! Via the New York Times.

    Ah, South Korea. They of the full-contact democracy, stratospheric education ratings, unimaginable broadband penetration, one of the largest concentrations of land mines in the world (the meat from animals that go grazing in the DMZ along the North/South border, and are blown to shrapnel as a result, are then sold to Indian Muslim restaurants in Malaysia for turning into mutton curry … just fyi), and wonderful wonderful barbeque and kimchi. My favourite movie of the year (The Good, The Bad, The Weird) comes from Korea. As a result of all this, I’ve often wanted to visit Korea. But then I read something like this:

    On the evening of July 10, Bonogit Hussain, a 29-year-old Indian man, and Hahn Ji-seon, a female Korean friend, were riding a bus near Seoul when a man in the back began hurling racial and sexist slurs at them. The situation would be a familiar one to many Korean women who have dated or even — as in Ms. Hahn’s case — simply traveled in the company of a foreign man.

    South Korea is a case (yes, another one) of wanting to have its cake and eat it too. It likes the part of globalisation that means people enter the country to do work that nobody else wants to do, or pay the government to study there, but it doesn’t like the bit about having to actually deal with those people as fellow human beings. But, as with most things, some are more equal than others:

    Ms. Hahn said that after the incident in the bus last July, her family was “turned upside down.” Her father and other relatives grilled her as to whether she was dating Mr. Hussain. But when a cousin recently married a German, “all my relatives envied her, as if her marriage was a boon to our family,” she said.

    I think it goes without saying that we’re talking about a white German here rather than, say, a naturalised German of Turkish origin, nyuk nyuk. ‘Cos if you’re brown, here’s what you can expect from fellow Asians:

    For Mr. Hussain, subtle discrimination has been part of daily life for the two and half years he has lived here as a student and then research professor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. He says that, even in crowded subways, people tend not sit next to him. In June, he said, he fell asleep on a bus and when it reached the terminal, the driver woke him up by poking him in the thigh with his foot, an extremely offensive gesture in South Korea.

    I have to admit, the idea of always having a train seat to myself is tempting, but I wonder if it’s worth the surrounding angst? Let’s be blunt. The East Asians are obsessed with skin colour — Chinese, Korean, Japanese. Even the most bigoted Westerner envies a nice tan, but not so for millions of Pacific Rim residents … and Chinese Singaporeans. And it doesn’t stop there. The Koreans hate the Japanese. The Japanese hate the Chinese. The Chinese hate the Koreans. Good Gods, most people from the rest of the world can hardly tell the groups apart and, with the way the winds of history — and population drift — have been going for the past few millennia, I doubt there are many utterly pure-blood Chinese, Koreans or Japanese around anyway!

    In 2007, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination … urged public education to overcome the notion that South Korea was “ethnically homogenous,” which, it said, “no longer corresponds to the actual situation.”

    If it ever did.

    My current hypothesis is this. The discrimination of skin colour in Asia can, I believe, be traced back to manual labour. That is, if you were a peasant then, by definition, you spent more time out in the sun, working your skinny arse off. Spend more time out in the sun and your skin becomes darker. Ergo, darker skin == cultureless, brainless peasant. On the other hand, don’t spend any time out in the sun, concern yourself with scholarly duties — or nothing at all — under a roof all day, and your skin remains lily-white. That, of course, has to mean that you don’t have to slog outside, either because of your education or wealth. Ergo, whiter skin == educated, rich, aristo type.

    It sounds too moronic, too simplistic, to be true, but nothing I’ve come across in decades of pondering this question leads to any other conclusion robust enough to encompass almost an entire continent. I’m open to alternate suggestions, if anyone has one, honest.

    I’d segue into other racial groups here, but I wanted to concentrate on the Koreans in this post. So, holiday there? I don’t think so. I know what you’ll say: “But, Kaz, you can’t just refuse to visit a country because of some incidents of stupidity!” And I’d just tell you how utterly sick and tired I am of having to pay to put up with even the probability of this kind of behaviour, year in and year out, and having to subject my children to it, and how about a frickin’ break, OKAY??!!

    (Oh, am I out of valerian already? That bottle went quick.)

    You’re after a happy ending, aren’t you? How about this?

    What was different this time, however, was that, once … [the incident with Hahn and Hussain] … was reported in the South Korean media, prosecutors sprang into action, charging the man they have identified only as a 31-year-old Mr. Park with contempt, the first time such charges had been applied to an alleged racist offense. Spurred by the case, which is pending in court, rival political parties in Parliament have begun drafting legislation that for the first time would provide a detailed definition of discrimination by race and ethnicity and impose criminal penalties.

    Will it work? I say no. There is too much embedded racism already at play in Asian society. Literally millennia of it. So, you see, it’s not just a Western problem. It’s a problem for all of us.

    ADDITIONAL: And, when I say it’s a problem for all of us, I include myself as well. My taking offence at the assumption that I was the servant of the house, for example (ref. last post). Upon reflection, one reason I felt such anger was because I consider myself superior to the average servant. There, I said it. So, being lumped in the same category with a domestic worker was deeply insulting to me. This is despite the fact that I know that many, for example, Filipino women who are tertiary qualified are driven to domestic servitude overseas due solely to their country’s woeful economic, short-sighted and rapacious policies. And, in any case, there but for an accident of birth, goes I. This is a demon I’m going to have to wrestle with myself. I just hope I win.

    ADDITIONAL THE SECOND: How about I lighten things up next week? I actually have * shock * horror * writing news and I’ll see about putting up an update on mini bull terrier and general vandal, Sausage.

  • 04 Nov

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    Locked out of my own home

    4

    This topic starts in so many places, and leads to so many places, that I’m not sure where it will end. So bear with me.

    A few weeks ago, J and I were at an afternoon get-together. It was actually a nice mix of people, an equal assortment of Asians and Westerners, and maybe that’s what relaxed me. To be honest, I don’t like being alone in a crowd of Westerners. It makes me feel uncomfortable and, to be honest, quite vulnerable. That’s because there haven’t been many events where I haven’t been — even unconsciously — insulted. The put-downs are varied — because I speak English well or because I have a Western accent when somehow an Eastern one is expected. Because I’m smaller than I sound, browner than I sound. Because I’m too “intense”, too “heavy”, too “depressing” to be around. Whatever it is, there seems to be absolutely no hesitation with a stranger telling me exactly what’s wrong with me to my face on very little contact. Is it because I’m female? Or brown-skinned? Or both? And, therefore, does that make it easier to use some kind of superior tone towards me? (This opens up a whole ‘nother grocery store of canned worms, so I’ll just leave it there, for the time being.)

    In any case, we were at this event and, because I usually get on very well with older people, I stopped to talk to the father of the hostess. I mentioned where we lived and he commented that he’d seen me walking around the house a few times (they live quite close), “but I thought you were the servant.”

    You’d think I’d be used to all this by now but, weeks later, I have to admit that that one throwaway line still bothers me. That person was English, and he made his comment with such blithe unconcern, that it stopped me in my tracks. I’m still trying to figure out what emotion is ascendant in me — anger, confusion, indignation. Shame. Shame that whites can look at people like me and the first thing that springs to mind is “servant”. Shame that, in the country where I was born, a foreigner can look at me and, with one word, reduce me to the level of a slave. Realisation that, in the eyes of a white, I have no status except what they deign to give me.

    This unsettling vulnerability strikes at the oddest times. I’ll be watching TV, looking at someone cute and then wondering whether he’d give me the time of day if we met, purely because of the colour of my skin. It was a question that dogged me from teenagehood. When I met J, I went through the same angst. Would his parents approve of me? Not because I was a professional, tertiary-educated woman with successful businesses of her own, but because I was brown-skinned? Everything in my life — all my skills, experiences and accomplishments; my past, my present, my future — reduced to one, genetically-determined, completely irrelevant, factor. Ah SLC24A5, thy sting is sharp.

    The mothers of two ex-boyfriends heartily disapproved of our liaisons. The first mother was Indian, her son was her first-born and she was worried about him liaising with an Eurasian girl because, “everyone knows Eurasian girls are sluts”. We’re of mixed blood, you see, and so can’t really be trusted. The Japanese thought the same, which was why they tried to exterminate my race during WWII. Srinivas went on to marry an Indian girl. The second mother used the old “think of the children and what they’ll have to suffer” argument to dissuade us. Peter the Pom eventually married an Australian Italian. All this is water under a several-decades’ old bridge and yet, all it took at a party, to bring it all crashing back, was one thoughtless comment from an old man.

    The other thing that I’ve come to realise is that you can’t change the mind of such people. What he said as a 70+ year old was only a public utterance of his own attitudes that were formed years earlier. And those attitudes are nothing that I can demolish with one witty comment at a social event. Not that I had any in reserve, even if I wanted to. All I can do is hope he dies soon so he infects as few additional people as possible with his views though, considering how long he’s been alive, it’s probably a forlorn hope.

    But do you want to know the kicker? He married a Chinese woman. I spoke to her as well and she’s a very charming, quick-witted, erudite lady. They had two daughters. But he only had to look at me and see “servant”. The mental convolutions in that mind are too complex for me to even begin to unravel, as they are in most bigots, so I didn’t even try. (But I do, don’t I? Was it because I’m shorter? Darker than his wife? Was it my bearing? My features? Some other non-verbal characteristic?)

    It’s too much to think that I’ll manage to keep my own children away from people like that old man. And it’s not a question of age, really it isn’t. I’ve found that, in general, you can only expect bald bigotted honesty from two groups – youngsters and oldsters. The rest are (usually) a little too smart to come out with things like that in company, and certainly not when they’re without their allies. But it doesn’t bother those who are young, and those who are old. And while you may be able to do something about the youngsters, it’s way too late by the time they’re pensioners. All you can do is smile, excuse yourself, and move on.

  • 02 Nov

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    On publishing and capitalism

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    [I'm assuming that everyone who reads my blog knows that I'm of socialist bent. But, just in case you didn't get, I'm a person of socialist bent. And capitalism -- US capitalism, in particular -- utterly fascinates me.]

    Recently, which means millennia ago using standard intertube dating methods, Nathan Bransford wrote a post on literary works vs popular works and how the internet “has opened up all kinds of ways for the crowd to be king.” He says, quite rightly too, that:

    I’d bet that more people read Amazon reviews than the New York Times Book Review. More people check Yelp [don't know what "Yelp" is, but I'll go with the flow. --ksa] for restaurant recommendations than a city’s local restaurant critic. People don’t particularly listen to the judges when they vote for their favorites [sic] on American Idol and they certainly don’t listen to movie critics when they decide which movies to see.

    And when he continues with:

    I understand that everyone has different tastes, but there is no pride in ignorance of literary fiction. Genre writers can learn from literary fiction, just as literary writers can learn from genre fiction. There’s a middle ground

    I find myself nodding in agreement. But then he starts to veer into the deceptive soft edges:

    For now, in order to have your book published you’re going to have to impress the experts, i.e. the literary agents and editors who demand a certain level of quality in the writing.

    Uh, maybe. This is going to be difficult to explain without appearing twitter and bisted, but I’ll try.

    The goal of every working person on the planet is to make enough money for a comfortable life. Of course the definition of “a comfortable life” varies from person to person, but I think I’m pretty well right in coming to that conclusion. Literary agents are working people and, what’s more, they’re freelancers. Every cent that they earn comes from their own hard work, with no goofing off.

    Now, having been a freelancer myself for many many years, I can tell you that the decisions I made during that time were completely different to the decisions I made/make as a wage slave. When hiring people as a freelancer, if A already had the ability to make money for my business, and B needed coaching then, all other things being equal, I’d hire A. When hiring people as a wage slave manager, I might take a punt on B, depending on where I felt that person’s long-term performance might take the company. It was all down to what the company could absorb, and a big zaibatsu (multinational) has a lot more room to manoeuvre than a small business in terms of cash flow.

    Just as it is with writers, agents are their own small businesses, whether going solo or under the umbrella of a larger agency. And this means the bottom dollar has to be on what sells. Deep deep down, I’m sure that a lot of agents will agree with me — if they see a manuscript that their experience tells them will sell like hotcakes, even if it’s not written to an exemplary standard, they’ll acquire it. If they see a manuscript that’s utterly beautiful but concerns a topic they know from hard experience won’t sell, they’ll reject it. It’s like choosing A over B in my previous example — the question to answer is, will it make money for me? Agents make this decision because they have to live. In a capitalist society, it really is as simple as that.

    (In socialist societies, you have other problems of supply and demand when it comes to publishing (and don’t even think! censorship, because that argument just don’t fly with me, m’kay?), but one thing socialism didn’t have were brokers having to rely on best-sellers in order to keep food on the table and their rent/mortgage paid. Where you have a living wage paid to everyone, regardless of profession, it frees up the acquisitive mind somewhat.)

    I know this may sound rather arrogant, but I consider myself a competent writer. However, at this point in time, I don’t have to depend on my writing in order to be able to eat tonight. So, I can afford to write the kind of stuff that doesn’t sell. Remember my space opera romance, War Games? Yep, Kaz ended up writing an f/f novel when everyone knows it’s m/m that sells. Another completed novel has a convicted terrorist as a heroine. Another is set after the demise of the United States and tries to examine the benefits of collectivism in a post-apocalyptic world. (I’m not a real collectivist myself, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see it working well in certain situations.)

    These novels might sell to small presses, but none of them are going to put me in the Dan Brown category of earnings. If I even aspire to be in the Dan Brown category of earners, I’m going to have to change what I write about and, to be honest, I’m starting to do that too. Or at least trying to come up with stories that sell better than a male-dominant hermaphrodite on a space station who’s accused of being a saboteur. That doesn’t mean I jump on every trend that comes along … I just can’t come up with either a steampunk or zombie story to save my life, for example … but it does mean that I start to think about tweaking the ideas that do come to me, with the objective of creating more mass-market appeal.

    The point is, given a particular level of quality — competent but not mind-blowing — it’s the ability of that manuscript to sell that’s the bottom-line, make-or-break question. Quality is okay but, as always, money is better.

    ADDITIONAL: Literary agent Kristin Nelson alludes to this herself with her recent post on editorial reluctance to purchase:

    In fact, editors will even be wonderfully complimentary—really highlighting how much they liked the writing, the concept, the talent of the writer but…

    That’s what it means to live in a capitalist society, whether you like it or not. And it’s something every writer should be aware of. Sheer. Talent. Just. Isn’t. Enough.

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