White Latinos Please Collect Your Anti Black Trash.

Why Book Reviews Matter! Part Two-The Financial Side

Why Book Reviews Matter! Part Two-The Financial Side

Okay so *cracks knuckles*.

We promised we’d make a post about how both retailer site reviews help on the creative side and another on the financial side of things. Both are and should be important because, let’s face it, writing isn’t all about creativity and entertainment, it’s also a business and a ton of writers make their livings off writing alone.

There are tons of reasons why reviews impact…

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#repost cc: @melaniehoo #bookstagram #authorsofinstagram #bookreview #booklover #indielove #indieauthor #bookblogger

Cold out this morning! So glad I got this kitty ears headband that doubles as earmuffs. #whathappenedtosummer excuse the brows😂haven't had a chance to clean up😂😂😂😂 #fallisfinallyhere (at New Haven, Connecticut)

I work retail, and have for many years now. I'm not an easily fazed person and have a Talk No Shit, Take No Shit mentality. However, I also have a pretty intense anxiety disorder on top of other mental health issues and when I started 6+ years ago there were some customers who got to me.

So, to all the workers facing Karens and Kens out in the wild, here's my advice - cry.

If you have the type of relationships with your coworkers and managers that will support you, don't try to hold it in. Cry like the overworked, underpaid peon you are.

Nothing terrifies an asshole Karen like the indisputable proof that their actions/words are affecting you as a real live person. They feel perfectly entitled to cuss out a cashier over a wrong order/no cash policy/ face mask mandate but when that person starts to cry and asks them why they'd say such mean things? A whole other story, my friend.

There's no way to make that situation look good to the manager they demanded to speak with, either. My manager literally got a security guard fired for being so verbally abusive he made one of her employees cry.

This strategy has multiple benefits -

1. You're not standing there trying to pen up your emotions, crying is a great physical release for negative emotions and you may very well feel somewhat better afterwards.

2. The person who precipitated the situation is forced to not only see you as a person with feelings, but also has to confront the fact that their abuse has consequences beyond themselves.

3. It can actually give your higher-ups leverage to address these situations. 'They yelled at my employee' is one thing, but 'They yelled at my employee until they were in tears' is a waaaaay worse offense. A good manager can use that. Hell, it can get a security guard fired!

tl;dr: We live in a capitalist hell but we can work the system and cry at work to shame awful customers

What advice do 2 agents, 1 editor, and 1 author have about publishing? Join #BMPChat on Jan 20, 8 PM ET/5 PT to find out.

Cover Reveal: Cheerleaders from Planet X by Lyssa Chiavari

Cover Reveal: Cheerleaders from Planet X by Lyssa Chiavari

Today I’m so excited to help reveal the cover and title for Lyssa Chiavari’s upcoming f/f sci-fi novel, releasing March 28 from The Kraken Collective. Are you ready to learn more about this tropey, quirky and fun book? Check out the cover and synopsis below!

Title: Cheerleaders From Planet X Author: Lyssa Chiavari Genre: New Adult Science Fiction Publisher: The Kraken Collective Release date:March…

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My story: 6 teen American girls of different backgrounds find each other and go on a quest to make the world a better place. The girls' backgrounds are: Native American (tribe TBD), Jewish, Muslim, African American, Latina (specific heritage TBD), and white Christian/lesbian. The Native American is the leader but each girl will play a unique roll and shine. Is it ethical for me, a white-passing Jewish girl, to write this story from a 3rd person omnicient perspective if I do extensive research?

Writing from many different heritage POV’s in the same story

I’m concerned about the one-of-each approach to choosing your characters’ ethnicities. Unless there’s some specific plot reason for so much disparity, like “representatives from different groups pick their best and brightest to Do A Thing”, it starts to ping my “why so many different groups/lack of multiple people from same marginalized group” meter.

For example, having two Muslims and two Jews seems more realistic to me than one Muslim, one Jew, one Latina, one Native American, etc. Putting it another way: if a Black girl wanted to change the world, I don’t instantly picture her choosing a group with no other Black people in which to do that in. The Black people I know who are trying to change the world are definitely doing it alongside at least some other Black people even if not everyone in the group is Black. The same thing goes for lesbians – not every lesbian would feel safe joining a group of entirely straight girls to accomplish social change.

Another way you can do this having some of the groups overlap, like having the character you listed as African-American be Muslim too (leaving you with two Muslims: one Black and one not), having someone besides the white Christian girl be into girls, etc.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing this in omniscient as long as you’ve read books by people in the groups you’re writing about to get a feel for how they write themselves, as opposed to seeing them through the White Gaze as we’re all programmed to do. (That’s another reason to cut back on the number of groups represented—less voices to master.)

–Shira

I have a few gut instincts with this. My biggest one is I’m looking at “make the world better” and “Native American leader” and wondering if you might not be pulling from the idea that because Natives had a culture that spans working with nature for so long, you’re potentially pulling from Noble Savage roots for making her the leader. There are a lot of subtle biases for Natives that include headstrong warriors, magical natives, noble savages, and basically a whole bunch of “positive” stereotypes that make Natives look like the best possibility for saving the world.

We’re not.

We’re just as divided on how to make the world a better place as the average culture. Our techniques don’t work for the industrial world, because they were built at a different time and place. Yes, they were sustainable, and yes, they were wonderful… but the time for them is gone. We need to rebuild society and while Indigenous attitudes of “respect/work with the earth” should be a core part of that… we don’t own that attitude. And we don’t know how to go about it instinctually. The world is different and we’re struggling as much as others.

My next biggest instinct is how you appear to be tokenizing everyone. It feels checklist-y, to me, because sure you have a white Christian but she’s lesbian, so she’s not majority group. Everyone you’ve said only has two things that make them marginalized (gender and either race or orientation), which means you seem to be writing archetypes instead of people. When you only have one of each member of the group, they become the representation for the group, meaning you actually have less freedom to create good characters. You end up so focused on getting the representation Correct and Respectful that the characters become stick figures, unable to breathe and be people because you’re scared of misrepresentation.

If you look at the difference between shows that only have one primary female character, and ones that have multiple female characters, you’ll see the difference. Sailor Moon, for example, has 10 female characters to pull from. Usagi would be utterly irritating if she were on her own, and probably unwatchable because most girls aren’t like that. Some are, but not all. However, most girls aren’t like Sailor Mercury, either— but some are. The pattern continues throughout the Senshi, where they are all very specific types of girls and each one on their own would be average to even poor representation, but together they create an actual cast of diversity that represents girls as a whole incredibly well, simply because there are ten of them.

Apply the same principle to your work. If you want to be representative, give yourself breathing room. Tokenization happens when there’s only one person of a group “thrown in” because people have some invisible quota for how much diversity a work needs. You won’t be offensive if you swap out one race/religion for another, and in fact you could even have better representation because now you have more “hold points”, so to speak, for each race.

Related— don’t be afraid to have people be two things. Nothing wrong with a Native lesbian and a Black Muslim, especially since Muslim is a religious marker and not any indication of skin tone.

Finally, watch out for internal conflict in the group. I can’t speak for others, but Natives can highly mistrust Christians as a whole, no matter how much this girl is non practicing. Do keep in mind Christianity is an organization that hurt Natives very deeply, from missionaries trying to destroy our religions to many residential schools being religious, and in Canada they only closed down completely in the 1990s. Christianity has left very recent scars on our communities and not all of us can get over that.

Check your motive for including her. Is it to prove that not all Christians are bad? Will you slip in a motive that she learns to overcome white guilt? Is it to teach these marginalized groups a lesson about not being judgemental? Is it because you feel you need a member of the dominant religion in the group, for whatever reason? Pardon me for the potentially inaccurate questions, but I’m wary of why the mix is the way it is. You have a ton of potential for it to go really sour, and I want to pose questions to make sure you’ve checked your own potentially subconscious biases.

~Mod Lesya

If y’all really want to go there, we can. Let’s talk about Black women and stereotypes. Angry Black women? Dark skin. Hoodrats? Dark skin. Babymamas (although no one wants to have kids with us) Dark skin. Welfare and crackheads? Dark skin. Crazy exes? Dark skin. Unsuccessful? Dark skin.

Wives? Light skin. High school crushes? Light skin. Love interests in almost every movie made after 2002? Light skin. Signs a Black man is winning in life? His girl/wife is White or LIGHTSKIN. The only kind of Black woman acceptable to be seen with as a rich Black man? Light skin.

If y’all want to fucking go here, we can. Everything from classic movies to current rap hits tell the Black boys that a lightskinned woman is worth loving. Every chance a rapper gets, he let’s it be known that lightskinned women are the prize. 

Are White people racist? Absolutely but guess what, they still going to pick you over me ANY DAY. So all those internships, jobs, promotions and credits you had to fight for, believe me, there was a dark skin girl fighting harder. Dark skin women been fighting so long, y’all forgot that Claudette the original DARK SKIN woman who refused her seat on an Alabama bus had to watch YOUR GRANDPARENTS AND UNCLES recreate it with a light skinned Black woman so it would be received. Y’all better miss me with the bullshit. 

Omg this is the best show you aren't watching! I love, love, love this show! And it's bloody amazing how diverse the Latinas are on the show!!! I love that the main character is beautiful, quirky and Afro Latina(and chocolate omg) I don't know how I lived without this show before today!!! #thepineapplediaries