administrative

I’ve been giving thought to this for some time, both before and since the blogging hiatus I took this winter, and I have determined that I need to hang up my blogging spurs, such as they are.

Basically, I am not cut out to be a blogger.  No matter how I try, or how I try to convince myself that it’ll be different this time if I just do this instead of that, I don’t do short, breezy, and casual very well.  Nor indeed short, hard-hitting, and serious. Mostly I don’t do short very well.  And I don’t do it reflexively at all.  I tend, as anyone who’s read this blog very much already knows, to write essay-length pieces.

A little aside on this, if you’ll indulge me: Most writers I know seem to find over time that they have a “natural length,” an average quantity of verbiage they are wont to spew in the average day’s work.  My “natural length” as a writer, if such a thing can be said to exist, is about 1500 words. As some of you may recall from agonized attempts to pad out college term papers to their requisite length — and I must note that making wordcount on academic papers was never my personal bugbear, but when I taught undergraduates,  many of my freshman comp students seemed to struggle with it a great deal — writing 1500 words takes a lot more time than reading 1500 words.  1500 words — about 6 double-spaced typed pages — is a pretty good writing day for most of the writers I know.  Sometimes I have a really good writing day and I get more than that.  Sometimes I spend all day grinding against something that’s hard to structure or express and I get less.  But that’s about average for me.

And herein lies the basic problem: writing 6 pages takes time and energy and concentration and so on. I only have so many hours in the day, and only so much energy and ability to concentrate.  I can spend it on blogging or I can spend it on writing books, but I can’t really do both.  Not reliably, and not well.  If I’m writing a lot of blog stuff I’m usually not writing a lot of book stuff, and vice versa, and either way the guilt sets in, and either way something isn’t getting done the way I would prefer it to get done, and, well, it’s just not helpful.

If I could easily and reliably write short’n’sweet for the blog, and writing blog entries didn’t suck time and resources away from my work, it might be a different story, but it ain’t.  Turns out that the answer isn’t “take some time away from thinking about the blog and then things will be different,” after all.

Oh, as they say, well.

I plan — as I have time — to finish recording podcasts of The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, to which I will post links in this blog as I can get that done, because I’d like to finish that for those of you who’ve been listening.  And I’ll leave the blog archives where they are.

Thanks for reading, and may all your domestic adventures be delightful.

I am not amused. A few days ago, as far as Amazon.com was concerned, I had written or edited five books that came up when a search on my name was run in the “all departments” search.

As of today? One. Virgin: The Untouched History.

Why? Because Amazon has decided that things with icky GLBT and/or sexually explicit content are icky! And also might make the eyes of helpless children explode! Or turn them queer!  Or make them think about (shudder) their naughty bits.  Or (even worse) someone else’s naughty bits. And as we all know, when that happens, the Ewoks dance terrorists win, thousands more workers in the American automotive industry get laid off, people buy automatic rifles and shoot innocent people, bell bottoms come back in style, and God kills a kitten.

So they had to strip all such items of their Amazon Rank.

Mind you, if I deliberately search only on “Books,” clicking that option in the search box, all of my books appear.  But I have to turn on the “Books” function.  A search on “All Departments” does not, in fact, give the search results from all departments at all: it gives highly censored search results.

You will perhaps comprehend that not all people are likely to specifically click the “Books” option on an Amazon search.  In fact, I confess that mostly, when I have used Amazon.com in the past, have not done so, because I operated under the perfectly reasonable assumption that when the search parameters are set for “All Departments” the search will, in point of fact, search all the available departments.

So the “All Departments” search is not at this point a comprehensive search of all departments.  It is a censored search that disallows certain types of results from appearing at all.  Effectively, Amazon is attempting — by duping the good-faith searcher into thinking that all of Amazon’s for-sale items have been searched — to mislead the user of their website in regard to whether or not Amazon carries or sells certain items.  Given that many users use Amazon not to see whether Amazon carries an item that is already known to them, but to browse for items they may not have encountered previously, this effectively means that Amazon.com is disallowing items with GLBT or sexually explicit content to be encountered.

Think about how you use Amazon.com, or the public library, or indeed a brick and mortar bookstore (if you are lucky enough to still have one of those around, since so many of them have been wiped out of existence by Amazon.com in the past 10 years).  Think about how you most often encounter new-to-you books that look enticing enough that you’ll pick them up and read the jacket copy, or maybe even to buy them and take them home.

By browsing.

Exactly the point.

I will further note that for an author, having only one of their several books easily findable on Amazon.com might, y’know, do some bad things to their sales, and thus to their ability to make a living. Publishers do, you know, consider an author’s prior sales as part of how they decide whether or not to publish new books.  (Prior sales also influence what kinds of print runs a publisher will produce of a new title, and what kinds of promotion those new titles will receive.)

This is not okay.

It’s especially not okay because it constitutes a massive attempt to make information on sexuality — explicit and not-explicit — difficult or impossible to find. Some of my friends’ sex ed titles are effectively erased from general Amazon searches because of this maneuver, including non-explicit titles aimed at responsible and comprehensive sex education for children and young adults.  Other titles that are affected deal with important topics like contraception, sex work, sexual violence, and sexual health.

I don’t think I need to rehearse all the very many reasons this is not okay.

Amazon rank this, Amazon.com: I have deleted all my payment information from my Amazon.com account and I have followed procedure (email their customer service from the e-mail account associated with your Amazon.com account or call 1-866-216-1072 ) to close my Amazon.com account permanently.  Your policy is cowardly, bigoted, homophobic, repressive, oppressive, and thoroughly repugnant, and even if you reverse this policy decision tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. Seattle time, you have lost my business for good.

If you need or want some books, or for that matter CDs or DVDs, find an independent book/media seller near you.  My favorite is Baltimore’s own mighty Atomic Books.  If you stop by, or send in an order (they happily do mail order and special orders — they order things for me all the time!) tell Benn and Rachel (and everyone else) I sent you.

I am not inclined, under normal circumstances, to check my web stats or userlogs.  I know I probably should, but as it is, I get around to it about twice a year.  Maybe three if I’m really procrastinating something just as hard as I possibly can.

But I recently did check my blog stats and user activity logs and whatnot for this blog, just to see what the activity’s been like since I resumed posting here more regularly, and was bemused to note that one of the posts that gets the most traffic is an old post on how to wash dishes by hand.  It’s the post that gets the most search engine traffic by far.   At least a few times a day, from the looks of it, someone lands on that blog post after searching on “how to wash dishes” or “washing dishes properly.”

Or, in the case of one obviously harried Googler, “how to wash the dishes properly m*th*rf*ck*r.”  (Naughty word disemvowelled for your work-browsing pleasure.)

A friend of mine wondered aloud whether this might’ve been Samuel L. Jackson, between housekeepers.

(Just in case it was, Samuel, please, in the future, feel free to have your agent call my agent and I’ll get in touch with you directly.  It’s cool.  I understand.)

Which brings me to the burden of my speech here: I never would’ve expected that post to get so much traffic.  Of all the things I could write about, and even of all the domestic-labor-related things I could write about, I must say hand dishwashing never seemed like it would be so popular.  Or a matter on which so many people would turn to Asking Uncle Google, for that matter.

So I invite you, should you have unresolved housekeeping or cookery questions, please to feel free to ping me with them. I can’t promise to have all the answers, but I’m happy to offer thoughts if I have any.  The dishwashing post was the result of a couple folks asking me about it, and it seems to have proven useful, and I’m all for that.

Do please leave comments in the actual blog, though, since I don’t see them if they’re left somewhere on some RSS feed.  People reading this through the LiveJournal feed particularly should keep this in mind, because I’ve noticed that people often leave comments in LJ to posts that do not actually originate from LJ, apparently out of reflex.  But here’s the thing: if you comment on LJ, I will not see it.

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I’ve put up the next two chapters of The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, in case anyone has actually been listening to them.  Sorry for the delay in getting these up.

The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, chapter 4

The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, chapter 5