Goodreads, STGRB, and Marketing

How is that so much drama can revolve around a single website such as Goodreads and from it mature adults who should know far better than they appear to can think it appropriate to so such horrible things to each other?

Review bullying, arguing, websites like Stop the Goodreads Bullies, and with it personal attacks, threats to reveal personal information online, accusations of illegal behaviors and inappropriate relationships: the list goes on and on and on.

It has reached levels that go beyond just words and is well in the realm of harassment and endangerment if you take them all at complete face value.  These are things if done in person would lead, quite likely, to blows or worse, yet they seem to come hard and fast on the internet.

And the obvious reason is: Why?

One word:  Marketing.

New Pricing Paradigms

Mind the Thorns has finished it's giveaway period on Goodreads, the books have been out in the wild for a week now and many have landed at their destinations.  Yay!  One kind reveiwer has already spotted some typoes that slide past me, my editor, or both of us.  More than likely my editor caught them but I didn't make the transition over to the document from the one he sent me.

This, dear readers, is the glory of Google Documents.  There's no file swapping.  He makes comments and they're right there for me to make the required changes.  It's glorious.

Now that all said there was one little thing I feared would come up, and I'm glad it did because the reviewer was very kind about broaching it.

It was a quick read (about an hour), and the author sets it up for a great series (though I think it would be better to compile it all into one whole book rather than a lot of self published novels). 

So I'm going to, if you'll indulge me, lay some cards out on the table.

On being a cover band/writer

There's been a bit of a curfluffle as there often is over on Good Reads, this time about 50 Shades of Grey. For those of you who don't follow literary circles (using the term loosely), the 50 Shades series is a trilogy of novels that follow a dominant man as he seduces an innocent, loving, young woman. The works are getting a great deal of attention in part due to the history of the work (it began as Twilight fan fiction) and because it's become the new guilty pleasure: A saucy kinky steamy romance complete with handcuffs and blindfolds.

And while a great deal can be said about the transitory nature of the book and how they've brought a good number of people out of their shells, or rather lead them to think thoughts that they thought only "those people" would think, I'd like to focus on the first of those two, the origin story of the novels.

But first, let's talk about Cover Bands and Harry Potter.

Short Story: The Next Best Thing

As I work on my next novel I've been doing a lot of short stories to help flesh out the world and the characters. I've debated a lot about posting them here on the website and come down on the "share them" side of the debate."

So here we have a chance to meet the novel's protagonist Mercy Lyons when she was still at the Naval Academy and still just a first year Midshipman. This was originally written for the Good Reads website Weekly Short Story Contest Group.


"The Next Best Thing"
1600 Words

I was in my second year at the Academy.

Alexandria, this beautiful thing from Tyson 4, dumped me that morning because she said she knew her cat better than knew me.

Commander LeGrange had just lit me up in front of my entire Terraforming seminar for missing two equations in my draft term paper.

My roommate was back in our bunk with the Hanover twins, and he let me know that I was not to come home that night.

So there I was, at the junior officer bar, two beers into my charted course to complete inebriation.

Get off my lawn! Wait? Your Lawn?

One thing that I find challenging about targeting audiences is to really get my head around who understands what when it comes to technology and modern trends.

Talking to students the today I realized that ten years ago a Palm Pilot was cutting edge technology.  On mine I could read websites, provided I plugged the pilot into a computer and downloaded a snapshot of the pages I wanted with the day's news.  The news was right there in my hand to read at my leisure, provided I didn't want news any more current than the last time I did a manual sync.  In that time not only is color a standard feature (you paid a lot more for a color pilot), but, well... there really is no comparison.

Of course this didn't post didn't come to mind at that moment but last week when I was talking to a fellow teacher, who I will call Mike.

Romantic Robots

Over on Goodreads a rather engaging question was posed:  Can a robot have romantic feelings without violating the three "Laws of Robotics"?

For those unfamiliar, the Three Laws of Robotics were created by Issac Asimov as proposed fundamental rules that we should have to instill in all robots.  First, a robot cannot cause harm to a human, nor can it allow, through its inaction, a robot to come to harm.  A robot, must, by this law, come to a human's aid.   Second, a robot must obey all orders given to it by a human, unless doing so would violate the first law.  The Third law requires a robot to protect itself, unless doing so would violate the other two laws.  A robot would get out of the way of a speeding train, but it would still rush into the train's path to save a life of a human. A robot would also destroy itself if ordered to do so, since obedience trumps self-preservation.

These three laws were more a vehicle for Asimov to explore the Law of Unintended consequences than they were, I think, actual laws we would need to imprint on robots. Throughout his short stories, attempts to adhere to these laws create a variety of odd and unforeseen behaviors, sending his protagonists off to explain how a robot can be following these rules at the same time.  The stories are one part high science fiction and one part logical debate.

Which brings us around, finally, to the issue of "Can a robot be romantic while still following the three laws?"