Caveat scriptor.

First, our weekly news roundup.

SwanSong love:  The picture to the right might look familiar to you, but take a better look -- that's the word "FINALIST" at the top.  Yup!  SwanSong is one of three finalists for the 2012 Global Ebook Award for Classic Fantasy Fiction.  I'm pretty darned excited about it, and am (somewhat anxiously) awaiting the announcement of the winners next month. Stay tuned....

Seized love:  The Paranormal Romance Guild gave Seized a lovely 4-star review.  Check it out! 

Spread the love:  Don't forget that both Seized and SwanSong are free at Smashwords all this month with coupon code SSWIN. 

*****
Capitalism is a wonderful economic system -- don't get me wrong.  But it has its drawbacks,  one of the worst being the fact that any shyster can make money from naive, unsuspecting people with a dream, and largely get away with it.

In the old days, that meant someone who dreamed of being a "published author" could send his or her manuscript to a vanity publisher.  For a hefty fee, the publisher would format the manuscript into book form, print several hundred copies, and send them to the newly-minted author -- who then, typically, gave away a few as Christmas gifts and then stored the rest of them on a shelf in the garage.

As you might expect, when print-on-demand (or POD) publishing was invented, the charlatans moved in.  One of these companies, PublishAmerica, has been operating a vanity POD press for a number of years.  They've gained a rating of F from the Better Business Bureau due to their shoddy business practices.  But yet, people with a dream of being published are still sending them money.

All that may soon come to a halt.  Three PublishAmerica authors filed a class-action lawsuit against the company last month, alleging the company misrepresents itself as a legitimate publisher and fraudulently charges its authors for services that legit publishers provide for free.  One of the law firms representing the plaintiffs is Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, which was also involved in the price-fixing litigation against Apple and the traditional Big Six publishers, so they know what they're doing.

If you, or someone you know, has been burned by PublishAmerica, I would urge you to go the Hagens Berman website here and join the lawsuit.  And if you haven't ever done business with this company, for gods' sake, don't start now.

So okay, authors should steer clear of PublishAmerica.  What about places like iUniverse or AuthorHouse?  Are they okay?

It's interesting that you should ask, because I stumbled on the news about the PublishAmerica lawsuit while doing a little checking on these two companies.  Guess what?  AuthorHouse and iUniverse are owned by the same company, Author Solutions, which also owns Xlibris, Trafford Publishing, Wordclay, AuthorHouse UK, AuthorHive, Palibrio, and Hollywood Pitch.  Many of Author Solutions' subsidiaries have also been sued over the years for the way they do business.  Authors complain about the publishers "editing" their work by introducing numerous errors that the author then has to pay to have fixed.  And that's even before they charge you for the boxes of your own books that they will never help you sell.

Author Solutions is owned, in turn, by a company called Bertram Capital.  And who or what is Bertram Capital?  It's "a private equity firm that partners with management teams to fuel the expansion of lower middle market companies."  If that sounds similar to the mission statement of Mitt Romney's former company, Bain Capital, you're not far off the mark.  Bertram's other holdings include Extrusion Dies Industries (a "leading designer and manufacturer of extrusion dies, coating heads and related products for producers of cast film, sheet, coatings and laminates"), Sanare (a "leading provider of care management solutions that improve the health and reduce the medical costs of people with diabetes"), and Spireon (a "leading provider of location based services and risk mitigation products, most notably GPS tracking solutions and payment protection systems for the subprime automotive finance industry").  Doesn't sound like the folks at Bertram know much about writing and publishing, does it?  Do you suppose Author Solutions is in business primarily to help authors, or to take their money and run?


Seriously, folks, if you're desperate to be published, don't waste your time and money with these shysters.  Hire an editor, get somebody to make you an eye-catching cover, and upload your book to Amazon, Smashwords and/or PubIt.  None of them will charge you a dime for publishing and selling your work.  In fact, they will pay you.

***
I'm Lynne Cantwell, and I approve this blog post.

News! and: saved by Mom.

First, an FYI that I'm kicking off a book tour tomorrow.  The wonderful people at Goddess Fish Promotions have organized it for me.  First up tomorrow is a review of Seized, and then the rest of the week I'll be posting various musings on various other blogs, a different blog every day.  I'll post the links on Facebook, and tweet them, too, each day.  But in case you'd like the whole list in one convenient place, I've added a tab called "Tour Dates".  Please stop by and post a comment.  And tell your friends! There's a $10 Amazon gift card in it for some lucky commenter.

The following week, Goddess Fish has arranged another tour for me, this one for book reviews.  I've put up links for those dates, as well.  One blogger is already talking about it.  I'm pretty pumped.

*****
So...I was going to annoy all y'all (that's the plural of y'all) with another punctuation rant this week.  But then I remembered it was Mother's Day (in the US -- the UK celebrated theirs last month).  So I'll save my semicolon spiel for another week.

I had a lovely Mother's Day today, thanks.  My daughter Amy got me flowers and a card, and took me out for breakfast.  My daughter Kat, who lives a few hours away, called, and we had a nice chat.

On the way home from running errands this afternoon, I reflected on how different my Mother's Day was than the ones we celebrated with my own mother.  Mom's been gone for a few years now.  She made it past 90 (I should be so lucky as to live as long...) and saw a stunning number of changes in her lifetime.  When she was born, in 1915, horses were still numerous on Chicago's roads.  She and my dad often called the refrigerator the "icebox" because when they were young, that's exactly what it was -- an insulated box that held a block of ice, which was delivered daily by the iceman.  Electricity was just being installed in homes when she was a kid; my mom's siblings used to reminisce about having fixtures on the wall for two types of lights -- a socket for a light bulb, and a gas jet.  The telephone not only hung on the wall, but you shared the line with other families.

She lived through the Great Depression, which instilled in her a kind of crazy frugal streak, and through World War II.  Then she got married to my dad and had three babies, one of whom died in infancy.  (Yes, smartypants, I'm one of the two who survived.)  And then the world accelerated:  faster cars, men walking on the moon, laptop computers, phones you can carry around in your pocket.  She never quite understood the internet, and she never gave up her manual typewriter for a word processor.  Heck, my brother and sister-in-law bought her a microwave, and had to pull it out of the box and plug it in for her, or she never would have used it.

But getting back to Mother's Day: I looked around in the restaurant today, at all the husbands who had taken their wives out for Mother's Day so that Mom wouldn't have to cook, and thought about how my family never would have done that.  My mother was always on KP.  A vacation for her was feeding us somewhere other than at home -- either out of the cooler in the trunk of the car or, later, in the RV.  If Dad ever cooked, it was an egg sandwich for himself, and then Mom would scold him for leaving her a mess to clean up.  So if we ever had a special meal for Mother's Day, chances are that Mom cooked it herself.

It's too late to make up for it now.  But Mom, wherever you are, happy Mother's Day.  I love you.

And happy Mother's Day to all the moms reading this.  I hope you've had a great day.

Outliving your childhood.

It's been a bad couple of months for me.  Oh, not personally, and not professionally -- things are pretty much going great there.  No, the problem is that this year, I've been watching my childhood die. 

First to go was David Jones of the Monkees.  Then, last week, Dick Clark.  And then Jonathan Frid, who played Barnabas Collins on "Dark Shadows".  All of these people were fixtures of my childhood, immortalized in reruns -- never aging, never facing any serious problems in life, always just who they appeared to be on TV.  And now they've died.  And come to find out, they were old.

I suppose it happens to everybody sooner or later, assuming you live long enough.  You pick somebody to idolize -- someone you wish you were like, maybe, or someone who just seems to have a certain kind of cool that you don't have.  Chances are pretty good that that person is older than you.  Which means that chances are pretty good that you'll outlive them.  But when you're eight or ten or twelve, you don't think about that.  It's only when you start racking up your own impressive number of decades that something happens -- like the death of a favorite actor from your childhood -- and it hits you that if that person has gotten old, you probably have, too.

The joke about Dick Clark was that he kept an aging portrait in his attic, a la Dorian Gray.  The stroke he suffered several years ago put paid to that rumor.  Then afterward, it was good to see him back on the air, helping to host "New Year's Rockin' Eve" -- but it was uncomfortable, too.  Clark was doing his best, but his speech was affected.  It was obvious he would never be the same Dick Clark who hosted musicians and helped teenagers rate new records back in the '60s.  I was a kid then, and my Saturday morning routine was to watch a whole bunch of cartoons back-to-back, and then "American Bandstand."  Dick Clark was a fixture on my Saturday mornings for years, and then he was a fixture on my New Year's Eves for years.  And then he wasn't.  And then he was back, but it wasn't the same.  And now he's gone.  He was 82.

Dick, thanks for the music.  I rate you a 100.

I keep thinking Dick Clark must have hosted the Monkees on "American Bandstand," but maybe not.  Their shows were on competing networks -- "Bandstand" was on ABC and "The Monkees" were on NBC.  "The Monkees" was on Monday nights at 6:30 p.m. Chicago time, right before "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In."  (Some of the factoids I have memorized are appalling, huh?)  Davy was my fave right from the start.  He had that cute British accent going on, plus he was adorable -- and he was short, just like me.  I wished, as I got older, that I would get no taller than his five foot three and a half inches -- and hey presto, I didn't.  (Genetics? Sympathetic magic?  Who knows?)  At one point I could even dance like Davy did on the show; friends would actually ask me to do it.  And I taught myself to sing harmony from listening to Monkees records, because -- now the shameful truth can be told -- I wanted to be the fifth Monkee.  I thought they could explain me as Davy's cousin.  And they needed a girl in the group, anyhow, right?

Years later, married and pregnant, I attended one of those '60s groups reunion concerts -- you know, where some promoter rounds up one or two or three members of the original group and assembles a backup band and sends them all out on tour to sing the old songs.  The Monkees, which at that point consisted of Micky, Davy and Peter, were one of the featured acts.  I was disappointed -- they sounded the same, but Davy just wasn't as cute as he had been in his twenties.

The Monkees dropped off my radar screen after that.  Not long ago, I heard that Davy had bought a horse farm in Pennsylvania -- so close to DC! -- but somehow I couldn't gin up the enthusiasm to try to find it.  And now it's too late -- he's gone.  He was 66.

David, thanks for the music.  I'll keep singing harmony with you.

I missed Jonathan Frid's big entrance on "Dark Shadows" -- I didn't start watching the show until well into his run as Barnabas Collins, the English cousin who didn't have an English accent (I can only blame New England inbreeding as the reason why the other Collinses never figured it out).  Frid had done Shakespeare before landing the role of Barnabas; he was certainly a good actor and made a suitably-creepy-but-still-sympathetic vampire. Due in large part to Frid and David Selby (whose character, werewolf Quentin Collins, was introduced later), I considered "Dark Shadows" the only afternoon soap opera worth watching.  Selby went on to many other roles after "Dark Shadows" (he recently played Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre here in DC), but Frid could never seem to shake the role of Barnabas.  And now he's gone.  He was 87.

Jonathan, thanks for the many entertaining afternoons.  I hear you did a cameo for the new "Dark Shadows" movie -- I'll be looking for you.

Eighty-seven? Eighty-two? Sixty-six?  How could that have happened?  I certainly haven't aged....

A very dry post, or: I used to like washing dishes by hand.

Most of the time, I like living in this apartment building.  My unit is spacious, my commute is decent, and the eighth-floor view is pretty spectacular.  I've only discovered two drawbacks:  Bubba, the Apartment Building A/C Unit, is below my windows, and it sounds like a 767 gearing up for takeoff when it cycles on; and when the Universe deals us an "act of God"-type setback, it seems to turn into a multi-day ordeal.

Twisted tree, August 2010. (Thanks, Amy!)

In August 2010, a microburst hit our neighborhood.  The storm only lasted a few minutes, but the damage was incredible: trees had been yanked from the ground, or viciously twisted so their trunks cracked, or both.  And a transformer down the street blew out, leaving us in the dark for 36 hours.  At first, it was kind of like camping.  We have a gas stove, so we could still cook (although the Microwave Queen here had to reacquaint herself with the joys of stovetop cooking) and heat water for washing dishes.  I bought ice and used the freezer compartment of the fridge as a cooler.  And we had plenty of candles.  But I've gotta tell you, 36 hours without power is pushing it.  The elevators were out, which was a problem.  The A/C was also out, which was a bigger problem.  I've never been so grateful to hear Bubba come on as when our service was restored.

Fast-forward now to our latest trauma.  I got up yesterday morning and turned on the bathroom faucet.  Nothing happened.  Hunh, I said to myself, and tried the kitchen faucet.  Same result.  Then I looked out the window.  There, on the other side of Bubba, stood a couple of our maintenance guys, staring at the hillside where our property slopes down to the adjoining apartment complex.  The area behind them looked for all the world like a river delta.  Ah, I deduced, we've had a water pipe break.

Little backhoe. Big mess. Bubba in the foreground. (Thanks, Amy!)

Since then, a little backhoe has been energetically making large piles of dirt, and workers have been going up and down ladders into the resulting hole.  Night and day, rain or shine, these guys have been at it, displaying dogged persistence.  I have every confidence that we will eventually have water again.  But right now, we're past the 36-hour mark, and it's getting kind of old.

In addition, Kitty and Suzu stayed the night last night after attending Katsucon (a local anime convention) with Amy.  Four women in an apartment with just one bathroom is already pushing it, but having no running water made things...interesting.  (Actually, it might have helped; we didn't need to negotiate who got the shower first.)

Today, I emptied the dishwasher and did all the dishes by hand.  I used to like doing dishes by hand.  No, really.  There's something calming about the warm water, the repetitive motion, the chance to let your mind wander.  Today, however, I had to heat the water, rig up a rinse basin, keep an eye on how much clean water I had left, and so on.  I never got to the Zen state.  I was disappointed.  Although there was something satisfying about having all the dishes clean, dry, and put away at the end of it.

This is supposed to be a writing blog, of course, and not a "Lynne is a whinypants" blog, so I'm trying to figure out a writing connection.  Hmm.  How about this:  The process of writing is kind of like washing dishes by hand.  Some days, you can easily find the Zen state, where the ideas are clicking and the words just flow.  Other days, you have to spend too much time on the mechanics to be able to relax.  But with dogged persistence, eventually you'll reach your goal.  (I grant you, it's lame, but it's the best I can do without a shower.)

One last thing:  my post on "love of language" is up today at the "For the Love of Love" event on Terri Giuliano Long's blog.  Hope you enjoy it.

Late to the party again.

So this week's post is late -- I was sick with a cold, okay?  And I'm not even going to post about writing today.  But indulge me.

I said I wasn't going to turn this into a political blog, and I meant it.  But as a former journalist, I feel compelled to take note of today's Internet protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 24 hours (which is highly doubtful if you're reading this), you have likely already run into plenty of coverage of the protest against these two bills.  Briefly, the "innocent" aim of these two pieces of legislation is to protect the entertainment industry and other owners of intellectual property by having their work ripped off by Internet pirates.  The supporters say Internet piracy is costing copyright holders tons of revenue.  But it's hard to catch these pirates -- they've largely moved their operations offshore, out of the reach of US police agencies.  So the solution put forth in these bills is to hold Internet service providers accountable for every page they put on the web.  They would also give the US Justice Department the authority to shut down websites for publishing pirated materials to the web.

Sounds good…until you look more closely at what the websites would be required to do.  Companies like Google, YouTube and Wikipedia would be responsible for policing every link on every page in their vast databases.  New companies might have trouble getting start-up funding because of concerns over their ability to police content as they grow.  Not to mention that the unethical could maliciously plant pirated content on someone else's website -- say, that of a competitor.

All of those objections are important, unquestionably.  But I'm most concerned about the censorship aspect.  We would be handing an agency of the federal government broad powers to block websites.  I don't know if you remember, but during the Chinese Olympics, foreign journalists complained that China promised them full Internet access -- and then didn't provide it.  China routinely blocks its citizens' web access.  So do a number of other countries.  With these bills, the United States would be heading down that slippery slope.  It doesn't take a conspiracy nut to see how this could lead to web censorship for other reasons -- including disagreeing with the government.

But that's not all.  To me, this is just another example of the freedoms Americans have lost, or are in danger of losing, since 9/11.  The Washington Post published a great op-ed piece this weekend detailing how we stack up against nations that we've criticized for human rights violations (hint: we're looking more like them every day).  I recommend that you check it out.

Next week, back to the writing biz, I promise.