Done!

On Monday evening, I handed my wonderful editor my Christmas novella.  (I’ve seen a preliminary cover but haven’t gotten the go-ahead to share it yet–trust me, as soon as I can show everyone, I will be plastering it everywhere!)

This was the first thing that I’d written completely on contract.  I had a lot of worries about this particular novella.  It’s written as a prequel to my publishing debut, PROOF BY SEDUCTION, and there were just not a huge number of happily married characters from that book who I could work into a prequel.

In fact, there was only one character who was happily married–and that was my hero’s man of business, William White.  Mr. White was an interesting side character in the book.  He doesn’t get much time on-screen, but I always imagined him going back to his wife in the evenings and snickering at my hero, saying, “That man has money and power but HOLY MOTHER OF PEARL does he ever need to get laid.”  Even though William White is unflinchingly polite, as any servant must be, there is always that undercurrent of amusement in all of his dealings with his employer.

And so when my editor asked me to write a prequel, I began to wonder about William White.  Who was this man?  How did he get to be so self-assured?  Why did the extremely proper and stringent Marquess of Blakely hire a man just into his thirties to help run his massive estates?  And what kind of woman would be a good match for such a man?

My heroine just kind of appeared full-fledged, Athena-style.  She’s the one who told me that the hero of my novella was not, in fact, Mr. William White.  He was William Q. White–and I can’t wait until you find out what the “Q” stands for.

*snicker*

Copyright and the blind reader

So a few days ago I mentioned that I saw copyright less as a matter of moral prerogative, and more like a bargain with society.

A few days ago, there was a discussion on RWA’s PAN loop about Bookshare.  For those of you who don’t know, Bookshare is an organization that scans in books, performs optical character recognition, and produces a computer-generated reading of the text of the book.  There are two additional pieces of information you need to know.  First, Bookshare gives away the computer-generated reading–for free–without royalties to the author.  Second, it only gives away that reading to people who are either legally blind, or who have some other documented disability.

Upon discovering Bookshare, someone on the loop was upset.  Her take was that even though the service was offered for blind people, Bookshare was copyright infringement.  And while she might be willing to grant the right to reproduce her book to benefit the disabled, nobody had asked her.  I don’t want to blame that author or others who agreed with her; I think that response is perfectly understandable.

I don’t share it, though–and it’s precisely because I don’t think of copyright as my prerogative, but instead, as a bargain with society.  Copyright–the granting thereof, and the enforcement thereof–is expensive.  It costs society money.  The copyright office uses taxpayer dollars.  The courts use even more taxpayer dollars.  It costs society in the form of legislation enacted to help prevent copyright infringement (for instance the Digital Millenium Copyright Act), which may lead to over-enforcement in some cases.  So why should society spend all that money, time, and effort?

The answer is, because it gets something back in return.  In return for recognizing my copyright for a limited time, after the time is over, society owns my work–I don’t.  (I’ll be dead then, but hey.)  In return for recognizing my copyright for a limited time, society gets the right to make fair use of my work–to parody my work or to quote selected portions for review and criticism or just for fun.

Also, it turns out that in return for recognizing my copyright for a limited time, if I publish my work, society gets the right to make copies available to the blind.  For free.  Without paying me a dime or asking for permission.  Don’t believe me?  Check this out.

If you think about this law, it makes sense.  It takes a lot of effort to transform a print book into a blind-accessible copy, and the market for such items is both very, very small, and not particularly wealthy.  If they couldn’t make copies for free, and provide those copies through volunteer work, blind people would have an extremely tiny reading library.  Almost none of those books would be romance novels.  Blind people would either have to choose between not reading, a truly horrible option, or looking for books they could read in violation of copyright.  In my mind, Congress’s decision to allow these people an option to read widely, without violating copyright law, engenders respect for an author’s copyright and for the rule of law generally.  Good laws don’t make people want to break them.

But it only makes sense if you see copyright as an author’s bargain with society, not as a matter of an author’s inalienable right.

Indecisive

Mr. Milan and I have a problem:  We are both indecisive about little things.

We might decide we want to go out to eat.  (In fact, since I am on deadline and he is working weird hours, we often decide this.)  Usually, the conversation devolves into something like this:

Me: Where should we go?
Mr. Milan: I don’t know.  Where do you want to go?
Me: No fair.  I asked first.
Mr. Milan: I asked last.
Me: Okay, let’s each list criteria about the place we would like to go, and when we narrow it down so much that there’s only one such place, we will know where to go.
Mr. Milan: Great.  I’ll start.  The place we go must serve food.
Me: It must serve edible food.
Mr. Milan: It must serve edible, yummy food.
Me: I see this is going to take a long time.

My whole family is like this.  At one family reunion, we decided to order pizza and two of my brothers-in-law watched the pizza-ordering process devolve into an endless rehash of toppings we liked and didn’t like.  Luckily, they were smart and took the bull by the horns and made decisions themselves.  I think they have a secret pact to make decisions for us–and I suspect they were more than a little bummed to discover they had not won themselves a new ally in Mr. Milan.

Of course, there are some things I am not indecisive about.  In fact, some of my biggest life decisions I have made in all of three seconds, without need for dilly-dallying.

Are you ever indecisive?  If so, how are you indecisive?

Copyright, Part III

But Courtney, someone somewhere is saying, you are an author.  You make money on intellectual property.  Don’t you favor strong intellectual property regimes?  Don’t you know that intellectual property is in crisis?

Yeah, piracy sucks.  And like I said, pirates are assholes.  But . . . if I live the average life expectancy, I will get eleventy-one more years of copyright protection for my book.  So heftier protections–a larger scope of copyright protection, or a longer term of copyright–is not really going to help with the main problem.  Pirates exist because people are assholes.  If people are assholes, in violation of the law, it’s hard to come up with a law that stops them from being assholes.  Not unless you want to go way draconian, and writing books and publishing should be fun, not a second invention of the Spanish inquisition.

We don’t need stronger copyright laws.  We need stronger social norms against being an asshole–and that means that you can’t go grabbing everything you can get.

Let’s go back to my playground analogy.  People are more likely to respect your claim to have a soccer ball at recess if your claim is reasonable: say, for ten minutes, or for half of recess, or maybe if you are playing with a large group, for all of recess.  But if you say, “Anyone who gets the soccer ball gets it for a month,” the social norm of respecting the first possessor of the ball as the putative owner for some duration is going to fade real fast.

If you don’t want people to be assholes, you shouldn’t be an asshole yourself.  And I think that pushing for more and more copyright protection–long past the point of commercial value for 99% of the copyrights out there–is a purely asshole move.  Don’t want people to be assholes?  Don’t be an asshole yourself.

Serendipity (or not)

So, one of the things I’m doing at the last minute is trying to place my novella heroine on a Regency-era map.  I know that she her father owns a circulating library.  When I started my novella, I figured out the basics of how circulating libraries worked and then left some of the details–like, how much money could a circulating library expect to make in a day?–as a question-mark to be filled in later.

Of course, now it’s later and I’m looking for details.  In any event, I also figured I should find out whether there were a great many of them (answer: yes, by then) and where they were situated.  The answer is: most of them are in very nice parts of town.  The problem is that my hero needs to be somewhat local to the library, and my hero is not going to be living on Harley Street or its environs.

Then I found this lovely list.  I looked up all those addresses.  Most of them wouldn’t do.  But there’s one that’s right off Chancery Lane (where my hero works) and Chancery Lane is adjacent to several areas of London that fall into the “fairly dodgy” spectrum.  Perfect!

But it gets better.  Last time I was in London, I visited Chancery Lane because the book I was writing then had a few scenes set on Chancery Lane.  In fact, it so happened that right after we turned off of it, I saw a tiny bookstore that said they’d been in business since 1830.  1830!  Perfect.  I dragged Mr. Milan inside.  When I first saw the location of  314 High Holborn on the incredibly detailed Horwood map of London, I nearly died.  It was exactly where I remembered that little shop.  Oh, Serendipity!  I know what that shop looks like inside.  I know how narrow the rooms are.  I know there’s a teeny tiny rickety staircase in the back, where even I had to duck my head not to hit it on the way down to the basement of books.

It turns out, it was my abysmal sense of direction rather than any actual serendipity.  I pulled up my pictures from the trip (yes, I took pictures!) and discovered that the little shop I went into was actually 16 Fleet Street.  The wrong end of Chancery Lane.  Drat!

Copyright, Part II

I think maybe one of the reasons I don’t see eye-to-eye with other people about copyright is that I don’t see copyright as protecting something that is morally mine.  Yes, I wrote my book.  Yes, I sweated blood over it.  But I wouldn’t have been able to write the book I did if I hadn’t read so voraciously, and the books I read shaped me.  It’s kind of a gestalt peer-review process of fiction: the writer I am stands on the shoulders of the writers I have read.

And so I see copyright as a way to help authors make enough money so that they can write a little bit more (or, um, promote her book so that anyone reads it at all).  It’s not a moral thing; it’s a manners thing.  (Not plagiarism, though–plagiarism and copyright infringement are distinct, and plagiarism is morally abhorrent.)

I’m not sure this makes any sense, but I see copyright as kind of my bargain with society:  You guys recognize that I did something cool, and when I’m done with my toys over here, I’ll pack them up in a nice box and let everyone else play with them.  That’s it.  Copyright infringement, in my mind, is like taking a soccer ball from someone else on the playground–if someone else took possession of the ball first, they should get to use it first that recess.  Taking the ball away from someone who claimed it first is a complete asshole move–but it’s not the same thing as stealing.  It’s just being an asshole.

Copyright, like a soccer ball at recess, has a time limit.

I recognize that this is a minority view.

Er….

So, there’s a discussion on Smart Bitches about what things an author can and can’t say online, and at what point people get turned off by an author.  It makes me nervous, because while I try very, very hard to be sweet and nice and gracious . . . okay, let’s face it, I went to law school for a reason.  And that reason had nothing to do with my being sweet and nice and able to handle confrontation in a gracious manner.  When I get an idea in my head, I am about as gracious as a bulldog with lockjaw.

One of the extremely practical reasons I decided not to post about politics on this blog had nothing to do with turning people away with my political beliefs, and everything to do with the fact that I handle disagreements more like a lawyer and less like an author who thinks that all viewpoints are valid.  (Although I do think other viewpoints are valid!  Sometimes!  Although definitely not if your viewpoint is on the content of law and is inconsistent with fifty years of Supreme Court precedent.  It is just that I show my, er, appreciation by jumping up and down on other viewpoints, trampoline style, to see what survives, rather than handling them like unique and delicate flowers.)

So this whole Suzanne Brockman thing has me in a bit of an uncomfortable tither–because that could so easily be me.  I would be SO MUCH WORSE than she is under these circumstances.  And yes, I could say that she shouldn’t have said this or shouldn’t have said that.  But my argument style tends to be more along the lines of shoot first, interrogate the bleeding corpse later, and then chop its head off and bury the body in unconsecrated ground if it doesn’t have a satisfactory answer.  It’s not a pretty sight.  And the scary thing is that I have toned myself down SO MUCH over the last ten years.

I am fairly certain that at some point in my career, I am going to say something I shouldn’t, and then I will dig myself into a hole by trying to explain where I’m coming from.

I am toast.  That is all.

End-of-book math

I’m working on finishing up my novella–the one that’s coming out October 1st.  I promised my editor she’d get it over the weekend (and I don’t think she reads my blog, but if she does, there are NO WORRIES, it is coming along fine, STOP READING THIS ENTRY, there is no reason to panic at all.)

At the time I made the promise, it made sense.  I only had about 5,000 words left to write (ha ha ha) and most of what I had was fairly clean.  So, no problem–crank through 5,000 words in a few days, and then spend most of the week polishing and bring things together and smoothing motivations into place.  Right?  Right? Ha ha ha.

I’d forgotten that the last 5,000 words are a lot harder than the first 5,000–or even the middle 20,000.  You have to carefully join all these loose ends, clean up all these plot threads.  And then, when you’re writing a scene that’s supposed to be a short little join between the day and the night (so to speak), filling a tiny little gap and explaining how your heroine comes to be in place B, it majorly sucks when something that was a tiny worry, one you thought you just had to smooth over a little bit, turns into something major, something huge.  And you can’t just beat the scene back into place and make it small, because it’s fighting you to be big.  And you know the scene is right-without this, your heroine’s arc just won’t sit right, but dammit, it is a novella, there wasn’t going to be room for your heroine to have much of a character arc.

Too bad.  She’s got one now.

And all those tiny edits I’d dropped into the first chapter for fun last night suddenly make sense.  Stupid subconscious.  Why do you do this to me?

I started yesterday with around 3,000 words to go.  I wrote 2,000 words.  Now I have 4,000 words left to go.

Because you asked

Yes.  I’m doing this because you asked.

Okay, nobody asked–but, like the romance hero who just knows the heroine really wants a kiss even though she’s saying no, I can magically intuit that, even though you are all leaning slightly away from me, you really mean yes.

You were thinking to yourself that 12 months–at this point, eleven months and a mere handful of weeks–was too much to wait for PROOF BY SEDUCTION.  February of 2010 is impossibly far away.  None of you could wait that long.

Well, don’t tell me I don’t give my readers what they want!  Here at courtneymilan.com, we (that would be the royal “we”) wouldn’t want you to wait one day longer than necessary.  And so instead of making you wait eleven months and 19 days for PROOF BY SEDUCTION, we’ve decided to shorten the wait.  In just ten months and nineteen days you’ll be able to buy PROOF!  That’s right–PROOF’s been moved up a month.  Yay!

P.S.  I just wish it were coming out on January 2.  Then it would be 01022010, and that’s a palindrome.  :(  Off by one!