Ordinary Day

I’ve seen a lot of reaction in the news to the events in Charleston, and in particular to the growing outcry to take down the Confederate flag from various places–South Carolina and Alabama being the ones I immediately noticed. I’ve also seen reports that Amazon and Walmart are removing merchandise with the flag on it from sale, and I’ve even heard that merch involving the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard is taking the flag off the car’s hood.

But, this being the contentious issue that it is, of course there are people shaking canes and yelling about this. I saw one particular report going around Facebook of an individual loudly pontificating about how removal of the Confederate flag from public display is tantamount to “cultural genocide”.

For the record: speaking as a Southerner born and bred, cultural genocide my ass. I mean honestly. Have you met the South?

I am for the removal of this flag. There are a whole host of reasons to be proud of being from the South, and that flag ain’t one of ’em. I posted about this on the social networks yesterday about several of my favorites, and got a flood of responses from others as well.

Music

Elvis freggin’ Presley. That man right there is singlehandedly responsible for most of my pride in being a Kentuckian, thanks to his “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and “Kentucky Rain”. And I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: he’s also responsible for the vast majority of my lifelong tastes in music. So damn straight I’m proud of that.

But it would be remiss of me to not mention the rest of the awesome musicians that hail from the South–white and black. Here’s a roundup of the names that came up in my Facebook thread! Johnny Cash. Loretta Lynn. Dolly Parton. The Oak Ridge Boys. Jerry Lee Lewis. Ray Charles. Aretha Franklin. Nat King Cole. Fats Domino. Charlie Daniels. The Big Bopper. Little Richard. Hank Williams. Buddy Holly. The Everly Brothers. Asleep at the Wheel. Austin City Limits.

There are many, many more I’m sure a lot of you out there could name, thanks to bluegrass and country music in general, not to mention rockabilly and the early days of rock and roll and zydeco (special shoutout for zydeco because hell yeah, Cajun and French \m/).

Also honorable and noble mention to the entire O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack.

Mmmmmm Key Lime Pie

Food

The South: land of food that is very, VERY bad for you but OMG SO TASTY. Kentucky Fried Chicken. Chicken fried steak. Okra. Key lime pie. Pecan pie. Sweet tea. Popeye’s Chicken. Cornbread. Crawdads. Catfish. Grits. Peaches. Sweet tater casseroles. Gator tails. Gumbo. BBQ. Tex-Mex food.

‘Cause yeah basically, if it looks like food, the South deep fries the hell out of it.

Writers

There’s a lot of Southern literature. Being, well, me, I’m specifically interested in the science fiction. Cherie Priest and Alex Bledsoe come immediately to mind as awesome SF writers from the South whose works I have deeply enjoyed–Cherie Priest’s Eden Moore books in particular, and I’ve rhapsodized in depth about Bledsoe’s The Hum and the Shiver.

Shoutout to Rachel Caine as well, hailing from Texas! ‘Cause y’all should know I love me some Rachel Caine, too.

And my aunt Teresa brought up Fannie Flagg who wrote Fried Green Tomatoes! (See below re: frying things being a critical part of Southern cuisine!)

Events

It was pointed out QUITE CORRECTLY that New Orleans has Mardi Gras. And while we’re on the topic, let us note that the Kentucky Derby was brought up repeatedly on my Facebook thread.

Also, while I historically have favored going to Worldcon, it is important to note that the South DOES have DragonCon–and a lot of other science fiction conventions as well. We DO represent in geekdom!

Places to Visit

Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Fort Boonesborough State Park in Kentucky. Bernheim Forest, also in Kentucky. Dollywood (see previous section on Music!). Busch Gardens in Virginia. Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. DISNEY WORLD, f’r chrissakes. What cultural heritage wouldn’t be proud of Disney World, I ask you!

SPAAAAAAACE

Kennedy Space Center. Astronaut training and mission control in Houston. Because SPAAAAAAAACE.

Language

Y’all know I’m a language nerd. This includes Southern-isms! “Criminitly”. Describing large quantities of anything as “a big ol’ mess o’ <whatever>”. If you’re in a reasonably good state, being “fair to middlin'”. Just off the top of my head–there are, of course, countless more examples.

And more…

Dogwood trees. Thunderstorms (because I do miss good and proper Kentucky thunderstorms, though I do NOT miss Kentucky tornadoes). Fireflies–or, as we called ’em when I was a kid, lightning bugs. Pussy willows. The chirp of crickets.

In other words…

All of this is just barely scratching the surface of the rich culture of the South–none of which will be threatened in the slightest if states stop flying the Confederate flag. If anything, hopefully it’ll help Southern culture take stock of itself and realize that it wouldn’t be what it is today without both white and black Southerners–because yeah, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.? SOUTHERNERS.

Go back and look at that list of names under Music further up the post, too. Lots of black artists there–and I wouldn’t be a truly conscientious Elvis fan if I didn’t acknowledge how he was influenced by the black artists who came before him.

Fellow white Southerners, I put to you that we should not be this guy:

Pro Tip: NOT THE HERO OF THE MOVIE

Because let’s get this straight: racism has stained the honor of the South for long enough.

And pulling that flag down from being publicly displayed is a good first step to fixing that. Let’s keep it up.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

So there I was reading my feed of articles coming off the Mary Sue when I saw they’d put up this: “101 Things We Wish Apple Gave Us Instead of That U2 Album and How to Get Rid of It”.

And my immediate reaction was “wait, WHAT?” And I found another article on Ars Technica, here.

Because apparently not only did U2 hand their album out for free over iTunes as part of Apple’s big event this week, the album’s also now been added to everybody’s iTunes libraries.

And sorry, Apple, sorry, U2, but that’s just obnoxious. If the band wants to hand out their album for free, dandy, more power to them. Promote the hell out of it and tell everybody on iTunes ‘hey look! A free thing! Click here to get the free thing!’ And stand back and watch the downloads roll in, because sure, people like free things.

But you know what people don’t like? Editing their online data without their consent.

I just logged into my iTunes account and clicked on ‘Purchases’, and yep, there it is, right there at the top of my recent purchase list. Except I didn’t ask for the damn thing. I don’t want it. Even aside from the matter of how I’m not a fan of this particular band or of most rock in general–’cause as you all know, if your band doesn’t have a fiddle player and at least one bouzouki, I do not care–the thing that annoys me here is the editing of my account data. And giving me no way to delete it, either. It’s useless data to me. It’s taking up space in my purchase history, and okay yeah fine I can apparently ‘hide’ it, but my point is, you shouldn’t be messing with user data like that to begin with.

And okay yeah sure fine, the album does not appear to have actually shown up on my phone; I’ll need to check my computer to see if it showed up there. And I’m aware that there’s an easy answer here: “if you don’t want the album, Anna, don’t download it or listen to it”.

Thing is? If that album shows up on my computer without me having asked for it in the first place, that’s pretty much the equivalent of Apple not only standing on the street yelling FREE ALBUM GET YER FREE ALBUM HERE, but actually walking up to people and stuffing CDs into their pockets, no matter how you try to say “NO THANK YOU”.

It’s not a big problem in the grand scheme of things. It’s absolutely a petty first world problem.

But dammit, have some respect for the integrity of your user data, Apple. Don’t go stuffing things into our pockets that we didn’t actually ask you for. You wouldn’t do that if we walked into your Apple Stores in person, would you? (You’d BETTER not.) So don’t do it online either.

ETA: Okay, further investigation shows that this album does not appear to have actually invaded my iTunes library, no doubt because I do not actually have Automatic Downloads turned on. I am however hearing from friends that THEY have had it show up. scrunchions tells me it startled her quite a bit because she KNEW she hadn’t purchased any U2, and for a long bit there she was afraid she’d gotten hacked somehow until she saw the news going around about the promotion.

The takeaway here: I don’t care what you’re promoting. I don’t care if it’s the finest album in the history of music. Any promotion that alarms your users and makes them think their account security might have been compromised is seriously not cool.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

While the SF/F genre’s been busy with yet another round of You Wimmens Are All Crazy, There’s No Sexism in Science Fiction, looks like Slate decided to put up an editorial rant about how adults who read YA should be ashamed of themselves. I’ve seen a unilateral reaction of “fuck you” directed at Slate, justifiably so.

I’m not going to link to the article because I’m not going to give it the click traffic; if you really want to read it, io9 does link to it in their excellent rebuttal.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again–any form of “you’re reading the wrong things” snobbery is bullshit and it needs to stop. And in this particular case, people who roll their eyes and assume that YA novels are dumbed-down, simplistic crap just because they’re marketed to teenagers clearly has no actual working familiarity with the best that YA has to offer. It’s also dismissing the mastery that an author can bring to a story, in general. And while I’m not a regular reader of YA, I’m here to tell you: it’s rare that I’m compelled to plow through an entire trilogy as fast as I can cram the words into my head. But the Hunger Games books did that.

Also, two simple words: The Hobbit.

Sure, it’s not marketed as YA, but Tolkien absolutely intended children to be the primary audience for that story. And sure, it’s not nearly as complex and dark as The Lord of the Rings. But Tolkien lavished his love for the language all over that book, and turning up your nose at it just because “oh well, it’s intended for children, and I am a Mature Adult” means you miss out on a masterpiece.

Others have pointed out, too, that YA gets a lot of shit because of more than a little sexism, too. A lot of YA authors are female. A lot of YA readers are female. It’s not a coincidence that “YA is simplistic claptrap for children” goes hand in hand with “women write YA because they can’t write real science fiction”.

At the end of the day, though, it still all boils down to “Hey you, you over there, you are reading the WRONG THINGS, and now I’m going to appoint myself the arbiter of your reading choices”.

I’m tired beyond belief of this. Literature readers sneer at genre readers. Male authors sneer at female authors. Male readers sneer at female readers. SF/F sneers at romance–hell, everybody sneers at romance, and boy howdy am I sick of that in particular. Now we’ve got sneering at people for reading books because of a mistaken idea that “marketed for a young audience” equals “claptrap”.

The other two words I’ve got for that: “fuck you”.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

So in between the network outage fun we’ve been having today, and a whole mess of various unpleasant things happening to various friends of mine (seriously, Monday, KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF), oh hey look the threatened U.S. government shutdown has happened. Because the Republicans have their damn shorts in a twist over the specter of Americans finally getting some goddamn healthcare.

How disgusted am I that the government is even arguing over this? Let’s review my and Dara’s health care timeline, shall we?

2003: I broke my arm.

2004: I had the first half of my thyroid out.

2005: I had the second half of my thyroid out.

2006: Dara got hit by the car.

2007: I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

2007-2009: Assorted lumpectomies, biopses, radiation treatments, and eventual mastectomy and reconstruction work.

2010-2011: Actually got some breathing room for once, and then…

2012: I get smacked with the h. pylori infection. Which, for the record: NOT FUN.

Throughout all of this, I have been fortunate to have regular enough employment with insurance that doesn’t suck that we managed to flounder our way through what out of pocket costs we had to handle–and even with the insurance, the cancer costs alone that Dara and I had to put down were well into five figures.

If we’d had to do this without insurance, it would have bankrupted us a long time ago. As it stands, I’ve simply had to learn to deal with a body that aches in various places from the various medical problems it’s undergone, and Dara and I both have gotten way more familiar with Evergreen Hospital than anyone should ever get with a hospital, except the people that actually work there.

I am beyond grateful that I’ve managed to maintain employment with insurance that doesn’t suck. I’ve been in a situation where that wasn’t the case–because I came out of a childhood and adolescence with a mother who had to fight cancer, and which killed her too damn young. My mother died when she was 38, people. Because we were too damn poor to continue to get her the care she needed. She went through grand mal epileptic seizures through all that I can remember of her life, because she’d had a goddamn tumor in her brain, and she remained in poor health up until the day she died.

And the thing that disgusts me? The thing that really disgusts me? It’s that similar situations continue to happen all over this country.

Time and time again I see good people having to turn to their friends on the Internet to ask for support to get care they desperately need–for surgeries, for cancer treatment, for any host of things that could possibly save their lives or at least lessen some goddamn misery. I see good people having to make their own ailments worse because they can’t actually afford to get treated. I see people having to choose between whether they go to the doctor, or whether they go to the grocery to get food.

But apparently we’re supposed to like this because it’s a free market health care system. Because it’s not a socialist/communist/whatever-ist health care system. Because AMURKA.

I not only don’t like it, I am outright disgusted by how certain parties in our government can turn a blind eye to the suffering Americans undergo every day. But apparently it’s the Americans who don’t actually count: the poor, the women, the non-white, the queer.

(And yeah, I don’t want to think about how much more difficult the medical crap Dara and I have been through would have been if we didn’t live in a queer-friendly part of the country.)

Look, I’m not a hundred percent behind Obama. He’s done some things I have massive issues with. But in this, in trying to get some health care to the Americans that need it the most, I’m actually with him. No, I don’t expect it to be perfect. But I’d much rather see the Republicans in the government pull their heads out of their asses and try to work with him to make the system suck less, rather than holding the government itself hostage.

I’ll be remembering this, people. In memory of my mother, whose birthday would have been TODAY, in fact. And in the name of every American who’s had to suffer rather than get the treatment he or she needs. Because this inhumanity has got to stop.

ETA: I see with grim satisfaction that Margaret and Helen are in accord with me on how the Republican part of Congress needs a bunch of emergency headfromassectomies.

ETA #2: Dara points out that our costs during my cancer care went into six figures, not five. Which only drives my point home harder. It took us until well into 2011 until we finally pulled out of how hard that hit us financially.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

I have a post on the Here Be Magic blog coming up soon, and I was going to save this for that, but fuck it, I want to post this now.

So yeah, as y’all can tell if you regularly read me, I’ve been keeping up with the recent SFWA explosions. However, on one of the posts I was monitoring, a generally reasonable discussion about the controversies at hand, somebody surfaced this morning to not only whinge about the dangers of OHNOEZ CENSORSHIP if people (read: women) complain about art involving absurd chainmail bikinis, but also to take a potshot at the romance genre. Which he described using the words ‘emotional porn’.

I promptly unsubscribed from the thread on the general principle of oh fuck you. But I’ve been seeing red about this all day as a result.

Because you guys, I am sick and goddamn tired of genre readers snarking on each other’s tastes. Especially when the snark flows in the SF/F->romance direction, because c’mon, people, we know how it feels to have our reading tastes belittled. To be bullied and mocked because we like reading stuff with spaceships and robots and magic swords and unicorns and elves. To have our reading material derided as “not REAL literature”, to be dismissed as socially inept losers. And if we happen to be women, to have the added slam of being “fake geek girls” thrown at us, and to have our worthiness to be reading and enjoying these books, comics, movies, TV shows, etc., constantly assaulted and challenged.

Yet a lot of us keep turning around and leveling the exact same bullshit over at the romance readers.

A lot of it is sexist, for the reasons romance readers have been getting hammered with for years: patriarchal dismissal of stories primarily written by and for women, and therefore unworthy of standing on the same level as anything written by and for men. Though a lot of that isn’t even exclusively coming from men–I’ve seen this shit coming from women, too.

But a lot of it is also just general bullshit, on the grounds that certainly in the vast majority of SF/F I’ve ever read, y’know what’s front and center with the spaceships, robots, magic swords, unicorns, and elves? Yeah, that’s right, epic love stories. To name three out of Tolkien alone: Arwen and Aragorn, Lúthien and Beren, and Éowyn and Faramir. Here are a few more: Tarzan and Jane, Superman and Lois Lane, Han Solo and Princess Leia, Leetah and Cutter, Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood, and Buffy and Angel.

The same applies if you go back and dig into mythologies and fairy tales from any corner of the world you care to name. Hell, you can’t swing a stick in Greek mythology without hitting a story involving a relationship of some kind–often highly screwed up, because the Greek gods were after all a pantheon of raging asshats for the most part. Ditto for the classic fairy tales, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast. At the core of almost all of them you’ll find a love story of some kind.

The point is, love stories are a fundamental part of just about every story ever told, because love is a fundamental part of human existence.

So why the hell, SF/F readers, do you keep snarking on romance?

Because if you’re doing it because we think that every romance novel is a bodice ripper full of prose so purple that it’s practically ultraviolet, I have three words for you: Eye of Argon.

If you’re doing it because we’re dismissing stories that focus on love, again I say: have you actually read your genre?

If you’re doing it because you’re dismissing novels with a lot of sex in them, because yes, a lot of romance novels do have sex in them, yet again I say: have you actually read your genre? Why is it okay to have fantasy novels wherein practically ever single female character gets raped at some point, but it’s not okay to have novels where the heroine and hero tear each other’s clothes off because they both want to?

If you’re doing it because your only conception of a romance novel is Twilight or 50 Shades, I challenge you to remember that those are the outliers in the genre, and no, actually, they’re not representational of the genre as a whole. No more than Harry Potter is representational of all children’s books in the world, or Tolkien is representative of all fantasy, or Star Wars is representational of all science fiction. I challenge you to find the authors that the regular readers of the genre are reading, so you can see what the current state of the genre is like. I will be happy to provide recommendations, or to point you right over to Smart Bitches Trashy Books. Like it says on the tin over there, “all of the romance, none of the bullshit”. And as you might guess, I do like my reading bullshit-free.

There. Now maybe I can let my blood pressure go back down for the weekend, hmm?

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Because another of these appears to be going around Facebook again, Internets, it’s time for me to do another post on the topic of “Please Leave Anna Out of These Status Update Games”. Somebody just tried to loop me into one of these again. I’ve already privately PMed her about that, and this post is not directed at her. It’s for the rest of you.

Y’all may remember that a couple years ago, a game went around Facebook where women were encouraging each other to post cryptic messages about various places they were leaving their handbags, and not telling their male friends why they were posting this stuff. The ostensible idea was to raise awareness of breast cancer. Now, I like a fun Internet meme as much as the next girl. But sorry, for me, this particular one isn’t fun. In fact, I find it actively depressing, for several reasons.

One, first and foremost, hi, I’m a breast cancer survivor. I lucked out and was only stage 0, and never had to do chemo. But I did have to do radiation therapy and a mastectomy. One of my breasts is a stunt breast, and I have big ugly scars under my bra. So trust me, I’m very, very aware of breast cancer. I’d like to be a little bit less aware of it, in fact.

I lost my thyroid as well, due to five, count ‘em, five growing tumors on it it that never got to be actual cancer because we took them out of me before they could do that. So yeah, long history here of doctors having to cut out parts of my body to cancerous or pre-cancerous behavior of my tissues.

Two, I really dislike the inherent assumption that one’s male friends aren’t already well aware of breast cancer. I’ve got a male housemate who’s certainly aware of everything I went through, and he and many more of my male friends were very supportive to me all throughout my cycle of treatments and surgeries. I know four other women, friends and/or former coworkers, who’ve gone through more severe versions of the same fight I have–and I guarantee you that every one of their male friends and family members are very, very aware of breast cancer.

And even if a man doesn’t have someone in his life who’s suffered from breast cancer, seriously, people, who isn’t aware of breast cancer in general these days? You can’t escape awareness of it, especially during the month of October, when it seems like every company in North America falls all over itself to slap pink ribbons on its products in the name of raising breast cancer awareness. It’s impossible to miss, in fact.

Three, given my starting point of assuming that yeah, actually, my male friends already know about breast cancer because they have brains in their heads and have observed the world around them, I find absolutely no point whatsoever in doing cutesy, cryptic status updates. If the menfolk already know about the thing you’re ostensibly raising awareness about, then ultimately, sorry, all you’re doing is spamming your Facebook friends with weird little status updates. You may make one or two of your male friends go ‘um, so what’s up with this?’ Assuming that they see your status update at all. And given Facebook’s history of making it tough to see updates from your own friends (another rant entirely), there’s absolutely no guarantee of that anyway.

Four, these games never actually mention breast cancer. You know what works to raise awareness of a thing? Talking about that thing. You know what doesn’t work to raise awareness of a thing? Not talking about that thing.

So if your goal is to raise male awareness of breast cancer, and you go about this by posting cryptic status updates for your male friends to read that never actually mention breast cancer, then how exactly does this raise their awareness?

Pro tip: it doesn’t. Instead, you’re putting way more emphasis on “let’s make the boys notice us” than you are on “let’s raise male awareness about breast cancer”. I like male attention as much as the next het or bi girl, but again, I like to assume that the men I know have brains and that they know how to use them. And that if I need to raise their awareness about something, I can outright say to them, “Hey, guys? There’s a thing I want you to know about.”

And then I tell them about that thing.

Five, these games also never have any actual follow-through. Raising awareness is all well and good, but I have yet to see any of these things proceed to the next step: what to do once you are, in fact, aware of breast cancer.

Because seriously, people, like I said–breast cancer awareness is pervasive in Western society these days. Nobody with half a brain in their heads is unaware that it exists. Raising breast cancer awareness is not the issue we need to be addressing here.

The issue we need to be addressing here is purging the scourge that is cancer off of the goddamn earth. Not just breast cancer, either, though it’s politically easy and safe to talk about that particular form of it just because it gets you cred about being friendly to women. But here’s the thing.

Cancer is not easy. It’s not safe. It fucking well kills people, and if it doesn’t kill you, it may well drive you into financial insolvency if you’re not lucky enough to have decent health insurance (and the fucked-up state of the American health system is yet another rant entirely). My mother died from cancer at the ridiculously young age of 38 because she had a goddamn tumor in her brain. My young cousin Phillip has been battling stage 4 bone cancer for the last couple of years, with ongoing regimens of radiation and chemo. I have a friend whose brain tumor put her so far in the hole financially that she still has to live on state support. My housemate lost a very close friend of his to cancer as well. Two more close friends of mine had a family member have to deal with a brain tumor, though fortunately she was young and strong and came out of it okay.

In the broader picture of society at large, we hear every day about another famous person who’s either suffering from cancer or who’s about to die of it. Ian McKellen has prostate cancer. Cancer just took out Roger Ebert, and we know now that it’s going to take out SF author Iain Banks in only a few more short months.

And given how many people I know who have either suffered from cancer themselves, have loved ones who are doing so, or have lost loved ones to it, I think I can safely say that yes, we’re all on the same page here. The page which has emblazoned upon it, in bright red capital letters: FUCK YOU, CANCER.

So yeah. Please leave me out of the status update games. And if you really want to do something about the problem, people, consider donating your money instead. Go to cancer.org and find out how you can do so. We don’t have a cure yet, but actual funding helps. Even if a cure hasn’t been found, the improvement of cancer treatments alone in the last three decades has meant that I’ve had it infinitely easier than my mother did. I’ve already lived longer than she did, and I have every expectation of several more decades to come, because I’ve got good medical support at my back.

Thanks for listening.

Here endeth the rant.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Y’all want to know the fastest way to get an epubbed author’s blood pressure spiking? Refer to printed books as “real” books.

This got shoved into the front of my brain yesterday when one of my favorite local bookstores linked off to an opinion article written by a twenty-something who was stridently against electronic readers–to the point that they’d confessed to having irrational hatred for seeing other people reading them. One of their primary objections to them appeared to be that they could no longer sneak peeks at what those other people are reading, if they’re reading electronically! They proceeded to wax eloquent for several following paragraphs about why they would never stoop so low as to acquire an e-reader, because they loved “real” books too much. Snarky commentary was made about how e-reader enthusiasts got on this person’s case about “what are you, a Mennonite?” And even the bookstore in question, in their linking to this article, dropped a cute little remark about how they “don’t have anything against e-readers, no wait, maybe a little”.

This makes me sad.

Part of it is of course that as an epubbed author, I’m really tired of hearing the print books getting referred to as the “real” books. This carries the automatic implication that digital books are “not real”. Imaginary. Lesser in value than books that were fortunate enough to get put into print. Which is an awfully cruel thing to say to somebody who labored just as hard to get her epubbed book written as the authors who are in print. I guarantee you, people, that to us epubbed authors, our stories are every bit as real to us as the ones that are put down on paper.

Part of it though is the bigger question of the print vs. digital argument. It’s yet another variation of the “this thing vs. that thing” debate that crops up in every single aspect of our daily lives: Coke vs. Pepsi. PC vs. Mac vs. Linux. Emacs vs. vi. Etc., etc., on and on, with each side espousing the virtues of whatever they’ve committed to and often sneering at the other side, who are clearly not clever enough or intelligent enough to realize the virtues of the Right Choice.

Don’t get me wrong. I get that the digital book is a threat to traditional bookstores, and that indie bookstores in particular, who have been struggling for ages against the bigger chains, are going to hunker down and cling to their print books for as long as possible. But I’m really tired of the print side sneering at the digital side, and vice versa. For me as both a writer and a reader, this loses sight of the most important thing: the story.

You tell me a good enough story, I’ll read it in whatever format is available–print, digital, on the back of a cereal box, in fortune cookies, in tweets, in skywriting, whatever. Seriously, I do not care about the format. I care about the story. Print has its virtues for me, such as the art of a beautifully designed book–Tolkien’s The Children of Hurin comes immediately to mind. It’s also lovely for reading if the power is out, or if you’ve left your Nook or iPhone at home and/or uncharged. And although this makes me sad too with my writer hat on, truth be told, writers still are compensated better for print than they are for digital. I’d love to see that change, but I’m not expecting it to do so quickly.

In the meantime, though, digital also has its virtues. Many folks like how a well-used book will have crinkled corners and bent pages and such, and this to them is a sign of how much the book is loved. For me, though, that’s an irritant. Because I love my books, I don’t want to damage them. And if I carry them around in my backpack on a daily basis, they will get damaged. Therefore, for me as a reading choice, a reader makes more sense because in its protective case, it’ll take a lot more abuse than a paperback or trade will. Never mind a hardback, which is often going to be too bulky to carry around easily anyway.

You tell me a good enough story, though? I will buy you in print and digital. Print to keep the archive copy around, and digital for day to day reading. I am living proof that you don’t have to choose one or the other. I long for the day that publishers will start offering sales of both print and digital for one nice premium price, because I will totally put down money for that.

In the meantime, though, print enthusiasts, I beg you, please don’t look down your noses at the digital fans. Digital fans, same goes for you in reverse. Let’s just all just agree that yeah, each of us will have our personal preferences as to how we like to read, and get back to the important thing that we all have in common: i.e., reading. Thank you!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.