I have a tendency to scream about how bisexual Simon Snow is, but honestly I am so glad that we get a character who still doesn’t know who the hell he is, much less who the hell he likes. Seeing LGBT+ rep is awesome, but seeing characters who don’t have the specifics down but know they for sure aren’t (straight/cis/allosexual/alloromantic) is so validating. Not everyone knows what they’re doing with their life right away! And they may never stick a label on themselves! And that’s okay!!!
You enter your zip code and they give you a list of things you can call your reps about about, the numbers and a script of what to say (my biggest issue was that I was afraid to make a call because I would just end up shrieking like a banshee on an senator’s voicemail because I cannot contain my rage re: anything) and I still feel like calling Liz Cheney is pointless because she’s a horrible human being BUT I guess I feel less helpless this way. ANYWAY I was helped by this so I hope someone else can be too.
This is really fantastic! Add it to your home screen for easy access.
Okay, everybody. A friend of mine in the publishing industry just shared a post on Facebook about this, and has given me permission to share the information (with her name redacted):
Hi. I’m someone who’s worked in publishing her entire career, and I’m here to explain the Milo Yiannopoulos issue (notorious troll just got a hefty book deal from Simon & Schuster; internet is freaking out) and how to handle it:
BACKGROUND: Let’s get the “free speech” arguments out of the way: Yiannopoulos is an actively dangerous man who leads bullying mobs against selected targets, and spreads hate speech as a life ethos. Even a person as vile as Yiannopoulos has the right to speak his mind, but decent people owe it to the world not to give him additional platforms and the air of legitimacy. That’s doubly the case in this political climate, which insists that all opinions should be valued equally, regardless of whether they’re true or false, and whether they make the world a better or worse place to live in. This is rather like deciding to publish “Mein Kampf” - is that really what you want your legacy to be as an organization?
WHAT NOT TO DO: No “I’m going to boycott Simon & Schuster” talk unless you are a published author and you’re talking about not contracting with them. This is not like buying toilet paper or leather jackets - they sell the work of real, living, struggling authors who really really want you to read what they’ve labored over for years, and it’s unfair to penalize them because their publishing company is being dumb. Print media is a fragile industry these days, and that’s why we’re seeing these big stupid controversial book deals - it’s because we no longer have a world where people walk into their local independent neighborhood bookstore and let the kindly old cashier recommend you a book of poetry with a 500-copy print run that speaks perfectly to your reading sensibilities. You gotta have your crossover blockbusters or the whole enterprise crosses the December finish line in the red. Insisting on a boycott just makes people who haven’t bought a book since college want to run out and pre-order this to spite you. Simon & Schuster knows you “I love books, here’s a shared image macro about how I would literally make gentle love to a piece of printed paper if it were socially acceptable” folks get all your books used from Amazon for $3.99 + shipping, anyway, so they don’t care whether you’re their friend. This is for the business traveler with gross views who needs something entertaining for the plane flight to the Atlanta conference. You gotta convince them not to sell to THAT guy.
WHAT TO DO: Write them letters, hard-copy ones that need a stamp and an envelope. At any major publishing house, the people at the bottom are mostly clever, thoughtful, progressive gals who don’t like this sort of thing any more than you do. They want to be able to go to their bosses’ bosses’ bosses with a massive stack of post and say, “Hey, this is the only reader correspondence we’re getting now,” because that wastes time, and the easiest way to piss off a publishing house is to waste their employees’ time. Wasting time = less time for making books. Remember also that everybody who gets into publishing does it because fundamentally they love to READ, they READ anything that is put in front of them, even the guys at the top who spend more time on the phone and at cocktail parties than working with text believe in words as a magical conduit of ideas, and if you write them a long heartfelt letter, they may scoff at it but they will read it, and if they have 1000 heartfelt letters a day, then sooner or later all those words will sink in.
This is not a plastics manufacturer, this is not a bank. This is a book company. Write to the people who are in the business of reading.
CONTACT INFO:
Corporate Headquarters SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 PHONE: 212-698-7000
Normally, the best tactic is to write directly to a specific editor or the imprint, but Threshold is conservative, so they may not care. Still, perhaps try:
Threshold Editions General Phone: 212-698-7006 General Fax: 212-698-2858 Jennifer Robinson Vice President, Director of Publicity GalleryPublicity@simonandschuster.com
And make the point that the views of this author are not conservative views, they are fundamentally hateful and aggressive views which seek to undermine the rights of other citizens. He did, after all, help lead the hate mob against Leslie Jones that got her hacked - they should ask themselves whether that’s something with which they want their otherwise respectable work to be associated, especially since the published book may end up becoming associated with additional hate crimes should readers take it too literally. Surely they don’t want their book to start making news for being repeatedly found in the homes of every homegrown militant for the next 10 years.
I’ll also add that Louise Burke is president and publisher of the Gallery imprint, which Threshold falls under, so you could send to her as well.
Good advice. A boycott in this case would be counterproductive. Milo is being published through a “conservative imprint” that has already published the likes of Dinesh D’Souza and Glenn Beck. However, Simon and Schuster has dozens of other imprints, many of which are rather progressive, and they actually have a strong reputation as a company that supports LGBT themes.
A boycott would drive down sales for those progressive lines - while not affecting the sales for the conservative imprint at all. S&S would potentially take that and double down on this kind of disgusting content.
^^^^^^^^
Reblogged for all of it.
Publishing houses are multi-limbed creatures with dozens of imprints. The very same conglomerate that edits and publishes paranoid authoritarian jack-off fodder probably edits and publishes green living diversity manifestos on the next floor up or down (and, for the record, despite my sarcastic capsule descriptions, I’m Team Green Living Diversity Manifesto). In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll add that this conglomerate in particular publishes a lot of hopeful young SF&F voices via Saga Press, which is run by friends (Joe Monti and Navah Wolfe) and will soon publish my wife, Elizabeth Bear.
A blanket boycott is useless; declaring a boycott against something as sprawling as S&S is like declaring a boycott against radio waves or “the media.” It also sounds like a virtuous and heroic thing to sign onto when reblog time comes around, but let’s have a brief reality check– the proto-fascist noise machine that Milo represents eats empty gestures for breakfast. So get specific. Write polite but sharply-worded letters to the listed people of responsibility.
The issue, as I see it, isn’t that poor little Milo has opinions we disagree with (the STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE of proto-fascists is to whine about how much people pick on them “just for having the wrong opinions”) but that he wants to be a court jester for white supremacists, neo-Nazis, violent nationalists, movement misogynists, and homophobes. Milo is exactly the sort of moneyed trans-national media elitist caricature his fascist bros have a hate-on for; the brutal irony of his life is that he wants to dance for the amusement of a demographic that wants to be able to drag people like him behind pickup trucks in a consequence-free environment. He’s a hypocrite and an enabler of violent, ignorant fucks who want to tear society down and rebuild it as a survival horror video game. In historical terms, he’s the sort of hilarious gadfly who would have enjoyed a protected existence in Nazi Germany until 1933, and then been hauled into the darkness for degeneracy in 1934. I guarantee his book will be a shit-tastic waste of any reader’s time, unless it’s subtitled “I Was A 33-Year-Old Helpmeet to the Forces of Fucking Darkness and I Can’t Believe What the Fuck I Was Thinking at the Time.”
I just loved her so much. She was so important to me. She was so important to girl nerds. She was our hero when we needed heroes.
She wasn’t scared of anything - not Jabba the Hutt, not aging, not the stigma of mental illness. She didn’t apologize for having been a Hollywood sex symbol when she was young and she didn’t apologize for aging either. And if you don’t know about her decades-long career as a script doctor making all your favorite movies better, you should. She was fucking FIRE.
Very few Hollywood stars are even more badass offscreen than on, but the
only person cooler than Leia was Carrie fucking Fisher.
Men have ALWAYS been the heroes of fiction. I don’t know if they understand just how much Princess Leia meant to us when she was all we had. I had a Star Wars-themed 16th birthday party. My brothers and I played Star Wars Monopoly and I was always Leia. She was my childhood hero.
We needed Princess Leia now more than ever. But she’s gone, so we’re gonna have to grab a lightsaber and rescue ourselves.
We needed General Leia now more than ever. But she’s gone, so we’re gonna have to lace up our boots and be the Resistance ourselves.
We needed Carrie Fisher now more than ever. But she’s gone, so we’re gonna have to keep living with honesty and humor and heart ourselves.
Be a woman Carrie Fisher would want to be friends with. Be a woman that General Leia would want fighting at her side. Live your life without fear. Fight tyrannical leaders and petty misogynist assholes. Be someone they’d be proud of.
So many fearless iconoclast rebel heroes - David Bowie, Muhammad Ali, Prince, George Michael, and now Carrie - left us this year. So many people who refused to let the world define them, refused to cave in to the pressures to conform. Only the bravest carve out space for themselves to say, “This is who I am, you can either accept it or go fuck yourself.” That’s what it is, to be a hero. To stand in your truth without apologizing, no matter what anyone else says.
We live in a fucked-up world that rewards conformity, with the forces of tyranny rising all over the globe. We live in a world where it’s only going to get harder to be different, to be brave. Harder to be queer. Harder to be bipolar. Harder to be a woman. Harder to be a person of color. Harder to not fit in.
I collect exactly two bookish things and one non-bookish thing, so I might be prone to collecting. (Editions of Harry Potter and Pop! vinyl figures are my other things, but where I want ALL the Rainbow Rowell books I can find, I am more casual and selective about the other things.)
As for the collection, it started innocently enough. I bought the US editions of her books because I wanted to read her books. Then they released a special edition of Fangirl that had extra art by Noelle Stevenson (the cover artist) and it was really pretty. Then I discovered ALL the UK editions are really pretty. Then they released more special editions of her books. It snowballed. So far, I have only purchased the US and UK editions for myself. All the foreign language editions have been gifts. The advanced copies were either gifts or trades. (Shout out to @bethanyactually, @fanbows, @rainbowrowell, and @hitchcockismyhomeboy for helping my collection grow!)
It started because I just really fell in love with her books. Eleanor & Park really got to me, so I made sure to pick up her other books. I’ve writtenaboutsome of the books on my (permanently) on hiatus book blog and my regular page if you want more specific thoughts.
Honestly, I love her books because no matter what she is writing about, no matter how different the genre, her voice is instantly recognizable. She has a quiet snark that doesn’t try too hard and writes the best romances. Beyond that, she writes characters who have very real fear and anxiety about who they are. Even in the lightest of stories, characters are uncomfortable in their skin to a certain degree and that feeling resonates with me very strongly.
I am not quite sure what the best way to do this is. I am in the process of moving shelves from room to room and reorganizing everything, and I don’t have a good display system worked out right now. What I’ll do is go title by title, take a picture of my stack, and then link to the various editions so you can see covers if you want and get the various ISBNs.
People always ask how I find these editions. A lot of it is luck and really great friends who are willing to send things. However, when I want to track something down on my own, I find the ISBN is the best way to search for specific editions because booksellers sometimes use stock cover images in their listings, but will usually have the accurate ISBN. This will be long, fair warning.
The jump was being dumb, so I took it out. I truly apologize to those who are uninterested and have to scroll through this!
*The green UK paperback and pink UK paperback have the same ISBN. My Kind of Book mixed pink covers in with the green and you couldn’t specify which you wanted when you ordered. The pink covers are no longer being made.
*Again, the two different editions have the same ISBN. I don’t know why they do this. I’ve been trying to find one for a friend, and they are hard to track down.
Miscellaneous Stuff
I don’t have pictures of all the Rainbow Rowell swag I’ve accumulated (pins, postcards, tote bags, etc.), but I have received thoughtful Rainbow themed gifts in the past and will link to them.
She is low on stock because of the holidays so I can’t find Carry On candles to link to, but she has a few. I have a Baz candle that smells like cedar and bergamot.
This mug Starbucks used to sell that I refuse to believe wasn’t designed with Landline in mind.
It is our duty as feminists to protect and respect women in Hijabs
Now. More. Than. Ever.
Question: if I see someone pull off a Hijab, what should I do? I know there are reasons they are worn so I want to if i should stand in between them and who did this, should i protect them from view somehow, or something else? This has been happening a lot so I feel it’s something everyone needs to know.
Good question! I cannot correctly and effectively answer, as I am a white, non-Muslim person; however, I will reblog in case any of my followers can answer.
I asked my Hijabi friend, so here’s one Hijabi’s answer:
“my opinion is, definitely try cover them or give them something to cover themselves with. And perhaps shoo off the person, without putting oneself in danger! God forbid, if that happened to me, I would like someone to come and comfort me and give me something to cover my hair with and then help me report it to the cops
“
(Followers, if any of you are hijabi and would like to expand on this answer or offer alternatives, please do.)
If u see it happen to 1 of us, pls cover our head + hair with a coat or shawl or any piece of cloth, while hugging us in comfort. Please don’t get hurt by lashing out @ the perpetrators in any way, coz if they dare to do that, they’re probably too far gone in their own hatred to listen to any reason. Much love + Thank You to anyone who supports us.
yes !! everything said here is important af. if you see someone pull off a girl’s hijab immediately cover her hair and provide comfort. don’t talk to the perpetrator but try to get the woman out of there if you can. maybe if you have a scarf on you at the time give it to her so she can wear it until she’s alone and can replace her hijab. please please protect muslim girls because we already had it hard before donald trump became president and now its gonna be worse with people going around thinking their violence and cruelty is justified
I just really love people asking honest questions about what they can do to support people and getting helpful answers in return. I love getting this information. Please tell me what I don’t know! I want to help and would love to know places to start. What’s really helpful to those who may need someone to stand with them. Thank you!
