As the Amazon fracas continues...

jaylake has an open letter to Kindle readers.

John Scalzi has a suggestion about a response. Don't boycott Amazon: buy books from other retailers.

And I want to talk about something that makes me uncomfortable: how EXTRAORDINARILY LUCKY I am.

Let's take my luck piece by piece.

1. I'm married to someone I love. That's not a given or an inalienable right. I got lucky.

2. Because I am straight, I can get married and have my marriage legally recognized in every state in the Union. Again, I got lucky. This shouldn't be a matter of luck, but as things stand today, it is.

3. My husband has, from day one, whole-heartedly and enthusiastically supported my work--he reads my stories in draft, he is fiercely partisan, and he recognizes and respects my writing AS WORK. This isn't a given or an inalienable right, either.

4. My husband is employed.

5. His salary is sufficient to support us both.

6. He is willing to let his salary support us both. I'm not going to talk about how much he makes, but for the past several years, I've made between $10,000 and $15,000 a year--and that $15,000 a year is contingent on my continuing to get contracts, because--like most writers--most of the money I make, I make on advances, not on royalties.

7. His job includes excellent health benefits. Yes. Writers do not have health insurance unless they either (a.) have a second job with health benefits or (b.) are married (or in a recognized domestic partnership) to someone with health benefits. If you oppose HCR, please consider the possibility that you are condemning one or more of the writers whose work you love to being unable to afford adequate dental care. And God forbid they should become seriously ill.

So yeah. I'm a full-time writer with health insurance and financial security. The writer part is inalienable, but all the rest of it is because I GOT LUCKY.

As John rightly notes, the people who are getting screwed by Amazon's, ah, dramatic response to Macmillan are the authors. And most of those authors are not as lucky as I am. So if you're boycotting Amazon, make it active rather than passive: go buy books from someone else.

Things! To! Read!

"White Charles" and "Mongoose" (with matociquala, and in Lovecraft Unbound, which made the Original Anthologies list) made Locus's 2009 Recommended Reading List.

[ETA: I just looked and realized those are the ONLY TWO short stories I published in 2009. I want to do better in 2010.]

So did two Shadow Unit stories, "Sugar" by Leah Bobet (cristalia) and "Cuckoo" by the Three Bs: Bear, Bull, & Bobet--and, yes, that would be E. Bear, not G. Bear. Which makes this a good time to point you to Bear's post about the start of Shadow Unit Season 3 and the plans for the rest of the SU arc, with its pointer to the Reading Order put together by the fans on the Shadow Unit wiki.

The rest of Locus's 2009 Recommended Reading is full of wonders and marvels.

found via several people

Blue whales are singing in a lower key. This is somehow deeply sfnal to me, and I love the idea that they're singing lower because their population is larger--although that may or may not be true.

It's really hard to write fiction as purely full-of-wonder as the truth.