If you like Brooklyn 99, you should read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, specifically the City Watch books, because they’re basically Brooklyn 99 but British, written 10-30 years ago, and set in a pseudo-medieval society that’s undergoing its industrial revolution.
There is a scene in Jingo where Sam Vimes learns of the growing nationalist tension and upcoming military action, hears one of his officers and best friends say the same casually racist things he’s said for thirty years about a brown-skinned foreigner that, by the way, he’s perfectly friendly to, calls him into his office, and says No.
This is a thing we are Not Going To Do Anymore, Fred. I know that you’ve been saying this for the last thirty years, Fred. It’s not offensive all of a sudden, Fred, it’s been offensive this whole time and I haven’t cared enough before, but it’s Time To Be Better, Fred.
Might as well have gone out for a pack of cigs, he’s so absent in his daughter’s lives – An Analysis of Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice
Would be fine with his wife and daughters dying after he dies so long as they aren’t sequestered to the same house in the afterlife
Literally Locked Lizzy Into Marrying Mr. Darcy Before Asking Her Opinion on the Guy
Verbal Abuse: The Mr. Bennet Passtime
The Patriarchy: It Sucks, but at this time it Still Necessitated Mr. Bennet Make the Connections and he’s only Made the fuckin 1 connection over the course of the book and just barely and it’s exremely detrim
ental to the lives of his daughters as it limits their options of husbands; ie the things they need to survive after dad’s poor planning
Mr. Bennet and the tendency to dismiss his wife’s silly matchmaking when marriage is, in fact, wildly improtant to their survival
How to be a clearly absolutely awful father and almost never called out by it by the fandom in over 200 years: A Guide, by Mr No-First-Name-Given Bennet…
A father’s love… For about 1 and ½ of his 5 daughters…
When guards, soldiers, community leaders, sea captains etc are mentioned in passing as side or background figures, they’re just as likely to be women as men, without any extra comment or explanation
I’m pretty sure there was just a Disney reference (in Sabriel ‘that’s what he did, it’s what he lived for’, in Little Mermaid ‘that’s what I do, it’s what I live for’—deliberate or not it’s cracking me up this morning)
He doesn’t spend a lot of time describing his female character’s bodies unless it’s practical mentions of hygiene or wounds
But also he doesn’t dance around the word ‘breasts’ when it’s the appropriate practical description of anatomy
Lirael has depression and suicidal ideation and is a badass heroine, Sammeth has PTSD but is still a badass hero, Nicholas the quintessential know-it-all white guy gets humbled and is the vulnerable character who needs rescuing
Mogget and the Disreputable Dog and their impatience with anything approaching YA drama tropes
The romantic elements that are so *mimes swoon* but also so subtle and also rational and drama free? I mean.
There’s even bits of domestic fluff in the middle freaking action adventure stories, I MEAN.
The political stuff in Lirael and Abhorsen is relevant, wow
Characters admitting that they’re afraid, including (especially) male characters
Some more honorable mentions
In Clariel, they mention it’s just as normal to be attracted to same sex as it is opposite – heavily implying Clariel is aro/ace.
The characters are racially diverse. It always makes me cackle that in the later books, Garth Nix makes more mentions of the Clayr’s skin, since so many people ignored the fact he explicitly describes them as dark skinned. Touchstone is pretty clearly described as black.
Women in leadership and guarding/protection roles. BONUS: w/out making dudes look incompetent in comparison.
Nix mentioning that The Clayr take casual lovers frequently and prefer to raise their kids with other Clayr, rather than their romantic/sexual partners.
Lirael has a service dog!!! The disreputable dog! And the dog sometimes tells Lirael shit she doesn’t want to hear.
Honestly, these books were so progressive and ahead of their time. Way, way better than Harry Potter imho.
This is pretty simple. Authors get paid when you buy their books. If you don’t buy their books, they don’t get paid. They get paid a percentage of the price you pay for their books. If you buy highly discounted books (from amazon or B&N or Scholastic book fairs), they get paid a lot less. If you borrow a book from the library, they got paid for that one time (in the US), but at least they got that. If you read a book from a pirated site, they don’t get paid.
The problem I see is that most people don’t understand this very simple equation. They think that authors get paid by publishers just to be authors. Hint: we don’t. Authors don’t get paid to do book tours. Unless people buy their books. Authors don’t get paid by the government to be authors. Authors don’t get paid by Hollywood for their books unless they get a pittance if they’re actually given an option (1% of authors get books optioned, 1% of those get made into movies). If an author gets a movie made, they still make very little of that money, except for if books are purchased. If an author wins an award, most of the time, they make no money from that directly, only if more books are sold.
Are you starting to understand what my point is here?
Yes, some authors make money on the side doing school visits for children. A lot of them don’t even make that, especially in Utah, where local publishers are using school visits as a promotional opportunity and have nearly eliminated the market for paid visits from authors who AREN’T trying to push books on kids. (Yes, I have strong feelings about this.)
Yes, these days authors make money sometimes by being youtube celebrities (I can count on one hand the number of authors doing this). Yes, authors sometimes make money through Patreon, though this is pretty new and we’re still figuring it out. Think about this for a minute. Authors have to hustle to make money because actually writing books doesn’t pay them very much. What? Yeah, even NYT best-selling authors are not making enough to pay mortgages sometimes.
Lots of authors are offered lots of opportunities to write for “promotion.” We do need to promote ourselves if we’re going to stay in the game and keep getting contracts for new books. But promotion is pennies. I’m not trying to complain about my chosen profession. This part of it sucks, but there are other wonderful parts, clearly, or I wouldn’t stay. But if you want to help me out and thank me for any of my writing you’ve gotten to read for free, it’s really simple. Buy one of my books. And while you’re at it, buy a book from another author you love.
If you can’t afford to buy the book, get it from the library. As OP states, at least then there’s one sale. And if it’s there on the shelves, people who haven’t heard of the author might pick it up, and mention it to someone, and spread the word of mouth about it. And if the book gets borrowed a lot, then the library is much more likely to buy the next book the author writes.
In the UK, there’s something called Public Lending Rights, where an author gets about 8 pence per borrow of their books (it’s a little more complicated than that, because they sample from a subset of libraries, but that’s the basic idea). So if a hundred people borrowed my book over the course of a year, I would get about £8. That may not sound like much, but that’s kinda the point OP is making.
Authors aren’t making a lot of money, so every little bit helps. Piracy doesn’t help at all.
Don’t fucking pirate books.
A publishing deal is nothing like a recording contract or being on a TV show/in a movie.
IF am author is paid an advance by the publisher – and that is getting rarer and rarer – it is basically “back payment” for 2+ years of work to write the book, and the average advance is $5000. For two years of full-time work – so that’s about $1.00/hr if you imagine it as payment for a 40-hour work week. AND AUTHORS DO NOT START TO EARN ROYALTIES UNTIL THEY’VE EARNED OUT THEIR ADVANCE. That means paying the publisher back in full for that advance money.
So really, authors make nothing until they’ve sold at least ~1000 books.
Most bestsellers sell roughly 5000 books. So to sell 1000 books and earn out the advance is extremely rare and extremely difficult. Most authors never sell enough copies to start earning royalties per sale, or else it takes 5+ years… and that’s IF despite low sales the publisher keeps your book in print at all. Most won’t.
If an author has not earned out their advance the first 6 months, most publishers stop printing that book, and the author never makes anything from what has already been sold because it goes to paying the publisher back for that advance.
Also when we say authors earn money for each book sale: it’s about $0.60 per book.
Yes, you’re paying $17.99+ for a hardcover or $8.99 for a paperback or ebook, but that is NOT how much the author gets. So if you imagine that an author DOES become a bestseller – let’s say they sell those 5000 copies and earn out their advance, so they get to make some money on the remaining 4000 books sold – that’s still only another $2400. It has likely been an additional 2-5 years at this point since they sold the book to a publisher.
So for 4-7 years of full time work, an average author makes MAYBE $7500. IF they are extremely successful and lucky.
That’s less than a dollar an hour for almost a decade of work.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. And then the murders began.
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. And then the murders began.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And then the murders began.
The phantom of the opera did exist. And then the murders begun.
Maman died today. And then the murders began.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. And then the murders began.
In 1815 Monsieur Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne. And then the murders began.
In an old house in Paris, that was covered in vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. And then the murders began.
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. And then the murders began.
“Where’s Papa going with that axe?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. And then the murders began.
Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. And then the murders began.
“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. And then the murders began.
In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit. And then the murders began.
Cudjo Lewis, who was born as Kossola, was nearly 90 years old and living in Plateau, Alabama. He was thought to be the last African man alive who had been kidnapped from his village in West Africa in 1859 and forced into slavery in America aged 19.
Hurston, who was an anthropologist, documented her interviews with Lewis during the late 1920s and wrote a book in his own words about his life titled, ‘Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’.
But the manuscript she wrote was turned down by multiple publishers in 1931 who felt as though Lewis’s heavily accented dialect was too difficult to read.
For decades, Hurston’s manuscript of the book was tucked away inside Howard University’s archives until The Zora Neale Hurston Trust found a buyer for the book – more than 50 years after her death in 1960. On Tuesday, May 8, 2018. ‘Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’,’ was published by Amistad/HarperCollins.
Of her time spent with Lewis, Hurston wrote in a letter to her friend, fellow Harlem Renaissance author and poet Langston Hughes, that the experience left her deeply moved, according to her biography, ‘Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston’ by author Valerie Boyd.
‘Tears welled in his eyes as he described the trip across the ocean in the Clotilda,’ Hurston wrote, as cited in Boyd’s biography.
‘But what moved Hurston most about the old man — whom she always called by his African name, Kossola — was how much he continued to miss his people back in Nigeria. ‘I lonely for my folks,’ he told her.
‘After seventy-five years he still had that tragic sense of loss…That yearning for blood and cultural ties. That sense of mutilation. It gave me something to feel about.’
Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.
Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.
Isaac Asimov.
yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point
If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole – oft credited as one of the first scifi novels
Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms)was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it
even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?
PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame
And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.
Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:
Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.
Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.
You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905.
The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.
Got that?
Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it
I have literally been telling people this for over a year.
the first extended prose piece – ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman
The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).
The day may come when I find this post and do not reblog it, but it is not this day.
I saw a sad facebook post from the gay bookstore back in Ann Arbor where I used to live about how they hadn’t sold any books that day so I went on their online store and bought a couple, and while you don’t get #deals like elsewhere online, I’d love it if y’all would consider buying your next gay book from them instead of like, Amazon.
wupacing 