Piracy

Well, I think three weeks is actually the longest it's taken for my books to go up on pirate sites -- they used to go up on the day of release, which was fun -- but I knew I'd need to make this post sooner or later.

If you're going to pirate books anyway, this isn't for you. You already don't care, which is absolutely your prerogative, but I still hope you understand how damaging it is.

If you wouldn't do a day's work if you employer proceeded to turn around and go "Yeeeeah, we're just not gonna pay you for your labor or time," at the end of your shift, then please consider not doing it to artists either. We're not some magical, mythical entitled race of beings -- we're human beings, with bills, and families, and need to survive just like you. If you value your own time and hard work (and everyone should) then maybe take a second to think about why you don't value a writer's the same way.

Let's be real, at the end of the day, a book about two guys shagging isn't exactly a necessity for anyone. It's not food, or shelter, or an education. It's not, as is often conflated in the "information should be free!" argument, enabling you to live a life of peace, democracy, free from corruption and with all your human rights intact. Entertainment of this kind is more akin to a treat, a luxury. And most of us, when we legitimately can't afford treats and luxuries, we either save up and savor them, go without, or in the case of books, lend from a library (which is NOT an equivalence to piracy; that's one of the most pernicious myths of all, right up there along with "If they pirate your new book, they'll go out and buy the others!" Like, no, Jan, they'll just ask their pirating buddies for the rest of your back-catalog, which is precisely what they did with me). We don't just take because it's not in the budget this month.

On the other hand, If you're someone who would genuinely buy a book if it was available in your country, or can't access it for some other reason, then I'd much prefer it if you guys contacted me before you grab my books from pirate sites. It's not only that adding to piracy site statistics is bad for me (by bumping up pirate site results in Google searches over legit retail outlets), they suck for you, too. They're often sketchy, either demanding credit card information for books they don't actually have (i.e. phishing scams), or they're infested with malware and spyware.

Everything I self-publish is going as wide as it can on Amazon. If that still doesn't cover your location etc. then like I said, drop me a line -- catkanewrites@gmail.com

Ten Years and One Rewrite

"The House on Sheridan Street" was originally written in 2008. It came out in December, but in the way of things in publishing, it had been finished and sent in much earlier in the year. By the time of its release, it was probably already an inaccurate reflection of the property market.

Ten years and one rewrite later, I'm realizing that global financial crises aren't the only unforeseen event that's turned this story into something very different to the original.

I can't remember where the idea initially came from -- I do remember that, at the time, I was deeply fascinated by urban exploration, in particular people who explored abandoned places. The eerie, hauntingly beautiful photos they'd post of disused buildings, vacant houses and derelict theme parks stirred something in me that was unsettled and mesmerized all at once. There was such a profound wrongness to these places, locations that should've been teeming with the mundanity of everyday human life -- offices, hotels, shopping malls, schools, hospitals -- standing hollowed out and empty, their ordinary contents left exactly where they'd been when the last person turned out the lights and closed the door. Waiting, it seemed to me. Like someone was going to step through the door any second, and the normal world would kick right back in. The idea for the eponymous 'house' came from that, from the sense that these silent, forgotten places held stories and secrets of their own.

Gale and Nathan came afterwards (names I picked up, as an aside, from my spam mail folder!), but with a hard word limit of 20k, they never really had the chance to come alive in the way I'd wanted. They were almost metaphors for the house themselves, waiting for some life to be breathed into them.

I've had much more leeway to do that in the re-write. And, in exploring and expanding the characters' backstories in more depth -- and their uneasy, messy relationships with their respective families -- I find I'm tapping into things I never, ever expected I'd use for my writing. Things that, ten years ago, hadn't even been on my radar. Things that, two years ago, I never wanted to touch, things I was perfectly happy to shove to the back of my mind and leave there. I was treating memories and emotions the same way people treated those abandoned places -- shut off the light, close the door, pretend it doesn't exist anymore. But writing, stories, are how I process and understand my world, so I shouldn't be surprised those things refused to stay there. I'm still not okay with writing about them -- I don't think I ever will be -- but maybe this way I can process a little tangentially anyway. Maybe I can at least give Gale and Nathan a truthfulness their story deserves.

And it's made me realize how true it is that sometimes, a story just isn't ready for us, or we're not ready for it. We don't have the experience, or the understanding necessary to quite do it justice, to give it honesty. I've always been a proponent of that reading of "Write what you know" -- as in, write the things you know you feel -- and I think that's just an extension of it.

Sometimes we don't know what we feel until we can look back at it and see. Sometimes the door's not closed as firmly as we like to imagine.