creatureofgraphite

[creatureofgraphite]

Fisheye Placebo by Yuumei

( Tumblr | Twitter | Instagram | DeviantArt | Website | Patreon )

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So true :P

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Adventures Of An INTJ -- Intro To Cognitive Functions and Sides Of The M...

Finally got my next video out.  It’s part of a series new series I’m making that places heavy emphasis on Jungian Depth Psychology and how it can be applied to life and writing.

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I was raised in the city, but one that’s near a lot of ranches and we have a lot of aspects of country living.  Even though I’m not in the farming and ranching lifestyle, I do value independence and believe in responsible gun ownership.  People should be able to defend themselves when they need to, and guns are part of that.

A couple days ago, I heard my dog barking in the garage, and I thought her tone seemed serious. I looked in the garage and she was standing on the back of my 4-wheeler looking down at a rattler that had her “treed.” I grabbed a shovel and killed the snake. After killing the snake, I remembered some comments I’d seen online where people said that if you had a snake problem, you should call the snake removal people to relocate the snake alive. (As opposed to relocating said snake’s head away from said snake’s body.) This made me realize one of the huge differences between country and city people. In the city, when someone has trouble, they can call another person for help. If I’d tried to call some snake removal service (which doesn’t exist here) it would have been at least 30 minutes away. By then, the snake might have hidden in the woodpile, bitten my dog, or done something else.

When country people have a problem, we have to deal with it ourselves, or if we can’t, call the neighbors. This is part of the huge cultural gap between us and people who live in town. If there’s a rattlesnake, we kill the snake. If there’s a fire, the neighbors get their fire fighting vehicles (we have those) and help put it out. The fire department won’t make it on time. If an animal is sick, we generally treat it or put it down ourselves. (Driving to the vet with a suffering cow/horse is crueler than giving the animal a quick death at its home.) Yes, we do call the vet when we have something we can’t handle. If there was a criminal threatening the neighbors, we’d have to deal with that too.

This is also a big reason rural people have guns and are generally pro-gun. Even though we respect our local law enforcement and fire department, they often can’t get here in time. When there’s an emergency, we are the first responders. We can’t wait for help.

#ranchlife #countrygirl #countrylife #rattlesnake #rurallife https://www.instagram.com/p/B1UYnbWAdi5/?igshid=4p0z3ty19sba

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The Bestiary Tag

Doing my first tag! This one is from Victoria at http://storitorigrace.blogspot.com/  Check out her blog if you haven't already.

I will also be cross posting this on my blog, http://creatureofgraphite.blogspot.com/

The Rules:

Include Victoria's graphic somewhere in the post and/or link back to her, pretty please. This is the link to her blog/the original tag: http://storitorigrace.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-bestiary-tag.html

Answer the questions on your blog!

Tag three or more fantasy fans!

The Questions:

1.) What is your favorite mythical creature?

2.) When was the first time you heard of this beast?

3.) What is your favorite portrayal of this creature in media?

4.) If you could shapeshift into a mythical beast what would you pick?

5.) What mythical beast would you love to have as a pet?

6.) What is your favorite mythological story surrounding a fantastical beast like in Greek Mythology, Egyptian Mythology, etc.?

7.) What mythical creature would terrify you the most if you encountered it in person?

8.) What is the most unusual mythical creature you've ever heard of?

9.) What uncommon mythical beast do you wish you saw more of in books and movies?

10.) If you could create a mythical creature what would it be?

My Answers:

1.) What is your favorite mythical creature? Out of all the preestablished ones? Probably gryphons. They seem very cool, agile, versatile, and reasonably powerful.

2.) When was the first time you heard of this beast? When I was a kid, I watched Quest For Camelot by Warner Brothers. The gryphon in that show was the coolest thing ever.

3.) What is your favorite portrayal of this creature in media? Quest For Camelot's version is pretty cool. Narnia's wasn't half bad. There's also a book series called The Summer King Chronicles by Jess E Owen. I haven't read much of it yet, but it's about gryphons and contains a lot of elements I like so far. I'm also working on writing a comic about gryphons and dragons, so I'm having fun with designing the lifestyle of the gryphons in that story.

4.) If you could shapeshift into a mythical beast what would you pick? Man, I dunno. Depends on a lot. Would the shapeshifting be permanent, or could I turn back and forth at will? And what kind of story world would I be in? In some story worlds, it would be more advantageous to turn into something small that way I could hide and sneak around. But, in other instances, it'd be nice to be able to turn into something big, like a gryphon or dragon, that way I could have more fighting power. Whatever creature I pick...hopefully it would be cool, and something that wouldn't get me killed in whatever world I lived in this scenario.

5.) What mythical beast would you love to have as a pet? Well, a gryphon would be cool, but hopefully I could live in a fantasy world with wide hunting grounds that could sustain such a large predator. Either that, or have an omnivorous gryphon, that way it could eat plants too. That said...I dunno. Dogs and cats are obligate carnivores and it's actually not that hard to keep them. Maybe if we had pet gryphons in the modern world someone would make kibble based food for them.

6.) What is your favorite mythological story surrounding a fantastical beast like in Greek Mythology, Egyptian Mythology, etc.? I like a lot of Japanese ones. I can't really single one legend out as my favorite, though.

7.) What mythical creature would terrify you the most if you encountered it in person? Malevolent spiritual entities have always creeped me out. Along with pretty much anything that could move through the dark and seems almost impossible to see, much less fight. I can't pick only one of those things. Thankfully thinking about that stuff doesn't terrify me as much as it used to.

8.) What is the most unusual mythical creature you've ever heard of? Some yokai are very strange. Like, I dunno, wasn't there one about a floating head attached to a wheel that had fire on it? I've seen something like that in anime now and then, at any rate.

9.) What uncommon mythical beast do you wish you saw more of in books and movies? Does a unicorn or pegasus with a dark/serious take on it count? Cutesy versions of these animals appear a lot in memes and accessories and such, but there aren't a lot of modern stories where they're taken seriously. That's probably why they're seen as prissy and girly. Nothing wrong with the sparkly take on those creatures, it'd just be nice to have more dark and serious ones as well. I plan on writing stories like that eventually, but that probably won't be for a while.

10.) If you could create a mythical creature what would it be? Creature design is one of my favorite things, so most of my story worlds have at least a few made up animals in them. Something I've been doing with one of my more recent story worlds is to take some beasts common to that world and form legends around them. So, those mythical creatures end up with a similar vibe to yokai and fairies, but with an entirely different mythology and culture surrounding them.

I tag:

Jessi L Roberts (If she wants) from

https://jessilroberts.wordpress.com/

And everyone else who reads this post and is interested in the tag :P

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Looking at that screenshot, in and of itself, it doesn’t really seem THAT rude.  I’m a little sad that it’s seen as such a big deal.

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Good to know about.

ATTENTION ZINE CREATORS, ARTISTS, AND ANYONE WHOSE BUSINESS UTILIZES PRE-ORDERS AND PAYPAL

As of June 15th, 2018, PayPal has changed their user policy with little to no fanfare at all in ways that could literally destroy your business. I’m going to say this as plainly as possible:

DO NOT USE PAYPAL AT ALL IF POSSIBLE.

I know this is a lot to ask, especially since PayPal is the most globally accepted digital tender, but unless you want to lose access to your funds for six months and PayPal possibly forever, you need to read this.

PayPal Business accounts are now being flagged, locked, and completely shut down if:

1. If you haven’t shipping anything within 21 days of your first transaction

2. You’ve received more than 200 orders

and/or

3. You’ve made an excess of $20,000 (USD)

If this happens to you, you will not be able to access your money for up to six months. PayPal is NOT willing to work with you, all they will say is there’s nothing they can do, they’re cutting business ties, and offer you the MAILING address of their legal department. That’s right, you can’t even get a direct line to these people, they’re just going to tank your business by dicking around with your money for six months. Your only options are to:

1. Wait six months and frustrate customers, and by-proxy tarnish your reputation.

2. Refund everyone, possibly lose their business, and tarnish your reputation.

3. Pursue the matter legally, which will likely take longer than six months anyway, not to mention cost money out of pocket.

IF YOU ARE CURRENTLY USING A PAYPAL ACCOUNT FOR PRE-ORDERS, GET OUT NOW. Deposit your funds and part ways with PayPal as a tender, this is not a battle they’re willing to let you win.

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I don’t think I support ALL art being classified as a civil service(if something is government/public funded, then people are more likely to think they have the right to control artists and their work), but I AM frustrated about some of the fan entitlement issues listed here.

“People have always felt a sort of ownership over art, and that’s actually good. It’s why you keep a book on your shelf and return to it, it’s why you hang a picture on your wall that speaks to you. But when this gets out of hand and you mistake access or a personal connection with your rights, as happens so often in our Internet age, it leads to a dangerous sense of entitlement. That’s why readers feel empowered to complain, directly to the creator, that a book or show doesn’t have absolutely everything they want: the romantic pairing they’d hoped for, the language they find most friendly, the ending they desired. And it’s also why, for instance, the last Harry Potter book leaked on the internet before it was officially published: fans saw the book as something they were owed, not the product of labor that deserved compensation. Not that J.K. Rowling needs more money—but she, and all authors, deserve to have their work recognized as work.

“Consumers hold a pernicious power, so this trend towards free content won’t reverse itself unless we want it to. This is a sad thing, and we will all be much worse off if we can only hear stories from people who can afford to write.”

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Before I agree to a license agreement, TOS, etc. I usually try to comb through until I at least find the parts that state who the art/writing will belong to after the contract is agreed to, who distributes it, etc.  Also, if I am looking at software to use or purchase, I make sure to see what kind of use that software is licensed for ((sometimes companies will have a free version of their software(or even paid!), but they’ll say that the software can only be used to make things for personal use, not commercial))

That’s also especially important for people that purchase stock images, because a stock image might be licensed for, say, use on a book cover, but that license might not permit someone to use it on products like mugs and tshirts.

I cannot emphasize enough how much you need to read thoroughly through the terms of any publication before you send your writing to them. It is mandatory that you know and understand what rights you’re giving away when you’re trying to get published.

Just the other day I was emailed by a relatively new indie journal looking for writers. They made it very clear that they did not pay writers for their work, so I figured I’d probably be passing, but I took a look at their Copyright policy out of curiosity and it was a nightmare. They wanted “non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide license and right to use, display, reproduce, distribute, and publish the Work on the internet and on or in any medium” (that’s copy and pasted btw) and that was the first of 10 sections on their Copyright agreement page. Yikes. That’s exactly the type of publishing nightmare you don’t want to be trapped in. 

Most journals will ask for “First North American Rights” or a variation on “First Rights” which operate under the assumption that all right revert back to you and they only have the right to be the first publishers of the work. That is what you need to be looking for because you do want to retain all the rights to your work. 

You want all rights to revert back to you upon publication in case you, say, want to publish it again in the future or use it for a bookmark or post it on your blog, or anything else you might want to do with the writing you worked hard on. Any time a publisher wants more than that, be very suspicious. Anyone who wants to own your work forever and be able to do whatever they want with it without your permission is not to be trusted. Anyone who wants all that and wants you to sign away your right to ever be paid for your work is running a scam.

Protect your writing. It’s not just your intellectual property, it’s also your baby. You worked hard on it. You need to do the extra research to protect yourself so that a scammer (or even a well meaning start up) doesn’t steal you work right from under you nose and make money off of it.

[creatureofgraphite]

I won’t always automatically unwatch a show that does that, but it definitely bugs me, at least if they don’t do it in a way that’s plausible.  Another trope that bugs me is when they depict a religious kid that feels sheltered, restricted and ignorant and all they want is to ‘rebel’.  I think Runaways did that in one of the first few episodes.  If that show is the one I was thinking of, the girl was a part of a bad cult, so I don’t mind that cult being depicted negatively, but the way they depicted the ‘typical devout religious kid’ was pretty one dimensional and stereotypical.

Though, to be fair, the show did also seem to have a bit of a stereotypical liberal feminazi as well, so maybe they just didn’t know how to make the chars feel realistic in the first few episodes(I didn’t watch past that.)

Comic I read: *Has a Christian character who stays true to their faith despite things not being good for them atm*

Me: :)

Comic: *progresses with that character dropping their faith as if they have had some sort of ‘revelation’.*

Me: :) *unwatch*

[creatureofgraphite]

Movie Review -- A Silent Voice

A Silent Voice, (or Koe No Katachi in Japanese), follows the story of Ishida, a boy that once bullied a deaf girl(Nishimiya) until she had to move away.  After she moves, his classmates turn on him, bullying him so much that, years later, he’s a timid shell of himself.  Ishida then sets off on a path of redemption, befriending Nishimiya and trying to make things right even if he’s not entirely sure he deserves forgiveness.

Pros:  Overall, this was one of the best movies I’ve seen in a while.  The animation was beautiful, and the story was touching.  One nice thing about the animation and story telling was that many of the gestures/ways the characters’ thoughts/reactions were depicted felt relatable, or at least realistic.  Toward the beginning, for instance, we see Ishida boredly fiddling with his mechanical pencil.  That kinda of reminded me of what it was like to be a kid fiddling with my school supplies back in elementary school.  This story also seems to show more realism than the average show does when it comes to how some deaf people might interact with others.

The story is a beautiful one about forgiveness and redemption.  It is by no means a simple one, however, and tackles heavy themes like suicide, and whether or not a bully deserves forgiveness in the first place.  Some complexity is shown around the bullying, which is a good thing.  The characters were shocked at having a deaf girl in their class, but they did not start bullying her right away, so we get to see a glimpse of how young kids sometimes react to a new situation they don’t know how to handle yet.  There are a lot of little details that indicate how and why the bullying started happening, so there is a lot to analyze and learn from in that situation.

Several of the main characters are easy to empathize with in some way or another because their emotions are often depicted in a relatable way.  We see how Ishida is genuinely a good person that is not proud of his past.  And his mother is a kind person that was very disappointed and hurt to learn that her son was a bully, yet she still loves him and doesn’t want to lose him.  And Nishimiya is sweet and forgiving, and experiences growth as she learns to love herself and become a stronger person.

Cons:  This movie does have its downsides, unfortunately.  Since it was a movie, a few of the characters’ actions and beliefs aren’t substantiated noticeably enough due to the lack of screentime, which occasionally makes them annoying and hard to understand.  Ueno’s behavior stands out as the strongest example of this.  There doesn’t seem to be much background and explanation given for why she despises Nishimiya, so her behavior almost feels like it was thrown in there for the sake of having an antagonist.  

Her potential motivations can be untangled with some effort(part of it is that she sees Nishimiya as a burden/liability that can even be harmful at times), but the story doesn’t make her thought process felt and understood, so the audience has to pay a lot of attention(or even see the movie a second time) in order to figure her out.  Feeling and understanding her perspective wouldn’t justify her behavior by any means, but it would make it feel like a natural part of the story, rather than something that is just tossed in there.  Having to pay attention in order to figure out a character is fine, but with Ueno...it seems detrimental to the movie at times.  This show is based off a manga series, though, so maybe the motivations of side characters like Ueno are better explained there.

One of the transitions in the story was a bit strange, too.  At first, it made it look like Nishimiya died, but then a minute or two later we see that her grandma died instead.  That is, however, a very brief and minor nitpick.

In summary…  A Silent Voice is well worth the watch.  The movie was pretty clean for the most part, with the primary caution being some emotionally heavy content surrounding suicide, though the show always depicts suicide as a tragedy that should be avoided.  This story has a chance of appealing even to people that generally don’t like anime, so it’s worth giving a shot even if anime isn’t normally your thing.

Anyway...that’s my two cents worth.  Have any of you seen this movie?  If so, what did you think of it?

[creatureofgraphite]

So, yeah, finally caved and decided to try out NaNoWriMo and enter my first ‘real’ contest by participating in Tapas’ 2018 Writer’s Camp competition.(click the image to view the story)

They are accepting entries until January I believe.  The full details are in the ad on the home page of their website.  Votes are cast based on how many subscribers each participating story has, so if you have a Tapas account, be sure to support your favorite stories! (Stories can still be read without a Tapas account, though.)

Still not satisfied with this cover, though, so expect a better version of it within the next week or two.

[creatureofgraphite]

Writing Unique Creature Psychology, and a Blog Announcement

Hey guys.  This post is partly to post a link to my newest article, and partly to announce some changes to this blog.

I am still keeping this tumblr, but it will be mostly dedicated to fandom stuff, along with occasional announcements for stories I publish.  Most of my writing tips and things pertaining to my original stories will be on the blog the following article is posted at.

http://creatureofgraphite.blogspot.com/2018/10/writing-tips-how-to-invent-psychology.html

Hope to see you there! :)

[creatureofgraphite]

I don’t mind people shipping things, but when they start to assume a sacrifice or even simple social interaction means the two chars MUST be in love...that’s where it gets ridiculous.  People need to learn to separate their desires from reality.

I feel like romantic shipping has harmed platonic love.

Now, even when something is obviously platonic, people still ship it. I want to see more cases of people sacrificing them for others that are platonic, where they do it because it’s the right thing to do, not because they’ll get the girl/guy if they rescue her/him. 

This is one reason I’m not a fan of the Zutara ship. Zuko took a bullet for Katara, but he was never romantically interested in her. He just sacrificed himself to save her, not because he was romantically interested in her, but because it showed he’d made a 180 from the selfish brat he was at the start of the series. 

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This is so true.  In a lot of ways, during the course of our lives, sometimes we just have to be ok with deciding on boundaries and enforcing them in a way that is both firm and respectful.  At first people might not like it, but as long as the boundary is enforced in a respectful manner, they will probably eventually come to respect you more as a result.

STEIFVATER - please help me! It's my 19th birthday today, which means that I'm legally allowed to down as many beers and shots as my liver can handle (I'm in Canada). The problem is, I don't drink for extremely personal reason that i don't like sharing. How can I tell people that don't want to just hear "I don't drink" that I WILL NOT be participating in the alcoholic merriment, without dumping my soul on them?

Dear whentheskytouchesthesea,

I also do not drink. 

It is not for any special reason — at least, no reason more special than why I don’t play tennis. I have nothing against tennis. I know how to play tennis. I don’t care if other people play tennis. I myself have even played tennis in the past, enough to know that I don’t really care if I ever play tennis again. I have discovered through thirty-four years of life that I’m just as capable of having a good time if I’m not playing tennis and it’s cheaper to not have tennis equipment.

People don’t seem to care that I don’t play tennis. People seem to care that I don’t drink. A lot. 

They’ve urged me to loosen up, asked if I’m pregnant, guessed that I’m a recovering alcoholic, bought me drinks to sit in front of me, told me one of these days we’re gonna get you drunk and see how fun you really are. 

Sorry, boys, I’ve done the science previously and this is as fun as I get.

I used to explain myself. I had gotten it down to a very short explanation that brought my companions gently to the understanding that I would not be drinking, that I wasn’t judging their drinking and that I was going to have a fine, uninhibited time. 

Now, however, I am thirty-four and crotchety. Now I just order a milk and let them draw their own conclusions. I’m bored with people who think it’s amusing or acceptable to pressure other people into looking like them, whatever looking like them might be at that thematic moment in time. You get to captain your own ship, whentheskytouchesthesea, and that means you and you alone get to decide what you want to put in your body and when and how you want to shed your inhibitions. Anyone who suggests otherwise, even in a jocular, well-meaning way, is actually asking to take the helm of your ship.

And I’ve long since lost interest in letting other people drive.

I suppose you are thinking, as teens often confess to me, that if you appear to be a lousy drinking partner, you will lose your friends. But if their idea of fun is going out drinking and your idea of fun is something else, you were going to wander away from them eventually anyway. The hard fact of friendship is that you need to make time for new friends by first stripping out the people who are using your energy in an unsatisfying way. You have to take that risk of being friendless to make room in your life for others who will be your new best friends.

This has wandered from your question. The answer to your question is: “I’ll have water.”

Happy birthday.

urs,

Stiefvater

[creatureofgraphite]

Just my opinion on the morals of the issue, not legal advice or anything, but although making fanart and fanfiction is fine as long as it isn’t done for profit, the author of the original, canon content should still be respected.  So if an author doesn’t want people to make fanfiction of their work at all, it is only polite to avoid making fanworks of that author’s stories, or at the very least to refrain from posting them.  Even if someone thinks it’s silly for the author to not want fanworks made of their story, the story is ultimately still the author’s.  If the author was willing to take the risk to share their heart and hard work by publishing their story, fans should appreciate it and respect the author’s rights rather than acting like the author’s work is fan property.

If the author is fine with people making fan works, then morally it is alright to make fanworks as long as the fanworks are not made for money.  If the fan is profiting off the fanworks, it doesn’t matter if it ultimately helps the author or the author ‘isn’t hurting for money’.  It is still a violation of the author’s creation and rights.  It’s a little corrupt for someone to say that they would violate an author’s copyright just because the author ‘isn’t hurting for money’.  That’s like saying if someone has money, they automatically lose their right to be treated as a human being, and that everyone should be free to take advantage of someone just because they are rich.  Someone with this attitude is looking to gain something from the author, instead of actually caring about and respecting the author like one would expect a fan to.

Of course, if the author announces that they don’t mind people making for profit fanworks off their stories, then morally it’s ok.  Also, if a fanwork is so completely different than the author’s work (say, for instance, a Naruto fanfic that is a highschool AU with completely different plots, character personalities, etc. and the only real semblance to Naruto is the character’s names and a few vague circumstances), then I think the fan should be able to take their fanfiction, change the names so that they are no longer ones belonging to Naruto characters, and publish it.  If the fanfiction pretty much has no semblance to the original work it was inspired by, then from an ethical standpoint this story shouldn’t have to stay a fanfiction forever, provided the fanfiction author removes names, etc. from the copyrighted work it was based off of.

Again, this is just my opinion on the ethics aspect of this, not legal advice.

As a side note, there are places where people can write fanfiction that seem to be for profit, but with the author’s permission.  I haven’t looked into it much, but it’s called Kindle Worlds:

https://kindleworlds.amazon.com/how

For those insistent on profiting off fanworks, please consider doing so in a way that the author agrees to and that benefits the author through more than just advertising.

Fic Commissions

No, I’m not taking them, ha.

This is a friendly reminder that creators and publishers alike are very ok with fanfic and fan art (in particular, I am very fond of the existence of fan art), but when you charge money or accept donations (i.e. take in money) for fan fiction, you’re violating the copyright of whichever content you’re writing for. 

I know it might not seem different, but the moment you’re writing about my characters for money, that’s … what I have a contract to do. I can’t even write about those contracted characters for money without getting permission from my publisher to do so. 

I know it sucks to try to make it as an artist, but as artists, we’ve got to respect other folk’s work. So remember, fanfic for the fun of it, charge for your OCs. 

urs,

Stiefvater 

[creatureofgraphite]

If the story isn’t worth paying for, or the author isn’t worth respecting, then the story also shouldn’t be worth the effort it takes to pirate it.  Often enough, it seems the efforts to diminish the author and their work in order to justify piracy is merely an excuse to get the book for free.  If an author wants to give the book away, that is their call.  But if they are selling their work, that is their right.  They don’t have to share their stories with anyone, and there isn’t really much point in sharing a story if the readers are going to walk all over the author.  No one is entitled to an author’s work.

I’ve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy.

I didn’t think I had much to add to the piracy commentary I made yesterday, but after seeing some of the replies to it, I decided it’s time for this story.

Here are a few things we should get clear before I go on:

1) This is a U.S. centered discussion. Not because I value my non U.S. readers any less, but because I am published with a U.S. publisher first, who then sells my rights elsewhere. This means that the fate of my books, good or bad, is largely decided on U.S. turf, through U.S. sales to readers and libraries.

2) This is not a conversation about whether or not artists deserve to get money for art, or whether or not you think I in particular, as a flawed human, deserve money. It is only about how piracy affects a book’s fate at the publishing house. 

3) It is also not a conversation about book prices, or publishing costs, or what is a fair price for art, though it is worthwhile to remember that every copy of a blockbuster sold means that the publishing house can publish new and niche voices. Publishing can’t afford to publish the new and midlist voices without the James Pattersons selling well. 

It is only about two statements that I saw go by: 

1) piracy doesn’t hurt publishing. 

2) someone who pirates the book was never going to buy it anyway, so it’s not a lost sale.

Now, with those statements in mind, here’s the story.

It’s the story of a novel called The Raven King, the fourth installment in a planned four book series. All three of its predecessors hit the bestseller list. Book three, however, faltered in strange ways. The print copies sold just as well as before, landing it on the list, but the e-copies dropped precipitously. 

Now, series are a strange and dangerous thing in publishing. They’re usually games of diminishing returns, for logical reasons: folks buy the first book, like it, maybe buy the second, lose interest. The number of folks who try the first will always be more than the number of folks who make it to the third or fourth. Sometimes this change in numbers is so extreme that publishers cancel the rest of the series, which you may have experienced as a reader — beginning a series only to have the release date of the next book get pushed off and pushed off again before it merely dies quietly in a corner somewhere by the flies.

So I expected to see a sales drop in book three, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, but as my readers are historically evenly split across the formats, I expected it to see the cut balanced across both formats. This was absolutely not true. Where were all the e-readers going? Articles online had headlines like PEOPLE NO LONGER ENJOY READING EBOOKS IT SEEMS.

Really?

There was another new phenomenon with Blue Lily, Lily Blue, too — one that started before it was published. Like many novels, it was available to early reviewers and booksellers in advanced form (ARCs: advanced reader copies). Traditionally these have been cheaply printed paperback versions of the book. Recently, e-ARCs have become common, available on locked sites from publishers. 

BLLB’s e-arc escaped the site, made it to the internet, and began circulating busily among fans long before the book had even hit shelves. Piracy is a thing authors have been told to live with, it’s not hurting you, it’s like the mites in your pillow, and so I didn’t think too hard about it until I got that royalty statement with BLLB’s e-sales cut in half. 

Strange, I thought. Particularly as it seemed on the internet and at my booming real-life book tours that interest in the Raven Cycle in general was growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile, floating about in the forums and on Tumblr as a creator, it was not difficult to see fans sharing the pdfs of the books back and forth. For awhile, I paid for a service that went through piracy sites and took down illegal pdfs, but it was pointless. There were too many. And as long as even one was left up, that was all that was needed for sharing. 

I asked my publisher to make sure there were no e-ARCs available of book four, the Raven King, explaining that I felt piracy was a real issue with this series in a way it hadn’t been for any of my others. They replied with the old adage that piracy didn’t really do anything, but yes, they’d make sure there was no e-ARCs if that made me happy. 

Then they told me that they were cutting the print run of The Raven King to less than half of the print run for Blue Lily, Lily Blue. No hard feelings, understand, they told me, it’s just that the sales for Blue Lily didn’t justify printing any more copies. The series was in decline, they were so proud of me, it had 19 starred reviews from pro journals and was the most starred YA series ever written, but that just didn’t equal sales. They still loved me.

This, my friends, is a real world consequence.

This is also where people usually step in and say, but that’s not piracy’s fault. You just said series naturally declined, and you just were a victim of bad marketing or bad covers or readers just actually don’t like you that much.

Hold that thought. 

I was intent on proving that piracy had affected the Raven Cycle, and so I began to work with one of my brothers on a plan. It was impossible to take down every illegal pdf; I’d already seen that. So we were going to do the opposite. We created a pdf of the Raven King. It was the same length as the real book, but it was just the first four chapters over and over again. At the end, my brother wrote a small note about the ways piracy hurt your favorite books. I knew we wouldn’t be able to hold the fort for long — real versions would slowly get passed around by hand through forum messaging — but I told my brother: I want to hold the fort for one week. Enough to prove that a point. Enough to show everyone that this is no longer 2004. This is the smart phone generation, and a pirated book sometimes is a lost sale.

Then, on midnight of my book release, my brother put it up everywhere on every pirate site. He uploaded dozens and dozens and dozens of these pdfs of The Raven King. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of his pdfs. We sailed those epub seas with our own flag shredding the sky.

The effects were instant. The forums and sites exploded with bewildered activity. Fans asked if anyone had managed to find a link to a legit pdf. Dozens of posts appeared saying that since they hadn’t been able to find a pdf, they’d been forced to hit up Amazon and buy the book.

And we sold out of the first printing in two days.

Two days.

I was on tour for it, and the bookstores I went to didn’t have enough copies to sell to people coming, because online orders had emptied the warehouse. My publisher scrambled to print more, and then print more again. Print sales and e-sales became once more evenly matched.

Then the pdfs hit the forums and e-sales sagged and it was business as usual, but it didn’t matter: I’d proven the point. Piracy has consequences.

That’s the end of the story, but there’s an epilogue. I’m now writing three more books set in that world, books that I’m absolutely delighted to be able to write. They’re an absolute blast. My publisher bought this trilogy because the numbers on the previous series supported them buying more books in that world. But the numbers almost didn’t. Because even as I knew I had more readers than ever, on paper, the Raven Cycle was petering out. 

The Ronan trilogy nearly didn’t exist because of piracy. And already I can see in the tags how Tumblr users are talking about how they intend to pirate book one of the new trilogy for any number of reasons, because I am terrible or because they would ‘rather die than pay for a book’. As an author, I can’t stop that. But pirating book one means that publishing cancels book two. This ain’t 2004 anymore. A pirated copy isn’t ‘good advertising’ or ‘great word of mouth’ or ‘not really a lost sale.’

That’s my long piracy story.