I moved!

For a long time I’ve meant to migrate my website to a platform that would be easier to update (not requiring html coding skills that I don’t have) and I finally did, choosing Reclaim Hosting and setting up a WordPress.org site there. Since that has blogging built in, I’m moving these shenanigans over there. The good news – no more cheesy ads! The bad news . . . I can’t think of any.

I should warn you – it’s liable to be more libraries and politics, less mysteries. Fortunately there are still a lot of fantastic mystery bloggers out there who read much faster than I do and actually keep up with writing reviews.

photo courtesy of Kathy McEldowney

The Soullessness of Our New Machines

My fellow-blogger at Inside Higher Ed and an insatiable consumer of books, Joshua Kim, reviewed Tracy Kidder’s new book, A Truck Full of Money, and I’m glad he did because I found the book frustrating and wasn’t sure how to review it. Reflecting on why made me think better of the book and Kidder’s possible purpose. Here’s how I responded to Joshua’s request to “please disagree with this critical review.”

I’ve finished the book (I got a review copy) and have been struggling to review it because I have the very same reservations Joshua expresses here. I love Kidder’s work. The Soul of a New Machine got at a certain culture with a lot of focus and depth. Home Town looked at lives in a college town – not a single culture at all, but exploring its many sides. Mountains Beyond Mountains was a portrait of a man driven to make the world a healthier, more just place. The trouble for this reader started when Kidder says he wanted to bookend his Soul of a New Machine to show the world of people who write software. As in his other books, he finds someone who can give him a close third person view, a shoulder to peer over. But while he does a good job of telling us about this person, in the end we never know much about the experience of (or the culture of) coding, which makes it hard to find the book’s soul, it’s motivation. It does bear out Anil Dash’s claim that “there is no technology industry” in the way we usually think of it.

Instead, this guy built a business because he could code, made a lot of money, and thinks about how to spend it. Some of his thinking leads to trying new start ups, some is about how to benefit the poor (which, it turns out, is complicated. Homeless people don’t need big schemes as much as they need a pair of socks, and thinking about how to get people socks doesn’t jazz up tech entrepreneurs much).

Maybe Kidder’s point is that this *is* what bookends the soul of the new machine – a kind of grandiose, meandering, but also highly self-absorbed and often wasteful quest to turn software into money, and what that does to a person.

Thanks for asking, Joshua. I wanted more context from Kidder, plus more about how it feels to code but now I’m beginning to think Kidder knew exactly what he was doing. It felt soulless, though I did get to know a smart kid who grew up without many advantages in Boston, made a lot of money, and wanted to do something cool with it. Maybe the whole point is that being hit by a truck full of money can be painful. And when we think of software, it’s not about code, it’s about money.

so done with rage

It’s been a long time since I replicated my family’s childhood tradition of sitting up late, eating salty snacks, and watching the Democratic National Convention. But we did it last night, and so I heard Michelle Obama’s speech in real time. There were things in it that should have rubbed me the wrong way: I’m a woman, so I’m going to be all about motherhood and the kids; our forefathers… greatness… greatest country… But nevertheless, she knocked it out of the park.

The annotations sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom (known to Twitter as Tressie McPhD) provided  clarified for me how that happened. Some of it was necessary political rhetoric (the “our forefathers” line being a bell that has to be rung, and I’m with Tressie – “I hate that bell.”) Some of it was shrewd knitting together of a raveled party by using stepping stones from being a proud but worried parent to electing the first black president to electing the first woman president. Some of it was just blunt, hard, but inspiring truth, bringing back the tears I shed the day Obama was elected.

When Trump refers to greatness, he’s referring the power of a country that used enslaved people to build the house he wants to live in. He wants a return ticket to that past. When Michelle Obama tells us about greatness, it’s the greatness we can achieve if we stop equating America with wealth and white folks.This moment in the speech (plus the earlier mention of police and Black Lives Matter in Dallas working to make the kids safe) is what rang my bell in a way that can never be unrung.

That is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.

And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.

I can’t improve on Cottom’s analysis, so here it is:

This is a dig at Donald’s nihilism the other night. But it is also saying, hey, there is no great american past. Remember, Obama had just referenced slavery a paragraph earlier. She’s making an elegant case that any allusion to the past is necessarily one that is closer to slavery. We are great now, she says, because we are at least greater than that. It is the idea that for black Americans, this country’s best days are always necessarily yet to come. It’s a stark contrast to the idea that America was only great when, as historian Ira Katznelson said, “affirmative action was white”.

It’s disappointing that we can’t have the kind of barn-burning change that the success of Bernie Sander’s campaign suggested was possible right now, that to avoid catastrophe we have to vote for someone who is firmly grounded in the kind of liberalism that screwed so many people. But getting to that other world will take work, long hard work. Conservatives have done that work in school boards and statehouses and in secret rooms where copy-paste legislation is written. This is ironic, considering the party of “small government” is so much better at manipulating government levers than those who don’t automatically think public servants are trash. We have to get better at organizing while dodging the kind of cynicism and exhaustion that comes with seeing the problems so clearly. Black Lives Matter is working on it. The rest of us need to get to work, too.

Change is hard and rage won’t get us there. Rage is the power-source for Donald Trump’s engine and it will get us somewhere we don’t want to be. If those girls can live in that house built by slaves, can we make this country that began with native genocide and slavery-based prosperity the home we want to live in? I have to hope we can.

 

I wrote to my senators . . .

Here’s what I said. It’s not enough. But, damn it all.

I am writing to my senators on behalf of millions of people who live in daily fear of state-sanctioned terror. They cannot send their children outdoors without warning them to be subservient to authority, to be wary of agents of the state, without reminding them that they do not have the freedom other Americans have to life or liberty or the pursuit of happiness. This is a violation of basic rights that urgently needs to be addressed. Our elected officials should investigate and take steps to prevent the all-too-frequent extrajudicial executions of black Americans by police.

I realize it may be impossible to pass laws or hold hearings in a Congress that has been deliberately broken. I mean, if we can’t even appropriate money to protect Americans from deadly viruses it’s pretty silly of me to think we can investigate ways to protect a mere 45 million Americans from living with fear every day that they or a loved one will be executed without a judge or jury. But I urge you to try.

This can’t go on.

It can’t go on because it polarizes the population and tarnishes the reputation of the nation worldwide. It can’t go on because law enforcement officers who want to serve and protect cannot do so when fellow cops commit the ultimate crime and aren’t punished, making a large percentage of the population understandably unable to trust the police.

It can’t go on because people – men, women, children – are being murdered under cover of law. Please do what you can to seek justice and peace.

Yours truly,

Barbara Fister

Edited to add: another black person was shot and killed yesterday, this time in my own state. He cooked meals for schoolchildren. He had been stopped in his car because a taillight didn’t work. He was loved. Now he’s dead. It can’t go on. But it does, on and and and on …

After the Break

So weird to see such similar upheaval in the U.K. and the U.S. and the very strange place that bigotry and resistance to inequality coexist within it. On both sides of the Atlantic we’re seeing the unraveling of established political parties that believed the malarkey of the globally wealthy – that market forces are forces of human nature, that wealth should cross borders but people shouldn’t, that rich people deserve their wealth and poor people just aren’t trying hard enough. That of course we can’t raise taxes, of course private corporations work but public servants are lazy, useless, self-centered bums, that individualism is freedom and caring for others is foolish unless you’re really wealthy and you want to reform something with your extra tax-exempt cash.

Bernie Sanders led an unexpected revolt that almost succeeded. Jeremy Corbyn was elected party leader but is too left for the left and is facing a revolt of his own. Trump is Nigel Farage with Boris Johnson’s hair in a hair-sprayed comb-over. The Republican and Tory leadership are bewildered by the monsters they pieced together from parts and animated with economic shocks. It’s alive! Dear god, now what? The markets are in an uproar that’s nearly as cataclysmic as the average person’s battle to pay their bills at the end of the month, something the market has blithely ignored for too long. It’s a mess.

I’ve long wanted people to recognize how absolutely wrong our assumptions have been and how much terrible damage they’ve done to social institutions and to the commonweal. But what’s scary is that this sudden challenge to the system that created enormous inequality feels a bit like overthrowing a dictator. Toppling the statue feels good, but what comes next? Sadly, too often the vacuum is simply filled with hate – hate toward people who are victims of the same oppression, anger and contempt toward those who feel differently, and no practice negotiating common ground because we haven’t had enough power to practice it.

As a liberal academic, I’m considered part of the elite. Fair enough. I have been lucky. Not especially talented or deserving – lucky. On top of that I’m a librarian, and we have values that are suspiciously left-wing: democracy, diversity, equal access to information, a commitment to social justice and the public good. We don’t always live up to those values, and market fundamentalism has warped our daily practices pretty thoroughly. But we still think information is important.

Caring about facts, evidence, and figuring out what’s true even if it isn’t what you want to be true isn’t a property of elitism. It’s a practical approach to the uncertainty that’s inevitable in a world as complicated as our is. Once you decide facts are a matter of choice, that decisions should be based on what your mates say, that hatred is easier than empathy, that anger feels better than making something or maintaining something – well, this is where you end up. The individualism that was so important to the unequal status quo has left us ill equipped to create an alternative to the thing we no longer believe in.

I’m glad that people are challenging the neoliberal assumptions that have caused so much damage and created such inequality. The big question is whether the damage done to social institutions and communities is so great that we won’t be able to come together to make something that works better.

I hope we can. Because the alternative playing out right now – the sudden rise in hate crimes, the murder of an elected MP, the vitriol being hurled on all sides – is too scary and I think fundamentally we’re better than that. We just have a lot to learn about how to function again. Caring about facts and caring about one another is a place to start.

photo courtesy of Julie Dello

 

Toxic Shock

Like many folks, I first saw the news that the record for the largest mass shooting in American history has been set once again while on social media. Since then it’s been on televised news 24/7 – a break from 24/7 election coverage, except that this horrible carnage is merging into election speeches. One of the things that I noticed as I scrolled through Twitter, which is 24/7 but never one channel, was how suddenly confusing it was. I saw a gory image and the word Bloody Scotland and thought “oh, shit. It’s happened there, too” before realizing no, it was something about a book festival. A book festival that was familiar and fun. But suddenly, not so much.

There’s something very disconcerting about intermingling real carnage and hate with fiction represented in imagery that draws so heavily on blood spatter and guns, with titles and descriptions heavy on death, killing, and terror. I’ve always wondered what attracts people to crime fiction, but right now the glorification of guns and death seems part of . . . I don’t know, some pandemic disease.

The massacre in Orlando is so confusing. Violence is always confusing, but we try to find an explanation: we must do something about mental illness. We have to stop being so stupid about gun laws. We have to stem the politically inflamed rhetoric that encourages homophobia. If we had better intelligence, took a tougher stance, bombed more targets, built higher walls . . .

I’m ashamed that our two leading presidential candidates used it as an occasion to brag about how tough they would be against something one of them insists the current president should say out loud or immediately resign. No, whatever ISIS social media channels say, this wasn’t their work. This was much more complicated. A brown American-born man whose father came from Afghanistan, a brown American man who had wanted to be a cop, a brown American man whose ex-wife says he beat her, a brown American man who had frequented a gay club, a brown American man whose religion is regularly demonized by opportunist politicians, that brown American man took weapons of war that he bought just down the street into a room full of mostly brown, mostly queer folks dancing together and killed as many as he could, which was a lot because he had weapons designed for killing and for nothing else.

Matt Pearce, a reporter who I follow on Twitter, said

(Which, of course, makes it also a story a politician can use in any of a number of ways to promote completely opposed agendas, but also very hard to understand on its own terms.)

The best way of thinking about it that I’ve heard yet came in reply.

I think he’s right. It’s a very large part of why so many Americans love guns. It’s infused in cop culture in ways directly tied to Ferguson and beyond. It’s driving the wild anger among some that most American have no issue with GLBT folks, anger that leads to absurd laws requiring bearded transmen to use bathrooms labeled for women and feminine transwomen to use bathrooms labeled for men where they will be in danger – supposedly to keep women and children safe from pedophiles. When reason fails, bring in the imaginary pedophiles. Bring on the fear that will distract people from thinking for themselves.

It’s toxic masculinity that drives fundamentalist interpretations of religions that use violence and terror to put down women – in fact, to put down anyone who isn’t the right sort of man – and return us all to an imaginary golden age when strong men were in  charge. It’s what makes Trump strut and splutter about warfare and Christian values, it’s what makes Clinton rattle swords to show she’s tough enough for a job only men have held so far.

All hate crime is meant to inspire terror in a class of people. That slaughter in Orlando was terrorism. But it was not caused by that label that Trump insists the president use (and which the president eloquently refused.) My best guess at the moment is that it’s toxic masculinity that made one angry, mixed-up man walk into a store to buy weapons of war – easily available thanks to other toxic men – so he could kill gay brown people whose joy and sexuality threatened him. He knew he would become famous by attributing his actions to a violent, masculine cult about which he knew little apart from shouty slogans and exciting film clips and the power it seemed to have over the rest of the world and his own countrymen who considered him either a loser or a threatening Other.

So here’s what I’ve been wondering about since misreading a Twitter stream and seeing violence where only entertainment was meant. How does a reader who enjoys fiction about people getting killed square it with her pacifist and feminist values? How can I enjoy reading one book after another about murder after 49 murders were committed in a crime that can’t be solved?

I’ve never been a great reader of mysteries that set a crime in an innocent place to be surrounded and smothered by goodness and recipes. I particularly dislike grotesquely violent thrillers that use a good-versus-evil storyboard with lots of blood and explosions so that that the monstrous Other can be defeated over and over. I have generally made the excuse that I’m drawn to “sociological suspense” – stories that delve into social issues in some interesting way, using narrative and characters to explore ideas that are otherwise abstract or dry. But other kinds of fiction can do that. Why am I so drawn to books about people killing one another? Why is that narrative the only one that seems to hold my attention?

Perhaps what I’m learning about society right now is that I’ve had enough of blood spatter and guns and am not interested in seeing it on book jackets or event announcements, however innocently intended. It makes me eye my pile of book waiting to be read with a new wary suspicion that a genre I love carries its own measure of toxic masculinity.

 

 

 

 

Like I was saying …

Julia Angwin asks

The New York Times covers a practice that has been going on since we declared war on terror. If you can’t find terrorists to justify the vast anti-terror apparatus you’ve created, make some, and then make headlines. The authorities, of course, say that they are making sure we’re safe from people who are inclined toward terrorism by getting there before they connect with real bad guys, but this is innocent until proven gullible.

This is the tactic that inspired If Then Else. It’s just wrong, and it doesn’t make us safer.

Of course there are real terrorists. We had two notable terrorist attacks in the U.S. just last year. People who are alienated and stirred up by hateful and apocalyptic rhetoric sometimes act out violently – in these cases, shooting co-workers at a party and people visiting a Planned Parenthood office, violence in the name of extremist beliefs and a sense of righteousness lit with a fuse of resentment. But our unprecedented surveillance regime doesn’t spot these people. Collecting it all doesn’t work. It distracts from focusing on actual threats.

A 2010 report recently surfaced in Britain saying our cousins have so much data they can’t find the needles in the haystacks. One response is to pass laws to increase surveillance capabilities and spend a lot more money on haystack-building and needle-detection. The other is to stop spending so much effort on building haystacks and start looking for dangerous sharp objects that are likely to hurt people. That’s the approach I favor.

In any case, using paid informants to coax people to act dangerous so that they can be arrested and headlines can say that terror plots have been disrupted, justifying even more intrusive surveillance, is a terrible kind of security theatre.

 

If Then Else – Hello, World

My latest work of fiction is now available as an open access book under a Creative Commons license. It’s a young adult story about a young coder whose brother is caught up in an FBI sting and arrested on a bogus terrorism charge. It was inspired by cases like it – a lot of would-be dissidents or simply disgruntled and unwary people have been persuaded by paid informants to say they would do stupid things that they wouldn’t have without official encouragement – and by the ways that we are all under unprecedented mass surveillance by both the state and by corporations.

Follow the link to download an ebook or PDF version for free or, if you really like print, you can order a print-on-demand copy via Lulu at cost. Lulu often has discount coupons to offset the price. Otherwise it will run you $6.29 plus $3.99 for shipping.

I had a lot of fun writing this book. I started it as a NaNoWriMo project, fueled by my increasing frustration about life in our modern-day panopitcon. It was improved by recommendations from my always-first reader to whom I am married, my agent, and an assistant editor who liked it, but not enough to get it past her publisher. As I wrote earlier this year, I decided the heck with trying to sell it. The fun part – writing – is done, so why not just release it into the wild?

So I did, using PressBooks to format the text in html, mobi, ePub, and PDF versions, which you can do with the push of a button.  Though you do have to pay something for this service, it’s a nice way to create a handsome book with a choice of styles. I decided to use Leonard, named for a favorite author of mine, Elmore Leonard. (Dillard is another favorite style – named for Annie Dillard – but this one seemed appropriate, and it is a bit more compact, which keeps the pagination and, therefore, the cost for the POD version down.) I also got useful support from Hugh McGuire, the creator of PressBooks, when I wanted to use a courier-style font for some of the text and wasn’t sure how. (Solution: monospace!)

In February I started to serialize the book via Twitter, chapter by chapter. And then – with a bit of delay because of various distractions – I wrapped up formatting and putting a print on demand version together.

By the way, my protagonist is big on privacy, and so am I. Here are some of the things I use to maintain some privacy online.

StartPage is a Dutch search engine that uses Google but doesn’t track your search history. (DuckDuckGo is also a good option, but I like being able to limit my searches by date, which is easier using StartPage.)

Privacy Badger is a browser extension that blocks non-consensual third party trackers. Sometimes you have to turn it off to load a page, but that’s super-easy.

uBlock Origin is an open source browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that blocks ads and trackers. Most people use AdBlock Plus, but their business model is problematic.

HTTPS Everywhere helps encrypt sites that have encryption available but not fully implemented. Encryption keeps mischief-makers from intercepting web traffic and routing you to places you don’t want to go or injecting malware.

Tor is a project to develop privacy tools online, including a browser and a complete operating system you can run on a flash drive. It works by routing your traffic through multiple servers, making it a distributed anonymous network.

Tunnel Bear is a VPN (virtual private network) application for computers and phones. It lets you conceal your IP address and location by routing your traffic through servers in another country.

I started collecting news about surveillance on a Tumblr last year – something I plan to keep up, if only for my own awareness.

For more expertise on privacy than I have, check out the wonderful Library Freedom Project.

 

Books I’ve Been Reading

I found The Case of Lisandra P. by Hélène Grémillon to be powerful, disturbing, and difficult to read for more than one reason. The cover claims it’s a page-turner, but the only time I turned pages quickly was when I honestly couldn’t handle what the author was putting in front of me. Otherwise, it took me a while to commit to it because it seemed to be about a therapist accused of murdering his wife whose only ally is a patient who tries hard to be remote and unlikable. I tend to avoid reading stories that advance through transcriptions of therapy sessions because too often it’s a lazy device to provide insight into a character (usually a messed-up cop doing messed-up things who we’re supposed to sympathize with) and the first of these sessions made me wonder if I should be reading something else. But the second session had an irresistible hook in it for someone who likes crime fiction to involve social issues. The book is set a few years after Argentina returned to “democracy” after a brutal military dictatorship that made dissidents disappear violently and without a trace (sometimes seizing their children and raising them, perversely, as their own, passing on their distorted and vile worldview to innocents). During the time this book is set, the government has decided to put all that behind them by essentially pardoning everyone involved and giving them anonymity. The main character has been seeing the therapist to deal with the trauma of her daughter’s disappearance, in large part because she has no idea whether people around her who seem so benign may have actually tortured and killed her daughter. The novel provides an appropriately chilling sense of how dreadful that would be. It also provides a neatly tied-up and ironic ending that upends the idea that there is any way to give a story about this time and place a sense of resolution. There was a certain amount of sensationalism in the ending that felt off to me for reasons I can’t explain without a spoiler, but everything between the opening pages and the closing ones seemed brutally true – a kind of truth that offers no reconciliation, because there was none.

 

I very much enjoyed Sigurðardóttir’s The Silence of the Sea, winner of the 2015 Petrona Award. Though I’ve enjoyed several volumes in her Thóra Gudmundsdóttor series, I was especially taken with her ghost story, I Remember You, where the author gives her penchant for the spooky and unexplained free rein. I’m not at all a fan of the horror genre, so I was surprised  how much I enjoyed that atmospheric story that has a mystery to solve, but puts the unexplainable first. In The Silence of the Sea, we get the best of both kinds of story. Thóra has to untangle the estate of a family who has vanished at sea – or presumably at sea. Nobody knows for sure, because the yacht they were sailing on has arrived on shore with its crew and passengers missing. As she pursues this task, trying to find out what happened so that she can sort out the affairs of the missing couple and their two daughters to take care of a third, much younger daughter left at home in Iceland with her distraught grandparents, we go aboard the yacht from its departure in Portugal out to the vast, empty sea, learning exactly what happened to each of the people aboard. It’s a kind of claustrophobic Christie-style mystery with supernatural effects, all of which have rational explanations for the mystery reader who hates jiggery-pokery, but with plenty of suspense and creepiness for those who think there’s more to it. The psychology of the people on board is intensely developed, the chapters in Iceland provide a welcome respite, there’s the social backdrop of a small island nation reeling from a catastrophic financial collapse, and the whole thing works quite well, along with a disturbing ending that’s . . . well, I’ll just leave it there.

A third book that I read recently is Canadian and features a Muslim detective investigating a cell of radical Islamists and, along the way, the various ways that Canadians from different backgrounds negotiate creating a society together. It also probes the utterly different interpretations of Islam held by the protagonist, Esa Khattak, and a charismatic extremist. I reviewed  The Language of Secrets by Ausma Zehanat Khan for Reviewing the Evidence, reposting it here thanks to RTE’s generous policies.

Following her well-received debut, THE UNQUIET DEAD, Khan continues an intriguing series focused on a Canadian detective of Afghan heritage who heads a federal community policing task force in Toronto created to deal with sensitive cases in a multicultural nation. His experience in both homicide and intelligence work makes him uniquely qualified to investigate the murder of a Muslim man who was working undercover when he traveled with a group to a remote part of a provincial park, apparently to train for a terrorist attack.

Hassan Ashkouri, the leader of an ultra-conservative mosque, has created two cells of adherents who gather together to discuss theology, politics, poetry, and possibly creating mayhem. Among those adherents are a young disaffected Somali-Canadian rapper, his waifish punk girlfriend, and a crabby convert named Paula who is looking for meaning in her life (while being infatuated with the charismatic if scary Ashkouri). Soon they are joined by another young woman exploring Islam – Esa Khattak’s colleague, Rachel Getty. She has followed the murdered man into the heart of the mosque to find out who killed him – and why he had decided to disobey his orders.

The investigation is challenging, but it’s made far more difficult as an intelligence official, Ciprian Coale, withholds information and deliberately impedes Khattak’s work, thanks to a longstanding grudge and a suspicion that Khattak’s religious beliefs make him somehow less Canadian. (Some of the interagency complexity would be easier to grasp by reading the previous book in the series.) To complicate matters, Khattak’s strong-willed sister Ruksh has become engaged to Ashkouri, believing him to be a devout and honorable man. Khattak and Getty don’t have time to lose. Intercepts indicate that there will be some sort of attack to mark the new year.

Khattak understands the missing context that explains so much of current events: the history of colonialism, the repeated disappointments as democratic movements have been crushed, the subtleties of a religion misrepresented in the news and by Wahhabi-inspired demagogues, inflamed as western societies tilt toward bigotry and right-wing nationalism. While Ashkouri uses poetry a kind of code to conceal his plans, Khattak invokes it when thinking about how complex his world is:

The generations mislaid by decades of war, by centuries of struggle.

The splintered past, the crippled future, nothing to gain, less to give.

A bruised carnation planted in a cup . . .

A knotting of sinews and bone because you were never disconnected from what the ummah suffered, any more than you could understand the madmen who claimed to speak or kill or die in their name.

This mystery, like its hero, is cerebral, but develops tension as time grows short and Rachel’s cover grows tattered. Khattak’s nuanced understanding of his religion and of the present moment steadies him as he and his partner Rachel strive to serve “a nation of communities, bound together by the things they hold in common.”

---

 

You may or may not have noticed, all three of these books are by women; one is by a woman of color. My next challenge will be to expand the diversity of my reading, an issue Sisters in Crime is currently working on for its upcoming Summit Report. I think it’s going to provide both practical help for writers (and readers) who would like to see a publishing industry that is more reflective of the general population as well as a rousing argument for why reading (and publishing) diverse books matters. Meanwhile, I’ve been collecting links about diversity in publishing and am keeping an eye out for more.

Do you have mysteries by authors of color (or non-heteronormative authors or authors with disabilities) to recommend? I need to give my reading list more diversity.

Starting a Serial: If Then Else

I’ve started putting my latest project into the Pressbooks platform, which I also used for a collection of essays, Babel Fish Bouillabaisse; it’s a very easy WordPressy platform that does a nice job of creating both ebook, pdf, and html versions of a book for a reasonable price. (You can try it for free, but it comes with watermarking; or if you’re handy with code, there’s an open source version. If you want to avoid watermarks or work, it costs $99 per book, unless you wait for a sale, in which case it can be as low as $50. That seemed an incredibly affordable price for not learning how to set up my own.)

The new book is If Then Else. There’s probably a better title for it. I just haven’t thought of it yet. It’s intended for young adults or adults who like to read this sort of adventure and don’t mind that the protagonist is a teen. The book grew out of my frustration – well, let’s be accurate, my rage at the way the surveillance-industrial complex has taken over our world. It’s a weird convergence of Silicon Valley values (free is a low, low price; just make micropayments of personal information every time you touch a keyboard) and Big Brother collect-it-all arrogance. It’s telling that the government couldn’t implement its overreaching Total Information Awareness program in 2003. People objected to it even though they were scared. The 9/11 attacks were still a fresh memory, but the idea of a total surveillance system was scarier. Then a year later Facebook was founded and our feeling about personal data aggregation gradually changed. Yes, people were upset and angry when Edward Snowden revealed the scope and audacity of the government’s surveillance programs, but they also were growing cynical and resigned. The entire internet relied on spying as its business model, or so it seemed. Of course the government would tap into those giant data banks. How could they resist?

How can we resist? Or is it futile?

I don’t think it is, but it’s going to be a long and difficult fight to fix it. Meanwhile, I did what I usually do when I get angry: I started to make up a story, this one mixing the problem of privacy with the way that the FBI has frequently set up stings that coax not-very-clever people into saying and doing things that they would never have considered if not groomed by a paid informant. So that’s the genesis of this story – a kid whose big brother has been arrested on bogus terrorism charges decides to fight for his freedom.

I have some work to do yet, but a couple of chapters are out and more will follow shortly. I was going to wait until I made a last pass at editing, but then last week it was my mother’s birthday and I decided that was the right day to start posting.

My mom (who died a few years ago at age 95) was remarkable. She knew everything but often insisted you look it up anyway, just for practice. She knew foreign capitals and historical events and the meaning of Latin phrases, even though she hadn’t had a chance to finish high school. It was the depression, she was the eldest of nine children, and her father died when she was sixteen, just old enough to become the family breadwinner.

She read all the time – mostly mysteries that she brought home in great stacks from the library. She didn’t teach me how to read – nuns did that, and it wasn’t easy – but she taught me why to read. For that (and many other things) I owe her a lot. And if she were here to read it, I’m sure she would find every typo I miss.

So, here it is – chapter one and chapter two. More to follow. If you follow me on Twitter, I’ll be posting links there. In a few weeks, I’ll post a link here to download the finished book.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in privacy issues, there’s  whole resistance toolkit available at the Library Freedom Project. Also, you might enjoy The Internet With a Human Face, a talk by Maciej Cegłowski. It’s by turns depressing and hilarious, and ends with some good suggestions for change.