The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Rebecca Ore:

Show all comments by Rebecca Ore.

Posted on entry Unmarked marriage ::: April 16, 2009, 10:07 AM:
Answering 21 and 60, Amazon did appear from sometime in 2008 to have decided that certain books were erotica. I'd thought that my Aqueduct Press book not being included with my Tor and Harper Collins books was a glitch, but that was the fastest thing fixed when I first complained. I'm still not seeing the Aqueduct Press book included in my personal best sellers list, but it is showing up in searches on my name and in default searches on the title and in Google searches (for a while, Amazon.com didn't show up in Google searches for the title).

So, Amazon had hand-coded or keyworded from publisher supplied information ("slashy," "sexy" perhaps in my case) some books as adult. The hamhandedness was extending the adult classification to all books with publisher supplied metatags of glbt or sexuality studies or whatever other meta information the publishers had supplied to make their books easier to find by people who wanted to read them.

I can see Amazon's point in trying to make the adult books less obvious, and now that the general glbt and sexuality works aren't unranked, we can have the smaller discussion with them about why explicit erotica should not be included among an author's other work. It's their store. For most people, the problem has been fixed now, and my Aqueduct book is now more visible than it was, just not as completely visible as my other books.

I can live with this. I'm also quite amused that Tower Books classified Centuries Ago and Very Fast as a Regency Romance (off by at least a century for any story in the collection).

The whole thing, including the Tower classification, has made me more aware than I was about intersecting issues of feminism and sexual freedom (for where I started, see the essay at the back of the collection).
Posted on entry Amazon's very bad day ::: April 14, 2009, 01:57 PM:
They've fixed most but not all of it for my Aqueduct Press book. Centuries Ago & Very Fast still doesn't show up on the list of my 14 best selling books, though its sales rank would otherwise make it my third selling item.

Amazon means to sell Bibles and butt plugs and to keep out of the culture wars by doing what they can to make the products one group wants invisible to the group that doesn't approve.

The adult classification appears to be here to stay, just not so hammer-handed and not such a problem for sales.
Posted on entry Amazon's very bad day ::: April 13, 2009, 01:17 PM:
The only common thread is that publishers listed the books as glbt (as Aquaduct did for Centuries Ago and Very Fast. The book was not linked to Rebecca Ore the former Tor and Harper Collins SF writer, but came up on general searches just fine until sometime around the weekend. And had its rankings at least week before last or so. No customers had tagged the book. The book is now listed with my other work, but on the last page of the things by Rebecca Ore. Aqueduct and I complained about that and it was fixed as of Sunday night, but not completely un-"glitched."

No customer metatags were necessary for the rankings being dropped and the book not showing up in the general search.

My books always did sell better when they were labelled over 18 only, so I'm actually kinda amused.

Posted on entry Thomas M. Disch, 1940-2008 ::: July 06, 2008, 11:27 PM:
Okay, folks, another one slipped through the cracks of being a freelancer without benefits and with a landlord who wanted him out of his apartment. I'm now working as a technical writer/editor in Northern Virginia to have something in my old age (it's worker owned), but maybe some of you know some folks in the foundations world, or some rich people, who could like, set up a fund to make life at the end a little easier for people who contributed that much to the field.

Enough people were reading his blog to know it was a slow suicide note. I don't know if an intervention could have helped, but Michael Swanwick's comment tonight was, "Even if he had to commit suicide, he shouldn't have had to worry about being evicted."
Posted on entry Articles we stopped reading ::: August 10, 2006, 09:44 PM:
New Wave was the science fiction that the poets and artists in the Lower East Side were reading in 1971. Technically, the people around Morecock would be the English New Wave, but some Americans were also writing books that were conceptually exciting to people who weren't the traditional s.f. readers: Ellison, Lafferty, the Silverberg of "Born with the Dead."

Delany is core to that NYC lineage as was George Alec Effinger, who also hung out with the poets around St.Mark's Church, and Tom Disch (The New York School of Science Fiction, perhaps).

Tiptree was writing meta-science fiction, as behoved a New Yorker writer. She was inventing the writer as well as the work, so she is more like Borges than like most s.f. writers.

People who come out of more literary traditions who start writing s.f. often write very conventionally at first, or at least apparently conventionally, as a sort of asking permission and as a ironic exploration of the standard tropes.

Attempting to divide people into waves or schools strikes me as weird, though, something people who aren't writers are given to doing.
Posted on entry The otters return, and they're on fire ::: September 03, 2005, 04:08 PM:
Check the *current* Red Cross site -- that FAQ question and reply isn't available now though the link Nancy Lebovitz passed on to me works.



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