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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
AngiePen's LiveJournal:
| Friday, November 27th, 2009 | |
| 10:12 am | HM Is Up -- Get It Now Let's see if I can make this this link work.... Hah, it works. :D This is a Word file, about 667K. If anyone has a problem downloading it, let me know in comments. [crossed fingers] This is only going to be up for a very short time, so if you want a copy, get it now. Also, I ask that everyone please be very discreet about this. :/ I'm trying to balance my obligations here, but I'm operating under the theory that it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. I'd rather the issue just never come up, though, so let's keep this in the family. If you know someone who's away from the internet right now, for the holiday or whatever, and they don't get back until after I've taken this down, please keep any discussion and sharing to e-mail. And finally, I want to thank everyone who supported me with comments and encouragement while I wrote this. You all are why I'm here, you're why I finally got published after all these years, and I love you all to bits. No other writer in the world ever had better readers, fans, or friends than me. Massive hugs to everyone. {{{}}} Angie |
| Monday, November 23rd, 2009 | |
| 12:24 pm | A Hidden Magic Hey all! [wave] This is just a preliminary heads-up to let you know that I'm working on revising A Hidden Magic for publication, and in fact I'm close to finishing. I have a verbal agreement to get it submitted by Thanksgiving, and I still think I can make that, or close. [crossed fingers] What that means is the clock is ticking on Hidden Magic 1.0. Once version 2.0 is finished, I'll be taking 1.0 down, so if you want a copy of the original fanfic version, grab it soon. So, what next? ( Read more... ) |
| Saturday, November 14th, 2009 | |
| 4:50 am | No Pledge of Allegiance ...until there actually is liberty and justice for all. That's what ten-year-old Will Phillips says, and he's acting on it, declining to stand for the Pledge at school because his family has gay friends who aren't being treated equally under the law -- who are being deprived of the right to marry, or to adopt children. Predictably, Will is being harassed for his stance, first by a substitute teacher and (of course) by some of the more nasty and ignorant students at his school. (Although to be fair, this is only elementary school and I'd bet cookies that the students who are taunting and harassing him are just reflecting the views and behavior of their parents, so the shame is on them for not setting a better example.) Will's parents support him, though, and got the school administration to admit that he's not required to stand for the Pledge, that he does have the right to sit through it. And what about the substitute teacher who tried to bully him into participating, even threatening to get his mother and grandmother (whom she knew, although obviously not very well) on his case? Since he hadn't broken any rules in refusing to stand for the Pledge, Will's mother asked when they could expect an apology from that teacher. Well, the principal didn't see that as "necessary." Of course not. [eyeroll] Will has an excellent sense of right and wrong, though, and I applaud his stand, and also his parents for supporting him in doing what's right. Read more about Will and the Pledge incident in this Arkansas Times article, and more commentary by John Brummett, a columnist with the Arkansas News. If nothing else, Mr. Brummett's suggested alternate Pledge is entertaining, and unfortunately apt. Thanks to Indigene on The Phade for the original link. Angie |
| Monday, November 2nd, 2009 | |
| 1:12 pm | Hanging With Wolves Jim and I spent yesterday (Sunday) at Wolf Mountain Sanctuary, in southern California in Lucerne Valley. Well, at the sanctuary, plus driving up and back with some friends; I think we spent at least half the day in the car. It was worth it, though. Wolf Mountain is smaller than I was expecting, but Tonya, the woman who owns the place, said that they're working on moving to a larger property. They have several packs which have to be kept isolated from one another -- I got the impression that they might fight if they were kept together, although I might be mistaken -- so while they have several larger enclosures with room for the wolves to trot around and play and bury things, bigger would be better. ( Read more, with pics ) |
| Friday, October 16th, 2009 | |
| 4:28 am | Is YOUR Senator Pro-Gang-Rape? Yeah, that's pretty inflamatory. I'm feeling pretty damn inflamed right now, so I think that's appropriate. In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones, a twenty-year-old employee of KBR -- at the time a subsidiary of Halliburton, and hey look, they're hiring -- was working in Iraq. Her co-workers drugged her, gang-raped her, abused her so badly her breasts were disfigured permanently, then locked her in a shipping container for twenty-four hours without food or water. She was told by her employer that if she left Iraq to get medical attention, she'd be fired. According to an ABC News post: Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas. "I said, 'Dad, I've been raped. I don't know what to do. I'm in this container, and I'm not able to leave,'" she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas. "We contacted the State Department first," Poe told ABCNews.com, "and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen" -- from her American employer. Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones' camp, where they rescued her from the container. Also: ( Read more... ) |
| Sunday, October 11th, 2009 | |
| 4:25 pm | Another Plagiarist My apologies if this is already all over the place; I'm behind on this Flist. I had to post about this, though. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} gwendolynflight, over in the Merlin fandom, decided that she didn't want to do the work to learn to write and refine her technique and develop her own style. She wanted hugs and pats and e-cookies for her wonderful writing right now. So instead of writing a novel of her own, she grabbed a copy of Jordan Castillo Price's (jordan_c_price) first PsyCops book, Among the Living, did a bit of editing to change the names and the setting and such, and posted it to her journal as a Merlin fanfic. And of course, she got a lot of applause and e-cookies for it, because it's a very good story. (Jordan isn't a particular friend of mine, I don't even have her journal friended, but we both publish with Torquere Press and I have Among the Living -- it's a good read.)Of course someone figured out what was going on -- 'cause there are fanfic readers who also read original m/m books, who knew?! -- and after some incredibly lame excuse-making, the plagiarist took the story down. But check out this screencap and read through the comments. :/ I love the part where gwendolynflight assures a commenter that "it is completely and fully beta'd." Umm, right, because the real writer polished it, then sent it to a publisher where a line editor and a proofreader went over it. [eyeroll]And then lower down where she actually admits that the story is a "fusion" with Price's PsyCops series. o_O This is where I get the idea that she's actually just that stupid, rather than a bold-faced thief. Not that being a moron is an excuse, but you know, it's something different to smack her for. Then a few comments later where she's talking to a reader about how dark the story is, and mentions that Book Two is particularly dark, and she's glad that isn't turning the reader off. So she fully intended to go on doing this, through the whole series? Once she'd ripped off all the available novels, since she seems to think she's doing absolutely nothing wrong, I wonder whether she'd have had the balls to, like, write to Jordan and nudge her about hurrying up on the next installment. :P Finally, about 2/3 of the way down, throwawayreview calls it what it is and clues poor gwendolynflight that this isn't a "fusion," it's not fanfic, it's plagiarism. And of course Ms. Gwen has all sorts of excuses, because plagiarism is "a social concept" and not absolute. And later on she says that "plagiarism isn't an inherent moral wrong - it's an issue firmly bound up in economic and patriarchal issues." Umm, right. It's a weapon of the Patriarchy. So her stealing the actual words of another woman writer and posting them as her own and accepting praise and credit for writing the words another woman actually wrote, is actually Ms. Gwen sticking it to the Patriarchy. Wow, good to know. [eyeroll]Note that Jordan has no problem with fanfic. She said, in her reaction to this situation: ( Read more... ) |
| Thursday, October 8th, 2009 | |
| 3:20 am | Bullies Get Butts Kicked By Cross-Dressers Gacked from a few places around the net. :D A couple of homophobic thugs in Swansea, Wales, attacked two men who were walking down the street in short skirts and high heels. The two cross-dressers turned around and wiped the sidewalk with the jerks. It turns out the cross-dressers were a couple of cage fighters -- talk about picking a fight with the wrong guys! LOL! Someone named CJ in comments to the above linked article suggested "Give these 2 badges and cuffs and get them out on the streets everynight dressed that way to attract idiots who only attack people (seemingly) weaker than themselves." I'd chip in for that, seriously. [evil snicker] Angie |
| Friday, September 11th, 2009 | |
| 2:20 pm | Irony, Thy Name Is Government Also incompetence, but it's the irony I'm mainly appreciating here. This morning at around ten, the Coast Guard carried out some exercises on the Potomac near the bridge where President Obama's motorcade passed by on his way to a 9-11 memorial event. Unfortunately they didn't think to, like, maybe notify any other agencies of what they were doing, so the exercise resulted in CNN reporting ten rounds fired at a suspicious vessel, and departures from the nearby Reagan International Airport being held for almost half an hour while the FBI scrambled to respond to the hostile incident. Oops. Good to know our tax dollars are being used wisely in these harsh economic times, to say nothing of the government's great respect for the time, money and feelings of its citizens (especially on this day -- come on, people!) who get caught up in this sort of fiasco, whether they were near the bridge and worried that they were going to be killed, or were stuck at the airport being made late for meetings, missing connections, etc. The gold standard of irony is toward the end of the article, though, where it says: The Coast Guard is part of the Homeland Security Department, which was created in response to the 9/11 attacks. The massive reorganization was designed to promote sharing of information within the department and among other law enforcement agencies. Umm, yeah. I think they need to work on that. Angie |
| Saturday, August 15th, 2009 | |
| 12:48 am | Making Amends icarusancalion has posted an explanation/apology/amends for something she did, attacking and slandering a Buddhist temple and its Lama over a period of years because she couldn't face her own responsibility for her failures as a nun and a Buddhist.Her hateful and lying words from the past have been used by others to hurt this temple and her old teacher, and she hopes that her confession and explanation will rise high enough in Google rankings that when people go looking for information on the subject, they'll find her post to mitigate the lies she helped spread, which are also still out there, propped up by others with similar issues. Aside from this being a pretty awesome melding of ancient tradition and 21st century technology, I think this is a worthy cause and then some, so I'm linking in all my personal fora. I encourage everyone to read this (it's not that long) and if you agree that it's a worthy cause, to link as well. Thank you. Angie |
| Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 | |
| 7:31 pm | Trying to Read a Fic I just saw an interesting looking fic that's almost twenty chapters in. There's no summary [sigh] but the title is suggestive of a trope I find intriguing, so I clicked through anyway. Chapter Almost-Twenty. No links. No tags. No nothing. The only way to find all the pieces would be to go on an Easter egg hunt through the journals where it's posted. I won't do that even if it's just someone's personal journal, but just to ice the cake, this person is posting directly to the (very busy) fic communities, so there'd be even more stuff to search through than there would be in a personal journal. Umm, no. Sorry. I've said before (and various other places in comments) that if a writer can't be bothered to make it easy for me to read a story -- all the way through, from the beginning, even if I'm not there as they post each chapter -- then I can't be bothered to click and search and hunt around to find all the pieces so I can actually read it. I don't care who the characters are or how intriguing the header seems; even if I had the time to go on said Easter egg hunt, which I don't, this sort of thing just pisses me off. I can only assume this person doesn't want readers, except perhaps the ones who were there when they started posting and have been there all along (sorry, no vacations allowed). And I can also only assume that this person isn't interested in being nominated for any fic awards, since it's clearly not fair to expect people doing a writer the favor of nominating, or people doing fandom the favor of running an award cycle (a thankless job if ever there was one), to take the time to go combing through the underbrush collecting however many pieces of a novel-length fic into one place so that it can be nominated, when the writer could've done it so easily as they posted but chose not to bother. So, whatever. Maybe it's a great fic, but I'm scrolling on. [sigh] Angie |
| Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 | |
| 11:26 pm | Thank You! Thanks to everyone who helped make my birthday wonderful. :D To pecos, dragonmad, anorienparker, illuminatedsin and arrowthroughme for greetings, to mistry89 for the balloons on my profile page, and to foxrafer for the e-card. Massive hugs to all of you! The day was pretty low-key at home, and getting all this love from people here on LJ made it very special and awesome. {{{}}}Angie |
| Monday, July 27th, 2009 | |
| 5:57 am | Pirate Humor, and a Challenge The funny first. I was checking hits on my blog and I saw that someone was querying Google for "chasing fire by angela benedetti torrent" recently. Yay, someone else looking to steal one of my stories. Except I've never published a story called "Chasing Fire." :) Nor even written one. And when I checked, it doesn't seem there's anyone else named "Angela Benedetti" who's written a story by that name either. (Although there are a couple others of us; one's a meteorologist who publishes a lot of scholarly papers, and the other is a lady who works with children in Bogotá. So far as I know, neither one writes fiction.) So it looks like this is one confused pirate. :D Not that I'm complaining or anything -- confused pirates are the best kind. Hey, dude? If you can find a torrent copy of a story by me called "Chasing Fire," go for it, with my blessing. [wave] Moving on to the subject of slightly more competent pirates, someone finally did find a copy of "Learning to Love Yourself" and got it up on a torrent site back around the end of June. I sent a takedown note and, credit where it's due, the site took it down. It was up for however many days, though, and a bunch of people got free copies. ( Read more... ) |
| Sunday, July 19th, 2009 | |
| 12:54 pm | Raffle! Today and tomorrow, PD Singer, Mara Ismine and I are taking over the Torquere Social community on LiveJournal to celebrate the release of our mini anthology, Walk the Plank. A number of the posts -- well, most of them so far -- are marked PIRATE RAFFLE in their titles. If you comment on those posts and participate in whatever activities we've got going there, you'll be entered into the drawing for one of three free copies of the anthology. For each post you participate in, you'll get one chit in the hat; hang out with us both days and you could really stuff the raffle. :) The first Pirate Post is here, with Mara on watch alone for a while 'cause she's in England. I chime in here with a story from my misspent youth [cough] and an invitation for others to share, for a raffle entry. We'll be around all day today, and tomorrow through midnight Eastern or so. Come hang with us, have fun, and enter to win one of the free anthos! Angie |
| Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | |
| 1:27 pm | Release -- Boarding Action I just had a new story released, "Boarding Action," in the pirate themed anthology Walk the Plank. Walk the Plank is a Taste Test, a short anthology with three stories all on a theme. Short stories sold alone cost $1.29; Taste Tests have three and sell for $2.49, so it's a little better than getting one free. :) =============== Cam and his friends plan a pirate themed prank to play on their friend Marsha Donovan and her father. They dress up and go out in their motorboat with their pirate costumes, plastic swords and water guns, hoping to stage a fun, fake pirate attack on the Donovans' yacht, then spend the afternoon swimming and cruising. Of course it all goes wrong, and Cam's friends bail on him, leaving him to face an angry -- but hot -- man with a gun who wants to know just WTF he thought he was doing. =============== Cam had been out with Marcia's family on their boat a few times and knew where they usually went. There was a series of beaches up the coast where Mr. Donovan liked to anchor and fish. They cruised by, keeping an eye out for the distinctive white hull, but didn't have any luck. Next, Cam directed David out to a cluster of islands Marcia liked; the tiny beaches there were quieter than the mainland, and sometimes she could persuade her dad to go there, even thought the fishing wasn't as good. They cruised around the wooded islands for half an hour or so, then Ted yelled, "There! Hah! Gear up, me hearties!" Cam snickered and made sure his head scarf was straight, then dug his hat out from behind the cooler where he'd stuck it to keep it from blowing overboard or getting stepped on. David aimed the go-fast right for the Donovans' yacht and the other three all pulled their plastic swords and waved them around, smacking each other a few times in the process. He happened to be on the right side of the boat when David pulled up to the swim platform at the stern of the anchored yacht, so Cam was the first off. He hopped over while Ted bellowed from behind him, "Ho the yacht! Come out with yer hands in the air and bring yer valuables, arrr!" ( Read more... ) |
| Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 | |
| 10:25 pm | More Rice Paddy Art Remember when I posted this about a year and a half ago? The husband forwarded a link to some more, from this year -- check it out. Isn't that incredible? I love the pics showing how distorted the actual plantings are to give the right perspective; scroll down toward the bottom for those. Angie |
| Friday, July 10th, 2009 | |
| 12:23 am | San Francisco San Francisco was awesome, as always, but it's good to be home. If nothing else, I heart my main computer, and particularly its full-size keyboard. :) We had a great time, though, and I'm going to babble about some of it. SF is a great place for food, particularly if you're into meat. We were staying at the Hyatt on the Embarcadero, right across from the Ferry Terminal. I've never gone over there before for whatever reason, but a few days before we left to fly up, Jim and I were watching an episode of a Food Network show called The Best Thing I Ever Ate. A bunch of the Food Network people talk about great food they've had in various places, and this was a bacon themed episode, yum! One of the guys talked about a great little butcher shop in the Ferry Terminal called Boccalone; their slogan is "Tasty Salted Pig Parts." Can't beat that, right? They cure their meat right on the premises; there's a glass-doored cabinet off to one side with slabs of bacon and legs of prosciutto and whatever all else hanging there. The "best thing" here was a salumi cone for like $3.50. Salumi seems to be like a superset of salami; it's a variety of cured pork bits, sliced thin and curled up in a paper cone, sort of like a snowcone only with meat instead of ice. We got that a couple of times -- good stuff. It's salty and porky and just fatty enough. ( Read more... ) |
| Friday, July 3rd, 2009 | |
| 3:23 am | Twenty Years Over the 4th of July weekend in 1989, I got on a plane and flew down to Anaheim to meet a guy for the first time ever in realspace. We'd met met in an online fantasy RPG called GemStoneII, on the old GEnie network, and had become close over the previous few months. We were both sort of nervous, but he didn't turn out to be an axe murderer or anything ;D and the trip worked out well. It wasn't a huge, swooping, love-at-first-sight sort of thing, but that was twenty years ago and we're still together. We've been married now for thirteen years come August, so I'd say the gamble of taking that plane trip -- which all the flailing hysterics who are terrified of the evil internet will tell you to Never Ever Do!!! in this fearful age -- was a pretty good gamble. :D In about twelve hours Jim and I'll be getting on a plane and going up to San Francisco, where we'll be touristing around for a week. We've done it before and both love the place; the weather is great and the food is better, and we're just going to hang out and relax and revel in having known the love of our lives for twenty years, which is pretty darned good these days. I'll be taking the laptop but probably won't be reading blogs/journals/etc. all that much. If anything cool happens, or you post something you think I'd be particularly interested in, feel free to e-mail me or leave a link here. Don't crash the internets while I'm gone! ;D [wave] Angie |
| Thursday, June 25th, 2009 | |
| 7:46 pm | GLBT Bookshelf and Some Press Weirdness Mel Keegan has pulled together a site called the GLBT Bookshelf to act as a clearinghouse for independent writers, publishers, artists, editors, reviewers, etc., of GLBT books, so that censorship elsewhere won't have the power to cut us off from the rest of the world again; we'll have our own place out from under the umbrella of any larger organization which might want to shove us back into a corner, or off a cliff. The inspiration was AmazonFail, of course, and the site, which is a wiki, has exploded with pages since it was thrown open for people to join and start building. There are so far a few hundred writers, a bunch of publishers, with lists and categories and cross-links so you can wander around and find whatever you might be into. And it'll only get better as more people come on over and add their info. Here's my main page for anyone who's interested; there are links to pages about each of my published stories, with buy links and links to two free stories, which are sequels to two of my commercial stories. Mel's also planning on adding a Booklover's Lounge too, specifically for readers. I'll let you all know when that happens. The first publicity campaign is starting and we've got a press release out to a few sites, which is pretty cool. Hopefully the site will get a nice wave of people wandering through. The weirdness, though, came just a few minutes ago. Mel Keegan e-mailed all of us who've signed up on the site about the press release, which says in part: Frustrated by the infamous "AmazonFail" fiasco of early 2009, in which the online retail giant was suspected of attempting to deny GLBT literature the benefits of its promotional systems, Keegan conceived of an online community in which all such systems were circumvented -- replaced by "community promotion" with direct links to authors’ and publishers’ pages. There's another mention of "AmazonFail" later on as well. But Mel mentioned that one of the sites to which the press release was submitted, PR.com, would only run the story if the mentions of "AmazonFail" were removed. o_O Umm, excuse me? None of the other sites minded the mention at all; "AmazonFail" was big news a couple of months ago and mention of it will only bring more traffic. So one has to wonder whether Amazon might not own a chunk of PR.com, and be trying to squelch mentions in the news of their more embarassing moments. Only speculation of course, but it's definitely suspicious. Angie |
| Saturday, June 20th, 2009 | |
| 4:42 am | Come Spend the Day I'm driving the bus over on Torquere Social today, so come on over and hang out with me. I'll be posting a series of questions and contests, and collecting names of folks who participate into a hat (well, probably a bowl, but close enough) and drawing a name for a five dollar Torquere gift certificate. (You can get about half my backlist for five dollars, so if you've wanted to try my stories but haven't had the money, this'd be a great opportunity. :D ) I'll be posting throughout the day, so check in whenever you're around. [wave] Angie |
| 12:52 am | To the Person Posting as BUGCHICKLV on Demonoid Thanks for expressing interest in my story, "Learning to Love Yourself," as well as a number of my colleague Mike Shade's stories. It's great to know there are people out there who want to read my stuff. But seriously, dude, it costs $1.29. You can buy a copy right here for, like, a quarter of what a cup of coffee costs these days. Now I'll admit that with the many, many stories which were passed around on that particular Demonoid thread, you If you're really that strapped for cash, there are plenty of legitimately free stories around on the internet. There's some great stuff in fanfic fandom (look for rec lists) plus a lot of published writers have free stories on their web sites. Archives like Nifty are free and specialize in gay erotica. Oh, and there are also places called libraries where you can borrow books for free -- I'll bet there's one near you. But you know, the pirated e-book thing? Please knock it the fuck off. Thank you. Angie |
