Figuring I should do up another post on my website I sit here staring at my screen. I have no clue what this post will be about given the number of things tumbling around in my head currently. So I think I’ll let it just ramble out at it’s own pace and see where it might lead. Be warned, this may be long, with some point to point insanity tossed in, and may actually get down, dirty, and plain old nasty. Here we go…

First thing that comes to mind is an issue of piracy. An author friend of mine recently had a release, and as part of the lead up to it had an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) give away. Being the smart cookie that she is, my friend found a way to embed coding into each copy to make them individually unique so when she gave them to the readers who won a copy, she’d know if any of them decided to be a douche. One such person proved themselves to be just that, a douche. This person took the gift from my author friend, and promptly uploaded it to a known piracy site. Because of the encoded meta data my friend put in it was easily traceable.

It’s people like this that make us authors so wary to gift our books. Personally I always do it via a site that has the DRM in place. Not saying this is the be all, end all to stop these folks. But it’s definitely a step in the right direction. The personalized meta data encoding is another. Making each book unique, easily traceable, and so you know exactly who the perpetrator is. Sadly I’m not sure what else you can do. While the FBI has a division set for cyber crime, including intellectual property theft on the Net, what all can truly be done to stop these jerks? You shut down one site, and another pops up. You find new ways to secure books to prevent this from happening, and some jackass finds three ways around it. It really makes me, as an author, wonder why I bother to do prize giveaways. Or at least ones involving my books. It also makes me fucking mad that these people continuously get away with stealing. And that others seem to think it’s perfectly fine.

Yes books cost money, so does gas, so do things like clothing, shoes, food. But not a one of these pirates goes out to steal a cup of coffee, or a loaf of bread because that would be “wrong”. So where the fuck do they get off thinking it’s perfectly okay to steal an author’s work? We spend hours, days, months getting a book just right before we send it into our publishers. Then there is more time in refining it, getting it perfect for sale, and then the hours of pimping the books to garner those sales. This is all time that we, at least initially, are giving away free. Because it takes a damn long time to actually make any money off your books.

Prime example. My first quarter as an author I earned enough to buy exactly 8 XL cups of Tim Horton’s coffee with a few pennies left over. Yes, I am a Timmy’s addict, and damn proud of it – so shush. My second quarter I earned enough to get exactly 16 XL cups of Tim Horton’s coffee (should mention this is prior to the just recent price hike of said XL coffee cup) with a few pennies left over. Yes that was twice as much as the first quarter, but it’s still not enough to live off of. No where NEAR enough. Yet I hear all too often, and this is a paraphrase of several different people, “authors make so much money why are they bitching about one/two/three (whatever number) of their books being pirated – it’s free advertising basically”. Bull-fucking-shit. It is THEFT. Unfortunately there’s no way YET to nail these assholes to the proverbial wall. Yet.

Okay, enough on that topic. All it does is piss me the fuck off which is totally not conducive to getting my head into the proper writing space. Which I need to do soon enough. I now have three, yes THREE damn WIP’s on the burner. Don’t know where the hell they keep coming from but they do seem to pop up to drive me insane.

Second topic of irritation I want to throw out there since I’m in a venting mood – Christmas. It is not the “holiday season”, it is Christmas. In a lot of things I am PC…to a degree. But not on this. I don’t give two shits who I offend, cause it’s my fucking country, it’s Merry Christmas. Every culture has their own version, I say celebrate it accordingly and proudly. But when folks who come to our country for a better life get all pissy because our holiday offends them, too fucking bad. We were here first and it’s our holiday. You get to celebrate your holidays without all of us getting pissy at you. So, quite honestly, if you don’t like it, there’s the fucking door – don’t let it hit you in the ass on the way out.

Sadly too many things are getting all white washed out to ensure we don’t offend anyone. It’s more than beyond time to get back to the way things were. A time when kids weren’t given everything they snivelled for, but had to earn it with hard work. Or where a teacher actually had some authority over her classroom instead of getting fired for giving a student a failing grade – I had to earn my marks, why don’t the “next generation”? Come on, all this is doing is raising a bunch of people who think they don’t have to do anything to get it all. Personally I can’t wait for the reality check most of these little shits will get one day when they are all flipping burgers at McD’s or somewhere similar for barely minimum wage. How you going to afford the latest and greatest toys then?

Okay, I’d better stop before I really get myself worked into an unholy tizzy. Time to take some of my annoyance and put it into my writing. I need to get to work on those otherwise there’s not much coming out from me in the New Year. EEEK! Not good. All right. Sorry again for the rambling, spewing crap I tossed out. But I needed to get it out of my system. I hope all of you have a lovely weekend, and play safe out there in the malls, and stores. ~ Moira