Christina Dalcher's Blog

Synopsis:
“A prosecutor can still seek the death penalty but her own life is forfeit if it turns out that the person executed was innocent. Justine Boucher Callaghan is one such prosecutor. After a life campaigning against the death penalty, she never expected to ask for it. But in the aftermath of the death of her husband, and faced with the monstrous murder of a child and absolute certainty of Jake Milford’s guilt, she seeks the death penalty. Yet shortly after his execution, Justine is presented with evidence that could prove his innocence—evidence that could send Justine to the electric chair. She now faces a choice: investigate the evidence and risk her own life, or bury it and know the real killer walks free. But is the choice really hers to make?” 

Can I just say how much I *love* this book? Well, I said it, and I do.

For bookish rights inquiries, please contact Cicely Aspinall at HQStories.

For film rights, please reach out to Jasmine Lake at United Talent Agency.

I’m thrilled to share this glowing review of FEMLANDIA from PW:

Dalcher (Vox) puts a delightfully dark dystopian twist on Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 feminist utopian novel. In the near-future, America has fallen into chaos after the collapse of its economy. Against a backdrop of failing infrastructure, looted grocery stores, and widespread death, Miranda Reynolds—whose husband recently abandoned her and her 16-year-old daughter, Emma—is homeless and hungry. With nowhere else to go—and facing starvation or worse if attacked by roving gangs of thugs—Miranda reluctantly decides to take herself and Emma to Femlandia, a self-sufficient “womyn’s commune” her estranged mother founded decades earlier. Emma embraces the thriving settlement and its progressive culture, but Miranda finds troubling moral failings in the colony’s pioneering way of life. Exploring speculative responses and remedies to toxic masculinity, objectification, and systemic patriarchal oppression, this wildly provocative glimpse into the future is sure to spark lively discussions about humankind’s past, present, and future. The incendiary epilogue compensates for the relatively superficial worldbuilding. Dalcher remains a writer to watch. Agent: Laura Bradford, Bradford Literary. (Oct.)

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to know whether to laugh or scream at the publishing industry’s absurdities. You can get into trouble for writing a character unlike you; you can get into trouble for failing to write a character unlike you. Your soon-to-be-released (and already printed) memoir can be tossed into the furnace based on a wishy-washy 27-year-old allegation that resulted in precisely zero actual charges. You will be labeled as ‘insensitive,’ ‘appropriating,’ ‘anti-intersectional,’ or ’dangerous’ at the whim of any reader whose self-worth hinges on locating stuff to be pissed off at.

You can also happen upon a literary prize that stipulates “no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered” in your story submission.

No prizes for these!

I won’t be sending my novels to the Staunch Book Prize for consideration. But my reasons might surprise you.

Other writers have spoken up about the prize criteria restrictions. Sophie Hannah, writing in The Guardian, suggests the prize “actively sets out to discourage crime fiction, even of the highest quality, that tackles violence against women head-on.” Scottish crime writer Val McDermid (quoted in the same paper, different article) insists it is “entirely possible to write about [violence against women] without being exploitative or gratuitous […] I agree that there is a lot of fiction – not just crime novels and thrillers – that seems almost to glory in a kind of pornography of violence, and I deplore that as a woman and as a writer.” Steve Cavanagh tweeted an analogy that speaks for itself:

I see your point. My point is which book highlights racism and prejudice better? A book which is not about those issues or To Kill A Mockingbird? Wouldn’t it be better to celebrate a book that could challenge prejudice rather than celebrate a book which ignores it?

— Steve Cavanagh (@SSCav) January 30, 2018

Interestingly, Margaret Atwood seems to be an advocate for an award which wouldn’t touch The Handmaid’s Tale with a ten-foot pole (of course, she too is free to support what she likes):

Want to win the Staunch Prize? Write a thriller where no woman is sexually exploited, raped or murdered https://t.co/l1S8OQTtJV

— Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) January 31, 2018

The goal of Staunch Book Prize founder Bridget Lawless is “to draw attention to the plethora of violence towards women in fiction and to make space for exciting alternatives. While women in the real world are fighting sexual abuse and violence, being harassed, assaulted and raped, or being murdered BECAUSE THEY’RE WOMEN, the casual and endless depiction of females as victims or prey sits uneasily alongside their fight.”

I get that. I really do. It’s one of many reasons you won’t find any torture porn on my bookshelves. (It’s also why I stopped watching Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale series in the middle of its second season.) And since the prize effectively ‘belongs’ to its founder, I’d be a bad free market and free speech supporter if I whined about said prize equating to a gag order. Lawless and other prize-founders can, and should be able to, do whatever the hell they want, including establishing awards meeting any criteria at all, even limiting submissions to novels that introduce a cat named Miffy on page 100.

The arguments of Hannah, McDermid, and Cavanagh are valid: there’s nothing inherently wrong with writing about violence against women (or anyone else). Stories of rape or murder where a woman is the victim generally aren’t penned to applaud those crimes, but rather to say something about them, to put them under the microscope of moral scrutiny.

And yet, I have other bones to pick, one technical and one philosophical.

At the heart of the Staunch Prize’s criteria is the unspoken assumption that if a woman is murdered, the perpetrator is a man, the crime is sex-based (see: femicide), and the motive is necessarily one of toxic-masculinity-driven hate. What about the dowry deaths in India, where mothers-in-law either actively kill their sons’ daughters or drive them to suicide? Or death-row inmate Lisa Montgomery, who strangled a pregnant woman and posthumously removed the unborn baby? The young mother who leaves her newborn girl in a rubbish bin? The best friend who euthanizes her terminally ill long-time companion?

These are stories that might be interesting to write, characters whose motives would be worthy of exploration. Yes, women are harmed in them, but femicide is patently absent. And how revelatory it would be to talk about familial relations in Southeast Asia; or the desperation felt by an infertile, unhinged woman; or the shame and confusion of being an unwed teenaged mother; or the love that drives one human to take the life of another out of mercy.

The Staunch Prize, according to its sweeping and overgeneralizing criteria, would not consider any of these. I find that shortsighted and, well, dumb. That’s the technical issue.

On the philosophical side, being the sort of feminist I am, I’m constantly appalled at a culture that strives to protect me. I don’t want or need the soothing blanket of safe books and safe spaces and safe topics. I am a woman, not a child. Book awards like the Staunch Prize (while I defend their right to exist) neither soothe nor uplift me. Instead, they put me in a victim box, and I have no time for such things. I find them neither exciting nor original.

The mantra of the moment in certain circles is, “You’re not being Canceled; you’re facing consequences.” Okay. Let’s take a moment to work around this and see where we fall. There are two outcomes: we’ll either meet in the middle, or we’ll get stuck to the centrifuge’s outer wall. (I’m secretly hoping gravity will win over inertia.) What we need to think hard about are the actions driving the consequences. And after thinking hard about it, I’ll put this out there: We’ve spun scarily out of control in what we see as punishable offenses.

Like many teenagers, I did a few bad things, one of which was lighting up a cigarette in the girls’ room of my high school. (I swear on the souls of my non-existent grandchildren it was the first time I’d ever committed such a sin, and I didn’t get past the first drag before Mrs. Teacher walked in and hauled me out of the unlocked stall.) The next three days of my life were spent in solitary confinement in the library, ‘in-school suspension,’ they called it. Also, my parents were DoublePlusUnhappy, and I won’t go into how that played out. If there was a silver lining in my temporary incarceration, it was this: I went from Nerd Girl to Cool Girl in a New York minute. So, consequences.

My sneaky ciggie was a consequence-bearing action on my part. It was also a conscious action that I knew would bear a swift and just reaction. Smoking was not allowed on school property. (Buses, fortunately for us nicotine cravers, were an entirely different matter back then.) I was not of legal cigarette-buying age—a fact generally overlooked by store clerks since nearly every kid in the 1970s was often sent out for Marlboros by a parent. And my parents were uncommonly strict on the matter of tobacco usage. They would not permit me to smoke until I was 65. In short, I did a Bad Thing and got my just deserts.

Fast-forward from the Pre-Discoassic Age of my teenagerhood to now. Rather than fill this page with umpteen examples of sackings, ‘resignations,’ and career erasures, I refer you to the Free Speech Union’s list of fifty recent condemnations and this other list of cancellations compiled by Everything Oppresses (@SoOppressed). Once again, please don’t be deterred by any assumptions about either of the groups. The cases in these threads speak for themselves.

Do you notice a trend? Do you see that many of the crimes for which these people faced comeuppance are, for lack of a better word, ridiculous? I’ll summarize:

Tweeting “All Lives Matter”Failing to cancel a university exam after George Floyd’s deathChallenging the concept of “White Privilege”Criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement for [breaking social distancing guidelines / violence / Marxist ideology / anything at all]Defending statues and monuments from destruction by mobsPublishing a controversial opinion piece (um…on the opinion page)Questioning whether trans women are women (operative word is ‘questioning’)

There are also countless examples of self-cancelation in the renaming of rice and pancake syrup brands, dropping ‘Dixie’ from a music band’s name, putting Gone with the Wind in proper context, and so forth. But that’s another story for another time.

Here, I want to focus on why we’re placing radical sanctions on individuals for saying the wrong thing, for offending someone or some group, for what is fast being labeled as hate speech—which now tries to trump free speech. Or, at the very least, tries to impose unprecedented limits on what we are permitted to say. (Take note, readers, that in the United States, there is no ‘hate speech’ exception to freedom of expression. See page 5 of F.I.R.E.’s recent letter to Fordham University on behalf of Austin Tong.) The word ‘limit’ has a nice, soft ring to it, but to me, it is as loud and strident as an airhorn blown two inches from my ear.

I do believe limitations on speech are necessary. We don’t get a free pass at yelling “Fire!” in a crowded cinema when there is no fire. We can (and should) be sued for disseminating lies about an individual either orally or in print. We don’t get to walk up to another person and threaten to “beat the living crap out of him.” Although, even this last I find fuzzy: consider the difference between this phrase uttered by me, a 110-pound woman, to Rocky Balboa, vice the reverse scenario. It strains the imagination to think I could ever be regarded as a serious threat to Rocky’s personal safety. Not so the other way round.

What we’re seeing now are herculean efforts to curtail our speech far beyond that which is both dangerous and false (shouting fire), lying at the expense of a reputation (libel or slander), or placing someone in fear of imminent physical harm (assault). We are hearing arguments in favor of limiting speech that is perceived as offensive.

Having lived in the UK for a few years, I came away loving that island with the exception of only three things: dental care, the lack of mixer taps, and the country’s interpretation of so-called hate crimes and hate speech. I can deal with the first two, but draw a hard red line at the last, particularly with the UK’s 2014 Hate Crime Operational Guidance, which defines ‘hatred’ based on the perception of the victim.

In other words, if I say I’m offended by what you say, I win. Discussion over. All I need do is state an exaggerated sense of fear.

On my side of the pond, it’s looking like we’re headed in the direction of a post-modern, relativist subjectivity that knows few bounds.

The question is, why? Why are we, as a society, beginning to dig into closets of the past and present in search of anything that might offend us? I offer two hypotheses.

First, doing so provides a sense of self-esteem (albeit false self-esteem, but some people will take any they can get when it comes to the I’m-better-than-you-are game). Even Barack Obama denigrated this practice in 2019, saying:

“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people,’” he said, “and that’s enough.”

“Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb,” he said, “then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’” (my emphasis)

For a timely example of exactly this type of social justice warriorship, see the call to change Trader Joe’s branding of ethnic foods–started, naturally, by a high school senior with absolutely zero standing.

As horrified as I am at the prospect there’s a shred of truth in self-actualization via condemnation, the second possible motive behind Cancel Culture is far worse. We may have arrived on the shores of a foreign land where we assign ourselves value points for negative characteristics. We are somehow better people if we can latch onto a sense of victimization and hold tight. It’s a James Taggart kind of ploy: love me not for my virtues, but for my faults—not so different from that scene in Notting Hill where dinner guests compete for the last brownie (points) by relating their tales of suffering. Tell the most pitiful sob story, win the prize.

And so it is with our embracing of offense—the sheer, masochistic, self-loathing love of being hurt. The more we enjoy this feeling, the more rocks we overturn to find further wounding material.

Whether virtue-signaling or lust for victimhood is the correct motive for justifying consequences from employment termination to de-publishing to death threats (and maybe there’s another motive, but I haven’t found it yet), the problem is not whether Cancel Culture exists, but why Consequence Culture exists in its current unreasonable state.

I’ll return to my smoking-in-the-girls’-room example. There was no subjectivity about that. I broke a stated rule; I got what was coming to me. But when the rules are no longer stated, when they change and expand at the whim of a few (see #9 on this NYT list of Cancel Culture theses)**, when the rest of us don’t even know what the rules are anymore, how can we talk about whether the consequences for our actions and speech are even remotely fair?

**”The emergent, youthful left wants to take current taboos against racism and anti-Semitism and use them as a model for a wider range of limits — with more expansive definitions of what counts as racism and sexism and homophobia, a more sweeping theory of what sorts of speech and behavior threaten “harm” and a more precise linguistic etiquette for respectable professionals to follow.”

I want to talk about the Harper’s Letter in a different way. I ask you to keep two words in mind as you read:

Ease & effort.

I’ve scribbled my signature thousands of times in the past two years. It’s hard on the hands, but easy on the mind. It’s effortless. And yet a signed copy of my first novel is currently on sale for £200 in a London bookshop. All because I drew a few lines on a page. I question the value for money.

And so it is with the Harper’s Letter, John Hancock-ed by 150 of the brightest stars in our contemporary academic-journalistic-musical-literary universe. Margaret Atwood. Noam Chomsky. Deirdre McCloskey. John McWhorter. Steven Pinker. Salman Rushdie. They and others call for open debate, free exchange of ideas, the abandonment of public shaming. When I first read those words, I felt a wave of joy. If I’m honest, I also felt a bit irked that no one asked me to put my name on the list (or responded when I emailed Harper’s about it). But I’m a Little Person. I’ve sold books numbering in the hundreds of thousands, not in the millions.

The signatories of the Harper’s Letter are not Little People. Yet they seem concerned about our well-being. They write: “The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.” Don’t think I take these words lightly. I don’t. But neither do I believe they offer any substantive help.

Shaun Cammack, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, published a thoughtful piece on the recent Steven-Pinker-Is-A-Racist hoo-hah over at Spiked yesterday. Don’t be put off reading it by the publication’s conservative reputation, because Mr. Cammack has a point. Pinker (and the other “Big People”) enjoy a kind of protection the rest of us do not. Cammack puts on paper the same worries that have been rattling around in my head since the Harper’s Letter was published:

“[…] you are not Steven Pinker, and Noam Chomksy and others probably aren’t going to come to your defence [sic] when you get sanctioned for expressing the wrong opinion. Not because they don’t believe in free speech, but because they won’t even be aware of your case. There will be no articles lambasting and criticizing [sic] the cancellers.”

I hope you read this with the same heavy sigh I did. Because it’s true. Margaret Atwood may be a lovely person, but her signature on a letter that speaks in rather vague terms is not going to save you from sacking if the mob decides you need to be sacked. It’s not going to change your publisher’s or employer’s mind if a petition to drop you for the tritest of offenses (and the list of offenses is not only ever-expanding, but hilariously subjective) gathers a thousand supporters who jump on the public shaming bandwagon. J.K. Rowling may wish you well in theory, but I question whether she has the time to notice every one of her supporters and take a personal stand on their behalf. And I really don’t think Mr. Rushdie will give a proper (and well-deserved) tongue-lashing to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in defense of a curator who was charged with racism for the most ludicrous of reasons.

For us Little People, the Harper’s Letter is as devoid of value as my inscription on the title page of a book, where I with the reader “all my best” or declare “my profound gratitude.” It is a token, a kind of talisman we put in our pockets that makes us believe we’re protected. Like a rabbit’s foot, we can stroke it and be aware of its presence, all the while knowing its worthlessness. As much as I want to love it, the Harper’s Letter is not a sincere effort because it required so little effort to endorse.

If the influential folks who cry out for justice and free speech want to be taken seriously, they need to do more. They need to broaden their awareness of the victims they so loudly defend. The letters they write should be specific and purposefully-targeted. These letters must name names—of both the cancelees and their cancelers—particularly in cases where harm has come to a Little Person as a direct result of his/her support for a Big Person. Maybe some have already gone to such trouble, and if so, I commend and thank them. If not, there’s still time.

Don’t misinterpret my plea—it is unrealistic to expect a busy author or academic to come to the rescue of every one of us as we run screaming from the mob. But once in a while, a personal gesture just might be possible. The Harper’s Letter saves exactly zero livelihoods. Anything greater than zero is, in my mind, a victory.

The last open letter I penned didn’t go well. That was back in early 2018, just after I signed the deal with my publisher for a first book. I expect this letter will wreak more havoc on my writing career—and this time, there’s more at stake. There’s also less at stake. Because, this time, I don’t really care. I’m prepared to move on if that’s where the fates take me. The alternatives are soul-destroying.

My sin some years ago (many of you will remember the nuclear fallout) was asking the writing community to account for the de-publication and effective blacklisting of two male authors accused of online sexual abuse. Many stood by me; others did not. Writers blocked me, literary journals likely flagged my name with a large red X, and one writer went so far as to call me out by name as a supporter of abusers (said writer also mentioned she had a relative ‘high up’ in the New York publishing scene—hint, hint). I recall spending several weeks waiting for my debut novel’s cancelation. All because I believe in something called due process.

Humor likes to creep in at every opportunity. So any humor won’t be lost on me, the author of VOX, should I find myself on the hunt for a new job after writing a novel where women are forcibly silenced via draconian measures. It’s a sad humor, the kind where no one can tell whether you’re laughing or crying. But I think I’ll laugh more if I speak up and cry more if I self-silence.

To illustrate what’s at risk, let’s look back at a few relevant scenes from the past years.

Responding (with usual Lionelesque humor) to Penguin Random House UK’s freshly published goals to “reflect UK society by 2025” in its hiring and author acquisition, Lionel Shriver (think: We Need to Talk About Kevin) pushed back with her usual sarcasm. The women’s writing magazine Mslexia summarily removed Shriver from a short story judging panel. (We have to ask — had they never read one of Shriver’s opinion pieces before inviting her as a judge? I’m assuming not.) The upshot is that a supportive note I sent to Shriver not long after this brouhaha was well received, and we continue to correspond. In every cloud, as they say.

In early 2019, I watched YA novelists Amélie Wen Zhao and Kosoko Jackson have their books put on hold because of ‘cultural appropriation’ and ‘insensitivity.’ That the second of these writers was himself a self-proclaimed member of the Sensitivity Police should have elicited a certain schadenfreude, but I still recoiled at the bloodfest. I recoiled more at Zhao’s and Jackson’s public mea culpas.

Flash forward to 2020, when Hachette announced at the last minute they would publish Woody Allen’s memoir Apropos of Nothing. The Farrow clan went a little crazy at the news, Ronan Farrow cut ties with the publisher, and dozens (dozens!) of Hachette’s staff took to the streets in protest. Result? Hachette dropped the book faster than you can say ‘Annie Hall.’ It didn’t really matter that Allen was never charged, or that his adopted son Moses had penned a lengthy blog post telling another side of the two-decade-old Farrow-Allen-Previn story.

More recently, two literary agents were burned at the virtual Twitter stake. Marisa Corvisiero committed the crime of calling for non-violent protests, saying, “This is how you do it. Make your point, take a stand and don’t hurt other people or damage property in the process. No violence is acceptable ever. The whole point is to be heard and seen to make things better.” Apparently, this was enough to send in the torch-carrying mob. Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa Literary Agency did what any concerned citizen might do when witnessing a looting in action: voice a desire to call the police. Because, you know, property rights. Frederick soon joined Corvisiero at the pyre.

Perhaps no one has been hit as hard by the active trans community as J.K. Rowling for her sarcastic tweet about what to call “people who menstruate.” Of course, Rowling makes several solid points about women’s rights, early-age transitioning (see recent articles on the Tavistock Clinic, such as this one), and feminism, but who cares? Off to the pyre she must march. Some self-righteous youngster even responded with, “god i hate jk rowling pls kill her for my 18th birthday.” Fortunately, with punctuation like that, it’s hard to take such a threat seriously. If you have difficulty finding a punctuation mark or the shift key on your laptop, think how hard finding a hired assassin must be. A sampling of death threats are below for your reading displeasure:

Here, and across the pond, we’re witnessing do-gooders cheering like a mob gathered at a public hanging. Say “All lives matter,” get canceled. Question the UK Black Lives Matter movement’s commitment to “dismantle capitalism,” get canceled. Have a problem with BLM-founder Patrisse Cullors saying “We’re trained Marxists” in response to questions about her organization’s ideology, you’re a racist. Like the wrong sort of tweet, get canceled. And heaven forbid anyone use the hashtag #IStandWithJKRowling because they agree with even some of her concerns. Gillian Philip could tell you all about losing her job over that mortal sin. Or—and this is especially juicy—we could look at the signatories of the now-infamous Harper’s Letter on free speech and talk about those few who “sincerely apologized” for adding their names—but only after they saw Rowling’s signature on the roster. The Linguistic Society of America received a letter asking to rescind Steven Pinker’s fellowship on the basis of some pretty shaky ‘evidence’ of Pinker’s racism. (I note approximately half of the signatories self-classified as students, hardly a representation of the “linguistic community.”) New York Times editorial page editor James Bennett was ousted after publishing Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-Ark.) op-ed advocating military intervention in US cities during protests. The staff, apparently, revolted. (A note for the curious: op-ed stands for ‘opposite the editor.’ Look it up, and tell me if you see the irony here.) As for me, merely questioning Woody Allen’s culpability in light of the many exonerating facts in his case (I’m one of those people who really like facts) resulted in an author whose book I had blurbed shutting me out. I do hope the quote helped her sales, though.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that even silence will get you a free pass. The Denver bookshop Tattered Cover embraced political neutrality in early June 2020. I’ve lost count of how many authors canceled online events with the store.

In short, few people have spoken out when the mob came a-running with their lit torches, their death threats, and their cries of “Sack her!” I can’t blame them. Speaking out now is scary. The rules of engagement seem to change with the tides. So-called “hate speech” has little to do with intended hate and much more to do with perceived hate. If you doubt me, have a look at the UK’s Hate Crime Operational Guidance, which clearly states on Page 5, “…the perception of the victim, or any other person, […] is the defining factor in determining whether an incident is a hate incident, or in recognising the hostility element of a hate crime. The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception.” (The boldface is my own emphasis.)

Are we starting to see the growing appeal of sitting quietly in a corner?

And where does the author of a book called VOX fit into all of this? What is my role now? I’ve deactivated and reactivated my Twitter account five times in the past month, mostly for fear of saying the wrong thing. I self-censored, letting the loudest and most influential voices have their way. I’ve stood aside, busily typing my latest novel, believing that would offer some type of distraction and a shield from impending career suicide. I slapped an electric shock-inducing band on my own wrist.

What I discovered was that shutting myself up wasn’t working. It’s ironic, in a way, because when I was asked to write essays on the forced silencing of women prior to VOX’s publication, I struggled. I couldn’t come up with any personal experiences where I’d been mansplained, interrupted, over-talked, gaslighted, or had my speech restricted in any other way. Not by the so-called toxic patriarchy, at least. It wasn’t until these past several months that I felt the sting of silence. And it isn’t the patriarchy who wield the stingers.

I’m the writer behind “The Novel of the #MeToo Movement” (Time Magazine), “The Handmaid’s Tale 2.0” (The Evening Standard), and “The dystopia where women are gagged” (Irish Times). I’m the woman who sent her readers into a frenzy of misogyny- and toxic masculinity-driven fear. I penned a frighteningly relatable, thought-provoking, and intensely disturbing story where half the population is forcibly silenced. I did all of that, and now I’m more terrified of opening my mouth in support of Shriver, Allen, Rowling, Pinker, and others than I am of coming down with a bad case of Covid-19. I suspect I’m not the only one.

As Cosmopolitan said about my book in which all women are gagged, “The real-life parallels will make you shiver.”

They do, readers. They do. The thing is, gagging comes from all sides, even from those factions who find it theoretically reprehensible in a work of so-called feminist fiction where the wrong sort are behind the gagging.

I’m not talking about a consequence-free world. We all have the right to choose who we listen to, who we associate with, who we employ, and who we publish. When we extend that right to ruining careers on the basis of perceived harm (or, worse, on the basis of mob justice and kangaroo courts that eschew due process), we tread in different waters. We create a culture not of canceling, but of revenge, vilification, and hatred.

Those waters are dark, and they run deep, and our collective silence has repercussions, friends. Those repercussions are far more serious and long-lasting than the loss of a job or a book contract.

Maybe it’s time to start talking.

A good writing pal of mine (the multi-talented Alice Kaltman) gave me an idea. When her YA novel Wavehouse was launched, Alice pledged donations to a charity for every preordered copy. At the time, I thought that was just about the nicest thing I’d ever seen an author do.

In the spirit of giving back and making people happy (readers, charities, my publishers, women, kids, and so forth), I’ll be copy-catting Alice and donating $1 to the House of Ruth in Maryland for every preorder / order of the #VOXBook paperback that’s about to hit the shelves in just two days. House of Ruth is a wonderful charity that helps women (and their children) who are victims of violence.

The details:
1. You order (or preorder) a copy from your favorite retailer between 14 and 18 July 2019.
2. You email me (see my contact page!) a copy of your proof of purchase.
3. I count up all those P of Ps, and multiply the total by $1.
4. House of Ruth gets a check.

Easy peasie, right? And everybody wins!

Some very exciting news this week, just a few days before the paperback edition of VOX hits the shelves here in the US!

First, I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve now sold over 100,000 copies in the UK. Many thanks to my hard-working team at HQ Stories / HarperCollinsUK for making this happen.

Prosecco tonight!

Second (more great news from across the pond), VOX is one of twelve novels on Goldsboro Books’ 2019 Glass Bell Awards Longlist! So proud to be among this amazing group of writers.

More prosecco!

And, last but not least, there’s still time to enter the most recent Goodreads giveaway for VOX! Come on, only 8900 or so people have entered (and someone has to win).

Big news: we just hit the Sunday Times bestseller list at #10! Thank you, Constant Readers.

I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Okay. Speechless now.



Still speechless.



Time for bubbles!

And so I’m delighted to share some fab news in my *other* writing world — the world of flash fiction. If you’re pressed for time and want to get the juicy bits, just hop on down to News Piece #3. I promise, I’ll make it worth your while, because even though VOX the book might not be the focus here, the vox that is my voice as an author is very much the focus. You’ll see why.

News Piece #1

Two of my little horror stories made it into The Molotov Cocktail‘s Phantom Flash top-ten list! For those of you who don’t know, I owe Josh and Mary over at Molotov big time — not only did they publish my first–ever flash story back in April, 2015, but they also pubbed “Wernicke 27X,” which was the story behind the story behind VOX. I haven’t had much time to write short fiction lately, but I never miss an opportunity to submit work to this market. Read the Phantom Flash top ten (including “Crop Circles” and “Threes” by yours truly) — just click on that weird eyeball below.

Clickety-click!

 

News Piece #2

I swear this wasn’t my doing, but one of my favorite lit mags came back to life last month after a long sleep. Proud to have a new story up in the newly-resurrected Airgonaut. It’s called “Mid-Life Mosaic,” and I think you might like it.

News Piece #3 (this is the BIG ONE)

I wrote another story, a 400-word flash about, well, two girls selling cigarettes at the Stork Club in 1940-something. This one, like many of my flash pieces, didn’t go out on sub to five million markets. I only had one in mind. One perfect market.

And they loved it.

Before we get to the smiley-happy-people ending with fireworks and champagne, we need to traverse that sad middle part, the part where my one perfect market told me they wouldn’t publish my story unless I made a seemingly insignificant change. I didn’t.

But I did trim it down to 300 words (no small task at thirty minutes before the midnight deadline) and submit the little bugger to the Bath Flash Fiction Award. A little history here: the marvelous Jude Higgins, who runs Bath Flash, was the person who got me started writing short-short fiction four years ago! Thanks, Jude!

Skip to the end: “Candy Girls” took first prize, which means I won, and I kept my voice.

I won! (In a couple of ways…)