Hell yes, it’s stealing.  Seriously. 

Welcome to Legal Musings…where I try to find a blog niche and talk about the law.  Yes, I’m a lawyer.  Yes, I hope to include a lot of legal analysis dealing with being an author.  But I might digress into other legal areas…because there’s some weird stuff going on in the law.

So, what is Senate Bill 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act…and where is it today?  Well, it’s a Bill that was introduced into the Senate by Sen. Leahy from Vermont that allows the government to go after pirates.  By pirates, I don’t mean Captain Hook.  I mean the blood sucking, evil, narcissistic people thumbing their noses at karma and stealing books on the internet.  Dante has a brand new, special level of hell for those folks.

But, I digress.  About the current status of the law…The Bill spent some time in committee, and needs to be re-introduced. 

On February 16, 2011, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings and Scott Turow, one of my favorite authors and the president of the Author’s Guild, gave testimony. 

First, Senator Leahy testified, “I am confident that we will pass legislation to target rogue websites this year. I want to hear from all sides as we move forward, but I refuse to accept that addressing the problem is too difficult because people who want to steal will always find a way. That is like saying that we should not prosecute drug crimes or child pornography because bad people will find a way to do bad things anyway. I am a former prosecutor, and that line of argument is unacceptable.”  See Judiciary transcript for full text.

Scott Turow testified and gave some amazing examples of online piracy.  “One is tempted to call it a vast underground economy, but there’s nothing underground about it: it operates in plain sight…Money clearly suffuses the system, paying for countless servers, vast amounts of online bandwidth, and specialized services that speed and cloak the transmission of stolen creative work.” 

Turow then gave specific examples of the most prolific of pirates, stating that it was time to make piracy not so secret, calling for online providers to register an agent for service of process (just like any business in the US has to do).  He had several recommendations…read the full text here.

Is anyone besides the pirates against the Bill?  YES.  There are groups up in arms about the former text of the Bill, claiming it would allow the U.S. Government to shut down every site from YouTube to Yahoo. So the text may have been over-broad.  I think that’s why it went back to committee and they’re holding hearings now.  To clarify the text.

Finally, Nora Roberts, the Queen of Romance, submitted a letter to the Judiciary Committee in support of the Act.  She asked, “If piracy continues to devastate a writer’s income, to erode the ability of the publishers to make the profit necessary to bring those books to the public, where will the next generation of storytellers come from?”  The woman can write!  The full text of her letter is up on the RWA website. 

So…the current status of the law is that they’re working on the law.  I’ll try to keep you updated.

Hi all!  So, I’ve been working on a book trailer for CLAIMED.  It’s a bit rough and I’ll work with it some more, but this is what I have so far:

I kill people in books.  It’s true.  The lady who cuts me off for a parking spot, the bat-sh*t crazy chick who yells at me in a bar…even the lady at the post office who growls at my many packages.  They die.  And hard.

One of the most cathartic things to do is work out your demons via writing.  Of course, you often end up passing emails to your critique partner titled, “Best place to bury a dead body,” or “Do you think I could snap a neck with a stapler?”  In the name of research, of course.  Other fun notes we pass back and forth: 

• Does the human body really bend that way?
• I don’t think a man would really call that “Tonto.”
• Your heroine already fell off the bed – there’s no way he can reach her now.
• I think the grave should be deeper.
• I’m not sure they’d eat his liver first.

So, one of the many fun things about being a writer is that you can talk pretty much about anything.  In one of my works in progress, my heroine stumbles upon a marijuana growing farm.  Well, my husband was using my laptop and went to ‘favorites’ for our bank’s URL.

He finished banking and asked, “Why do you have the ‘hydroponic marijuana guide’ listed as a favorite?”  My answer:  “So I wouldn’t forget the name.”  What’s cool is that he nodded, because that made perfect sense to him.  He lives with a writer.

So, welcome to the St. Patrick’s Day Blog Hop!  Make sure you leave a comment at the end for a chance to win the Kindle 3–as well as a bunch of books, including FATED.  This time, the organizers of the blog sent out a list of words and a challenge for us to incorporate them in our stories.  I’ve made the important words green for easy counting.  🙂

The Mark of the Leprechaun

“Why is it green?”  Emily asked, leaning forward from her comfortable chair to peer at Jordan’s nipple.  He’d stormed inside, interrupting what should’ve been a relaxing afternoon by the fire.

He let out a low growl.  “The damn leprechaun marked me with a shamrock shape.  Last night at the tavern.  When I find that little monster, I’ll take my leather boot to his head.”

“Okay.  We can figure this out.  Don’t get your knickers in a bunch.”  Her mind spun.  Green.  Not the green marking.

 The smile he flashed was all teeth.  Pure, pissed off vampire.  “I don’t wear knickers.”

No.  He didn’t.  The damn man went commando, actually.  “Okay.  Let’s keep calm here.”  She tugged on her earlobe, forgetting once again about the nervous habit.  “So.  We need to leave Dublin and ride out to the Blarney Stone.  Legend has it if you kiss the stone, you won’t turn entirely green.”  Probably.  A green vampire.  Interesting.  She just couldn’t tell people she was in love with a green vampire.  They had to fix this.

“I’m not kissing the Blarney Stone.”  Jordan reached for the sidetable to pour a whiskey.  He downed it in one gulp.  His tongue darted out to lick his lips and she fought a groan.  Sexy.  Even facing certain greenhood, the vamp was sexy.

“Yes you are.”  She leapt to her feet, dislodging the book from her lap.  Damn him.  She knew what he planned.  “You can’t seriously think to outsmart a leprechaun.”

“Don’t need to outsmart him.”  Jordan glanced at the fireplace.  “I hid his pot of gold.  If he wants it back, he’ll remove the marking.”

Emily chewed her fingernail.  “If you make him mad, he’ll never take away the marking.”

“You don’t cuddle a leprechaun, sweetheart.  You take his gold and kick his ass.”

She stood.  “I took the pot of gold out from behind the fireplace and hid it.”

The air shifted.  Jordan’s golden eyes flashed.  “Excuse me?”

 Fire flashed down to her toes and her breath caught.  She struggled to concentrate.  “You took the gold because he sent me that pretty silk scarf with the large shamrock on it.  You were being silly.  So I planned to give him back his pot of gold.”  Honestly.  A vampire jealous of a leprechaun.

“Is that a fact?”  Jordan’s voice lowered to a rumble that echoed along her skin.  “Well then.  We’ll take him his gold, he can remove this marking and then I’ll make good use of the silk scarf.”

She smiled.  Now that was a plan.

Here are the words and point values:

love 1
smile 1
kiss 1
tongue 1
cuddle 2
nipple 2
earlobe 2
fingernail 2
green 3
fireplace 3
book 3
whiskey 3
ride 4
Dublin 4
shamrock 4
knickers 4
silk scarf 5
leather boot 5
Pot of Gold 5
Blarney Stone 5
“Why is it green?” 10

So, I received my first one-star customer review the other day.  Reviews are popping up on book seller sites as well as reader sites.  On this particular site, I have eleven reviews.  Ten people loved FATED and gave it either four or five stars – mostly five.  One person hated it with the passion of a hundred suns.

They tell you not to read the customer reviews.  People get ticked over prices, over covers, over stuff the writer has no control over…and then rant about it in a review.

I read the review.  It was hilarious.  She hated the book.  Not the cover, or the price or anything like that…the actual book.  She took great pleasure in deleting FATED for all time from her e-reader.  The review made me laugh.  I mean that sincerely and not with sarcasm.  While this woman went into great detail about how much she hated the book, she was kind of…well, funny.  Great sense of humor.  And the things she disliked were the very things other people loved.

I’m tempted to send her CLAIMED when it comes out just to see if she hates it as much.  I’m not going to, of course.  You don’t send free books to people who hate your writing.  That’s just dumb.  But, I am curious.

There’s an expression in this business that I dislike.  “Nobody likes hearing your baby is ugly.”  Here’s the thing.  I have two babies and if someone calls them ugly, we’re heading outside.  This is my book.  Not my baby.  Some people aren’t going to like it.  I’ve always known that.  But I truly didn’t expect to enjoy the scathing remarks. 

I guess if I had a bunch of one-starred reviews, I wouldn’t be so tickled.  Or maybe if the attack was on me and not the actual book, I’d be upset.  But this gal kept to the story and explained her position, using some pretty good humor.

Everyone says writers need a thick skin.  I don’t have one.  Really.  I’m rather sensitive.  But I am able to put things into perspective.  One person’s opinion is only that.  An opinion.  The other people who’ve left reviews so far love the book.  I love it.  My agent, my editor and my critique partner love it.  Publisher’s Weekly recommended it.  Yet, this woman with her sense of humor didn’t.  That’s okay.

Perspective is crucial in this business.  If your first form rejection from an agent destroys you…then find another creative outlet.  Because that’s only the beginning.  I find that a sense of humor helps as well.  See the humor.  We need it.