Victoria Foyt's novel coming under fire...

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Stacia Kane

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Unimportant

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Cyia

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Aruna, you look fantastic with your hair like that!

I'm a bit jealous, actually. Like Unimportant, braids don't last long on me, and they tend to tear my hair. :(
 

K. Trian

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Seconding how gorgeous those braids look on you, aruna! :) you have the perfect head-shape for them! (is this a weird thing to say?)

No one I know can make cornrows, but they sure would be handy in sports and save me from bad hair days. Unfortunately I have a... spacious forehead (you could project a widescreen movie on it!), so e.g. french braids aren't really my most flattering hairdo, but I have to wear them in martial art training. Not that I'd really give a crap how I looked there...
 

akaria

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Aruna, you look great in braids! Those pics are lovely. And yes, sometimes people have....unfortunate head shapes. It's like when a guy shaves his head for the first time. He's like "Where did that dent in the side of my head come from?"

I've been rockin' locs for almost ten years now but still miss getting braids. I'd always get bright blue or purple fake hair mixed in to express my punk rock side. Ahh...good times!
 

Blarg

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Heh, that's exactly what keeps me from shaving my head, because otherwise I'm all about the convenience. Head shape matters a lot when you consider shaving your head while still wanting to look decent. In my case, no can do.

But if the choice comes down to bald versus a comb-over or tonsure, I'll probably bite the bullet and accept that wherever I was on the looks scale, I just dropped three points.
 

Kim Fierce

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Wow, there's a lot of conversation about this book! I can't see the braid pictures here though at work :-( I never heard of this book but I wanted to see what it was about here, and it sounds very strange.

My book is set in the future, and I am white, but I just thought that in the future most people would be considered multi-racial and wanted to experiment with a post-racial era. The skin colors are mostly described as light brown, dark, and pale. The last names are mostly Hispanic and Asian, because I wanted to show that no one judges by color, so using the old labels didn't make sense. So diversity in last names was the best I could think of. The main plot is about a dystopian world in which GLBT are forcefully separated from normal people, and I hope the world works!
 

E. Martin

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Not Even Close to the Facts

Eric Hoffer Award
Entry fee: $50
Number of awards given in year of SavethePearls: 112
Parent company: Hopewell Publications
Primary business: Selling publishing services to new writers
URL: http://www.hofferaward.com/
Additional info: per a Jan 2012 column by the founder of the Hoffer Award Christopher Klim, it accepts 1000 entries annually. Doing the math (1000/112), that means if you enter this contest, you've got roughly 1 in 10 chance of having an award or honorable mention to use to promote your book. Contest revenue: 1000 x $50 = $50,000. Cash prizes given: $2,500. Other companies that seem to promote this award (US Review of Books, Infinity Publishing, Best New Writing) are all part of Hopewell Publications,

Hopewell Publications has no connection to Infinity Publishing. Hopewell Publications is not a self-publishing press. It derives most of its income from publishing books from previously published authors, not new writers. It does not charge people to read or publish.

Regarding the Eric Hoffer Award. Your outline in the media would be called a hatchet job and in a court of law it would be called libelous. The Hoffer, which is actually controlled by the Eric Hoffer Project, is a year round operation. Thousands of calls and e-mails have to be handled. Endless media connections must be made. Over one thousand registrants must be handled and distributed to judges around the country. Books are heavy. This is a huge cost. The six dozen judges receive an honorarium for their work. The dedicated staff needs to be paid. This is not a million-dollar operation. It’s not even a thousand-dollar operation.

Please see my other post which sets the record straight with actual facts not vitriol and slander.
 

Cairo Amani

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Most of the points I WOULD make are made. So I have this to contribute: Ew.

It reminds me of "Breeders", a book by Matthew Beier. I got to read his query and first 50 pages and I was like o_O. It's set in a world where homosexuals are the majority. It was just filled with stereotypes of gay men and it felt like an excuse to say faggot alot.
 

Cairo Amani

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Wow, there's a lot of conversation about this book! I can't see the braid pictures here though at work :-( I never heard of this book but I wanted to see what it was about here, and it sounds very strange.

My book is set in the future, and I am white, but I just thought that in the future most people would be considered multi-racial and wanted to experiment with a post-racial era. The skin colors are mostly described as light brown, dark, and pale. The last names are mostly Hispanic and Asian, because I wanted to show that no one judges by color, so using the old labels didn't make sense. So diversity in last names was the best I could think of. The main plot is about a dystopian world in which GLBT are forcefully separated from normal people, and I hope the world works!


Careful, "Normal" makes it seem like GLBT people are not-normal. And we are lol, just say "heterosexual" :)
 

Kim Fierce

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sorry, CJ . . . the government in my book labels the people as "Normal" or "Gay" (in spite of where they land on the QUILTBAG spectrum) and I must have slipped into that terminology in that post! I would say I'm a fairly normal lesbian . . . my wife might disagree. ;-)
 

J.S.F.

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I haven't read all the replies--sorry, my eyes just can't stand up to eleven pages of posts--but this novel sounds like a very bad, VERY bad idea, even if it's handled sensitively...and I don't think it is. I don't know if the writer was referencing what I'm gonna say (see below), but if she did, it sounds like she handled it in an extremely poor manner.

I'm gonna do the time warp thing and mention a Star Trek episode, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, one of the finest explorations of racism on television and this was done in the late 1960's. Frank Gorshin and Lou Antonio guest-starred, and the tension between them was palpable. White on one side of the face and black on the other...you'd have to see it and listen to the dialogue to get the whole picture. I thought it one of Star Trek's finest episodes.

Apparently, there was another episode which was shelved and it had Kirk and crew landing on a world in which blacks were the dominant racial group and whites were the minority, but I guess the sponsor outcrys got too great.

With this novel, has the reaction to it subsided any as of late? (Last posts were all about Aruna's hairstyle:))
 

lolchemist

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I haven't read 17 pages of replies either. Just wanted to add that I tried reading the chapters that were available for free online and they were just SOOO bad! Just forgetting the race issues for a minute, the scientific parts made no sense at all! They are so ridiculously advanced in some ways and yet they can't figure out an effective sunblock for white people so they need to force white people to mate when they are still teenagers or go die?? UMMM Okay, way to create the most ridiculous strawman society ever!

I didn't even get to the part where the older black guy turns into a panther or whatever and then she and the older black guy "mate." I just... NO.
 

Polenth

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With this novel, has the reaction to it subsided any as of late? (Last posts were all about Aruna's hairstyle:))

It depends what you mean by subsided. We don't think it's suddenly awesome and we were all wrong. But there reaches a point where what needs to be said has been said, and there's nowhere else for the conversation to go outside of repeating it all.

The sequel is out, so I suppose people might talk about that a bit. But it looks like more of the same as the first one, only with the indigenous stereotypes more noticeable from the start (those stereotypes didn't kick in until later in the first book, so not everyone got that far).
 
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