Shannon Phillips

So here’s what I originally wrote about this book on my Goodreads account:

Louise Erdrich is one of my very favorite authors—I’ll read anything by her. She works in a magical-realist vein informed by her Ojibwe heritage, writing portraits of modern-day reservation life where ageless tricksters and powerful animal spirits move in the margins. She’s also just an immensely powerful writer, creating striking and indelible characters and gorgeous passages of haunting prose.

All that said, I’m going to classify The Round House as my least favorite Erdrich novel (that is, if you don’t count The Crown of Columbus, which I don’t). It’s one part lurid crime thriller, one part “message” tract, and a third part that stands as a companion piece to her other work. I really liked that third part (I always love a Nanapush story) but I was much less taken with the other aspects of the book.

The problem with this summary, or at least the element I’m still thinking about, is the “message tract” aspect of the book.

The Round House opens with a brutal rape that takes place on the boundary of Indian land, and proceeds to illustrate the hurdles that prevent the woman and her family from seeking justice. Essentially, the case can’t be prosecuted until it’s known where jurisdiction lies—with the tribal police (if the assailant is an Indian and if the crime was committed on tribal lands), with the state police (if the crime was committed on non-Indian soil), or with the Feds (if the crime was committed on tribal lands but the assailant was a non-Indian). A lot of the book’s plot basically serves as an illustration of the ways in which violence against Native women goes unpunished under our schizophrenic justice system. One character, a tribal judge, is even given a few pages to deliver a lecture on the legal underpinnings of the tribal court system, and to make the case that the tribes should have the power to investigate and prosecute these kind of crimes whether or not non-Indian offenders are involved.

The thing is, this is kind of clumsy storytelling. Erdrich pulls it off well, but there’s no escaping that this book Has A Message, and at times the story serves mostly as a delivery vehicle for the moral.

On the other hand, I didn’t know about this issue until I read the book, and after reading more about it I realize that outrageous miscarriages of justice very similar to the one depicted in the book are in fact happening all the time. The New York Times today has an article on the problem:

At 26, Diane Millich fell in love with and married a white man, moving with him in 1998 to a home on her native Southern Ute reservation in southern Colorado where, in short order, her life was consumed by domestic violence.

Her story of beatings and threats, reconciliations and divorce—painfully common among Native American women—had a twist. Because her husband was white, the Southern Ute Tribal Police could not touch him, and because she was a Native American on tribal land, La Plata County sheriff’s deputies were powerless as well. She said she tried going to federal law enforcement, which did have jurisdiction, but that went nowhere.

After one of his beatings, she said, he even called the county sheriff himself to prove to her that he could not be stopped. Only after he stormed her office at the federal Bureau of Land Management and opened fire, wounding a co-worker, was he arrested. And even then, law enforcement had to use a tape measure to sort out jurisdiction, gauging the distance between the barrel of the gun and the point of bullet impact to persuade the local police to intervene.

…

“It was just crazy, now when I think back on how insane it was,” Ms. Millich said in an interview.

If a Native American is raped or assaulted by a non-Indian, she must plead for justice to already overburdened United States attorneys who are often hundreds of miles away.

The Violence Against Women Act, currently up for reauthorization in Congress, has added a new section that would allow these victims to seek recourse in the tribal courts, with provisions to ensure that non-Indian defendants retain their rights to representation and to a jury of their peers. But House Republicans are seeking to block it:

“This is a bill which could do so much good in the battle for victims’ rights, but unfortunately it is being held hostage by a single provision that would take away fundamental constitutional rights for certain American citizens,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said on the Senate floor on Thursday. “And for what? For what? In order to satisfy the unconstitutional demands of special interests.”

Unconstitutional demands of special interests. By that he means the right of Indian women—who are disproportionately victimized by rape and domestic violence—to seek justice. They aren’t victims, you see: they are “special interests.” And their attackers are fine, upstanding “certain American citizens.” (The women are American citizens too, of course, but you get the sense that Cornyn doesn’t quite believe it. Certainly not the kind of citizen who has “fundamental constitutional rights.”)

This is revolting. The contempt in those words—unconstitutional demands of special interests—God, it’s sickening.

So, I’m torn. On the one hand, I think Erdrich is bringing attention to an issue that needs attention. She’s created a searing portrait of real-world injustice, and part of me responds with a “sing it, sister!”

But on the other hand, the book is really really message-y, and even though the message is strong and important and moral and timely, I do think it weakens the storytelling. I don’t know if this is inevitable in books that have a political point to make. Trying to think of counter-examples, I flashed to Toni Morrison’s (flawless) Beloved: but that novel doesn’t really have a message so much as a complex emotional truth to convey. Something like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is more of a “message” book, and let’s face it, that was a pretty crappy novel. Strong and important and moral and timely (for its time)—but as a piece of literature, it’s weak.

The Round House, I think, is in a similar space. It’s no Love Medicine. But I am rooting for it to have the same kind of social impact that The Jungle had in its day.

The kids have been home sick from school all week, though they’re on the mend now—I think they’ll be able to go back tomorrow. Still, it’s been a pretty wretched week of coughing and snot and being all cooped up in the house. So this afternoon I decided it was time to do something fun, and I set the kids to a project of making Valentines for their preschool friends.

This year we went all Martha with it. I found this idea for making Valentine’s cards using vegetable stamps on the Martha Stewart website, and it seemed both cute and fun, so we tried it out. The radicchio we brought home was too wide to make a good stamp, but we had better results with Brussels sprouts and the end of a head of celery:

The kids really enjoyed playing around with the vegetable stamps (and the white-ink pen), although their cards tended to fill up quickly with undifferentiated smudges and scribbles. So I ended up making most of the Valentines that we’ll actually give out. Still, the results are cute and a good time was had by all, so I’d call this project a win. Thanks, Martha!

This book was Sam’s Christmas present to me, since I like all right-thinking people was obsessed with Nate Silver’s blog during the election season.

I liked the book a lot better than the title. Well, actually, the title is fine, but the subtitle—Why So Many Predictions Fail…but Some Don’t—is terrible. It makes it sound like you’re in for some kind of dry introduction to the fundamentals of statistical analysis. The book is actually far more interesting than that. It’s about the ways in which the edifices of our society—financial, political, even physical—are built on “knowledge” that in some cases is flawed at the very root.

Just as an example, there’s one part of the book where Nate Silver pulls off one of the strongest gut-punches I can remember experiencing as a reader. It starts off with him discussing, innocuously enough, the science of weather prediction. It turns out that the science is better than you might think, but that local weather forecasters deliberately skew their predictions in order to account for some common biases in the audience. For instance, people want their weather forecasts to err on the side of caution. They would much rather be told to tote an umbrella, and have the day turn out to be sunny, than to be assured their Sunday will be nice and then get caught out on the golf course in a sudden thundershower. So local weather forecasters, understanding this preference in their audience, will routinely inflate their estimates of the likelihood of bad weather. If the weather model says there’s a fifty percent chance of rain, you’ll hear on the news that there’s a sixty or seventy percent chance.

This all seems interesting, if academic: it’s a neat bit of trivia, right? Then Silver sinks in the knife:

The weather forecasters did not make any apologies for this. “There’s not an evaluation of accuracy in hiring meteorologists. Presentation takes precedence over accuracy,” one of them told Eggleston. “Accuracy is not a big deal to viewers,” said another. The attitude seems to be that this is all in good fun—who cares if there is a little wet bias especially if it makes for better television? And since the public doesn’t think our forecasts are any good anyway, why bother with being accurate?

This logic is a little circular. TV weathermen say they aren’t bothering to make accurate forecasts because they figure the public won’t believe them anyway. But the public shouldn’t believe them, because the forecasts aren’t accurate.

This becomes a more serious problem when there is something urgent—something like Hurricane Katrina. Lots of Americans get their weather information from local sources rather than directly from the Hurricane Center, so they will still be relying on the goofball on Channel 7 to provide them with accurate information. If there is a mutual distrust between the weather forecaster and the public, the public may not listen when they need to most.

Ouch.

Silver goes on to discuss Katrina in a lot of detail, and he’s very evenhanded about the multiple factors that made the disaster so awful, but from his perspective the most relevant detail is that it was predictable. We knew what was going to happen in New Orleans, we knew the city had to be evacuated, and yet the evacuation was botched. And one of the factors working against those who struggled to convince New Orleans residents to leave their homes before the flood came was this widespread skepticism about disaster predictions, a skepticism that is in fact rational given the fact that bad weather predictions are routinely inflated and overhyped for the sake of news ratings.

Silver’s book covers a lot of topics. Sports, the stock market, politics, even national security—his comparison of the fields of earthquake prediction and terrorism prediction is really fascinating. At base it’s a book about how we make decisions, how we gain knowledge about the world, how we know what we know. And how our unexamined biases undermine us, and destabilize our society. It’s a great read.

I got a much-needed boost this afternoon: I had an ultrasound scheduled, to check on the positioning of a previously low-lying placenta. (As expected, it’s moved into position now and everything is green to go.) But while we were peeking around in there, the baby showed up clear as day playing with his toes! It was absolutely the cutest thing, seeing those little fingers grabbing and then releasing his own foot. I laughed so hard the sonographer had to ask me to hold still.

Sol is doing fine by the way, measuring at four and a half pounds (though ultrasound weight estimates are not terribly accurate, and in any case he’ll put on a couple more pounds before he’s born). I’m closing in on my due date—March 13 based on the first couple ultrasounds, though his growth seems to have slowed a bit recently, and the latest ones have suggested an adjusted due date of March 20. I’m starting to get excited. I think this weekend I’ll get the baby clothes out of storage and give everything a good washing.

I haven’t posted much in a few weeks—it seems like we’ve all been dealing with a string of colds and coughs that just. won’t. go. away. Davy has been the hardest hit—we finally took him into the doctor today and learned that the poor little guy has RSV, respiratory syncytial virus, and a piggyback ear infection. And possibly pneumonia. The doctor gave us antibiotics for the infection, which will likely knock out the pneumonia too if it’s there, but the only treatment for RSV is rest and lots of fluids. It’s one of those things that’s really mild in older kids and barely noticeable in adults, but can be quite serious for babies. So in a way I’m glad we’re dealing with this now, and not in a couple months when we’ll have a newborn in the house.

Davy hates the medicine, and hates us for forcing it on him, and hates the cough that wakes him up in the middle of the night, and hates not being able to go to school or have playdates with his friends, and generally is a very crabby two year old right now. Poor little tough guy.

These reviews are cross-posted from my Goodreads account.

The Chukchi Bible

This account of the myths and legends of the Chukchi people (a native Arctic tribe) is written by a contemporary Chukchi author, which sets it apart from a more anthropological narrative in some vital ways. Yuri Rytkheu is telling the history of his own family, and he claims the right to tell it in his own way–which in this case means with a rather modern narrative voice. Though the stories themselves may have been handed down through an oral tradition, this book was written: there’s none of the formulaic, repetitive cadences that you generally find when encountering narratives that are primarily designed for storytellers to memorize and repeat. Instead we are told what characters thought and felt and sensed in each moment, as with a modern novel.

Yet the stories are infused with a more ancient sensibility. There’s an easy interchange between the material and spiritual worlds, and between the animal and human realms. War and rape and murder happen, and are neither excused nor treated as anything particularly shocking. There’s euthanasia of the elderly, harsh treatment of children, and one act of human sacrifice (although that IS shocking, even to the people carrying out what they perceive to be a divine mandate). The most thrilling part of the book is Rytkheu’s account of the life of his grandfather, who traveled the world during the early twentieth century and witnessed the loss of the traditional Chukchi lifestyle at the hands of the Americans, Europeans and Soviets. Rytkheu doesn’t sentimentalize the often-brutal lives of his ancestors, but he’s clear-eyed about what the Chukchi have lost, and he brings that heritage brilliantly to life.

Bloody Fabulous

I bought this collection because it had a Zen Cho story in it, and while her piece (“The First Witch of Damansara”) is my favorite in the book, I enjoyed several of the others as well. As might be expected from a fashion-themed speculative fiction anthology, it’s heavy on the vampires, but there’s also fairies, ghosts, time-travelers, immortal children of an Aztec blood god, and acrobatic mathematicians. (I quite liked the acrobatic mathematicians.)

Washington Square

Spoiler alert!

Henry James is obviously an amazing stylist, and I love the way he excavates the thoughts and emotions of his characters. I love the way the conflict in his stories almost always comes from characters encountering the limits of their own natures, and how he explores the nature of true honor in a world of hypocrisy and sham propriety.

That said, sometimes I can only take James in small doses, and Washington Square exposes some of his more artificial and frustrating traits as a storyteller. I could believe in Catherine to a certain extent, and certainly found her quiet defiance of her overbearing father compelling, but the resolution of the situation seemed forced and hollow. After showing us a character of such unexpected depth and strength, James expects us to turn around and believe that she’s utterly broken forever? No, sorry, I feel pretty sure that the Catherine we met over the course of the book would have been able to find happiness with a John Ludlow. The final image of the spinster alone with her embroidery is meant to be striking, but I just found it false.

Quick link: Noor A Jahangir at Trollking has posted a review of The Millennial Sword, giving it a solid 3 out of 5 stars: “The story is well-written with an almost whimsical style and it is clear that Phillips has done her research without info-dumping or the story reading like an interesting history lesson. The lead character is likable in that she feels compelled to her duty by her employer, her colleagues and the mantle of the Lady of the Lake, but selfish enough to make her more human and interesting.”

http://trollking.co.uk/2013/01/05/book-review-the-millennial-sword-by-shannon-philips/

Warning: this post is very much “insider baseball” for e-published authors, probably only of interest to those who are marketing books with Amazon or who like to keep tabs on various predatory corporate tactics.

So Amazon has this program, “KDP Select,” which is designed to increase the number of e-books that are Amazon-exclusive. The KDP Select program offers authors some increased visibility and promotional tools on Amazon’s site. In return, authors agree not to sell their e-books through any other retailer for a period of three months. This is in contrast to “vanilla” publishing with Amazon, which doesn’t require exclusivity but also doesn’t allow for things like free promotional giveaways. So far, so good—there’s a lot of chatter on the author boards about whether the Select program is worth it or not, and about the effects of the exclusivity agreement on the larger e-book marketplace, but plenty of authors have found the program at least worth a nibble. I decided to launch my book through KDP Select, which is why I delayed publishing in other formats for three months.

Unfortunately, I’ve just discovered that Amazon considers the three-month Select term to automatically renew, unless you find a hidden checkbox in their user interface (it is literally hidden; you have to find and click a special link to make it appear) and “deselect” the auto-renewal “convenience feature.”

Now, I’m pretty sure this kind of practice is not legally enforceable. My state, California, was in 2006 party to a settlement against Time Inc. that alleged automatic subscription renewals to be a deceptive business practice. In that settlement, “Time Inc. agreed to refund $4.3 million to more than 108,000 eligible consumers who made payments for magazine subscriptions that were automatically renewed between 1998 and May of 2004.” Other suits have been brought, generally successfully, against companies that engage in automatic renewals of products or services.

The problem is that Amazon dominates the e-book marketplace and few self-published authors are going to want to risk having Amazon drop their titles altogether, as it threatens to do if the Select exclusivity clause is violated.

I’m personally weighing how I want to proceed. I’ve sent a few polite-but-clear emails to Amazon’s KDP Select customer support, expressing my displeasure with the auto-renew policy. I’m also going to be linking to this post on various author boards. I’m hoping that with enough outcry from their authors, Amazon will voluntarily drop the deceptive “automatic renewal” policy. However, while I’m lobbying for the change, I may have to delay publishing to Smashwords for another three months.

And speaking for myself, I’m offended enough by the auto-renew trickery that I’ll never enroll another title in KDP Select.

Update: After a couple of go-rounds with customer support, they cancelled the “re-enrollment.” Hooray!

I am targeting a January 15th release date for making the e-book version of The Millennial Sword available through Apple’s iBookstore, Kobo, and other outlets. (I’ll be publishing to Smashwords, which supports basically all the non-Amazon retailers.) At that time, I’m planning to raise the price of the e-book to $3.99. My friend Megan, who has a publishing background, advised me to look into a higher price point, and after doing some research I discovered there’s something of a consensus among indie authors that slightly higher prices can actually boost sales. I’ve also noticed that on my book’s Amazon page, in the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section, the majority of other titles that readers of The Millennial Sword are picking up are priced at $3.99 or $4.99. So, just a heads-up: there will be a slight price bump soon.

Amazon remains the 800 pound gorilla of the e-publishing market, and their royalty structure rewards e-books priced at $2.99 or higher, so $2.99 is in many ways the floor for self-published book prices. (You do see 99 cent titles, but Amazon only pays out 35 percent royalties for these books, as opposed to 70 percent royalties at the $2.99 price—making it very difficult for a 99 cent title to ever make significant earnings.) And it’s nice for authors to be able to reserve the $2.99 pricing for shorter works like novellas.

Amazon sales so far for The Millennial Sword: in the first three months I’ve sold 93 copies across both print and digital formats (mostly digital). When I started this project I decided that fewer than 500 sales in the first year I’d consider disappointing, while more than a thousand I’d consider a big success. I expect sales to end up somewhere in between. I’m not really worried about slow sales at the start, though, because the book is just starting to see some promotion on the review blogs—and the more reviews it picks up on Amazon and Goodreads, the more visibility it will have. Right now I think the book is doing pretty much exactly what I expected it to do, and the real test will be whether or not the sales figures start to gradually rise over the next few months.

I wanted to throw up a quick link to the Beauty in Ruins book review blog, which has posted a very kind review of The Millennial Sword:

It’s a fun story, lighthearted and humorous where it can be, but serious and action-packed where it needs to be. Given the rather fantastic premise, it’s a remarkably believable story, owing as much to Viv’s character as to the way in which Phillips pays equal attention to both worlds. In that respect, she makes the most of her setting, using the real San Francisco as a solid backdrop, as opposed to just going with a generic big city. I’ve never been, but the setting feels genuine, as if you could use the story as a roadmap around town.

It also needs to be said that despite Viv being armed and designated for a special role, she’s no victim of prophecy or destiny. This is not one of those stories where things happen despite the characters, but because of them. Well-told, with engaging characters, and a generous mix of humour, romance, and adventure, this is a book that I suspect will have a lot of cross-genre appeal.