Lesbian Vampires and the NSA…

For NaNoWriMo in 2014, I wanted to write a spoof on young adult paranormal romance books with hunky-blue-eyed-servants-of-the-underworld and angsty teenage girls that fall in love with them. The result was Misunderstood. My favorite line, written at 3 a.m. while trying to make my word count for the day, was delivered by one of the female vampires after a vampire hunter hits on her: “I prefer my men dead, but thank you for the compliment.”

A recent blog by author A.J. O’Connell about research she’s doing for her latest book made me think of something funny with regards to my manuscript. It occurred to me when I started writing I knew very little about vampires. Do the myths really say they can only go out at night? What special powers might a vampire have? I immediately turned to Google to get my questions answered. While my intention was to keep all the romances heterosexual, it was obvious where the book had to go after I wrote a scene where the older female vampire consoles a newly turned vampire after the new vampire’s family rejects her for revealing what she had become. Thus, I searched for “lesbian vampires.”

I hope the NSA had a lot of fun with that one.

I know authors who feel that, when writing fiction, research is not necessary. The attitude is, because fiction involves made up characters, places, and events, one can take liberties with facts. This often results in manuscripts that fall short as readers start noticing things that are not accurate. Was the murder weapon or getaway car in your book available to your characters at the time the story was supposed to have occurred. Would one really drive northeast to go from Gary, Indiana, to Missouri City? Can a character really be shot in the abdomen ten times and continue fighting? Can you really kill an assailant, or your spouse, with a lettuce knife? Great fiction draws a reader in and makes them feel like part of the story. You’ll never accomplish that if a reader is questioning if your story is believable.

Research also tells us what has already been written and provides backstory a writer might not come up with on their own. The story Carmilla, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and published in 1871, was about a lesbian vampire. Knowing this allowed me to make some changes to my own manuscript, such as altering the appearance of one of the female vampires to suggest the woman might be Carmilla. While done subtly, fan of the genre should pick up on it. I hope it makes the manuscript a more interesting read.

One more amusing comment about the NSA. I was recently checking the spelling of some words in Sharia and Brandon Mayfield’s Improbable Cause, which we are releasing in the spring. One word I had to look up was Al Qaida. So now my NSA browsing history includes “lesbian vampires” and “Al Qaida.” I wonder what the NSA computers set up to mine our data will do with that combination…

Hacking my Keurig 2.0…

For Christmas last year we purchased a Keurig 2.0 coffee maker. People who know me will tell you I drink a lot of coffee (usually with cognac in it when I’m reading queries). I took it out of the box, put in my favorite ‘Donut Shop Coffee’ k-cup, and was floored when I saw the “Oops, this package wasn’t designed for this brewer” message. The cup worked fine in my previous Keurig brewer.

Because almost no one reads the instructions on a coffee machine, I called Keurig. They informed me that you now had to purchase your coffee from them because they had included a new ‘technology’ to better brew coffee. Read this to mean they included DCM (Digital Coffee Management) to prevent competitor’s k-cups from working in the machine unless the competitors paid them a large licensing fee for the ‘technology.’ I told the woman from Keurig I would stop drinking coffee before I was forced to buy overpriced k-cups from them and that I was returning the machine. I then hung up and did what I suspect most people who purchased the new machine did.

I Googled “Keurig 2.0 hack”…

The answer is simple. Cut the ring off an “approved” k-cup and tape it to the “unapproved” cup. This is what I’ve done with my reusable EZ-Cup and SoloFill cups – I prefer buying bags of coffee, both because of the price and because the reusable cups are more environmentally friendly. The Roger’s Family Company website has a nice collection of videos for all the hacks available. They also make a device called the “Freedom Clip” that will disable the new optical scanner technology in the Keurig 2.0. I’ve already ordered my Freedom Clip and will let everyone know how it works.

So what does the price of coffee have to do with the publishing business, other than the fact I rely on my cup of coffee to read queries? It has to do with setting the price for your products. In my blog on Profit and Loss statements, I talk about doing market research to determine the optimal list price for your book. Each k-cup from Keurig costs 3 times the amount of buying bagged coffee and the filters for my reusable EZ-Cup and almost twice the cost of k-cups from most of their competitors; this is the main reason I don’t buy coffee from Keurig. If you price your book too high for the market people will not purchase your book. Instead, people will go someplace else for their reading entertainment, or they will find a way to hack the DRM on your eBook. They may even hack their coffee machines just to make a point…