Frank Rich at the Times on Obama’s condescendingly piecemeal approach to gay rights, forty years later.

Slightly longer version: I read this last week while I was at Mailer camp, during an afternoon or two when I should’ve been working on my outline. (I worked on the outline too, I promise.) I’ve never before had the experience of reading a book set in a place where I spent so much time — people don’t tend to write many novels about Lancaster County, and thankfully Witness doesn’t exactly represent my childhood. I was surprised by how delightful it was to read a book about Smith: about orientation, about living with women, about the little maids’ quarters singles in the Quad houses that I used to visit occasionally. And about female friendship, weird beast that it is. I really enjoyed this book.

In Norman’s basement

Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

I spent last week in Provincetown, participating in a workshop on historical research and writing at the new Norman Mailer Writers Colony. We had our classes in Mailer’s house, and as you can see, we also had a few non-class-like events there. This photo illustrates the conclusion of one long dinner party — we all ended up in the basement and my new friend Jesse taught me how to punch. Any bad form on display in this photo is my fault, not his. (I was thinking it over and realized that I’ve never actually punched anything, or anyone, in my life. I took a self-defense class in college, I broke a board with my hand, but in real life I’ve been lucky enough never to have to go beyond the play-punch.) The last night we were there, the tide was so high that the bay water was slapping halfway up the deck stairs.

Anyway: Provincetown was wonderful, chilly and damp and sandy and full of older men with neatly shaved heads. The workshop was wonderful — Doug Brinkley led it, and we discussed the state of publishing (eeek), our own current projects, and many wonderful books. I was very grateful for a reason to re-read In Cold Blood.

While I was there I revised the outline for my next project, the Mt. Holyoke novel. Before going to P-town, I stopped in South Hadley and spent a week in the archive reading letters written by girls to their families in the 1890s and looking at their old photos, all dark teal with time. I found some great, strange material and only hit one major my-ideas-vs.-reality snag, which was easy to unsnarl. I’ve spent a lot of time with visiting researchers at the Ransom Center, but I’ve never been a visiting researcher before, either — kind of an odd shift.

Now I’m back in Austin. Insert obligatory moaning about the heat here. (Seriously, it was 106 today. Unacceptable, Texas!) I’m doing my best to plan my fall syllabus, dive back into dissertation work, and keep poking at the novel all at the same time. Also to watch silly movies with T. and drink my weight in Reed’s Extra Ginger Ale.

Michelle Sagara/West’s post on writerly delusions and learning to accept reader responses to your own work.

In other news, I’m about to mail off my corrected page proofs tomorrow — the ARCs will be ready in June! The book’s already gotten a few very nice quotes, too, which my editor forwards on to me. Getting an email with a new quote in it, particularly when that email shows up at the end of a long work day, is kind of like having someone surprise you with delicious cookies.

On a happier note, my galley proofs arrived today. They look BEAUTIFUL. (We’ll see if I’m still saying that after several hours of poring over them.)

T. sent me an email after FedEx came that said: “Your book is here.” Now it actually looks like a book — it’s not just the same old Word document in yet another iteration. I’m almost hesitant to start marking it up. Except that it has to be back with Soho by May 1. So I guess I’d better get started!

This is, to put it bluntly, some bullshit, as you can see by glancing at Metawriter’s list of books currently de-ranked. Here are some of the first few:

James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain
Stripped of sales rank on amazon.com, but not on amazon.ca
http://www.amazon.ca/BROKEBACK-MOUNTAIN-ANNIE-PROULX/dp/2246699215ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239562478&sr=1-3

Jeanette Winterson’s OrangesAre Not The Only Fruit
Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.

Heather Has Two Mommies has also been stripped of its rank. It’s such a bodice-ripper, you know.

Jezebel is also tracking books that have had their ranks removed.  As their list makes clear, this policy is not being consistently applied, which suggests that it’s probably some kind of automatic filter affected by the tags users have left on books. Regardless of how the system actually works, its results are discriminatory.

Here’s the initial blog post in which Mark Probst describes his communication with Amazon about why his book’s sales rank was removed.

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books suggests Google bombing their new definition of Amazon Rank. Don’t mind if I do.

Dear Author offers a sample letter for emailing Amazon as well as a direct phone line.

And here’s a petition against this idiocy.

Finally, Ed Champion calls for a boycott.

Below is my own email to Amazon, with some debts to the Dear Author model. Steal it if you’d like to.

Dear Amazon,

It has come to my attention that you are stripping books of their sales ranks, supposedly on the basis of “adult content.” Apparently, this includes books that have anything at all to do with GLBTQ characters, authors, issues, or references, along with some heterosexual erotica. You’ve defined this category so broadly that children’s books meant to teach tolerance — such as “Heather Has Two Mommies” — have been stripped of their ranks. Think about the message you’re sending. Children’s books meant to foster understanding about the lives of children of gay parents are “adult”? Essentially, your policy implies that your “entire customer base” — as one of your customer service workers stated, here: http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15293.html — consists of bigoted homophobes who must be shielded from any mention of homosexuality. I profoundly hope that this is not your intention.

If you want to allow your users to opt in to a transparently designed and labeled special search mode that blocks adult content, go to town. But what your current policy suggests is that you, as a company, intend to judge all books with non-heterosexual content to be intrinsically “adult” (with the strong implication that “intrinsically adult” means “intrinsically dirty”) and to prevent your users from finding, and buying, those books easily. This is discriminatory.

Consequently, as a longtime Amazon customer and a current holder of an Amazon Prime account, I look forward to an immediate reversal of this ridiculous policy. Otherwise, I will purchase elsewhere and encourage everyone else I know to do the same.

ETA: Powell’s is now thinking about a GLBTQ book sale in response to Amazon’s asshattery.

ETA part deux: Jonquil covers the “terrible software design” element of this nonsense admirably well, and includes a truly horrifying screencap taken by prusik of the results of a search for “homosexuality” during amazonfail.

ETA the third and final because I have to do some work: good posts by Rosefox and Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times’s Jacket Copy blog.

Proof pages - nearly the finished article, but not quite. They’re a good sign: they mean your book is almost done, almost ready to pack up its things, get published and amble out to meet the reader. But, then again, proofs are also a source of almost primal panic for the writer. If your proofs are awful, wrong, badly-spelled, oddly-italicised and otherwise dysfunctional, they are a very real demonstration of both your complete powerlessness within the editing process and your witless lack of talent within the writing process. They alarm, containing, as they do, all manner of peculiarities and absurdities which have been added by strangers for no clear reason, along with the plethora of screw-ups which are utterly your own fault. How did you miss that non-agreeing verb? Did you ever know what this final sentence means? Will that character stand up to even the most cursory examination? Why did you ever think this was any use? Can anything within the compass of your meagre abilities be done to remedy this papery hellsbroth of shit?

I’m hoping my reaction will be a little less extreme.

Via my friend Elizabeth Scott (whose lovely Something, Maybe is now in bookstores!), a fascinating link about the cover design process for a new book about Columbine.

A New York Times article about a 40-foot clonal amoeba colony in a cow pasture near Houston.

In other news, I’ve started doing more in-depth research for my new novel idea. There’s nothing quite so giddiness-inspiring as walking around the library collecting an armful of books for a new research topic.

But I do agree with both Justine and Elizabeth Gilbert that the most important thing you can do as a writer is keep doing your work, or, as Justine says, make it the best book you can.

Now I’m off to make the best dissertation chapter outline I can. I hope.

• Deepa D.’s I Didn’t Dream of Dragons
• Mary Anne Mohanraj’s two posts on John Scalzi’s blog
• bossymarmalade’s beautiful sees fire
• Verb Noire, the community devoted to publishing writers of color
• fight_derailing: aimed at continuing a productive conversation about race in SF/fantasy
• 50Books_POC: a community dedicated to reading books by writers of color