The Cockroach Invasion (Video)

Baby cockroach on an egg boxA common question raised by my bio is, “Do you really keep cockroaches?” As though it might be a quirky thing I invented just for the bio. Yes, I really keep cockroaches. I started with one cockroach (Sparkle), then got two (Ash and Gem) and this time ordered five (but I have eight). Mostly because I used to have a community fish tank. Now I don’t, I’m filling that space with cockroaches.

Other things people often ask:

What type are they? Madagascar hissing cockroaches. (There are several species called this, which interbreed, so most likely they’re a bit of a mix.)

What do they eat? I give them dry stuff (fish food, cereals, nuts, seeds) and fruit/veg (most stuff, except they don’t like cucumber and I avoid irritant things like onions and chillies). Sparkle was an odd one, in that he’d only eat dried food (and wouldn’t eat if it’d been moistened). Most of them like their fresh stuff though.

What are they called? I’ve named the one bigger nymph. They’re called Pancake, because they’re unusually broad for their length. My guess is Pancake is a bit older, as they’re hanging out on their own more and look less nymphy.

Do you breed them? No. Cockroaches breed a lot, being cockroaches and all, so that’s a lot of babies to handle. A lot of people also have reptiles, so feed unwanted babies to those… but I don’t have space for lizards.

How do you avoid breeding? Keep males and females in separate tanks. For the batch this time, I’ll split them as they get a little bigger, then sort out their final tanks when I know what they’ll be.

Do they get lonely (when kept in a tank alone)? No. Cockroaches live in colonies, but they’re not attached to each other like bees and ants. My biggest concern with the new babies is they’re rather small and the weather’s hot, so they’ll help retain moisture by staying together. I won’t be splitting them until they grow a bit (except Pancake, who’ll move after some settling time).

Why?!!!!? They’re clean, friendly and easy to keep. They tame well and live about as long as a hamster (in approximate ages, my previous ones reached four, one and a half, and three). I love their little antennae!

Can I see them? Here’s five minutes of my cockroaches being cockroaches…

Trigger Warnings, Content Guides and My Books

Cartoon rainbow octopusThere tends to be a lot of talk about whether books should have trigger warnings or content guides, but little talk about how to actually implement this in a useful way. Back when I first published my collection, I tried to write a content guide (I use that term because I don’t like to dismiss discomfort that isn’t at a triggering level… a reader shouldn’t need to have a panic attack before it’s accepted as a problem). I started this by writing a list of content for each story in the collection, but I ran into some problems, and didn’t end up including it on the book information page in the end.

The two big issues I found were:

  • False Grimdark Tone – By listing out every possible item for each story, it made my work sound like the grittiest grimdark ever. Certainly my short stories tend to run darker than my novels, but even the novels would come out as sounding really dark. The problem here is a longer work will often have small references to a lot of things that potentially might get a warning, but when it’s put together as a list, it seems like a huge number of things.
  • Overwhelming Lists – Providing someone with the initial story-by-story list would be overwhelming. So would a paragraph trying to summarise all those things. A content guide that’s too long will be ignored. It also means readers might not notice the items they need to notice, or assume that it’s only a small reference (like the other twenty things on the list).

I revisited this topic recently after my decision to write a cozy mystery. I picked up a bunch of free cozies from Amazon and began reading. As they were free, I didn’t check the reviews that carefully. This was a mistake. One book was branded as a cozy mystery, but it wasn’t (down to having a rape scene). It’s not that I don’t read books with darker content, but I’d not expected it from this book, so it was jarring. It’s not a surprise that some reviewers stated they’d never read a book by this author again.

Lack of accurate content information can cause issues in all directions. It can make it harder for readers to trust a new author. It can make it easier for authors to misbrand a book for sales, because they can cover over that it has content that isn’t part of a certain genre. Overall, it makes it harder for people to make informed choices. This is always the thing that baffles me when people are against discussions of book content, because it does me no favours as an author if readers pick up a book under false pretences and never want to touch my work ever again.

But on revisiting, I still didn’t have much of an idea of what to write in the content guide. There isn’t a lot out there for those who have decided that it’d be a good idea. There are guides for things like films and computer games, but those don’t always work in the context of a book. What I ended up with was a bit of a hybrid between having a content paragraph and having a content grid (listing content briefly under main categories). I discarded the idea of a general rating, as I don’t think it’s that helpful (and my book pages will make it clear when something is a work for teens or children, so that’s covered elsewhere).

The general format I decided on was this:

Tone Paragraph to get around the grimdark issue. In this paragraph, the general tone of the book is set, along with a few other issues that don’t fit in sex/violence/swearing. As this is prose, it’s easier to make it clear it doesn’t list everything. I can say it includes things like this, or a number of issues such as that and this, rather than a providing a complete list of every possible thing.

Then specific categories. The big three people tend to want to know about: sex, violence and swearing. This is a more at-a-glance summary of whether it does have these things and what sort (where appropriate).

As an example, Sunstruck became:

The novel primarily has supernatural violence, but does touch on real issues such as racial microaggressions and attitudes towards mental illness. There are bar scenes and references to alcohol.

Sex: None
Violence: Fight scenes; descriptions of dead bodies
Swearing: Some, usually from secondary characters

This still left a few issues. What exactly should be included, outside of the big things? I felt social issues were one to include in the tone paragraph, such as noting things like racism*. Alcohol was a big problem area, as technically, it’d be listed for a lot of books. But when does it reach the point of it being worth noting? A passing reference to a wine and cheese party? The main character actually drinking? In the case of Sunstruck, neither main character drinks alcohol during the novel, but there were enough bar scenes that I felt it was worth a note.

I also considered some book-specific issues. In mysteries, sometimes the dead body is described and sometimes it’s glossed over. This is an important thing to know for the mystery genre, as it helps set the level of coziness. However, this isn’t something likely to be discussed much in a content system for computer games, as they don’t match up with book genres in that way.

Finally, there was placement of the content guide. I decided to put it as the last thing on every page. It made it both easy to find (as it’s always the last thing, so always there when you scroll right down) and easy to avoid for those worried about mild spoilers (just stop reading at the title, because there’s nothing more after it).

I don’t think it’s perfect, but it’s a start. I can edit them later if they turn out not to be quite right. I also think it opens it up for people to ask me if they have an uncommon thing they want to avoid. All in all, I hope it helps people find books they’re comfortable reading.

* Some content guides include character identity, but really, if a reader has a problem with marginalised characters, they don’t want to be reading anything I write (and no one ever seems to want WARNING STRAIGHT WHITE MALE ALERT on books). That’s not really a book-by-book content statement, but an author statement. I do want to mention acts of discrimination though, as I know from personal experience that some days it can be too close to home.

Sunstruck: Word Clouds

Sunstruck has two viewpoint characters, so I thought it’d be fun to word cloud both of them (using the services at Wordle). Click to see bigger versions.

Ari

Ari is a Bigfoot, who previously worked in a bar and really likes cats. She speaks Bigfoot English, which is based on a number of real English dialects (but isn’t a direct match for any of them). Common features are using ain’t, tending to use got/get rather than have/had and refusing to capitalise Bigfoot. This does show in her word cloud. The liking of cats does not, so apparently she needs more kittens.

Ari's word cloud (Sunstruck)

Ben

Ben is Spokane (Native American), two-spirit, has OCPD and trained as a chemist. It’s interesting looking at Ben’s, as a notable difference is family. Ben has Grandpa, Mom and Tal, who are all his relatives (and don’t appear in Ari’s at all). He also mentions time more often, as he’s focused on tracking time (and keeping things tidy, but that doesn’t result in many repeated words).

Ben's word cloud (Sunstruck)

Random Observation

I would have thought Ari talked about chocolate more often, but apparently not as much as Ben talks about coffee.

Rainbow Lights: Writing the Back Cover

Cartoon rainbow octopus

Recently in one writing community, a new person arrived and declared themselves amazingly talented. Their other online bios said they were special and unique. The reaction was a certain amount of bogglement, to say the least.

This is the issue self-published books face. Everyone knows the author wrote the summary on the back*, so the usual marketing fluff sounds hilariously unaware at best. Most authors deal with it by writing as little as possible, which is going to harm their sales, because it leaves the reader with little idea about the book.

So what can go on the back, if declaring myself to be an amazing writer is off the cards**?

I tackled it in a similar way to covers, by going out and reading descriptions for short story collections (and a few anthologies). My thoughts aren’t rules set in stone. Someone else may prefer an entirely different sort of back cover. But these are the things that I felt worked, or didn’t, when it came to telling me whether I wanted to buy the book.

Sections of the Summary

These are the main areas I found in summaries. They appear in different mixes in effective summaries, but I didn’t find any I liked that missed out summaries of the stories inside. After all, I’m buying the collection for the stories, so it better say something about them.

1. Author Name

It sounds obvious, but a lot of self-published collections missed this piece of information. It’s on the cover, yes. But it still helps to state it directly in the product description, so it’s clear it’s a collection of stories by one person, and not an anthology.

2. Genre and Themes

This might refer to the author or the stories. Genre writers have this one easy, as it’s where the book would be placed in the bookstore (romance, mystery, fantasy, etc.), with perhaps a modifier like humorous, dark or experimental. It’s a little trickier with books that don’t easily classify, but experimental, interstitial and cross-genre are all possibles.

Some descriptions avoided this direct reference, and tried to rely on descriptions of the story content. The issue here is some left me uncertain about the overall genre. Stories about dark secrets could be literary fiction about people’s past traumas, mystery stories about serial killers or paranormal stories about werewolves. So which is it?

Making up genres also doesn’t help. I know people like to believe they’re created something all-new, which couldn’t possibly be described in basic terms, but how many readers will search the online store for spacehamsterpunk?

3. Statistics

The ebook age has changed the needs of the summary somewhat. In a physical book, you can see how thick the book is, so you know roughly how many words are inside. In the digital world, a collection could be anything from three short stories to fifty. The reader needs some idea of length, so they can judge whether it’s good value for money.

Self-published authors win on this point, as even the shortest description tended to include the number of stories and their length category (five short stories, three novellas, and so on). Some of the trade published books have yet to catch up.

4. Story Summary

This is likely to be the biggest part of a lot of back covers. It’s a way of going past a basic genre tag and showing what the author writes about. A few common ways:

Story description: A cat grows a fish tail and swims across the Atlantic, to be reunited with her owner.

Character lists: A sentient potato, a pink mushroom and a lump of coal find happiness in this collection of twelve romance stories. Character lists worked the best for collections with unusual characters. A college graduate, a house spouse and an office worker aren’t as eye-catching. The lists also tended to be part of a sentence with some other elements (like the genre and number of stories).

Character plus story: A cheerleader has a dark secret. A squirrel is chased by the ghosts of acorns. This combines the character list with a bit of story, but not as long or detailed as the single story description.

There wasn’t one true way of making these work. The back covers I liked the best all had some story summary, but different combinations work best for different books. The biggest failing of this part is some descriptions tried to summarise every story in the collection (or as many as possible). In general, this worked best with a maximum of three descriptions in a row, or three items in a list. More than that started to drag. It’s understandable if it was a collection of four novellas to include a description of all four, but ten in a row is too many.

5. Author Achievements

Not every author has achievements, but when they do, it helps. Someone with professional publications or award wins is expected to be able to put out coherent prose. However, some back covers tried to use achievements to carry the whole collection. It doesn’t matter how many awards someone has won… if I don’t know the author and there’s no suggestion of the type of stories in the book, I won’t buy it.

6. Quotes

Established authors often have quotes from reviews or other authors. Personally, I find these useless for buying books. They take up space with waffle about how great the author is, without telling me what the author actually writes. Someone obviously likes them, as they’re common, but I skip these. When a back cover is mainly quotes, I’m moving on to the next collection.

7. Table of Contents

An optional extra for short collections is to include the table of contents after everything else. This is more common for online product descriptions than the back cover of printed books, and works best for collections with only a handful of stories. I don’t think anyone would expect a collection with thirty stories to list them out.

Back Cover Issues

Order and Weight

The order of the elements mattered. If it started with three quotes from other authors, I would have moved on as a reader. I only read to the end because I was analysing them. If it ended with those same three quotes, it wouldn’t have mattered as much.

Some descriptions were also a bit too in love with one element, such as listing author achievements and not much else. Yes, it’s nifty they’ve done all those things, but if no space is given to the stories, it won’t attract new readers.

Vagueness

Some summaries had an attack of the vague. Everything’s amazing, ground-breaking and awe-inspiring, but nothing got more specific than that. What’s the book about exactly?

I Hate my Genre!

It’s a fantasy story, but it’s totally believable, unlike those other fantasy stories. It’s science fiction, but there’s no science in it, so it’s like it could be the modern world. It’s romance, but without any of that love stuff. Apparently it needs to be said this isn’t a good idea. Readers generally like the genres they read. Why would they read a book written by someone who hates them?

Repeat Everything

Repeats were often not the exact same word, but similar enough. Mythic, mythical or myth-inspired. Dark, darkness and darkened. This doesn’t always pop out as a problem, in that it reads okay when the words are spread out, or someone changed darkened to shadowed. But it means the description misses the chance to introduce a different aspect of the collection. If I replace one of the darknesses with melancholy, it’s given me an idea of how the collection is dark.

Oh, the Humanity!

A surprising number of books assure the reader it’s about humans. Or if it’s not about humans, it’s about humanity, the human experience, or some other way of saying it’s all about humans. Generally, I think it’d be safe to say people will assume the book is about humans. Or of it’s about non-humans, that it won’t be so mind-bogglingly incomprehensible a human can’t understand what’s going on.

I’m never again going to be able to read a cover mentioning the human experience without laughing.

But other than adding to my general level of mirth, you’re also filling up space with a rather pointless message. Shock news: there are humans in this! Actual real ones who do human stuff!

Nobody’s Perfect

The summaries I liked best were not perfect. Some summarised a few too many of the stories. Or they started with a rather vague review quote. Or they didn’t say how long the book would be. But I would have bought the book, if I was looking for that sort of story, and that’s ultimately the goal.

It’s important to keep in mind, because trying to make things perfect can lead to stripping out any voice and soul from it. A back cover won’t work for everyone. It mainly needs to work for the target audience and it only has to work enough for them to want the book. I’m sure some instances where the summary was over-long or repetitive were due to trying to answer all the questions critiquers had (because I’ve seen the exact same thing happen to queries).

My Back Cover

Putting this all together, I came up with something for my summary. Here’s how it ended up:

A deep-sea robot tells stories in every colour, but no shade can describe meeting a giant squid.

Rainbow Lights is the first collection by science fiction and fantasy author Polenth Blake. Alien scorpions, vampire ice cream sellers and clockwork flies, try to find their place in worlds where being human is optional. These thirty-five stories and poems are a mixture of new pieces and work published in venues like Nature, Strange Horizons and ChiZine.

And here’s why:

A deep-sea robot tells stories in every colour, but no shade can describe meeting a giant squid. [Leading with something storyish seemed a good idea, as the back cover is mainly for buyers who don’t know who I am. It’ll be down to whether the stories sound interesting.]

Rainbow Lights is the first collection [Not compulsory, but it sounds shiny and new to be the first one… if it were the tenth and they’d never heard of me, they’d wonder] by science fiction and fantasy [I have genres!] author Polenth Blake. [And also a name. This gets the basic stuff out of the way.]

Alien scorpions, vampire ice cream sellers and clockwork flies, [I aimed to make each part do as much lifting as it could. The character list gives an idea of the range of sub-genres (as it implies science fiction, steampunk and urban fantasy), along with a liking for invertebrates and quirky things (unless ice cream becomes the next big thing for urban fantasy, I think it’s safe to call it quirky)] try to find their place in worlds where being human is optional. [Okay, I’m having a joke at the expense of human experience summaries. But there really are non-humans, so it works whether anyone shares my sense of humour or not.]

These thirty-five [I really hope I counted them correctly] stories and poems are a mixture of new pieces and work published in venues like Nature, Strange Horizons and ChiZine. [I write well enough for people to pay me, and these also come with some genre implications, as Nature is hard science fiction and ChiZine is dark/horror. I have range, or something like that.]

And there we go. Someone did suggest I mention my imaginary goldfish on the back cover, but I’m saving that for the author bio.

* Though I’m calling it the back cover summary, it’s also the product description for online stores. It’s sometimes called the blurb too, but I’ve seen that used to describe quotes from other authors about the book, and that’s not what this post is about.

** Not that it was ever on the cards. I’ve always hated job application cover letters, where you’re supposed to say you’re reliable, hard-working and the best person for the job. I’m cursed with a certain amount of honesty, so I know I’m not the best person for the job, and no more hard-working and reliable than the other candidates. My solution was to achieve things, so I could list achievements, rather than talk about how wonderful I was. It’s helpful to have something else to waffle about.

Rainbow Lights: Analysis of Rainbow Covers

Colour Wheel

Usually covers have a limited colour scheme, using shades of one colour, two colours that work together (either because they’re close together or dramatic opposites), or a bold tri-colour scheme using the primary colours. This is mainly because it’s very easy to make rainbows look like a unicorn vomited on the book.

Which is all very well, but the theme for my collection is rainbows, so an all-green cover wouldn’t exactly fit (no matter how lovely). I want to avoid any of the unicorn-vomit pitfalls, but I also want a rainbow. So before starting my own cover, I looked at other artwork using rainbows. These are my thoughts about using that colour scheme effectively.

Rainbow Rules

My first step was a visit to Google images. I searched for terms like “rainbows” and “rainbow lights”. A few observations on the pictures that came up are as follows:

  • Some images used the vomit method on purpose, such as psychedelic artwork and digitally edited photos of rainbows. These are intended to overload the viewer. There’s nothing wrong with that, but for a book cover, it’d detract from the details you want the viewer to see (the title and the author).
  • For non-psychedelic works, the most effective had de-saturated backgrounds, such as black, grey or a greyish shade of a colour. This made the rainbow stand out and also solved the visual overload problem. White backgrounds were also used for a brighter feel, but the rainbow stood out less against them.
  • Some focused mainly on one or two colours, with only small amounts of the rest. This gave the feel of the rainbow, without too much of a colour explosion.
  • The central colour would often appear to dominate at first glance, even if it was in the same quantity (or less) than the rest.
  • For contrasting areas, some used rainbow opposites. What I mean by this is they’d pair the opposite ends of the rainbow – red and violet. Usually in art, you’d use the opposite on the colour wheel* for this sort of contrast (which would be red opposite green, and violet (purple) opposite yellow). Red and purple wouldn’t be considered to have this sort of contrast, as they’re next to each other on the wheel. However, in a rainbow, the viewer has the expectation that red and purple are opposites, so odd though it is, it works (as long as the picture sufficient screams “rainbow”).
  • Realistic rainbows had more subdued colours for the rainbow itself, because in the real world, rainbows aren’t generally that bright against the sky. Sometimes it’s good to remember that you don’t have to set saturation to maximum when editing a rainbow picture.
  • Rainbow lights often had darker shades of the colour at the edges, with highlights in a bright/light shade. Most of these in the image search were photographs of lights, but the principle would work for a painted image too.

Cover Examples

After looking at rainbow images in general, I found book covers with rainbow colour schemes, and analysed which techniques they used (and how well).

Meant to Be – Lauren Morrill

Meant To Be Cover

The cover takes an inspiration from natural rainbows, both in having the rainbow in rays like a sun, and having a scene in the foreground. There are colours in the scene, but they’re somewhat muted (note the red dress is not that bright, and has been mostly shadowed out… the grass is somewhat de-saturated). It’s focused on reds and yellows, which goes with the feel-good contemporary novel blurb. It’s also used some rainbow opposites to show the city against the sky.

It does a decent job of implying a groovy psychedelic theme, without going into eye-bleeding territory. The thing I least like is the font choice, but that’s not a colour issue. It’s certainly readable.

The End of the Rainbow – V.C. Andrews

End of the Rainbow Cover

Not only did a unicorn have an accident here, but the magic turned it into a rainbow-vomit whirlwind, which ate the protagonist! Also, the title is in a similarly bright colour so there’s no real contrast. Add in the blurb, which talks about devastating tragedies, secrets and hardship, and someone had too many skittles.

In terms of colour balance, red was shifted to pink, and the yellow/green part is smaller than the rest (possibly in an attempt to make the yellow title text stand out a little more). This wasn’t a successful cover, and it doesn’t surprise me they changed it for the newer version (the new cover barely has any rainbow on, so I won’t be looking at it).

Arclight – Josin L. McQuein

Arclight Cover

The black background makes the light beams stand out, with white to outline the face without drawing away from the rainbows. A focus on purples and blues is common for speculative fiction, and has been used to good effect here.

Rainbow opposites were used for the title, making it stand out, but also fit with the rainbow theme. It uses the same patterning as the lights, linking the title to the picture.

Crewel – Gennifer Albin

Crewel Cover

Another speculative book with a different approach. One trick here is the extremes have been minimised. There’s only a hint of violet, indigo and blue. Red is softened to pink for most of it. Saturation has also been used – most of the background colour is less saturated (more subtle than using a grey background, but it’s still there). The swirls are the most saturated parts, and draw the eye (the focal point of those being near the centre, close to the title).

I liked the choice of the pink swirls and red lips as the central colours. It’s playing with cover colour stereotypes, as such colours are usually put on chicklit books. But it’s using them in different ways, with an overall composition that’s more dreamlike and suggests a speculative book. This goes with the blurb about becoming a beautiful and deadly spinster.

Much like Arclight, the title interacts with the picture. It’s dark, so it stands out, but has reddish sections where it crosses the picture.

My Plans

My original idea was a rainbow squid in a black ocean. Arclight was very close to my colour scheme ideas, so I’ve seen it can work.

The debatable point is how bright to make the squid. It could be lit up, as though it’s self-illuminated. It could also be fairly dark, as though a light is being shone onto it. Or a mix of both, with small points of light. As the squid body will take up a fair bit of the cover, I’m leaning towards a darker approach, with some points of light.

Colour-wise, purple/blue is often associated with speculative work, so would be a sensible dominate colour scheme. I liked Crewel‘s play on the cover colour stereotypes, but it’s more of a risk for self-published work. Making the genre easier to identify increases the chances of a reader looking at the book.

I preferred the covers where the title and the picture went together. Meant to Be worked as far as the picture was concerned, but the text seemed separate, as though it was an afterthought. But this decision can come a little later, as I’ll be adding the title digitally. The next step will be drawing the squid, which is a story for another post.

* See the top of the post for a picture of a basic colour wheel.