One of the things I had to weigh in my decision to talk to Dear Author last month about my former life as a fan fiction author was the grief it might bring me with my ex-husband. As those who knew me when I was writing it were aware, my ex has been known to follow me online. He entered my fan fiction in our divorce records. While I unfriended him on social networks, he continues to follow me, and will repeatedly mention things I talk about there, following me to writing forums like Absolute Write, tracking my friends on Twitter, etc.

It can wear a person down; I’ll admit it.

In the beginning, I chose the hermit approach. I took down my personal blog, which I’d been using for over six years at the time. I lost my job at a web magazine and chose to try to find something less conspicuous, less in the public eye. It hurt me career-wise, but gave me time to regroup, personally. I took time off from social networks like Twitter and Friendfeed and Facebook because I’m known to be a very outspoken person, and I didn’t like the idea of watching what I said all the time.

Talking to Dear Author was, honestly, a moment where I could say “fuck you” to three years of hiding everything. I’m able to talk to people on Twitter I haven’t talked to in over two years, since the last time my ex found my profile. I’ve warned people on forums when I know my ex follows them, but other than that, I try not to change my behavior.

Nathan’s article touches on the difficult part of it, but he doesn’t cover the nasty underbelly of divorcing in the Internet age. There are those of us who end up making a choice between being online and knowing we have no privacy from an ex who wants to invade that privacy endlessly. Everything thing I say and do can (and will) eventually be used against me. Any choice to date (or not date) has to be kept completely offline, and trust me, I’ll never again use the relationship status feature on Facebook.

Social media has made the world smaller, and made it easier to do so many great things. But it’s also made things like divorce a lot more painful, and drag on a lot longer than they should. Nearly three years out, I still can’t completely move on, because my writing endeavors are followed and mocked and claimed to replace “serious” employment. Working remotely doesn’t qualify me for assistance with daycare because I’m “home with the kids” and “online.” There are days when I’d like to be a turtle, crawl inside a shell, and ignore the Internet altogether.

But then I’d miss my friends and talking about books and writing, and where would I be?

No, I was terrified of outing myself. I stood up and essentially said “Hi, I’m Cyndy, and for two years I wrote Twilight fan fiction.”

Twilight fan fiction was my secret shame until yesterday. I’m not a particularly huge fan of the books — quite the opposite, in fact — and never wrote anything that was what’s called “canon”: in the world of the books. My fan fiction was all-human, close to original, and mostly borrowed from the characterizations, never the plots.

In the time since I left the fandom, I’ve learned that writing is a very lonely pursuit. When I wrote fan fiction, each chapter was met with reviews and feedback, most of it good. Writing original fiction? Each chapter is met with another blank page, and the threat of even more rejections, and believe me when I tell you I’ve had my share. Writing fan fiction was easy and fun, and had no pressure, other than the business of keeping it a secret.

So why did I? Why was it a secret and why did I choose now, when I haven’t written any in well over a year and change?

I kept it a secret because I feared my professional life being impacted. I feared other authors looking askance at me, like I was less of a writer because I’d done it. I feared not getting hired for freelance gigs, or not getting published.

Guess what? All that happened anyway, without anyone knowing about the fan fiction.

When I offered to do the Dear Author panel, it was because I wanted the other part of the Twilight fandom to have a voice. I wanted the other fandoms to know that not all of us are ignorant of how fandoms are supposed to work, that some of us believe in the ethics that have gone before us, and will hopefully survive after us. Mostly, I wanted them to know that there are a lot of us who are upset and frustrated at what has come out of our fandom, and wanted it to be known as more than just the fandom that spawned That Book.

The author of That Book feels justified in what she did. She’s rich and successful and being talked about on national talk shows and in newspapers. She has the NYT bestseller that most of us will only ever dream of.

But unless she’s devoid of any conscience whatsoever, all that money and fame and success come with the price of wondering whether she could have done it on her own. She’ll never have the excited feeling of having a debut novel released under her own steam without being propped up by the fandom. There will never be any way for her to know if she was talented enough to have succeeded without the foundation put in place by coming out of a fandom, by using someone else’s characters and fame to build her story.

I made the decision to out myself because I want to do that. I want to write a book and have it published all on my own, using my own characters and by building my own platform and by doing everything the hard way instead of taking the easy way. Maybe it will never happen, but at least I’ll never have to wonder what might have been. I won’t ever have to question my own talents and abilities.

I’ve been on a huge reading jag lately, and it seems that all the great middle grade books are written with boys in mind: great male protagonists, lots of action and adventure, etc. There’s a dearth of middle grade books that are really outstanding for girls that I can see, and now I’m wondering if that was why Sissy blew through middle grade quickly, sticking to sci fi and fantasy before moving on up to young adult.

Yet my older son is reaching the point where he could be reading some lower-end young adult, and I’m seeing … girl books. I’m not finding a lot of great male protagonists, and even if the book does have a male main character, it still seems geared toward girls, with romance being at the heart of it.

So help me out here: good middle grade books for girls? Great young adult books for boys?

Odds are, if you are a parent and/or writer, your hackles went up based on that single-sentence lede. I mean, Wimpy Kid! My kids have read all the books, multiple times. They’ve worn out even the hardcovers. They paced waiting for the latest one to come out, which outsold even the Steve Jobs biography.

Everyone knows Wimpy Kid. He had a balloon in the Macy*s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Odds are, however, you didn’t know Antarctic Press, and would never have known them, were it not for the lawsuit. This is what’s called the Streisand Effect, in which someone sues someone over something that bothers THEM more than it affects the public as a whole, which then makes the public as a whole hyper-aware of it.

AP publishes mainly comics. I know of them only peripherally; they don’t publish anything massive like Justice League that most people are familiar with, and you have to be a pretty hardcore nerd to know their titles. The only one I recognized, to be honest, was Time Lincoln (which is cool, and you should totally check it out).

At any rate, one of AP’s prolific authors wrote a parody title of Diary of a Wimpy Kid called Diary of a Zombie Kid. Anyone with half a brain (hah!) would understand this was a parody. Zombie Kid’s mom accidentally brings home a zombie virus. Can you imagine going through middle school with your flesh falling off? I mean, really.

Until today, I hadn’t heard of the book. Neither had my kids. Now, however, I’ve heard of it; my kids have heard of it; and I have two Wimpy Kid fans who want the book. Do they think it has anything to do with the Wimpy Kid books? Hell no. These are the same kids who watched the teaser trailer for The Hobbit and wanted me to get someone on the phone because someone was stealing from Peter Jackson. They understand parody a lot better than lawyers and grown-ups do, apparently. They get that people will make things that make fun of their favorites, and they think that’s interesting and cool. Is the problem that someone else might make money making fun of a bajillion-dollar franchise and Kinney didn’t think of it first?

Let’s hope the judge in this case shows the same sense my eight-year-old and nine-year-old do.

Living as a copy editor, I have a love-hate relationship with the AP. Mostly, it ends up being hate.

I mean, I need a style guide. Every copy editor needs a style guide. Without a style guide, and one put out by some sort of governing body, writers will go completely apeshit insane. I have flailed wildly when there’s even a whisper suggesting we go with a simple site style guide, because that’s just crazy talk that suggests we all run naked into the office, declare anarchy, and start writing in Pig Latin.

Okay, I’m using a bit of hyperbole to make a point, but other copy editors are nodding their heads along with me here. You need rules to back you up.

So when the AP comes out with this “helpful tool” (emphasis on tool) that “automatically edits your writing” I seriously want to scream. The AP Style Guide’s biggest user group — and biggest supporters — are copy editors. You put out a tool like this and countless publications are going to think to themselves: “Gee, if we have this, why are we paying the [admittedly low] salary to a person when this tool can do it for us?”

Dumb move, AP. Dumb. Ass. Move.

What any copy editor worth his or her salt does is so much more than any automated tool will ever do, which is why we exist in the first place. We know when to ignore the ridiculous AP rules, which took how many years to remove the useless hyphen in email? (It was removed just this year, for those playing the home game.) We know to look to sources closer to the breaking story to find accepted spellings, so when Osama bin Laden was killed earlier this year? It took the AP nearly three months to come out with accepted spellings for the city where he was found.

We know when to make changes and when not to, but most of all, we know how to reword things for grammar while preserving a writer’s voice. It’s the reason why, even though I work full time as a copy editor, when I’m writing, I still turn my work over to someone else for editing; everyone needs an editor.

So no, I’m not at all in favor of the AP’s new tool, and I wouldn’t recommend it to any news organization. Spend the money and get yourself a good copy editor instead.

We’re worth it.

As a writer, I want a book of mine to be published by a publisher that comes with a cover designer and a typesetter and all those same things that have come along with “being published” since Gutenberg designed his press.

However, I work in tech. I follow what’s happening in the publishing industry and I see the moves Amazon is making, and the Big Six really look like they are asleep at the wheel when Amazon is making some of these moves. You can’t look at the industry from the outside and not be boggled at what companies like Amazon are doing and think the status quo is going to continue without change.

Yesterday, on Twitter, there were two interesting little bubbles of discussion. One was about the somewhat viral video from now-infamous, would-be writer Sebastien Marshall to his agent. The general reaction from the traditional publishing industry — editors, agents, writers who are published — is that Marshall has clearly had some sort of breakdown. He’s destroyed his credibility. He needs help.

But in discussions with those who, like me, view the industry from two sides, I’m willing to bet the man is less insane than I am.

If you compare Marshall’s shirtless rant about his agent and the publishing industry to one other notorious online meltdown from earlier this year — Charlie Sheen — you’ll see marked differences: Marshall is aware he’s dressed inappropriately, and makes reference to it several times. The video’s subject matter was prepared in advance, from the white board to the bills in his wallet to the notes he has on the paper he refers to often. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is a marketer, and he’s maximizing his platform. He no longer cares about being published by traditional publishers, because right now, he has a venue and he’s well aware of it, and he’s going to maximize it to its greatest potential. The book he was allegedly contracted to write was about that very topic, and now he’s doing it, live and in his best P.T. Barnum fashion, for everyone to see.

Do I think he went into his original contract without enough research? Absolutely. He likely had no idea how slow and old-fashioned traditional publishing can be. With a non-fiction proposal, he went in without a book even written, but if he could imagine how it works for fiction writers, who must write a book and edit it, THEN try to find an agent, who must then try to find an editor to buy the book, and then go through copious edits and then the publishing juggernaut … What most people don’t realize is that the books they see on the shelves in a bookstore or at a Target are often five years in the making, or more, depending on how long it took to write and how quickly a publisher fast-tracked it.

The allure of self-publishing when faced with that is enough to tempt anyone, no matter how badly you want to see your book on a wood table on that main aisle in a Barnes & Noble.

But then you are told that it’s not worth it, which brings us to Twitter issue number two: Dan Friedman’s breakdown of best-case traditional publishing advances vs. the ubiquitous 99-cent self-published e-book.

That math looks pretty scary, doesn’t it? Especially if you have no idea how publishing advances are structured. Friedman used Stephenie Meyer’s advance on Twitter, so that’s the one I based my own math on when I refuted it.

Meyer’s rumored $750,000 advance wasn’t for Twilight alone, but was for a three-book contract. Now, publishers aren’t stupid, and they generally structure those advances so that they are paid in installments based on deliverables. Any freelance writer would recognize the format. It isn’t like they handed over $750,000 cash the second that they signed her; some of it would have been paid upon acceptance of the contract, but other installments would have been paid upon acceptance of the final draft, as well as the drafts for the other two contracted books. In addition, in those cases, with a hefty advance paid on a three-book contract, it’s not like the publisher usually breaks it out and said “Okay, it’s a $250,000 advance for the first book, same for the second, etc.” For her to see any royalties, the advance has to “earn out,” meaning until sales for any and all books make back that $750,000 advance, she’s not going to see any more money. Obviously, with a series like Twilight that flew off the shelves, she made a boatload more money, but yes, it’s possible to get a hefty advance like that and never see another dime of money.

Now, the second issue is that most writers, even those like Amanda Hocking, who became famous (and rich) with the 99-cent e-book don’t generally price all their books at that price. It’s what’s known as a loss-leader. You lure readers in with the first book, priced at 99 cents or even free, then charge more for the rest of the series. So using the same math, while the 100K-selling author on Kindle would make $35,000 for that 99-cent book, if the same figures continued for books 2 and 3, priced at even $2.99 each (when the percentage jumps to 70 percent for authors), the royalties for the other two books would be $418,600, which added to the $35,000, looks a lot better, doesn’t it?

Now, keep in mine that Meyer also had an agent, and the agent’s percentage would come off the top of that $750,000. (As an aside, I have met her agent, and she’s lovely, and I’m sure none of her writers begrudge her a dime.) But the numbers that often get cited, such as Friedman did, suddenly don’t look as drastically different. And the Kindle author mentioned above will continue to make 35% royalties on the 99-cent book and 70-percent royalties on books priced $2.99 or higher in perpetuity. Traditional royalties aren’t that high, because of overhead for things like marketing and editing, etc. that the self-published author would have to pay for out of pocket.

So at the end of the day, the decisions really aren’t as easy as they might have seemed, are they? Odds are, authors probably don’t have the marketing savvy or the chutzpah to go out shirtless and ream a Big Six CEO and a respected literary agent online. And note that I said at the beginning I have no desire to self-publish my own books.

The reason? Simple research. In addition to being a voracious research of the industry on my own, I am lucky enough to work with some incredibly smart people. In years past, most of my debating with Mathew Ingram took place on Twitter, as we worked at different publications. Now that we work at the same place (and I get to edit all his pieces), a lot of that debate takes place over IM, but it’s still going on.

Mathew is a big proponent of the disintermediation going on in publishing, which is fairly obvious if you’ve read his stuff. But when I sent him a piece a little over a week ago written by someone who writes in my genre (I waver between literary fiction and upmarket fiction), he ended up writing his own piece on what purpose traditional publishing is still serving.

There are days I wish I wrote romance. If I did, I honestly doubt I’d be querying agents, because the audience for romance has already made the transition to e-books and self-published authors are doing well, as are other genre authors. But the disintermediation hasn’t made its way toward other holdouts: It’s still not there for young adult books, or other children’s genres. And it’s definitely not there yet for literary fiction.

But when you see editors like Stacy Cantor Abrams making the move to an e-publisher specifically to handle non-genre adult fiction, you can see the waves starting to lap a bit at the foundation. It’s coming, and the people like Sebastien Marshall who are saying they don’t care about burning that bridge because they won’t be crossing back over, they really may not need to.

It was a joke, but it was half serious.

I received what some of us call a “zombie rejection” yesterday: a rejection on a query sent so long ago that QueryTracker had already automatically grayed it out as a non-responder. It’s a rejection that merely twists a knife; you’ve already long ago given up on the book, the agent, and the query. Odds are, you’ve forgotten all about ever sending it, but there it is, staring you in the face.

As most people who know me are aware, I’m nothing if not blunt, often to my detriment. Among the group I “hang” with at Absolute Write are some amazingly talented writers. I laugh a lot that had I know who they were behind the screen names, I’d probably never had the courage to start talking to them at all. I’m still pretty blown away that half of them talk to me.

It is devastating to spend years on a novel only to see it go nowhere, to get no representation. People ask you about what’s going on, especially when they knew it was in Amazon’s ABNA contest, and saw it do reasonably well, and it’s hard to not burst out crying every time you say “I never found representation for it.

Most of the time, you never find out what was wrong with it. Was it a good novel that wasn’t right for the current market? Are you a terrible writer? Did you pick the wrong agents? There are no answers. You simply take all the work and all the rejection letters and file them away.

The worst, however, the absolute worst, are the no answers. I have joked that I am the one in our AW group whose novel had The Most Initial Interest That Never Got Rep. I still have fulls outstanding, some of which were partials-to-fulls, which are supposed to signify some level of enthusiasm, and yet I never received a reply. You try to move past it, but they sit there, irrational hope that maybe the agent simply forgot yours in a pile and hadn’t started reading yet. Until you see people you know get offers from those same agents and you realize that you will never get a response.

After yesterday’s rejection, I went into QueryTracker and closed all the outstandings. I don’t know when they would have automatically been marked with requested materials out, but the false hope needs to disappear. I have a new novel to work on and the ability of that one book I loved so much, those characters I loved like my own children, to rear up and cut me to the quick again and again because no one else loved them is a distraction.

Maybe someday I’ll learn enough to know how they are fixable. But trunking a novel involves turning a key. So I am, officially, closed to rejections.

It’s sort of kismet that the YA writers were talking about it recently, because I’ve seen an uptick in discussions around kids Sissy’s age.

As a parent, you’re never sure which would be worse: to have your kid being bullied, or to be doing the bullying. Having been bullied as a tween and teen, I know what it felt like, and I don’t want my kids on either end. They’ve been taught since kindergarten that I have a zero tolerance policy of them picking on classmates, no matter what the reason, and as I’ve told them time and time again when they complain about someone at school who’s “just so annoying”: You have no idea what that person’s life is like at home. Maybe he or she just wants attention. Or needs a friend and doesn’t know how to ask.

At the same time, having been bullied, I know how bullies get to you: They prey on all your insecurities. The best way to keep my kids from feeling that way is to not let them feel that way in the first place. From the beginning, I’ve taught my kids to celebrate differences, and to embrace “weird,” pointing out that just about everyone in history who people think are “cool” were the same people who didn’t fit in when they were in school.

As a result? If someone calls Sissy a name or says she’s weird? She usually says thank you. Or corrects misinformation. No running away or hiding, and it generally shuts them right down. That way, the bullies don’t win.

Go ahead. I’ll wait. I have a lot of time tonight.

I’m glad I’m not writing tonight. Glad I could sit by the sidelines, watch Twitter, retweet the sentiments of those I’ve worked with before and those I just follow and send a few along to the writers I work with.

I have worked in the online news business for longer than I want to be thinking about. I have reported on stories I can’t say I’m necessarily proud to have reported on at the time. My work may have been good, at times even better than good, but I don’t think there’s a reporter out there who ever feels good when you are reporting about someone’s death.

The old mantra in COMM/J 101 was always “Fuzz and was are the two things that sell. Police and death.” It’s just as true today as it was when I first heard that phrase, and the business is even more cut-throat. The Web was something out of a Gibson novel, not a reality.

Lam says (and I’m just repeating it since I know you read it because I told you to):

“Sometimes we have to do things that are difficult and what some might consider parasitic, with regards to reporting on health. And things like this.”

I don’t think there’s a person who has ever worked in any reporting capacity out there who hasn’t written a story that made them feel — for want of a better word — icky. Who hasn’t asked questions no one wanted to be asking. Who didn’t do things or say things or write things no one would want to do, say, or write.

But it’s a job.

The news cycle moves so quickly now, and every writer knows if you hesitate, even for five minutes to take a breath and think about what you are doing, someone else will get that story, that scoop. Apple is a gigantic company, so gigantic that even piddly old me got interviewed by the local paper asking about my lust for the latest iPhone. I sit here, on my bed, typing on a MacBook, next to an iPhone and an iPad, with an Apple TV in the next room and kids who can ID Steve Jobs from fifty paces when they often can’t tell one great-aunt from another and regret that things were so invasive, that he felt the need to hide his health issues from the public to do what he loved most: design ridiculously over-priced and oh-so-lickable products for us.

I have a feeling that Lam’s post will be a popular one — at least in terms of page views — and will resonate with a lot more than just me in this crazy business. I know I can’t be the only one who wished for once we could just leave it alone. Not report it. Not look for quotes or wonder about Apple’s memorial plans or what the stock prices will do when the markets open in Asia and New York in the morning.

Maybe no one will say it, but there are a lot of stories I don’t think anyone wants to report. No one wants to be a parasite in this business. This story is probably at the top of that list.

When I saw the headline this morning, “Is rejection turning you into someone you’re not?” I couldn’t click on it fast enough. Shoot, I was the fat girl who tried out for cheerleader three times and got cut before I finally made the team my fourth try. I’ve never had trouble getting back up in the face of rejection, yet I spent nearly six weeks not writing a single word after one particularly harsh rejection. “That’s me,” I thought. “I’ve become someone I’m not.”

I thought the post would be motivating. What I found, however, was flippant. Dismissive. Oh sure, the agent posted, her words may have been hurtful, but she didn’t even remember them. They were meaningless. Forget all about them.

In the comments, she suggests authors think of it like a game.

A game? Meaningless? Is this what writing is to this agent? To all agents? Suddenly, self-publishing, which I’ve personally felt I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole, looks a hell of a lot more attractive.

Let me explain something, before I delve in to why I feel this flippancy is downright offensive to every author who has ever been rejected: I’ve seen more than my fair share of pitches. Right now, in my email, I have 248 unread pitches (at least, that I’ve filtered; there may be more in the main inbox), as a matter of fact, even though I’m no longer a reporter. That’s not counting the pitches I still get to my personal email from when I was freelancing.

I probably should delete them, unread. After all, it’s a game, and there’s no chance I’m going to cover any of these subjects. But see, unlike Ms. Friedman, I understand something in these pitches. They are emails that are the result of someone’s blood, sweat, and tears. They are asking me to care enough about someone’s passion to pay it attention. To give it coverage on a blog that might get it noticed, get it more coverage, get it customers. Someone’s career, someone’s dream, someone’s livelihood may hang in the balance of the right reporter getting hold of that pitch.

Even as they come into my mailbox, I try to scan the subject lines, to see if there’s something that might be of interest to the reporters I edit for. Unlike Ms. Friedman, I don’t think any of these people think of it as a game. I think they are deadly serious, whether their pitches are amazing and I wish I was still writing and could cover their product or whether the pitch is horrifically amateurish. I may not remember every pitch, or every product, or every email, but no, I don’t forget any of them. I do think about them, unread, uncovered, hoping someone will offer that moment in the spotlight that will make a dream come true. Sure, it’s often easy to tell when a company or idea is ill-thought-out, the business plan ridiculous, the pitch unprofessional and downright laughable. Does that mean the people behind it believe in it any less? That they want it to succeed any less? That they will be any less disappointed when it fails and they find themselves having to go back to a regular job, slogging away as a code monkey somewhere?

I guess maybe I don’t need to explain why the flippancy over a rejection is so offensive after all, do I? It amounts to the same thing as a stranger telling you that your children are ugly and walking away. An imagined future and hours of labor are tied up in one email, or letter. The least you can expect is that someone takes five minutes out of their life to acknowledge your humanity.