K.M. Soehnlein

Reborn This Way

Robin and Ruby turns one today. It was exactly a year ago that my third novel was published in hardcover. What a great year it's been. I made a book trailer, did readings in SF, LA, NYC, Philadelphia, Boston and Berkeley, was interviewed by some smart people, and even got nominated for one website's gay fiction award.

As of this week Robin and Ruby has been reborn as a paperback, with a new cover photograph, a book group guide and some great blurbs to help convince folks to buy it. I hope they do. Book sales are the least of the reasons that motivate my writing, but without moving a few units, what I do becomes unsustainable.

You'd have to have your head in the sand not to know that the publishing industry is going through all kinds of changes, not least of which are shrinking hardcover fiction sales and the increase in E-books to 25% of publishers' overall sales. Though I'm a read-on-paper guy when it comes to my own habits, I don't much care how someone finds my stories, just that they do.

But the big bummer of E-publishing is piracy. Just as music artists suffered ten years ago when everyone started passing around files for free, so too are authors seeing their incomes shrink as pirated versions of their books become disseminated. It's been plenty hard to make any kind of living off writing fiction; things aren't getting easier. I can't tell you how many times I've stumbled upon a website offering a free (i.e. illegal) download of Robin and Ruby, usually for the iPad. (My publisher stays on top of that, in a cease-and-desist way, but it's nearly impossible to stop. They call it "viral" for a reason.)

If you haven't bought a copy of Robin and Ruby yet, this would be a good week to do it, to give the book a little sales bump. And if you have: THANK YOU. The reason I do what I do is because of you—the chance to communicate with a readership hungry for stories.

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, I'll be reading at the following events next month. Come by and say hello.

Mon. April 18. 7-9pm. Lost in the Woods: Five Writers off the Beaten Path. At Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby @ MLK, Berkeley. Theater is located across the street from the Ashby BART.

Fri. April 22.7pm. Peninsula Literary Series. 7pm at Gallery House, 320 South California Ave., Palo Alto. 

Freedom from Religion

I've been mesmerized by the events in Iran since the election "results" that came in this past Friday, results that favored the ruling president -- Holocaust denier, artist censor and homo-hater Ahmadinejad -- over the opposition candidate, Mousavi -- symbol of hope for reform for many of Iran's youthful population, including young women. The supposed victory was announced implausibly fast and by such a wide and obviously fraudulent margin that millions of Iranians immediately took to the street [photos], and have returned every day since, a spontaneous populist expression of outrage at the top-down control by the ruling mullahs over so many aspects of day to day Iranian life. Cries of "coup" and "dictatorship" have risen up in a country where freedom of speech is not a given, and speech is often punished.

Having opened my Twitter account only a few days prior, I found most of my news there, tagged #iranelection, a feed of comments from folks inside the country and around the world that continues to renew itself at a shockingly fast rate, far outpacing reporting by traditional news outlets. (The failure of the mainstream media to pick up on what was happening on the streets has itself become a story within the larger story of the events.) With websites and radio shut down inside Iran and foreign reporters arrested and beaten, these dispatches from everyday Iranians marked a new means to bear witness, demand accountability and seek aid at a time of heightened crisis. There are signs that the pressure is working -- Iran's s0-called Supreme Leader has been forced to dial back his original dismissive rhetoric and now says election results will be investigated. What happens next is at this writing frighteningly uncertain. There are reports that the mullahs are feeling the heat, both from the the massive display of popular outrage as well as criticism from governments worldwide, though other reports warn that we might be seeing a Tiananmen Square-level crackdown against protesters, or a civil war.

I know no more about Iran's political workings than any other U.S. amateur news junkie, but I do know that the Islamic Republic of Iran has never been a place where personal freedom has had much of a foothold, and so whether Ahmadinejad keeps his chokehold on power or Mousavi's popular support edges him toward the center, we're still looking at a country run by religious fundamentalists. Even the vision of hope revealed by the past few days of mass protest, largely by young people -- Iran is a country where a third of the population is under 30 years old -- can't erase the fact that the protest generation has  been raised in a country where anti-Semitism is official policy, where homosexuals are executed in public for having sex (there exists an underground railroad for queers who want to leave the country), and where women struggle for any measure of political influence. Beliefs and attitudes must be resisted as surely as individual politicians. Mousavi, a former hardliner, has only recently been a voice of liberation; could he possibly provide the kind of change that would bring true freedom to the people of Iran? Would a queer man or woman living in Tehran, or an artist, or an atheist, experience some measure of freedom under a new regime?

If there is anything that has sparked my interest in the past few days' astounding political display, it is not the hope  for one candidate, or even, really, for "all the votes to be counted," but for the people of this vibrant and storied nation to create for themselves the possibility of freedom. Separate church and state: that is my real wish for this new Iranian revolution. Only then will real change take root.