Romance Books '4' Us: Summer Solstice

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

The Dog Days of Summer are Here ~ and the World of 1984!

The first day of the Summer Solstice 2013 began June 21^st, and the sweltering sun and heat came in with a roar. At least here in the U.S., the Dog Days of Summer have hit us. And hard. We’ve had a few named hurricanes, and more are predicted. The crazy weather started with the devastating storms raving parts of Oklahoma. We’ve only just begun. Wasn’t that a name of a song by The Carpenters? Good grief, I’m dating myself.

In a couple of days, for those who do recognize and celebrate the day, is the Fourth of July—Independence Day—and here in Central Florida, we’ll be hot, humid and more possible thunder bumpers. Not sure how that will play out for the fireworks events happening around the area, but hopefully everyone, everywhere will be able to enjoy them. Exercising our patriotic spirit once a year is good, not to get political here, but with what I’ve seen the last year is frightening. I don’t know if I would have noticed what was happening with our rights as U.S. citizens if not for the interaction I’ve been involved with since starting my writing career. Trademark infringement issues, something all of here on this blog are quite familiar with, was an issue last year. Amazon doing wonky things with their new algorithms making it difficult to search for erotic/a romance as a category, and most recently in the past few weeks Facebook has decided to take down pages where there is questionable degradation toward women.

In theory, the action sounds like a good thing, but they are targeting many and one which is BDSM groups and even author pages. Whether you like the sub-genre or not this isn’t that different from the PayPal fiasco last year. We, as authors, have enough to deal with on a daily basis and to continually be bombarded with one more avenue by which we try and connect with readers, we have to make sure we’re not offending women? We are women, at least the majority who visit this blog, and I’m frustrated yet again. These things side-track me. All I want and love to do is just create sexy stories. I swear, I’m about to say forget all the social networking, keep my nose glued to my laptop and forget about everything else around me. I may not make any money, but I won’t be stressed anymore about the BS going on.

Oh, and Blogger has also changed their terms of service as of June 30.

Please be advised that on June 30th 2013, we will be updating our Content Policy to strictly prohibit the monetization of Adult content on Blogger. After June 30th 2013, we will be enforcing this policy and will remove blogs which are adult in nature and are displaying advertisements to adult websites.

If your adult blog currently has advertisements which are adult in nature, you should remove them as soon as possible as to avoid any potential Terms of Service violation and/or content removals.

I’m don’t have links on my blog to adult sites (I read the notice like Adult Toy Shops, Porn, etc.), but what if this eventually is interpreted as even the books we write and the on-line retailers one can purchase our books?

This is getting to be scary stuff.

What are your thoughts? Am I being paranoid? Are you concerned too? Should we just ignore what’s happening? Is this 1984 but coming a little later than George Orwell wrote about?

Okay, my monthly rant is over. If you want to find me on social places other than my personal blog, here are the links (if I haven't been banned or I gave up and took the pages down).