Last night police in riot gear marched down West Florissant Avenue, ordering people to leave the area and firing tear gas onto the streets. Police even fired tear gas into the backyard of a home where several people held their “hands up” in what’s become a symbol of protest over the shooting of Michael Brown. Daily RFT caught the melee on video.

The incident occurred after police had already evacuated nearly everybody on West Florissant Avenue. Between tear gas firings, a police officer bellowed “go home” into a loudspeaker. It took about an hour, but nearly everybody within vicinity of the police left the streets.

Yet a group of four male protesters remained defiant on West Florissant, screaming profanities at the police and putting their hands in the air. The police responded with threats of tear gas.

"Turn around and leave or we will deploy gas," shouted a police officer through a loudspeaker. Residents in their backyards pleaded for the men to get out of the street. After a few minutes of prodding, they did so. But the police still decided to advance.

Standing in his backyard along with a few friends and family was 24-year-old Rich West. And after seeing the police deploy tear gas as they marched down the empty street, West and his friends felt like protesting.

"You go home! You go home!" they chanted. As the police come closer, they all put their hands up.

Once again, the police officer with the megaphone ordered the protesters to go home.

"We’re in our yard!" they responded.

At one point West walked to his fence with his hands high up in the air.

"This my property! This my property!" he shouted, prompting police to fire a tear gas canister directly at his face. He moved at the last second.

"This my shit!" West screamed irately after narrowly avoiding the gas canister. Eventually a friend grabbed him and pulled him back to calm him down.

"This is my backyard! This is my shit!" West continued screaming into the camera. He turned to the police: "Y’all go the fuck home!"

"This is our home. This is our residence," West’s brother added. "Why do you think people say ‘fuck the police?’ Because of that shit."

Flora Busby, West’s mother, a soft-spoken woman in her 60s, came into the backyard to see if her sons were alright.

"We in our backyard!" she said. "Why you gotta shoot us?"

Again West shouted at the police. And again they fired another gas canister into the yard — this one nearly hitting his house.

"It’s pure ignorance," West responded after catching his breath. "I pay property taxes here. I should be able to be in my backyard any time."

He said that regular harassment by the Ferguson police department, often in the form of traffic stops, has been occurring ever since he was sixteen years old.

"They ain’t gotta be throwing tear gas in my backyard," added Busby. "This is my property. We were just standing back there, my son was standing back there, and I go to see about him and they threw it."

She continued: “I’m angry about that. They shouldn’t be doing that. And they didn’t need to kill the poor little boy. “

http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/2014/08/police_in_ferguson_fire_tear_gas_on_protesters_with_hands_up_in_their_own_backyard.php

Everyone should sign this. I support this petition! (WFA stands for World Fantasy Awards)

for real this is so important and would make so many white neckbeards mad 

Let’s take Lovecraft down a peg, yeah?

oh hell, yes

#Why do we even have that lever

You need diverse books? I've got 'em! Part 1

So, in honor of #Weneeddiversebooks, I’m posting about a few books I’ve been, er, involved with, either as author or editor. All of these feature lesbian and bisexual female characters as protagonists or major secondary character. Some are sexy, some are chaste; some are romances, some are not; all of them are SF and fantasy.

First there’s my second novel, Ebenezer.

What is it: It’s a retelling of A Christmas Carol with a lesbian protagonist who is living with severe depression brought on both by genetics and by several circumstances. (And yes, her name really is Ebenezer—because she’s from Utah and people don’t know how to name their children there sometimes. Believe me, I know this firsthand ;)). It’s set at the height of the global recession in 2009 and explores not just the mind of someone essentially undergoing a life-threatening mental health crisis but the connections that we need to form as human beings in order to protect and care for each other when governments, businesses,social structures, and even personal ambitions fail us. 

Trigger warnings: Yes, for graphic suicidal ideation, frank discussions and portrayals of mental illness, discussions of death, as ell as classism and some pretty harrowing verbal/emotional abuse of poor people. ETA: And emotional/verbal abuse of a child. (I’m sorry. I knew I forgot something. Basically, I know it’s kind of an emotionally harrowing read, but I promise it’s worth it!)

Since this book is set in NYC, I tried to make the cast reflect the city’s diversity as well. Had I written it today instead of in 2009, I would have done a few things differently,but I still am hopeful that I did this part well. Ebenezer is white, but many secondary and tertiary characters are not. 

My goal with writing this book was to rescue A Christmas Carol from over a century of schmaltzifying and saccharine-coating and to get in touch with what makes this novella so strange, so haunting, and ultimately so awe-inspiring. It seriously is my favorite book of all time, and one I re-read every year around the holidays. I cry every time I read it, and I wept several times while writing this book. I hope I did well by Dickens and by everyone who will read my retelling of him!

One of the difficulties in marketing this book has been the them, of course. People hear “A Christmas Carol” and think “Christmas book.” Well, in a sense that is correct. This book takes place on Christmas Eve and Christmas Morning. But the idea of Christmas—even in the secular sense—is very much not an overwhelming theme, so it can be enjoyed, I think, all year round, and by people who don’t like or celebrate the holiday.

You can find it here on Amazon.

or

Here on Barnes and Noble.com. (if you have a Nook). 

And here on All Romance Ebooks if you’d rather support a smaller company.

If you’re a reviewer and would like to review the book for your blog, Amazon.com, or Goodreads, feel free to send me a message here or at upstart(dot)crow (at) gmail (dot) com and I’ll set you up with a pdf. :)

Next up: part 2: steampunk and witches and lesbians, oh my! 

jesus

According to a teacher at J.Law that my mom knows, she was apparently an honors student and was extremely motivated and had her plans for college all thought out. She wanted to go somewhere in life and now that was all cut short because some guy couldn’t handle rejection. This is tragic, and my heart goes out to her friends and family. I NEVER want to hear someone say that women have no reason to be afraid of men ever again.

I’m speechless… 

I’msoangry.

i’m so livid

and so fucking sad

it was done at school. And a teacher might’ve seen part of it happening. THAT. Really pisses me off. This makes me so sick

Chris Plaskon walked up to Maren Sanchez at 7:15 in the morning on the day of the junior prom and asked her to go with him. When she said no, she was going with her boyfriend—which he knew already—he stabbed her in the neck.

Which means, does it not, that he came to school carrying a knife, prepared to murder her if she said no.

This wasn’t about a sixteen-year-old being unexpectedly set off by rejection. He brought the murder weapon to the crime scene. And he made sure to ask her very early, when few people would be around.

I don’t know what his motive was—but it wasn’t the prom. He had the means and he created the opportunity.This was premeditated.

There’s something very, very wrong with this article.

No.

Why are they discussing how “great of a kid” he was? How he was strange, but never dangerous? How no one saw it coming even though he was obsessed with her for two freaking years.

He brought a knife with him to school that day.

He brought a knife with him that day, knowing good and damn well he would ask her to prom. He knew, when he brought that knife with him, that she would turn him down due to being in a relationship.

You asked a girl in a committed relationship out on a date, and then got angry and “snapped” when she acted on the fact that she was in a committed relationship and said no, instead of miraculously going against it and saying yes to you.

But we all know he didn’t really snap. No, not when he packed the murder weapon on you ahead of time. Not when he cornered her during a low traffic time. Not when he knew she was seeing someone. Not when he knew she’d say no. No, he knew what would happen, but felt so entitled to her and her body that when she dared to say no, he felt justified in taking her life so that no one else could have her.

But the media talks about his model family? How he was strange but funny and happy and a class clown who enjoyed making others laugh? How he was a nice guy? How devastated his family is?

His? The attacker? The murderer? The one who felt so entitled to someone just because he liked her that he felt justified in stabbing her because she dared to tell him no?

What about her? What about her family, who has to live day in and day out with the fact that this boy felt so entitled to their child that he felt entitled to determine whether she lived or died? What about them, who have to move forward without seeing her because some rude, selfish, evil thing couldn’t take the word no and planned to kill her as soon as he heard it? What about them?

You don’t get to stab an innocent girl in the neck and have the media humanize you. I don’t care if you were a little depressed now and then, I don’t care if you have ADD. No one cares that you seemed to be a well adjusted, cheerful kid and that your actions were “so unexpected.”

You MURDERED someone for refusing your advances.

The media needs to STOP humanizing this evil, dangerous, selfish thing. It’s what’s wrong with the world.

Aaaand once again the media immediately has to mention that the perpetrator was mentally ill/neuroatypical, implying yet again that murders are only done by mentally ill people. And no, before anyone says that depressed people never get blamed for this sort of thing, reread the first paragraph again. FFS, if it didn't seem to play any part in his motivation to murder her--which, by the way, mental illness seldom does--why bring it up at all?

And I can't even start with the ADD thing, or I'll be furious all weekend and not be able to talk about anything else. 

I'm so done.

The Most Important Letter of Our Life by JoSelle Vanderhooft (via sidestreets)

Woww. It's awesome to see that some of my old writing is still going around! I'm so glad you liked this, sidestreets.

Also:

1)  Have you ever tried writing a book?  It may not take much in the way of material resources, but it does take time, energy, and skill (which can be attained through practice - i.e. even more time and energy) that does not pay off immediately, and very, very rarely pays a living wage.  I know lots of people who have books they want to write, but they are either a)  going to school full-time, b) working just above minimum wage, or c) both.  So yeah, it does take less energy to ask for diverse books than to write one.  

2)  I once heard this response compared to “Don’t like the government?  Well, why don’t you just run for president?”

Absolutely. Plus the fact that some of us DO write our own “diverse books” and then find ourselves spending all our free time trying to signal-boost them just so the audience that’s already there and waiting even

knows about it in the first place. Someone once posted about a lesbian princess and the post got 50,000 notes. But I bet you that less than one percent of those people knew about my lesbian princess/queen character. Just to give you an example: I had people telling me months after my book came out “wait, your characters are Jewish? How come I didn’t know that?” I didn’t know what to tell them.

It's also frustrating because people say they want diverse books, but then don't blog about, read, review, or even check out small press titles like Shira's or mine. Sometimes even when we offer a free copy. For example, i gave away something like 50 copies of the first Steam-Powered anthology (lesbian steampunk stories) to people who swore up and down that they'd review it. Maybe ten of them actually did.

We need diverse books because mentally ill people of all ages need to read about themselves as being more than passive victims of their own minds or violent, manipulative threats to be defeated.

If you want a book about a teen girl struggling with depression, who’s story is mirrored by her mother also struggling with depression, i suggest Saving Francesca. It’s my all-time favorite book and it’s so damn good.

Reblogging again so more people can see this recommendation. Thanks for offering it, snugglesfordean! :3

What if you could get lesbian books for even cheaper than usual?

It’s coupon time again at Prizm, which means the eBook package (contains Kindle, pdf, and something else) of The Second Mango, my fantasy novel about a young lesbian queen who hires a dragon-riding warrior woman to take her around on a search for a girlfriend, is only $4.79 if you use the coupon code reviewmay2014 until May 9, 2014. I  Or, you could buy Tiffany and Tiger’s Eye by Foxglove Lee, a modern, lesbian take on the classic “1980’s teen horror” genre. An impoverished teenage lesbian’s life is finally starting to look up when she gets a fascinating new girlfriend—except her Creepy Doll (tm) gets jealous and starts making trouble. With coupon, it’s only $5.59. Both books contain no dead lesbians, lesbians who end up with men, or other Tragic Queer tropes, and the bisexual love interest of each protagonist is positively portrayed (and any hints of biphobia on the part of a character are corrected by the plot.) And the coupon gets you 20% off all books in the Torquere Press/Prizm Books catalog. Coupon does not work on Amazon.

I have read both of these books and can attest that they are well worth your time!

On Murder of Jordan Davis By Michael Dunn (via disabilityhistory)

“FEMME SHARK MANIFESTO!” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme edited by Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman (reviewed at The Lesbrary).

(via fuckyeahlesbianliterature)

No way!

Hm. So this would make Clara's father the son Rory and Amy adopted who we saw in the storyboarding for "P.S.", or it would mean that Rory and Amy adopted other children. This is all possible, but it does rather pose the question of why Amy didn't tell the Doctor who she was, why the Doctor never found out about this family link in all the time he researched Clara's history, or why the Doctor could never see her and Rory again. 

On the one hand, Moffat often has really...careless, non-resolutions to the big problems he creates (why can't the Doctor just park the TARDIS in Long Island and take LIR in to see the Ponds?) On the other, with how messy Clara's timeline is, maybe her "real" version is one of Amy's descendants.