Library Mouse

the subject of Knox's talk was mainly how, on the right, this deep belief in the innate power of the written word is a large part of what drives efforts to have books removed or banned from public libraries, as if good "normal" white children are going to instantly become polyamorous atheist antifa supersoldiers if they're exposed to degenerate filth like And Tango Makes Three.

YOU!

YES YOU!

A Good chunk of time back i mentioned that I was writing a book. I ended up finishing it when this post was originally published ( I'm editing it as of 04/21/22)

So far, only my close friends have seen/read it, and I really wish it had more attention! So I'm paying tumblr money to reach the rest of you.

This is The Jackalope's Journey! A fantasy novella about a vampire hunter who really doesn't want to be that anymore!

It's currently on itch.io for anyone to purchase!

It's only 5$ for about 40k words and three years of work! I'd love to see people enjoying it.

people of color should not have to be other minorities to earn your sympathy. you as a white person need to respect people of color. straight, able-bodied, cisgender people of color.

(Please do not screenshot this to share on Twitter because I don’t want this to become a Whole Thing there)

(Nvm, decided to go public on Twitter about this after all. So feel free to share this.)

Turns out my publisher got a JAPANESE VOICE ACTOR to narrate the audiobook, which means all the Mandarin is pronounced wrong. I didn’t discover this until several days after the audiobook went on sale because they never sent me a sample of the VA reading any Mandarin or a preview of the audiobook before it was finished.

I’m pretty annoyed by this because when my publisher first sent me a list of four candidates to choose from, I suspected pretty quickly that they were all either Japanese or Korean, so I asked if any of them were native Mandarin speakers because there’s a LOT of Mandarin in the book so that’s rather important. My publisher assured me they can all handle Mandarin, so I just chose the voice that seemed most suitable for Zack. It did give me pause that that VA’s bio said they were born in Tokyo, but I thought maybe the VA was Chinese-Japanese or something because my publisher wouldn’t lie to me, right?

Well. Turns out they did. Or SOMEONE in the production chain lied, because the final product was clearly done by a Japanese person who could not speak Mandarin. When I raised the issue to my publisher, they said it was the VA’s team that assured them they could handle Mandarin (they definitely cannot). Mandarin is a tonal language, so if you don’t hit the tone right you are saying something completely different. It can’t be half-assed. I even painstakingly sent my publisher a list and a recording of every Mandarin term or phrase in the book, organized by page, but clearly no one involved in production could differentiate the tones because they all came out wrong.

Now my publisher is working on finding an actual Mandarin speaker to rerecord the whole audiobook and I’m just so frustrated because this could’ve been avoided so easily if they’d taken my concern seriously from the start. Or like…didn’t suggest Japanese and Korean VAs for my very Chinese book. Publishers have a LOT of work to do beyond presenting surface-level diversity, smh.

They took the audiobook down from retailers for a bit but I told them it can stay up for now as long as the buyers can automatically get the new version later. I do like the VA’s performance, it’s just a shame about the Mandarin.

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