Cat Kalen’s book Pride’s Run has been nominated in multiple categories in the 2012 eFestival of Words Best of the Independent eBook Awards, including Best Young Adult ebook, Best Hero/Heroine, The “I’ve Been Shyamalaned” Award for Best Twist Ending, and the Harvey Award for the Book We Most Want to See as a Movie. I had the chance to catch up with Cat and pepper her with ridiculous questions, and she was gracious enough to answer without looking at me like I had three heads.

The Sith Witch: What was the title of the last book you read?

Cat Kalen: Divergent by Veronica Roth

The Sith Witch: After participating in a séance, you discover you are actually the reincarnation of what famous author? Who are you, and why did you come back in this form?

Cat Kalen: Mark Twain, because he’s awesome and has more stories to tell!

The Sith Witch: You have discovered how to bend the time-space continuum and can travel back in time for one day to any point in history. Where do you go and why?

Cat Kalen: I’d love to go back to the roaring twenties! Such a fun time!

The Sith Witch: Where did the idea for Pride’s Run come from?

Cat Kalen: I wanted to write a dark, edgy book that spoke to teens on many different levels. I love writing about werewolves, and when I thought to myself how “can I write a wolf story with a twist”, something that is completely different from what is out there, Pride’s Run was born. I’m a dog lover and one day when I was leashing my pet, the whole idea of leashed wolves came to me, then I played the “what if?” game. What if they were compounded? What if they never had freedom? What if they were abused? What if they were assassins?

The Sith Witch:What do you do when you aren’t writing?

Cat Kalen: I love to watch big action flicks with my hubby, and I love to bake and shop with my daughter. My son is off to university now, but he used to play provincial/national soccer so that kept me very busy!

The Sith Witch:Why did you chose to self-publish? Did you consider going to a publisher first?

Cat Kalen: This book almost sold to a traditional publisher sooo many times but most houses already had bestselling werewolf stories and couldn’t take on more. I had fabulous feedback and I had many editors fighting for it. Because I believed in the series, and really loved the story, I decided to self pub and the response had been phenomenal.

The Sith Witch: OK, give us some completely random trivia about yourself to share with our readers.

Cat Kalen: Fav color: Purple, Fav food: Pizza, Fav fruit: Watermelon, Fav clothes to work in: Pajama pants, Fav drink: Coffee, Fav animal: Chocolate Lab, Fav snackfood: Chips and onion dip, Fav YA book: Hunger Games. A fact you may not know: I’m a romance writer under two other pen names. Another fact that you might not know: I never say no to a brownie!

Learn more about Cat and her books at catkalen.com

And should you need a good advisor when you finally decide to put your plans for world domination into motion, my rates are rather affordable.

1. Forget symbolic blows to morale. If you are going to launch a full-scale invasion, start somewhere remote with a small population so you have a chance to stage your army fully before engaging the enemy. It’s very hard to get ground forces on the ground with a god auto-spraying Chain Lightning at your interdimensional portal.

2. Don’t attempt to usurp the tower of a guy with a bigger ego than you. Things like patriotism, civic duty, or even survival-of-the-species take a back seat to protecting his massive phallic symbol.

3. When the de facto leader of your enemy is standing before you without his protective armor and no allies, KILL HIM. Don’t engage him in conversation.

4. Don’t taunt a crying woman. Just because she appears to be crying doesn’t mean she is not listening to and processing every…single…word. You’ll end up saying something stupid that will ruin your plans. (This is generally good advice even if you aren’t a villainous overlord.)

5. Don’t attempt a maniacal soliloquy fifteen feet away from a raging, monstrous green person. That just will not end well for you.

6. Germany is probably not the best place to try and sell your “Freedom is Slavery” pitch for world domination. Lots of baggage there. Just saying.

6.a You know what? In general, less talking. Just…shut up. Your biggest problems are going to come out of your constant need to verbalize you internal monologue. See 3, 4, 5, and 6 above.

7. If doesn’t matter how freakish-looking your army is. Humans will instinctively SHOOT at them. Damnit make sure they are equipped with bullet-proof armor. Seriously, particularly if you are going to launch an assault on American soil. The Right to Bear Arms is officially part of the Constitution. Unofficially, it is also assumed that right includes SHOOTING AT ALIENS. Humans will shoot you. Hell, they will shoot you with weapons when they don’t even know what the weapons do. If it has a trigger, humans will point and pull. Wear a vest. How hard is this?

8. Forget the god shooting lightning, the big green monster, the guy flying around in the bright red mecha, and the juiced-up patriot throwing around the red, white, and blue shield. See that non-descript guy all by himself up on that ledge? The one with the bow and no obvious supernatural abilities or ridiculously OP armor? KILL HIM FIRST! He can pick off your army one at a time from like a mile away. And he’s spotting for everyone else.

9. Do not leave the mind-controlled human who is in charge of keeping your quasi-magical technology operational alone. Why is he not under guard to protect him, or at least prevent him from helping the good guys? Because you know damn well that if he built it, he can destroy it!

10. Never, ever, under any circumstances should you underestimate a team assembled by Samuel L. Jackson. Because he’s Samuel L. Jackson.

In their defense, a quick look through my spam folder shows an enormous amount of spam from gmail and hotmail addresses, so I can kind of understand how the sheer volume of real spam from those addresses could lead the filter to miscategorize legitimate emails. I get between 100-200 spam emails A DAY to my business account, and the bulk of them end up in the spam folder. So Yahoo! Business IS doing its job for the most part.

But this doesn’t help the folks who are trying to send me submissions for the Bards and Sages Quarterly.

So I’m going to set up a new email account specifically for the Quarterly using gmail. That will allow folks the option of using Google Documents for their submissions. I think that will work out well for a lot of writers, as many are now starting to use Google documents to create work as well. And it will allow me to access submissions from anywhere, so I don’t have to wait until I am at a computer to download submissions. Which “should” mean quicker turnaround times.

So if you have been waiting over 90 days for a response from me and haven’t gotten one, now you know what probably happened. I apologize. I’m working on it. I think we’ll have a solution up and running before the end of the week.

The eFestival of Words, scheduled for August 17-19, 2012, is the first virtual book fair designed specifically to highlight the best of the independent digital publishing community. The awards program is one of many events being ran in conjunction with the fair.

According to Event Coordinator Julie Ann Dawson, “The goal of the eFestival of Words Awards is to highlight those independent authors and publishers that have worked to raise the bar in terms of the literary quality and production value and of digital books. Many people still think of ebooks as nothing more than scanned pages of print books. We hope that both the fair and the awards will help readers discover the amazing wealth of original content being produced in digital formats.”

Dawson, who has operated Bards and Sages Publishing since 2002, says that all nominees were nominated by their peers in the industry. Only authors, publishers, and others involved in the production of digital books were invited to submit ballots. Nominations were accepted in over two dozen categories, including genre categories (horror, romance, thrillers, etc), format-specific (short story, novella, novel) and a few just-for-fun categories (such as The “I’ve Been Shyamalaned” Award for Best Twist Ending).

Each category will be narrowed down further to five to seven finalists, which will be announced July 1, 2012. Final voting will be opened to all registered attendees of the eFestival of Words, with winners announced on the last day of the fair. Registration is free and entitles the attendees to not only vote in the final awards, but also participate in panel discussion, author chats, workshops, and more.

For more information on the fair and the awards, visit www.efestivalofwords.com.

I made the mistake of being a responsible homeowner and buying a more efficient home heater. Bellmawr requires three separate inspections for new house heater installation: electrical, fire, and plumbing. And I don’t mind the need for inspections. I understand it is a gas heater and the city has a vested interest in making sure it doesn’t blow up. I don’t have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is the completely asinine schedule that homeowners have to adhere to.

See, all the inspectors are apparently independent contractors who set their own schedules. And those schedules were seemingly set up in the 1950’s when housewives stayed home all day waiting for inspectors to come inspect things. One inspector is only available Monday and Wednesdays from noon to 4:30 pm. Another is only available Monday and Wednesdays in the morning. The third inspector is only available Tuesdays and Thursdays in the morning. Meanwhile, we both have to be at work during the day. We HAVE to work, because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to pay the ridiculously high property taxes we have to pay. And we can’t NOT schedule the three separate inspections, because otherwise the city will cite us for failure o comply.

So I have to burn vacation time to comply with the regulation, because nobody in city government considered the fact that people work during the day and therefore forcing them to make three separate appointments during work hours for one installation isn’t just inconvenient. It is stupid. In all seriousness, how hard would it be to have one night a month available? Or one Saturday? Even the DMV has evening and weekend hours.

I don’t know if city employees even understand that people have lives that do not involve sitting around just waiting to jump through the city’s hoops. For example, we managed to get the first inspection scheduled for 4:30 on the 9th. Mike was going to rush home from work to meet the inspector. Good Friday we both had off from work, so we had invited some friends over. Out of nowhere there was a knock on the door. The inspector who was supposed to come over on the 9th decided to stop over on Good Friday because he wasn’t going to be available. No phone call. No warning. Just showed up at my door and expected us to let him in to do the inspection while we are entertaining friends.

I wonder if I can send the city a bill for my lost vacation days and have it applied to my tax bill.

In retrospect, probably more like E-list, but it was a nice thought.

Added bonus of the convention was to see my friends Chris and Julie Hedge, whom I haven’t seen in years. Chris and Julie were part of the Camarilla’s staff and helping organize several of the I-Con events. One of those events was a scavenger hunt. Julie had decided to make me part of the “hunt.” I agreed so long as participants weren’t trying to collect hair or blood samples. She assured me all they would be asking for was my signature on their participant form.

Friday night was a “Meet and Greet” panel discussion. Besides yours truly, my fellow panelists included Cam Banks of Margaret Weis Productions, George Strayton of Secret Fire Games, Mat Hawkins of Fortune90.com, Meg Baker of Night Sky Games, Tim Hutchings of PlaGMaDA.org, and RPG Examiner and freelance writer Mike Tresca.

Saturday included two panels: Dealing With Difficult Players and Girl Gamers. In the elevator on the way to the first panel, I overheard two attendees excitedly going over the convention schedule saying “OK, we need to get to room 311.” I asked them if they intended to present themselves as examples of difficult players.

After a brief back and forth, one of them suddenly said, “Wait, who are you?” When I identified myself, he exclaimed, “YES! Found her!”

The Dealing With Difficult Players panel was a full house. Guess there are a lot of problem gamers out there. (Who would have thought? Lol) But the biggest attendance was the Girl Gamers panel. We actually had people sitting on the floor because we ran out of chairs. Was also impressed and surprised by the number of guys who attended to show their support for women gamers and game designers. Was a great conversation.

After the Girl Gamers panel, had a gal approach me with a print-out of the cover of an issue of Demonground I had published some Vampire: The Masquerade fan fiction in years ago. She asked me to sign it for her. Apparently Alex Austin had made quite an impression on her and even appeared as an NPC in a couple of her games. That was probably the coolest moment of the convention. Finding out a character you created excited someone else like that is amazing and humbling.

My only regret is that I didn’t actually have a lot of time to play because of how my panels were scheduled. But still had a great time. Particularly happy to see the number of families at the convention. Even saw a few senior citizens in wheelchairs being helped between events by their kids and grandkids. Three generations of gamers around a table must be amazingly cool! Though I can almost imagine some of the conversations:

“You kids and your fancy dice! When I was your age, we didn’t have all these different colored dice. We had to carve our own dice from bones. And we had to number them ourselves, too. Bah, you kids don’t know how easy gaming is today. Back in my day, we had to calculate THACO to know whether or not we hit the target. And you needed two sets of dice, one that rolled high to make THACO and one that rolled low to make saving throws. And percentile dice were needed for skill checks….”

Good times. Good times.

This is the actual situation, which I will try to convey without naming names and starting flame wars. This post is not about causing drama. Most of you I think know I am not one to talk publicly about my business or personal life except in the most general of terms. But I’m just trying to provide information so some candor is needed.

Bards and Sages has always been a labor of love. I have a full time job that pays my bills. So my publishing company has always been my passion, not my career. I started the company back in 2002 for no other reason that to run my charity contest, because I thought running the contest would be enjoyable (and it is). Then I discovered self-publishing, and decided to self publish by first two books. September and Other Stories was a train wreck, and the first incarnation of Neiyar was hideous in design. They sold anyway, in spite of themselves. And I enjoyed working on them.

I love working with authors. I love editing. I love putting together anthologies. Doesn’t really matter if I sell 10,000 copies of a book or not. I’ve never put out a product I did not 100% believe in, even when I knew the commercial value was minimal. Because it was never about making money. I make enough to pay the writers and artists I work with and make some extra cash on the side.

Over the last year, things have exploded. I mean that in a good way. The Bards and Sages Quarterly is doing very well. The Karma Roleplaying System has taken off. I just finished serving as an editorial judge for IBPA’s Ben Franklin Awards. Heck, I’m attending I-Con this year as a guest panelist because someone decided I’d be a publicity draw. (Not sure what she was thinking! Lol).

Bards and Sages had gone from a labor of love to a serious business, and it was time to take the next step. Last summer, I had a substantial amount of money set aside from publishing that was earmarked to hire on more help and launch some new initiatives. These projects were meant to help capitalize on the growing momentum. We were going to really start targeting bookstores, to start doing even more conventions to promote the games, to create more products on a more rigid schedule.

But then Hurricane Irene came through and left two feet of water in my basement. Total damages were over $10,000, and the insurance company wouldn’t pick up any of it. Despite the fact that I had a sump pump rider on my original policy, at some point over the years they quietly dropped the rider from the homeowner’s policy. Mike and I applied for disaster relief and were told we make too much money. So we had to finance the recovery ourselves. You can guess where my publishing money went.

The situation was compounded by changes at work. As I said before, I have a full time job. While my publishing makes money, I can’t afford not to work. But as with any corporation, changes in direction from higher up the food chain hurt the minnows at the bottom. Without going into details, it became less and less practical to consider taking out business loans to grow Bards and Sages when I wasn’t sure if my regular income would continue to come in and pay the mortgage. particularly with most of my savings wiped out due to Irene.

Meanwhile, over the Fall my editor needed to reduce her workload due to her own personal matters. I restructured some projects and shuffled a few assignments to freelancers, but she was still handling a couple of major projects. Unfortunately, I haven’t heard from her since around December, and it wasn’t until too late that I learned the projects I thought she was working on were not getting done. This left me in a scramble to complete a couple of major releases.

I also contracted with someone to take over writing content for some of the RPG product lines. It was a work-for-hire arrangement that included both per word payment and royalties. As people involved in the RPG industry know, if you don’t support a product line with new supplements, it dies on the vine. While supposedly working on my IP lines, however, this person tried to pitch the ideas as his own original work to a couple of other publishers. He apparently was not aware that these publishers were familiar with me and knew my IP. Thankfully, they both alerted me to the issue. But again, I’m left with a half dozen only partially fleshed out supplements and no time to do anything with them.

I had also contracted with a salesperson that was going to start working on getting our books in bookstores. He was someone I had met at a convention a few years ago. This person had worked with some other larger publishers in the past, knew I was basically a one-woman show, but because he liked many of my books offered to provide sales support on a commission basis. After a couple of months, however, not only had he not managed to actually sell anything, but he had committed my without my knowledge to providing door prizes and such to events that I had not budgeted for. To protect my company’s reputation, I fulfilled those obligations but it was money I was not planning on spending and essentially was flushed down the toilet.

All this was going on while I was trying to get Indie Firsts! Magazine off the ground. The truth of the matter is, if the rest of this nonsense was not going on around me, I probably would have had the patience to try to stick the magazine out longer, or at least not ended it as abruptly as I did. But the casualness with which so many authors disregarded their commitments to participate in the magazine was too much to deal with on top of everything else. I made a decision to terminate the magazine in order to focus on those things I could control without depending on other people.

Through it all, I have keep these issues to myself and continued to take care of my people. I’ve continued to pay my authors their royalties despite the fact that Amazon, via the now defunct Mobipocket.com, still owes me a substantial amount of money from sales through the program. Mobipocket closed in January and was supposed to cut final payments to publishers when it closed. It is now almost April and despite multiple emails I have not been paid. I have some retailers who sell my books on consignment who have been “delayed” in their payments. This has been an ongoing problem for months now. But I’ve never once not paid my people. I’ve reached into my own savings (what is left of it, anyway) to make sure people got paid what is due them.

I have sacrificed and done without to make sure my authors are being taken care of the way I promised them I would, despite everything else going on. I’ve not used any of my business or personal problems as an excuse to take advantage of them or not fulfill my promised to them. Because of this, I have been especially sensitive to blanket accusations posted in various communities I belong to that claim publishers are useless, greedy, and that authors are better off self-publishing. Whenever I read some accusation about how authors don’t need publishers, I think about all of the work I’ve done for my authors, none of whom have any interest or desire in being self-published and only a few of them even have active blogs. Whenever I read some accusation about how greedy all publishers are, I think about the fact that I routinely reach into my personal bank account to pay people while waiting for vendors to pay me. Whenever I read some accusation about how publishers don’t promote books, I think about the thousands of dollars I have spent in the last six months on conventions, book fairs, print ads, and giveaways.

Maybe the snide comments, backhanded compliments, and in-your-face-with-my-uber-sales-without-a-publisher posts wouldn’t bother me if everything else around wasn’t as chaotic as it is now. But things are chaotic right now, because I am dealing with major problems while still trying to do right by my people. So it makes me angry when people mouth-off about how unimportant people like me are. And when I get angry, I suck at hiding it. It is my flaw. Which is stupid on one hand because why should I care about what someone online says, but on the other since the bulk of my business is done online it is my professional reputation being sullied. Even when those comments are not directed at me personally, it impacts me professionally because it colors the perception people have of what they think I do compared to what I actually do. I have worked very, very hard over the last ten years to build an honest and ethical reputation and I’ll be damned if I should just sit idly by while others indirectly attack it.

So yes, I am angry and frustrated. No, I’m not sitting in a white jacket waiting for the doctor to bring me happy pills. .And I’m certainly not going to go anywhere anytime soon. But yes, I have deleted some comments I made on some forums and message groups, not because I’m having a breakdown, but simply because I don’t want to be drawn into the fights anymore when certain people entered those conversations. I deleted a bunch of reviews on Goodreads not because I’m having a mid-life crisis, but because people see the reviews and think I am still reviewing and I’m not, and I don’t want to keep explaining why. I haven’t returned some phone calls or emails not because I’m in a corner crying. I just don’t want to repeat myself fifteen times. And if I have said or posted something that you took personally, I apologize. I posted something that made you worry, I’m sorry. I’m not real good at asking for help or talking about my own problems so sometimes things come out the wrong way without context. Consider this the context.

The more times a false claim is repeated, the more likely people are to be exposed to it. The fewer people exposed to a false claim, the less likely it is to spread. It is also important not to repeat false claims because people are more likely to judge familiar claims as true. As false claims are repeated, they become more familiar and thus may come to seem more true to people.

This is a profoundly important principle for honest people to understand, because those that wish to manipulate the general public already know it. Many of us who routinely try to educate others, whether it is about writing scams or questionable business tactics or just interpersonal relationships, often accidentally play right into this.

There are actually three separate problems at work. This situation regarding familiarity and perceived fact is one of them. The second problem is that people instinctively believe the first version of a story they hear. We even learn this as children and realize we need to tell “our version” first in order to be believed. The third problem is that people tend to give more weight to things that they WANT to be true, even if they should realize that something is not true in reality.

So we have the following scenario:

1.: An audience that wants to believe certain facts, because those facts fit into their personal worldview.

2.: A perpetrator who is able to tell his or her version of the facts first to the susceptible audience.

3.: A facilitator who, in an attempt to disprove the fallacy, reinforces the fallacy by repeating it over and over.

This isn’t just a problem of “the other side,” either. We are all susceptible to this process. People who believe all Republicans are engaged in a “War of Women,” for example, are going to be inclined to believe any Republican policy has a secret anti-woman agenda just because their favorite organizations tell them so. When Indiana Representative Bob Morris made his bizarre claim that the Girl Scouts promoted abortion and homosexuality, it didn’t matter to most people that every other Indiana lawmaker, Republican and Democrat alike, denounced the statements as ludicrous. Morris is a Republican, Republicans hate women, and therefore this was proof the entire Republican party was anti-women. The narrative became fixed in the left-leaning media as part of the anti-woman plot of the Republican party.

Which brings us back to the most recent Rush Limbaugh dustup. Many people have condemned his verbal attacks on Sandra Fluke. Women throughout the U.S. were insulted by the comments. But the broader question is, why did anyone repeat them to begin with? The audience of Rush Limbaugh is inclined to believe this sort of nonsense, and Limbaugh perpetuated it by telling them his version of the narrative. But without facilitators to spread the lie, even in an attempt to disprove it, it merely reinforced it in the minds of those inclined to agree with it.

Let’s be honest. Someone, somewhere, is right now saying something to someone that would offend you. In fact, there is a good chance that at some point today, YOU will say something to someone that would offend someone else if they heard it. Yet miraculously these statements manage to never spread beyond the narrow audience they were originally intended for. But take any one of these statements and post it on Facebook or Twitter or Youtube, and suddenly we have an offensive epidemic.

This is not to say we shouldn’t speak up when we come across false information. If false information is being used as the basis of passing a law, then we have a responsibility to speak out against the law. If false information is being used to engage in criminal activity, we should speak out. But maybe we should step back when confronted with the thousands of nuisance falsehoods that we accidentally stumble over each day and consider how we respond, why we are responding, and what impact the response will actually have.

Do we respond to a “factually challenged” blog post in the comments section of the blog, or perpetuate the lie by reposting it in other places to discuss it? Do you let the lie languish among its own tiny audience, or do you give it a larger audience and make it stronger? Do you allow a lie to “die out” naturally in the attention-deficient ocean of the internet, or do you put it on life support by repeating it over and over again in order to ‘warn” other people about it?