Even though things don’t look as dire as on election night, the real trouble is only beginning. Losing is going to really kick the hornet’s nest down there, especially if the losing side is the more armed one. I hope for peace, but expect a few mass killings will really seal the whole “collapse of a civilization” experience. Please be safe, my American pals.
After that, I’ll try to bring you back around to a decent headspace so you don’t snap at your colleagues in your 11:30 bluesky session.
First Page Student Writing competition… It’s important you tell your kids about this so they can enter and lose and be discouraged forever from trying to do this stuff;
[Ed note: this is basically a comfort post for me, today. Like eating an entire plate of buttered pasta and mashed potatoes. Don’t judge me. Just pass on by and do whatever it is you do to self-soothe.]
When I was a kid playing D&D in the early 80s, it didn’t take long for me to want to leave published modules behind and make up my own stories, but long before I created my own fantasy realm, I would just set my games in the world of books friends and I had read: Middle Earth, The Four Lands of Shannara, Pern, Discworld, Aloria, Fionavar, etc. We even returned to that over the years, occasionally breaking from our epic homebrew campaigns to try out a world featured in books we’d just read. Well, BookRiot is keeping that tradition going with some suggestions, including NK Jesimin’s Broken Earth, if you’re looking to spice things up around your dice tray.
More than 45 years after the first boxed set was released, Dungeons & Dragons is more popular today than ever. Wizards of the Coast puts out plenty of new D&D adventures and supplements each year, but game masters who want to branch out from Eberron and the Forgotten Realms to build their own RPG worlds will need a little bardic inspiration if they want to bring their speculative fiction landscape to life. If you’re searching for invented worlds to set your next D&D campaign in, look no further, because I’ve got ten great titles for you to take a crack at.
As the literary world moved online in 2020, a central question for many organizations was how to manage the annual festivals that gather thousands of readers from around the world. Here, the directors of five festivals—Sara Ortiz of the Believer Festival, Lissette Mendez of the Miami Book Fair, Amanda Bullock of the Portland Book Festival, Steph Opitz of The Loft’s Wordplay, and Conor Moran of the Wisconsin Book Festival—discuss how their teams made it work.
I called it last week: well, that it would be too close to actually call. Prepare for three months of crazy shit, regardless of the outcome. This is the thing about democracy: everyone gets a say, no matter how stupid. And when you spend 40-50 years slowly eroding trust in science, fact, and education in general, this is how things end up. Good luck looking your neighbours in the face this week, America. It’s like a murder mystery party where half the people there are “the Killer”.
PEI introduces story-walks for kids… Let’s see how long this lasts into “I know you just got me dressed in my 10 layers, but I didn’t have to pee when you started” season;
Every year there’s someone on at least one of our lists that makes people go, “Uh, are they even Canadian?” People who just got here, people who left long ago, people who’ve never been here but have citizenship for some reason, etc. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t care. I love that we’re a (supposed) nation of immigrants and that we’re always bringing in new blood. That said, Canada has always been willing to call anyone with even a moderate level of success Canadian, or at the very least crow about their connection to our land of forests and moose and decent beer. Emily Bishop? She spent summers here. Ernest Hemingway? Worked for the Star. If you’re famous, you basically just need to have once stood in Vermont and pissed northward over the border into Canada and we’ll call you one of ours. That said, it’s not the case in many places, and citizenship is a requirement for many literary prizes. Should it be? Strikes me that it’s mostly there to ensure the bloated elephants of certain sleeping imperialistic cultures (coughusacough) don’t roll over on the mice bedding down next to them. Thoughts?
Did you know that approximately 7% of the people presently living in the United States are ineligible for nomination to the Pulitzer Prize due solely to the prize’s citizenship requirement?
This 7% are, according to 2017 PEW Research Center data, made up of some 12.3 million people living in the United States who are immigrants with permanent resident status, and the 10.5 million people living in the United States who are undocumented. Combined, this totals 22.8 million people who call the United States their home, but are ineligible to win one of the nation’s highest literary honors.
Of course literary awards, like any other prize or competition, must have rules. Eligibility requirements also put parameters around things like the dates between which a book has to be published for eligibility in a certain award year, for example. But why is citizenship used as a rule?
A conversation arose on Canadian-writer-Twitter last week about who is required to collect and pay HST/GST in transactions between writers and their various employers (magazines, reading venues, schools, festivals, etc.) Seems some places or events think they’re exempt because they pay in “honoraria”. Consensus seems to be that most writers who are required to collect and pay HST have run up against this at one time or another, and the information sharing was illuminating. That said, none of us are experts, so Bookninja asked an expert. Enter Artbooks. My accountant, my wife’s accountant, my friends’ accountant, and the best damn pals an artist could have. Tova Epp, our point person, takes it from here. Thanks to Artbooks and Tova for having our backs!
BN: Can you please tell us who you are and a bit about Artbooks? TE: I’ve been a tax preparer at Artbooks for almost 12 years now, and before that I was a long time client. I am an actor by training, and came to Artbooks after receiving some solid recommendations from friends in my field, and now I do those very friends taxes! Artbooks was launched over 30 years ago as Canada’s first organization dedicated to artists and entrepreneurs’ financial sanity. Artbooks is a place where we know and understand artists and freelancers, as the majority of the staff are also freelance artists. As a freelance artist myself I get to bring my own, real understanding of the life of an artist to the tax return, which I think helps me communicate with my clients in a way that they understand and that lets them feel comfortable.
BN: When must a writer collect and pay GST/HST? TE: If your gross (pre expense) revenue is close to $30,000 you must register for an HST number. That gross revenue includes all freelance income, including foreign income, but does not include grants, which are an exempt HST supply. In the words of the CRA: “If you are a sole proprietor, include the total amount of all revenues (before expenses) from your worldwide taxable supplies from all your businesses”
BN: When must an organization pay a writer GST/HST? TE: When they pay them! Basically if you are invoicing a Canadian organization you need to be your own best advocate and bill them your HST, or remind them you have an HST number. There’s a huge, common misconception about honoraria and that they are exempt from HST. They are not exempt if they are not a surprise. If you agree to do a reading for $100 in advance and the organization tells you this in advance, it’s not exempt from HST. Of course these organizations won’t pay the HST because they think they’ve found the loophole but in general we just need to do the best we can to get HST from everyone who has offered us a fee for a service. You do not collect HST on grants, and you charge any foreign vendors 0% HST.
BN: For writers who are obligated to collect and pay HST, the most common complaint seems to go like this: the festival/magazine/school/etc. says they will pay $XXX.xx for delivery of a specific service (a piece of writing, an appearance, a reading or performance, etc), but when it comes time to invoice and the writer includes their HST number and appropriate taxes to the bill, the organization says it only has the original $XXX.xx to pay the writer. The reason most often cited is that the payment is considered an “honorarium” and is therefore not taxable (effectively making the writer forfeit the money she will have to pay to taxes later.) Is this true? TE: Yes, this happens all the time. See above answer. I don’t have a solution to it, it’s just really shitty. Most festivals, etc. are non profits or are functioning on tight operating budgets and they are just not factoring HST into their budgets, which means that there’s no room on their end for extra. It’s complicated and an uphill battle for anyone who wants to fight this, because until there’s formal legislation about it, no one is going to change their practices.
BN: What are the options for a writer if an organization or venue refuses to pay HST when required? TE: Talk to their accountant…. 🙂 They can back it out of their original fee. There’s always room for a few small honoraria but if all someone is making is honoraria it gets complicaed and needs to be taken on a case by case basis. I can’t offer specific advice about this, as it’s a bit too specific….
It’s going to be super tempting to order everything from Amazon this year: you don’t have to go out into the plague, it comes quickly, it’s cheaper, and you can get everything in the one place. That said, you’re a dick if you do. Local indie bookshops have twisted themselves in knots trying to keep books in your freshly-washed hands during this whole thing, and this holiday season, you need to pay that back by spending your money there instead of putting into the latest ivory back scratcher in the Bezos collection. Will this new Bookshop.org initiative help fight back against the Amazon hegemony? I don’t know. I always assume the worst will happen. But maybe give them a try if you really can’t get out.
Initially starting with 250 bookshops, more than 900 stores have now signed up in the US. “We went from selling $50,000 (£38,000) worth of books in all of February, to selling $50,000 a day in March, then $150,000 a day in April,” said Hunter. By June, Bookshop sold $1m worth of books in a day. The platform has now raised more than $7.5m (£5.7m) for independent bookshops across the US.
“We were four employees plus me, working at home, getting up as early as we could and going to bed as late as we could, trying to make it all work. It was a real white-knuckle ride,” said Hunter. “But it was extremely gratifying because the whole time we were getting messages from stores saying, ‘Thank God you came along, you’ve paid our rent, you’ve paid our health insurance this year.’ If you’re going to have to work in insane circumstances and with huge amounts of stress, it’s good to be doing it in something you feel good about.”
Tomorrow, the Great American Experiment comes to an end, one way or the other, and the last battles of their Civil War, begun so long ago, should start to take shape. It’s the conservative vs progressive, racists vs allies, stupid vs science, misogyny vs feminism, hate vs love, money vs people, and billionaires vs everyone. And no matter which side wins, there’s going to be more than enough of all these things to go around.
Gee, that’s depressing. Let’s try for something cheerier.
Halloween is over, so cue the Christmas carols! It’s November: time for you to start mindlessly purchasing things to prop the illusion we call The Economy and ensure that you, like a tree changing sunlight to energy to live, convert your sweat and pain and allotted time into lifegiving nutrients for the world’s billionaires. Enjoy your existence, you life-support-transit-vehicle for a wallet.
Bookninja 