Karen Sandler

Author: Karen Sandler

  • Tech and Big Brother

    While returning from San Francisco for a weekend trip, we stopped for lunch in Emeryville, just outside of the city. As we were about to pull back onto Interstate 80 from Powell Street, a white light flashed on the nearby left turn lane as the red light camera took a picture. The drivers in that lane were being obedient, all of them legally behind the limit line when the arrow turned red.

    That flashing white light set off a discussion between my husband and me. Were the light flash and the camera capture triggered by the green arrow turning red or when someone crossed the limit line after the light is red? We figured it was probably the former, but that would mean that plenty of people are having their pictures taken when they’ve done nothing wrong.

    I don’t like the idea of an automated camera capturing my image while I’m at a stoplight. Of course, people shouldn’t be running red lights. It’s against the law and could be dangerous (I witnessed a nasty collision once that was caused by someone turning left on the red). But are those images collected used for purposes beyond checking for red light running? Like to establish the whereabouts of a certain person at a certain time and place to build a case against them?

    While my husband and I talked about the possibility of the images being misused, it led to further discussion of our expectation of privacy when out in public. There’s a case currently being considered by the Supreme Court in which police attached a GPS device to a drug dealer’s car in order to monitor his movements. They installed the device secretly while the car was in a public parking lot and tracked the man’s movements for a month.

    Many of the justices were troubled by the actions of the police. Justice Scalia in particular considered it trespassing since the police attached the device to the man’s car without his knowledge or permission.

    In the course of this conversation, I wondered: what if police could use technology to track this individual without affixing a device to his car? What if that device was already there?

    What if every car manufactured were required to have a GPS installed? And let’s say it’s installed within the car’s electrical system in such a way that it could not be easily removed or its removal would disable the car. I can imagine this “every car must have a GPS” being sold as a way to minimize car theft. If a thief knew every car could be tracked, that might make them think twice about stealing one.

    So we’re all happy that no one is stealing cars, until we realize that cars are not just being tracked when someone is suspected of breaking the law. We have the equivalent of red light cameras on every street corner that sense and record the location of every car that passes. The cars are identified by their VIN numbers which are read when the car’s location is noted. All this data is dumped somewhere in a server farm and whenever the police need to know the whereabouts of someone, they can scrape out that data.

    Okay, I’m paranoid. I wrote about essentially this sort of thing in my book Tankborn, except it’s people being tracked instead of vehicles. But I do think there’s a slippery slope here with attaching GPS devices to cars, even if that car belongs to a bad guy police want to catch. Because I just have too good an imagination of where it could lead.

  • RTW – How far would you go to get published?

    Today for Road Trip Wednesday, YA Highway is asking, How far would you go to get published? In my case, I’d have to answer the question How far did you go to get published? since I’m already published and have been for 13 years.

    Along with the blog prompt, the RTW post shows the graphic here of a baseball field on which is represented four escalating options for how far a writer would go to get published.

    I’m here to say that getting every one of my 18 books published has always required a trip to home plate. While I haven’t chased a trend (first base), and not all my books were agented and so did not include agent feedback (second base), while I wrote and published romance, my editor always put in his or her two cents (and sometimes a whole dollar) before the book was ready to be published. I learned to go with the flow (except for my dirty little secret below) and make those changes that would improve the book.

    Then came Tankborn. Young adult wasn’t the big hot new thing when I started writing Tankborn, or if it was, I didn’t know that fact. All I knew was that I wrote five proposals for my romance editor (each one comprising three chapters and a detailed synopsis) and he turned down every one. I was starting to think that maybe it was time for a genre and market change. YA science fiction sounded like just the ticket.

    So maybe I hit a double and I went straight to second base. Once I wrote, edited and polished the manuscript for Tankborn, I went on the agent hunt. Thirty agents and four months later, I signed with my agent and it was time for that mad run to third base. My agent wanted some fairly extensive changes, much of it cutting back on the “throat clearing” in the opening chapters.

    So now I’m done, right? That sucker must be polished so shiny, it’ll put your eyes out looking at it, huh? Um, no. Because I’m still stranded on third base. I need to make one last all-out run to home plate.

    My agents submitted Tankborn, and Lee and Low bought it for their new Tu Books imprint. I galloped toward home, along the way performing one, two, three major revisions (luckily three strikes and you’re out did not apply). Maybe I should have scored three runs during that process. Instead I got the MVP award of seeing my book in print.

    Let me tell you the little secret about all those revisions that I alluded to above. When I receive my agent/editor notes, I don’t bounce around saying, Thank you, thank you, thank you. Well, sometimes I do when they point out something that makes a light bulb come on and I realize, Doh, that’s why that part wasn’t working.

    But usually my response is (a) sheer terror that I won’t know how to fix the problem, (b) anger that they have a problem with what I’ve written, or (c) a sense of being totally overwhelmed by the amount of work required to make the change. It’s kind of the stages of grief, I guess. I’ll often let myself wallow in those emotions for a few minutes.

    Then I’ll put on my big girl panties and start working.

  • Hopelessly Devoted to E

    I was e-published pretty early in the game (my SF romance, Eternity, came out as an e-book in 1998). But I was definitely not an early adopter of reading e-books. I always felt pretty guilty about that. Here I was, an e-published author, on the cutting edge of publishing, and I read nothing but paper books.

    The thing was, back then the options for reading e-books were not the greatest. There was reading on your computer (ugh), or using one of the clunky e-readers that were available. I did try it for a while, first using an eBookman, then a Palm Pilot. But with both of them, the experience was awkward and uncomfortable. I always went running back to my paper books.

    Then I bought an iPod, which I grew to love. And downloaded the Kindle app. I started reading books on that tiny screen and realized I really liked it. The device was nice and small, the backlit screen allowed me to read in bed after my husband turned off the lights to go to sleep. I could buy and download a new book from the comfort of my own home (or anywhere else with wireless) and receive it immediately.

    I was hooked. A few months after I started reading on the iPod, I realized I wanted a bigger screen and a better display for reading books. My birthday was coming up (which means it was just about a year ago), so a Kindle went on my B-day list. I’m pretty cheap, even when someone else is buying my gift, so I went for the lower priced non-3g model.

    And oh, what a wondrous time it’s been this past year. I’ve always been a voracious reader, but I’ve probably upped my reading by 15 or 20 percent. I seem to fly through books now, even with the slightly more awkward button click instead of touch screen technology. I love-love-love my Kindle, only putting it down this last year to read maybe 2 or 3 print books.

    What’s kind of funny about this is that I still read a “dead tree” newspaper. Yeah, I read many articles on the web, but I enjoy the tabloid format of an actual Sacramento Bee. Until we have a holographic substitute that I can “hold” and is as big as a current day newspaper, I’m sticking to paper for my morning read.

    But my pleasure reading–all e, all the time. I love you, Kindle.

  • RTW – The Best Book I Read in November

    I just finished a post on why I love reading e-books and scheduled it for this coming Saturday. I mention this because YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday prompt for today is What’s the best book you read in November? and thanks to my Kindle, it was easy as pie to refresh my memory on what I read this past month. I could have also checked Goodreads, but since I’m not great about updating my reads there, it’s not as reliable.

    Anyway, my best book for November was The Declaration by Gemma Malley. In The Declaration, Anna and Peter are illegal children living in a hellish children’s home that’s like something from a Dickens novel. A Longevity drug that extends life indefinitely has led to an overcrowded world, and the illegal children are the ones who pay the price. It’s set in a futuristic Britain and its British voice is part of what led me to fall in love with this book and its characters. I very much enjoyed the humor interleaved with the very dire situation Anna and Peter were in. I also found the set-up intriguing and since we’ve recently reached the 7-billionth mark of the population on our planet, The Declaration had some very real-world elements to it.

    Of course, this is an “older” book (published 4 years ago), but as a newcomer to young adult, I’m still catching up on the great books. The upside to that is I don’t have to wait for the sequel. The Resistance is already available. And since I have the patience of a flea when it comes to waiting for the next book in a series, I am a happy camper about that.

    Has anyone else out there read The Declaration? What was your take?

  • 5 Things I’d Tell My Teen Self

    A lot of time has passed since my teen years. They were decades & decades ago, and you would think the memories might have been washed away by the intervening events in my life. I’ve finished college, worked at all sorts of interesting jobs, met my now-husband, bought a house, got married, had two kids, moved from my birthplace in Southern California to Northern California, sold my first book, then many other books.

    I’ve cried innumerable tears, have had many hours filled with laughter, had to say goodbye to a dog, several cats, a few horses, and most heartbreaking, my mother. I’ve seen my father decline until he no longer knows me.

    So my teen years should have been washed away. How could those seven years have compared to the decades that followed?

    And yet, I remember so much of that time. Some experiences seem as real and immediate to me today as they did then. I haven’t forgotten the turmoil and the triumphs (however few they seemed at the time), the heartache and the joy (however infrequent it was).

    I started thinking about what I would tell that confused and often heartbroken young girl I once was. I came up with the following thoughts and advice:

    1) Other people’s opinions of you have nothing to do with who you really are.

    If they think you’re ugly, stupid, awkward, dorky, screw them. They know nothing, nothing about what’s really inside you. You might be just as klutzy as they say you are, but you have beautiful ideas. Maybe according to them you don’t wear the “right” clothes, maybe you don’t even like them yourself, but your Mom/Dad/financial situation made you wear them. But that can never change your heart, your soul, your dreams.

    I was a frequent target of derision and torment by a certain group of girls back in junior high. It hurt terribly and made me feel worse about myself than I already did. But I was smarter than those girls. I had a wild imagination their worst bullying could never touch and I channeled that creativity into stories and later, books.

    2) The pain doesn’t last forever.

    If it does, if it’s unrelenting, then you need some help outside yourself. If you can’t share that pain with your parents, find someone else you trust to talk to.

    But if it’s heartache because the boy doesn’t like you back, or you’ve been made to feel like an idiot once again by that same cruel bully, the hurt will heal. It takes time, it seems impossible sometimes to get past. But your heart will let go of the pain eventually. It will find a new focus, whether it’s a new love or a new passion. The hurt will lose its grip on you, and you will look at the world with fresh eyes.

    3) You won’t die from embarrassment, even though sometimes you’ll wish you had.

    I was a pretty smart kid in school. Maybe not straight A’s, but I got a lot of good grades. Teachers liked to hold me up as an example.

    But that meant nothing when I did some awkward, bonehead thing that made me feel like the biggest idiot in the world. It often had to do with me regularly blurting out something that should never have been said out loud. When I’d do something like that, I’d want to just crawl under a rock and disappear.

    But I lived through the mortification. I came out on the other side, still me. I learned, one agonizing experience at a time, to count to ten, hold my tongue, and rethink my words. I’m not perfect (still planting my foot in my mouth upon occasion), but I’ve learned to live through the awkward moments. Teen self, you will too.

    4) You can’t always get what you want.

    Not every dream is going to come true. Not everything you wish for can become reality. Some of your dreams might rely too much on what other people will do. You can’t make someone like you. You might never be one of the popular kids, because the gatekeepers might never want to let you in. Instead you have to walk right past their gate, and find your own meadow that isn’t confined by certain rules of what popular is.

    You can’t wish your way into winning, because the ones judging are outside yourself. You can work your hardest and still fall short because that dream just wasn’t meant for you (sorry). And sometimes, you’ll let go of that dream to pursue another. Or you’ll put a dream aside for years, then when you take it up again, you’re ready for it, you have the skills you need, you know the right people who can help you, you have all the information at your fingertips. And everything will fall into place.

    5) Love yourself. Love yourself. Love yourself.

    Even if your nose is too big, or your hair always sticks out everywhere, or it seems like everyone is beautiful except for you. It is impossible to feel the love of others, to believe you’re worthy of that love if you don’t love yourself first. Yeah, this might sound phony and woo-woo, but it’s absolutely true. If you can’t bring yourself to do it, pretend. And hopefully, someday, you’ll really feel that love, you’ll really know it.

    That’s it. That’s all I’ve got, teen self. I’m glad to have known you. And glad to have been you.