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first-world problems
Aug. 5th, 2011 11:57 amRemember Jessica Verday?
If you don't know who she is, she's the author who was told by an editor for the "Wicked Pretty Things" anthology that she needed to make one of the characters in her boy/boy romance a girl. Her response to this request was, essentially, EFF THAT (she was more polite/verbose about it), which immediately endeared her to me and led me to buy The Hollow in the first place, a purchasing decision I sincerely wish I didn't regret.
Anyway, she pulled her story from the anthology and has published it on Amazon's Kindle: Flesh Which Is Not Flesh.
I want to read this story. I have wanted to read this story ever since the drama started, because I love drama and I have a weakness for queer fiction and another weakness for supernatural YA lit.
More importantly, I want to give Jessica Verday money for her story because I am thankful to her for standing up for queer characters and, by extension, for the visibility of queer characters in fiction.*
So we have her story, and we have my money. Kindle is the middleman. Therein lies my problem.
I do not own a Kindle. I do own a Mac, but it's running OS 10.4 Tiger, and the free "Kindle for Mac" program that Amazon offers is only for OS 10.5 Leopard and up. Ideally, I could buy the story and find some way to convert the file to a .pdf or something my computer could read, but Amazon won't even let me buy the story without having a Kindle program installed.
And now, we come to the point:
Does anyone have any ideas for a workaround that still lets me pay for the story legally?
---
*Why is this important? Short version: bigots find it harder to be bigots when the targets of their bigotry are humanized. Some queerphobes may never [knowingly] become acquainted with a queer person outside of fiction, ergo queer characters in fiction are an alternative way to let queerphobes know that 1) queer people exist and 2) they are not big scary monsters/weak pathetic sub-humans. Not all queer characters succeed on the second point, but still.
If you don't know who she is, she's the author who was told by an editor for the "Wicked Pretty Things" anthology that she needed to make one of the characters in her boy/boy romance a girl. Her response to this request was, essentially, EFF THAT (she was more polite/verbose about it), which immediately endeared her to me and led me to buy The Hollow in the first place, a purchasing decision I sincerely wish I didn't regret.
Anyway, she pulled her story from the anthology and has published it on Amazon's Kindle: Flesh Which Is Not Flesh.
I want to read this story. I have wanted to read this story ever since the drama started, because I love drama and I have a weakness for queer fiction and another weakness for supernatural YA lit.
More importantly, I want to give Jessica Verday money for her story because I am thankful to her for standing up for queer characters and, by extension, for the visibility of queer characters in fiction.*
So we have her story, and we have my money. Kindle is the middleman. Therein lies my problem.
I do not own a Kindle. I do own a Mac, but it's running OS 10.4 Tiger, and the free "Kindle for Mac" program that Amazon offers is only for OS 10.5 Leopard and up. Ideally, I could buy the story and find some way to convert the file to a .pdf or something my computer could read, but Amazon won't even let me buy the story without having a Kindle program installed.
And now, we come to the point:
Does anyone have any ideas for a workaround that still lets me pay for the story legally?
---
*Why is this important? Short version: bigots find it harder to be bigots when the targets of their bigotry are humanized. Some queerphobes may never [knowingly] become acquainted with a queer person outside of fiction, ergo queer characters in fiction are an alternative way to let queerphobes know that 1) queer people exist and 2) they are not big scary monsters/weak pathetic sub-humans. Not all queer characters succeed on the second point, but still.
