#faleena thoughts

[theoutlawfaleena]

would like to take this chance to say i love all versions of könig. i just love him. u write him shy and quiet and sweet??? wow i'm in love with him. u write him feral, loud and brash? omg. wow. i am in love with him. do whatever u want with könig's character bc at the end of the day we do not know shit about him and u can write him whichever way u like. as long as u are not hurting anyone, his character can be whichever u enjoy

[ghost-emoji-anon]

hello! i'll start some basics here. some of you may have seen me send in a request to faleena! i am the 👻 anon who sent in my idea to her and i decided to write about it!

i'm currently on and off of Tumblr, so i won't be writing requests. i apologize to those who thought i may be a blog for that, but this is moreso a hobby to put down my own thoughts into characters.

about me —

you can call me ghostface or ghost. whichever, i am over the age of twenty so the whole nsfw talk can be spoken to me about, but i don't write that sort of content.

fandoms —

if my icon and header weren't obvious enough, but i do enjoy the slasher fandom. i have a couple of my own stories already posted here for that fandom. but i can talk about characters from COD, marvel, DC and other things. (i'll list them below)

star wars

gundam (and several other anime. just ask and i'll see if i recall said anime/manga or not)

stranger things

the boys

final fantasy

overwatch

apex legends

plenty more! just ask away!

[christinaroseandrews]

Part 1

First off, I’m going to have to break this review up into pieces. I’ve got too much to rant about - complete with screen grabs - that tumblr will hate me. Not to mention, I want to show you the pain and then talk about some of the more salient problems with this book in depth. 

A little over a month and a half ago I said I was going to do something stupid. I was going to read my way through Faleena Hopkins’ book You Don’t Know Me. I got through the first half in a fairly decent clip - the writing was not good, the characters weren’t good, the plots were flying more than mosquitoes in summer... and then I got to the part where I just started continually shouting.

Laws of physics, laws of nature, laws of storytelling were all thrown aside as if they were garbage and then literal garbage was shoved into its place.

This was not a good book. This is not me ragging on her as an author. But I am not joking when I say I’ve read stuff by actual teenagers that was much, much better than this. And because I had to suffer through it, you have to suffer through my ranting.  Aren’t I nice?

The story takes a common trope “Secret Love Child” and combines it with another “The Missing Heir” and adds a dash of “Draco in Leather Pants” and “Poor Little Rich Boy” into the mix. By the way, if you can’t guess, TV Tropes is my wiki-walk rabbit hole and I have no regrets. The same cannot be said for this book.

Rue Calliwell (and I don’t care if I misspell the name - the author doesn’t; why should I?) is trying to make it in Los Angeles. She works the graveyard shift at a local grocery store while trying to catch her big break as a dancer. When Jack Stone, one of America’s Famous Billionaire Playboys, suddenly appears on her doorstep hopping mad, she wonders what died in his Wheaties and maybe if she can kiss away the frown he’s fixing her with. (Yep, she’s dreaming about some brother banging.) After dragging the story out for way too long, it’s finally revealed that Rue is the bastard daughter of Jack’s father and that he’s been embezzling from his company to stock up an inheritance of $50 million that has Rue’s name all over it. If she refuses the money, it goes to the KKK and she can’t allow that to happen. While her other brother, Sean, treats her to a Pretty Woman makeover, Jack wrangles their best friend Alec (and super hot lead singer of a band that’s never mentioned and isn't important to the plot in any way) to seduce his sister and then break her heart. Because that’s what all pissed off brothers do, dontcha know? 

So where do I even begin with this?

How about at the beginning... I have over 120 notes that I made on this as I read it. I’ll share some of them with you.

This is the opening paragraph to this book. There is so much wrong with this I just can’t even. From the random thought, to the run-on sentence (a Faleena Hopkins Trademark), to the weird-ass descriptors. Frowning Forehead? Are there lips on this forehead? Another face? Not to mention that there are missing en-dashes and it’s in a confusing tense. (Most of the book is in first person/present tense... because of the contraction, the sentence can be read as both present and past tense.)

The story introduces us to Rue, Jack, and Sean in pretty short order. Rue is supposed to be the heroine. The one we’re rooting for. Jack is the antagonist. One of the two wronged brothers and the one who thinks that Rue has an agenda. He is not a nice character. Then there’s Sean who is too good for this world and is written like every single stereotypical gay best friend but he’s got a “SECRET!” You have one guess what that is going to be.

If you can’t tell, this is in reference to Jack. But not only do we have a wild apostrophe, but we also have Exorcist levels of neck contortion. Not to mention a super awkward sentence.

This is also a Faleena Hopkins Trademark.

See...

I also mentioned that the story was in need of a good editor. Not just a proofreader, but an actual story doctor who could prune the 15 or so subplots down to something manageable while actually giving us a romance. Not a sex story shoved into a family drama. By the way, this story BARELY qualifies as a romance and I’m not totally convinced it is. The main characters end up together, but it is in no way satisfying and the focus of the story wasn’t on the relationship. More on that later.

But let’s go back to the editing.

Sorry about the italics not translating between Goodreads (where I can access my notes) and what’s in the actual book.  Trust me when I say that this woman hasn’t met an italic she didn’t love, except when she should use them.

As you can see, there are now enough errors for me to mark it down a star for poor proofreading.  And I’m not even a quarter of my way through this. The errors continued including something I find a death knell... the author spelling her main character’s name wrong. I’m not going to bother sharing more of her proofreading errors, unless they are really eye-roll enducing.

Another reason why this book is so bad is because the foreshadowing is heavy-handed as fuck. Like I’m going to hit you over a brick with it but I want you to act surprised when the reveal takes place. It’s that bad.

Here’s one of the most egregious examples.

We didn’t get the actual reveal of what was in the summary until 7% of the way into the book. Which is 21 pages and 5 Chapters into the book. Even then, the author played with it for a while, making it so that Rue didn’t believe the lawyer and thought this was some elaborate reality show prank. Yeah.

The author also wasn’t terribly good at hiding her foreshadowing.

This was in the character’s head. You don’t hide that kind of thing in your own head. It’s why most mystery writers don’t write from the POV of the killer, “The Strange Case of Roger Ackroyd” aside. It gives away the mystery. Coupled with the over abundance of POVs and this heavy handed handling of the character. I would have dropped this plot line entirely.... More on this later.  Trust me, what goes on with Sean is a rant in and of itself and is enough for me to rate this one star.

Now let’s get into the flashback portion and will portion of the plot.

This is where the first gif really starts showing through.

Part of me really wanted to send Hopkins the Wikipedia article on cancer. The other part of me wondered: if this is what she considers hyperbole, then what other horrors did I have in store?

I shouldn’t have asked.

This is brought up, but never actually addressed. Also I need to talk about how the father gave Rue the money. He gave it to her in a lump sum. $50 million. Not a trust. Not a foundation. Just here! Cash!

The author tries to address it later. But fails.

And that’s assuming that there aren’t locality taxes and again congrats you’re in a higher income bracket.

The biggest problem with this is that the father would know better. Or have the money offshore... not something that would be transferred into a U.S. checking account to make the IRS piddle their pants like an errant puppy. The father who claims to have loved the mother and the daughter, would make sure that the daughter had the money to keep her comfortable for the rest of her life and not able to spend it or give it away all in one go.

I used to work for a lawyer’s office who specialized in estate planning (and real estate) - in most cases, if you have more than $250,000 in assets that will survive your death, it’s recommended to have a trust because the federal government takes so much.

These tricks are one of the many ways that the rich stay rich.

As I mentioned before Rue gets a makeover, courtesy of Sean.

I’m thinking of the now deleted video of hers... But here’s the author.

So of course from here on out, I’m picturing Faleena as Rue... which did not help matters.

The reason why I say this is a nice lampshade is literally until she finds out that Jack and Sean are her brothers, she’s fantasizing about sleeping with them and kissing them.  Which again is “Ew!!!” for the reader and not funny and kinda crosses the pseudo-incest vibe that Amazon will allow and goes into Incest because again, we the reader know what the score is, it’s in the damned summary.

This is a huge problem in the book. The sainted mother who died of the mystical cancer is the sole woman who doesn’t get the slut/bitch/sexist treatment. Huge problem. Not even Jenna is immune (which happens later) and Jenna falls into another bad trope which I will get to later.

There’s more, but let me tell you, headhopping in the first person, present tense is tough. You’re deep into one character’s head. That takes talent.

Crappy talent. But talent.

This is where I’m going to stop my first post. We’ve just got the first mention of the love interest, Alec. And opened up another problem.

How is Alec Sean and Jack’s only friend? I say this as someone whose best friends growing up were identical twins. Most siblings, especially those that aren’t twins, won’t have the same bestie. They don’t want the same bestie. It’s a thing. They may have friends in common, but most best friends tend to be someone else. Mostly so they have someone they can rant to about the other.

If you think this is bad, wait until you meet Alec and the new siblings have a night on the town.

It’s going to be great....

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[helenarlett-rex]

What exactly did Michael-Scott Earle do?

I’ve said this before but here’s a refresher...

If you are aware of, or remember the cockygate scandal that had the publishing world up in arms a few years back, a self-published romance author by the name of Faleena Hopkins tried to copyright the word ‘cocky’ in the use of book titles. Before she even had the copyright approved, she started sending letters out to other authors whose books had the word cocky somewhere in the title. Pretending to be her non-existent lawyer, Hopkins informed the authors that she owned the copyright on the word cocky and they had 24 hours to change the titles of their books or remove the books from sale. As a self-published author I can tell you that 24 hours is not enough time to change the title and cover of a book already published and for sale. But she threatened to sue if her demands were not met. Her demands were not only unreasonable, they were also insane. You can’t own a single, common word, let alone enforce a copyright on it. It was just a tactic to try to remove her competition from the marketplace. She knew as well as anyone else that her demands couldn’t be met and was just trying to scare her competition into removing their books from sale. And in a sheer act of stupidity, when her demands weren’t met, she actually took some authors to court. Of course, her case couldn’t hold water because you can’t own and enforce a common word. She ended up losing her copyright and most of her readers. And once she drew all of this attention to herself, people started looking into her and it was found she was in violation of other things against the Amazon TOS, like book stuffing.

But even though Hopkins‘ underhanded plan failed and pretty much destroyed her, here’s the thing... Amazon doesn’t care when it comes to copyright law. If someone has a legitimate copyright, they are bound to uphold it. If Hopkins had just kept her mouth shut and waited for her copyright to be approved... which was very likely to happen considering how overworked the people at the copyright office are... she could have just waited, reported the infringement directly to Amazon, and they would have removed the offending books from their marketplace for her. And other authors saw this...

Even though Hopkins destroyed herself, others started thinking that if they were smarter about it, they could pull the same stunt and actually get away with it. Spoiler alert, they didn’t. After Hopkins, everyone was on guard any anyone who tried to file a copyright for a common word was instantly shot down. But greed is powerful so that didn’t stop people from trying. Enter Michael-Scott Earle...

The guy is not just the #1 best seller in his genre on Amazon, with every new book he releases instantly hitting the #1 spot as soon as it’s released, but he’s also a New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author. And by self-publishing on Amazon he’s cutting out the publishers and raking in the money. The guy has it made. Literally everything I wish I could be. But that apparently isn’t enough for him because not even a year after cockygate is put in the ground, he tries to do the same thing. But just filing a copyright on a common word and hoping no one notices isn’t enough for him. He has to do one better. He still files copyrights on several common words, but that’s not the only thing he files a copyright on. He also tries to file a copyright on the format of a book cover. The most common format of book covers in the sci-fi and fantasy genres... If he had gotten away with it, he would have owned the copyright on any book cover that had the book’s title at the top, the author name on the bottom, and a picture of a person holding a weapon on the cover. I’d estimate that’s like 75% of all sci-fi and fantasy novels. If he’d been able to enforce that copyright, he wouldn’t have just been killing the competition, he would have been dropping a nuclear bomb on it.

This instantly put a great big target on the guy’s back and everyone started looking into him. We don’t know what exactly he was doing... There were rumors of click farming and of him paying for false reviews and so on... which would explain his very sudden, almost instant rise to the #1 spot... but nothing was ever confirmed. According to Michael-Scott Earle himself, Amazon refused to ever tell him what he did wrong. Which is the exact kind of thing Amazon would do... I’ve had a book blocked by Amazon before after being for sale for only a week, and they never would tell me what was wrong with it... But what we do know is that within two weeks of his attempted copyrights being uncovered, the guy’s entire Amazon account was shut down, all of his books removed from sale, and to this day, Amazon has still refused to give it back. Now the really weird thing is that Audible, which is an Amazon company, didn’t do the same thing. You can still get his books in audio book form. As far as I know that’s the only way you can get them now. But the printed and kindle editions of his books are dead. The guy was pretty much blacklisted and no one knows why. If Michael-Scott Earle himself knows, he’s still feigning innocence.

But if he hadn’t tried to be a copyright scumlord that probably never would have happened to him. And it’s a shame he had to be that way, because I listened to two of his books on Audible before this whole mess ever happened and I enjoyed them. They were horny teenage boy wish fulfillment, but they were still fun at least. I thought he had real talent for the kind of stuff he was writing. He knew his audience and he played to it well while still managing to give them something more than just no-effort schlock. But what he tried to do was just inexcusable and would have ruined me and so many other authors just trying to make an honest living, so even though I did enjoy the two books I listened to, I won’t be giving him my money ever again.

[yankeecountess]

More and more I’ve become “anti-Amazon”

It’s been something gradually growing for several years. I’ve always been a “support brick and mortar stores!” over online companies, and always felt guilty whenever I purchased something from Amazon, especially as I heard about other stores, from small indie places to larger chains, laying off employees or closing their doors permanently because they couldn’t compete. 

Then I heard about the shifty ways Amazon tries to avoid paying sales tax in most (if not all) states, which forces other companies to “foot the bill”. 

But the creme de la creme for the whole thing came this past holiday season, when I heard more and more about the atrocious ways Amazon treats its warehouse workers and drivers, treating them more like machines than human beings (and the sad truth is, they would probably happily replace their workers with machines if they could).

I had thought that perhaps I would only use Amazon for the purchase of ebooks. But now articles are pouring out about the ways certain “con-authors” (like Faleena Hopkins to name one) abuse the system and Amazon does little or moves in far too late to reprimand these con artists.  I’m not saying these problems don’t happen with other online ebook platforms, but you certainly don’t hear about it with NOOK or Kobo the same way you do with Amazon.

But whether it’s publishing, music, media (TV *and* film), travel, grocery stores, and even non-profit charity work...this company isn’t becoming a monopoly...it *is* one. And that’s terrifying.

When cities and states, governors and mayors are more or less felatting themselves over who gets to be the next Amazon hub, making so many deals like “we’ll never tax you!” or “we’ll never regulate you!” or any other number of shady, “look the other way while we do something illegal or unethical” deals...then this is *not* a company we should support.

I’ve seen so much over the past week about “boycott Amazon!” and “stand with the workers who are striking!” and I agree...but unless we, the consumer, STOP making purchases from this company, then all our reblogs are meaningless.

If you want to purchase ebooks, then use another platform: I recommend Kobo, who have close ties to many indie bookstores and publishers. 

Want print books? Be they old or new, I highly recommend thriftbooks.com

Do your research--we all know there are other resources out there for music and media that aren’t connected to Amazon. Give the competition some of your time and attention--this is the “positive” side to Capitalism, if you will; as consumers we have the power to tell companies what we want. If they want our business, then THEY need to meet our needs and demands, and if they don’t, then we need to take our business someplace else.

Seriously, do your research on companies that practice “conscious capitalism”--these are businesses that usually achieve high scores among employees for ethical work treatment and practices.

And while I’m not versed on all that “Amazon Smile” does for non-profit charities, I always look to charitynavigator.org as a trusted, reliable source.

We really need to put our money where our mouth is; it’s one thing to say we support these causes (and reblog about them) but then when we go back and make various “insta-purchases” with a company that we are cementing more and more with every click into that “world domination monopoly”, then we are basically a bunch of political, hypocritical posers.

DEMAND justice for Amazon workers. DEMAND ethical treatment, fairer wages, and human decency.  DEMAND it and say, “you aren’t getting my business until you make these changes!” And then follow that through by giving your business elsewhere until those changes are made.

Older generations are always saying that the younger ones don’t care, that they’re apathetic and that’s why “all these changes they demand for” never change, because they don’t follow through.

Bullshit. Let’s prove otherwise.

[joannechocolat]

Cocky Hopkins: a few thoughts about #cockygate

If you haven’t been following #cockygate, it’s worth checking out some blogs: the writing community, especially that of Romance authors, quite rightly feels strongly about it, not only because it constitutes breathtaking arrogance, ignorance and, er - cockiness from the author involved, but because if it were really possible to legally forbid authors from using a certain common word in their book titles, then the whole publishing industry would be down the drain in a matter of days.

In case you missed it, this is what happened. An indie romance author, Faleena Hopkins, who seems not to know that the one real strength of the indie community is the fact that it IS a community, has written a series of novels with “Cocky” in the title. I’m not going to comment on them, as I haven’t read them, and don’t see the need to start now. But yeah. It’s a hook. Like “Confessions of...”, or “Carry on...” 

Having attempted to trademark the word “cocky” as well as the font she uses, Faleena has been sending e-mails to fellow-romance authors who happen to have also used the word in the titles of their books, threatening them with legal action if they don’t change their titles straightaway. 

There are two things wrong with this, apart from the obvious, which is that such behaviour is considered a dick move, and that Faleena Hopkins (no relation to Katie, although from what I see of her Twitter account, she might as well be).

One; the font she’s attempting to trademark actually belongs to someone else.

Two: outside of the community which no longer wants anything to do with her, no-one has ever heard of Faleena Hopkins, except in the context of her recent attempt to intimidate fellow-writers.

“Common words and phrases can be trademarked if the person or company seeking the trademark can demonstrate that the phrase has acquired a distinctive secondary meaning apart from its original meaning. That secondary meaning must be one that identifies the phrase with a particular good or service.” 

In short, it means you or your product need to be a household name to be associated with a brand. It means that your use of the word in your product has changed its original meaning. 

Is Faleena Hopkins’ “Cocky” series a household name? Is she? Because it seems to me that, outside of the indie Romance community, no-one has any fucking idea who she is. Nor, after this recent personality failure, are they ever likely to.

[respectingromance]

I have an update on the attempted trademarking of the word forever that I mentioned here.

(Screencaps are from Heidi McLaughlin’s Facebook page.)

Some thoughts. This situation is a little different than the one with Faleena Hopkins, the author trying to trademark a romance series with “cocky” in the title, because it appears that Heidi McLaughlin has more supporters instead of being someone hardly anyone had ever heard of. I am using “appears” because I’ve never heard of Heidi McLaughlin. But she’s written 20+ books, been on major bestseller lists, and a movie based on one of her books came out this January. When you’ve built up your brand and your community, you have more cushion for your trip-ups. 

I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t think she handled this well. There are the earlier vague post and responses to people, and now the padding of her statement above prior to the explanation. Even the explanation she gave is muddled. But internet drama can get amped up fast, and it’s easy enough to screw up your response. The best action McLaughlin took here is withdrawing the application.

It’s good to see that the romance community is committed to vigorously defend itself against shenanigans. Post-Faleena Hopkins and whatever this was... hopefully predatory actors understand that they cannot pull these trademark tricks without a fight.

[sweetfirebird]

The Faleena thing reminds me a little of a friend felt her dreams were unfulfilled and her intelligence wasted in her day job (which it was) so she decided to get into writing m/m romance, which I encouraged.... 

Only for her to repeatedly call writing romance “prostitution” and say again and again *to me* that she was prostituting herself by doing this. (I took that--at first--as her being worried about failure and so playing down the very significant act of writing and creating. But she kept doing it). She wrote one book which was fairly well received from what I can tell (I don’t know the numbers) for a debut book. Then she wrote another, got discouraged that she wasn’t as immediately adored and loved as she felt she should have been, and quit. All the while complaining to me about how easy she thought it would be. 

Yeah.  Still not even sure she ever realized why I ended that friendship. 

[melissagromley]

We were not bullying Faleena Hopkins

We were not bullying Faleena Hopkins

The other day, I came across an article that demonized the #cockygate and #getloud campaign while putting FH on a pedestal. I read the article myself and thought there were a million things wrong with it, not only because of the absurdity of it but the lack of research and receiving other opinions about what was happening. The truth can be distorted by anyone who wants to make it work for them,…

[james-master]

The 2018 Cocky Kerfuffle

My take on the 2018 Cocky Kerfuffle. What are your thoughts? #cockygate

  I was a bit dumbfounded when I stumbled into Facebook drama earlier this week. It was from a fellow indie author who was talking about something with the hashtag #cockygate. Curious, I inquired about it and was shocked to find out that an indie Romance author by the name of Faleena Hopkins trademarked the word “cocky.”

So instead of reacting like a spoiled, self indulgent millennial that I…

[theoutlawfaleena]

könig snorts when he laughs! bye that's all i had to say for tonight

[ruthlessbookfish]

Cocky Senator by Faleena Hopkins

October 31

My Review

There was so much drama in Justin’s story. Some of it cute, some was sad. My heart really went out to Jaimie. Justin was so cold at times. It was hard to watch her try to navigate that, and do what she thought was right in her heart.

I loved it though. The political aspect could have veered the book off into boring territory, for me, but it didn’t. I was actually interested.

Now onto Jeremy’s story.

*Read through Kindle Unlimited

[theoutlawfaleena]

my niche historical interests and intriguing movie watching habits have led me to add another masked meow meow to my library

i fear i've rlly gone off the deep end this time besties

[theoutlawfaleena]

so obviously i'm gonna write more parts for the king & the siren but how would y'all feel about a possible könig x medic!reader series as well.... feel like a pretty cute dynamic could be explored there

[theoutlawfaleena]

so uhhh 👉🏻👈🏻

i know i've been gone for a long long time but if i started königposting again would y'all act like i never even left 👁️👁️

[theoutlawfaleena]

uhhh so yes i disappeared again but to make up for it here's some pictures i took in europe