One Never Knows

Quick Update

2011-11-24T19:27:00.002-05:00

I'm still working off a back log of books to proof for one publisher, expecting more from another, and doing various editing and writing things for yet another. I just turned in the final draft of a new introduction I wrote for a forthcoming book and when that gets a bit closer to coming out, I'll be more specific.

I haven't been posting much simply because I've been too busy and at least up to now I've been reluctant to write about the books that I'm working on. Why that is so I can't exactly say; chalk it up to a vague reticence, a discretionary valor kind of thing. But that probably ought to change.

I'd like to write about proofreading a small bit. There's more that goes into it than one might think, especially as the source for the books I work on is typically riddled with errors of their own. So when a problem exists in the source, and I edit it out, I've changed the text of the book now, haven't I?

I was reading an editor's foreword to a prominent book and he seems to take things to the logical conclusion of not only is he correcting errors, but he considers it his job to make the author look as best he can. But that's the worm can being opened and it's Thanksgiving and I'd like to finish proofing a particular book tonight rather than begin a long series of posts on proofing and editing.

Although it is coming, I think, and it is interesting. Doubt me now, but really, it is. A bit. At least.

Memories

2011-08-13T08:10:00.000-04:00

Yesterday my 9 year old daughter spontaneously broke into a speech about how much she loves me. She even came up with 10 Reasons Why, which was pretty darn special. Until I realized that it's pretty much these same 10 Reasons that'll make her hate me when she's a teenager.

You're always there for me --> "Get away from me!"
You practice sports with me --> "I'm so over softball!"

I could go on, but I torture myself enough as it is.

Fairy Tales

2011-08-07T20:57:00.000-04:00

My son is seven and is at the point in his childhood where he is losing many teeth. He's also clever without trying to be, a skill most adults will never master. The home school evaluator wondered how he'd do with a sudoku puzzle. I'll spring that on him when we start up with school again.

Anyway, he lost his second tooth in a month and before it goes under his pillow for the Tooth Fairy (he's not clever in quite that way, yet), he's writing her a note asking if they can keep in contact. He thinks she probably knows Santa Claus and so it must be a good idea to stay in touch.

I don't know what's in his head (I know it's not the same number of teeth he had at the start of the year), and that's probably okay. I've always been ambivalent about the lies we tell our kids to perpetuate the Easter Bunnies of growing up time, mostly because I think I'm going to feel quite awkward when they finally figure it out. I thought about fessing up to our nine year old last Christmas but didn't. Shouldn't news like that come from mom and dad, and not some party pooper playmate down the street?

Who knows. Another sad day, and it comes nearly every summer, is that point when you realize your baseball team really isn't going to make it. Despite hanging around near, and briefly at the top, of their division, despite having a record among the top six in all of baseball for much of the first half of the year, they've been passed and just can't keep pace. Today I watched them lose in extra innings but, from a postseason perspective, it no longer matters. Part of the magic of summer has gone. Things were so cheery in April.

Under the Bell

2011-07-30T07:48:00.000-04:00

Argh. I've posted bupkiss (really, I have no idea of the preferred spelling) in the month of July. Not because I've had nothing to blather on about, but because I'm godawful buried in book work for some very nice publishers. Who are perhaps too busy themselves. Notwithstanding that everyone needs a month off, or even everyone but me, so I'd get a chance to catch up, here's a quick link to Irish writer Declan Burke's blog. Today he posts some (non) rules for aspiring writers, quantum physics and love.

The first rule is this, and works above the sub-atomic level in the Newtonian world:

1. Writing is a lot like love and quantum physics. If you think you have the answer, you probably haven’t understood the question.

Which is typical of the attitude Mr. Burke brings to his daily blog, which is only one of the reasons I recommend its reading, which can be found here.

Monday I'm going to wake up and say, "Crap, it's August already? Already?" It may not be reliving my youth, but all the other kids on summer vacation must be thinking the same thing, even if they're not old enough to say "crap" without getting in trouble. Here's to ya.

Trouser snakes

2011-06-25T07:44:00.000-04:00

Elsewhere on this site I recounted the time I hiked Mt. Lafayette in the winter inadvertently wearing ladies' underwear. I have, as much as I can recall, kept mostly to myself the time I pantsed myself at a track meet in high school by, again inadvertently, hooking my thumbs inside my shorts and not just my sweat pants. Voila! The walls came down.

Yesterday I went to the post office and as I was crossing the street I tried to put my keys into the pocket of my shorts. For a moment I thought, these shorts don't have a pocket, but I knew they did, so I kept at it and sure enough, there it was. Angled toward the front.

As I was half twisted in the crosswalk of Main Street, I saw a woman behind me, smiling as though I knew her. I didn't, and now I know the look of a woman who recognizes someone who is wearing their shorts backward to the post office. I think the Adidas insignia behind the knee gave it away.

I didn't think there was anything I could do either on Main Street or inside the court house/post office that would actually make the situation better, so I went in, mailed my package, had a discussion about leftover cake with one of the employees, and slowly backed out of the building. I hope this doesn't become a habit.

Sad Everyone

2011-05-30T22:14:00.000-04:00

Dino didn't make it through the holiday. After a dance recital, I took the kids to a friend's house and then Melissa and I took our boy up to the vet. It didn't take long, and now he's gone. The house is emptier than it's ever been and a large part of us is gone, as well. After the results of last week's blood work came in, the vet said he wouldn't make a month. He made five days, and we loved him hard every moment.

I hope Ricky's right. I'm going to keep trying.

Sad Children

2011-05-25T16:00:00.000-04:00

Our Golden Retriever is old, and has kidney disease, and the vet doesn't think he'll be around at the end of the year. The kids were in the room when she told me this. They handled themselves very well until we got into the car. We had the discussion about getting old and bodies breaking down and living life the best we can while we can.

And then my boy, through a faceful of tears, says, "Dad? Can you please believe in Heaven so we can see Dino again?"

I'll try, Ricky. I'll try.

Hmmmm

2011-05-20T20:01:00.000-04:00

Buried up to my eyeballs in proofing and other book work, schooling kids, and kids' sports. No, I'm not getting a chance to do much of anything else, including this.

Watched a doc on Netflix about maverick director James Toback called The Outsider. It's ostensibly a behind-the-scenes flick about the shooting of his film When Will I Be Loved with Neve Campbell (which is also on Netflix but haven't seen yet).

In any case, the documentary is well worth watching for all the reasons such films often are, but the point that struck me was made by Toback in an offhanded comment about addiction. He's been a heavy drug user in the past, had vicious gambling troubles, but had a bet with Campbell about quitting soda if she quit smoking. Hardly seems equitable but it ran into the fact that Toback used to smoke five, yes, five, packs of cigarettes a day.

When asked if it was difficult to stop, he said no, not at all. The thing is that he has an obsessive/addictive personality (clearly) and that a five pack a day monkey is an extreme. Going to zero is also an extreme. Moving from one extreme to the other fits in exactly with his personality.

What struck me was when he said that five to zero was easy, extreme to extreme, but had he tried to cut back to three packs a day he would have been screwed. In other words, moderating the behavior would be harder than inverting the extreme.

It's stuck with me. Very interesting concept.

And again, the film is excellent, not likely to be shown on cable, and can be viewed on demand, on your television, without the slightest hint of a commercial. Wish we'd dropped cable long ago. Haven't watched anything with a commercial in it for months. Haven't had any news of the Kardashians other than walking by their pictures on the supermarket tabloid covers.

I can live with that.

Soup

2011-04-30T16:30:00.000-04:00

I haven't meant to ignore the ol' blog but I'm buried. With the kids running track, playing baseball, softball, home school, spring is a busy time. But I've got a stack of books to proofread (actually three), an essay to edit, interviews to conduct for newsletters, and blurry vision.

I saw where the writer Joanna Russ just passed away. Apparently she hadn't written much in recent years due to chronic back pain and chronic fatigue syndrome. These same kinds of illness have kept many writers from working and every time I see something like this, it helps me feel like what I'm going through is still real and not some subconscious excuse for a lack of productivity.

At least of my own work. And so I toil on other peoples', I make a contribution, and hopefully chip in some miniscule difference in some things that I care about. And if that's all I can do right now, then that has to be okay. If I can't get healthier, I'd at least like to get younger. I figure shooting for two moons doubles my chances of achieving one, right? (Do not insert logic here.)

TBR

2011-04-22T11:55:00.001-04:00

I don't have a TBR (To Be Read) pile. It's more like a TBR Library. The Rick Ollerman Memorial LIbrary of Books Begging To Be Read. I once read where a fellow calculated how many books he read a year, multiplied that by the expected number of years he has left on this planet, and came up with a depressingly miniscule total.

I have not the balls to do the same thing. Rather I believe firmly and with conviction that not only will I read every book in my library, not only will I read the interesting ones multiple times, but I will add to the stacks with books every bit expecting to be read.

The ideal hospital of the future will be able to kill the pain, keep the blood circulating, and somehow flash page images into the still animated portions of my brain that can actually read. My family can surround my bed, shake their heads, and wonder just what it is I saw in all that crap.

Lately I've begun to suspect that I may have accumulated enough material to actually have enough to read before I die. Mind you, I don't want to back this up with any attempts at mathematical certainty, but common sense dictates that with at least some moderate re-reading, I could likely be set until I'm summoned home.

Doesn't seem to stop me, though. I'm waiting for Ray Kurzweil. The only bad books are the ones that haven't been flung across the room yet. The rest still have potential.

How much is too much? Clearly, I'm the wrong one to ask. The actual limit may be when I can no longer build new shelves. That day, actually, may arrive sooner than I'd like.

High Notes

2011-04-13T19:56:00.000-04:00

When I was a wee lad, a TV commercial bombarded our set for a period of time. It was a four or six record collection of the bulk of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons catalog. If I recall correctly, Valli had the rights to the music and against expert advice released this massive offering. My mom used to wrinkle her nose whenever they played the song bits, and say, you don't like that stuff do you? No, I assured her. But really, I did. I really did.

The music was in my mind in seventh grade when I somehow brought it up to Greg Born, who told me he had seen Frankie and the Seasons in concert. Boy, could he sing high, Greg said. Anyway, I was too young to get the record collection from the commercial, and it was years before I came across it in a record store and had to have it.

I bought my first stereo with my paper route money, an all in one number with a turntable, AM/FM radio, and an 8 track player. And two plug-in speakers. At Woolworth's in the Southdale Mall I came across a record called "Story" by the Four Seasons. It had some medieval-looking cover and some recognizable song names to me but also a few odd ones, like "Opus 17 (Don't You Worry 'Bout Me)." I went back and forth trying to figure out if this two record set contained the same sounds I'd obsessed over since that TV commercial years before, and finally I bought it, my first record for my new stereo.

It was heaven. It really kicked off a lifelong appreciation for both Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. I've seen them in concert several times, own all but one CD (the Dylan/Bachrach one), and listen to them regularly.

On my birthday last year my wife took me to see "Jersey Boys," the musical story of Frankie and the boys. Wow. As the show started with a bang and just kept going, you knew in very short order that this was something you'd remember for the rest of your life. The show is that good. The level of talent across the board was unbelievable. The show won the Tony for best musical in 2006 and has permanent shows on Broadway, in London, Australia, and Las Vegas. The touring company is out and about and you should go see this show.

I really can't imagine anyone not liking it. It ended and it broke my heart, I wanted it to go on and on and on and on. As the lights came up, I asked my wife if we could see it again. Sold out, she says. But we both want to see it again. Preferably many times.

The soundtrack album is fun. There's good music there but its magic comes from making you relive those moments in the theater. We've played it so much we haven't hardly been able to get in the car without my son yelling, Play "Sherry!" or my daughter yelling, Play "Silhouettes!" When my kids run on the treadmill they make me plug in my MP3 player and play Four Seasons albums.

Which brings the story full round from music that captivated me in my childhood to the same music captivating my kids in theirs. My wife digs it, too, which isn't something she says a lot when discussing my musical tastes.

Go see "Jersey Boys." You'll never forget it, and you certainly won't regret it.

All This for a Dime

2011-04-08T09:38:00.000-04:00

A large box came in the mail earlier this week. Fifteen books, bright covered, exciting, screaming to be read. They're pulp or pulp-related books and it's been a chronic daydream of mine to imagine going back in time around 1930 or so and finding a New York newsstand, filled to overflowing with dozens and dozens of pulp magazines. The Shadow, Doc Savage, the Phantom Detective, the Green Lama, the Black Bat, Operator #5, Secret Agent "X", Weird Tales, westerns, railroad stories, air stories, adventure stories, science fiction stories, and on and on and on...

Makes me breathless. Adventure House will sell you a subscription to their bi-monthly reprint series called High Adventure. For around fifty bucks a year you get wonderful pulp reprints from across the spectrum. Last issue contained a novel of a character called the Shadow, albeit a different one than the one who became famous as the longest running pulp mag (or at least the one with the most issues). The current issue has two tales of the Black Bat, a precursor to the Bat-Man, and a short story.

A number of publishers have put out reprints in standard book form through the years, some being fairly pricey. Altus Press out of Boston has been putting out beautiful versions for years, books of all stripes, and is well worth your time.

I have the first five installments of Operator #5's "Purple War" saga, which means I have to find the last eight. I will, too, because I have to find out how Jimmy Christopher wins back the country from the Central Empire. Right now I'm reading about the Cobra and how he fights crime in various countries, exacting justice by means of his cobra sting, tiny darts shot through an ordinary-looking green cigarette holder. And there's Senorita Scorpion, fighting the baron Anse Hawkman to retain control of her family's lands and mine. The Black Bat, alias the assumed-blind Tony Quinn, is trying to find out who controlled the assassin who walked into a court and poured several slugs into the head of a newly appointed judge.

Good stories, wonderful characters, and quick reading make for an addictive reading experience. That's why these stories will never go away. If you haven't read any, or haven't read any recently, there hasn't been a better opportunity in my lifetime to do so now. Go on, pick up one of these lost gems and settle in for a few hours of fine entertainment. I'll bet you want to pick up another...

Must Read List

2011-04-03T20:45:00.000-04:00

Following the post I did on being picky about writers, I thought I would offer a few thoughts on my MUST READ BOOK LIST. This is a list that I would recommend to everyone without hesitation. This is a list of books that deserve to not only be read widely, but read repeatedly. This is a list of books that are so good that people who don't read should strap on the reading glasses and pick them up.

This is also a very short list.

In fact, it's miniscule. It's exclusive, it's rarified, it's probably lonely. But I'm afraid those are necessary traits for a list of this type.

It isn't a list of important books, or seminal books, or books that I just like a whole lot so I think you should, too. It is simply my universal list, suitable to any and all with an open mind.

After years of careful consideration, for the books really must nominate themselves, it is as follows, and in no particular order:

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. It's funny, it's dramatic, it's immersive, and it's wonderful. If there is such a thing as the contemporary Great American Novel, this would be it.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. The story of one of the greatest friendships ever written, with an incredibly poignant Dr. Livingstone-esque poignancy (if I get more specific I'll spoil). If there is such a thing as the contemporary Great American Novel, this would be it.

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. Zelazny was at times a poetical writer and his passion for the world's mythologies inform some of his best work. In this case, with a non-linear narrative, he gives us all the passion and drama of humanity played across an otherwordly locale, where humans have achieved aspects of Hindu deities and act every bit the petty gods, with occasional nobility, that we expect in the ancient stories.

I think you can make the worst book sound sensational and the best book sound banal, and other than including these three on the list, I haven't tried to go either way. Out of the three, Lord of Light may seem to be the most risky, but it would be a mistake to treat it so. I've read it six times and may very well read it six more.

There are a number of books that come close, but are just flawed enough to earn slightly less than the Universal label. Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White comes to mind. The origin of one of the most compelling villains ever written, Count Fosco, bogs the ending down a bit and doesn't quite live up to the first two thirds of the book.

Anyway, the list of "almosts" would be long, the titles legion, and it would contain multitudes. I would like to expand this list, though, but it's been stuck at three for so long I wonder if it ever will. So I'm picky. Sue me.

TV Guide

2011-03-31T20:32:00.000-04:00

We've been cable-TV free for a month or so now, and in addition to saving $85 a month to see not a damned thing I'd actually choose, I've discovered a number of equally significant benefits. First and foremost, watching Netflix on demand movies and shows, there are no commercials. Big deal, you say, but when a third of a network or cable show is made of commercials, that's a huge amount of time to recover.

If you watch three hours of cable/network TV, you're actually getting only two hours of show. With Netflix you get all three. How is this not a fantastic development?

Secondly, it comes a step closer to a la carte programming, the idea that a cable subscriber can choose which set of channels they actually get in their subscription. Cable companies say people don't want it, but in Giant Corporation-ese, that means they don't want to upgrade their equipment in order to make that happen.

But now I can see British television shows (like BBC America), documentaries (The Documentary Channel), independent films (the Indie channel) etc. No, you don't get all the programming available on those channels, but you get to choose, and what you choose won't have commercials. The math works for me.

When I was a kid in Illinois I used to watch Creature Feature on some local television channel. Every Saturday they'd show some classic monster or science fiction movie. I always thought that the largely disappointing SciFi channel (now SyFy) would have done a great thing had they done a Friday Night Monster Movie kind of thing. Not their Megashark vs. Superoctopus crap, but The Creature from the Black Lagoon or Attack of the 50-foot Woman or Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. How cool would that be?

Now, thanks to the magic of Netflix and Roku, my six year old son knows about giant radiation-spawned ants in Them and who the hell Klaatu is from The Day the Earth Stood Still. Springing the kids from the clutches of the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon has been wonderful. I'd much rather them watch Steve McQueen run away from the blob than the next Hannah Montana or Wizards of Waverley place installments.

That's my quick cable cutting update. I still miss baseball, and if MLB ever decides to charge you for a subscription and leave off the commercials (you bastards), I'm there. Otherwise, if I never see another commercial again I will be a happy guy.

Now back to season 2 of Wire in the Blood. Damn, that's good stuff...

Persnickety

2011-03-29T16:54:00.000-04:00

First off, I used a word as the title of this post that I don't know, and what's more, that I didn't look up first. It just sounds like the right word and while that's never enough, who knows, I might be lucky. If I end up looking like an ignoramus, well, I haven't looked up that word, either. But enough of reveling in my own laziness.

I was once invited to join a book group by the esteemed author Diane Vogt. We would select crime fiction of some sort and meet regularly to discuss the book. I ended up dropping out after some months because some of the participants didn't leave a comfortable amount of room for dissenting opinion.

Anyway, during this time the notion that I wholeheartedly endorse authors as opposed to titles seemed to crystallize. As I've written about before, there are far too many writers who can write well, or better yet, craft fine books, but for whatever reason don't.

So I can recommend so-and-so's (see, I'm getting away from naming names) first two books, or such-and-such's first three books, but then things seem to start sliding in the wrong direction. Yes, I got grief for this in the book group, but that's been over for years and I really need to let it go.

There are very few authors who've never let me down. Lawrence Block is one, with some books being okay and others wonderful, and some that I like but have to get past that annoying street urchin in the Scudder books. His burglar books have never done it for me, but I don't despise them, either. They're just not to my taste.

Donald Westlake is superb, and his alter-ego, Richard Stark, is sublime. His Parker series is the single best crime fiction series there has ever been. If you don't believe me, pick one up and see if you can put it down whenever you like. They're a crime fiction reader's crack.

James Lee Burke writes such terribly beautiful prose that it's incomprehensible to me when I read that some people think he tends to wax a bit purple. No, he doesn't, but I can see why you say that. Even when he was in that period where he wrote the same book over and over, his work was mesmerizing. And when he was able to get more creative again, there was no happier day on my bookshelves.

Dick Francis maybe had a book or two out of forty that was a bit flat, but only a bit. And even though he wrote about different characters who were really the same character with a different name and job, his books are just so damned pleasurable that it doesn't really matter.

I find Robert B. Parker's Jesse Stone series to be highly readable, too. You have to look past the fact that Stone never did a whole lot of actual work, he'd investigate the crime but someone always steps forward and gives him the information he needs to solve it. He's no Sherlock Holmes but the characterization in the books is so strong they're easily addictive.

I like Domenic Stansberry a lot, even though some of his stuff has some fairly obvious contrivances. In Manifesto for the Dead, for instance, the fictionalized Jim Thompson has his plans revealed by his inappropriately loud-mouthed wife in front of the very people conspiring to frame her husband. You can't read it without feeling the clumsiness, but otherwise the book, like all of Stansberry's work, reminds me more of a modern day Hammett than anyone I can think of. And not just because he writes of San Francisco.

There's a fellow named Jack Kelly who reminds me of Stansberry and a bit more of James M. Cain then Hammett whose books used to be difficult to cull because of the broad search results from his not terribly distinctive name. His five books are all excellent and I wish he'd either write more, or make it easier for me to find them if he has.

So there, there are a number of contemporary writers whose work I can recommend, at least in large chunks. If we look at Irish crime fiction, I can give you a bunch more: Adrian McKinty, Declan Hughes, Declan Burke, Ken Bruen, Alan Glynn, Stuart Neville, and more. But that's for another time.

(No matter what, DON'T) Follow That Dream

2011-03-26T09:19:00.001-04:00

I've been swamped this past week, and I haven't been feeling well, so not much writing of any sort has been accomplished. I've been wanting to write something about Irish crime fiction for a long time, but enough people have been doing that I'm only going to look like a bandwagon jumper, but so be it. There are a few other things as well, all requiring more time and energy to do them justice than I've been able to generate. But the worm will turn, I hope.

With time and chronic illness, I find that I look back more and more on all the things I've done in my life that make me absolutely cringe. There are far too many. But I've always thought than when you break up with your girlfriend, no matter how bad your relationship has been, there was at least some good spread around in there. And over time, for whatever reason, you tend to forget the bad and remember that good. Perhaps that's why so many men pine after lost relationships and do the classic breakup regret, I can change thing, only to eventually recover their pride and self esteem and only then actually let go.

I'm finding I'm looking at past life inversely to that, I'm remembering the bad and forgetting the good. This is probably no way to be, and I wonder why that is. Rather than look back with satisfaction at anything I may have accomplished, any positive difference I may have made in anyone's life, I seem to focus on my mistakes and feel bad about them.

Lately I've been thinking about how things could have been worse.

At some point as a strapping young man, I found I enjoyed musicals like "Singing in the Rain" and "My Fair Lady." This may not sound like the past time of a strapping young man, but bear with me. There is a positive energy to those movies, part of it from the wonderful songs, part of it from the charisma of a Gene Kelly or an Audrey Hepburn (or the brilliant Stanley Holloway, who played Eliza's dad). I know some people don't like musicals at all, they feel that the spontaneous breaking out into song is too much to swallow.

But would that really be so bad? Granted, breaking out into a full 112 piece orchestra-backed production number with bystanders and pedestrians joining in with perfectly timed choreography might be a tad cumbersome, but what about if it were much simpler?

At another point, I discovered Elvis movies. Yes, there were the serious ones like Jailhouse Rock and King Creole and those are fine and show a young Elvis who really could have been a fine and appealing actor, but it was the silly ones that were just sort of goofy fun. And when Elvis broke into song, it was often just himself and a guitar, or just a simple band, or, if he was playing a musician in the film, his onscreen back up band.

Elvis made this work. He could be walking with a pretty girl in the moonlight, pluck a flower from a passing bush, gently tuck it into the girl's hair, and start singing. Why can't this work, I always thought. It looks good in the movies. I'm sure I gave this way too much thought.

So when I look back at the things I've done or the ways I've behaved or the decisions I've made that make me shrivel in horror at their images in the mirror of time, it occurs to me, it could have been worse. It could have always been worse. I could have actually but my silverware down, taken the hand of whichever unfortunate girl I happened to have brought with me, walked through a restaurant and started singing. It probably would have been an Elvis song from one of his goofy movies, like "Wooden Heart" maybe.

And lord knows what would have happened then. Probably nothing good. I'm sure the notion had occurred to me more times than is healthy but thank whomever may be up wherever, I never pulled the trigger. Oh my god. If I'm feeling bad about not doing this when I should have done that, doing this when I shouldn't have done that, imagine how I'd be feeling if you could throw in a dollop of failed and spontaneous Elvis impersonation? This would certainly be from the pre-"Thank you very much" rhinestoned jumpsuit days, when Elvis still had the cool, but it wouldn't have mattered.

I can look back and know a disaster when I see one. Saddled with regrets of things both done and undone, I can at least feel good that I had never, not once, actually done the Elvis/musical thing. It would have been too much to remember, I'd go blind from hysterical shock. Looking back at my life now I'm not sure how I could survive the embarrassment. And you should note that right now, at this very moment, there is no guitar anywhere in my house. Some things are best left alone.

Overlooked gem

2011-03-19T22:37:00.000-04:00

Living closer to Canada than to a Barnes and Noble or Borders, and in a town with an independent store currently contracting shelf space and inventory, browsing for books isn't the mad sport around here it could be. There's a bookstore specializing in remaindered books over in North Conway, which is all the way across the state next to Maine. We live next to Vermont but even so, it's less than an hour and a half drive, and that only because the only road is a two lane twisty thing through the White Mountain National Forest.

I haven't been there in a year or so. But for a long time, and possibly still, they had a number of Hugo Wilcken's hardcover, The Execution. I bought this book when it came out in 2001 after reading an intriguing review in Publishers Weekly.

The thing is, as I started reading it, I didn't like it. I thought the writing was fairly stiff and pedestrian, not ready for prime time. But loathe as I am to stop reading any book I start, I kept going. And discovered a brilliant book that unfortunately, doesn't seem as though many people have heard of it.

Clearly the book has legs, though, with paperback versions still in print. New hardcover copies can be had for less than a buck and a half on Amazon, with used copies lower still. In the ten years of its life, it must have found some sort of audience.

When I say I didn't care for the writing in the beginning, I'm not talking about having to plow through a dense hundred-page chunk like that in Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, another slow starting but ultimately excellent book. It's just the very beginning of the book that seemed cumbersome in the writing, but very shortly, the characters assert themselves and the plot begins to take shape.

I don't like doing plot recaps as reviews, so I won't give one here. What I will say is that this book is a brilliant tale of descent, of a man losing control gradually and relentlessly, of transformation from "normal" to-- something else. There is a murder at the heart of the book, and it is in the aftermath that the interesting things happen; the crime is merely the catalyst for the personal destruction to unfold. Perhaps "unravel" would be a better word.

Every time I saw those copies in that store in North Conway, I had an impulse to buy them all, perhaps to give them to friends. If they could slot it into their X-Boxes, that might be viable, but as it is, probably not so much. The book is so good, the emotional disasters so well drawn, that I wouldn't mind looking at a chunk of shelf space with half a dozen copies keeping each other company. Someone could look at my library and ask, Why do you have so many copies of that book?, and I could say, Take one and find out.

That would be cool but not very likely. My recommendation is to pick up a copy, cheaply or otherwise, read and absorb it, and then let me know if you've felt the same sort of impact. If you're in North Conway, New Hampshire, you could make it an impulse buy (assuming they're still there). Because really, let's face it, I'd never steer you wrong.

So there

2011-03-17T03:01:00.000-04:00

I'm mad at Amazon. It seems if you buy a few of the least expensive books you can get, they'll arrive wonderfully packaged in an appropriately sized box, with the books shrinkwrapped to a piece of cardboard. They can't slide, they're away from the box corners so the edges can't get bumped, and they arrive as they ought.

On the other hand, should you buy more expensive books, including limited run editions, they more often then not ship them loose in a box where they slide around and collide around the inside edges of the box. I used to take this lying down except where the books were really unacceptable. One time, when this wasn't such a common occurrence, they sent me an apologetic e-mail saying that their goal is for the books you buy on Amazon to be in the kind of condition you'd find in a brick-and-mortar bookstore.

Well, they've gotten worse and they don't even bother to respond anymore. I've sent more books back in the past few months than anyone should find reasonable. Buying from them has become less of a "My books are here!" experience to a held breath and mild sense of dread.

On the other hand, Barnes & Noble, whose prices used to significantly higher than Amazon's, are now usually within a few cents. I'm moving over, going to give them a try. (The cheapest place to buy books used to be through Books-a-Million after you joined their club. But their shipping was always bad, not just sometimes, and they were flat out unacceptable.)

This is important because books are so/too expensive and a lower price means I can buy more books. Not at the expense of paying good money for books with creased spines, wrinkled pages and dust jackets, dirty smudges (fingerprints?) on the page edges, bumped corners, and whatnot.

I'll show those Amazon people. When my order numbers make their P&Ls trend downward they'll-- yeah, um, not even notice. But still. Why the hell don't they? Why don't they see that people are returning books due to poor packaging and fix the problem? A while back they added a separate feedback system just for packaging. Were they just faking concern? Because it hasn't changed anything.

Train your people. Get them to wash their hands when they handle the books. Make it a condition of their jobs packing books to do a good job packing books. I scream but no one hears.

But let's give them their due, however. We know they offer good prices on many items, not just books. In fact, I just looked at a 55 inch LCD television by Vizio. The list price on this thing is $1,699.99. The discounted Amazon price is $1,699.98. I found the TV by clicking through their "2010 Markdowns" link.

A penny saved is a penny earned. I'll spend mine on books from somewhere else.

Dept. of Irrational Wants

2011-03-16T11:28:00.000-04:00

I'm busy, so I will post this.

I really want this. It's too expensive for my broken-ass self to afford but it's just so damn cool. Yes, it's a pen on a stand.

I would like to use it to right on any number of "products" (you'll get the joke in a minute) but especially this ones made according to the process pictured here.

You can find a complete list of their "products" here.

And if elephants aren't your thing, they have products derived from product of cows, horses and even the lovable panda bear.

So if you are a discerning person of means, I highly recommend you pick up like the coolest pen ever, and some worthy paper, and right some really boss notes and send them to your friends. They'd love to hear from you, I'm sure, even if what you're sending them is #%*^%.

First web work in years

2011-03-13T21:17:00.001-04:00

Because I've been working on this stuff for several days, including ALL day today, here is a link to the newsletter thingies I've done for Stark House Press. If I were able, I'd do a real post, but there's a piece of cake making eyes at me from the table next to me. If I've learned anything in my four plus decades of life it's never to argue with baked goods. Even, perhaps especially, when they come out of an Entemann's box.

If you're not intimidated and want to actually subscribe to the newsletters your own selves, you should. At some point in the future I'll put up a form rather than an e-mail link, but it works, and it's done, and I don't have to figure out anything else right now once I locate my fork.

Mmmmm, cake.

Point in time observation

2011-03-10T11:44:00.000-05:00

The rise of the e-book is mirroring the path I was afraid it would mark. Between the two camps of "print books will wholly disappear in the near future" and "there will always be print" lies what I think should be the logical and clear road: that there is room for both. One should not have to supplant the other.

And I think in a more rational world, this would happen. However, I've been blasted on the internet for pointing out how many e-books cost more than their print versions, and many more are within a dollar, but this is so easily visible now that there shouldn't be a question to anyone who's taken issue with this notion in the past.

I read of a survey recently where the number one thing that kept readers from buying more books was... wait for it... price. Yes, I've written too many words about this in older posts so I won't retread that ground now. But if publishers are going to charge roughly what they charge for print versions of their books, then the appeal of the e-book has to change for the typical non-independently wealthy reader such as most of us.

An e-book reader is a godsend if you want to read public domain works that simply are not within reach as a physical book. The unabridged diaries of Samuel Pepys, the works of Richard Burton (no, not the actor--you knew that, right?), and more can finally be more accessible than a Project Gutenberg file on your computer. Being able to increase the font size is a marvelous thing for people with declining eyeballs.

To a lesser extent, there are a number of readers who are not bibliophiles, who merely want to read the text and not be encumbered with the disposing of the book. All well and fine.

But if e-books, with no printing, distribution, consignments, returns, and perhaps most expensively, the sponsoring of shelf and table space a publisher pays for bookstores to trip each customer as they walk into the store, why in god's name would you price the damn things so high?

My point is that the BIGGEST, most substantial benefit of e-books should be that it makes books, at least in some form, more accessible. Because without all of the physical issues, the costs should go waaaaaaaay down. And yet, they've gone up, especially when you consider the agency model which has taken away the ability of a bookstore to set the book's price.

So to circle back to the beginning of this post, publishers are mucking up the whole thing. In this environment print books aren't going anywhere, and I hope that the pricing is about at the limit of what publishers can charge.

Bring back mass market paperbacks (not the inch-taller, two-dollar more abortions), lower your hardcover costs, price e-books closer to three or five dollars (in other words, follow the lead of the writers who are making many sales and much money by self-publishing without going through a traditional house), and you will move more books.

If a library buys a book, they can keep it in service as long as they like. Thanks to recently (stupid) publishers' terms, a library can allow an e-book to be checked out one user at a time (like a physical book), but after 26 check-outs the library has to purchase it again.

There are many issues with publishing today, and there have been for years. When the day dawned where individual houses were gobbled up and merged into just a few divisions of mega-corporations, the business of books was probably doomed. Sensible e-book pricing and marketing might have helped things, but much like the government, when the people who can enact the change don't want to be affected by the change, it ain't gonna happen.

If small press publishers can keep their prices down, I see rosy futures for them. On the other hand, with fewer and fewer bookstores or outlets to move them, an internet presence is likely key.

Incidentally, this post was going to be about something else, but I lost my way. Fortunately, there's always tomorrow.

Subscription service

2011-03-08T08:41:00.000-05:00

The glory days of magazines may be officially over and sadly, I couldn't argue. A couple of decades ago a friend introduced me to Outside magazine and in many ways it changed parts of my life. Not only was the subject matter inherently interesting, the sheer quality of the writing was completely unexpected and absolutely blew me away. It introduced me to writers like Tim Cahill, Randy Wayne White, Mark Jenkins, Ian Frazier, and many more. Their books are still on my shelves.

Unfortunately, the magazine is no longer in my mail box. At some point, many of the same writers began writing for Men's Journal and who knows what else. So I subscribed to both magazines because, dammit, I couldn't get enough of the kind of travel reportage slash memoir slash adventure stories and for a while there, things weren't so bad. But then Outside switched editors a few times and grew more and more to look like Men's Journal. The problem was that Men's Journal was steadily growing more like People.

I don't want to see Harrison Ford on one of the magazine's covers, and then the other's a month or so later. I want to read about traveling to the source of the Blue Nile by hot air balloon, dodging natives, wild animals, and poachers with automatic rifles. I don't want to read about a celebrities air plane or his ranch in Montana. I don't want to read magazines that for a quarter of the year could be subtitled The Journal of Lance Armstrong.

In short, they took the best parts of both magazines (which in Outside's case was damn near all of it) and homogenized and pasteurized them away into dribble, more cult of celebrity rag than a chronicle of an outdoor and active lifestyle. They were real and they became phony. National Geographic Adventure was an excellent attempt at doing something that had a resemblance to the classic Outside but they up and folded before its time.

I had long ago canceled my Men's Journal magazine by not renewing. I was still holding on to my memories of Outside, though, and had a three year subscription going at the time I finally had enough. I went from devouring every issue I could find, reading parts of it multiple times, to paging through it and dropping it in the recycle bin. This was the fate of the magazine who had brought us the single most fascinating article I've ever seen in a magazine, Jon Krakauer's account of the Everest tragedy in 1996, the basis for the book Into Thin Air. It also published the story Sebastian Junger wrote that later became his bestseller, The Perfect Storm.

Because of Outside I've bought virtually all the books recounting the '96 Everest disaster, which led to many books about Everest, which led to books about climbing other peaks (such as the deadlier K2), and on and on. The travel/adventure section of my book shelves is over twenty feet long (a lot of books).

And the bastards went and changed into Good Housekeeping on me. I canceled my subscription because really, by that time it was a fairly worthless chunk of paper. I'd hoped when I sent in my cancellation that they'd wake up, fire the current editor, and bring someone in to bring the magazine back to the glory days. Oddly enough, they merely sent me a refund check.

Reading matter that is so exciting, so enthralling, so magnetic that it can permeated what you think, what you do, affect your entire lifestyle, is such a rare and wonderful thing. Indeed, what better thing can come from the printed word?

Sylvester Stallone movies. Stallone pioneered the concept of violent action in short, hour and twenty minute movies. His point was that theater owners could squeeze in an extra showing and thereby make more money. Didn't matter that the movies sucked and continue to do so to this day; it's not about art or even craft, it's about demographics. Outside followed the same path in magazine-land, they sold out to what they thought was mass market appeal at the expense of its core consumer base. So I don't go to Sylvester Stallone movies, and I no longer read Outside. One of those things makes me sad.

Abstract expressionism

2011-03-07T09:30:00.001-05:00

I watched the Ed Harris vehicle "Pollock" on Netflix last night. The movie garnered an Oscar for Marcia Gay Harden (Best Supporting Actress) and a Best Actor nom for Harris. It's based on a biography of the abstract expressionist painter, Jackson Pollock.

The movie is, of course, much easier to understand than Pollock's art. Except when they talk about Pollock's art. Apparently Pollock managed to free the line from delineating shape, boundary or even image. Doesn't that make the line the shape? The boundary? Ultimately the image?

The movie is clearly a labor of love for Harris and it shows throughout the film. Unexpectedly fascinating is Harris painting with the techniques (including not having the brushes actually touch the canvas) and in the style of Pollock. Pollock's real art, at least to my ignorant eye, is more interesting and appealing than that in the film, but that's probably as it should be.

There is a wonderful scene (no, not the one where Pollock extinguishes a fire in a high society soiree) where Pollock's future wife, Lee Krasner (played by Harden), takes him home to her apartment. The camera is looking down a hallway and is completely stationary. There is no music in the scene. Harris/Pollock is standing in the foreground at the camera end of the hallway, with little ambient light. There is an indirect light in the bedroom at the far end of the hall and that serves to back light the characters' movements.

While Harris stands still, the Krasner character moves along the hallway, stopping to remove her coat and hang it on a hook. She moves back and forth in the hallway, getting ready for one knows not what, while Harris stands like a statue. Eventually Krasner moves to the bedroom and takes off her blazer. Then she takes off some more. She never looks at Pollock and we have no idea how aware of her he is. At the appropriate moment, he sheds his own jacket and walks down the hall away from the camera and into the bedroom. Krasner at once moves to him and begins removing Pollock's clothes, the expected result all along. There is no music in the scene, no sound other than that of the characters walking in the hall, swishing their coats, etc. Wonderful scene.

I didn't care for most of the soundtrack. It was a bit all over the place, and almost whimsical in places where the overall tone of the movie is fey and brooding. And if you know anything about Pollock, you know how the movie is going to end, a la "The Buddy Holly Story." You spend some thought on wondering how they're going to portray what you already know is coming. Which actually is the weakest part of the movie, the climactic ending. Lacking all subtlety and surprise, blaring the upcoming event through loud, screaming dialogue does nothing to aid the climax. Instead it diminishes it greatly. If you drop a ball on my head, I'll be startled and react accordingly. If you scream at the top of your lungs, "I'M GOING TO DROP A BALL ON YOUR HEAD NOW!" it's not going to come off the same way.

There's also a point in the film where Pollock is suddenly having an affair with a hot young thing, and tells Krasner he's in love. I don't know where she came from. While the girlfriend (played by Jennifer Connelly) professes her love for Pollock several times, no time was devoted to the development of this relationship so that this comes off as very unconvincing. How do they know each other? What does she see in him? How did they come to be? "I'M GOING TO BE YOUR GIRLFRIEND AND TAKE YOU AWAY FROM YOUR WIFE!"

Overall a solid movie, most notable for the acting performances. While I'd recommend it, the soundtrack, the light portrayal of the extra-marital relationship, and most of all the presentation of the ending keep the film from being the classic it clearly is trying to be.

I'm going to go draw lines now, and see if I can do it without boundary, form, or image. I suspect I'll just sit and scratch my head and pick nits from my scalp, but we all do what we can for our art.

Not Reading My Favorite Authors

2011-03-03T12:53:00.000-05:00

One day a few years back I went to search through the shelf for an as yet unread Dick Francis book. His titles are so short and often similar that I have little idea of whether or not I've read a particular book by checking its title. Sadly, after going through all of them, I realized that yes, I had actually read all of them. Which made me sad.

I have two of James Lee Burke's pre-Robicheaux books on the shelf, as well as his two most recent novels. I think James Lee Burke is one of the top (pick a number, any number, the lower the better) writers we have today.

Charles Dickens is an all-time favorite, but I have yet to read Bleak House and a number of others. He's one of the few writers I've read who make it feel as though they have a wire straight to your brain and what they're saying to you is more than the words that appear on the page.

The problem with reading all the books of your favorite authors is simply that you've read all the books by your favorite authors. I'm not sure what good it does to simply take up shelf space and leave unread volumes to themselves, but there's a certain anticipation, a strange appreciation to simply having them, to knowing they're there. I will read them, I'll read them all, and when I do, I know I'll feel some sort of loss, as I did when I'd inadvertently run through Dick Francis.

After his wife's death, Francis began collaborating with his son, Felix. The books are fine, clearly Dick Francis books, and I've read the first three. Now that Dick himself has left us, I'm clinging to the last remaining collaboration. I'm not sure why, or what this means, because I really do want to read it. It's just that then it will be gone.

Yes, I can always reread them, and I'm sure I will, in much the same way I've reread Len Deighton's Bernard Sampson books. It's not the same thing, though.

As to the Burke, I keep checking to see announcements for his next book, which I imagine should be out sometime in mid- or late summer. I just saw where Felix Francis has his first solo offering coming out in May. I have a feeling I'll read the first Felix before the last Dick/Felix, though.

And for Dickens? I have a complete, 12 volume hardcover set of the Oxford University Press's The Letters of Charles Dickens. If you look up how much each volume costs, you'll see how ridiculous it is to let them languish on the shelves. I do look at them often, despite the underwhelming quality of the books themselves (glued bindings on books that cost hundreds of dollars apiece? Really?), but I don't want them to reveal too much about Dickens' work before I get there myself.

So what's stopping me? One never knows. More contemplation is in order. I wonder if anyone else out there doesn't read books by their favorite authors. It sounds awfully strange when you ask that out loud...

Stupid Television Tricks

2011-02-26T20:40:00.000-05:00

So I mentioned Farscape last time, a science fiction show that spent four years on the Sci-Fi Channel (there was supposed to be a fifth, but Sci-Fi pulled the plug unexpectedly after a season-ending cliffhanger episode. Brutal. They settled for wrapping things up in a movie-length production called The Peacekeeper Wars.).

I discovered the show after a surgical procedure gone wrong left me bedridden for eight months. One of the side effects was an amazing inability to sleep, so I finally watched an episode at something like three in the morning. I'd seen commercials prior to that but I mean, hey, there's a character that's actually a puppet in there. Clearly I wasn't as broadminded as I'd always told myself and since have come to regret my unfounded prejudice. 'Cause the show is really good, and it has one of the best over-the-top villain of all time, in any show of any kind: the half-breed Scorpius, with his leather bug suit, a cooling system installed in the middle of his head, and an oily, upper crust British way of speaking that makes him really, for such an awful being, really appealing.

The show is one of those whose sum is greater than its parts. While certain episodes can be really, really well done, the show really shines in its multi-parters. I think, though, the real appeal is the growth and the change of the characters throughout its four year run. In that way the show reminds me of Dead Like Me, a non-science fiction show about a dead girl that is stunning in the development of its characters, the main ones and the role players (which makes it even more unusual).

Anyway, the point I'm trying to get to is really this: why does every science fiction show do episodes with the same themes we've seen since Philo T. Farnsworth?

Let's see, we've got an episode where the characters suddenly advance into old age (and once they figure out what's going on, they don't just stop the process, everyone becomes young again); we've got one where the characters swap bodies/minds; we've got the old crew member is guilty of murdering some local citizen somewhere; and my LEAST FAVORITE RECURRING THEME IN ALL OF TELEVISION:

The one where the characters are trapped in a video game.

Who the hell ever thought this was a good idea? The other examples (and there are plenty of others) have been showing up since Captain Kirk was helming the Enterprise in the original Star Trek. And they were repeated in all of the following Star Trek incarnations, and even in the X-Files, only tangentially science fiction. Yes, Mulder found himself trapped in a video game.

Now look, Farscape may have been on its way to jumping the shark. After all, the male and female leads were having a baby during season four. Introducing babies among the main characters has never been a good thing. It just changes the show's dynamic too much and rarely offers any sort of improvement. But trapped in a video game? Other than my earlier irrational distrust of puppets, I can say with confidence that this is an incredibly stupid concept, borne out by the actual episodes of the various lemming-like shows.

At least its the only one on my list that wasn't used in the original Star Trek. I used to watch reruns on a UHF channel with one hand on the antenna, trying to follow the action through the snowy picture. And thankfully, James T. Kirk and First Officer Spock never found themselves in the absurd predicament of existing within a virtual reality, let alone a freakin' video game.

But it was the sixties, though, and video games weren't video games back then. If Roddenberry and crew had attempted this nonsense, they would have been forced to drop Kirk and Spock into a Pong game. I have no idea what that would look like, and I'm not sad.

Unplugged

2011-02-25T14:43:00.000-05:00

We did the deed two weeks ago: we cut the cable with Time-Warner. So now that we're saving eighty-some dollars a month (and rising), we lost 50-some channels as well (which were shrinking). We tried a digital antenna, which works really slick (great picture, sound) but only gives us five channels. Which is better than it sounds, since they are all PBS channels and four of them are actually two sets of duplicates.

So we went the Netflix route. On the day I ordered a Roku box, my wife came home with a Wii from the company holiday party. There's something to be said for being able to out-Hula Hoop the entire organization (or at least those bold enough to try). In any case, I set up the Wii and installed the Netflix app, and damn skippy, what a slick deal.

Now instead of watching acres of crap from Time-Warner, we can pick our own crap and, here's the real beauty, not have commercials. None. Those volume jumping, obnoxious (why does every car commercial have to have a metal soundtrack these days?), jarringly interrupting wastes of human attention are gone.

The second really cool thing about Netflix is that you can stop a show, turn your device off, come back whenever, and the show will start again at the point you stopped it. Brilliant!

I was finding it harder and harder, nearing impossible, to watch an "hour-long" show on cable. With only a forty two or forty three minute show time, almost a third of the hour is made up of commercials. Whether you mind those damn things or not, the effect on the story being told is enormously detrimental. As soon as I'd start getting involved with what was going on on the screen, Bam!, a three or four or five minute commercial break. Could you imagine making Mission:Impossible or Perry Mason or any of the classic shows of the 70s (or whenever they had an extra ten minutes per episode) like this? It makes me wonder how many shows fail simply because the power to capture individual users is lacking in these abbreviations.

There wasn't a single show I watched on cable. I think the last was Farscape, otherwise I'd turn the TV on while I was eating. I can't watch the news without my blood pressure turning my eyes red, so I don't miss that (I still read whatever I read on the internet), and watching sports was largely ruined by again, loud, jarring commercials.

Seriously, I love watching baseball but the breaks are so at odds with the game that it just became unpleasant. I'd find myself watching the games with the remote in hand, thumb on the mute button, and that's no way to be.

Not having baseball is actually the biggest blow, at least at this point in time. I sent an e-mail to MLB.com about their package (you can subscribe and watch games, including spring training, over a Roku box) asking if they aired commercials. Sadly, they do. You pay for your device, you pay for your internet connection (and your router, etc.), and then $130 for a year's worth of baseball, and you have to watch their commercials. Argh. Yes, there's a way a savvy networker can disable the commercials on the computer but I'm not sure you can do so with the Roku box. Nothing comes to mind, anyway.

Having grown increasingly pessimistic over the years, someone will screw this up somehow. I'd hope enough people would "unplug" and force the cable companies to offer a la carte programming (you pick which channels you receive), or even better, the government forces the cable plant owners to lease their lines to other companies (and introduce competition). But the cable companies are trying to get Congress to go along with surcharges on Netflix traffic, waving the annual "we're going to run out of bandwidth" pirate flag up the pole.

Right now, though, my kids aren't exposed to inappropriately racy prime time shows, no Melrose Place type dramas taking place in junior and senior high schools (in other words, nothing like Glee), and a much larger measure of peace and tranquility is taking hold in my family room.

Which is nice, but I still miss baseball.

A Bit of Venting (with apologies in advance)

2011-02-23T10:36:00.000-05:00

Following our government and their actions may be our civic duty, but it should stop short of putting bullets in our brain. Unlike yourselves, this is the feeling I get when I watch/listen/observe too much of it.

So no, I don't talk about it here. I don't want to talk about it at all, usually, or really even think about it. Depression abounds enough. Our little town here is run by people who don't want to pass a budget based on revenue, they do them based on the "level of service" they feel the town ought to provide. It doesn't matter that the town's population is shrinking, that school enrollments are down, or anything else. When that fire truck has its third birthday, they need to get a new one, dammit. I'm sure it will go a town with more frugal management and hopefully serve them for many years to come.

Next month the town will vote on whether or not to go with the selectmen's budget or one that was revised lower. Apparently the lower one has already been voted on and passed and the next vote is some kind of finalization deal. Meanwhile the town is going ahead with their plan to implement sixty-five thousand dollars in raises this year.

Reality seems to work differently here.

In any case, in this, my once every very blue moon political post, here's a link to a set of eight charts that should mean a lot to all of us. Until the day that politicians from both parties see their jobs as sitting down and improving the country as opposed to promoting their own interests and keeping their parties elected, that is. Anytime now...

Quick "Silent Wall" Update

2011-02-22T09:13:00.001-05:00

The lovely people at Amazon, following whatever impossible to follow pricing algorithm (or perhaps merely skilled at picking series of random numbers), have Peter Rabe's The Silent Wall/The Return of Marvin Palaver for the trifling sum of $13.57. Two weeks ago it was at $19.95. For a time it was at $15 something. Logic dictates that waiting a month or two may yield a free book but I don't think publishing's that poorly off yet.

Click the link of Rabe's name to get to his Wikipedia entry. It may not be hip, witty or erudite, but I wrote it anyway. And the book itself, as I've pointed out before, has an introduction that too is not hip, witty or erudite, but I wrote that, as well. And did other stuff with the book but that's another story for darker places. (I just said that because it sounds spooky.)

You (don't) Have Mail

2011-02-20T17:24:00.001-05:00

My e-mail has been down for days. How many doesn't matter, since one feels like weeks when you don't like telephones. So if you've sent me an e-mail recently, chances are I'll get it one day soon. Shortly thereafter I'll get set up with an ISP and hopefully the recurring e-mail issues I've had will evaporate.

And there's nothing I like better than futzing with stuff that should just plain work, but on the other hand, after many years in IT, Microsoft and their ilk have made it clear that not a whole lot's going to change. I think this is true no matter how many times they want me to upgrade OSs. Then, with another new computer to run the new version well, I can ignore the new set of issues (bugs, driver updates, no longer supported peripherals) and keep the giant wheel of tech consumerism rolling along.

Bitter much? How come sunny days in the winter can be such downers? Cold temperatures and feet of snow on the ground beg for beautiful grey steel low-hanging clouds. I'm considering moving underground, perhaps a cave or an abandoned mine. We'll see how things shake out with e-mail servers first.

See, I'm rolling on my own damn wheel. Evening's coming but there's a giant spotlight for a moon coming around shortly. There'll be enough light to shovel by.

Go Get One!

2011-02-19T13:49:00.000-05:00

The new Peter Rabe book I've pushed here came out a few weeks ago. Everyone should own at least one copy. Not only would that make me happy, and the publisher ecstatic, you would be getting a really excellent volume of novel/novella/short story by a master.

The reviews I've seen so far are here:

Somebody Dies
Bookgasm
Pulp Serenade

I did a lot of work on this book, including contributing the introduction, and of course I'm hoping the book does well. If you like popcorn reading like James Patterson, this ain't it. If you like longer, slowly paced fiction like John LeCarre, this ain't it, either. It's Peter Rabe, for god's sake, and as with anyone as much a stylist as he is/was, the masses will never find favor. For fans of flat out good writing, fans of hard-boiled crime stories, and even (in the case of Marvin Palaver, at least) wickedly wry humor.

If I'd had no hand at all in the production of this book I'd have been first in line with a pre-order as soon as it was announced. And after reading the material more than a dozen times, I can safely say that I certainly was not disappointed. And I don't think most of you would be, either.

So don't wait, be the first on your block, complete your Peter Rabe collection, impulse buy, whatever. Just do it already. If nothing else, set it on the shelf and admire the cover, why don't you...

Unplugged

2011-02-03T19:16:00.000-05:00

Yes, we did it. We canceled cable. The tides of our monthly bleeding to good ol' Time-Warner have been bottled up for good. Being too old now to not have problems with just about everybody, I remember how expensive T-W cable was down in Florida. Magically, Knology moved in and planted their own green box on our boulevard, right next to the T-W green box, and suddenly the cable prices were cut in half! Unfortunately the magic didn't carry well over water and Tampa, with only T-W to play with, stayed twice what we were paying in St. Pete.

And yes, we went with Knology the second they went live. Their cable modem service was tremendously more reliable than T-W's RoadRunner, too (where I had to call them frequently, BS my way past the first level of "tech support," and then speak with someone who could fix what I already knew the problem to be).

Now that we live in tiny little town closer to Canada than to an actual city, we found ourselves right back in T-W Land. Not surprising to anyone, they still suck on the TV end, but the cable modem has been refreshingly problem-free. So every month our bill would go up by one or two dollars, and in December a whopping eleven or twelve dollars (a huge percentage jump), they would drop channels from the lineup (without any notice), and there doesn't seem to be any end in sight.

These increases aren't all their fault, of course. Fox and others who demanded fees for carrying their over-the-air broadcasts isn't helpful, nor are the networks who simply feel they ought to get more. But in a world (or country) where just a few networks own all the channels, where nearly one third of an hour's programming is commercials (and where said commercials are loud and jarring, I suppose to get noticed), and where each channel now seems to show multi-hour blocks of the same show. You know, not everybody loves Raymond, and certainly not for three hours at a time.

In short, we were part of a captive audience in a pool of not only shrinking channels, but shrinking programming options. I don't think they could give me a stronger impression of giving the lowest value service they could. The networks get money from the cable companies just for showing up; they get money for the ever more increasing commercials; they pay less for programming because they show two, three, or like SyFy, eight hour blocks of the same show; they show the same movies several nights in a row; and on and on.

As a consumer I am very unhappy. When I don't have a choice of services, when there's no competition, cable TV is a clear example of how we all lose. Until the Feds require the companies with the cable plants to allow others to use them, we're stuck. And no, I don't want satellites on top of my house (or their set top boxes at each TV), and I don't want to deal with their inevitable rising prices, either. Bottom line, I don't think I should have to pay a hundred bucks a month for television. De-regulation was a good thing for consumers for a good five minutes or so. After that, corporate interests seem to drift away from the rest of ours'.

With an antenna and a digital converter (you remember analog TV's) we can pull in seven channels. Two of them are duplicates, and four of them are Vermont public television channels, but the picture is nice. There's not a network in the bunch but we're so far away from the nearest city (Burlington, VT, Portland, ME, Manchester, NH) it's not really a surprise.

Soon, we may join NetFlix. We could even get a Roku box one day. On the other hand, we may just not bother.

Falling well

2010-12-06T17:22:00.000-05:00

It's been snowing around here for days now but strangely while mostly constant, we haven't had an overwhelming accumulation. Today's a different story, though, and I just finished the season's first snowblower (or as they say in the North Country, snowthrower) foray. This is being followed by the season's first laid-out-on-the-back-suck-every-watt-from-the-heating-pad adventure. Whoo hee.

Yesterday I went through the instructor seminar at the ski area where the elementary school kids get to ski through the official winter program. This is a wonderful program where the kids basically get a half day of school and then are bused off to various winter-type activities, the most popular of which is downhill skiing. This is my third year of instructing the kids and thus my third instructor seminar. The first two years went fine.

And then there was yesterday.

Due to changes in the blah blah blah, we spend the first hour and a half on the bunny slope (is it still politically correct to call it that?). When we went up the big mountain, we were a bit cold, my broken down body was a bit stiff, but when they told us to get loose by skiing down for a bit on our own, we took off one at a time. I was third in line and tried to let out the big dog eat, get right into some aggressive turning, get the feel of the skis that you just can't get from the vertically challenged bunny hill.

The snow was mostly man-made stuff, so it was a bit sticky, but it was on top of a lot of ice. The terrain wasn't consistent so it was a little bit of a challenge but nothing particularly difficult. Until I slid out of a snow patch onto an ice sheet and crossed my tails. I was going pretty fast and I immediately spun out, going backwards down the mountain with my tails crossed, thinking this is going to hurt when I fall straight backwards on my head. With all the stuff wrong with me, skiing only works if I DO NOT fall, so this wasn't good.

And then, boom, just like that, I was on top of it and could spin out of it, and not go home with the massive headache that I really didn't want. I came around, finished the free ski bit, and waited for the group.

Which included the two people instructing the course, who immediately gave us all a stern lecture about spinning, and how that may be appropriate to teach but not your school kids, and not here, and not now. Someone could have been hit, there would have been paperwork to fill out, and other unpleasant things.

I'm listening to this thinking that, yes, I agree with her, I wonder who was hot-dogging it down the mountain in those conditions in that setting. And then a nagging thought began to tuck at my nearly concussed brain.

Apparently my near wipeout-last-second-save was elegant enough for them to not have recognized it for the personal disaster it almost was, and maybe I should have just sucked it up and smashed my skull into the ice at a high rate of speed. I suppose I wasn't thinking. But I certainly wasn't showing off, just the opposite, I was crashing and burning.

At the school today I told this to two of the people that had been there. They, of course, think this is very funny. "That was you?" they said. They remembered the lecture, of course, and were only too happy to ridicule me.

I got in trouble for not falling. Oh, well, maybe next time.

Sign up and take advantage...

2010-11-20T18:15:00.001-05:00

“Hitch was with this great, high-heeled monster of a woman and the only reason I was along, I spoke Italian and Hitch did not. It turned out that the woman was not Italian at all, she was Sicilian, and her glue-voiced accent was so heavy that I understood almost as little as Hitch. Not that it mattered.”

Hello Everyone--
Stark House Press is happy to announce the long-awaited publication of the late, great Peter Rabe’s final manuscripts, The Silent Wall and The Return of Marvin Palaver. Along with a very rare Rabe short story, “Hard Case Redhead,” the books will appear in a single volume this coming January. The above passage is the opening from The Silent Wall, which Booklist calls “a claustrophobic noir, at times almost unbearably tense.” And it is certainly that. Matty Matheson has the run of an entire town but he is not allowed to leave, held captive by the Mafia for reasons he only thinks he knows.

The Return of Marvin Palaver is a darkly comic, highly complex short book about a swindle, payback and the incredible lengths one man will go to get his revenge against the man who ruined him. Rabe never wrote the same book twice and even with his talent for writing different kinds of crime fiction, the story will leave you breathless with its unique voice and dark sense of humor.

Shortly before his death in 1990, Rabe had sent these manuscripts to friend and author Ed Gorman, who’s had them in his possession until now. We’re ecstatic to be the ones who are finally bringing these books, along with the short story “Hard Case Redhead,” into the world. In “Redhead,” two thieves and their uninvited guest try to wait out the aftermath of a troublesome heist. It’s hard-boiled and noir and shows that Rabe could write just as well at shorter lengths.

Donald E. Westlake named Rabe and Hammett his two major genre influences, Bill Pronzini called him “a kind of fictional surgeon,” and Bill Crider said, “Few writers are Rabe’s equal in the field of the hardboiled gangster story.” If you’ve never read Peter Rabe, there’s no better time to start.

We’re also announcing the creation of the Stark House Book Club with a special offer of free shipping on all our books to everyone who signs up now. No minimum to buy, no obligation, just sign up and you’ll receive each new release, hassle free and with no shipping, as they are published. For a limited time, each new member can order as many backlist titles as they’d like for 15% off list price and again, free shipping. To sign up for the club, e-mail us at griffinskye3@sbcglobal.net. And to check out our list of authors and titles, visit our website at www.starkhousepress.com.

On tap for the near future are a two-in-one volume of vintage sleaze crime novels from the famous (under his real name) Don Elliott and a nice trio from Day Keene, and many other exciting titles. So sign up now and don’t miss a book!

To receive this newsletter automatically, please send your e-mail address. We look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,
Greg Shepard, publisher
Stark House Press

Been a while...

2010-11-20T18:01:00.000-05:00

Someone pointed out to me that I was writing a lot about e-books and related issues which I took as a sign that they were tired of it, too. So I stopped for a bit and spent some time devaluing the rest of my opinions as well. I'll try to stay away from e-books, at least for a while.

When I was a kid if I wanted to go to a book store I'd have to hop on a city bus, transfer once, then walk a bit, and I could get to a shopping mall with a B. Dalton in it. I remember picking up "Doorways in the Sand" by Roger Zelazny and giggling like an out of control stoner on the bus ride home as I read the first chapter. Imagine a young teenaged boy on a city bus, laughing so hard but trying desperately not to make a sound, tears streaming down a bright orange face, body vibrating faster than the bus's big diesel. Couldn't have been pretty.

I just had nearly the same experience but this time as an adult and safely in the privacy of my own home. Steve Hely's "How I Became a Famous Novelist" is funny. Very funny. The first hundred pages are really, really funny.

It's sort of a combination Nick Hornby, Brock Clarke's "An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England," and another third just plain funny. To a book person, the fictional bestseller list on the back cover is hilarious by itself.

The title tells the basic plot, the comparison to Hornby and Clarke indicate a bit more if you're familiar with them, and the book itself just won the 2010 Thurber Prize. I don't really know what that is but since Thurber is a famous humorist and this book is really funny, I can guess.

So not so much a review as an endorsement. If you want to laugh out loud, really, while reading a book, pick it up. If you're a bibliophile or anything close, it'll be just that much better. Just keep the beverages in the fridge while you're reading. We all know they come out the wrong places when we're not properly prepared.

Free Book Secrets

2010-05-15T11:53:00.000-04:00

Amazon has announced that sometime in the near future, free e-books, be they public domain, promotional, or what have you, will no longer be included in their Kindle bestseller list. Interesting. Will the free stuff appear on their own list?

The rationale appears to be that excluding these books will give someone a more accurate picture of something. I can't help wonder if this is obfuscation; if you really wanted to give an accurate picture of what people are downloading to their Kindles, I think you'd keep things as they are, or perhaps add a counter showing how many downloads/purchases are made for each title.

In other words, once this happens, the number one Kindle "bestseller" will likely not be the book that is most downloaded. Perhaps this will make things more clear to someone but I'd rather see what people are downloading. With two thirds of the top 100 list traditionally being free books, this is going to be a drastic change. There's no doubt in my mind that when people see a book on the top of whatever list they're more likely to investigate what it is. In other words, this move may help sales but I think it does so behind a bit of a veil.

I'm still waiting for the Kindle ad that says, "Pay your two fifty, read for free the rest of your life!" Now that's a sales pitch. We'll never hear it, but I've got to believe there are people out there doing it.

M & M's

2010-05-06T22:56:00.000-04:00

Lord help me, I can't stop. I have to do just one more, and one more and...

Right now you can order a first edition hardcover version of Scott Turow's sequel to Presumed Innocent, called simply Innocent. The book will cost you $15.11.

Or, you could order the Kindle version, for the strange price of $14.99.

Not only can you save yourself twelve cents, but you won't have to deal with a pesky book laying around when you're through reading it.

Twelve cents.

I know Amazon is long-chaining the hardcover version, but still, this is why e-books scare me. There's no reason to think they aren't here to stay, and that's fine. But there shouldn't be any reason that print books disappear, either. Are we seeing the creation of a purposeful marketing strategy that dovetails with the "this is the future, it may suck, but print is dead because electronic gadgets are always better than anything"?

No good can come of this, whatever this is.

What's my point, you say? What is the problem? I'm not sure, other than to say that books are generally too expensive and worthwhile books are too few. Is there really an industry-wide trend to steer readers away from print to e-books by depending on the power of the technophile? And is that really bad?

I don't have an answer. I think it's bad because it feels bad, and I like books. I think the iPad will sink in the marketplace (no, really--a cool toy that's too big, has no keyboard, no stand, with a glossy backlit screen, all for eight hundred bucks (if I want to connect to the internet away from home)) but there seem to be a lot of people announcing it will kill the Kindle.

Apparently the number of books printed last year was down, but revenues were up. This seems an obvious manifestation of higher prices, but possibly the significant number is the nearly 23 billion dollar size of the market. If we can sell books, e-books, Kindles, Sony Readers, Nooks, book displaying apps for our smart phones, even in-between devices like an iPad, is reading really a dying activity? Really?

Something is definitely off here and like politics and the New York Yankees, a million people can have a million opinions on what may be going on. I guess I'm not convinced publishers are giving readers, real readers, what they want. The answer may not be the mass market paperback, but one never knows.

Another one

2010-04-30T09:08:00.000-04:00

Peter Abrahams won the Best Young Adult Edgar for his book Reality Check. You can buy a version you can actually hold in your hand from Amazon for $8.99. Or, and you know what's coming, you could buy a version that requires no paper, no printing, no binding, no boxing, no shipping, no storing, no other shipping, no possible returns to the publisher, nothing very book-like other than its appearance once properly viewed on your electronic reading device. It's only a dollar more, at $9.99.

So on the one hand I've been worrying about Big Publishing pushing us all gently and subtly towards e-books because "it's the future" or whatever other BS. The reality is that if people spend yet more money for something that costs publishers less to produce, then print books will disappear. Will that happen? I don't see how it can, but that doesn't mean they won't try.

If the world were a better place, they'd sell five million paperback copies and ten electronic ones to those folks who would buy it just because they're cutting edge hip and the rest of us are an anchor on their future.

I can live with that. My kids think I'm cool anyway. Not that they've actually said so or anything, but I know. I know.

You can buy an Kindle version

Big Amazon

2010-04-23T11:28:00.000-04:00

I just read where Amazon's total revenue has gone up 46% and their net income 68%. As usual, I can only say that yes, I've contributed my share, I've done my part, I continued to drink the Kool-Aid. They can thank me by continuing to do things like sue North Carolina, who have sought records of state residents and what they've purchased, going back to 2003, for the purposes of trying to collect state tax.

If consumerism represents two thirds of our nation's economy, why do we constantly try to drag it down? Why do we even listen to crapweaselly schemes like VAT taxes? For that matter, why do we pay for parking, or penalize people for shopping some place?

(When I was a kid in Minneapolis, downtown was dead to anyone with a sense of smell. They put up an upscale indoor mall called City Center, which created a lot of buzz but few customers (though they did keep the winos out). Then they offered free parking in the nearby parking ramps and boom, a thriving marketplace was born. It did so well, in fact, that other shops opened up and downtown retail became a destination shopping target. Clearly, the time was right to exploit the situation and, um, charge for parking. Downtown shopping was Tombstone, Arizona in a matter of months. This was years ago; now they have sports stadiums downtown and all of the old buildings are gone. If I were a wino I may be completely lost on Nicollet Mall or Hennepin Avenue, but that's another story...)

Does this make sense?

2010-04-21T21:56:00.000-04:00

No matter how much I try to make sense of all of the issues that the existence of e-books pose, I keep coming back to rising consumer prices. Which may be completely wrong, either because no one actually knows or I am actually just really, really bad at extrapolating anything out of this stuff. Or I'm just a bad guesser.

Anyway, publishers want to charge more for e-books. You would think that since there are no printing costs, shipping costs, distrubutors' cuts, more shipping costs, returns, etc., that e-books could actually retail for less than the cost of a printed book. But now, especially with the agency model coming into vogue, most major publishers will charge a minimum of $12.99 per book.

Okay, so what effect will this have on trade paperbacks that go for, say eleven or twelve bucks from an online retailer?

You see where I'm going with this. This would be absurd. But since we already know what they want to charge for e-books, than all they can do is to raise the cost of the print book to equal or exceed the e-book. This would seem to get to a higher margin and lower cost situation but at no benefit to the consumer/reader.

You'll have rising prices for a diminished product (I think most people would agree that the very nature of a physical book vs. an electronic file denotes a more substantial product; this can be argued, I suppose, but either you value a book or you don't, the actual words aside). In other words, the existence of e-books can be used in an attempt to either push people toward electronic products or simply to accept a higher cost. It's that higher price that has a greater chance of affecting demand moreso than the premise that available hi-tech gadgets will always supplant anything older than your first dog.

Again, as an endless repeat, I think what ought to happen is that a niche for e-books be created and allowed to grow to whatever size of the market would like to see. But when a small number of entities control the majority of a market, an oligopoly as it were, they can dictate more than respond to the market. I've already been driven to second hand books to a degree I absolutely rejected not so many years ago. But a used book vs. new book isn't much of a contest. Fortunately, despite the fact that I own two e-book readers (and other than experimenting haven't spent a dollar on new e-books), if you price me out of the market now I can make do with a) the books I already own, b) the library, and c) public domain e-books.

Bring back real mass market paperbacks. Hell, bring back pulp magazines. How cool would that be? I have no idea what The Shadow's been up to since the war in Europe ended.

Good No-Shouting

2010-04-14T10:38:00.000-04:00

Following yesterday's post, I see that Amazon's Kindle price of Paul Harding's "Tinkers" has been reduced to exactly that of the paperback print version, $8.22. Perhaps this model makes sense: pay a single price and pick your format, instant delivery and a mere text file, or an actual battery-resistant book.

(I kind of like the idea of buying the print version and getting an e-copy for no-additional cost; I've already paid for the book, now it's a matter of how I choose to read it. But that's a different pipe dream.)

More likely the pricing difference was nonsensical and this was the simplest way to resolve it. In any case, no one called my a lying buffoon so this has been a winning situation for me.

Very Small Experiment

2010-04-13T13:17:00.000-04:00

Some people have very violently yelled at me (electronically, thankfully) for pointing out instances where Amazon's Kindle prices are actually higher than print versions of the same book. These scary people are basically implying that I'm making it up, or some such nonsense.

I just saw where Paul Harding was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel, Tinkers. As of this moment, the Kindle price is $9.99, and the trade paperback is $8.22.

The obvious point to make is that prices fluctuate; many Kindle prices have started out high, especially, it seems, when the publication date has been recent. They then often go down, in the meantime prompting rabid posters and e-mailers to be mean to others.

I haven't been shy about my feelings toward e-books: there is a niche for them, and they will co-exist with print books. My two big fears are that because "New York" publishers have become so consolidated that they will be able to dictate what form their offerings take, and that the "print books are better but technology will take over no matter what" folks will enable a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Clearly, any case where an electronic version requiring no printing, no shipping, no distribution and no shelf space can command higher prices than a print version, which requires all of those things, is not a sustainable thing. And the agency model that many publishers are turning to for their e-books is simply going to make things even less clear.

I have a Sony Reader and I have a Kindle. They're great to travel with, but you know what? I read the public domain books that cost me nothing to download (see my earlier post about two thirds of the Amazon's bestselling Kindle list being available for $0.00). I have two readers but I spend, um, nothing on actual e-books. One day I would like to read all of Richard Burton's "Arabian Nights" volumes and if I don't come across an affordable set in an antiquarian bookstore (I missed an opportunity years ago in Florida), I'll read the e-version. I could read e-books for the rest of my life and never pay a cent for them. Yes, the authors have all been dead forever but they're still books I'd like to read.

But I digress, which is easy to do with such a big and complex topic. The point is that somewhere along the line either the print version of Harding's book will go up, or the Kindle version will go down. Since the latter seems extremely unlikely, and it's difficult to see the former, the experiment I mentioned will simply be to watch this title and see what happens.

In the meantime, nobody yell at me for pointing out the greater e-book price, it's real, it's right there on the site. Until it isn't. But really, I'm not lying, once all the probing was done the ship put me right back in my bed, and only one side of my face was tanned. Spooky.

Book Review

2009-12-02T23:14:00.001-05:00

I'd quibble with the reviewer about what his definition of "noir" is and that Paul Cain can be a "woefully overlooked" author when he only "wrote" one book (it was assembled from a series of short stories), but other than that, this is an excellent piece. It's a review of one of the books (containing two of the books) that I've proofread lately. You should read the review and then, of course, buy the book. It's very good.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-book25-2009nov25,0,261128.story

World Without Men

2009-09-26T16:15:00.000-04:00

I have a problem with the show "The Real Housewives of Atlanta." Only two of the women are married and therefore only two of the women have husbands. That leaves three or four that are single and not housewives, or any kind of wives, at all.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that the show would be improved if the girls were married, although part of that is that I'm not sure the show could be improved. Not because it's sublime but because no matter what they do it stands, alongside much of reality or "partially scripted" shows, as a completely vapid waste of time.

And yet here I am, writing about it. This can't be good.

Inglorious Basterds

2009-09-11T17:00:00.000-04:00

Saw the thing last night and was disappointed. I've read some pretty sloppy reviews by folks that have loved it so I wanted to throw out a few things that seem to me may have been overlooked.

First, the good: most of the acting for most of the movie is fine. Brad Pitt, to me, has a certain charisma but not a lot of appeal as an actor. I thought he limped through his breakout role in "Legends of the Fall" and he's not much better here. He wears a near constant expression that looks somewhere between the crooked mouth set now frozen on Burt Reynolds' face and a man caught sucking a lemon. His Tennessee accent is odd but consistent although he delivers while seeming to impersonate his pal George Clooney's clipped mode of speaking in "O Brother Where Art Thou."

Another thing that took away from the acting were the cliches, both spoken and acted, that tore me out of the movie with a lurch.

The movie is told in chapters, reminding me of Tarrantino's description of his "Pulp Fiction." And while each chapter follows a different plot line, the juxtapositioning works well until the last chapter where the narrative seems to run out of drive just before the climax. Because the previous chapters don't set enough hooks for the ending, and because at the time you I didn't know it was the ending, the finale came off flat and forced.

Perhaps the biggest flaw is the depiction of the Basterds themselves: they simply didn't do enough. They were formed, we jump ahead to their established history, we see the ending of one adventure, and throughout the rest of the movie we see them in small groups in different places. Are there more of them? Will they be coming together? Whoops, it's over, I guess not...

In the end I'd say that some of the writing was very smart, some of the performances very well acted, and even halfway through I was smiling at how much I was enjoying some of the things I was seeing. But it was ultimately disappointing, very much so, and for me it's one of those what-might-have-been movies. If an extended director's cut were ever released, I might try it again but otherwise, a revisiting of either "Pulp Fiction" or "Jackie Brown" would be much more enjoyable.

Brilliantness

2009-08-29T08:52:00.000-04:00

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6685324.html

No, really.

Ohmigod, Another One...

2009-06-12T13:09:00.000-04:00

I just saw another book on Amazon's site (Stieg Larsson's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo") that is MORE expensive in the Kindle edition than it is a print version. Unlike the first book I found like this, this edition is the trade paperback and goes for $10.17. The Kindle version is priced at $11.99, $1.82 more.

Um, so right now today I can pay $359.00 for an electronic reader, then pay higher prices for the electronic versions of books? Geez, how fortunate we all are to live in such technologically advanced times.

I read on a blog where an author was posting his unpublished books on the Amazon site for sale in the Kindle format. He could charge $1.59 and make .70 per download. This means that Amazon's share is 56% of the consumer price, which beats the hell out of iTunes' 35%.

I suspect the great miscalculation in the amazing Kindle project is that the technology is somehow so compelling that price is no object. As a believer that the publishing industry as a whole is shooting itself in the foot with book prices that are simply too high, I can only believe that at the end of the day, this whole Kindle thing will be a small footnote along the path. Books will be written about it, I'm sure.

And if you're willing to pay a buck or two extra, you can read it on an actual Kindle.

Still...

2009-06-08T20:55:00.000-04:00

I can't help it but I gotta say more. I've been trying to hold it in...

Still an Amazon fan, still not sure what they're trying to kindle with a Kindle. I saw a book last week that is actually a dollar MORE for the Kindle version than the physical hardcover. I just clicked on a random cover shot on their site (Melissa Gilbert's memoir) and the Kindle version's a whole dollar and some odd change cheaper than the hardcover.

Really, what are they Kindling? Are they expanding the e-book market, or just their bank account? If I bought books all priced at the same rate as the Gilbert one, I'd have to buy four hundred books to break even on the cost of the reading device.

Rather than call it "Kindle," how about something more accurate like, "E-book Reader That Displays Books Sold According to the iTunes Model." iTunes apparently gets 35% of everything sold through their site. They get the biggest slice of the pie, more than the artist, more than the label, more than anyone.

Perhaps that's fair, just, and the way it ought to be. I can't help but think, though, that if distribution is so lucrative, and can be done by anyone with a web server, that at some point labels will sell their bands' music from the labels' own sites. Or the from the bands' own sites. Once the consumer is used to buying music online and the artist is well enough known that their fans will seek out their sites, why iTunes?

Yes, this is already being done to some degree but not enough to diminish iTunes. I think that ultimately expensive distribution will always drive manufacturers (in this case writers and artists) to find cheaper methods. I don't think that's the fire the Kindle is supposed to be igniting.

Don't leave any money on the table, charge what the market will bear, charge for the hype. Yeah, whatever. To live up to their hype they'd need to make e-books attractive and available to people who are reluctant consumers.

My point is that buying into the Kindle way is just too darned expensive. Charging prices that are so close to the actual book price is simply laughable, especially when your biggest potential audience are actual book buyers. There's a market, sure, but it's a subset of readers, ones that treat books as disposable objects, not items worthy of a Library. I suppose if they spend more money on books than ordinary book lovers they could make Amazon happy.

For the rest of us, I say bring back the mass market paperback. Sell some books at five or six bucks a pop and maybe they could kindle something more substantial, like more actual readers. A new reader isn't as likely to shell out over three bills for a machine and THEN shell out so much for each file, er, book than they would be to come out of a bookstore with a handful of paperbacks. Just two more cents in the pickle jar.

Not Politically Correct...

2009-05-01T14:29:00.000-04:00

...or justifiably uttered in any kind of public forum, but this is what popped into my mind yesterday...

I saw an AP headline that read "8 year old Saudi bride divorces 50 year old husband." The first thought I had was how sick that an 8 year old would be married off to anyone, let alone an old man. My second thought was surprise that somehow, someway divorce would even be possible for the girl. Sadly, this was followed by the flawed notion that the girl just didn't give the relationship enough time.

I'm sure this says something about me but whatever it is, I'm probably better off not knowing.

Weasels on the Wire

2009-03-08T16:45:00.000-04:00

Here's a review I left for an Amazon Marketplace reseller after ordering a "New" book that was clearly used; by that I mean very obviously read as opposed to some kind of shelf wear. Or, as the seller maintains, transportation mishap. There are so many clear lies that it compels one to assume all of his questionable statements are also untruths. I won't get specific because no one really cares. The mystery in all of this is how someone can fudge on the truth, get called on it, and then fudge it some more. It seems likely that his offer of a refund in exchange for me deleting the rating is how he does business: exagerate/lie about the book, send it out, if called on it offer a refund. Good business model. And if he fails, it's all my fault...

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"This book isn't in "New" condition as stated. The front cover is dinged in two places as well as bent (along with about a fifth of the pages in the lower right corner), and the paper edges are dirty, especially along the top. Given this and the fact that the book lays as though it's been read, it should be hard to call this "New.""

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Hello Rick,

This is J* from B*. Firstly, I'd like to express my sincere gratitude for purchasing your book, Black God's Kiss, from our new company. B* is a brand new seller on Amazon, and I know many of our customers have taken a chance in buying from a seller who does not yet have the standing of the more established Amazon sellers.

I read your feedback this afternoon and I want to apologize for your book not arriving in the condition you expected. We do screen all our orders prior to shipping, but I do know damages can occur if packages are mishandled during transportation.

As a new Amazon seller receiving feedback's of 3 or less is devastating. To be honest, it will only take a few negative feedback's to drop us to a 96%. To buyers and sellers alike this feedback is below acceptable standings and will hurt our sales substantially.

Therefore I would like to compensate you in such a way that would make your shopping experience with B* better than a 3.

If it pleases you, I would like to offer you an additional 15% discount towards the purchase of your book.

Again, I apologize for this inconvenience and the frustration it has caused you. I hope you will allow me to rectify this situation.

I look forward to your response.

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Hey, J*:

I appreciate your offer of a discount on the book I purchased although I'm not sure how it would help. The problem, as I said in my review, was that the book was not in the stated "new" condition. It isn't even in "used--like new" or a "fine" used condition. The book has plainly been read, not overly carefully, and the bends in the cover and pages, and especially the dirt smudges along the page edges and the way the book lies when placed flat certainly weren't caused by "mishandling during transportation."

I'm sorry you're unhappy with my review, though probably not more so than I am with a "very good" used book sold as "new." If this review prevents disappointment for another customer or else causes a more accurate book listing, then I think it's doing what it was intended to do. I buy a lot of Amazon Marketplace books and have only rarely had issues of any kind. I try to be conscientious, accurate, and aware of what I'm saying.

Sincerely,

Rick Ollerman

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Hi Rick,

Thank you for your quick response. I certainly understand your dissatisfaction. All I can say is that your book was purchased directly from the publishing house, so I can assure you the book has never been read. I don't doubt your observance. I am currently at the Book Spring Show in Atlanta, but upon my return I will have a serious discussion with my staff about our quality inspection prior to shipping.

We deal with a lot of books, and I admit sometimes we incorrectly list the condition of the books. (Though none of our books have ever actually been read, some are damaged by improper packing by the publisher.) This is why we spend the extra labor certifying that the condition of the book being shipped is the condition of its listed state.

I work very hard to ensure my customers are satisfied, which is why even with sabotage from large Amazon sellers, my company remains at a 99% feedback percentage. Since my offer was obviously not acceptable to you, I am willing to refund your entire cost including shipping. I lose my postage, labor, mailer and book cost, but I gain customer confidence by assuring your dissatisfaction is not acceptable to me. From time to time my customers come to me with complaints (as with any business) but I always make sure they feel I care about their business.

Your feedback won't destroy me, but it will hurt, and in the end the only people who lose are the people I am forced to lay off from decreased sales. I hope my offer of a full and complete refund changes your mind about removing your feedback.

Again, I do apologize about this inconvenience and the frustration it has obviously caused you. (Why else would you want to leave my company limp.)

I look forward to hearing from you again.

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Hey, J*:

I don't really appreciate the insinuation that I may have some reason for causing you to lay off people or "leave your company limp." My only agenda was to leave honest feedback on a questionable transaction.

That being said, I was going to delete my rating and be done with it but while at the site I stopped to read the other reviews. In the first two pages there are four instances of people who had the same problem I did. This would suggest that you, your company, or somebody is conspiring to sell books falsely labeled.

I suggest that if you end up laying off people or losing firmness in your company it is only yourselves you have to blame. Since my case does not appear to be an isolated one, I didn't remove my feedback rating. You appear to have earned it.

Sincerely,

Rick Ollerman

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Hi Rick,

I consider this case closed and will not bother you further. You are correct, in a very short time span my company has received 3 similar claims. I also wrote each of these customers in hopes of reaching a resolution. Again, if I did not care what you thought I would not spend time trying to make the transaction right by you.

If nothing else, please accept my apology for seemingly insinuating malice on your part. I meant no disrespect. I am a young, freshly-graduated, entrepreneur who obviously has a lot left to learn. I do appreciate your feedback (via your e-mail responses) and will do my best to not become frustrated when unable to reach an agreement with customers.

I don't expect your business, at least for a while, but truly hope you might check us out in the future to see an improved feedback rating.

I wish you the best.

I see it but I...

2009-03-03T13:31:00.000-05:00

I've thought about this for years (although I've shared the notion sparingly; I didn't see how it could really happen) and now, good gawd, it's happening. Hopefully it will last and spread.

Nelson is offering some of their titles as part of their NelsonFree program. Once you buy a hardcover from the line, you are enabled to download an audio version of the book or an eBook version (available in several different formats).

And all without raising the price of the book. Read this:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6641258.html?nid=2286&source=link&rid=829785075

If I could choose the future, this kind of thing would certainly be a part of it.

Book Games

2009-01-29T11:57:00.000-05:00

Okay, so book sales keep going down, we know that. I think that's going to continue because the books are so expensive and people simply can't afford them. Publishers can spin their wheels all they want comparing their cost to that of DVDs, computer games, or light sweet crude, the problem remains. I believe that, for the most part, people who buy books want to buy more units than, say, your typical video game purchaser.

(Why kill the mass market paperback? They said sales their sales were down and trade paperbacks numbers were up; therefore, eliminating the mass market format in favor of the crappy and expensive trade format means more money in the pocket, right? No, it means fewer books sold, regardless of the numbers of the mass market format as a whole. I looked for the mass market version of a science fiction book--no longer available. What is in print, lucky me, is a trade paperback version for fifteen dollars. Guess what I won't be buying?)

Anyway, if bookstores are so convinced that newer, alternate forms of entertainment are what is to blame for bad business (note that I don't think I agree with this, at least not across the board), why not sell video games? Take out those endless racks of DVDs and CDs and put in precisely those forms of entertainment that are actually selling.

This seems quite obvious to me, but they'd have to offer them at competitive prices. C'mon, who out there has actually gone to a Barnes & Noble or a Borders (or an independent) and actually plunked down list freaking price for a DVD or CD? That shelf space may as well be designated as the Display or Browsing section because they sure can't contribute much to the bottom line. I'd be willing to bet that they don't cover their costs per square foot in an average store.

The only argument against this that I can think of is a water and oil mentality, where books and these newer entertainment forms can't mix because they really oughtn't. Get over it. Sell something and stay alive. Publishers sure seem to have sold out, the booksellers may as well, too. Something positive needs to happen until books can become affordable again even though that seems to be the absolute last thing publishers are willing to consider.

eBurns

2009-01-08T10:18:00.000-05:00

I love Amazon. Their books sometimes ship with missing or cursory packing in the boxes. But most of the time they come very well packed. Occasionally other problems crop up: the wrong books show up, books listed as available really aren't, etc. They used to discount all books, now they don't. They used to discount books more or less uinformly; now they don't. They used to have a "featured book" listed on their home page at an extra special discount; now they recommend something based on your buying habits. I HATE this. I already know what I like, open up new doors and introduce me to something I might not be familiar with. At the very least, allow me to choose whether to see a featured book or the ones based on my history. It'd be easy enough to do (but they declined when I e-mailed them).

Now I must make clear how top notch their customer service is. They are accessible, they speak English over the phone, and despite some occasional odd responses to issues via e-mail, they do everything that can be expected to make you happy. Yay, Amazon.

But...

Along comes their Kindle eBook, their expensive and bludgingly obvious named eBook reading device. Everyone knows about it. eBooks scare me, though, mostly because I see too many comments from people saying things like, "Print books will disappear and be replaced with electronic devices. I wish it weren't so, but technology is technology and if it can be done electronically, it must be better."

I'd say this is utter hogwash, despite the fact that I have and use a Sony Reader (I use it instead of large print books to work my repaired right eye; plus, it's good on the road if I'm away from home for long enough periods). But I can't discount the notion of the self-fulfilling prophecy. I think publishing is enough out of touch with the reading public that someday they will only offer us eBooks, tell us that's what we, the market, really want, and poof! it will thus be so.

The point in all this is that I caught part of an Oprah a few weeks ago where she gushed over the Kindle, said it was her new favorite thing or some such, and gave everyone in the audience one to take home. Cool stuff. But more than once she talked about how much money everyone will save on books. I've written before about how this just isn't the case although logically you might assume that it would. After all, there's no paper in an eBook, no shipping, no packaging, no handling.

A while back Amazon began showing their Kindle bestseller list right below their print book bestselling list. I took the top five from each list, which were all the same titles, and compared their current prices:

Title Book Kindle
Breaking Dawn 12.64 11.38
Eclipse 10.99 9.99
The UltraMind Solution 16.50 14.85
New Moon 6.04 6.04
Twilight 6.04 6.04

In other words, I could buy the print editions of all of these books for a total of $52.21. Since the amount is over $25 I'd qualify for free shipping. If I bought the Kindle editions of these books, I'd be spending $48.30. I'd save a whopping $3.91, assuming I'd already shelled out $359 for the Kindle and didn't mind having DRMed files that are useless to me without batteries.

Sadly the other notion regarding eBooks that I can't seem to let go of is that they will just be an attempt for publishers to charge the same price while lowering their costs by a whole lot. This will not change publishing, it will further change readership. I can't see how that would be a good thing.

Lastly, I'll repeat something I've said before: a collection of books is a library; think of all that word entails. A collection of eBooks is a floppy disk. Or maybe a CD. I suppose even a Kindle. All of that is something different.

Off the Rails Again

2009-01-06T18:05:00.000-05:00

Yes, yes, yes, I've ranted over and over about what I think the biggest single problem in publishing is today: the books cost too much, and most of them aren't very good anyway. I am down to buying at least 80 (maybe 90) percent used books; it would be very difficult for me to "find" a new author because I'm not going to drop the money for a new book on a wild guess.

I hear theories that publishing is hurting because people are reading less (books cost too much), the blockbuster mentality caters to known sellers and hurts the nurturing of new writers (whose books cost too much), and today I read one from author Dave Zetlserman that postulates the flood of manuscripts by people using computers has bogged down the industry (regardless, books still cost too much).

I just saw on Amazon what may be the ultimate example of this absurdity. Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir's Executioner series, started in 1971 and running to something over 130 books, are being reprinted in trade paperback editions for $14.95. Each. (Their books cost too much.)

These were paperback originals that originally sold for somewhere in the neighborhood of a dollar (these books didn't cost too much, even back then). Who is the market for these books? Millionaire retirees? Who do the publishers think can afford these? And they want to tell me used books are bad for business?

I'm telling you, Mr. Publisher, if it weren't for used books, I really would be reading less. There's a difference between how much people read and how much people are willing to spend. Maybe you all should get into the video game business and give publishing back to people who actually care about books. Given all the layoffs, restructurings, and acquisition freezes that have been reported lately, what you're doing now isn't working. And it's not going to (a lot of it is because your books cost too much).

Colored Underpants

2008-11-07T10:13:00.000-05:00

Elections are finally over and here in New Hampshire, perhaps the most politically involved state I've ever been around, the mailmen can finally seek treatment for the hernias they developed delivering daily junk from every conceivable candidate. Strangers with mysterious lists can stop ferreting out our house, mispronouncing our names, and entreating us to "get out the vote" and leave us to our seclusion. Next election I may rent a three-headed pit bull and install him at the base of the driveway.

For years I've been somewhat numbed by the two party hammerfest they both pull on each other. I no longer believe in Democrats or Republicans. I'm not too sure about Ralph Nader, either, and the Libertarians need to keep their candidates out of federal penitentiaries if they want to gain credibility with me. The truly disturbing thing to me, though, is the passage of anti-gay-marriage amendments in Arizona, Florida and California.

I am neither for or against these kinds of rights. It's like asking me if I think people in town really ought to be wearing brown shoes instead of black, or white after Labor Day. It's another individual's business, not mine. What's been missed as far as I can tell, what I've seen no one discuss on any news show, is the legitimacy of asking the question.

When the founding fathers put together our system of government, they feared what they called "the tyranny of the masses." If you put up for question the rights of any minority group to the majority, what is likely to happen? The minority gets trounced time and again. This is why we have a representative government based on democratic principles as opposed to a purely democratic government: American society was not intended to be dictated by "the tyranny of the masses."

Arguing whether or not marriage should be between a man and a woman only, or what the consequences of a society where gay marriage is allowed would be, or what color underwear the pizza cook is wearing, serve to cloud what is perhaps the most salient question: what right have we, the straight majority, have to dictate the rights of the gay minority?

The answere is that we don't, or we shouldn't. The framers didn't think so, and I don't either. How can these amendments even be put to referendum? How can we even ask the question? Nothing would make me happier than to see a judicial challenge make its way to the Supreme Court and have a ruling invalidating these state amendments because even proposing them is unconstitutional.

I have no idea whether the language of the Constitution actually supports this or not, but one can hope. I think we've let ourselves down by compromising our society through ignorance of how our society was supposed to be structured. Government should protect the rights of minority groups from the majority. What happened this week just isn't what America is supposed to be. It makes me sad.

Dark Matter

2008-11-07T10:04:00.000-05:00

There are news reports out that cosmologists may finally be able to "see" dark matter by using gamma rays. The existence of dark matter has been postulated for years even though it cannot be seen any way. It's believed to exist because the movement of galaxies seem to be affected by a certain amount of gravity that cannot be accounted for by any observable mass.

This is all well and cool, but I'm kind of hoping there is no actual dark matter. How cool would it be if the source of gravity were not unseen mass but something completely unforeseen? Collision points with extra-dimensional universes? Some new branch of physics where very, very large bodies have their own rules, like the opposite of quantum physics?

I'd love to see the mystery solved, I just want the solution to live up to the romance of the problem.

Publishing Bites

2008-10-15T13:21:00.000-04:00

First post in a while, attempt to be succinct:

To all those who idiotically proclaim that "real" books will inevitably disappear and be replaced by eBooks, I say:

a) Books are intrinsically valuable in and of themselves. Holding a book, browsing shelves, smelling ink and paper; these things cannot be improved upon with electronic technology. Indeed, technology does not enhance either books themselves or the act of reading.
b) I hate it when my Sony Reader's batteries run down and I have to recharge before I can use it.
c) I've dropped and broken a PDA before so I know what's in store should the Reader take a fall. I've also dropped books before, taken them to the beach, read without glare and in different intensities of light. Yay, me.
d) How long does a computer last? Perhaps more relevantly, how long does Microsoft or Apple allow an operating system to last without compelling an upgrade? Ever lose all your files on a disk? Ever fight digital rights management (DRM) while migrating/changing/upgrading your computer? Ever wrestle with iTunes over accessing the music you've purchased on a new computer?
e) As I've said before, a collection of eBooks is a CD. A collection of books is a library. This is on a level all its own.

I am babbling on about this crap because I used to think that the market would dictate what would survive and what wouldn't but that was either pure naivete, ignorance, or stupid wishful thinking. Too few entities control too much of the publishing world and it seems that they are trying awfully hard to push things in a direction that would only be good for them. I can't understand eBooks that sell for ten or more dollars any other way.

A couple of years ago I read a story about how mass market paperback sales were falling and publishers wanted to phase them out in favor of trades. The same story also mentioned that they'd like to eventually stop producing hardcovers as well (I ranted extensively about this in earlier blog entries). As time has passed, mass market pb's have been mostly replaced with those inch-taller abortions (with a corresponding price increase of a third) and trades and hardcovers are still around.

I still have not, nor will I ever (I pray) purchase one of the new mass markets. I wish I knew how well the sold as opposed to the traditional format. It's difficult to believe that books, virtually identical to the old format but for the added inch in height but signficantly more expensive, could sell more rather than fewer books. I used to buy paperbacks to try out authors, to keep reading authors who were readable but not for whatever reason hardcover necessities, or just to take a flyer on a cover that looked cool. At ten bucks a pop (or nine or eight or seven or six) I just can't afford that.

So I used to buy the books of all of the authors I wanted to read. I no longer do that. I buy hardcovers by James Lee Burke and Dick Francis every time they come out. I used to buy mass market pb's of most of my regulars; many of these books no longer even appear in mass market form, period. When I take flyers I do it with used or remaindered books. Mass market paperbacks are not an option because I won't pay ten bucks and participate in what seems so obvious a scam. I'd rather buy a discounted hardcover from Amazon than an overpriced trade too often printed on low grade paper with covers whose natural state seems to be an irreducible curl.

The last time I mentioned the name of one of the authors whose work I no longer keep up with (don't quite want to spring for the hardcovers, the mass market pb's are the scam editions, and the authors are popular enough that buying a new/used one online too often results in receiving a dreaded book club edition), I heard from his son. He told me that his father, as well as other authors he knew, universally despise the new pb format. So I won't mention names but again, I cannot be unique here. I buy less books because they are too expensive. I buy fewer new books because of the formats in which they are offered. I buy more used books which may not be my first choice but keeps my library stocked although at the expense of putting royalty money in the authors' pockets.

This all adds up to, this all has to add up to, fewer book sales for publishers. Not less reading, perhaps not even that much less actual book sales (if you count used, remainders, eBay, etc.). In other words, I can't see any other way that publishers are not pouring fuel on the fire of declining sales. Publish better books at cheaper prices. Get away from the Hollywood blockbuster mode of mega-advances for some while leaving pittances for others. People will enjoy buying books instead of shaking their heads, their wallets upside down, and disposing of their income elsewhere.

In conclusion, I've had two kids pulling me away from this as I try to write it so as too often happens, coherency and conciseness likely take it on the nose. But there are points in here somewhere, critical ones, I think, for the publishing industry. They offer options but they are few and unpalatable. They're paving their own road and while their destination may dovetail with mine, I can't afford their proprietary limo ticket. I'm left either sticking my thumb out, showing a little leg, or waiting for the bus. By the time I get there, there may not be much left to see. See you in the library.

Killing Books

2008-08-11T18:00:00.000-04:00

By reducing the discounts on many of their books, Amazon has raised their prices. Again. It's been a few years since they've done this (I think the last time was when they simply stopped discounting mass market paperbacks altoghether), and I'm not counting the mandatory Amazon Marketplace shipping price (from $2.99 to $3.49 to $3.99 in a little more than a year). This makes me sad for a number of reasons.

I realized a few weeks ago that I no longer really buy books, I scrounge them. I will not be coerced into buying the inch-taller, two-dollar more expensive "mass market" paperbacks. Rather than drop ten bucks per on these marketing monstrosities, I'll buy a used hardcover. Even with shipping I can more than likely get the book for less. Which is sad.

Yes this is an opinion but I just cannot believe the way to sell more books is to charge more for the same book in a different form factor. Or merely to charge more. I've blogged about this extensively so I'll cut myself off here, but geez, if it costs me fifty bucks for five fricking paperbacks, how many do you think I'll buy? Seriously.

Spot-checking Amazon shows that smaller presses' offerings are suffering the reduced discounts. Look, guys, I only have so much money to spend each month. You won't make more money from me this way, you won't generate more sales, you'll generate less. And you'll keep driving me to the used book market. Since I live in a small town about a hundred miles from the nearest Barnes & Noble or Borders, I'm quite cozy with the internet and buying used or new isn't any more difficult. Amazon needs to require booksellers in their Marketplace to state whether or not their books are publishers' or book club editions but that just makes me buy bestsellers from ABE or Alibris. (It seems that many Marketplace vendors buy up surplus book club editions and sell through Amazon.)

When I grew up, I would haunt the bookstores and spend the money in my pocket in books I thought would be good. This is how I discovered new authors. I can't afford to do that any more, nor have I for years. And I know I'm not unique. I still think that people who want to play video games or watch Matrix movies over and over are doing exactly what they want; readers will read, be it by patronizing libraries, used book stores, borrowing books, whatever. I just don't think competition from other leisure activities outweighs the sheer cost of reading new books. It is expensive, which inclines it toward an elitist activity, which further limits its scope.

It all just makes me wonder whether publishing is really in trouble or the fine art of reading books?

The other thing that occurred to me in the not too distant past tied all of this with e-books. While I still don't see readers choosing to supplant physical books with electronic ones (and deal with disk crashes, computer changes, O/S upgrades, DRM related issues, etc.), I could envision a scenario when publishers make books so unaffordable that they can then push a cheaper e-book price and basically force a reader to go there. But that's another nightmare.

Michaelangelo

2008-05-30T17:02:00.000-04:00

We try to be a very humane and environmentally conscious household and for the most part I think we do a really good job. A nagging thing, though, has been how we use those hated plastic grocery bags to package our dog waste. Any bag that has holes and is thus unsuitable goes directly to the recycling bin, but the intact ones get used as a knottable glove so that our neighbors don't grow annoyed at mounds of dog poop growling alongside the road.

But this makes the bags landfill, and I've never been comfortable with that. I wanted to start a compost pile but it turns out using cat or dog feces in compost invalidates it (or ought to) for use in a vegetable garden. So with some research we found the Doggie Dooley, an in-ground composting system that should exactly fit the bill.

It comes with everything but the hole, however. So I've been working on ours. You need to do roughly a two foot by two foot square, two feet deep, and then go deeper in the middle, as deep as you can to stay below the frost line so the thing has a chance for working in the winter. Then you add the enzyme powder and water, then the dog stuffing, and voila, problem solved.

But you still gotta dig the hole. With a spine like mine, that ain't easy. So far you can look at it as either a five day hole or a five hour hole. I can scrape at it for about an hour at a time before I begin daydreaming of life as an invertebrate. And here in New Hampshire, rock is just about as common as dirt, so there's a lot of digging out and around and hoisting and doubt: you never know if you're excavating a bowling ball or a Volkswagen.

I'm just about done, though. Another day/hour should do it. My strategy has been that of the great sculptors where I lay down on my stomach, torso hanging over the abyss, hand trowel in hand, breaking up everything that is not a hole. After the Zen-like sessions are past, I measure my success by depth, the rocks I've removed, and the actual hole. Ricky likes to stand in it and has become my measuring stick. I'm not sure how tall he is but he's beneath ground level at this point. If I could get Sabrina below ground level I'll call it done.

But then I'll be filling my hole and it will no longer be one for there will be things in it. All grocery bags from that point forward will be recycled, though hopefully using reusable ones will mostly eliminate that problem.

And eliminating is what this post is all about.

Book Fear

2008-05-21T16:59:00.000-04:00

Went in to the town bookstore a few days ago. Left me very scared. Those heinous extra-large, extra-priced mass market paperbacks have still not disappeared or noticeably lessened but rather seem to have spread. Looking at some of Bernard Cornwell's Grail Quest books, the only editions were trade paperbacks for fourteen bucks apiece. They had the latter two books of the trilogy so to read those would cost almost thirty bucks. Um, if they were available in mass market editions for half that I would have picked them up.

Bottom line is that once again I'll buy the books used from somebody online and pay less money but half of it in shipping charges. Who wins in this mess? As a book buyer I've been pushed to the fringe and I'm sure I'm not alone.

Once there were good old days...

It occurred to me that a collection of books is a library and that a collection of e-books is a floppy disk. DRM controlled ones will die with your next Microsoft induced operating system upgrade, but that's another rant.

Shortage

2008-05-20T14:41:00.000-04:00

I'm going to try some posts of purposely shorter length. They won't take as long to write, and I'm not sure that I can do it. Let's see.

Jack Vance is a brilliant writer. Everything I'd like to say about him has apparently been said here by someone named Nick Gevers. The piece also mentions the Vance Integral Edition (or VIE) which was an edition (two actually, one a bit fancier than the other) of his collected works, restored as much as possible to the original manuscripts.

This was done by a group of several hundred volunteers and took years to complete. The books were sold on a subscription basis and once printed, were gone. Someone involved had said he'd figured out a good way to get a free set of the original 44 volumes: purchase 2 and then wait until the subscriptions closed, then sell the second for double the purchase price. Based on the few sets that have appeared on eBay, he would have been right.

The "corrected" VIE texts are also serving as the basis for commercial reprints, another gratifying result of the project. Now if the band could just get back together and give the same treatment to other worthy authors...

Suspended Animation

2008-05-09T10:11:00.000-04:00

My surgically repaired right eye had been getting worse the past few months which led to terrible eyestrain as my left eye had to do more work. The eye doctor cut something open with a laser on Monday and things are better but different. I still need to rest them to take care of the eye strain but that's not an easy thing to do. I also am feeling addictive symptoms to the meds I take for my back and neck issues; when that happens, which is all too regular an occurrence, I leave them alone until I'm over it. I'll use the damned things but I won't let them get bigger than me.

Which is all to say that I'm staying away from the computer as much as I can for a few more days. So even though the blog entries have been sparse, they're going to be sparser still until next week some time. That's just the way it goes sometimes.

Commercial Madness

2008-05-06T13:39:00.000-04:00

When I was kid, hour-long TV shows were around fifty-two minutes of actual show, including credits, with the rest filled in with commercials. Today hour-long shows are ten minutes shorter (TEN MINUTES!) and it seems (although I haven't timed it out), that some cable shows and specials have an even worse ratio. It seems that just as though I start to get into a show, BAM, I get hit in the head with a commercial.

That's one minute of commercial for every three minutes of show. This ain't why there's a flat-screen on my Christmas list.

More frequent commercials aren't news and I'm sure that someone somewhere could make a compelling case for doing this. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't buy it but that may because I'm starting to get crotchety as I get older. Be that as it may, why do the commercials have to be so damned LOUD? I can't even relax in front of a baseball game because not only are the commercials as regular and unrelenting as body shots in a Tyson fight, their soundtracks are frequently obnoxious music that either doesn't fit the product (is that Led Zeppelin on those Cadillac bits?) or so inanely repetitive (vehix.com, for example) that I plug my ears and repeat la-la-la over and over until it's, um, well, over.

But then it comes back, usually in about five minutes...

To paraphrase Robin Williams' famous remark regarding cocaine, television commercials are God's way of letting advertisers know they have too much money. I don't need a Time-Warner commercial during every segment every show on every night on every channel. I tune them out, they turn me mean and nasty, and land them squarely atop the list of Last People I Will Ever Do Business With Willingly. Another note on the aforementioned vehix.com ads: um, yeah, got the point during the first bit the first time I saw it. Why, oh why, do you feel the need to run on the Cartoon Network in the middle of weekday afternoons? There are no adults watching! Really. My kids are watching and I overhear that damned annoying tune and guess what, I will never, ever, ever go to their website as long as I live.

Or as long as there's still cars.com, anyway. I've still got to get along, you know. But geez, it's still with less and less TV. Which isn't a bad thing. It's just that in the past it's been a choice, kind of like having an apple pie in the refrigerator, a snack that I can always dip into if I happen to get the urge. It's become the enemy now, a source of annoying sounds I can't get out of my head no matter how many nails I drive into it.

It's past the point where whatever value I'd get from watching any given show is outweighed by the annoyance factor of the commercials. TV advertising has almost become like spam e-mail to me, where I'd never consider buying anything it shows me. The problem is that Neilsen can't tracks folks like me. Um, assuming there are others.

Short Story conclusion

2008-04-25T08:41:00.001-04:00

SOCK MONSTER - part 2

All the way home and all through his dinner Tobey considered as rationally as he could. While he still didn’t know exactly what it was they were up to, he had identified at least one of the people against him. But they had the advantage of time, he thought; the wheels of their plot had been likely turning since well before last Tuesday when his shorts were taken. After all, 414 couldn’t have just moved in, exactly two floors above Tobey, Tuesday afternoon in time to rendezvous with his laundry. That would be crazy.

The most important thing he’d done, he thought, was not tip his hand. He may not know much about 414, or her possible connection with Elizabeth, or any of the rest of it, but he was reasonably sure they didn’t know he knew something bad was happening, something wrong.

At seven forty five, slowly and deliberately, he collected all of tonight’s laundry in his ancient wicker basket. He didn’t know what else to do but forge ahead with his routine. He didn’t want to tip them off and he certainly didn’t want to play sitting duck all alone in his apartment just waiting for god knows what to happen. He put his plastic bottle of detergent on the top, along with his fabric softener, and at five minutes to eight left his apartment.

Sometimes he took the stairs down to the first floor, but not usually. Not wanting to possibly find himself alone in the elevator with one of his opponents, at least not on laundry night, he decided to risk the walk. It wasn’t such a big break in his routine.

Once Tobey made the laundry room without incident, he nodded to a woman he knew as a Mrs. McAdams who had just finished loading the complex’s two dryers. She said good evening and squeezed out the door, her plastic basket squished against her side.

This was okay, thought Tobey. Mrs. McAdams had lived there longer than he had so it was unlikely she was part of the plot. Since the dryer cycles ran longer than the washers’, though, his own clothes were going to have to wait their turn again. Just like last Tuesday.

With a trickle of sweat working its way down the back of Tobey’s neck, he fed his clothes into the two waiting washers. One for dark, the other for whites. Now that he’d committed to maintaining his normal routine, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was somehow becoming more of a spectator than a participant.

When the sweating grew worse and he began to shake, he checked his watch and went back to his apartment. He’d be back in eighteen minutes, the same as always. Nothing unusual going on here.

* * *

Except for a dedicated and manic pacing in Frederick Tobey’s living room, nothing out of the ordinary happened. At the appropriate time, he returned to the laundry room and calmly and efficiently transferred his damp clothing from the spent washers to the tops of the two front loading dryers.

This was just the way he did it last Tuesday, the way he always did it. He managed an enforced sort of calm by screaming a melody from some long dead composer, Mahler, he thought, in his mind. He projected the same snippet over and over and over, his movements unconsciously falling into time.

And then it was back upstairs for another twelve minutes. But now he had the dryers reserved. And, he wondered, if a new move was underway, if a new die had been cast. The music crescendoed in his head.

* * *

Precisely twelve minutes later, Tobey was back. Mrs. McAdams had just completed the transfer of her own laundry back to her basket for the trip back to her apartment, number 109, to be folded in front of the television set.

Tobey said goodnight, loaded the dryers, and with a deep sense of dread trudged back upstairs. He had another forty minutes to wait and by now the music in his head had finally stopped playing. It no longer helped.

* * *

Inside fifty minutes Tobey was back inside his apartment, no problems, no woman from 414, nothing unusual. As he shot the dead bolt on the door he dropped to his knees and began gulping air like a giant beached fish, his laundry basket clutched to his side in a two-handed death grip.

When he felt his body wouldn’t betray him if he moved, he crawled over to the center of his living room, dragging the basket behind him.

Folding time. Then he could relax, he thought, perhaps mix himself a cocktail. He had survived something, he thought, even if he didn’t quite know what it was.

The droning of the television and the calming of his euphoria almost made him miss it. Tobey sat bolt upright and went through the neatly folded piles again. And then again.

They had made their move after all.

How could he have been so stupid? What chance did he have, trying his best to behave normally, performing well at his job, being a good person, and all the while thinking he could resist the people doing this? They held all the cards, they knew what this was all about. What was he to that?

He was a fool, he thought, but he wouldn’t be any more. He may not be smart enough to figure out what was going on, but he could damn well play the one card he held without them being able to do anything about it. He could see to that.

Tobey flew from his apartment as fast as he could, down the hall and up two flights of stairs until he stood in front of apartment 414. Without pausing he hammered on the door with his fist, then took a cautious step back.

The door opened a foot and she was there alright, holding back the shock she must have felt.

“Hello?” she said, merely curious.

She wasn’t even trying to lie, thought Tobey as he rushed the door, driving the edge of it into the woman’s forehead and knocking her to the floor. She turned away from Tobey on her hands and knees and tried to stand up.

“Where are they?” Tobey bellowed. “Where are my shorts and t-shirt?”

The woman stumbled forward and Tobey could see her object, a telephone on a small table neatly positioned on a small rug at the entrance to the bedroom hallway. Without a thought he pushed her square in the back with both hands. Her feet caught on the edge of the rug as she flew forward, knocking the table over and sending the phone spinning further down the hall.

Tobey jumped on her back, driving the air from her lungs as she clawed at the floor in front of her. He wrapped his fingers in the curls of her long blonde hair and jerked her head back and then drove her face into the floor many times.

“Where are my clothes?” he yelled again, in time with his pounding. If he could just get them back, where would they be? They’d have nothing, nothing at all, and of course they wouldn’t try anything again, not once they realized how he’s been on to them for so long.

The woman wasn’t making any more sounds. She had landed across the small area rug and the telephone cable it had been covering was under her chin. Tobey grabbed it and pulled it towards him, around the woman’s neck, pulling and pulling with all the strength he had left.

Eventually he pushed himself off her back and stood up behind her, an expression of sublime triumph on his face. He could see a wetness spread through the seat of her denim jeans. “Hah!” he said to the figure on the floor. “How do you like it?”

His sense of liberation, of having been set free, was intoxicating. He staggered back toward the front door, strangely uncoordinated, when he saw the thing on her kitchen counter.

The laundry basket.

If laundry had been so important to their plan, he could think of one other way to throw them off. They have a couple of his things, but he’d have their whole basket.

He snatched it from the counter and ran.

* * *

Not long after, when the knock came at the door, Tobey opened it to see two men in sport coats standing in the hall.

“Yes?” he asked, still feeling wonderful.

“Frederick Tobey?” the taller one asked.

“Of course,” Tobey said. “What’s this about?”

“Police, Mr. Tobey. May we come in?”

Tobey stepped back as the two detectives introduced themselves and followed him inside. “Do you know a woman named Amanda Peters in apartment 414, sir?” the shorter one asked as his eyes swept across the room.

A wide grin grew across Tobey’s face as he realized what this meant. This Peters woman, his ex-wife Elizabeth, they didn’t get him. Their plan had fallen to pieces and he had won. All by himself, without anyone else’s help, he had beaten them.

The taller of the two detectives gestured at the neat piles of bras, panties, and other bits of women’s clothing arranged about the carpet. “Is this your laundry, sir?” he asked.

“I did good, didn’t I?” said Tobey.

“Real good,” the shorter one told him. “Turn around, please, and clasp your fingers behind your head.”

“She should have been more clever, I think, but she let me see her on Tuesday.”

The two cops looked at each other as they attached a pair of handcuffs to Tobey’s wrists. They read him his rights as they walked him out of his apartment and into the elevator but he wasn’t really listening. From deep down inside, he felt too damned good for silly distractions.

Riding in the back seat of their car, halfway to wherever it was they were taking him, a sudden thought hit him like an electric shock delivered at the end of a giant sledge hammer. His euphoria evaporated with an icy chill and his stomach knotted as he fought to control his breathing and his bladder.

The boxers, he thought, and the t-shirt: where were they?

He hadn’t found them.

This thing wasn’t over.

THE END

Short Story

2008-04-24T12:34:00.000-04:00

My disappointing spine has still not recovered from driveway rescue attempts from the spring thaw. On the plus side, I have newly refilled prescriptions of vicodin and carisoprodol. Just don't talk to me about my liver.

So I want to cheat and rather than write a new blog entry I'll post a short story I wrote a little while ago. I'll split it up into a few pieces so it's more readable in the blog. And I'll get more mileage out of it.

I had wanted to write a story with a crime brought on by thoughts going on entirely inside someone's head. His perception of reality is far enough off the objective that he deals with things in a very abnormal way. At the time I wrote it, I thought I got down the essence of what I was going for but based on some reader feedback, I'm not sure. In any case, I'm not a short story writer but I think this at least works at least on a very basic level: I think it is a complete story. It just may not be any good but hey, ya get what ya pay for.

SOCK MONSTER

It made sense to him, then, back when it started. He thought it was when she had taken a pair of his boxers from the wet pile he’d left on top of one of the dryers. He never saw her take them, he wasn’t even in the room when they’d disappeared, but when he saw her looking at him in that peculiar knowing way, she had made herself stand out. That was her mistake and that was when he knew his life was about to change.

For the life of him he couldn’t figure out what to do about it. Although they lived in the same four story building, they weren’t friends, they weren’t family, and he didn’t even know her name let alone which apartment she lived in. But he’d find out now. He’d have to if he were going to figure out what she was really up to.

His name was Frederick Tobey and he worked as a CPA for Freedom General Insurance Company. They were a massive company with many holdings, all of whose taxes were filed by the staff on the sixteenth floor of their eponymous building in lower Manhattan. Frederick Tobey rode a bus and then two subway trains to work each day, from Brooklyn to Manhattan, there and back, each and every week day. Tobey rarely took sick days and hadn’t gone on an actual vacation since Elizabeth left him nearly fifteen years ago.

During this morning’s commute, Tobey kept turning the matter of his missing boxers over and over in his mind. It didn’t make sense at first blush but that’s what made it so damned clever. The woman hadn’t done anything obvious when he passed her in the hallway, she’d just given him that look, almost as though she couldn’t help herself. But that was all he needed, he thought.

His work day was difficult; clearly he couldn’t be expected to concentrate on his job with some kind of plot going on against him. Fortunately it was late in the autumn and the mayhem of tax season had passed. This meant that he could more or less cruise through the motions of his daily routine while part of his brain worked constantly on his new problem.

Was he in any danger? How could he know, he wondered. He decided he didn’t have enough facts and he asked his supervisor if he could go home an hour or so early. Given the light work load of the time of year this was not an uncommon request for the rest of the staff but coming from Fred Tobey, who never took time off, it was almost remarkable. But it wasn’t a problem and Tobey left the office at three o’clock. No one noticed his passage.

* * *

During the long subway commute Tobey knew he had to take a few risks in order to safeguard his own future. He’d begin by staking out the mail boxes in the front vestibule of the apartment building. If he could pinpoint his aggressor’s apartment number, he’d at least know where she was some of the time. Perhaps he could even find out her name.

Surely she wouldn’t try anything in the front vestibule, not at that time of the day. If he was as careful with his facial expressions and body language as he thought he could be, she shouldn’t tumble to the fact that he knew something was going on.

Last night’s laundry was done on Tuesday. The next laundry time was on Friday at eight o’clock. Two days. Just two days for him to figure out just what was happening around him.

* * *

While he waited just inside the glass paneled security door, Tobey thought about Elizabeth. He hadn’t been so paranoid since the divorce. The way she had constantly gone through his clothes, had read all of his mail, even told him how he should drink his coffee; it all felt so wrong until he finally realized she was up to something. He wondered if the divorce had literally saved his life. And now there was this.

Perhaps, though, he was exaggerating. Surely there were logical, pedestrian reasons for himself and this woman to have come together the way they have. There were over three hundred units in this building alone; surely pure statistical chance could have taken a hand and touched the two of them together.

He wondered what Elizabeth was up to now. There hadn’t been any contact since she left, which was a relief. No requests for alimony, either, which Tobey still found suspicious.

It was in this slightly more relaxed state that he found himself when the woman finally walked through the door that faced the street. Unsuspecting, she walked directly to her mailbox, in plain sight through the security door, and opened the small bronze door with her key. Tobey couldn’t make out the number from where he was but now he knew how to find the right mailbox. In a marvelous coincidence it was just two up from his own.

This meant he wouldn’t have to risk another personal encounter and he quickly darted up the stairway behind him. He listened from the landing and could hear her as she called and was then swallowed up by the creaky old elevator.

Nearly grinning, he stole back down the stairway, making sure she had gone. Some of these people could be sneaky. He had married one, after all, so he knew.

Standing up straight, feeling calmer now after his reflections from the stakeout, he strode into the vestibule and found the right box.

His knees went weak as he read the number. How could this be? How long has all this been going on? He walked as fast as he could away from the mail boxes and back up the stairs. He knew it wasn’t rational but he wasn’t going to feel safe until he made it inside his own apartment, 214.

Tobey dead bolted the door after himself and couldn’t help but look upwards as he forced himself to calm down. This was no time to lose control.

She was up there now, he knew, in apartment 414. Two floors above him, directly overhead. This was getting sinister. He staggered over to the sofa and tried to sit, but he missed and crumpled onto the floor. He lay there for hours, his head cradled in his arms, fingers enmeshed in his hair. Later, when he realized he had wet himself, he crawled across the floor to his bathroom shower.

* * *

Thursday. One more day. Tobey wanted to call in sick but he didn’t dare do anything so remarkable. The last thing he could afford to do was tip his hand, to let them know that he was on to them. As long as they didn’t have a clue he could act with some control.

In the office he set about filling his day with meaningless meetings. He scheduled them via e-mail and the network calendar programs. No matter what else happened, he wanted to leave a trail and document his day as much as possible. If something were to happen to Frederick Tobey by god he’d have left his mark. Strength in the face of adversity. There would be a trace of him left behind.

By the time he got home, he was exhausted. His mind kept turning back to the missing boxing shorts. Why had the woman in 414 taken that particular pair? What made them different in any way?

The next thought hit him with an icy wave as he fumbled with the boiling water and his tea. Elizabeth? Could 414 be working with his ex-wife? Again, though, for what? But Elizabeth did know his clothes, and she’d know he wouldn’t change all that much in twelve years.

Too much, too much, too much, he told himself as he began to slip to the floor. NO! Keep it together, god damn it! He wasn’t sure if he’d shouted out loud or not but he was nearly past caring.

Tobey took several deep breaths and tried to visualize calming things. He tried ocean waves but the sounds of the crashing surf were too distracting. He tried brilliant white cumulus clouds slowly floating through a bluer than blue sky as he laid on his back in an open field of rich green grass. But the blades made his back itch and he couldn’t be still. He pictured himself floating on his back in a wide, shallow pool, his body barely breaking the water’s surface and not wanting to sink, bobbing gently at the surface. Slowly, though, tiny streams of water trickled into his ears and made him twitch uncomfortably.

Although he was still hugging his knees to his chest on the floor of his kitchen, things were better, more settled. Just to be sure, he checked himself and his pants were dry. Not wanting to upset things again, he crawled his way across the floor and into his bathroom.

Fighting hard to retain his fragile equilibrium (but Elizabeth!), he swallowed a small white pill from a glassine bag with a zippered top. It was supposed to be a generic Ambien that he purchased over the internet. The web site was from Canada but the shipping label said the package had come from Texas. Tobey thought this meant the pills themselves may have come across the Mexican border.

Regardless of what it was, it helped him get to sleep if he took the pill and didn’t try to stay awake. And he never had to submit to a doctor or get stuck with a needle or hit with a hammer or prodded with a finger.

He fell asleep in his bath tub, curled into a ball and dreaming of conspiracies. But thanks to the pill, whatever it was, all that would be beyond his memory when he awoke.

* * *

Now it was Friday and Tobey was refreshed and alert. He almost felt good, he thought, until he realized where he was. Picking himself out of the tub, he walked into his bedroom and peeled off the clothes he had slept in, throwing them into the wicker laundry basket Elizabeth had bought for them when they’d originally taken the apartment.

Laundry. Elizabeth. Tonight…

Laundry night.

Tobey felt much more calm in the morning. It was as if he had an internal reset that could be pushed overnight, allowing him to pick up his life at the beginning of every day and move on.

He shaved, showered and breakfasted, absolutely determined to carry on a normal day. Just as he did yesterday, he’d remain normal and predictable to a fault. Whatever was going on with 414, with or without his ex-wife, would unravel in its own good time. At least that’s what he told himself over his commute.

At work before lunch it was much the same as the day before. Scheduled meeting after scheduled meeting, Tobey imprinted his mark upon the work lives of those around him. If something were to happen, these people would remember Frederick Tobey.

Things grew darker around lunch time, however. Being the off season, his co-workers began to leave on a kind of semi-sanctioned early weekend. Tobey nearly panicked. What if he were left alone at work, exposed, with no one able to vouch for his movements?

He himself left at noon for a cup of coffee at the deli across the street. He didn’t feel up to solid food and he was right. After two sips of coffee he ran to the rest room and vomited repeatedly into the stinking toilet. When he was through he nearly ran out the door.

According to his watch it wasn’t even twelve thirty. Too early to go back to the office. Maybe a walk.

Tobey headed east into the afternoon sunlight, visible in patches high above the Manhattan skyline. After half a block he began to shiver.

Turning abruptly, Tobey careened off the shoulders of half a dozen pedestrians before being able to right himself and plot a course back the way he had come.

His fingernails and lips nearly blue, and with a full on case of teeth chattering chills, he fought his way back to the lobby of his building. Pacing back and forth along the bank of windows, he gradually began to feel warm again. It was seventy six degrees outside.

He returned to the sixteenth floor and found it nearly deserted. What the hell would he do now, he wondered. It wasn’t unheard of for the staff to be granted an unofficial half day during an especially pleasant off season fall day, but would it really be likely to happen this week? The same week a particular pair of his boxer shorts were stolen by a strange woman who just happened to live in the apartment TWO FLOORS DIRECTLY OVERHEAD? It strained credulity. He decided he wasn’t going anywhere.

Tobey found the department’s clerk; he was an older man, semi-retired, and management simply never thought to extend the same privileges to him as the rest of the staff. A perfect alibi, Tobey thought.

Throughout the tax season, pile after pile of manila folders, report binders, and other miscellaneous paperwork would accumulate until some point late in the year when “volunteer” pizza parties were held over a weekend. The staff would come dressed in jeans and t-shirts, munch pizza, tell stories and mindlessly file.

This was what Tobey needed and he set about the task with a maniacal efficiency. At one point it occurred to him that the work was like lifting weights. Requiring no intellectual thought, the exertion nevertheless induced a focus so sharp all other thoughts were obliterated. Running or walking didn’t work this way, he knew; he had been on his cross country running team in high school. When running, the last thing you can do is get away from your own thoughts, no matter how much you may want to.

The clerk had to remind him when it was time to go. Five o’clock and he had his own mass transit timetable to keep.

Fine, Tobey thought. At least he’d made it this far in the day on his own terms.

But that still left tonight.

********END PART 1*****************

Rambling Dissatisfaction

2008-04-22T10:47:00.001-04:00

A month or two ago I picked up a short story by Stephen King. It didn't have any of the gimmicky phrasing or cliched adolescent dialogue that I can't get past, so that was good. But from the get-go the story read like something I've seen many times before. As I read it, I kept thinking, Didn't Richard Matheson already do this? Or Robert Bloch? Wasn't this a Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode?

In other words, been there, done that. You knew almost immediately what was going to happen and sure enough, it did. So why write the damned thing?

Writing is such a contradictory thing to pursue. On one hand, anyone can pick up a pencil and scribble words on some paper. I'm doing in now (only on a computer). But to make it something someone else wants to read, well, there's the rub, isn't it?

I think millions of people out there can right absolutely gorgeous sentences. Then some much smaller percentage of those can write stunning paragraphs. A much fewer number can carry that through to a page, and a disappearing few for an entire chapter. As for the number that can actually create a book, one with a valid beginning, middle and logical end, well, those are the ones that have kissed the holy grail (lower case, I don't want to get in too much trouble).

What's killing me is the notion that you can have all the innate talent in the world, your facility with language may be second to very few, but if you have noting to say, nothing to write about, big hairy deal.

It's been said, rather cynically, I think, that all novels are made up of the same few plots. So what? There are billions of people out there, all uniquely different, yet still make up one category: human beings. Or two: men and women. The more we ignore particular differences and roll individuals up to higher and higher levels, naturally more distinction we lose. So again, big hairy deal. There are only eighty-eight keys on the piano yet original music has been composed on the thing for centuries.

You can analyze good writing all you want: you can diagram the sentences, praise the dearth of adverbs (or not), marvel at the unique metaphors or allegorical vision. But what is the subject? What is the story that's being told?

Because what I've been thinking about is that a talent for the written word is part of being a writer, but so is a talent for coming up with a story. Sure, you can cheat and consciously borrow the structure of someone else's books (can you tell what I think of that practice, despite what they teach in some MFA programs?), and your writing talent can get you through. And, as a craft, you can practice it and study it and improve it.

But can you do the same with the story part of it? My jaw drops when I consider all the different ideas that make up a series of books like Richard Stark's Parker series. The writing is awfully fine, too, in his spare, noirish style, but it's a lot easier for me to accept the mystery of his craft and style than it is for me to comprehend the breadth of the collection of capers he writes about.

When I consider the writing of someone I admire, I usually wonder, Why did they do that? or Why did they do it that way? When I consider the uniqueness of the stories, the frame on which to hang the plot, I ask, How did they come up with that? Then I ask, how can I learn to do that, too?

And I know I probably can't. My ideas perversely flow while I'm writing and then seem to scamper away like lighted roaches when I'm not. It seems to take me a ridiculously long time to get started on something. Part of the reason is that I constantly discard notions as being too similar or to derivative of other works and I just can't bring myself to commit to something like that. And yet clearly it works for some highly successful folks out there.

So the King story was entertaining but in a way reminiscent of viewing a re-run of a favorite TV show as opposed to enjoying a new reading experience. And I guess that's enough sometimes. I tell myself I wish I could do that but I don't really believe it. If something's been done, it's been done, and I think I want more.

Suspended Articulation

2008-04-20T17:18:00.000-04:00

The smartest moment in my life happened when I was a kid, sitting at home flicking channels on the TV. A movie was just about to start so I paused during the opening of the black and white title sequence, waiting to see what kind of potluck broadcast television was bringing to a bored pre-teen boy. Turned out it was the movie Them!, a film I'd heard of but had never seen. Most importantly, I didn't know anything about it.

The story begins somewhere in southwestern desert. People are brutally murdered or killed or eaten or some such thing. No one knows what is going on or what to make of the ravaged sugar stores left behind in the kitchens of the isolated households where the grisly crimes were committed.

Or something like that. It's been years since I've seen the beginning of the movie and the point is that what was going on was a mystery. It took a while for the authorities to figure it out but by then, and within minutes of the opening, as I recall, I had figured out who the villain was. Or what the villain was: ants. Really, really big ones. The clues were there and I was all over them and man, did I feel thrilled watching the rest of the story play out.

I was thinking of this because I was considering how rarely I "figure out" who the bad guy is or what the secret of the house on the hill is or whether or not the presence of the buffalo nickel in the kitchen drawer was really significant or not. There's a reason for it all, and it's not, I hope, because I'm an idiot.

Just like there must be a willingness to suspend belief if we are to enjoy fantastic fiction or movies or any form of media, it also helps if we can suspend our tendency to analyze things, to intellectualize what it is we're actually reading, watching or listening to

When I was even younger than I was when I first saw Them! I used to read the Encyclopedia Brown books by Donald Sobol. Each book was made up of short mystery stories that were solved by the adolescent and phenomenal Encyclopedia Brown. The challenge for the reader was to figure it out along with the hero, of course, but what was brilliant about the stories was that the reasoning behind the solutions were never presented in the stories themselves. The logic for each mystery was printed at the end of the book which meant the stories never bogged down with cumbersome Aha! moments, never slowed for repetitive denouements, they just crackled from page to page, mystery to mystery.

I never did figure out that many of the darn things and it always vaguely bothered me. I was supposed to be the smart kid, maybe not like Encyclopedia Brown, but at least like someone who knew a thing or two about ants. My father would read the books, too, and as far as I could tell he'd figure out the solution to every one of the stories, making me feel both awe and deficient.

The thing is that I was so caught up in the wonderment of the stories, of the being entertained, that I would not or could not allow the analytical machinery to get in the way of the roller coaster ride. I didn't care what made the gears turn, I just loved the fact that they carried me along with them. My father I'm sure treated them as riddles, appetizing as popcorn, and about as enjoyable. It's only now that I realize while we were reading the same books, we weren't doing it for the same reason.

Clearly my father was not about to be mystified by anything intended for a grade school audience but that's not the point. Even today, if the solution to the mystery or the identity of the bad guy pops into my head before the book or movie intends it, I think there's more likely something wrong or clumsy with the plot or structure. I've never had a problem with a willingness to suspend belief, but now I realize that suspension of the intellectual process is just as important. When it's all over, yes, I will pick the book or story apart mercilessly trying to figure out why it did or didn't work, or even what I think they could have done to make it better. Often I'll even engage in idly wondering what I would have done had I been the author.

But if this process takes hold while I'm reading or watching or listening, than something's wrong. The imagination, the place where the action is supposed to be unfolding, is thrown off. It's like when your favorite toy broke as a kid and as long as it doesn't work any more, you smash the rest of it open and wonder how it did what it did. The magic is gone, though, and you can't get it back, at least not in that particular toy.

Now when I read reviews or hear people talk about how they figured out the ending early on, I wonder, Why would you want to? I did it once, way back when, and I was lucky enough to get the genie back where it belongs. If I hadn't, I'm not sure I'd be looking for any more bottles.

Elementary Science

2008-04-17T16:49:00.000-04:00

I don't eat as much as I used to, which is probably a good thing. Back when I competed with the local livestock for feed, I got into the habit of eating out of large bowls. The bigger the better; thick, sturdy, soup-spoon proof. My choice for wedding china was a set of oven-safe mixing bowls.

During an extended stay out of town some years back, I needed a bowl but couldn't find one at the local grocery store. I ended up for an over-sized cereal bowl kind of thing made out of something called "Corelle." This thing has been a mystery ever since.

It feels kind of like metal, tin, maybe, with a coat of enamel. It could be some kind of plastic, I suppose, but it seems much less brittle and rings with a hum when you flick it hard with your fingernail. It could even be some sort of better-living-through-chemistry processed glass but again, it seems too un-glass-like somehow.

Internet searches have proven fruitless. Apparently it's a common enough substance though it has yet to crack the periodic table. I've been using it for close to a decade now and it still looks as white and unblemished as they day I brought it home to the Holiday Inn in Cairo, Georgia.

It's going to suck when I take a hammer to it and see if I can shatter the bastard, though. I just don't know if that would help unravel its inner secrets but what the hell. Maybe it can't even be broken. Maybe the hammer will shatter, or worse, bounce off and back into my unguarded forehead with a force equal to the attempted killing blow. Just to be safe I'll probably not do this as part of a homeschool science experiment.

Lost in Time and Space

2008-04-16T17:31:00.000-04:00

I lost my brother when we were ice skating one time on the fields the city iced over during winter. They opened up a building that had benches with cubby holes where we'd change our shoes then chop our way out the door and out to the ice. They always put up a hockey rink, too, right next to the open ice but we didn't go in there much. I guess people actually played hockey in there but I don't remember seeing them much.

There were four kids in our family, all within five years from oldest to youngest. After stopping at two myself, I have no idea how my mother dealt with it all. Especially since we didn't get along all that well. I'm sure we did in the beginning, back in those times we can't exactly remember, but mostly what comes to mind were the petty fights and resentments. My younger sister used to get me in trouble by saying I hit her when I hadn't. My mom would prove it by having her show me the red marks on her back but it was still a lie. My sister must have rubbed her back against the door frame or something because sure as hell those marks were there, I just never had anything to do with them.

I finally got so sick of it I took a pair of scissors and gouged a nasty track all along one side of one of her record albums. It was a mean gesture, no question about it, but I didn't figure all that many ways to get myself heard at that point. If anyone was listening, they weren't believing. I never heard a squeak about that record scratch. As far as I know, my sister never played that record again and my bad deed went unnoticed. Then one day, weeks or months later, I felt so bad about it I bought a new one and replaced the mutilated one, again without telling a soul. Never heard about that, either.

My brother I did hit, I'm ashamed to say. Not a lot, and not excessively, just a blow to the stomach or shoulder now and again when he really got on my nerves. I know he used to lose pieces to every game and toy he ever touched but troublesome as that was it was never the reason. Other than vague recollections of taunting on his part, I don't have any idea why it ever happened. Still, though, we hung out at least a little bit, and did a few things together.

Until the day at the ice rink. There was a kid there who insisted on skating around and around wearing a black stocking cap even though it was a well known fact that he'd go absolutely ape-shit if someone skated by and plucked it from his head. As soon as he got it back, he'd calm himself like it never happened and keep skating the same random figures we all did. I'm eternally ashamed that I stole his hat a couple of times myself. I may even have done it in front of my brother on that one day I'm talking about.

We grew up in the city where there were a lot of kids. Lots of kids means lots of cliques and bullies. There were shy kids and outgoing kids and kids that played sports and kids that got into trouble with adults. And there were kids that liked to fight.

Other than a few group-think induced instances like the hat thievery from the smaller boy at the skating rink, I was never a bully. And I was lucky to be big enough that I was never a bully's victim. But as I recall there were a group of kids in my grade that I didn't really get along with but that I didn't really care about one way or the other. Some of these kids were on the ice that day and somehow, some way, I ended up in a snowbank at the side of the ice faced off with a number of them.

We weren't fighting, though. I certainly wasn't mad or upset or I probably would have fought. I really don't recall the circumstances, though, if I were pushed or had fallen or if my sitting in the snow had anything whatsoever to do with the presence of those other boys. But I do recall that a fight could have happened, perhaps should have happened when I look back on it, but didn't, merely because I didn't feel like it. My whole life I found it difficult to fight if I wasn't angry or upset or hated somebody. I was never scared of fighting, not ever. Instead I just tended to laugh at someone and tell them okay, whatever, now go away. I did get into fights over the years but that was when the other person really wanted to fight and really made me mad.

So on that day, I was sitting in the snow for some reason, being challenged by a couple of kids I didn't like for some reason, and I declined to get into a fight for some reason. They skated off, I got up; another day in the life of a fifth grade boy. But I remember something else, and this I remember more clearly than anything else: the way my little brother looked at me. He was in the second grade at that point. Lord knows what he thought of the big brother that took him skating and goofing off down by the creek and occasionally hauled off and slugged him one but from that point on it was something different.

Somewhere along the way, we hung out less and less. He took up with his friends, I took up with mine. I didn't like his friends or the things they did and seemed to get away with, and I stopped having any idea what he thought of me. But I knew I'd lost him and there wasn't any going back, not at that age.

Today I don't know him any better than I did back then. We see each other every few years and are at least as polite as folks who see each other time after time in the same breakfast cafe, say, yet with much more distance. I still see the kid with the same mind set and same friends (literally) that he had back then, the same things I didn't approve of then and have no business passing on judgment on now. I have no idea what he thinks of when he sees me. It's sad because this gap is tangible, obvious, and, I believe, unbridgeable.

Last year his beloved dog passed away and after my mother told me about it, I went out to the store and got some stationery so I could scribble out a condolence and send it off to him. I've lost my share of dogs in my life and the one thing I know about him is that he cared for his boy like I care for mine. I sent the card and never heard from him. And still, when I think of that, I remember that day long ago in the city of Minneapolis, a block or so from our house on the public skating rink, when I could have gotten into a harmless scuffle with some punk kid who almost certainly has no memory of that time, that day, or even me. I wonder if anything, anything at all, would have turned out differently in any way that matters. I wonder what my brother thought, and how he felt. Did he think I was afraid? Did he think I wasn't somehow the big brother he thought I was? Does he even remember?

My guess is that he doesn't but I don't know. I don't what he's thinking now any more than I did back then and there's no way to ever know. Odds are that at some point, a funeral or something unpleasant to contemplate will bring us into contact again. I'm sure we'll shake hands, mutter something forgettable, and return to our lives. The ones we somehow chose for ourselves without knowing better, perhaps as far back as that winter day in grade school. Some memories would perhaps be nicer to forget.

Tired of It ALL (Don't Read This)

2008-04-15T12:20:00.000-04:00

I wish tax cuts were not the issue with Republicans. I wish tax increases (or elimination of past tax cuts) were the issue with Democrats. I wish they would be united on one issue, which would be spending cuts. Someone once said that you can't tax yourself into prosperity. You can, apparently, tax the hell out of people and spend it irresponsibly and increasingly without really seeming to acknowledge it.

It seems to me the best thing we could come up with in our muck-mired system would be to have a Democratic president and a Republican congress. Since congress spends the money, I have an iota more inclination of belief that while they'd spend way too obscenely much, the Democrats would be worse. I think the current congress's approval rating of 13% would be optimistic with a Democrat in the White House.

Which is another way of saying I have no idea how to vote, who to vote for, or sadly, whether to even vote. I don't want to vote for someone or something I don't believe in. I would vote for anyone against Ms. Clinton simply because I feel she's that horrible a human being. We don't need someon who's trumpeting her ability to fight Republicans. Someone who thought they could get along with Republicans would be a much nicer thing.

Stop dividing us into rich and needy, Republican or Democrat, pro-war or anti-war. We're all Americans, we're all the same. Why can't we act like it? And if our leaders can't, how can we? Throwing the bums out would be a good strategy if it works, but it never has. There are always more bums, indistinguishable from the previous set, to take their place.

I live in fear, and I don't want to vote in fear. They've stolen my optimism, the bastards, and I'm begging for reasons to get it back. So far the best I've been able to manage is to drastically cut back my exposure to the media. But the bad stuff is still out there, and still going on whether I wallow in it or not. It's very sad.

Put Downs

2008-04-14T20:00:00.000-04:00

Ahhhh, it happened again. I put down a book by a bestselling writer and have been trying to wash the taste of it out of my mind with Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke and Alan Furst's Night Soldiers. So far, so good.

I don't agree with the notion that people like to read negative reviews more than they like to read positive ones. They probably are easier to actually write because the reviewer (or anyone) can always find things they don't like about anything and write them down. Is that fun to read? Is that fun to write? Does it serve a purpose? On the other hand, a review that merely picks out positive things and portrays an otherwise bad book in that light is likewise worthless or wrong or some other kind of misleading.

I think when you review a book, you ought in some way try to interpret what you think the author was trying to do. After that, you can gauge the book on a number of levels, chiefly, "Did it work?" and "Was it enjoyable to read?"

As long as this is being done, and the reviewer is clear as to what is actually opinion, I have no problem with so-called negative reviews. If I write one, I hope that I can support my opinion in such a way that the reader understands that it is just that, and that there is some justification to support that. I also think that if I read book X and think it's the worst piece of ham-fisted monkey typing this side of a vanity press shopping list, that I should be able to name title and author without feeling bad about it in the same way that I'd tell my friends about it if we were discussing it over the phone.

And if a "negative review" is well reasoned and makes sense to me, it could very well be doing me a positive by nudging me in the direction of not wasting my time and my money. I wish that would have happened in this case.

Somewhere a while back, I read a review of this particular book. It is by a well-known and bestselling author with numerous books, a few of which have been made into movies (one of which spawned a very successful and iconic franchise), and a recognizable name. I'd avoided him in the past, however, because he couldn't pass my first page test. That's where I pick up the book and simply read the first page. If a writer is clumsy and inelegant and prone to cliches, very often it begins on page one and is easily discerned. I put these books down and very rarely ever try the author again. I can't think of a single instance where I tried and been surprised.

But the review of this particular books was overwhelmingly positive, spoke well of the author's portrayal of the technology and tradecraft used in the world of intelligence, and suckered me in to giving the book a chance, despite my impression of the author as one whose style clunks loudly in my inner ear.

By sheer will-power, I made it a couple of hundred pages in, then had to throw it hard and run away screaming. Books like this may not only actually rot my brain, but may cause me to actually question the value of reading and other writing, especially my own. My nightmare fear is that I could not produce something even up to this level...

The book beats you over the head with his knowledge of the intelligence community. It has the ignorant sidekick who, as a participant, consistently and unexpectedly behaves like an old pro, while all the while needing every teensy tiny little thing explained to her by the hero. Very annoying, but not as annoying as the hero, who has to explain every teensy tiny little thing he's doing, feeling, and thinking to the reader who clearly is not expected by the author to be able to follow the thriller along without having every obvious step painted in giant red letters across the eyeballs. This is talking down to the reader with the best of them.

There's a scene where the hero is being chased in a car through a mall parking lot in the rain. Suddenly a woman walks out from between two cars. Time inexplicably slows while the hero processes how little time he has to react and how small his margin for error is. He knows he can miss her by not looking at her; this will cause him to hit her. This is explained by nearly three pages of flashback to his time in driving school with the instructor telling him this is the reason why people skidding out in the middle of nowhere hit telephone poles, lone rocks, etc. So he misses her. Not before noticing the whites of her eyes, though.

But I thought I just read three pages of how he wasn't going to look at her or else he'd hit her. Hell, the guy chasing him probably didn't take the same course and would mow her down anyway.

I'll stop there because this isn't all that informative nor well justified; I'm going to do that because I'm not going to name the author or the book. I'm using it as an example of good reviews doing a disservice to the reader. A review that would have enumerated the positives, say the technical basis for the plot, while pointing out the weaknesses in the characterization and the writing, would have done me a lot more good. Yes, writing may be hard enough without people saying bad things about your books. But passing bad books off as not-so-bad ones is a much greater sin.

Unless the reviewer actually liked the bad book, which after all comes down to a matter of opinion. But wouldn't it be fun to sit down with the reviewer of this book and challenge him with all the reasons I think it's a fine waste of paper? Debate Club with book reviewers, an in your face contentious book club meeting. Now that's TV I would watch. Really.

Usually I'm not shy about naming names in the course of what could be called a "negative review."

Done to Death

2008-04-09T16:19:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I know, but in case anyone wants to read for themselves, here's a link to a story of the new HarperCollins imprint: story. They discuss the problem of high returns from booksellers, saying that it's around 40%. One of the prinicipals says that anyone not thinking like they are will go out of business. I'm wondering if anyone thinking like they are will go out of business.

It would seem logical that if booksellers are returning 40% of the books they order that they are ordering too many. I'd want to know why: are they concerned with aesthetic appeal and filling their shelves because they know they can easily return the books? Are they that bad at projecting the demand for a particular book? And if the shops are returning four out of ten books, why are the publishers printing so many at a time? Would restricting the supply, or even rationing them out, force booksellers to estimate better?

I'm neither publisher nor bookseller so it beats the heck out of me. Any way I slice it in my own little mind, the logic seems off. It's not easy being the Smartest Man in the World. Just keep in mind 'World' can be a loosely defined word.

P.S.

2008-04-09T02:26:00.000-04:00

After I've at least half-convinced myself I'm an ignorant buffoon with a laptop, as well as vaguely recalling an Ambien-fueled entry from last night, I came across this quote from a gentleman that published his book about the making of a certain television show through iUniverse:

“I knew that I wouldn’t be in bookstores, but I didn’t realize how devastating that would be,” said Rosenzweig. “Not having a warehouse full of books that will accept books back from booksellers if they don’t sell really puts a crimp in your ability to sell. Booksellers are not interested in becoming book buyers.”

So maybe I am right about being nervous about the new HarperCollins imprint that I've been writing about lately. On the other hand, perhaps reform requires a revolution and this is where it starts.

I still doubt it, though. "Preliminary estimates" from the Association of American Publishers show that total industry sales rose 3.2% last year. This may be a modest gain but the industry is still nearly 25 billion dollars strong. Which, again in my ignorance, seems kind of big to me.

The Meaning of Life

2008-04-08T23:19:00.000-04:00

I have a lot of things to be thankful for. I'm not terribly bad looking, my wife is gorgeous, and I have two kids that amaze me daily by how they approach their lives and the love they inspire within me. My dogs are pretty cool, too. Once upon a time I was successful at my work. I've been paid to jump out of airplanes, been an organizer and participant in numerous world records, and coached and taught numerous others. Once there were some people who considered me reasonably intelligent.

Sometimes it's good to remind ourselves of some good things that are personal in nature, that speak to your self-image. There are just too many damned people that will negatively influence your life without giving it a thought. It's just what people do. Not all, of course, just some. Enough, though, that the God of Statistics has put me into contact with far too many.

The good thing about the Blogosphere (no, it's not that hideous name) is that any idiot with access to a computer can write one. Such as me. I don't know what the hell I'm talking about at least 99% of the time. I didn't start this thing because I thought I had anything to say that any one ought to want to listen to. But then I realized that this is not the best attitude for an aspiring writer to take so I jumped in.

It quickly became something of a drill for me, "writing practice" as it were. The loose goal was simply to write a coherent thought in a style that was readable, fairly concise, and lucid. A strong opinion would be good, too, because really, that's the kind of person I am.

These entries are typically long, longer than I thought they'd be. I'm not sure if I just can't get to the point or if it comes out of the kind of voice I'm trying to write in. It doesn't help that I typically write these things while homeschooling my daughter. Six or seven interruptions per minute seems about the norm and I just can't maintain enough focus to jump back and forth without losing coherence.

Even now, I was going to write about flaky people and how I try to deflect their impact on my life by erasing them from my thoughts as much as possible. But I allowed my opening to grow, and then elongate, and now my internal blog clock is ringing so I have to wrap it up. Dammit, I'm trying...

My wife thinks I hold things against people; grudges, or something like that. Really, I don't, but she doesn't buy it. When I finally shut the door on my neighbor, he had just come literally screaming out of his house, wearing nothing but a pair of gym shorts, going off on me about the appliance man who committed the mortal sin of backing down my driveway. Since the beginning of my driveway overlaps with a portion of his, he felt that the appliance man should have turned around on my driveway than driven straight out without having to go twice over a buried culvert.

The culvert is a pipe that goes beneath the driveway. All sorts of vehicles travel over them. See, I want to say, how it works is, the culverts get buried and cars drive over them. Since each spring sinkholes form and need to be filled because the either the culvert system isn't working right or there's an underground water channel or the God of Statistics has a hard on for me, I don't know.

This spring we have more sink holes. My neighbor seems to hijack me when I take the dogs for walks. For months we just turn around and avoid the situation. I don't have to hear the same stories over and over and give up hours of "casual" conversation so sticky I'd have to give up homeschooling and making meals for the kids. Today he went to see a lawyer after I called to him that I didn't have time to talk to him this morning. I'm not sure who's more mature: the one who just ignores the other, or the one that goes to talk to a lawyer because of it. The sinkholes are on his property but the water comes from down the hill and we live on it. The holes would probably close our driveway but he ought to be able to drive around them.

But he calls a lawyer on me? To do what? There are other reasons that I won't get into here about how one year of contact with the man is like ten dog's years time. We were good until the lawyer thing because now its like he's picking a fight with out a prize. I'm not going to deal with him. I'm going to deal with the driveway no matter whose property it falls on because that's what we need to do. His presence is immaterial on my actions. Frankly I hope he got himself a really expensive lawyer. I don't plan on even opening it. If it comes registered I'll just refuse delivery.

And I will do my damndest to forget all about it. These are the times I wish I was a Buddhist, and I could meditate on the true art of happiness, focus on freedom from want, and love my fellow man. Dude, I was crying tonight while watching a mixed martial arts match. Two huge guys just plain buttwhipped each other in the name of something not covered in polite Buddhist dharma. I almost couldn't watch it, eyes misting over, but I stuck it out until the match was stopped. These have no idea how to fight this like a sport. It seemed clear to me that with the massive blows the rained repeatedly into the same spots on their faces with their off hands clamped around the back of their opponents necks. Neither man at that point can control the damage that's being done to them, they just have to hang on and pummel longer. Not a lot of the sweet science here.

Free Tibet, already. There are exactly the guys you want to have out in the world teaching idiots me how to let things go and allow the feelings for natural happiness to come out. Running them over with Chinese tanks does nothing for my personal happiness.

And now it's time to go to bed, bearing no neighbor ill will. Tomorrow we'll try to get an expert out here who can tell us how we can overcome the situation. Tonight we bought five hundred pounds of rock from Home Depot and filled a coupld of the holes. I'd like to take the next letter I get from a lawyer and stick it the neighbor's front door. After all, the thing is intended to make him feel better.

So my gorgeous wife thinks I'm an ass. I wish she wouldn't. I've deal with unpleasant people all my life, this is the first time where the forced driveway kind of thing has come up. The driveway will be fixed somehow, then the problem will return next spring. And Tibet will still be in chains.

My ambien is kicking in. It's cool, when it does this it's like the words on the screen or on the page go 3D and move and pulse arond on their own..Another reason for wandering posts. Maybe by morning a new sinkhole will appear and solve my problem once and for all. A Buddhist can dream, can't I? Or at least a fan.

There May Be Cheese

2008-04-07T13:21:00.000-04:00

There is more to this new HarperCollins publishing model, I'm sure. Maybe a lot more, maybe not a whole lot. One of my problems is that I don't trust them. Or credit card banks, mortgage companies, oil conglomerates or anyone else where there are too few companies competing for business. Market forces don't work the way they're supposed to when you have an oligopoly.

I've still yet to figure out why the G broke up AT&T and then allowed the Baby Bells to gradually re-merge. As Robert Louis Stevenson said, and he's better known as a dead writer than as a management guru, business is a competition of fraud. And he wrote that twenty years before the Civil War.

Apparently the new HarperCollins is considering offering free e- and audio books to the purchasers of their hardcovers. I like this idea: I read physical books but I also read e-books to rehabilitate my surgically repaired eye. I originally began this process by reading large-print books but I didn't want to build a library of them. If it was a book I thought I was going to like (and why else read it?) I wanted a "normal" copy. I switched to a Sony Reader which allows me to read thousands of public domain books--they don't cost me a dime. My book purchases are confined right where I want them: at conventional books.

It would be preferable to read the same book in both a hardcover and e-book format at the same time. I don't know that it would be compelling (an audio book doesn't do much for me -- they'd be good if I were driving long distances like I used to, but only if they were books I didn't want to actually read) but it would be convenient. And if they came with DRM embedded or were perceived to be an actual threat to the manufacture of real books, then I'd avoid them at all costs.

Is this paranoia? Quite possibly. If physical books ever actually go away, I'd like it to be because there is truly no market for them. My cold, unrelenting, blue steel fear is that the few companies that make up commercial publishing will declare that readers no longer want paper books, they want e-books (or f-books or g-books), and that's what they'll get. I've met too many people that have told me that books will soon be obsolete. Why? I ask them. Simply because we have the technology? There's not improvement here, just an option for a technological change. I'm afraid of publishing fiats and self-fulfilling prophecies.

Publish better books. Sell them at more reasonable prices. Sell e-books for a buck. All of these things would make more readers. More readers would make a better market. Wringing more money out of the existing customer base won't do this, nor will changing whether royalties are paid or books are sold on consignment. They could, in a way, but I don't think they're that enlightened. Instead of "giving them what they want," I feel like I'm listening to a multi-millionaire politician tell me what I as a citizen want. Ultimately I'm afraid they'd simply sell fewer books.

My world is very small. In many ways I wish it were smaller. I just want it to hold books and libraries and stories and writers and all the vicarious thrills and bits of knowledge and wisdom and adventure and mystery... I now buy used books the way I used to buy new books. They're about the same price as what I used to pay (especially with shipping) which means I can actually afford them. I'm already too far down the downhill slope.

Additional Giant Rats

2008-04-04T22:20:00.000-04:00

I just read where HarperCollins is starting a new imprint that not only will not accept returns but will also not pay advances. I believe another publisher began a similar program a year or two ago and I think, in the publishing world, that this is too nearly a trend.

If you don't know, books are traditionally sold on a consignment basis. This means that a bookseller has the option to return books that aren't selling for credit. This obviously makes it easier for sellers to stock perhaps a wider selection than they would otherwise, the publisher can't really know how profitable a particular title is until such time as they no longer accept returns for it.

Eliminating the consignment system across the board would probably be a good thing for the industry if they could figure out how to lower the prices or uniformly discount (wholesale price is typically around fifty percent of the marked price). I'd like to think that by eliminating waste they could actually lower the prices to consumers.

But I don't live in the real world...

Anyway, eliminating advances means an author, presumably new ones (established, selling authors wouldn't take this deal, would they?) would be working for nothing longer. Even the typical advance of three to five grand doesn't come out to much per hour (or per day, per week, per year). Leaving that alone, what point does it serve to dis-incent booksellers from stocking your titles?

I would think making it harder for a store to accept product is the wrong way to go. Evidently the point is to use the internet to market and sell the books. Um, how exactly do they plan to do that?

Perhaps it's the wave of the future and e-books will rule uber alles after all. My fear (or paranoia) is that it's not readers that want physical books to go away, it's the publishers. Soaring oil costs mean through the roof shipping rates and I have this vision of being pushed to e-books as the single distribution option rather than choosing it for myself should I choose to do so. Which could happen, I suppose, if they start charging a hundred books for a hardcover I'll be loading up the Sony Reader. But I don't want that. I want books: I want to hold them, browse them, pick them up, put them down, and create a visceral atmosphere of knowledge.

A recent study showed that the biggest factor on a child's growing up to become a reader is not how much they read as a kid, or how much was read to them, but how many books they were around as they grew up.

What's ironic to me is that Neil Gaiman's publisher made his American Gods available online, complete and without charge (read only, no downloading). This provoked some controversy with some people wondering how on earth it would make financial sense to let people read a book for free rather than forcing them to buy a copy. Gaiman himself takes the position that the online experiment is like the library where the point is to encourage readers, to create readers: author appreciation and subsequent book sales will follow.

This seems to me to be eminently sensible and filled with the common sense of how real people actually think. At the end of the experiment, the publisher reported that instead of declining or freefalling sales, orders for American Gods were actually up THREE HUNDRED percent. Which makes complete sense to me. What doesn't is who Mr. Gaiman's publishers are: the aforementioned HarperCollins.

I don't think I get it. Clearly, I miss much. I have no other explanation.

Giant Rats

2008-04-03T10:08:00.000-04:00

Today's Ricky's fourth birthday. Some how, some way he got me to offer? agree? to take him to the local Chuck E. Cheese for his birthday. Melissa took the day off and they're at gymnastics now. When they get back, off we go. Only there's no such thing as a local Chuck E. Cheese. We live in a small town closer to Canada than to a city. The nearest Chuck E. Cheese is one hundred and seven miles away. Each way. May the God of Carbon Offsets forgive our souls.

So by way of a quick post, the issue of high prices for e-books has been bumping around in my brain and I haven't been able to shake them out. Why should a book, delivered as an electronic download rather than, say, a book, have to cost as much or more than its paperback equivalent? There's no fossil fuel burning freight charges, packing labor, cardboard box, etc. etc.

And then I finished a book this past weekend, a brand new hardcover history of the CIA, that before I even picked it up showed signs of cocking. It didn't arrive that way and was stored upright on a shelf in an appropriately controlled climate. As I read it, the binding (sewn, not glued) cracked and complained repeatedly. It made me think of that publishing exec's opinion that books should be deliberately made of disposable quality in order to crush the expanding used book market. Are they actually doing it?

Putting the two concepts together, it made me wonder if the prices for e-books aren't where they are because that's where market forces dictate they be, but because that's the target, the price level that the publishers want when (hopefully if) they actually start to sell.

In other words, if they can keep raising prices on new books, from brain-damaged concepts like the inch-taller mass market paperbacks to shoddily made first edition hardcovers, at some point e-books may become more attractive to people than they are now. Rather than entice readers with an easily distributed lower priced product, they'll drive people away from expensive traditional books, leaving them the one option. At a price point they're comfortable with, one with lower costs and higher profit margins.

Sadly, I don't find this far-fetched in the least. Sad, sneaky and underhanded, yes, but not inconceivable by any means. I can't really think of another reason why e-book prices wouldn't reflect the economies they represent. A cheaper, more accessible product would mean more readers, and more readers means a healthier publishing industry. But that may make too much sense.

The only other reason I could come up with is only half as sinister, but still as ugly, is that publishers simply don't care about e-books. Charge whatever, you sell a few, you sell a few; they're not on the radar. Either way, cluelessness abounds. Maybe it just abounds to me, though: I don't get it any way you slice it. Book lovers are your best readers, your best readers are your best customers, your best readers ought to be begetting more best readers, publishers ought to be making it easier to buy and read books (and feel better about it).

But I don't live in the real world. Mine has a local pizza parlor with a giant mouse within a mere two hundred and fourteen mile round trip. While Melissa drives I'm going to read chapters from "The Mystery of the Screaming Clock" to the kids. From paper, even.

Two Words You Can't Write in Books

2008-04-01T21:09:00.000-04:00

I've been saving this topic for a time when and if I could come up with more than two, but I'm being hit in the head by Robert Parker's fifth Jesse Stone novel, Sea Change, and I gotta get it out of my system.

This is as good a book as the others I've read in the series. That is to say, nearly the same. But you know that going in, and if you like it, you won't be disappointed. Still, though, I was again struck by how easy it is for Jesse Stone to solve crimes. Someone always seems to turn up and offer him something that advances the case. He can brood on it for a while, maybe do something here and there outside the office, but someone else will invariably drop by and tell him something new. The crime will of course eventually be solved and Stone's so good at it that he makes it look easy to us outsiders.

He actually reminds me a lot of the character Tom Selleck played (before Magnum (I think) and way before the Jesse Stone movies) on The Rockford Files. A complete reliance on my memory and disdain for research leads me to say his name was Lance and that he was a rival P.I. to Jim Rockford. Where Rockford ground away on his cases, often not figuring out who did what or why until the end of a lot of work, much of which got him beaten up regularly, Lance would simply look for a clue, find it, and solve the case.

In one of the cases someone had thrown a set of keys out of a car window; Rockford said it would be hopeless to even look but Lance, of course, said it was nonsense. They drove to the overgrown field, Lance told Rockford where to stop the car, figured out how far the keys would have traveled, then walked straight into the field and stooped over and came up with the keys. Rockford would shake his head and look like he wanted to shoot him.

Jesse Stone solves cases almost like that. But surprisingly I digress...

Like George Carlin's 'Seven Words You Can't Say on Television,' there are words that break me out of a book just about whenever I read them. So far I've only come up with two: giggle and even (when used as an adverb).

A little kid can giggle here and there, and that's okay. The hero should never giggle. An adult should almost never giggle (unless they're skillfully doped or drunk, and then maybe only once a book). In Sea Change several characters, chiefly a set of twin sisters, giggle throughout the book. Adults don't giggle. Adults don't giggle when they speak with other adults. Sisters don't giggle when they're discussing the death of their sister, even if they're somewhat left of center. They don't do it, and others don't discuss it, throughout the entire book.

When writers say a character even does something rather than explain, or usually better yet, shows how a character can do something, I feel cheated. I'm ripped out of the narrative thinking the author couldn't be bothered to show a character's prodigiousness at a certain task, shortcutting it to something like, "Bill could do mean tongue tricks. He could tie cherry stems into square knots. He could chew ice and quote Shakespeare with the proper accent. Bill could even spit watermelon seeds and hit the eye out of a cricket." If this is coming on the heels of a set of descriptive sentences, it makes me want to scream.

So not using these words is one of my own personal writing rules. And I think each writer should make their own rules, whether or not they overlap with anyone else's. Then the only really inviolable rule, and absolutely so, is to not break the ones you set for yourself. Because then you're shortcutting, you're allowing yourself to do something you know you don't think you should do, and you hope your readers won't notice the slight.

But they do. A writer can never insult the reader and be easily forgiven, not if they want to be read again and again.

This post has turned out to be a book review, a point about language, and a theory of writing rules. Coherent or not, others must decide.

The Weed of TV Bears Bitter Fruit

2008-03-31T11:25:00.000-04:00

Baseball season's started and the Yankees are on TV this afternoon but other than that, I still am as down on television as I've ever been. While I can recognize some really talented sparks behind a lot of the crap and cliche and garbage onscreen, the overall effect, to me, is of a time-draining, mind-numbing void in my day. How much time could a lot of us save if we weren't aligning ourselves with the networks' half hour grids? Don't wait for the ending, just turn it off...

I've found that I've fallen into a habit of turning the thing on while I eat, and then shutting it down as soon as I'm done. Not sure what the point is in that other than I've been feeling compelled to distract myself from my own thoughts. So lately I've been listening to Old Time Radio (OTR) broadcasts over the internet. You can find just about anything (as far as I know), including the original broadcasts of shows like The Shadow and Suspense.

I was listening to an episode of The Whistler the other day when my daughter came down to visit. She sat down on the floor, listened for a few minutes, then asked me to pause the playback. "What is this?" she asked.

Before there was television, I told her, there was radio. It was like watching TV without the pictures.

Interestingly, rather than equate the radio to reading aloud, she compared it to television and said, "How do you know what's going on?"

The same way you do when you read a book, I said. You read the words and the story takes place in your imagination.

"Ohhhhh," she said, as if it may actually have been dawning on her.

The next day my son came down. He's almost four and I stopped The Shadow and found a character he's familiar with: Superman. The show came on and like his sister, he sat on the floor and listened for a minute. Then he started looking all around him, several times.

"I don't see it," he said.

Before I could tell him he wasn't supposed to, my daughter said, "Ricky, it's in your imagination."

So now that I've gotten them used to hearing voices in their heads... [Evil laugh goes here.] I have them now...

Shrinkage

2008-03-27T13:33:00.001-04:00

One of the surgeons that my wife works with told her that he'd be interested in reading the book I'd just first drafted. Why he or anyone volunteers for this type of duty is beyond me. What if you absolutely hated it? What if you thought I were the worst kind of unmitigated hack? Don't you have any Shakespeare or Dickens lying around that has a greater call on you? Bless 'em all for the offer, though, and I gratefully accepted the offer.

I think this kind of thing is different from the writing group kind of experience. For one thing, it's completely voluntary: the reader is under no obligation to generate advice, tips, pointers or anything beyond the fact that it would be awfully strange if they didn't at least say whether or not they liked it. There's no encouragement either asked for or expected; no (or at least) reduced fear of disapproval or discouragement; and it gives me the closest feedback from an "impartial" reader that I can get.

The problem is that I've found it can be depressing as hell. Not call the psychiatrist and refill the Prozac hide the sharp objects kind of depression, but maybe not far off. When there's positive feedback I want to go to ground, find a dark place with no family and no dogs and no good things where I can ruminate on the dead ends and dwindling byways I've allowed my life to drift along. For the sake of argument if we assume I have some talent, some technical knowledge, some skill, some knack for telling a story or writing in an entertaining manner. Why the hell have I waited so long to get around to it?

The short answer is that I listened to my mother. Though I didn't quite swallow the whole be-a-doctor/lawyer/eminent scientist thing, I did stay away from being an astronaut, race car driver, and rock and roll singer. It may be the world's everlasting loss, but I fell into computers instead. Stubbornness and being early to the personal computer era contributed to my staying in it as long as I did but now that the long dream is over, waking up is awfully scary. Unless businesses start getting tax breaks for hiring geezers, I'm too old to go back to school, get a degree, and start a new career. The same is just about true for going back into IT: after some years off, who would hire me?

Clearly bright and enlightened employers must be out there somewhere, and I'm not so far past forty that I wouldn't necessarily be able to find them, but the fact remains that what I want to do now, and have wanted to since I was around eight years old, is write books.

An author friend in Florida read the 43k word start that I want to re-work for my next book. She said good enough things that it about killed me. Melissa's co-worker was positive enough that it ruined the rest of our vacation weekend at a classic New England hotel. Three of the four other people that have read it have all had different things to say, which is good, but the overall feedback has been very positive.

My daydreams all involve where I'd be if only I'd written constantly since the birth of the ambition. Even if I completely sucked, after writing eighty or ninety books I'd expect to achieve some level of competency.

Hopes for sanity lie with my dad. He's read the book but he's like a literary clam. I can't get a damned thing out of him. I suspect that means he doesn't care for it, which is completely fine. Karaoke be hanged, he can be my Simon. I've just got to work harder on that next one.

Peer Review

2008-03-26T15:05:00.000-04:00

A couple of months ago a woman asked me if I'd be interested in joining a writing group. Argh, I thought. Why make me say no? My tendency is to be like Annie in Oklahoma but as I age and petrify I've begun to see the inconvenience of it all. I hemmed and hawed for a minute or two and then I told her that I probably wouldn't want to do it.

"But why?" she asked. "I like to get feedback from other people."

"I don't know if I'd be looking for feedback or adoration," I said.

That seemed to do the trick. But it's not quite true: I know that I don't really want the feedback, and what compliments may or may not come forth mean just as little. The bottom line is that if I believe my book is good, I've done what I've set out to do whether or not anyone else agrees with me. Likewise, whether I get a compliment or an insult means nothing as to how I feel I did.

I can sing in a karaoke bar to local drunken acclaim or jeers, but unless Paula, Randy and Simon agree, it doesn't meet the goal and move me to the next level. Likewise I can write what I want how I want, but unless an agent or an editor finds it compelling, then so what?

Of course there's value in feedback; someone could very possibly point out something that doesn't work in the book. This is why we all have friends and family we foist these things upon. Unfortunately, there's too often a pervasive "be encouraging at all costs" mentality that positive feedback probably doesn't mean much. Negative feedback would probably be more helpful but if there were really something wrong, the writer should already know about it. If they don't, they're probably kidding themselves and wouldn't listen to the criticism anyway.

Clearly many people, especially those in writing groups, would disagree with me. I do think, though, that there comes a point that to write well you have to write with confidence, you have to write with an assurance that you have an idea of what you should be doing. Whether it works or not is a different question but if the writer can't answer it for himself, can he really fix it in himself?

Vacation's Over

2008-03-25T22:57:00.000-04:00

Two days of travel bookending three days of vacation: there must be an easier way. Nonetheless I'm back, a bit wiped out and dealing with the predicted neck and back issues arising from airplanes, airports and layover times. I think there's a reason the signs for airports all say "terminal."

Tomorrow should see me back on a more normal schedule. I need to post more about writing and book stuff as opposed to cell phone commercials and anything but. Something about sharing the pain, I think.

Which may make no sense. Everything hurts and I'm trying to cut back on the meds now that I'm home. A bit of withdrawal here and there is probably good for toughening up something. Or saving one's liver. If I turn yellow I'll let you know.

Leavin' On A Jet Plane

2008-03-19T05:45:00.000-04:00

For some reason I get quite a spike in readers here when I post every day (or nearly so). I'm not exactly sure why that is; my supposition is that people may subscribe to an RSS service but then actually come to the site to read it when they get notice of an update.

Anyway, I'm off to Denver through the weekend and unless I manage something while I'm gone, there won't be anything new here until Monday. I've got to lay over at O'Hare and then transfer over to Denver. Ugly stuff. They've taken all the joy, all the sense of adventure, the romance of driving to one place and a few hours later appearing in another part of the country, and jackbooted it all away.

I thought this was done when I used to fly out each Monday and back home each Thursday for consulting jobs. I was wrong. Those were boring, but reliable. We're leaving at six this morning to get to the Boston airport at 8:30 in order to wrangle with checking my skis and skating through security machines in my socks without a bottle of water. Then the fun really starts, hours and hours in an airport terminal, waiting for the plane...

There's a reason the word "terminal" has a sinister meaning.

Anyway, I'm likely away until Monday. I've got two books to read for research for the new novel project and if that gets done I'll be happy. I was originally planning on reading volume 3 of Shelby Foote's Civil War Narrative, but I wasn't sure it wouldn't surpass the airplane's weight limits.

Have a good week and weekend! Ricky Nelson made this stuff seem so glamorous (at least in his song) but then we know what happened to him. Ugh.

Where'd What's-His-Name Go?

2008-03-17T22:49:00.000-04:00

We just got back from a vacation weekend, and Wednesday I leave for the rest of the week on a ski trip to Colorado. I want to write about another unread book phenomenon, a short story vs. novel issue, and the depression that comes from people appreciating your unpublished work.

But it's late and I need to walk the dogs and finish a book I'm reading as research for my next book project. So I'm going to try to be cute, which means I'll probably be stupid. Silly, at the least.

Every day my little girl Sabrina, who's six, reads a chapter in book to me; then I read a chapter in a different book to her (we're on the Robert Arthur Three Investigator books--big inspiration to me when I was a boy). It got me thinking about the "Where's Waldo" fad some years back. Not much called for by way of reading skills, and it's no mystery that Waldo faded away.

Or is it?

Apparently good ol' Waldo has grown up and changed that red and white striped shirt. Now he's got a jacket he doesn't change, along with a job and a new celebrity. He actually speaks in this gig, asking people if 'they can hear him now' while traveling the country, much as he did in his books, educating those same children, now grown up to be cell phone consumers.

It's true, I guess, that we all grow up. In a recent commercial I saw where he's going to be a dad. Congratulations, dude. Since you have a phone, it'll be a lot easier for your friends to find you then it was before when you were camouflaged in various crowd scenes.

I don't know the man but I can't believe that he's trying to bury his past completely. He still has the trademark glasses, only slightly less noticeable than the old hat, and if he were truly moving on you know he'd have switched to contact lenses. It makes me wonder if the slogan itself isn't simply an attempt to recreate his earlier fame. In either case, he's plainly shouting for recognition, whether by sight or by sound. Can you see me, can you hear me: seems like he has some things he needs to work out.

I'll stop now. Someone else can pick this up and make it really funny. As long as no law suits are involved.

Hawaiian Ice, My Way

2008-03-14T15:48:00.000-04:00

Here's where I stick up for people who don't need it, haven't asked for it, and I'm sure don't care one way or the other...

The other day I wrote about Tom Selleck and his Jesse Stone movies. When I've read other online opinions about them, the vast majority is of the same opinion: they're excellent movies. The disturbing thing is how many people seem genuinely surprised that Tom Selleck does such an excellent job. Why wouldn't he?

There's a cultural snobbery that seems to ridicule men (I can't think of any women) who make enormous names for themselves with television shows that can be labeled as trendy. I didn't care for Magnum P.I. myself. I didn't like the pilot, the shady sidekick, I really didn't like Higgins, and the constant bickering turned me off. The car was cool but would a P.I. really drive one of those around? Maybe if he wanted everybody to look at him...

Don Johnson suffers from the same image problem. I loved him in Harlan Ellison's A Boy and his Dog. He was great in Paradise, possibly the last movie where Melanie Griffith looked like Melanie Griffith. He showed his usual charismatic screen charm in Tin Cup. But he made his bones with the Miami Vice TV show and it's become a post-eighties cliche. He, too, drove a cool car, but it wasn't enough. He did a fine job in the show, you just had to like the show. (I liked Nash Bridges must better.)

Do we resent these guys their success? Why don't we do the same for any women? If these guys were the lousy actors or punchlines they're too frequently portrayed to be, how'd they succeed at all?

It's not fair, and damn it, I'm here to stand and up and be counted. I'm not ashamed that I like watching these guys work on screen. They beat the snot out of enigmas like Keanu Reeves and Paul Walker. Those guys I don't get at all. Then again, they haven't been in cheesey hit TV shows.

A musical name pops out at me, too: Paul Anka. I like the guy. For years I've heard people deride him as some kind of second rate talent. He was a legitimate teen idol, writer and performer of hits like "Diana" and "Put Your Head on My Shoulder." He showed his longevity with hits (and Kodak commercials) like "The Times of Your Life." According to him, his song "My Way" caused Sinatra to reconsider his retirement.

Personally I think he survived the creepy AM horror of "You're Having My Baby." As far as I could tell, America forgave him for that one. His downfall was his first big hit, though, and he can't get over that any more than Selleck could outpace Magnum or Johnson could leave behind Miami Vice. Fifty years later, five decades, Anka fell in "Puppy Love" and we won't let him out of it. I think something's wrong with us.

Sad But Not Forgotten

2008-03-13T08:04:00.000-04:00

Sigh. A friend of mine sent me this at the end of an e-mail last night:

BTW is Roxy ok? Will Cam and Lori get back together? What about Roy, when's he gonna turn up and f***everything up?

I couldn't make head or tails of it. There was a "Roxy" in the show Dead Like Me which I recommended to him but he watched all the episodes and knows everything about her I do. There's a "Cam" on Stargate SG-1 but he's played by Ben Browder, who I thought was excellent in Farscape but my friend never warmed to him. I couldn't think of a "Lori" or a "Roy" of any sort, though. I called my wife over and asked, "By any chance, do you know what the hell he's talking about?"

She looked at the line, looked at me, straightened and said, "He's talking about your book." At that moment the furnace likely kicked in and I couldn't hear when she added, "You idiot" under her breath.

So I wrote this thing, tentatively titled "Some Things You Die For" (sounds awfully Lawrence Block- or Donald Westlake-ish) and for the first time I did it as a draft. In other words, I kept writing past passages I knew I needed more work. I can't do the "just write it all down, you can fix it later" kind of thing; writing on top of crap just yields more crappy writing. Still, there's a midpoint where it's roughly good and roughly correct and at least bobs along on the surface without fully sinking.

Before I went back to it, though, I wanted to do two things. First, "forget" it to the point that when I read the thing it would be with fresh eyes, so I'd naturally read every paragraph and not mentally skim over because I knew what was coming. The second thing was to do the prep work for the next book (if I don't answer certain questions ahead of time, I'll butt up to the same places in the book every time. Apparently.).

The prep work for the second book is around halfway done. It takes me a while, especially since we haven't had the babysitter since last fall. I wish this could go faster but I'm a CFS-stricken, sleep deprived, homeschooling dad propped up by vicodin and carisoprodol. Hemingway had his booze...

As for the part about forgetting the first book before I do the edit/revision work, I guess I'm about there. I was going to reply to my friend with a, "Huh? What are you doing, watching soap operas over there?" "Forgetting" the book shouldn't include forgetting who I give it to to read.

Ahhhh, mental health. Don't waste yours.

"Dead Watch"

2008-03-12T14:48:00.000-04:00

I'm dying here. Between the falling dollar and rising oil, proposed Democratic budget and tax increases and Republican unrestricted trade and seeming indifference to global warming, to the nation's credit crunch and our town budget proposal. We're growing corn to burn more fuel so that we're running out of grain for food and feed. We decimate sharks for soup and other fish because we get paid. And blah blah blah blah blah blah...

I'm depressed. I'm afraid for my children's future. I don't see any way out of it. I can't even seem to make myself care about illegal immigration. My only real hope is that the media constantly harps on the worst possible angles of the most unsavory stories and we're not really any better or worse off than at any other point in modern history.

Except for that global warming thing. That's a big one.

TV's painful because my basic cable service from Time-Warner combined with a cable modem costs over a hundred dollars per month. Beneath the total should be a statement that says: This is why you hate us. Love, TW. And then, of course, it's still TV.

Thank god for books. Open the cover, turn the page, and get me the hell out of here.

Clearly, as I mentioned a few posts ago, I'm not coping so well. For years and years I haven't been able to read books about three things: politics, Hollywood, and sports. They are typically filled with cliched cardboard cutout characters placed in situations so far out from what I can identify with they are about as interesting to read as the latest Party vs. Party diatribe for the upcoming election.

That doesn't always stop me from trying, however. I really liked Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate but it was published a long time ago. Recently I read John Sandford's Dead Watch and I'll be damned if Sandford didn't handle it with all the skill and inventiveness that he's brought to his two series (the Prey and the Kidd books).

Politics are inherently interesting. American politics are inherently distasteful (to me; maybe it would be different if I was Portugese or something but I don't know). Dead Watch introduces us to a new character, a typical Sandord man's man: bright, clever, socially adept, knows how to get along with the ladies. The plot revolves around political intrigue as plausible as anything occurring in real life but without the cliches, without the tiresome comparisons to American presidents past, and without any preachy or attempted redeeming message about the great American Way.

What it does do is tell a damned good story. As I've said here numerous times, Sandford is one of the few contemporary authors I know of that consistently gets better as time goes by; he's resisted falling into a self-parodying formula or rehashing of previous works and comes out swinging every time. I can't think of anything I'd rather read about (for pleasure) than a book with a political setting (or Hollywood or pro sports). But Sandford makes it work because, I think, he puts the story above all else.

There should be a writing Rule in there somewhere, I think. Aw, but then someone would just come along and break it. In the meantime, I think I'm behind one Prey and one Sandford standalone. Those ought to keep me away from the world for a while.

Put Down the Ray Gun, Stewie...

2008-03-08T18:50:00.001-05:00

With a six year old girl and a three year old boy in the house, practically the ONLY way I can get any writing done whatsoever is to leave the house. For whatever reason, homes in New England have detached garages, many with some kind of finished rooms either above or behind the car space. When we bought our house, we had the builder put in a two car standalone garage with an office space up top. It's heated, has a bathroom (populated only with a toilet at this time), and all of my books.

The ongoing project is to build wall to wall bookshelves on the two long walls. The picture above shows one completed unit (it doesn't all fit in the picture); the skeleton for the other wall exists and the rest is waiting until spring.

The other day, out of the blue, my son said, "Daddy, when you die can I have your room?"

Somewhat flustered, I stammered out, "Um, sure, I guess. I'll be dead so you can work it out with your mother."

He waited a few seconds and then he said, "Will you die soon?"

"I hope not," I said. "But you never know." I hope that he realizes it would be in his best interests to let me complete the other shelf unit, finish the bathroom, and take care of the insulation deficiency the builder left us with. Presumably then he'll be more able to take and hold the facility. Or turn it into a cool fort. Something, anyway.

Rodentia

2008-03-05T14:40:00.001-05:00

One day I'd like to read a good biography of Walt Disney. I think he did good things, I think he was a visionary, an innovator, and he had an appealing presence on film. He sure did some cool things with mice. For all I know he kicked dogs and drank too much, but I really hope not.

When I first started going to Florida to jump out of airplanes, I'd head over to DisneyWorld on bad weather days that kept us from jumping. It cost fifteen bucks to get in and five bucks to park. I thought this was a bargain. Being used to the bumper to bumper inhumanity of stadium parking lots, I feared the entire parking process but it turned out to be a dream. It's as easy-in and easy-out as could be. This cemented my first real Disney thought: they did things right. Rather than be an afterthought, the logistics of moving people around had clearly been someone's priority early on in the development process.

But then I noticed that each time I went back, the price of admission had gone up two bucks. I just checked now and the price is up to $71.00. Per person. For one park. For one day.

For years the parking stayed at five bucks but shortly before we moved out of the Sunshine State they started hitting those, too. When we left it had gone up to ten bucks. I've never believed in paying for parking anywhere I go (not that I'm not forced to do it). It's like a surcharge or a penalty for giving someone my business. And the ever-increasing prices for the season passes we used to get... I had hoped when Universal opened up that competition would slow the increases down. I'm so naive.

And then they announced they would do no more animated features. Because computer-rendered images trump actual art and story? You can't have both? I believe there's a place for "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Little Mermaid" alongside the Pixar offerings like "Toy Story" and "The Incredibles."

And they keep putting these computer animated cartoon series on their cable channel, THE favorite of my kids, with "art" and "characters" that are so crudely drawn, so unimaginative, so
unpleasant to look at that I can't bear to watch them. "The Buzz on Maggie," "Dave the Barbarian," and now "Phineas and Ferb" are simply dreadful. And that's just to name a few.

A couple of weeks ago I read how the woman who wrote the Cheetah Girls books that a series of Disney Channel movies (third one forthcoming), CDs, and an actual touring musical group are based on, hasn't been paid any of the royalty money she contracted for. Sure, it's a common enough story for a freelance writer to be screwed by Hollywood, but this is Disney, for gosh' sake. Isn't it? Happiest-place-on-earth kind of company?

So, yes, I'm disappointed. But here's what I REALLY find appalling: so much of the programming on the Disney Channel perpetrates the same kind of "class warfare" that make me keep my kids out of public school. I was watching their "Minutemen" movie last night with my daughter and one of the characters, a JOCK, was complaining about the behavior of fellow students he previously bullied. He said something like, "It's like the dorks don't know their place anymore."

To be fair, it's not just Disney. All the studios put out this crap that sorts people into Jocks and the Popular Girls, as well as consigning large numbers to be Dorks, Nerds, Geeks, Brainiacs, and other groups to be mocked and ridiculed. These are the lessons we want our kids to learn? This is what life in school is really like?

Really, you can't tell your stories any other way? Give me a break.

These shows force kids to take sides, either mock or be mocked, be on the inside or the outside, behave a certain way and be cool or don't and be a joke. I watch these things, too often alongside my children, and think "Columbine De-mystified." It's sad, it's pathetic, and it can't be anything other than wrong.

And I hope to god that Walt himself, were he still with us, would not have allowed this stuff to take over his vision. Someone has to light the way, which I think he did, but those that follow have to keep the flame alive. Other than the snooty waiter from "Ferris Beuller's Day Off," I don't know who said, "I weep for the future." Sadly, I do, too.

Save Ferris. Save us all.

Vegetarianism

2008-03-03T17:30:00.000-05:00

I talked about "thin books" a little while ago, books that I find easy to read, filled usually with snappy dialogue, and contain interesting characters. But they fail to involve, to really absorb, to make me really want to know what comes next yet be afraid to turn the page because there will only be that much less story to discover.

So many of these books are produced by the same writers over and over that I've come to think of it as an actual style. They're like Dippin' Dots, the freeze dried ice cream we used to get at the mall when we lived in the South. The little pellets melt away in your mouth almost before you can get your teeth on them, leaving but a wisp of tantalizing flavor. Ah, the ice cream that could have been.

This isn't to say that they're bad books, just brain popcorn, some with a bit more butter or salt than the others. Elmore Leonard's books fit this category for me, as do Robert B. Parker's. Leonard's oft-quoted Ten Rules for Writers make a good deal of sense but like any rule, especially one regarding the arts, they're usually about as substantive as a small tub of Dippin' Dots.

For instance, the Leonard Rule of leaving out all the parts "that readers tend to skip." These are the "thick paragraphs of prose" that are the writer waxing "hooptedoodle." To me, a better rule is just, "Don't be boring." Or, as I once heard author James W. Hall say at a conference, "But I like reading those parts." If the text is well written, if it moves the story along or develops the characters, mostly if it advances the story, then I'm all for it. I read a book to read the book, not cherry pick shorter paragraphs or passages of dialogue.

Leonard is so well regarded that once upon a time I read a number of his books even when I became convinced that, for me, the work didn't live up to the hype. Enjoyable for what they were, but they left me longing for something more like a good, meaty James Clavell. Or at least a John Sandford, who is every bit as 'easy to read' but can sweep me away in a milieu that keeps me up at night turning pages.

Parker works much the same way for me. Judging from seeing him at conferences, he's a tremendously charismatic and intelligent guy. But his Spenser books, again, just roll off the mind like a bead of water down wax paper. The first time I stopped reading him was after the plot of the book was very clearly borrowed from Chandler's "The Big Sleep." A few years later, I went back to the beginning of the series and read the first two. These were better, but not all that different.

I started again, kind of, with his Jesse Stone series. I caught part of one a few months ago and the earth tone color palette, the performance of Tom Selleck as Stone, and the moody atmosphere had me mesmerized. I went to the town bookstore to find the first book: they didn't have it. I went across the street to the library: they didn't have it. I looked online for an e-book version: nobody had it. So back at the bookstore, I bought the fourth one in the series. (They had others but they were in that &%#@ inch-taller mass market format that I WILL NOT touch. So far.)

Again, thin as usual, but with a strange twist. The atmosphere of the TV movies and the characterization and portrayal by Tom Selleck of the lead character played in my head as I read the book. A few weeks later, I found the third book at a discount (remainder) store. Same experience.

My wife and I began watching the movies in their entirety. She's enjoying them a bit more than me, I'm afraid, because, well, the plots of the movies are a lot like the plots in the books. Um, they're a bit thin.

This is tough to do without spoilers, but I'll try: a character already knows something about another character; the state police captain tells Stone other things about other characters; Stone instinctively and correctly knows things about his cases (sure, I'll buy that he's that good). The end result, though, is that while there's an element of mystery there's not enough mystery solving to make the experience more satisfactory, more filling, more, I suppose, thick.

The movies will make me read the books, and vice versa. Almost always it's the other way around. At least I already know I won't be skipping any parts.

Bound Talisman

2008-03-01T21:17:00.000-05:00

I don't cope so well anymore. Once upon a time I was fairly easy going, then grew into something of a hothead, and then settled down again. When an incompetent doctor punctured my dura mater and sent me home to ooze my cerebral-spinal fluid away from my brain in private, I was left bedridden for eight months. After numerous procedures and tests, I was restored to my feet, only now with messed up discs in my neck and a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome. I munch vicodin and carisoprodol with disturbing aplomb (when I met my wife I wouldn't even take aspirin for a headache; the first one wasn't even free).

For a time there I became more emotional and somewhat irritable. Constant pain and a lack of "restorative sleep" will do that to a person. Over the past few years, the pain is a bit more manageable and yet more prescription meds allow me to fall to sleep without the instant-on radio that seems to happen in my mind most nights when I try to pass out. I still can't sit upright in a chair for prolonged periods of time, shovel snow, play on the floor with my kids, and feel proud of not polluting my temple with chemicals.

So I'm a junkie. I never claimed to be in denial. If the doctors would see fit to recommend surgery, I'd be there in a heartbeat but that's another story.

Put another way, certain aspects regarding the quality of my life have changed for the worse the past few years. I'm not the same kind of person I used to be. I'm not the same extroverted, hyperactive gadfly that wooed my wife. She tells me she thinks I'd like to be a hermit, and that I need to take a few more deep breaths throughout the day. I don't argue with either point.

So I bought a book...

I've always admired Buddhism as a philosophy rather than as a dogma. The idea that people are inherently kind and compassionate creatures, that we are happiest if we are acting so; that freedom from want is a key to happiness: notions like these could actually help me become a happier person. I think.

Enter Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, one-time headliner for the self-help phenomenon of the eighties and now barefooted smooth talking pitchman for public TV. I saw him last year talking about the Power of Intention and I had no idea what he was talking about. My own fault, I'm sure; I can't watch any show and stay through either a commercial or an appeal for sponsorship. Makes it hard to follow just about any show more complicated than I Dream of Jeannie.

His more recent appearances have shown him talking about the philosophy of the Tao. Dyer read a number of Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching, a series of verses that offers guidance on how to be moral, spritual, happy and good, and wrote a book offering his own interpretation.

It's there now, on the table in front of me, and it's been working for me for several weeks. Sure, the introduction offers a corny bit comparing his own name to the words Tao Te Ching, and the discussion of each verse contains a section called "Do the Tao Now." But it's a fact that I've been calmer in the face of poor work left us by our homebuilder, erratic snowplowing by our neighbor, and dozens of the petty nothings that all of us have to face every day. Just knowing the book is here, that I bought it for this purpose, has helped me achieve it. It's bizarre.

Dyer's an excellent speaker, even more impressive since he doesn't use notes or cue cards during his talks, and I only hope his actual writing lives up to the promise of its message. In a way, though, I suppose it doesn't need to as long as I seem to be responding to the book's physical presence.

There may be a Zen or Taoist message somewhere in that thought but I have no way of knowing. I'm starting to think I'll have to actually read the book.

It's Not Schwab's Drugstore

2008-02-27T11:00:00.000-05:00

Every month I get the new Hard Case Crime book in the mail. The town bookstore doesn't carry them and even if they did, so many of their books are stored crookedly on the shelves that I wouldn't them anyway. But for $3.99 per book plus shipping, I spend about the same as I would at the bookstore and the books arrive in a protective cardboard box. Which gets recycled.

The book for March is John Lange's Zero Cool. Lange is the pseudonym of Michael Crichton who apparently put himself through medical school by writing these Gold Medal-type thrillers. Hard Case published one a year ago which was pretty good, as is the new one. I prefer the Hard Case Lange's to the Crichton's I've actually read. For instance I thought Jurassic Park was better as a movie because the T-Rex wasn't obsessed with bypassing geography and the convenience of more readily available food in order to mercilessly track humans in a jeep. And the movie makes the kids much less annoying than the book. The last one I read was Rising Sun and I've been mostly successful in blotting that one out of my mind.

But I digress. The new cover of Zero Cool pictures a woman who looks strikingly like my wife. The face is not quite right but everything else is. I sent a letter to the artist, Gregory Manchess, which he'll probably assume is from a crackpot but what the hey. Here's the letter:

Dear Mr. Manchess:

As a fan of all the Hard Case Crime titles, I've appreciated your cover work very much. I just recently received "Zero Cool" in the mail and was especially struck by the cover painting. I know this is odd but I thought I'd drop you a line and see if you'd be willing to share your inspiration or the genesis of the cover.

You see, the image of the woman on the cover is almost the spitting image of my wife. The face is a bit different, but not a lot. The hair, bikini, glasses and physical proportions are all spot on (at least prior to delivering our two children). We lived in Florida for over a dozen years and I couldn't go off for a coke or a hot dog without people (okay, men) wandering over to her, some asking if they could take her picture.

I've been sending the link to the cover from Hard Case Crime's site to people we know and they're all floored. It may be completely illogical to think you and her may have crossed paths, but it would make a coincidence into a great story.

Sincerely,

Rick Ollerman
Littleton, NH

If life were fair, I'd post a picture of my wife in a similar pose wearing a similar not much, but that would be up to her.

How To Make the List

2008-02-26T11:17:00.000-05:00

I'm finishing proofreading an upcoming two-in-one edition of A Shot in the Dark and Shell Game for Stark House Press. The books were written by Richard Powell, whose book Say It With Bullets was reprinted last year by Hard Case Crime. Sadly, Mr. Powell passed away in 1999 and couldn't be around to see some of his works rediscovered.

Anyway, in the course of proofing the books, sometimes my brain gets so filled with things I feel the need to look up some fairly obvious things. Sometimes I use my Oxford Compact dictionary, and of course the internet. This morning I used Google to make sure that "boyfriend" is a legitimate compound word. Yes, of course it is, but you proofread a bunch of books and see what happens to you...

So I typed in "define: boyfriend" in Google's search bar and put my ruffled mind at ease. At the top of the page was a section titled "Related phrases" and lists, in this order: 'my boyfriend is type b,' 'helga's boyfriend,' and 'kill your boyfriend.'

Holy crap! People search for this? What happens when the FBI seizes their computers and check out their caches? And can't a girl figure out a good way to do the deed by herself? Even if she needs Google's help, you'd think she'd be more subtle about it and search for say, 'murders disguised as accidents' or that kind of thing.

But then again, if you're using the public internet and Googling ways to commit a capital crime, you just may not be the sharpest bulb in the tool chest.

Unaware of the specific boundaries of the Patriot Act, I steeled my nerves and clicked on the link. Yes, you guessed it, turns out that "Kill Your Boyfriend" is a comic book. So I was relieved, until I thought: a girl needs a comic book to figure out how to kill her lover?

I'm running around in circles here. I need to clear my head. I think I'll get back to the lighthearted, happy stories from Stark House and Hard Case Crime. Hardboiled and noir? Forget about it. Just don't leave them out for your girlfriend to find.

Title for New Book

2008-02-25T13:55:00.001-05:00

When I was in college I had a roommate who told me I called a spade a spade. I wasn't sure at the time I knew what he meant. Since then I've pretty much figured it out.

A week or so ago a friend of mine asked my opinion on his essay for admission to law school. In my opinion, and my opinion only, no warranties expressed or implied, I thought he had gone in the wrong direction and spent a bunch of time reworking it into what I thought, and only I, right, wrong or indifferent, would serve him in a more positive and flattering light.

He was very defensive when I sent it back to him, and that was okay. I suspect that he knew that would be the case when he originally asked me; if he'd not bothered to read it or thrown it away or lined his hamster cage it all would have been fine. It was completely his deal and he asked me for an opinion and that was all he got. And what's that worth? If anybody wants to send me a dollar I'll send them at least half a dozen...

The whole thing made me think back a bit. Like most people's self-images, I don't think I'm that bad a guy. But what I think about myself and what others think about me have never been completely in lockstep but again, I'm sure that's true with most everyone else. Unlike past relationships, though, where I tend to forget the bad aspects over time and just remember the good, I seem to forget the good things I've done (I'm sure there are some) and remember the bad.

Yes, I used to wear expensive Carerra sunglasses. Indoors. Sometimes with the lights off in my office while working (I had big windows). I used to chew on toothpicks all the time, too; I kept them in my wallet and a friend would actually give me a stack he'd marinate in peppermint oil whenever I saw him. My shirt was undone a button too far and it wasn't to allow my seven or eight chest hairs a chance for air. And yes, I liked pointed shoes as opposed to Weejuns or penny loafers or wing tips.

I'm cringing as I write all this. What the hell did people actually think of me?

Here's what I remember: I was born with a bad eye and dimmer light would allow the pupil to dilate and be more comfortable for me. I have some larger than usual spaces in my teeth and I needed toothpicks to keep the broccoli out after just about every meal. I kept my shirt unbuttoned to the point I did because it was easy to slide off over my head that way when I got home at night. The shoes-- Well, the shoes were just cool.

So my given first name is Richard, a strong Old German name meaning powerful leader. I've gone by the nickname Rick since the fifth grade when people seemed to spontaneously hit me with it. That was fine with me; Richard seemed awfully formal. Another nickname is Rich, which I don't care for, and another is Dick, which is fine but carries with it cultural memories of Mr. Nixon. I think of my dad, though, since I'm a junior (and our son is a third).

My dad wouldn't call me Rick until I was past thirty. He always told me it wasn't my name. I countered with the fact that it was as much my name as Dick was as his. Apparently he caved.

'Dick' also has another meaning in the vernacular, one that I've used myself. After my experience with my friend's essay and looking back at how I must have come across to other people when I was younger, I've had a thought. If I ever defy odds and do something worthy of a memoir, could it be called anything other than "AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A DICK"? Clearly not.

I did have a group of friends who for years called me 'Rico Suave,' pronounced swa-vay after the one hit wonder song of the early nineties. There's got to be a story there, too, but I don't think I'm strong enough to face it right now. I've named my own spade and dug an adequate hole as it is.

My Brain Is (Much) Too Small

2008-02-21T19:02:00.000-05:00

Just when you think--

You won't believe this but--

Are you sitting down? Because--

A guy walks into a bar--

Honey, we have to talk--

I'm too stunned to come up with a good way to open this entry. I had no idea the market for backwards-thinking people was so huge. I was hoping we'd outsourced all those positions long ago. However--

I just saw a Reuters story where Random House has announced that they will begins selling books online.

That's okay.

By the chapter.

That's stupid.

For $2.99. Each.

That's stupefying.

So, what, a ten chapter book will cost me thirty dollars? But realistically, most books have closer to thirty chapters; so I'm looking at a hundred bucks? For an e-book, something that is already priced on par with a version that I can actually hold in my hand and read without batteries?

Apparently they're saying they're doing this to "gauge interest" in the title. Truly I think they must be developing the market for a mailing list of stupid people addicted to online shopping who think they want to learn to read. Or something equally beyond the capacity of the tiny little nerve endings that meet between my ears. Are you telling me that if don't fall off the turnip truck after winning the lottery and decide NOT to endorse this futuristic, cutting-edge, marketing tool of tomorrow that my message is that I just don't care for the book?

It must be. I can't think of another explanation for publishers who think that adding an inch in height and two dollars to the price of a mass market paperback will sell more books. If charging twenty percent more for an approximation of the same book will lead to an increased readership, I'll... I'll... I'll... If selling e-books by the chapter for three bucks per makes sense to anyone who actually buys books of any sort, I'll... I'll... I'll...

Crap. Got nothing. See, my brain is too small. I need to listen to my wife more.

Blood on the Snow

2008-02-20T11:13:00.000-05:00

While walking out to the garage a few nights ago (it's a separate building from the house), I noticed some bright red spatter on the snow. The series of spots began about eight feet from the side door and ended about six feet from the corner on the same side. The spots were clearly bright red, clearly fresh, and clearly blood. There were no footprints in the knee deep snow next to the path.

The blood began, and then it stopped.

Given the number of spatters, it doesn't seem to make sense that there weren't any more on either side of that alarming stretch of path. We checked the dog's feet and found nothing. I checked my hands to see if my fingers could have been dripping blood. (Without me knowing it? Sadly, it could probably happen.)

Later that night, while walking the dogs down the driveway, I heard an absolutely curdling scream cut through the night. The two dogs and I froze. It sounded like a woman being stabbed with a dull steak knife. A few seconds later we heard it again. Then again, and again. It seemed to be coming from the other side of our neighbor's house, still a hundred yards or so away.

Convinced it was an animal, I turned around and ran the dogs back to the house. I grabbed Melissa and made her scramble into boots and jacket and hustled her outside. At the top of the driveway she heard it for the first time.

"Did you hear it?" I asked.

"That was Sabrina screaming!" she said.

I knew she wouldn't believe me that it wasn't. I told her to keep walking while I ran in and checked on the girl. She was asleep in her bed. Back outside, Melissa was about two thirds down the driveway. We both stopped and listened again. The scream came again, and then again, growing more faint each time.

"What the hell is it?"

"Some kind of bird," I guess. "It's moving away too quickly."

Slowly we made our way back to the house. I was enjoying the opportunity to hear more nocturnal wildlife, thinking of the night we first moved up here and listened to some still unexplained roaring/braying at a Vermont rest stop. We've heard that same sound here, too. Suddenly Melissa said, "Lock the door tonight."

That blew everything. Suddenly I had the plot for a story bubbling up in my mind, where an innocent pedestrian scolds a strangely dressed man on the sidewalk for casually littering. The strangely dressed man takes an odd offense and begins heckling and following the man down the street. Eventually he follows him to his home and then starts calling and otherwise harassing him, ultimately ending in a real bad situation. All the while the man can't believe he's suffering such torment and threat because of an almost casual remark. It disturbed my sleep and I vividly remembered the dreams the next morning.

Melissa said she, too, had had bad dreams, of death, destruction, and other mayhem. Life in the woods in a small town, I guess. With killer birds. We don't need no stinking bears.

Unless they can fly.

From Left Field

2008-02-14T15:10:00.000-05:00

As a quick follow up to my non-involved, uninformed post yesterday on the settlement of the WGA strike, according to Harlan Ellison (via his board), the writers did a poor deal. This makes me sad. I assumed that all along the writers would get what they wanted. I found it hard to conceive of the notion that they wouldn't. They shut Hollywood down, they went on strike; how could they not win (whatever that means)?

If the union can't stave off the evils of corporate money-mongers notorious for ripping off writers from the start of time (or at least Edison), then I guess all I can say is I hope they have a really good insurance program. I mean, what was the point?

The next post will be about actually writing. No, really. Not that I know any more about that, but I do pay more attention.

Here's what Ellison said:

Creds: got here in 1962, written for just about everybody, won the Writers Guild Award four times for solo work, sat on the WGAw Board twice, worked on negotiating committees, and was out on the picket lines with my NICK COUNTER SLEEPS WITH THE FISHE$$$ sign. You may have heard my name. I am a Union guy, I am a Guild guy, I am loyal. I fuckin' LOVE the Guild.

And I voted NO on accepting this deal.

My reasons are good, and they are plentiful; Patric Verrone will be saddened by what I am about to say; long-time friends will shake their heads; but this I say without equivocation...

THEY BEAT US LIKE A YELLOW DOG. IT IS A SHIT DEAL. We finally got a timorous generation that has never had to strike, to get their asses out there, and we had to put up with the usual cowardly spineless babbling horse's asses who kept mumbling "lessgo bac'ta work" over and over, as if it would make them one iota a better writer. But after months on the line, and them finally bouncing that pus-sucking dipthong Nick Counter, we rushed headlong into a shabby, scabrous, underfed shovelfulla shit clutched to the affections of toss-in-the-towel
summer soldiers trembling before the Awe of the Alliance.

My Guild did what it did in 1988. It trembled and sold us out. It gave away the EXACT co-terminus expiration date with SAG for some bullshit short-line substitute; it got us no more control of our words; it sneak-abandoned the animator and reality beanfield hands before anyone even forced it on them; it made nice so no one would think we were meanies; it let the Alliance play us like the village idiot. The WGAw folded like a Texaco Road Map from back in the day.

And I am ashamed of this Guild, as I was when Shavelson was the prexy, and we wasted our efforts and lost out on technology that we had to strike for THIS time. 17 days of streaming tv!!!????? Geezus, you bleating wimps, why not just turn over your old granny for gang-rape?

You deserve all the opprobrium you get. While this nutty festschrift of demented pleasure at being allowed to go back to work in the rice paddy is filling your cowardly hearts with joy and relief that the grips and the staff at the Ivy and street sweepers won't be saying nasty shit behind your back, remember this:

You are their bitches. They outslugged you, outthought you, outmaneuvered you; and in the end you ripped off your pants, painted yer asses blue, and said yes sir, may I have another.

Please excuse my temerity. I'm just a sad old man who has fallen among Quislings, Turncoats, Hacks and Cowards.

I must go now to whoops. My gorge has become buoyant.

Respectfully, Yr. Pal, Harlan Ellison

Gutter Ball

2008-02-14T14:29:00.000-05:00

I've never understood why it should be incumbent on a person who points out a problem to also have a solution to the problem.

"That's broken."

"Can you fix it?"

"Um, no."

"Then shut up."

That philosophy strikes me as some kind of fallacious dodge but I lack or have forgotten the terms from logic class to say it with more specificity. How about:

"Dude, your house is on fire."

"Can you put it out?"

"Um, no."

"Crap. Can I borrow your phone to call the fire department?"

Sometimes, too, people can ask questions and not only not have an answer, but not expect one. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike was finally settled, which is a good thing, but I'm not sure what side of the conflict I sympathized with most. On the one hand, WGA members were well compensated before the strike in terms of salary and insurance benefits. The fact that the studios could take advantage of new technologies such as DVDs and the internet to make millions more dollars does not take that away. So while the writers made a pittance from, say, DVD sales based on their work, they had already been well paid to do the work in first place.

From the studios' perspective, they'd paid to have the writers do their work and they felt they owned it to do with as they would and to make as much money as they possibly could. The work has become a commodity at that point. Unless they have deals with directors or actors or copyright holders to pay points on whatever profits may form.

Do I think the studios would treat everyone fairly and equitably, distributing the wealth as any decent, sympathetic human should be expected to do? That would be a joke. Without the union the writers would be hosed every possible way the studios could think of.

Do I think the writers were being screwed because the studios were raking in dough that wasn't accounted for in their earlier contract? Kinda sorta not really, although there are claims that an understanding had been in place to address the new technologies but had gone ignored by the studios.

In the end the good news is the strike is over and everyone can get back to work and everyone can make money. The union did what it was supposed to and got the best deal it could for its members and did so without damaging the studios' ability to make a profit and stay alive (as opposed to the auto workers). The writers weren't being greedy and the studios weren't acting particularly like the Evil Empire.

I think what I really think about all this is that only good can come from more money flowing out of the hands of the studios. As long as market forces keep the consumer prices down, the field can only grow. I think. I may be completely full of crap, expressing an uninformed opinion, but when this stuff is plastered all over the media, this is what we do: comment, spout off, create internet content.

Proper Fish Wrap

2008-02-13T11:21:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid there were a number of occasions where my father set me straight on just how things ought to be. One day he brought home an Irish Setter and when he presented him to the family, he said, "Now that's the way a dog ought to look." Another time he took my brother and I along on a fishing trip to Lake Mille Lacs or somewhere and when he caught a walleye (my brother and I never caught anything) he said, "That's the way a fish ought to look."

Yesterday I wrote about Robert Charles Wilson's Blind Lake and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind yet. Not just the book itself, but what it made me feel while I was reading it. It's one of those books that makes you sad as you flip through the pages, watching that stack on the right side shrink slowly but steadily away. And when the thing accelerates into its climax and you can't put it down, it makes you think about how wonderfully entertaining a book can be. Blind Lake is the way a book ought to be. I can't say it any better than that.

A Sort of Review

2008-02-12T14:42:00.000-05:00

Eons ago I read a story by someone named Robert Charles Wilson in an issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I remember at the time being struck by not only the beauty of the story but the lyrical writing that did it justice. Immediately I searched for any books he may have written and sure enough, his first novel had just been published. It was called A Hidden Place and was as beautifully written as the magazine story had been, but, if memory can serve after so many years, the book itself didn't quite live up to what I was hoping for.

I hesitate to say that because labeling a book "good" or even "very good" instead of "great" or "stupendous" shouldn't taint the novel or make it seem deficient or lacking in necessarily substantive ways. I think the real problem is that Wilson writes so well that your expectations float to the stratosphere and sheer anticipation leads to dangerously lofty expectations. The two don't always meet, at least not in as high a place as you might like.

So I'm not sure what to say about the guy. He's been around for a long time, often I think out of print, but he's won an armful of awards, including the 2006 Hugo. How can a guy like this be under the radar screen? He's the only contemporary science fiction writer whose work I keep up with. As I've written before, I'm one of many who left SF behind as we grew older, turning to more "grown up" forms of literature.

Again, I'm not sure how to describe that concept. SF lost me when it seemed like all of the new books were Star Wars variations, with civilization fighting civilization and race fighting race; I get enough of that in the city news. General fiction, and crime and mysteries, seemed less, what? Silly? Contrived? Formulaic?

I know that reads as a slam against SF and really, I have no problem with Star Wars. But the lexical dexterity of Jack Vance, the emotional beauty of Theodore Sturgeon, these things cannot be replaced by ray guns and jet fighters ins space. I miss the hard science of Larry Niven, before he dipped his typewriter in fantasy and wrote about magic. Sigh.

Maybe it's me. Probably it's me. But Robert Charles Wilson brings it all back to me. This morning I tried to put down Blind Lake after breakfast but I couldn't do it. The Sturgeon-like work he did with his characters came together with a Niven-esque scientific scenario to keep me reading when I should have turned productive for the day. Damn, the man can write, genre be damned.

Wilson's books often have wildly interesting premises: a series of monolithic structures appear overnight commemorating the future conquest of the land; a section of Europe is suddenly overwritten with what appears to be an alien landscape, complete with its own eco-system; in Blind Lake, quantum machines designed to find intelligent signals from the noise of space teach themselves to find and follow signals from other civilizations though no one understands how they work. Especially when the telescopes stop working yet the machines continue to render the signals.

This book, I think, comes closest to marrying his prose with his depth of characterization with a fascinating scientific premise. It, too, was nominated for a Hugo, which is publicity that can only help him attract new readers. He deserves it.

Natural Disaster

2008-02-08T18:35:00.000-05:00

Since we moved up to the woods of New Hampshire I've had this nagging fear that a fire in the woods would knock out our house and garage, including my office/library, before the local fire department even knew there was a fire. Short of digging a moat or deforesting the hillside, I'll just have to learn to deal. Writers James and Livia Reasoner weren't so lucky. They lost everything in a fire a few weeks ago.

I've never read James' books, and I need to rectify that (Texas Wind is supposed to be some kind of modern classic) but I do read his blog. He's posted a few pictures of the fire's aftermath; they show a devastating loss. Here's a link to an article describing the fire.

Livia Reasoner's agent is apparently accepting donations of books for the day when the couple can begin rebuilding their library. I sent a box today that contains some second hand Gold Medals that I have duplicates of, and some excellent new Stark House books that I hope they find interesting. It's not much, but a small drop in a big bucket should be better than nothing. Or a cinder.

Anyway, it's a gesture, and I hope that they, and anyone in similar circumstances, get well from this. There but for the grace of...

Books can be sent to:
James and Livia Reasoner
c/o Kim Lionetti, BookEnds, Inc.
136 Long Hill Road
Gillette, NJ 07933

Checks for the James Reasoner Emergency Fund can be sent to:
WWA
MSC06 3770
1 University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001