No, not the reviews I’ve been getting; I mean the ones I write. Twice now I’ve written a view on Amazon.com for a book I bought from them, and twice it has not posted after a 48-hour delay. I swear I’m filling the form out correctly.
What could be causing this? The reviews are pretty short–probably around ten words. Could that be it?
via mightygodking
2) The eleven topics all crime fiction blogs post about.
3) Ten things crime fiction writers can learn from Paris Hilton
4) Michael Shanks as Hawkman? No. Just… no. Isn’t there a superhero who plays tennis and does hot yoga he can play? Because that seems more his speed.
5) Your book isn’t self-published, but do readers know that?
I have an interview with the folks at Seattle Geekly in about an hour. Meanwhile, I’m trying to fix a scene in Man Bites World that makes perfect sense in every way except the emotional. I’m trying to figure out how these two guys feel about each other right now, and their past is so complicated that… Oh! I know!
Update: Interview went well, I think. Nice people.
The plan to take a long, healthful walk to the library to work on Man Bites World went out the window when I looked out my window and saw freezing fog and black ice everywhere. The sidewalks were crazy slippery, and the walk I’d need to take has an 18% grade in some parts. Time for the bus.
But I have a question for the internet mind before I head off for lunch and more editing: What do you use for quality color printing (if at all)? My color printer is on its last legs, and my wife would like to be able to print high-quality photos for reference. Not just on photo paper, either.
Thanks.
Why Science Fiction Is Dying & Fantasy Fiction Is The Future.
Fantasy author Mark Charan Newton has some ideas about why sales for sf is flagging while fantasy is still going strong. He comes across as the extra who had to nod and duck out of frame when Claude Rains said “Round up the usual suspects.” We have literary types and Hollywood and “We’re living in the future!” and, er, women. (Because “Women matter” which I guess is supposed to suggest that women as a group read very little science fiction, or that sf doesn’t appeal to women. Or something. The author doesn’t make it entirely clear, stating that sf readership is falling and citing “More women than men read books” as a reason, leaving the reader to draw the conclusion. I know there are many, many women who read sf, but I wonder whether the percentages match the percentage of the reading public as a whole.)
There are a couple of interesting comments and assumptions in the post. One is the comment about women I mentioned already. Another is that the LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER movies have driven people to read fantasy as a genre. While I’m sure that’s happened, I’m not all that convinced it’s happened at a significant scale. Harry Potter was bringing people into the genre well before the movies; that’s why they made the movies, actually.
An interesting question raised but not addressed in the post is that there are lots of science fiction movies out there (TV shows, too) but they don’t seem to be driving people to pick up sf novels. (In comments, “Niall” states that DOCTOR WHO is the exception, and if that’s true it would be interesting to figure out why.) Didn’t sf have a huge spike in popularity after STAR WARS?
He also states that he’s “talking about Space Opera, Hard-SF etc – the core genre.” I can’t help but wonder what parts of science fiction don’t make it into the core.
I guess my final point would be that I don’t expect science fiction will ever die. Not really. It might become the sort of thing that only a specialty press would want to publish for a core audience, but I seriously doubt it would ever fall to that level. Seriously doubt, in part because the poster notes that when talking about the survival of the genre, literary sf doesn’t count. I can’t quite figure out why.
I should mention that the last science fiction hard science fiction[1] novel I read was probably Picoverse, which was great fun until I realized the characters weren’t. My interest flagged quickly, and it occurred to me that several of the sf books I’d read recently had incredibly uninteresting or unbelievable characters. I’d been reading them out of a sense of duty–science fiction is supposed to be good for me, isn’t it? And the culture, too?–but not enjoying them. So I stopped. At this point I read mostly fantasy and mystery, and I’m happier for it.
[1] Discussion in comments has made me realize that I have read sf since then, but I wasn’t thinking of them as sf because I’d enjoyed them.
I’ve been offline all day because of malware on my office computer. Thanks for putting pron links on my work desktop, malware writers!
1) “Climategate:” Not as damning as certain people would like.
2) My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement Former front man for the band Too Much Joy jousts with a major label over royalty statements. Much more interesting than it sounds.
3) NFL creates more stringent rules to prevent players from going back into games with concussions. Which is great and all, but it doesn’t tempt me to watch again.
4) I wish I understood why the NY Times included this as the second sentence in this article: “She is tall, fashionable and, dare we say it, slim.” Maybe it’s a valuable piece of information in an article about a new bill in the French parliament that would require all retouched photo to be labeled as such. Maybe they wanted to deflect accusations that the politician was just a jealous fatso who should get to the gym. Maybe the writer couldn’t write a story about fashion and women’s bodies without taking careful note of who has an approved body type and who doesn’t. It just seems unprofessional to me.
It turns out that Joshua Jackson has been cast as Captain Foster in the feature film adaptation of the British SF TV show UFO. No word yet on who will be cast as the ultra-fashionable but mean as hell Commander Straker.
And yeah, that sound you hear is me falling over like I’ve been punched in the gut.
Joshua Jackson! In an Interceptor! You know he won’t be stuck with that one stupid missile on the front of his ship. Mr. TV Star is going to have, like, ten!
And he’s going to slide feet-first through an opening in the wall to board his space ship, and I never, ever will. The bastard. I wonder if I can sneak onto the set.
1) Perils of translation: Emailed out-of-office autoreply text from translator used on road sign.
2) Seductive monsters, Batman-style. Has to be seen to be believed. The “best” part is that this is part of a villain’s origin story.
4) The NY Times 100 Notable Books of the Year. No, I’m not going to read it, either. I loaded the page, “control f” searched for my name, and of course found nothing. Now I’m done with the list.
5) Cormac McCarthy donates his typewriter to charitable auction. The most amusing part is that the dealer handling the auction thinks it’s astonishing that McCarthy wrote all that fiction on such a primitive machine. Someone should explain to him that it’s the machine in McCarthy’s head that did the real work.
6) Celestial Soul Portraits. The perfect gift for your most hated enemy. via tnh’s Particles.
7) Maureen Dowd in a telling misstatement: “Barack Obama is the ultimate party crasher. He crashed Hillary’s high-hat party in 2008 and he crashed the snooty age-old Washington party of privileged white guys with a monopoly on power.” A quick note for Ms. Dowd: Barack Obama didn’t crash a thing. He was invited by the only people empowered to give out invitations.
