Author Archive
Chronogram reviews Indigo
Hudson Valley food and culture magazine, The Chronogram just posted a nice review of Indigo in November 2013’s ‘Short Takes’ column. It’s Chronogram’s 20th Anniversary issue, so grab a copy if you’re in the Hudson Valley, or check them out online!
Inner Life
Watched “On the Road” last night. A lot’s been said about this film, both positive and negative, but I thought it was great.
But what really struck me was how they captured the stillness you used to be able to experience when you went on the road.
No electronic devices. No constant flood of information. If you were lucky you might pick up one or two radio stations broadcasting local content and some doo-wop, but that was about it. On the road meant something different then; it meant you could be the center of your own life, the star of your own universe. You weren’t always prodded to see your life in the frame of everything else happening back home, or in Washington or Hollywood. You didn’t have a stash of 14,000 songs, books on tape and language lessons on your iPod.
I wonder what you lose when you lose your capacity to handle silence?
Am also sort of wondering if there isn’t an app to help with that.
Suzy Hotrod
She skates, she hits people really hard and she does tabletop photography.
And she says, “…tattoos are a cool way to collect without clogging up your apartment.”
Suzy Hotrod is my new Inked Crush (which is a whole new category for this blog).
Olivia Wilde & Beer are the new Mumblecore
It’s the Just Do It age. Every person in this NY Times article started out making a small movie that they wanted to see. Winging it and improvising. Well, every person in that article except Olivia Wilde, and she’s just in my post title because of the inexplicable pleasure I get from typing her name. Olivia Wilde’s name, that is.
And her new movie has Olivia Wilde in a brewery. So, I surrender: someone else has come up with the ultimate concept for a film, and I hate them. Even if I’m going to see the movie 3 times.
What’s Wrong Here?
Where ‘here’ is the publishing industry.
Anis Shivani, writing for The Daily Beast has a great description of the problem:
This model of literary production is doomed. The idea that there should be centralized, massively consolidated, bureaucratic organizations known as the major trade houses, with multiple layers of editors, vast publicity departments, and books fed to them by an entity known as literary agents, only to take repeated losses and rely on a few stars to help them break even, is bound for extinction.
Read the whole article here: 5 Ways to Fix Book Publishing”.
But his solution is to make the big publishers smaller and get the stodgy agents and other middlemen out of the way, and I’m not sure that’s meaningful – those stodgy agents and middlemen are some of our most literate and widely-read book lovers, and if they occasionally overlook a gem, mostly what they do is curate our literary tradition and prevent from being published all the books that really do belong at the bottom of America’s sock drawers. It’s not like these people are hell bent on preventing good books from being published. But with the cost of ebooks so low, the evolution of the industry is going to happen organically: nobody will want to be an agent when book sale commissions won’t put a pizza on your table every week. Agents and middlemen won’t be overthrown, they’ll walk away from the business on their own as the business goes the way of the well-off session bass player – i.e. with commissions on songs running at 79 cents on the iTunes store, there’s not a lot of room to make your backup band rich; the music industry is a precursor to what’s going to happen with books. The reader-led revolution is already beginning to happen at places like Smashwords and Goodreads, where eBook readers cruise for cheap, solid reads based on peer reviews and a bit of advertising.
Still, I’m having trouble picturing a future that runs entirely this way – the commercial parts of the world lack the necessary plasticity. It would be as if the rooms at The Met morphed and changed size and shape depending on how many people lingered in them. Over time you’d see the Impressionist galleries blossom to the size of a small city, while rooms of German Realist etchings shrunk to the size of shoeboxes and eventually disappeared.
But we have to try. Of course the right way to try is to buy some self-published books, enjoy them and let it be known. The revolution might not be televised, but it will be heavily ‘Liked’.
Bodies of Subversion
The Bridesicle
Wish I’d invented the concept, but no, the Bridesicle comes from the weird and wonderful mind of Will McIntosh in his book “Love Minus Eighty”.
In McIntosh’s world, women who die young and beautiful are cryogenically frozen, and only unfrozen when a rich enough man comes along who’s interested in paying for the cure to whatever killed her. Lots of other cool, weird, worrisome and just absurd enough to be true elements in the book, but the Bridesicle stands out as the fuzz that makes the book peachy.
Marley & Me
Speed the %^$#ing Plow
David Mamet is going to self publish his next book. Or at least he claims he is. Could be one of those games you read about, get the other writers all excited about self-publishing then piss off to Knopf with your new manuscript. But what sorta guy who always writes about con artists would do that?
Interesting factoids from the article: Self-published books make up a quarter of Amazon book sales. That’s a lot of virtual paper for a young movement. Second factoid – going through an agency (ICM claims) can get you plum online placement not accorded un-agented self-publishers. Now this one I have to research. Sort of creepy when you think you’re at the forefront of a new movement but the cream is already being set aside for established players. Of course ICM could be playing one of those games where you convince a writer he’s getting special placement while you piss off to the bank with his royalties. But what sorta con-man publisher would do that?
Books have changed forever
Mentioned Hugh Howey a couple days ago on one of my how-to epublish pages, and here he is again, being incredibly smart and insightful about the state of modern book publishing. This is a must-read article for anyone who thinks they have a book inside them (unless you’re a Great Dane with a book inside you, in which case… bad doggie, but also, mad skills with the pointing device, pooch).
As one more reach-around in this love-fest, you should check out articles about Howey in Wired, starting with his interviews with Geek Dad, then go buy his books — note that you can get the Kindle Edition of the first book in the Wool series free at that link.