My Two Cents

What’s J Been Reading? [First of Brumalia, 24 Nov 11]

Hey, Nelson, why didn’t you identify today as Thanksgiving?  And, what the hell is “Brumalia” anyway?

Well, I have been avoiding the use of moveable holidays to identify the dates in my daily reading.  Also, I lament the fact that we have reduced the three-day Thanksgiving feast to a single day (yeah, yeah, I realize that a lot of people take a four-day weekend) so I thought I would honor the 30-day-long Roman feast of Brumalia instead, as a sort of protest against our truncated festivity.

Now, what have I read this morning?  Read more »

What’s J Been Reading? [RFK's Birthday, 20 Nov 11]

Yes, this photo is meant to be self-deprecating. Thank you.

I know you guys (the writers … guys and gals, technically) love yourselves some good query advice.  So, here’s something I read at Hey There’s A Dead Guy: Benjamin LeRoy‘s “Three Tips for Querying! (Because everybody loves a list).”  And, yeah, we do love a list.  Also at Dead Guy is an interesting piece about that unfortunate dust-up over FridayReads.

GalleyCat discusses the movement to create a Literature category at YouTube.  I’m all for it!  And… as if the Quentin Rowan scandal wasn’t bad enough, Melville House reveals yet another case of blatant plagiarism in publishing. Read more »

What ELSE Has J Been Reading? [Bonus Edition, 18 Nov 11]

Wow, I spoke too soon.  Normally I publish the daily reading around noon, and I should have waited today, too.  Lots of cool stuff since then.

Ellie Robins at Melville House talks about a Guardian piece on Melville House‘s Not The Booker Prize party, in which Sam Jordison discusses “whether literary criticism [in broadsheet book reviews] adds anything to our appreciation of books, and whether the limited pools of reviewers and books reviewed skews the picture of what there is to read out there.” Read more »

What’s J Been Reading? [Chinita's Fair, 18 Nov 11]

Accidentally left Raymond Chandler‘s anthology, The Simple Art of Murder, at home, so I was not able to read further into the short story “Pickup On Noon Street.”  Where has J been reading Chandler?  On the DC Metro, to and from work.

So, hey! Remember yesterday when I pointed you to Juliette Wade‘s discussion of gender in fiction?  She specifically talks about Ursula Le Guin‘s The Left Hand Of Darkness.  What do you know, a rejection letter for The Left Hand Of Darkness is featured in Flavorwire‘s “Famous Authors’ Harshest Rejection Letters.”  If you’ve ever gotten a rejection letter, it’s a fun read!  Read more »

What Is A Book?

Here’s a little chart for all of the oh-so-cooler-than-thou coolsters out there who like to show their anti-hip hipsterdom and appreciation for traditional literature by displaying their ignorance of its history.

So, you say you prefer “real” books to Kindle and Nook?  What people read on Kindle and Nook are real books.  You’re talking about codices — singular codex — which, early in the Christian Era, largely replaced the scroll format that had dominated book presentation for thousands of years.

Yes, we often use “book” as a synecdoche for “book in codex form.”  But, regardless of format, the book is the words, not the format through which the words are presented.  Here are some images to explain the concept: Read more »

What Has J Been Reading? [Birthday of the Federal Reserve and LSD, 16 Nov 11]

I finished Charles Bukowski‘s Pulp, and now I must say that I love it.  It’s the most brilliant piece of crap I have ever read, filled with absurdities and despair and flippant disregard for social norms.  Dedicated “to bad writing” it lives up to that threat, but it’s bad writing as obviously written by a writer who knows he’s writing badly.  The result is hilarious.

We now know what color moths were way back at the dawn of the Age of Mammals.  How? Scientists are some clever motor-jammers, that’s how.

At Melville House, a couple of good stories: Read more »

A Serious Business Question About The Quentin Rowan Scandal

I hinted at this story a few days ago, with a teaser link.  Essentially, it was discovered that Assassin Of Secrets, the debut novel by Quentin Rowan, contained multiple sentences that were pilfered from other novels.

According to an excerpt from an emailed confession cum explanation, Rowan says: “Once the book was bought, I had to make major changes in quite a hurry, basically re-write the whole thing from scratch…”

Okay, okay. Stealing sentences from other people’s novels (dishonestly and without ironic intent) is a Big NoNo, but what I want to know is why a debut novel that was clearly not ready for publication was already bought?!  More importantly, why was Rowan allowed to “skip the line” in front of other debut authors who are repeatedly told to have their novel ready to go before even considering a query letter to an agent?

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Publishing Saturation

There are some numbers floating around the internet, allegedly drawn from Publishers Weekly (but referencing a now-defunct link to a PW Daily installment), that show the number of publishers over time starting in the late 1940s.  The numbers are intriguing, however, because when they are charted they exhibit an exponential growth curve.

Of course, there is a legitimate question as to how many of the later “publishers” are actually one-off enterprises set up to sell a single author’s book or set of books, in which case an apples-to-apples comparison might show a more reasonable growth curve.  For example, PW’s 2002 numbers show that the big five New York publishers accounted for nearly half of the market, while Andre Schiffren at the Washington Post reported in 2000 that the top 20 publishers accounted for 93 percent of sales.  Perhaps the growth curve is largely about the extension of the lower margin of a very tight power law distribution.

Anyone have more reliable numbers?

Odd Thought on Market Saturation

I think my next short story is going to be about vampires, but instead of sucking the lifeblood out of humans, they suck the lifeblood out of their own literary trope.

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[And, as a sequel, maybe something about zombies that eat just the creative part of the brain ... not the whole brain, like the mirror neurons and the parts that make us do the same thing other people do ...]