Lizard on the wall and that ain't all.
That ain't all.
Author: Mary Anne
Romancing The Readers
Is Stephen King really America's favorite novelist? I think lots of folks have seen movies based on his novels. I think King is famous enough to get his name before the movie title (i.e. - Stephen King's The Stand). But I really don't believe that he's America's favorite novelist despite the results of the new Harris Poll.
Don't get me wrong. I mean no disrespect to Mr. King. He's a fine writer and he's paid his dues. He deserves the money and the recognition. The other 2 writers who made the top 3 are James Patterson and John Grisham. Both of them also spin a fine tale and I know that I've read many of Grisham's legal thrillers. Heck, Grisham is sort of the red letter standard for lawyers (like me) who write. I've always been especially proud that Mr. Grisham is a Southern lawyer who writes. My home region is a proud place.
Roosting Roosters
To paraphrase Rev. Wright, some of my roosters have come home to roost. And we all know that there are good roosters and bad roosters.
The good rooster is my eldest, Zack. He's home for the weekend from UCF in Orlando, Florida where he's studying to be an engineer. He flew home on the rails, thanks to Amtrak and the Student Advantage program that gives travel discounts. We're looking into flying him home next time because Spirit Air has some good discounted rates and because I dearly love Amtrak, but their train schedules aren't what you'd call convenient. I had to get up at 3 a.m Thursday night/Friday morning to pick up the returning rooster from a train station a couple of hours away. I don't mind the trip - just the hour.
HOLLA at the Fall Rally Harley bikers and weekend visitors who were travelling to Myrtle Beach in the wee early hours on Friday morning. No, the woman whose car lurched randomly at one point wasn't coming home from a really good party. She was just sleepy. The kidlets (the newly retrieved oldest and my youngest, Sam) jolted from their comfy sleep to wide-awake and terrified consciousness and insisted that Mom visit the nearest convenience store for a good dose of caffeine.
I'm not so sure about the Spirit thing though. Their air fares look reasonable ($50.00 to fly from Orlando to Myrtle Beach) is a damned good looking rate. But sometimes the good looking ones don't turn out to be so good when you look at 'em close. The eldest pointed out that the fine-print on the Spirit site talks about fees and other charges not being included in the $50.00 fare. Those fees could up the cost considerably, making what looks like a good deal, not be such a good deal after all.
The one thing I can say about Amtrak after a lot of experience financing my son's trips home is that what you see is what you get. The round trip on the rails costs about $85.00 and the fare they quote is the full fare. There are no extra costs or charges (unless, possibly, you take a heck of a lot of luggage or something, but that's not a college kid problem). If Spirit offers a fare where what looks like a bargain turns out to be an actual bargain then we might give 'em a shot next time. Flying him right into Myrtle would be nice, but in my present economic circumstances, it'll only work if its nice and cheap.
My eldest is a rooster who's welcome to return home to roost any time. The sky is brighter, the air smells sweeter and life is better when all three of my resident roosters are roosting in their home coop.
The other rooster is a dose of cosmic karma, and it's a bad, bad, evil and downright nasty kind of rooster. It slapped me in the face this morning when I was boogling around my customized Google News page. A couple of years ago Mr. Quack and I were looking for an economical and LEGAL way to download some music to burn some CDs. For me, that means mostly songs of the 70s and 80s. Has any good music been written since the 80s? I think not. (Or mostly not. Charlie Daniels has a new one out called What This World Needs Is A Few More Rednecks. I'm not too much on country, save for a few tunes and everything by Charlie Daniels).
A Romance Novel By Any Other Name Would Still Read As Sweet
Earlier this week I read a piece about Danielle Steel's interview with CBS News in which she denies being a romance author. I found the statement so shocking that I emailed a link to the story to Mr. Quack. From trolling the blogosphere since that time, I understand that Ms. Steel's statement surprised a bunch of folks.
It also reminded me of a USA today piece about a novelist who lives right down the road a piece from me, Nicholas Sparks. Mr. Sparks was pretty vehement about not being a romance novelist too.
What do Danielle and Nicholas have in common? They're both laughing all the way to the bank.
You know what else they have in common? People read their books for the love stories. Instead of sneering about the romance genre, Steel and Sparks should be thanking romance readers for supporting their work and buying their books. See, romance is the not-so-little genre that could. In these down and out times when everybody is cutting back on everything, people are still buying romance. Today more readers than ever before need something that will take them out of reality and sweep them away on an emotional joy ride.
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Season 7: The Aftermath of Grey’s 9/11
Last season the halls of Seattle Grace Hospital got too crowded. The merger with Mercy West brought in a herd of new folks. All of the Mercy Westers seemed to be in a continual hunt for patients - and for screen time. The fans of Grey's didn't know or care about the new faces. They were invaders stealing screen time from the cast that now seems like family. A bunch of 'em needed to go.
The problem with that was that Derek was running SG and in typical McDreamy fashion he didn't want to hurt anyone. He'd been trying his best to integrate them into the hospital and had even taken one on (April) as his assistant. Besides, in the economic tsunami of the current economy, most viewers had a downsized somebody right in their household and we wouldn't view any administrator who downsized a bunch of workers as McDreamy. (Not even the Mercy Westers who by and large aren't liked much).
There were also some story lines that needed to be turned upside down to move characters to another emotional place. And now that the writers were gonna have time to coddle and confound our favorite characters again, the writers needed them to be ready to make some big changes. I guess what I'm saying is that SG and its team had driven into a rut and couldn't get out even though they were headed in the wrong direction.
One event, one man with a gun, solved the overcrowded staffing and the rut entrenched storylines. I think of it as Grey's 9/11. It blasted away the old SG and forces the staff to start over and build something new. Just as 9/11 did, the explosion made heroes of folks who didn't set out to do anything extraordinary. It made some of them make choices and sacrifices at the point of a gun that they'd never have made after cool reflection. We'll watch our heroes who endured so much and lost so much do the most heroic thing of all - get up, start over and move on.
But they're moving on from a different place. They're moving on from the place they picked in the heat of battle. It's like I tell my kids all the time - and I had to tell myself very recently - you have to pick the hill you want to die on. A bunch of the doctors at SG had to pick that hill at the point of a gun. This season is about dealing with the consequences of those choices.
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All Day, All Night With Zombies & Old Dogs
After a fairly lengthy absence, I'm finally on the road to recovery.
No, I haven't had the flu or been diagnosed with some dread disease. It wasn't really me who was MIA. I could deal with little ole' me being down and out. This was much, much worse. This was every writer's worst nightmare. Yeah, that's right - my Muse bolted.
Too much stress at work, too much stress at home and WAY too much of a very bad reality everywhere sent Muse on the lam. Reality kidnapped my Muse. As days stretched into weeks and the long Labor Day weekend passed without my fingers touching a keyboard, I started fearing the worst. Maybe Muse wasn't just on vacation. Maybe she'd taken up residence elsewhere. She might even be ... dead.
It took several things to bring her back, and that's what this blog post is about. There's more than one way to lure your muse to return.
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HOLLA At Chapin Library – A New Future For An Old Friend
I have always loved public libraries.
The library was always a little like church, wasn't it? You had to be quiet and you had to respect the fellow patrons. But you could stroll through the library on any weekend day and find tables of people with books spread out around them. They were clearly working on some research paper or project. You could walk the aisles and find a couple of friends chuckling quietly over the pages of some slightly scandalous book they were checking out on the sly. Or you could have real fun and take a tour through the kid's section. There you'll see the little boy tearing down the aisle back to Mom, excited to share his newly discovered book.
The public library has always been everyman's temple of knowledge. And I was always every(wo)man. Oh, I know that out there somewhere are folks who grew up rich or at least well off. They rarely visited a library. If they wanted to read a new book, they'd go to a bookstore and buy it. Why borrow when you could buy?
Well, I borrowed because I couldn't buy. I grew up POOR - very, very poor. Can't buy groceries, holes in the floor kind of poor. Bill collectors calling kind of poor. There were many things that got sacrificed out of necessity - but books were never amongst those things. Thanks to the public library, the wonderful world of books was always something I didn't have to sacrifice.
Then life moved on and despite our poverty, my Mama (God Bless Her Soul) worked very hard to be sure I got an education. I did college and law school. If I ended up as a writing kind of "scholarly" lawyer instead of a rich ole' trial lawyer, well that surely wasn't my Mama's fault. She gave me the world and even though driving terrified her, at least once a week she'd load me in the car and drive me to the library. She never checked out a book that I recall, likely because her life was too full of taking care of 2 houses and her sick parents. But she made sure I worked at my schoolwork and she made those weekly trips to the library for me to make sure that the world of books would be my world.
Things went pretty well after law school. I was never rich but for many years I met one of my most important goals - I was never poor either. That was true for most folks for a lot of years, I think. We became a country of folks who could afford to go to the bookstore and buy. During all those years the library was still there and I'd pass one and remember when. But you know, it really is true - everything old becomes new again.
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The Jackal, A Pioneering Royal & Nostradamus A La Amazon
Wow. Just absolutely - Wow.
In the last couple of weeks someone hit the fast forward button on the ebook revolution. Changes that bespeak of major industry shifts have occurred like a landslide. One rock goes, and then another and before you know it, at the foot of a mountain, there's a new road you can follow that will take you to the unexplored territory of the future.
First came the deal of the Jackal. Andrew Wylie is a superagent whose "feral pursuit of clients and their interests earned him the nickname of 'The Jackal.'" The Jackal's roster of clients reads like a who's who of publishing and includes Mailer, Updike, Nabokov, and Cheever. The Jackal apparently saw what many authors saw - publishers have been screwing authors out of their fair share of royalties for years. The old book numbers were set in stone, the system likely crafted when books began to be mass produced. But at the dawn of a new day in publishing power shifted to the hands of the creators who wrote the work. The Jackal was smart enough NOT to let history repeat itself. This time he, on behalf of his clients, would craft a system that would be fair to the folks who made the system possible. So The Jackal created a digital only imprint, Odyssey Editions (gotta love the name) and inked a deal with Amazon to sell electronic versions of work of 20 amazing authors.
To do the deal Wylie exploited a hole in older publishing contracts written before the era of e-books. Writers and Wylie believe that the contracts leave those authors and/or their estates free to negotiate separate deals for the ebook versions. The publishing royals read the contracts differently and believe the older deals should include the ebook rights - because they're the publishers and they've always had the power to set the terms. Publishers have decided to punish The Jackal where it hurts - the pocketbook. Random House held the print rights to many of the works in question and it's announced it won't do business with Wylie until the issue is resolved. I'm hoping that the Jackal's clients are sending him champagne and telling him that they never liked Random House anyway. After all, Wylie is trying to craft the terms for the new ebook industry at the dawn of the era, so that when they get set in stone, it'll be in the authors' favor. In my opinion, Wylie is to be lauded, revered and much - much imitated. The biggest literary award for the new e-book industry should be named for him - the Jackal or the Wylie.
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The Used Car/Myrtle Beach Vacation of Genres
This post may be a bit brief (for me) because we're editing the first part of Duke of Eden, the serialized novel I'm going to publish exclusively on Kindle for the amazingly low price of 99 cents per installment. I've still got to write the product description but, Yes Virginia - the man tittie cover will hit Kindle next week. Be sure to check out the book then!
The serialized publication/value price of Eden actually relates to this post. As I was working on edits yesterday, I clicked over to Google News - my home page for Internet Explorer. I've customized my version to show certain types of stories, and yesterday up popped a Bloomberg Businessweek story of all things. Naturally, I got distracted from my work and had to read the piece right away. The romance genre meriting a piece on a prominant business site was worthy of notice, and its worthy of mention here.
The piece was titled: Romance Fiction: Getting Dirty In Dutch Country. It focused on how romance fiction is - even in this Friday the 13th of economies - on the rise. The story mentioned the writer's opinion that the many and varied categories of romance, including Amish, knitting and paranormal specifically, helped keep romance climbing towards the top. I don't really disagree with the piece, I just don't think the writer attributed the rise to all the right factors.
According to the article, publishers say that book sales declined by 1.9 percent in 2009 after a 3 percent drop the previous year and books appear to be "suffering a slow and rather boring death." The article doesn't talk about ebooks, which have been undergoing dramatic growth.
The piece notes that despite declining sales in books overall, one genre has been experiencing "steady and unusual growth." Yeah, that's right, ROMANCE. The Romance genre increased to $1.4 billion, up by $100 million, or 7.7% from the prior year. In a down market and a down economy people are buying more romances than ever. Well, duh. When have we ever, ever needed to believe in happy endings more than today?
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Romance – What Makes Us Close The Book?
I recently read an article by a psychology researcher who thought she could explain why women read Harlequin romance novels. Such articles often intrigue me and this one, in particular, drew me in because the author and I share the same name (Mary Anne) - albeit, she doesn't spell hers the way my namesake Granny told me I had to spell mine. Dr. Fisher concluded that women read romance because they're looking for a cad who becomes the dad.
Most of the articles trying to "explain" women's love of the romance genre make me want to throw something at my computer screen. The other Mary Anne's piece didn't make me mad so much as it made me pity the author. First of all, as a researcher, she should have known she couldn't base an understanding of a vast and complex genre like romance on one atypical type of book of the genre. It makes all her conclusions laughably wrong. For example, based on her study of Harlequins, Fisher decides that romance novels are too short and characters are therefore too underdeveloped. Certain types of Harlequins are intended to be short fast reads that get the reader in and out fast. But not all Harlequins are short - some of the publisher's imprints are long, slow, luscious reads. So Dr. Fisher bases her conclusions one type of one imprint from one publishing house. I hope she does a better job with the psychological research she gets paid for.
Fisher concludes that romance novels are "candy for women's brains." She concludes that they allow the reader to live vicariously through the heroine and fall in love with the hero but without any of the consequences. Of course, she also thinks that the plots revolve around the woman trying to decide if the hero is "Mr. Right." So, at least Fisher is consistently wrong.
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