…That I am my own independent publisher, with the Tiny Publishing Bidness, and only wasted a couple of months and a lot of postage, in 2007 or so, trying to get an agent interested in my first two novels. Because that was the way to break into traditional publishing; get an agent, who would present your work to the traditional publishing houses. Another book blogger at the time advised trying it for a year, and then going independent, as there were sufficient small companies doing publish-on-demand, some of them for rather reasonable fees. I did have an interested agent in New York, who was referred to me by another milblogger back then, and although the agent reluctantly declined to offer me his services, he was jolly complimentary and encouraging, and provided some good insights. One of the unspoken insights that I took away from this exchange, and drew from all the other letters saying “Thanks, but no thanks” from various literary agencies was that it was all a terribly insular world, the world of the established agencies and big publishers, all of whom seemed to be based in about half a square mile of real estate in New York.
Diversions
Ephemeral Amusements
The Daughter Unit was a little over two years old when we went to live in Greece, and almost kindergarten age when we left, and during that period we lived in a second-floor apartment in suburban Athens and hardly ever watched television. (I had a television set, but it was 110v, and Greece was a 220v country, and anyway, I was almost never at home in the evenings, the exception being when we went to our neighbors to watch Jewel in the Crown when it aired with subtitles on Greek TV.) This was at a time before wide-spread adoption of video players, before cable, way before streaming video. It was, in bald point of fact, rather like the three to five broadcast channels available when I was growing up. So, no, I didn’t miss TV much, and nor did the Daughter Unit, because we had books.
Heaps and heaps of books; my parents took the opportunity of the Daughter Unit being a military dependent and entitled to have her personal items shipped to Greece gratis to include almost all of the kid-lit that Mom had accumulated for my brothers and sister and I. (Mom and Dad were in the process of moving into a travel trailer parked on the building site of their eventual retirement home, and so took every opportunity to down-size what they didn’t need or want. Like … that part of the personal library.) Off that shipment went to Athens, augmented with new books that I bought through an English mail-order service which offered lovely catalogs aimed mostly at expatriates whiling away the decades in locations devoid of English-language bookstores, and a children’s bookstore in what passed for a mall in Voula or Vouliagmeni, which featured Greek, English and I think German and French-language books. It was a small place, barely one twenty-foot square room in size, with each wall dedicated to a language. I am pretty certain that I bought the Daughter Unit’s favorite comic book series there; the Asterix and Obelix books.
New! – Your Least Favorite Movies and Books
Here are some of mine:
Movies
Death In Venice – I walked out of this one in college. A middle-aged man’s erotic infatuation with an adolescent boy simmers, it is suggested, beneath the surface. In reality nothing ever happens. The action is all silence, furtive glances and views of dramatic sunlit esplanades. Hard pass.
Whale Rider – A politically correct, tear jerking piece of crap. It’s got the exploited-native-peoples angle, the anti-Anglosphere culture angle, the You Go Girl! feminist competition-fantasy and anti-male angle. And of course those stupid whales. What’s not to dislike?
The Help – Essentially a cartoon in which the white characters are crass, stupid, racist jerks and the black characters are smart, kind and wise. In case you don’t get the point, the disgusting white people are all southerners with strong southern accents. We must fight stereotypes – except, it seems, the ones that serve our argumentative purposes. Run, don’t walk.
Books
The Magus – The worst book I’ve ever read. The protagonist is unappealing, the plot silly and incredible. This one-star Amazon review tells the tale:
A reminder of how terrible writing can be
Perhaps the worst book I’ve ever read. I’ve seen Scooby Doo episodes more plausible than this mess. Suggestion for the author: if your plot turns on its head not only every chapter, but practically every page, readers will realize the story is contrived garbage and stop caring.
What is contrived here? Maybe the endless scenes of naked people running around wearing antler masks, the star chamber of evil academics from the Sorbonne watching naked prisoners whip each other on racks, oh just remembering the juvenile and ludicrous “plot” makes me wet with embarrassment. The author admits in the preface that this book was an unsuccessful and sophomoric effort, and that’s the only convincing thing in the whole book.
[. . .]
(True story: I was once at a social gathering when someone asked someone else to name the worst book he had ever read. I immediately thought about this book. It was the other guy’s choice too.)
What are your least favorite movies and books? Feel free to share in the comments.
Rush Limbaugh Went There.
He was being funny, late on last Thursday’s show, and he came up with this. “My favorite conspiracy theory is that this virus is the work of a bunch of lunatic billionaires who really believe that we are destroying the planet and they have discovered that we can’t get to Mars in time and we can’t colonize the moon so they have come up with a way to get rid of billions of people to make the world have a longer survivability potential.” I’ve been referring, recently, to Tom Clancy novels, but I had no plans to go anywhere near Rainbow Six.
As the novel involves precisely that kind of lunatic billionaire, as well as some clandestine work to shut down the plan and disappear the plotters, because of the risk of “a global panic when people realize what a biotech company can do if it wants,” though, well, perhaps there’s another story in it.
Regular readers of Tom Clancy know that the likelihood of a secret being blown is proportional to the square of the number of people in on it. The novel left a number of possible dots to connect to put together yet another story, one with the potential to topple governments. If I had any sort of novel-writing skills, I might essay such a thing, although it might be more productive to offer some of the dots, as if a mental exercise in quarantine, should anyone wish to essay such an effort.
There are almost enough dots to make a post as long as a Tom Clancy novel. They’re below the jump.
Ask Not …
… whom the woke-mob bays for; it bayeth for thee… to paraphrase John Dunne. As no less than Woody Allan may testify at this point, as the article linked here outlines. So the woke mob claims another scalp; yay, wokesters of New York City Mainstream Publishing Division! Take a bow, having thrown a glorious temper tantrum and bent your employer to your will! Today, Woody Allen tomorrow? Who knows?! N.K. Jemison, a notoriously woke science fiction writer and beneficiary of the current system, weighed in on behalf of the mob, which is … not a good look for someone dealing in speculative fiction. She is supposed to possess some talent, but again encouraging the mob, even joining in not something which a thoughtful person with a sense of events and historical recall ought to do. But never mind.
Frankly, as far as I am concerned the mainstream publishing establishment, which is centered in New York (as if that wasn’t sufficient punishment) may ride off into the sunset any time now. Words like “incestuous” and “culturally-blind” come to mind, as well as “arrogant” and “exploitative.”