Square Pegs

You know us and our penchant for feel-good stories (hey, it happened once!). We all worry about what we’ll do with our post-retirement selves. A few friends have noted that “sitting around” is their number one goal, and while we salute sloth, we think it might get boring. Thus we have a solution: spend the last of your earthly sums on books and give them away. That’s what Irwin Herman is doing — and he’s happy. You want to be happy, don’t you? “I kicked back,” Herman said. “I swam. I got brown. Then a friend said that the guys […]

Laurel Snyder has asked us, in the most appropriate way possible, to post this exciting news about her upcoming writers’ contest. Because we are highly susceptible to flattery, we are more than happy to get the word about the First Annual Verb Fiction Contest out. Also, we do so love writing contests. Rules, submission information, and exclamation points after the break.

Normally, we don’t do this*, but needs must and all that. We dutifully waited for the archived edition of yesterday’s Publisher’s Lunch to be posted because Michael Cader did a bang-up job of reviewing the cool (and sometimes perplexing) new features at Amazon.com. We appreciate this, given our natural laziness. Alas, the good stuff is on the members’ only side of the Publisher’s Marketplace divide, so you’ll have to be satisfied with us telling you how great the story is. Probably you’ve noticed them: the plogs, the wiki, the stats showing what percentage of people who viewed the book your

You know how it goes — you’re waiting for something to process, so you say, quite logically, “I think I’m going to check out the Anne Tyler interview at Failbetter.” Possibly you decide to do this in a public place. Be warned: those snort-like chuckles? They can be heard by the people around you. Naturally, we do not speak from personal experience. Our snort-like chuckles are of the most delicate variety. Tyler isn’t one for major publicity pushes. We imagine that if we saw her on the Today show, it would be by accident. Either hers or ours, doesn’t matter.

The library-that-yanked-the-manga story has been circulating for a few days now, showing no signs of dying. This is, sadly, a fairly typical story in our culture. Paul Gravett’s Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics was pulled due to, ahem, sexual content. Needless to say, a mother of a 16-year boy started the ball rolling. This leads to one of our favorite rants. First, of course, we’re going to point out the obvious: true Japanese manga is not kids’ stuff. While there are certainly manga geared toward the younger audience, this stuff is read by adult men. Manga is racy stuff.

As we have been slowly (make that really slowly) working on another project, we have become enthralled by the notion of multiple books by the same title. It has has taken all of our inconsiderable will power to avoid the temptation to delve deeply into the “same title, different book” canon*. Let us just say that the Associated Press story (via The Los Angeles Times) article on this very topic is not doing much for our resolve. Especially since there’s this: Romance, mystery and other genre books are particularly likely to have recycled titles because of the vast numbers that

Jill — who helpfully stepped up to the plate yesterday with a rousing post on author branding and STDs — noted that we allowed a bit of wiggle room on the Dan Brown issue when we last mentioned the court case (also, anytime we can use the word penultimate in a post, we’re happy). Thus we can bring you today’s happy news without breaking any vows of silence. The verdict is in. Brown and Random House — already celebrating because both the trade paperback and mass market paperback versions of The Da Vinci Code debuted at number one this week,

At last: the invention we would have invented had we an inventing kind of mind. Yes, kids, it’s brain-wave typing. You know how all the great lines are in your mind, but never quite translate via the fingers? No worries. Downloading your brain is just a few years away . Okay. Fine. So writers aren’t the primary targets of the technology — but surely there will be no better test group than a bunch of people who stream words and sentences and paragraphs like extroverts talk. And, fine, it’s not a streaming sort of thing. More like the brain-wave equivalent

This may be the most delightfully absurd story we’ve read in, well, hours. Paul J.J. Payack, an amateur something-or-other, has calculated that the English language will acquire its millionth word sometime this year. Of course, the experts, you know, the ones who count all the words and keep careful statistics, they say not so fast. Such knowledge is apparently, well, unknowable. Presumably that’s ’cause so many words have died deserved deaths. We have no clue where the vowels are buried. But still, it’s a wonderful thought — a finite number of words comprising the English language, if only for the

For those of you who greeted the time change with aplomb, we salute you. Messing with time is a dangerous thing, and we are of the belief that no good can come from it. Except maybe the opportunity to drink wine in the backyards on lovely spring evenings. We figure that if you’re the type to rise early, then you’re the type to get all excited about copy-editing. And if you’re the type to get excited about copy-editing, well, see previous re: wine. It will help. It’s a nice article (transcript, actually, but why quibble?) that had us in almost