Square Pegs

Due to circumstances (mostly) beyond our control, fiction writing has been a luxury around our house lately. We could bore you with a litany of excuses (some of which are, even by our standards, quite creative), but we won’t. The bottom line is that we have to get back to work, and this requires a kick in the butt. Hence, we are informally doing NaNoWriMo. Informal because while we’re signed up and have made a donation, we suspect we won’t remember to post to the NaNo site on a regular basis. Since we are strongly motivated by things like guilt, […]

Sometimes we admire our self-restraint. Like when we read an interview with Cory Doctorow. Our inclination is (usually) to copy and paste the thing in its entirety. It certainly would be easier that way. But then you (our lovely readers) might miss out on discovering a new and different site. We’re sure you wouldn’t want that. So, once again, we’re limiting ourself to a few choice quotes while feeling confident you’ll go off and read the whole thing at your leisure. And we do recommend reading this particular article. Not just because we strongly support Cory Doctorow, but because his

We never meet most of the people who impact our lives. The author who made your realize there’s magic in your head. The singer who made you feel like there was someone out there who truly got how you feel. And the person who brought those artists into your world. John Peel was one of the final group. While we’ll never forget the impact of Casey Kasem on our lives (when one grows up in a town with two radio stations of note, Kasem is akin to a god), we think it was John Peel who will have the lasting

Forbes.com takes a look at Nora Roberts. Being a business-oriented magazine, they focus on the numbers and the fairly well-known story of how Nora Roberts became Nora Roberts. Since that part of the article could be skimmed, we allowed our attention to linger on the packaging aspect of the publishing business. It happens more often than you think, the repositioning of authors. Sometimes it’s due to declining or disappointing sales plaguing a talented author. Sometimes it’s the (in our estimation) bizzare belief that audiences cannot accept new directions from authors (have we ever mentioned that we think it’s the marketing

If, as we suspect, bestseller lists are some sort of symbiotic relationship between publishers and book review editors, then reviews seem to be the same. Movie reviews seem to exist for the pulling of out-of-context quotes for one sheets. Does anyone ever really walk up to those posters and say, “Hey, XXX loved the film, and despite his liberal use of ellipses, I’m so there!” We doubt it, but we also doubt that cover quotes on books truly sway many readers. Someday we’ll get off our lazy couch and do some research on this. In the meantime, we can have

Beatrice unknowingly taps into our unofficial Band of the Week while examining one of our favorite subjects: Wal-Mart and books. Yes, we know, it’s hard to believe, but they’re doing it again, this time with the new George Carlin book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/140130134/alttags-20). According to their representative*: “We did not order this book,” says Karen Burk, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. “It was shipped to us in error by one of our distributors.” Publishing sources say it’s unlikely that Wal-Mart — known to skip books that might be deemed politically or religiously provocative — would have ordered the book in the first place. But

One of our secret vices in life is lists. We adore logical groupings of information. Give us a countdown and we get very excited. We have done things we don’t want to admit to in attempts to find out what is at Number One. Just as the Top Forty is a bit of a myth (this, by the way, explains how so many people knew about U2 before Rick Dees), so are New York Times bestsellers. Though the exact methodology for determining the list is a supposedly closely guarded secret, one can be assured the chart toppers aren’t based on