Just this afternoon I finished the last few pages of the final chapter of the final volume of the Adelsverein Saga (known to all as “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and Lots of Sidearms” - first draft, so there is quite a lot of snipping, editing, revising, et-cetera to be done.

But still - a grand total of 437,800 words, spread over three volumes. It’s nearly as long as Lord of the Rings, which is supposed to have clocked in at half a million. No wonder I feel like I have just finished a marathon.

There is so much that I wanted to do, to flesh out the characters and the various dramatic incidents, to include some significant backstories and to generally do right by the epic, even if some of the not-so-essential stuff is snipped, I may very well finish with just as many words or more.

Something to think about, perhaps dividing the final volume into two. Say the heck with that and make it a quartet….

Slightly depressed this evening - the part-time job that I went to, after my dear friend Dave the Computer Genius and part-time employer died most unexpectedly, has come to an end. Also somewhat unexpectedly. Eh, I knew it was temporary, I just thought it would last a little longer! But they did think the world of my work and enterprise, will call me in again to work on specific projects and will recommend me enthusiastically to their various clients, I departed on extraordinarily good terms - it’s just that I am back to a certain degree of job and financial uncertainty.

On the up-side, the commute, even once a week was a bear and I would have slashed my own wrists with my teeth after spending another couple of eight hours a day on the phone doing cold calls.

Sorry for the light blogging this week; I can only handle so much Obamania. Having pegged him as a gorgeous, charismatic empty suit a couple of months ago, watching the wheels wobble on his bus, in spite of all the fawning adoration of our supposedly non-biased press corps… well, it’s just tiresome. The crash is inevitable; it will be messy. His wife is a shrew, his associates are as embarrassing as the close associates of machine pols always are, and the professional black race-mongers will rally around him regardless. Yawn. I think I will have another cup of tea – I have a book review, two DVD reviews and the draft of an old-media article about city politics (in another city!)… and a book chapter to finish.

Personally, the book chapter is the most important. It’s the final chapter of the Adelsverein saga, AKA “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a lot of Sidearms”, for which I first sketched out some notes and a short plot outline eighteen months ago. It was going to be a single book, incorporating a lot of the elements for which “Truckee” was criticized as not having, in order to be commercial; a lot of suspense about survival of the main characters, a fair amount of violence, romantic tension and even a hint of sex. I decided that I might as well throw in operatic levels of everything, in the hopes of being more commercially appealing. I thought I could do another unknown dramatic story of the frontier, since hardly anyone outside Texas has ever heard of the German colonies. The more I discovered in the course of researching this little corner of the 19th century, the more that I was drawn into my characters’ lives.

I wanted to go farther than just a simple romance about the founding of a small town, and the heroine’s discovery of love and a new land, of marriage and the birth of her first child. I had to follow her and her family and circle of friends through the crucible of the Civil War, through loss and desolation, up to the dawning of new hope and the crumbling of the Confederacy. The last volume does not tell quite so neatly contained a story; it’s a story of building again, of the rise of the cattle baronies in post-war Texas, of middle age and seeing your children open their wings and flying, of letting go of illusions and coming to terms with life. At the very end, my heroine sits in the 20th century parlor of her younger daughters’ house, reflecting on it all. She has seen marvelous things, known fascinating people, seen the world move from one powered by horse and sails to one where men fly, in engine-powered contraptions of wire and canvas. She has also become an American.

Sometime this week, I will write that last chapter of her story, Oh, I won’t be done with it, of course – I will need revise and edit, polish and format. I will need to re-read a stack of books, classic and modern Westerniana, immerse myself in the coffee-table books of Western art that I bought at the library sale last month, make about a thousand notes of new inclusions, take in the feedback of all the people who have read all three volumes, and chain myself to a hot computer for a couple of months. But it is the beginning of the end. One of the other Texas IAG members takes beautiful scenic photos and likes to fiddle around with artistic effects. He is letting me use three of them as covers for the Adelsverein Saga – look for all three in December of this year. For a sneak peek at his work, I put some of them up on my book website.

What to do next? I don’t know, yet – I had thought of doing a sort of prelude, about pre-Republic Texas, and maybe an adventure to do with the Mason County Hoo-Doo War, the original farmers-and-cattlemen feud. I’d hate to milk a franchise to death, though. I’d almost rather start on something original.

On the literary front I have a signing for “Truckee’s Trail” at a local Borders next month, a place that not only has a very interested and supportive general manager, but a venue that jumps most evenings, being co-located in a complex which includes a huge movie megaplex and a lot of popular restaurants in a well-heeled part of town. Alas, the IPPY short-list has been released, and “Truckee” didn’t place. The other contest I entered it in won’t be announced until October, so I’m well served by putting it out of my mind entirely.

Back to the 19th century…

Well, really, isn’t that what it is turning into, what with Her Inevitableness and The Fresh Prince of Chicago locked in a knock-down, drag-out grudge-match to the death. I can hardly wait for the showdown at the convention – this is going to get really interesting, in the sense of ‘slow down and look at the carnage on the highway’ sort of interesting.

There is so much to dislike about both of them – who would have thought that a young and doe-eyed political neophyte, fresh from the mills of the Chicago political-machine could exhibit a collection of such embarrassing associates, unfortunate missteps and evidence of obvious wheeling and dealing. It’s a fascinating - in the forensic sense - collection of soiled laundry. And Her (perhaps) Inevitableness has been assembling her own vast collection for twenty years, so all hail the ambitious newcomer! Each has a spouse which may prove to be just as much of a millstone – the serial sexual harasser against the BAP with a limitless sense of entitlement and injury. Yep, the convention is going to be a cage match. I predict blood, inside and out, before and especially after – the fans of whoever doesn’t get The Big Nod will be extremely resentful.

It’s too much to hope for, that the delegates wander in the way of a ration of sense and nominate a compromise third candidate. Nope, never happen, although it’s been suggested – laughingly I am sure – that the Goricle himself would nobly put himself in the way of such an effort…

All kidding aside, I don’t think that Obama himself had any idea of how swiftly and how completely the Reverend Wrights’ inflammatory sermons would percolate through the national media and the body politic, or how absolutely offensive that ordinary people outside the holy environs of his immediate circle would find them. And they are offensive – I don’t care how many ways you slice and dice it. I am a fairly devout and intermittently observant mainstream Christian; any white minister preaching the Reverend Wrights’ line from the pulpit would have been disowned from a mainstream church so fast his clerical collar would have spun around his neck like a horseshoe flung towards a stake. There’s a lot to be said for the ‘flip’ theory – that is, reverse the colors (or the genders) involved in any controversy and see if it still seems fair to you. The Fresh Prince worshipped for twenty years and took as his mentor a racist and demagogic nut-case. Deal, ‘kay? So we’re started a dialogue about race in America in the 21st century – not quite the one expected, but as I said – deal.

I’m not even getting into the question of Obama’s association with former Weatherman Bill Ayers, except to note that damn-it, won’t the Sixties ever die? What do we have to do, bury that low dishonest decade at the crossroads with an ash stake through its heart? This picture says about all that you have to know about Bill Ayers, except to note that the advance publicity about his memoir – from which this local story derives - got lost in all the news coverage about 9-11. Bet he cried into his Chablis for months – how dare a bunch of Islamic fundies ruin his carefully laid publicity campaign about the golden days of ‘fighting the power’?!

Yep, it’s going to be an interesting couple of months. I’m going to need a couple of hundred pounds of popcorn just to be able to deal with it all.

(Link courtesy of Rantburg, my source for all that is sarky and cynical)

Meek the cat had to be put to sleep this week. He was one of Blondie’s cats, the other being Sammie From Across the Road – like Sammie, he took a look at my daughter and fell into deep, abject adoration. Unlike Sammie who did have a home (although it was overrun with small, yappy dogs) and people who wanted him, Meek was a dumpee. That is, someone who had him as a pet, and thought enough of him to neuter him… and then dumped him. At some point the veterinarian deduced that he had been hit by something which had injured one of his legs, floated a rib which nature did not intend to float, and left him with a small hernia on his chest. Those injuries were at least a year old and healed without the aid of medical care. Until last fall Meek was one of the semi-ferals who hung around Blondie’s workplace, a former little frame house turned office premise just off the I-35 in Selma, Texas. There was a small coterie of these cats, some of whom were tameable and whom my daughter fed and worried over, especially when one of her favorites was hit by a car and killed quite messily. Meek was the other one. He took to following her into the office, waited for her on the porch and generally gave every indication of deep and undying devotion. One morning she left to pick up office supplies and Meek followed her car down the drive, out onto the access road and appeared to have every intent of following her onto the highway on-ramp. Obviously, he had decided that if he couldn’t live with Blondie, he didn’t want to live at all.

So he came home with her, after a short side trip to the vets, where he was given all the appropriate shots and tests, judged to be clean of feline AIDS, intestinal parasites and fleas (not ear mites, which proved to be persistent). He tolerated the dogs, formed a pair-bond with Percival, the little Russian Blue that I tamed with great care a number of years ago, and generally lived the lush life as a cat of the First Degree.

He was white, with brindle spots, and had beautiful jade-green eyes, which were set off by dark eyelids, as if some cat-beautician had lined them with kohl. He was a talky, responsive cat, and zeroed in on any lap with the speed and precision of a heat-seeking missile. He loved to hang out in the evening with us, watching TV in the den – if not on Blondie’s lap, on the arm of the sofa next to her or on the window sill above her head.

Late one evening this week, Blondie thought he seemed lethargic – and most distressingly, was straining over the litterbox without producing any urine. We know what that portends in neutered male cats. (I lost one of my early cats to it – an awful, heartrending experience at the vets’ and the cat still died of it.) Meek was at the veterinarians next day. Since he had eaten and drunk normally that morning, and was able to produce a small dribble, the veterinarian had a very cheerful prognosis; yes, it looked like he had a tendency towards feline cystitis. They gave him the first of his pills, advised us to switch over to a special food for this kind of problem and were about to release him to go home when he crashed right in front of us.

It looked and felt for all the world as if he was having a sort of feline panic attack. I had my hands on him; he was shaking violently and his heart rate was through the roof. The veterinarian said “Oh-oh… that doesn’t look good.” She asked to do some quick tests. They came back showing nothing good. He was already in crisis. There was a surgical option, but it cost a bomb and there was no guarantee. It’s a chronic condition – it could have happened again next month or next year. His old internal injuries may have even exacerbated that condition . So, we did the kind thing. Blondie held him. He was so happy to be in her arms, he was purring up to the very end. The veterinarian, who was also crying as she put the drugs into the shunt in his leg said “At least you can say that you gave him the very best eight months of his life!”. Last night, when we related this to Mom and Dad, (who have had to do this with about half a century’s worth of beloved pets), Dad said very kindly, “You can’t save ‘em all, you know.”

Well, you can’t – but you can give them the best eight months, or eight years, or whatever.

An essay from Gerard Vanderleun, for the first day of May. “The Banality of Sedition”. (Link courtesy of da Blogfaddah)

In all of my life, I only met people who had run away from communism and I met them by the score, starting in kindergarden. I never met anyone who packed up their bags and their copy of ‘Das Kapital’ and ran deliberatly towards it. And that counts the handful of college Marxists that I knew.

And if I thought the snails at NIOSA were dubious eats, I hadn’t had a chance to grok the full horror of the guacamole bird – it’s the third one down, here Found this through neo-neocon, here who was running a two-part Jello retrospective. Some of the recipes which Neo’s commenters recollected fondly don’t seem too bad at all – the salmon mousse here was especially savory

You see, there is Jello and there is just plain gelatin mixed with a variety of sweet or savory liquids and poured into an appropriate mold. There is the stuff whipped up by the staff of women’s home magazines trying to catch the eyeballs and not coincidently sell more Jello… and of late there is the parody stuff (like the famous brain mold), and a lot of bizarre things put together for contests; I have heard of Jello aquariums with lettuce for seaweed and Goldfish crackers as… er, gold fish swimming in the pale green lime depths.

And then there is stuff like my mother’s favorite – the wine-orange gelatin dessert, and my own yoghurt cream mold – I posted the recipe in January.

From Joy of Cooking, p. 745 “Wine Gelatin”

Soak 2 TBsp gelatin in ¼ cup cold water. Dissolve it in ¾ cup boiling water and stir in until dissolved, ½ cup sugar. Allow to cool and add 1 ¾ cup orange juice, 6 TBsp lemon juice and 1 cup well-flavored wine. Sugar amount may be adjusted if the orange juice and/or wine are sweet . Pour into sherbet glasses and chill until firm. Serve with cream, whipped cream or custard sauce. (It strikes me that this might be very nice with blood-orange juice and a nice rose wine)

Gelatin molds – not just for Lutheran church suppers!

On Friday night, Blondie and I daringly ventured into one of San Antonio’s most popular and certainly one of the most tasty – in the culinary sense – Fiesta events. Oh, dear, now I shall have to explain San Antonio’s yearly Fiesta to those who have not heard the legend; you may think of it as our peculiar version of Mardi Gras, but it has grown into something considerably more. My some-time employer, a San Antonio native, describes it as a city-wide, week-long block party, but it is a great deal more than that. One upon a time, in the 1890s, it started as a parade to commemorate the victory of the Battle of San Jacinto, where people rode around in carriages and threw flowers at each other. That was the humble beginning with the Battle of Flowers Parade. But everybody wanted to get into the act, and now Fiesta covers ten days, beginning to end and takes in just about every part of town and just about every socio-economic element.

There is a grand debutante coronation, where the two-dozen daughters of local elite wear gowns and trains crusted with about fifty pounds of rhinestones, sequins and metal-thread-embroidery (look, I am not making this up!), a raunchy variety show that sends up the whole concept (not making up that part, either!) , half a dozen elaborate parades – one of which is an evening torch-light parade, and anther is on flat-boats along the San Antonio River - an open-air oyster-bake on the grounds of a local private university and exhibitions, parties, open houses, athletic contests, pageants, shows and concerts all over the city, (schedule for this years’ events is here - one more day to party hearty, people!). It’s an excuse for people to dress up in strange costumes, eat, drink, party hearty and bash total strangers over the head with confetti-filled eggs. Like New Orleans Mardi Gras but on the whole, we like to think it is a bit more cooth. The crowds along the parade routes don’t yell at the girls on the floats to show their tits; they ask them to show their shoes. Under their ornate and gorgeous gowns, they are usually wearing running shoes, or crocs. One year, when rain threatened, one of the debutants was wearing swim fins, which earned her quite a lot of laugher and applause.

The culinary crown-jewel just might be NIOSA, or Night in Old San Antonio, a sprawling food-fest in La Villita, the old ‘Little Village’. It’s sponsored by the San Antonio Conservation Society and runs for four nights. My some-time employer has worked on the set-up for years, and knows practically everyone. He asked if Blondie and I would like to go, as his significant other had volunteered to dress up like a gypsy and work in the fortune-telling booth. I have to admit, Blondie was keener on this than I was. It was hot and sticky last night, thunderstorms threatened, and there would be dire traffic downtown, both coming and going. (Which there was – getting out of the parking garage afterwards was a lengthy agony; 45 minutes to get from where we parked to the exit!)

La Villita was crammed with food booths – and the extraordinary thing is, all of it was pretty good, and not that expensive, even if Some-Time Employer basically comped stuff for us, from booths where his friends and buddies were in charge. It was all organized roughly by ethnic neighborhoods; Mexican foods all clustered together, regular American (mostly barbeque of various animal parts) a hugely popular booth with egg rolls and other orientalia, a French-Cajun section offering jambalaya and delicacies like…umm, snails, and the German neighborhood, who had cannily set up inside the biggest building, the assembly hall where they could benefit from the air conditioning. (Sausages, pretzels and cream-horns, but we were all pretty filled by then). The thing about the food is that many of the food booths have been run by the same set of volunteers for years, and they have done a lot of tinkering with the recipes, besides cooking it all from scratch. (One variant of meat-onna-stick is famous locally – this is one recipe for it, but apparently the original was done with beef hearts. It’s a Peruvian specialty; one of the volunteers adapted the recipe for American palates years ago with considerable success.)

And every third or fourth booth offered soft drinks, water and tasty adult beverages - sangria, wine and beer. We even dared to try escargot; snails to you. Having had a couple of cups of beer first helped. Three dark little wads of gelatinacous phlegm drenched in melted butter and garlic, served on a slice of baguette; which only goes to prove that if you throw enough melted butter and fresh garlic on anything, you have a chance of rendering it edible. Not appetizing, but at least edible. You could have done a whole fifteen-course dinner, just walking from booth to booth, grazing; appetizers, fish course, vegetable, entrée, salad, dessert- eating out of hand as you walked.

In the German area, Blondie and I talked to a re-enactor and local history fan all dressed up like a member of the 19th century Bavarian royal regiment. Blondie refrained from asking him earnestly why he had a feather-duster stuck on top of his hat – since he did have a sword, too. I passed out my ‘books and writers’ business card to a couple of people; I mean, why turn down a chance to network. Got home at nearly midnight, in the middle of a thunderstorm, which mercifully had held off until well after NIOSA closed for the evening. Good times – and I just may do it again, but I think I’ll pass on the snails, next time.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch this program the other night. It flashed past as we were channel-flipping. Our neighbor Judy had come over for dinner (beer-can chicken with Memphis rub on the grill, if that is of any interest) and we had watched one of the Young Indiana Jones DVDs that I am reviewing. Judy said,
“Oh, I saw that in the TV guide and I thought it looked interesting – what was the story on that?”
“A very sad one,” I said and Blondie added,
“No, I don’t want to watch – it will only upset Mom.”

And she was right – it would have. Rudyard Kipling’s only son was only seventeen and as blind as a bat, quite unfit for military service. But in that surge of intense patriotism and sense of duty that attended the beginning of World War One, he asked his father to pull strings for him; and Rudyard Kipling obliged. He had friends everywhere, as one of England’s most famous writers, the poet-laureate and chronicler of all things Imperial. He wrangled a commission as a second-lieutenant in the Irish Guards for his son; John went off to France with his regiment, arriving on his eighteenth birthday. He disappeared in fearful combat sometime during the second day of the BEF’s attack on German forces at Loos six weeks later. Rudyard Kipling spend years hoping that he had survived somehow, more years searching for any witnesses to his son’s death, or clues to where his body lay… and finally worked tirelessly on various memorials to those dead in the Great War, the one that unfortunately did not end all war. A close friend of the family discovered from some surviving members of John Kipling’s unit that when last seen, he had been badly wounded, his glasses smashed and he was crying in agony; these details were kept from his parents. Other witnesses told other stories; at this late date there would be no earthly way to sort out which was the truth, or where his body was finally buried. Any time after 1919 was probably too late, anyway.

No, I didn’t much want to watch it; that kind of thing just comes too close to home. And I’ve always loved Kipling’s stories; the poems too. (I had a go at writing some Kipling-type stories myself, here and here) Loved the stories of the Jungle Book from when Mom read them to us as children. Later I thought Kim was absolutely sublime, and then I found the other India stories, the other animal stories, the stories about soldiers and travelers, ghosts and Masonic lodges, of madmen and beggars, railwaymen and elephant drivers, of colonial administrators and their desperate housewives, of schoolboys and small children sent ‘home’ for their health and continuing education. I loved the lot, and ploughed gamely through a copy of the complete collection which my high school library unaccountably had on its shelves. Lord only knows how that came about, because Kipling drifted out of fashion with the literati well before the end of his own lifetime, reaching a sort of nadir in the sixties. Imperialist, colonialist, racist, sexist – all the heavy brickbats of ‘ists’ flung his way! And he would have just as enthusiastically flung them right back, god love him – perhaps that’s why he attracted such enthusiastic animus.

But he was a story teller; I think an almost compulsive one. Everything and everybody interested him. Explaining how things worked interested him – everything from engines, to railway-bridges, to the workings of a lowly colonial district office and a pack of wolves. He also had a gift for writing dialog - not only dialect, which is not as common as you would think, but an ear for the way people speak and put their words together. I’ve always compared that to having perfect pitch. A perceptive listener can sort out all kinds of things from the way someone talks; and a good writer can put this down on paper! So many things can be given away in speech; age and education, origins and way of life. I think Kipling did this beautifully – even the animals that he gives speech to are consistent and unique; compare the Maltese Cat and his friends to the beasts in “Servants of the Queen.

And I still think this is one of the best explanations of journalism around; still relevant after all those years.

Just a small taste to whet the appetite, a climactic chapter from the final volume of the Adelsverein Trilogy. All three volumes will be availabe in December, 2008 from Booklocker.com and all the usual sources.

The Civil War is over, some little prosperity is beginning to return to the Hill Country and the Becker and Richter families.

Chapter Forty-Eight: Day of Reckoning

“It all seems very quiet,” Magda remarked, on the Saturday that she and Anna reopened the store. “And so empty!”
It was a week after Rosalie’s funeral, a week after Hansi and the boys returned, empty-handed and covered in trail-dirt, on horses trembling from weariness.
“I still keep expecting to see Vati in his room, or sitting under the pear tree,” Anna agreed, wistfully. “I wish Papa and I could induce Mama to leave her room – but she will not hear of it.” Hansi had exhausted himself, pleading fruitlessly with Liesel. He had finally lost his temper and left with Jacob, taking a wagon-load of goods to Kerrville. He had promised to deliver a load of cut timber to the Becker farm, where work had commenced on the house, after the spring cattle round-up. Magda didn’t know if Liesel would have forgiven Hansi by the time he returned, and was herself too grieved over Rosalie to care very much.

“It’s like one of those starfish,” Sam observed earnestly. He plied a broom with great energy, although Magda thought he was merely stirring the dust around. “When it loses one of its arms,”
“How is that, Sam?” his mother asked, much puzzled.
“It grows another one to replace it,” Sam scowled, thoughtfully, “Or maybe it’s one of those jellyfish things I am thinking of. It grows again into the shape it needs, even if it’s not in quite the same shape as it was before.”
“Clear as mud, Samuel,” Anna said, but secretly Magda thought her son was right. The household, her family – it was reshaping itself, like a starfish. Wearily, she wondered if the starfish, or whatever Sam was thinking of felt pain when part of it was cut off. For they all felt pain, but only Liesel was incapacitated by it, by the unbearable absence, the emptiness in the places where Willi and Grete should have been. She had withdrawn into her deep, deep cellar, leaving Marie to cope valiantly with the household, aided as always by Mrs. Schmidt in the mornings and by her sister and aunt whenever they could step away from the shop, and Hansi’s freighting concerns.

Vati might have coaxed Liesel to come forth – he had always been good with her, but then there was the Vati-shaped absence where he had always been, as well. Magda had the same sense that had haunted her in the months after Carl Becker’s death – that he had not really gone, but was somewhere in the house or close by. When she looked into the parlor, or into the garden she half-expected to see Vati there, dozing over a book with his glasses slipping down over his nose, or deep in some abstruse discussion with Pastor Altmueller.
Hansi insisted she move into Vati’s room; certainly she preferred that to her old room, which for her was marked forever as the place where Rosalie had suffered, and where the miasma of death still clung to the walls. Still, there was something restful about returning to the shop – restful and yet exhilarating. All the plans they had made while in Indianola, which had needed to be set aside for Vati’s final illness – all of them could be picked up again and coaxed towards fulfillment.

Very gradually, over the weeks and months of the summer – the summer of the first full year of peace, they were able to do just that, although Liesel still refused to come downstairs. Lottie began school that autumn, walking to the schoolhouse between Hannah and Sam, blithe and eager, with not a backwards look to Magda, who lingered in the shop door watching after them. Her older brother and sister had earnestly begun teaching her letters, marking out the shapes of them on Sam’s school slate and challenging her to sound out the letters of the shopkeepers’ signs along Main Street. Lottie stopped asking wistfully after Grete about that time. She was a sensible and sensitive child; Magda thought that her younger daughter had worked out the connection between the absence of her almost-twin cousin, and her aunt’s withdrawal into seclusion for herself.

There had never been any news of the children, in spite of all the letters that Anna wrote in careful English for her father, letters to the governor, to the officer commanding Federal Army troops in Texas and the territories, letters to the Indian agency. They received replies, expressing regret and occasionally even sympathy, but nothing more effective than that. Encouraged by Charley Nimitz, they placed advertisements in certain newspapers in Kansas and the Indian territories, asking for information and promising a reward should that information lead to the return of Willi and Grete Richter, aged seven and four years of age, taken by raiding Comanches from Gillespie County in the spring of 1866. They received some reply to those; mostly semi-literate scrawls asking for money, in exchange for information.
“They are extortionists, Papa,” Anna said firmly and burned the letters before Liesel could see them, and frantically beg her husband to pay anything, anything at all, to anyone who claimed to know where the children were.
(more…)

So… how is that book-thing going, ask all both of my readers? Very well, thank you, in spite of the Great Amazon-Booksurge Kerfuffle of 2008. That, by the way appears to have died down to a small and resentful simmer. Way to go, Amazon – completely piss off a lot of articulate fans and customers by going all heavy-handed on small-press and independent writers. A couple of the bigger POD presses capitulated, accepting Amazon’s terms, but for now they are not pressuring any other presses. Something about the threats of legal action under certain trade laws might have something to do with it. That and the fact that there are other internet outlets for books. (Barnes and Noble, anyone?)

I am going ahead with plans to bring out the the “Adelsverein Trilogy” or as it is better known around here, “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Side-arms” this coming December. Originally, I wanted to bring out just the first book, with the subsequent books a year apart, but Angela at Booklocker strongly advised against it, saying that it would be better to have all three available at once. Because it will be a set, with a unified ‘look’ to each volume, they are going to cut me a deal on the fees for the custom-designed cover. They will even offer a small discount to anyone buying all three at once, and we are working also on a means of putting all three into one volume at a later date – which may not even be possible, because it will be about a thousand pages long, all told. Drop that on your foot, you’ll feel the pain for about a week. (I am using my income tax rebate to fund this, and the continuing royalties for “To Truckee’s Trail”. Think of it as government really supporting literature and art!)

So, I am galloping through drafting the last five chapters, neatly wrapping up and tying off all the threads of a plot that has sprawled across a couple of countries, three wars, four towns, one blood-feud, a lot of romance, two interconnected German-American families, sudden murder, stolen children… and a lot of cows and horses. And a Texas Ranger or two, even. Then, what with revisions, editing, polishing to a high glossy finish, and scrounging for the usual reviews’n’links; my dance card is pretty well filled for the next few months. Blogging continues, of course, especially if the election follies continue to provide bitter amusement – really, didn’t I say months ago that Obama was a beautifully tailored but empty suit?

Stay tuned – more to follow.

(From an email posted to the Old FEN’ers Website - yeah, I’m just warped enough to find them amusing!)

Birds of a feather flock together and crap on your car.

When I’m feeling down, I like to whistle. It makes the neighbor’s dog run to the end of his chain and gag himself.

A penny saved is a government oversight.

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right time, but also to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

The older you get, the tougher it is to lose weight, because by then your body and your fat have gotten to be really good friends.

The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement.

He who hesitates is probably right.

Did you ever notice: The Roman Numerals for forty (40) are ‘ XL.’

If you think there is good in everybody, you haven’t met everybody.

If you can smile when things go wrong , you have someone in mind to blame.

The sole purpose of a child’s middle name is so he can tell when he’s really in trouble.

There’s always a lot to be thankful for if you take time to look for it. For example I am sitting here thinking how nice it is that wrinkles don’t hurt.

Did you ever notice: When you put the 2 words ‘The’ and ‘IRS’ together it spells ‘Theirs.’

Aging: Eventually you will reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it.

The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.

Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know ‘why’ I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way and some of the roads weren’t paved.

When you are dissatisfied and would like to go back to youth, think of Algebra.

You know you are getting old when everything either dries up or leaks.

One of the many things no one tells you about aging is that it is such a nice change from being young.

Ah, being young is beautiful, but being old is comfortable.

First you forget names, then you forget faces. Then you forget to pull up your zipper.
It’s worse when you forget to pull it down.

Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft.
Today, it’s called golf.

So my first reaction to this story was a jaw-dropped five minutes of boggle-eyed amazement. The second was to double check – this wasn’t an intricate send-up by the Onion, or Iowahawk? April Fool’s day was almost two weeks ago, admittedly… but no, it appears to be a completely straight – in the sense of being accurate, not in the sexual sense – news story.

Third reaction – wow, what a horrible thing to do to a poor unsuspecting little Verdi opera. That rumble you hear for south of the Alps? That must be the great maestro himself, revolving in his grave at a couple of thousand RPMs. Hook him up to an electric generator, you could probably power a couple of good-sized American suburbs, or maybe all of North Korea with the resulting output. This is just the latest manifestation of a depressing and currently fashionable penchant for staging operas and incorporating trappings and conventions taken cafeteria-style from an assortment of sources, to include gangster movies of all ages, S&M porn flicks and bloody violence a la Peckinpah or Tarantino…no matter how unsuited the opera is to that sort of artistic vision, or how much violence it does to the plot, or the characters. (more here)

It seems to be the ultra-trendy thing in Europe, apparently; it doesn’t seem to have caught on much in the States, where an opera house actually depends on appealing to the subscribers, season-ticket holders and the audience in general. We’re… umm, kind of traditional, that way. Generally the people who want to revel in gangster movies, S & M porn flicks or whatever, can get their fix somewhere else than the stage of the Met or the Houston Grand.

You’ve got to hand it to the director of this 9/11 Masked Balls-up, though – for sheer Teutonic thoroughness in including every single stupid, tired and overworked anti-American trope in the eu –repertoire: ugly naked people in Mickey-Mouse masks, same old anti-capitalist political posturing, Uncle Sam and Elvis impersonators… the whole ugly collection, calculated to demonstrate American vulgarity and European cultural superiority and creativity. I’m imagining the creative types sitting around, brainstorming and shouting out their ideas for every element and laughing their asses off the whole time at the credulity of their audience. It would be reassuring to think this was some kind of ‘Producers’ type scheme, to deliberately create a production guaranteed to go down in flames on opening night, but apparently not. According to the linked story, it’s sold out, or near to being so.

Ah, well – the next time I read of some euro-snot looking down his artistic nose and condemning Americans for being crass and vulgar and generally uncaring of our artistic heritage, I shall think of this production… and laugh, and laugh and laugh.

(Although the following appears with my name on it, ths is actually a guest-post by another IAG member, who did a lot of numbers-crunching and came up with some recommendations: Michael S. Katz is an attorney, editor-in-chief of Strider Nolan Publishing, board member of the Independent Authors’ Guild, and author of the comedy novel Shalom On The Range Take it away, Mike!)

Amazon.com recently announced a new policy requiring all Print On Demand authors to use Amazon’s own printing company, Booksurge, in order to be sold through Amazon. Many POD authors and publishers are understandably upset by this, as this can only serve to cost the authors money, and cost the printing companies business. But in terms of Amazon’s market share, how much business are we actually talking about?

WHO’S ON FIRST?

Sales of books totaled $2 billion in 2000, at which time on-line sales made up between 7.5% and 10% of that total.1 Amazon and BN.com now account for more than 85% of online book sales.3 Recent data shows that Amazon’s book sales are approximately four times that of BN.com,4 and Amazon has a 70% share of the Internet book market, so this translates into a 15 to 17.5% market share for BN.com.5

Amazon’s total sales in 2006 were $4.63 billion, but this includes books, music, and various other items, including a lot of high-end electronics, jewelry, and the like. Barnes & Noble actually outsold them at $4.68 billion (and they were basically limited to books, music and movies), but their on-line presence had only $477 million in sales. Why are people flocking to Amazon over BN.com?

A LOT TO RECOMMEND IT

A lot of it has to do with programming. Amazon has a reputation for being the best at tracking customer habits, having collected information longer and used it more proactively. Over the years they have collected detailed information about what its customers buy, considered buying, browsed for but never bought, recommended to others, or even wished someone would buy them.10 Amazon uses this information to calculate recommendations that boost sales.

In the entertainment industry, recommendations are a remarkably efficient form of marketing, as they enable films, music and books to more easily find the right audience.9 For example, the book Touching the Void, a tale of a mountain-climbing tragedy, was released in 1988 to good reviews but modest success. In 1998, the book Into Thin Air, about another mountain-climbing tragedy, was released and became a bestseller. All of a sudden, people began buying the older book again. Touching the Void began to be displayed side by side with Into Thin Air, and actually wound up outselling the newer book. How did this happen? Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, attributes this to Amazon.com recommendations. Amazon’s programs note buying patterns and suggest similar books to readers. Some people follow the suggestion, enjoy the book, and post excellent reviews. These purchases and reviews lead to more sales, more recommendations, and the cycle continues.9

Readers’ reviews also stimulate sales, although moreso on Amazon than BN.com. One study (Chevalier and Mayzlin) examined how sales on both sites correlated with number of reviews and customers’ ratings.12 They determined that a good review will increase the number of books sold, although with much greater effect on Amazon than BN.com. A bad review has a greater effect than a good one, based on the assumption that many 5-star reviews are believed to be “planted,” whereas 1-star reviews are seen as more legitimate.12

GETTING FROM POINTS A(MAZON) TO B(ARNES & NOBLE)

How do prices compare between the big two? A study (Chevalier and Goolsbee) collected Amazon and BN.com data for 18,000 different books during three different weeks in 2001. They determined that there was significant price sensitivity for online book purchases at both sites. But the demand at BN.com was much more price sensitive—both to its own prices and to Amazon’s prices—than at Amazon.4

A one percent increase in a book’s price at Amazon reduced sales by about 0.5 percent at Amazon but raised sales at BN.com by 3.5 percent, implying that (based on the 4-to-1 ratio in sales) every customer lost by Amazon instead bought the book at BN.com. Conversely, raising prices by one percent at BN.com reduced sales about 4 percent but increased sales at Amazon by only about 0.2 percent.4 Therefore, a customer lost by Amazon would usually wind up buying the book at BN.com, whereas a customer lost by BN.com would not necessarily go to Amazon. If BN.com keeps its prices right, they can steal away a lot of Amazon traffic.
(more…)

It was raining this morning. A storm front blew in to South Texas in the wee hours, a cool breeze and the patter of rain in the dark. Spring has been warm this year; sometimes up into the high eighties, where it begins to verge on being hot, rather than just pleasantly temperate. When everyone starts to think seriously about using the AC – that’s when we know in South Texas that it’s summer. I refuse – it’s only April, for pete’s sake!

We need the rain, though; it would be pleasant to have a repeat of last year, where it rained, drizzled, showered, spat, poured, misted or came down in buckets more or less constantly all through spring, summer and fall with the pleasing result that most of Texas was as green as Ireland is legendarily supposed to be and the wildflowers lasted all through summer… but I have a book-signing this afternoon at the Twig Bookstore on Alamo Heights. If it’s still coming down in buckets this afternoon, Blondie and I will be sitting there with a stack of books on a little table, embarrassingly doing nothing much for two hours but look at each other.

For all that they call it “Alamo Heights” certain streets in it are notoriously flood-prone; a better excuse for many residents to drive 4WD sport-utes than most people living in top-crust old-money suburbs have. I’m not yet in the Phillippa Gregory class of historical novel-scribblers, for whom the usual fans would turn out for a signing in anything up to and including a hurricane. I’m afraid that a mild drizzle by this afternoon will be enough excuse to keep readers away!

Sales of “Truckee” trickle along in a steady little stream, by the way. With luck that will increase, as a couple more reviews come meandering in. The Historical Novel Society has a copy for review… with a six-month window, so around about any time now…I also entered it in two independent book contests; the IPPY and the Writers Digest Independent Book contest. Entry fees for those two contests are there mainly to winnow the field slightly. Placing among the honorable mentions or higher means a nice bit of exposure and hopefully some more sales, all of which will go to fund the next book.

I have about decided to go ahead and shoot for December, 2008 as a date with Volume 1 of the Adelsverein Trilogy will be available. It’s pretty much edited and polished to a fine glossy gleam. I am coming down the home stretch of the first draft of the final volume, about six chapters or so from completing something that I began scribbling notes and outlining in October of 2006. I think of the initial research and chapter outline as sort of the skeleton of the book. The first draft is creating and applying the innards and flesh. That’s the slow and exciting part, because that’s when the characters come to life, some of them even developing a stubborn will of their own. Revising and editing – that’s like a little bit of nip and tuck there, a nice bit of couture styling there, a touch of makeup and a flattering hairstyle… and there you are.

This one will be a much easier sell in Texas – and I’ve already been told that most of Gillespie County will want to buy copies, just to see if I have worked in their ancestors. (I probably have, even if only in a brief mention.) I’ll be a bit down, when I finally finish the last revisions to “Barsetshire with cypress trees and a lot of sidearms”. I’ve been living with the characters for a year and a half, they’re real to me and I am nearly done with them now, and ready to set them loose on other people.

Blondie is already asking me, what the next book project will be, and I keep saying that I don’t know. She says I should stretch myself, and do a kid’s adventure set in ancient Britain, about three children who escape the massacre of the Druids by the Romans.
I just don’t know… but I’ll know it when I see it. Another relatively unknown story, for sure, something that reclaims an honorable past. Any suggestions?

Odds on, the first thing that anyone walking into any of the various places that I have lived- starting with the enlisted barracks in Japan in those dear distant days when female troops lived in a female-only dormitory was something along the lines of “Gosh – have you read all of those books?” To which the answer was some kind of polite rephrase of “Of course I bloody have! Did you think I had put them up as decorating elements?!!”

Yes, I have books. Lots of books; books in the bedroom, books in the den, books in the hallway, books in the living room and even a shelf of them in the kitchen – what better place for the cookbooks, pray tell? There aren’t any in the bathroom; first of all, the light isn’t that good and secondly there isn’t any place for shelves.

I used to buy books that I liked, just so that I could have copies of my own, which I could read any time I felt like it. Then I wound up overseas, where English-language bookstores were few and far between, and the Stars and Stripes Bookstore was pretty limited; if you saw it there and thought you might want to read it - better buy it quick, because it wouldn’t be there next time, and even though the base library did their best – well, there were other seriously committed readers out there. (When I moved from Spain, the packing crew had a pool going, on how many boxes of books there would eventually be; 63 and no, I don’t know what the winner got. Probably had many cervezas bought for him, after they finished nailing up the packing crates.) And then I came home, and discovered second-hand stores and services like Alibris, and the online behemoth which must not be named because they are behaving like total d**ks in regard to POD publishers… oh, off-topic. Never mind. Books, the topic was books, the love for (or addiction to!) and constant acquisition of such.

Now, I review books, for Blogger News Network, and for iUniverse Reviews, with the result that I get a constant trickle of books from other writers asking for reviews through the Daily Brief or the IAG. But writing books myself is another splendid excuse for buying more; for the research, you see. The shelves of my writing desk (built by Dad for Blondie’s use, but too big for her room) are now crowded with Texiana and various books on aspects of the Old West. I had a fair number of them already – it’s as if I knew there would be an eventual use for that Time Life series about the Old West. It’s not so much the text in that case, but the pictures.

Blondie and I went to the library book sale on Saturday, at the Semmes branch on Judson road. There’s always a crowd for this, the room where the sale is set up almost instantly achieves a ‘black hole of Calcutta’ degree of heat and overcrowding. Fortunately, most of the people lined up for admittance –many of them armed with large plastic tubs and canvas shopping bags - are intent on the novels or the children’s books. I am on the lookout for more Texiana and western stuff – especially with illustrations, especially with contemporary – that is contemporary 19th century artists. I need pictures of all sorts of things; horses and wagons, of old forts and plains river valleys covered with buffalo herds, of buildings and animals and people, something for my imagination to fix upon, so that I can build all the other living elements around it.

I scooped up a couple of prizes almost at once – Don Troiani’s American Battles and a thick coffee-table treasure-trove called “The Art of the Old West: From the Collection of the Gilcrease Institute” which has color plates of practically everything, and a collection of Frederic Remington’s black and white magazine illustrations – all for considerably under 20$.

There’s enough pictorial stuff in those books alone to start me off with ideas for another book of my own. My only problem is that I am running out of shelf-space for all of my necessary research materials - but it’s a happy problem.

(Cross posted at the IAG Blog)

Being a child of the later baby-boom, of course I remember seeing Charlton Heston on the big screen – the very big screen at the drive in, when Mom and Dad packed JP and Pippy and I into the back of the trusty jade-green Plymouth station wagon for an evening at the double-feature. We were all in our pajamas for this sort of excursion, with our pillows and blankets in the back; lamentably, we usually fell asleep before seeing very much of the first feature, let alone the second.

But I do have a hazy memory of him as El Cid, in desert exile, seen through the windshield of the Plymouth, between Mom and Dad’s heads, as “Ben Hur” – especially the bone-crunching chariot race - a very much better one of him as Moses in “The Ten Commandments” – this one at one Pasadena’s gloriously ornate picture palaces, and of him as the devious and worldly Cardinal Richelieu in Richard Lesters’ Three Musketeers and Four Musketeers. Mom always said it was because of his background in classical theater, that he could swish about in historical costume so convincingly.

So, he was about the biggest star that any of us had ever heard of, when he came to Zaragoza, Spain sometime in the late 1980s, and the Public Affairs office informed us that we had a chance for an interview. We were all of a twitter; Zaragoza was kind of a backwater – I used to compare it to Bakersfield – and whereas it had a lovely old downtown, a cathedral (two cathedrals), a Roman bridge and a Moorish castle, practically everywhere else in Spain had better, more beautiful, more historic and better preserved. Our radio and television broadcasters there had practically no chance of doing celebrity interviews; I saw more interesting and famous people come through Sondrestrom, Greenland than I ever did in Zaragoza.

What was he doing in Zaragoza, of all places? Filming the commentary for this program series, on location in the old Alcazar; of which he said jokingly during our interview that it was practically the only castle in Spain that he hadn’t been to before. We were the only news outlet to get a TV interview with him on that trip; he was terribly busy with the location shoots, and it wasn’t the sort of enterprise that needed additional publicity anyway. We all liked to think that it was because of his service connection that we even got in the door. He couldn’t have been more gracious or considerate to our two nervous young airmen who shot the interview.

No, I did not do the interview; I came up with the questions for our staffer to ask, since the ones suggested by the Public Affairs officer were embarrassingly amateurish. We all watched the raw video of the interview afterwards and marveled – because he was a pro. We could use practically every second of the footage we taped, he was that good. Most people we did interviews with were nervous, fidgety and stiff. They radiated discomfort; it came off them in little wavy lines that you could almost see, like those used in cartoons to signify a stink. We usually had to spend a lot of time putting them at ease, and a lot of video time and editing to just get something useable that didn’t make them and us look like idiots.

But Charlton Heston sat still, graciously playing to the camera – (Of course! He was an actor!) – he didn’t fidget nervously. His responses were thoughtful, smooth, as composed and literate as a small essay or sonnet. No awkward umms and pauses, no false starts; he was at ease, completely comfortable and polished to a high gloss in a way that most of us- even those who had interviewed various currently popular celebs before – had never seen. He wasn’t just a star –besides being a military veteran, he was a total pro in a way that you rarely see these days.

(Note - I am a bit off Amazon.com, and protesting their recent decision to pressure POD publishers into using their print service by sending all my links for books and DVDs to Barnes and Noble. Take that, Jeff Bezos!)

Here we are, after a week of the Great Amazon-Booksurge Kerfuffle of 2008; wherein the great 800 pound gorilla of internet retailing has strong-armed various small POD (publish on demand) houses into having any of their books sold through Amazon printed for delivery to the customer by Amazon’s in-house print division. They did this by the simple expedient of threatening to ‘turn off’ the Amazon “buy” button for those authors who publish through those POD houses. Essentially, the book would still be there on the Amazon page… but if you wanted to actually to buy, you’d have to go through one of the secondary vendors… and it wouldn’t qualify for the free Amazon shipping. And having Amazon do the printing – through a POD publisher notorious among the cognoscenti for shoddy work – and charging for it, chipping away even further at author royalties… the fur is still energetically flying among the book-bloggers and writers’ discussion groups. It was the blatant bullying of the Amazon/Booksurge reps which got up peoples noses the most. Honestly, it’s as if they never heard the old saying about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Scroll down for my previous posts on this - and check out this page of updated information from Writers Weekly is here Oh, goody, the American Society of Journalists and Authors is adding their voice to the mighty chorus! This doesn’t look like it is going to die a quiet death and very soon, as much as Amazon probably hopes it will.

Now there seems to be a lull in the storm while everyone takes stock and figures out what to do next. Although my publisher, Booklocker, has declined the offer of a contract for Amazon-Booksurge’s services with the vigor and force of a concrete block thrown through a plate-glass window – indeed has taken a very prominent place in aggressively reporting on the tidal wave of criticism crashing upon Amazon.com as well as practically surfing on the leading edge, “To Truckee’s Trail” is still available through Amazon. (No link, I’ve sworn off Amazon for the moment!) To the best knowledge of the other IAG members, no one’s buy buttons have been turned off, and we have member-writers published by just about all of the various POD houses. The fury continues unabated, though – and it’s hard not to imagine various lawyers hastily brushing up on various anti-trust regs and laws though. And whatever in-house emergency meetings at Amazon this week must have been eventful. Oh, to have been a fly on those walls!

Standing back and taking a long look, and considering other developments though – as the release of the handy-dandy-Espresso Book Machine and perhaps this kerfuffle-du-jour is just one more of those harbingers of change in the world of books and publishing. Everything changes, nothing stays the same for long. Having been hanging out in among the book blogs and in the author discussion groups for the last two years has been enlightening. Many of the other writers in the IAG have been in and around the writing game for years . They don’t have the five-figure royalty checks – if they did, they wouldn’t be hanging around in the discussion group skulling out ways to market their books if they did. But what I picked up, over and over again was a feeling that for most writers, the way the literary industrial complex is set up… it just was not working, and not working in a big way. This guy (now on hiatus, unfortunately) was a shrewd and extremely knowledgeable insider.
This blogger is another: and what they were saying was confirmed by the writers that I met in putting together the IAG; which is that it is nearly impossible for interesting, genuinely original books with niche appeal to even slip in over the transom at traditional publishers.

If you aren’t an established best-selling writer already, forget trying to break into the club. Still, there were all sorts of interesting bits of knowledge floating around – like the day of big advances from a publisher is probably over. And if you do get one, you might have to pay it back if the book doesn’t sell. And that more and more publishers were using print-on-demand, for exactly the quantities needed, rather than print a warehouse full of cheap copies that would be remaindered and pulped. And all but the very top rank of best-selling authors had to go out and do their own marketing, organize their own signing events.

In the light of all that, I speculate that Harper Collins’ new imprint is trying to tap into the indie-author and POD paradigm. From what I can make out of this story and from some of the IAG group discussions, it all seems like Harper Collins is having a go at what we’ve been doing with our various POD houses – Booklocker, and iUniverse and all the rest for the last couple of years. We’ve saying with varying degrees of desperation, hope and passion that big publishing just couldn’t go on the way it has been; it had to change, or go down. Now we see the very first cracks in the wall of Things as They Are, and hope that the paradigm shift has really and truly happened.

One of the big traditional publishers is tentatively trying out something new, and trying out what indie writers have been doing in the last five years. Why, yes, I think I’ll have a drink, so that I can toast to them.

And to myself – I sold a copy of “To Truckee’s Trail” to a contractor doing work on a house in my neighborhood, and two copies to co-workers at one of my jobs. There is a reason to keep a box of copies and a fistful of promotional materials in the car, you know!

Well, this is getting interesting – last weekend the writing world – or that portion of it that doesn’t have a name which frequents the New York Times best-sellers list - was all agog over Amazon.com’s fiat that all books sold through Amazon must be printed by it’s POD subsidiary, Booksurge. (Gruesome details here in my post of Sunday last).

Many of us ink-stained scribbling wretches are being advised to A-remain calm, it is not the end of the world as we know it and B- that Amazon doesn’t own the bloody world yet, anyway so change over all of your links to Barnes and Noble and sit tight.

Angela Hoy at Writers Weekly has the latest development here; yes, a couple of POD firms have caved, given yesterdays deadline to stand and deliver, or else their authors ‘ buy buttons’ be disabled on Amazon’s website. Angela has some shrewd guesses about why and how this is all going down the way that it is, as well as a link to further developments – and the cheery news that no buttons have actually been turned off or harmed in the making of this power-grab/controversy.

The Independent Authors’ Guild forum has been all of a twitter though: what would Ingram/Lightning Source do about this? (Break out the terrible swift sword and start trampling those grapes of wrath, some of us hoped!) How would the various POD firms react ? (Stand tall and tell ‘em “Nuts!”, some of us hoped!) And how would the general public react? A volcanic outburst of rage would be nice, but perhaps a little much for us mere scribbling mortals to hope for. Some of us still have day jobs, you see, Although book-blogger PODdy Mouth has a nice takedown here, including a number that can be called…

OMG Amazon has a actual telephone number for people to talk to a real live human?

Well, OK, probably some poor barely-minimum-wage call center drone, so keep it civil and dignified, people. It isn’t their fault; the guys whose f**king brilliant idea this was are well beyond being reached by a phone call. Maybe not beyond subpoena… eh, call me a dreamer. It goes with the territory, I write historical novels and would like to make a living from it, for f**ks sake! Given that there are so many lawyer-bloggers, perhaps some searching analysis of whatever basis there might be for anti-trust action. All well and good; and this sort of controversy is bread, butter and circuses to the blogosphere.

But I have long predicted that the towers of the literary industrial complex would totter, crumble and fall when a certain technological point was reached – when there was a desktop gadget that would print and bind a nice little paperback or hardbound book. Even if it was so expensive to buy that only places like Kinkos would have them, even if it could only crank them out one or two at a time, even at a cost per unit substantially above that of one of those industrial print shops that could churn out a thousand in a minute – it would mean the end of the literary-industrial complex. Anyone could take their book content and cover file, with ISBN and everything, down to the corner copy place, pay them to print and bind a couple or three or half-dozen copies of your book… and you could mail them to whoever had bought them. Or who you wanted to send them! That’s the future, and according to this release, may be here already, in the form of the Espresso Book Machine. Think of this as Ingram/Lightning Source looking across the poker table with a steely gaze and saying, “raise.”

“It’s always been the holy grail of the book business to walk into a store and get any book,” said Kirby Best, president and CEO of Lightning Source. With the signing of today’s strategic agreement with On Demand Books, proprietor of the Espresso Book Machine, Best sees that goal coming a little bit closer.”

And savor the discription and call me a prophetess: “We’re building a new machine that’s much smaller that can be mass produced, version 2.0,” said cofounder and chairman Jason Epstein. Neller adds that a beta machine, which will be the size of a copier at Kinko’s (3’ X 2-1/2’ for the finishing unit with another 2’ for a duplex printer), will be ready in the fall. If all goes well, a less expensive model will begin leasing in 2009. “The point of this machine is to represent the ultimate in POD,” said Epstein, who sees it as the best way to preserve backlist. If the machines catch on and proliferate like so many Starbucks outlets, the marketplace would become radically decentralized and book distribution would require simply an Internet connection.”

Oh, yeah… definitely we’re into round two. Pass the popcorn.

(Crossposted at the IAG Blog)

(And yeah, my blogosphere cover is now comprehensively blown - I blog under the name “Sgt Mom” and write books under the name “Celia Hayes”. It turns out that someone is already using my real name and has somewhat of a reputation under it. I understand that Elizabeth Taylor had something of the same problem.)

Question – Where does the eight hundred pound gorilla sit?
Answer – Anywhere it wants to!

It hasn’t made much of a ripple yet in the political blogosphere, but among the various writers’ discussion groups, websites and e- newsletters, discussion of the Amazon-Publish America imbroglio is achieving a melt-down-and-drop-through-to-the earths’ core degree of nuclear passion. The implications of Amazon’s recently announced policy of requiring that small independent and publish on demand (POD) presses who want to sell through Amazon must print their books through Amazon’s “Booksurge” publisher-printer are being chewed over like a mouthful of rubbery and vile-tasting bubblegum through this weekend, ever since this story was posted in the Wall Street Journal.

A short background refresher in the vagaries of independent publishing may be in order here. Once upon a time, in a universe far, far away there used to be two ways of being published. The first kind was the respectable kind, with one of the big name publishing firms that with luck and if you were any good, or fairly good or even a literary genius, and you had any sort of agent, you would wind up with stacks of copies of your book in all the bookstores, a nice royalty check, maybe even an advance, good reviews in the right magazines, and hey, presto – as Blondie says, pretty soon you were a ‘real arthur’. The other kind of publishing was disdainfully known as ‘vanity’ publishing. The assumption was that untalented hack with lots of money would contract with a publisher to print quantities of a book that ‘real’ publishers wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole and no one but the ‘vanity author’ and his family and friends would ever read, and the ‘vanity author’ would wind up with a garage full of expensive books that would never go any farther than that.

Clear so far? Good. It’s different now; between the internet, the development of POD, or print-on-demand technology, and the big-name publishing houses becoming risk-adverse, unadventurous and stodgy. Rather like Hollywood and the music industry, come to think on it: stuck on established big names, carefully constructed sure-fire blockbuster hits and guaranteed big returns. The quirky, original, eccentric and genuinely creative will likely never be invited in the door – even if they are talented, too. The result has been an explosion in the numbers of writers who have gone ‘indy’ – just like filmmakers and musicians, because the technology has allowed it. Getting in through the doors of the big-name publishing houses is no longer the only game in town.

Print on demand technology allows a printer to print up copies of a particular book as they are ordered from a formatted electronic text file. Because they are usually printed in small batches, not in 10s of thousands at a whack, the cost of the individual copy is higher, but not all that much. And because they are printed to order, the matter of warehousing thousands of copies doesn’t come up; all very ecologically sound. It allowed writers who couldn’t or didn’t want to publish through a traditional publisher and couldn’t afford to pay for a print run from a so-called vanity press to pay a small set-up fee for their text and cover, which would be available to the printer. Whenever orders came in for their book, the printer could run off as many copies as needed and drop-ship them to the customer.

Sensing an opportunity, a whole host of new publishers sprang up or morphed from their previous incarnation. Most of these are internet-based: Author House, iUniverse, Booklocker, Booksurge, Publish America, Lulu: just check out the IAG books and members to get an idea of the range. And a fair number of authors set up as publishers themselves, since the actual printing of the books was now relatively inexpensive and accessible. While a good many of resulting POD books are just as much vanity publications as ever were, and are pretty dreadful besides – quite a few are not. In fact, the best of them are as quirky, literate and as high quality as anything available from the big traditional houses – and those authors who took it seriously have reached a wider audience. As another IAG member pointed out, readers don’t much care how a book that they love to read was published – they just want to read it. Nothing is in stasis for long – POD publishers grew, or were absorbed by others.

Amazon.com purchased the POD publisher Booksurge in 2005; not a large publisher or a particularly well-regarded one. In fact the worst POD book I ever reviewed was a Booksurge product, although that seemed to have resulted from author stubbornness rather than Booksurge incompetence. Still, it didn’t seem to be terribly out of line for a book retailer to be also in the book publishing business – and Booksurge books didn’t seem to be given any special favors among all the other POD books available from Amazon… until this last week. If anything, I thought it might indicate that the bright sparks at Amazon thought that POD published books were the wave of the future.

The main printer for many, if not most POD publishers is called Lightning Source; it’s owned by Ingram, the mega-huge book distributor. It’s essential for POD books to be included in the Ingram catalogue; it’s a main line into brick and mortar bookstores; other wise you might just as well be back in the vanity-press days, with a garage full of copies to hawk around. But it’s also essential for your books to be available on-line, and on-line means Amazon.com – the proverbial eight hundred pound gorilla of internet book marketing. If it’s published, it’s available from Amazon. Over the last couple of years, Amazon.com has been relatively welcoming to readers and writers alike; offering opportunities to review and blog about our books, to do Kindle reader editions of our books, to do wish-lists and recommendations, to set up discussion groups; as a matter of fact, the Independent Authors Guild started as an Amazon discussion group.

So last Friday’s action by Amazon.com, demanding that POD publisher, Publish America now and henceforward have their books be printed by Booksurge, or else their authors books would not be sold directly through Amazon comes as a rather thuggish slap in the face. (Publish America’s news release is here.)

Worse – as reported here by Angela Hoy at Writers Weekly – it looks like other POD publishers are or will be getting the same treatment. (there’s a long bloglist of other reactions to this at Writers Weekly)

In essence, POD writers are being told to make a choice between doing business with our chosen publisher and printer…or being sold through Amazon. Amazon might be able to make this stick – they are, after all, the eight hundred pound gorilla. But pissing off people who bought as well as sold a fair number of books through them is perhaps not as good a business model as previously assumed. There’s a petition here, and a place to comment. I hope it does some good. (Donation not needed, though!)

(Crossposted at Blogger News Network, and at the Independant Authors Guild Blog)

(Part one is here)
As was noted by a number of other bloggers and commenters, one doesn’t usually have a choice about your relations. Parents, cousins, grandparents and all; you’re stuck with them, as embarrassing as they are. Friends or spouses, business partners or clergy – those we choose – and we are known for good or ill by the company that we keep. Barack Obama’s chosen clergyman and mentor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, has been shouting pernicious and venomous nonsense from the pulpit, apparently to great applause, every Sunday for twenty years. From this distance, he sounds too much like a black version of Fred Phelps for my taste. Black racism ought to be just as much the political kiss of death as white racism.

And perhaps it is – since well-meaning people of pallor seem to be fed to their back teeth with having ‘you racist!’ screamed at them, every time they voice a mild criticism of controversial mayors like Ray Nagin and Marion Barry, or buffoons like Al Sharpton - or any one of those other race-card playing luminaries, who seem to have no more qualifications for the position they hold other than a whip-lash inducing swiftness in accusing critics of racism. Here we are in this year 2008; at least forty years since casual social racism was acceptable in most circles, more than that since racial segregation was the law of the land, sixty years since it was the common practice of the military, a hundred and forty since chattel slavery was outlawed utterly… well, really, what better time to have a conversation abou