MUSINGS
One of my best friends, Noah Stoner, runs his own video production company in Central Pennsylvania called, aptly enough, StonerMedia. Recently he's been doing mostly weddings, but if you have a particular project in mind, he'll definitely hear you out. He does great work, as seen by the wedding trailer below.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/14782471[/vimeo]
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh1ZRtXk_ho
If you're a big Seinfeld fan like me, you probably heard about Len Lesser (aka, Uncle Leo) passing away a few days ago. Very sad news indeed. He's one of those character actors you never forget, and despite the commercial above, he's been in a lot of great stuff. Here's a lengthy interview where he talks about some of his biggest projects (he talks about being on Seinfeld first):
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7sw0QNO78E
Earlier in the week I talked about e-book royalties and what the Authors Guild had to say. Just yesterday they released a new part of their ongoing series, this one aptly titled "The E-Book Royalty Mess: An Interim Fix":
Negotiating a publishing contract is frequently contentious, but authors have long been able to take comfort in this: once the contract is signed, the interests of the author and the publisher are largely aligned. If the publisher works to maximize its revenues, it will necessarily work to maximize the author's royalties. This is the heart of the traditional bargain, whereby the author licenses the publisher long-term, exclusive book rights in the world's largest book market in exchange for an advance and the promise of diligently working to the joint benefit of author and publisher.Now, for the first time, publishers have strong incentives to work against the author's interests.
As we discussed in our last alert, authors and publishers have traditionally acted as equal partners, splitting the net proceeds from book sales. Most sublicenses, for example, provide for a fifty-fifty split of proceeds, and the standard hardcover trade book royalty -- 15% of the retail price -- represented half of the net proceeds from selling the book when the standard was established. But trade book publishers currently offer e-book royalties at precisely half what the terms of a traditional proceeds-sharing arrangement would dictate -- paying just 25% of net income on e-book sales. That's why the shift from hardcover to e-book sales is a win for publishers, a loss for authors.
The piece goes on. Definitely worth checking out.
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I love Twitter. I don't know why. If I had to choose between Twitter and Facebook, I would take Twitter in a heartbeat. There's just a simplicity to it that I really like. Also I really dig the fact that each tweet can be no more than 140 characters. And I'm not just saying that because I'm the "Hint Fiction guy." I believe it really can help writers work on their word-choice and self-editing. Of course, a few tweeters out there will run on and on, which sorta defeats the purpose. You know what else defeats the purpose? Services like TwitLonger.
On some level I've always known this service to exist but never bothered with it. Why would I, when the simple point of Twitter is to keep your posts nice and short. But recently a new upgrade with TweetDeck (which I use mostly for my desktop tweeting) has this service enabled. Before when I would tweet and go over the 140 character mark, the numbers would turn red and show a negative. Now, however, it just continues, as if encouraging you to keep typing away and not worry about the limit. This is sad and goes against everything Twitter stands for.
My point? That servies like TwitLonger really suck. And if you use them, shame on you. Shame!
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On a brighter note, the table of contents has been announced for the third edition of The Best of Every Day Fiction. It includes online friends Gay Degani, Aaron Polson, Ben Loory, and many, many more. It also include my story "Multiplicity." A big thanks to Jordan Lapp and Camille Gooderham Campbell and the rest of the EDF team for not only publishing my story in the first place, but for now reprinting it. When the book becomes available, I'll be sure to post about it here.
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Everyone have a nice and safe romantic weekend. Tune in Monday for an exciting announcement (at least, I hope it'll be exciting). In the meantime, American Grindhouse!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AndtsMdk2fc
Last week I was at AWP, but you knew that already. In fact, some of you probably saw me there. I probably saw you there. We probably talked. Or we didn't. Either way, it was a really fun time. I could do a breakdown of everything that happened -- or at least what I did -- but I won't. If you're that interested, check out my Twitter feed starting all the way back to last Wednesday. Basically, I met a lot of great writers I've known online for quite some time, and everyone was super friendly. There was a lot of talk about writing and publishing. There was also some drinking. Okay, there was a lot of drinking. Even some karaoke-ing as you can see from this picture:
I sang "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" by the Charlie Daniels Band. And yes, by that point I'd had a drink or two or three or four.
Anyway, Friday was the Hint Fiction panel. It went very well, despite the fact that at the beginning I feared we wouldn't have enough material to fill the allotted hour and fifteen minutes; then, an hour later, I realized we didn't nearly have enough time for everything I had wanted to discuss. They put us in one of the smaller rooms that they had at the conference, so it was standing room only. In fact, there were even people standing out in the hallway listening.
Later the panelists -- Randall Brown, Roxane Gay, Michael Martone, Daniel Olivas, and myself -- as well as a few other contributors went down to the Norton booth in the book fair and signed copies of the anthology for awhile. Later Norton sold out of all the copies.
I'd said before that I would try to get the entire panel on video. It happened, though the picture quality isn't very good. The sound quality, however, is pretty decent, and that's all that really matters anyway. Because YouTube won't let you upload more than 15 minutes of video at a time, I had to break the whole thing up into 6 parts. So below you can view part 1; to view the rest, check out my YouTube channel.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4obfFNZ_Ao
It's 2 o'clock in the morning where I am, and I hear the freezing rain outside. It doesn't sound very nice. In fact, it sounds rather angry.
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My wife and I watched Red tonight. Not the movie based on the Jack Ketchum novel (though that's one on my instant queue, and both star Brian Cox, who is always great in everything he does), but the one starring Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich and a bunch of other well-known actors. It's a fun action-packed movie that is what it is. Definitely worth my $1 from the Blockbuster kiosk.
The movie is based on the graphic novel by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner, though I don't know how faithful the movie is to the original story. Either way, I like that Hollywood is realizing they don't have to remake everything and are taking graphic novels more seriously.
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Speaking of graphic novels, tonight I just finished reading American Vampire by Scott Snyder, Stephen King, and Rafael Albuquereque. I've had the first volume since November and just started it yesterday. I don't know what took me so long. I loved it. Each chapter is broken up into two interconnecting stories, one that takes place in 1925, the other in 1880. Scott Snyder -- the series creator -- does the 1925 storyline, while Stephen King takes up the 1880 storyline. At the back of the book is a section that includes two pages from each writer's script with the corresponding art to show the differences between the two writing styles. It's really interesting, especially if you, like me, are fascinated by the world of graphic novels. It's a medium I'd love to try my hand at someday, but for some reason it seems so intimidating. I'm definitely looking forward to the second volume, scripted solely by Snyder, which comes out in May.
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Do any of you writers out there carry business cards? I was at a party a few weeks ago where someone found out I was a writer and, as the conversation came to an end, asked for my business card. It felt weird. I've never seen the need for them, but maybe that's because I normally don't attend big conferences and conventions. Yes, I'm on Twitter and Facebook, but that's as far as my networking goes. Still, my wife has been pressing me to get some, especially with AWP coming up, and while it's now way too late to have some professionally made, I broke down and did a few myself. I did two versions, a serious one and a not-so-serious one. Can you guess which one this is?
Who knows, maybe in the future I'll have some "real" business cards made up. Ones that would even impress Patrick Bateman. Though, you know, I wouldn't want to piss him off too badly. (Below I would have embedded the "business card" scene from American Psycho, but YouTube won't let me. So instead, I have embedded a different kind of psycho.)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YBxeDN4tbk
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I still hear that freezing rain outside. It's taunting me. Tomorrow hopefully the sun will come out and melt some of the ice, as I have to drive down to D.C. and would prefer not to skid off the highway into a tree. I'll try, as always, to tweet my adventures. Hopefully there won't be any tweets about an accident. Wish me luck.
