Monday, September 15, 2003
I have D&D friends who have not stopped smoking and this morning my eyeballs are wishing that they had. I think D&D is the geek equivalent of poker. Last night I kicked serious gnoll ass. But anyway . . .
We had a good trip to the museum for jacket photos yesterday. Spooky will have the prints for me to see in an hour or so. A lot of people think I'm a camera whore, but I'm actually very, very nervous about being photographed. There should be some good ones in this batch, though. It was great being with the dinosaurs again. The Argentinosaurus (the largest known sauropod, by some estimates), will never cease to amaze me.
Today it's back to work on Murder of Angels. I figure I should finish Chapter Nine either tomorrow afternoon or on Wednesday. And I have to call my Hollywood agent today, as well. It's kind of neat having an agent on each coast. They're like bookends. Bookends who get a percentage. But that's fair. They keep my books from falling over.
Hurricane Isabel bears down on the Carolinas, hovering just below a Category 5 now, losing a little speed as she moves out over cooler waters at 10mph, her top windspeed somewhere around 150 mph. The satellite images are beautiful. And I want to pack up Spooky and the van and head north and east to watch her approach. I know it's insane, but I've done it before. Those final hours as the storm approaches land, as that towering outer wall comes into view, are so spectacular. The quality to the air and the light. The sound of the sea.
I got this e-mail from Katrina James yesterday, regarding Ja're and Amazon.com reviews:
My Amazon.com wish list has carried this statement for a couple of months
now:
Unique facts: Until Amazon changes their questionable user "review" practices, I'd prefer that this list be used only as a reference guide and that the items be purchased from independently-owned businesses (like Borderlands Books).
Katrina
Good idea. I actually have an Amazon.com wishlist and wish I'd thought of this first. I shall add it today. And I urge you to buy books by me published by Subterranean Press directly from Subterranean Press, rather than through Amazon or Barnes and Noble.com (which has an equally questionable, though far less popular, "review" feature).
There's a new "review" of Silk up, which I just noticed this morning. The reader, someone who goes by icestormtx, liked the novel, but reports that "the ending did not live up to the rest of the book." This is, of course, a not uncommon complaint about Silk. I think I spoke of it very recently. The people who mistake metaphor for actuality, who want dueling angels, Prophecy 4, or a giant killer were-spider, or something silly of that sort, and are disappointed at the book's purposefully quiet ending. The first ending I wrote for Silk was much more graphic and traditionally horrific. And I didn't like it and immediately wrote the far more subtle ending it was published with. But readers who approach it a) believing the cover copy (that usually misleading stuff on the back cover that tells you what the book's "about"), b) expecting Silk to be a traditional, by-the-numbers "horror" novel, and/or c)mistaking the "plot" (ugly word) as a thing more important than, or even half as important as, the characters, are very often disappointed by the ending. They want a scream and get a sigh. People like Ja're had similar problems with the ending of Threshold, because it goes somewhere they probably didn't expect it to. Not because it's the wrong place for the book to go, but because we've so recently confused dark fantasy/weird novels with action films. These people will be a little happier with Low Red Moon, I think. But then they will be totally flumoxed by Murder of Angels.
Gods, it's depressing knowing that I could be a much more popular author (i.e., sell more books) if only I would bow to the pressure of readers and industry and set aside my own agenda as an author. It's enough to make me want to quit and spend my days sitting on a street corner at Little Five Points, stringing beads for spare change. And when I've written a sentence like that, I know it's time to end the entry, lest my morale dip so low that I can't face the words today.
|
|
