The Blacklist: Season Three, Episode Six

Oh yes, I have it. Of course I have it. Why do you doubt?

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Alas, Books!

The Tsar of Love and Techno

You think record execs are bad, publishers are much worse, kinda like movie executives on steroids, people who believe they’re better than us. And I’m not going to laud the uneducated, but the publishing world is everything I hate about New York, where your pedigree rules and it’s all about keeping everybody else down. Come on, have you seen Donald Trump’s act?

Books are so passe it’s laughable. And so many are written by graduates of writing workshops where the standard is unreadability. It’s like they pack their tomes with words you have to look up to make them feel better about themselves. Whereas the first criterion of a book is readability.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Another opportunity for me to link to this: A Reader’s Manifesto.

It’s not you. It’s the book. That book you have to wrestle with is shit.

Previously here:

Who Do You Write For?

Moneybook

Moneyball, the movie:

Billy Beane: It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball. This kind of thing, it’s fun for the fans. It sells tickets and hot dogs. Doesn’t mean anything.

Fuck baseball. How can you not be romantic about book publishing?

Harper Lee’s Millions

Everyone was in on the auction last week. The proposal went out to fifteen hundred fucking people. Matt Damon got one. On Mars.

This post is for my fellow writers. No one else would understand.

Effin Money

The money thing part 1: there is none in writing about comics

This stands in stark contrast to a piece that ran a few days ago on the Atlantic by Olga Khazan called Can Mommy Bloggers Still Make a Living? that showed CPMs circling the drain at an alarming rate. One mommy blogger who once made enough to support three people and pay for an assistant has now all but moved on[.]

And:

I know I’ve said this before — just a few days ago in fact — but without my own Patreon campaign I couldn’t even keep this site running. For some insane reason, I live in NYC, where working two jobs 14 hours a day to pay for a room in an apartment with three other people living in it is pretty common. A 260-sq. foot apartment built from Legos in the middle of a park full of homeless people across the street from a mental hospital rents for $2000 a month here. (This is a block from Stately Beat Manor, BTW.)

Brutal.

Hollywood Dementia: No Paywall

Advisory: No More Paywall

Previously here:

Nikki Finke’s Hollywood Dementia Now Live!
Nikki Finke Returning!
The Second Rise Of Nikki Finke
Welcome Back, Nikki Finke!
Nikki Finke Going Solo Again

Nikki Finke’s Hollywood Dementia Now Live!

Hollywood Dementia

It is soooo good to see Nikki back with a site. I hope this will be a smash success.

Previously here:

Nikki Finke Returning!
The Second Rise Of Nikki Finke
Welcome Back, Nikki Finke!
Nikki Finke Going Solo Again

More Troubling Signs

ReCode To Vox

Walt Mossberg, one of America’s two most famous tech columnists, shot himself in the foot. He left the “Wall Street Journal.” They’re finding out in news what we already know in music, you can go it alone, the internet allows you to do this, but in a chaotic world he with the established presence wins, the major record labels figured out the internet and the big news sites still rule.

And:

And then you’ve got David Pogue, Mossberg’s nemesis, who left the “Times” for Yahoo and was promptly buried in the tsunami of bogus information on that site. He went from being one of the two experts to a nobody.

And:

Bottom line… ReCode had the best tech news in the business. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher built a team of experts. But nobody cared, nobody went to the site, they thought their minions would follow them but it turned out they were aligned more with the “Wall Street Journal,” their former home, than the writers themselves.

He didn’t even mention Katie Couric, who is supposed to have gone to Yahoo too (did she? Bueller? Bueller?).

I should have seen all of this coming. When the two biggest mouths of book publishing — who touted self-publishing — quickly sold themselves out to Amazon, that was the warning sign.

The Lost Women

re: women, rebellion, and counterculture movements http://t.co/ySoJChaFIf—
[redacted] (@NotAllBhas) January 29, 2015

Larger text image after the break.

Grave-Robbing The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Sequel to Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy set for 35 countries

This is the world as remade by lawyers. This is why movies are shit reboot after shit reboot. This is why TV does shit reboot after shit reboot. Art becomes “property,” like fucking real estate. Those who can’t do, who can never understand, rape the dreams of creators and turn them into whores for all the world to see.

Previously here:

The Girl With The Bank Account Tattoo
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: Book And Movie Versions
Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Trailer Mashups
Shot By Shot: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Red Band Trailer
New Statesman – Girls, tattoos and men who hate women

Wannabe Neverbe “Writers” Whine Against Amazon

Amazon Offers All-You-Can-Eat Books. Authors Turn Up Noses.

Let me fix the headline: Shitheads Who Have No Business Writing Whine Their Free Ride Is Ending

On Twitter, I railed against that article.

I’m publishing those tweets here. Because fuck you.