#254:  Guest post on “Writers on the Move.”  Thanks to the encouragement of Karen Cioffi, one of “the writers on the move,” I’m writing up my experiences with targeted ads directed at the local audience of attendees of the Montclair Film Festival (April 25-May 5).  I will be candid with this series of articles, no matter the results.  Whether positive or negative, it’s a learning experience for me I’m willing to pass on.  The series is titled “Targeting Specific Readers” and the first part, which appeared Wednesday (April 17), is subtitled “The Marketing Conundrum.”  I would be pleased if you follow the series.  (Note: it will NOT reappear here.)

#255:  Major writer goes indie.  Wednesday’s (April 17) NY Times reported that Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author David Mamet is going indie for his next book.  When he released his last one, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, it sold well enough to make the Times’ best-seller list.  This year, when the author set out to publish his next book, a novella and two short stories about war, he decided to take a very different path: self- or indie publishing.  His reasons should be familiar—he wants more control.  (Note: One other so far, Hugh Howey, author of the Wool SF series, has managed to do both, and keep digital rights separate from paper rights.)

(more…)

…of what’s wrong with American government.  Who makes the laws of the land?  The lobbyists and special interests, that’s who!  We don’t have single payer health insurance and universal health coverage because of the demands of health insurance and pharmaceutical companies and all the healthcare industry—AMA, hospitals, clinics, doctors, and nurses.  Every special interest pressures Congress, the executive branch, and, increasingly, the judicial system, especially Wall Street and other corporate lawyers.  But the special interest group that screams the loudest, puts its money where its big mouth is, and effectively makes 90% of the American public their slaves is the NRA.

Yes, stats are out: about 90% of every public sector—whites, blacks, Hispanics, women, men—are for at least extensive background checks.  You’d think that would guarantee passage of something.  We just commemorated the death of Martin Luther King.  I saw recently a clip of RFK announcing his death—Bobby died a few months later.  James Brady took a bullet meant for Ronald Reagan thirty-two years ago.  Four months ago, we lived through the Newtown massacre.  Over a span of thirty plus years, America has proven that it’s addicted to guns.  Thirty plus years and no significant change!  If anything, our leaders kiss the butts of the NRA hierarchy now even more as vast sums of money pour into campaign coffers and the Association campaigns against any candidate that dares to attack them.

(more…)

(Bob Adamov, Sandustee, ASIN: BOOBMZNCMU)

Here’s another great Indiana-Jones/Da-Vinci-Code-style adventure, and it’s arrived on my Kindle just when I thought I’d seen the last of them.  Many readers still enjoy a good tale along these lines.  I do too, if it’s done well.  H. Rider Haggard could do it well.  Dan Brown at least receives credit for reviving this adventure subgenre while managing to infuriate Catholic orthodoxy.  Problems occur when readers, or authors, start taking these books too seriously.

Bob Adamov’s investigative journalist Emerson Moore (no relation) is much more believable than Dan Brown’s Harvard professor.  The larger-than-life characterization might trouble a few readers, but I enjoyed the swashbuckling and somewhat ingenious Emerson Moore and his nemesis (who the latter works for is one of the nice twists) as they both follow the clues that lead them to the Nazarene’s code (contents never completely divulged).  The settings and clues were carefully researched as near as I could tell—Masonic symbols are not as prevalent as in some books in this subgenre (and not a Gnostic reference was to be had).

(more…)

#248: New ebooks for your enjoyment.  Let’s start with my most recent release, The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan.  Thriller and conspiracy lovers, take note.  Women tired of vampire romances, take note.  Baby boomers tired of watching ups and downs of their retirement funds, take note.  This book is fast-paced entertainment that’s gripping and thought-provoking.  What would you do if the U.S. government sponsored a retirement plan designed just for agents and other employees with early onset dementia and Alzheimer’s and too many secrets?

Detectives Chen and Castilblanco, my favorite NYPD homicide detectives from The Midas Bomb, Angels Need Not Apply, Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java, and Virginia above will be featured in my very first true mystery titled Teeter-Totter Between Lust and Murder.  Besides the title themes, they will take on arms smugglers and militia members in their new adventure.  I’m in the final editing stages on this one—look for it.  Coming soon!

#249: Review of Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James.  I write reviews; this is not my review.  Mandi M. Lynch, author and reviewer writing for the Book in the Bag book review blog, tells it like it is.  She made the effort to read the book and try to find some redeeming qualities.  I never had the courage (Prurient interest? Misogynist sociopathy?  Puerile curiosity?  Pornographic sadism?) to even consider reading this book.  I do want to see a sociology or psychology thesis on why this book is so popular with suburban soccer moms and their desperate husbands trying to find out where the closest S&M-hardware shops are located.  The review confirmed my opinion (well developed, even though I didn’t read the book) that this book is just trash.  What’s your opinion?

(more…)

I have many friends who are avid…well, I’m not sure what to call them.  On a long commute or a plane ride cross-country, they listen to a book.  In other words, they purchase audio books instead of paperbacks or ebooks.  If the reader for the audio book is a first-rate master of the spoken word and not like my sophomore English teacher, that’s a fine way to read a few books.  In fact, it harkens back to the days before books when storytelling was a vocal tradition.

Poetry has more of a modern oral tradition.  Even if the poet writes his poems in silence, he’ll often be called upon to read them aloud.  That doesn’t work so well when the poet, like my sophomore English teacher, has a voice that is soporific.  Too often, poets and other writers don’t seem to be inspired by their own prose or they just don’t have the skills to read aloud and make it interesting.  Many parents do better with bedtime stories for their kids than some poets and writers do with public speaking.

(more…)

Most days I’m thankful I’m not a lawyer.  I’m not addressing those legal duties that involve helping people with their wills, estates, tax issues, births, deaths, etc.  A lawyer can make a good living doing this, it’s a feel-good way to occupy your time (especially if you throw a few pro bono jobs in toward helping out people who can’t afford lawyers), and a service that most people need to survive in modern U.S. society at different times in their lives.  I’m not addressing the legal duties of corporate lawyers either, those who protect corporations from people who would sue them, or personal damage lawyers, those who raise grievances of a person or groups of persons.  I’m also ignoring the fact that we’re a litigious society and support many more lawyers than most other nations because of that—a practice that is not only insane but generates a humongous drag on the national economy.

No, most days I’m just glad I’m not a constitutional lawyer…or a higher court justice, which, many times, amounts to the same thing.  My problem (that’s what many people call it, but not me) is that I can’t see all the nuances and hidden meanings these people come up with.  I generally hack away at problems just using good old common sense—arguments in constitutional law seem to lack that key ingredient and the lawyers either ignore it or don’t have any of it themselves.  Again, the latter includes high court judges…especially the ones on the Supreme Court.  They have exalted positions in our society, as if they were sitting on the right-hand (or left-hand, as the case might be) of God, but they are mere mortals that often lack the specific knowledge and common sense for making intelligent decisions.  Moreover, as lawyers they were trained to argue any side of an issue—no real identification with it at all.

(more…)