We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.—Oscar Wilde

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“Clones and Mutants Trilogy” is on sale. Some authors bundle a series or part of a series. Here’s an alternative: from now until July 1, all three books in the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” are on sale AT SMASHWORDS, $0.99 for each ebook, reduced from $2.99. The clones make their appearance in Full Medical (coupon code VJ44L) as part of a complex government conspiracy, they combine forces with the mutant in Evil Agenda (coupon code LE48D) to thwart another plot, and they save the world in No Amber Waves of Grain (coupon code PZ86X). These aren’t comic book characters like X-Men—they’re real people who work to halt an apocalyptic future. Use the links and go directly to Smashwords to enter the coupon codes and get hours of summer reading for only $3. (Amazon addicts, did you know Smashwords also does .mobi files for your Kindle? They handle all popular ebook formats.) Pass the word about this sale to your relatives and friends.

In libris libertas….

Summer is here! Not officially, but the past Memorial Day is often considered the unofficial start of summer. People were hitting the beaches in the tri-state area; many also remembered what that holiday signifies too. For the rest of the summer, in your leisure time, why not find a shady tree or park under your umbrella on the beach and catch up on your reading. Your choices are practically infinite with so many good books and good authors writing entertaining fiction and informative non-fiction—novels, short stories, bios, memoirs—it’s a reader’s world.

Amazon clamps down? The retail giant went after product reviewers paid by companies. It’s now using the info gained in that lawsuit to go after the companies themselves. Finally! This probably doesn’t affect all those suspicious book reviews, although it should. Amazon just considers books products, so why not consider book reviews product reviews. They do, of course. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the content of the review. They just want your ranking so they can calculate an overall rank.

Readers shouldn’t give a rat’s ass about the reviews either. Consider The Martian with its almost 28,000 reviews. If everything hasn’t been said beyond 100 reviews, something is wrong. Yet promo sites like BookBub key in on the number of reviews, so they’re also promoting excess. Even if all those reviews were legit, who’s going to read them? Readers, please, choose books by their blurbs, “peek inside” info, and even their covers—it’s much more efficient and probably more ethical. After all, it’s your tastes and opinions that count.

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Does anyone else see the hypocrisy in Mr. Obama’s trip to Hiroshima? Or, at least the irony? OK, as a guy who wordsmiths full-time now, what the president said is both ironic and hypocritical. His basic message was that everyone has to work toward a nuke-free world. No apology for dropping the bomb (more on this later), but that message was clear. It was hypocritical because the U.S. isn’t doing that, and it’s ironic if Mr. Obama really knows he’s being hypocritical.

The nuclear powers of the world—and they include Israel—don’t want others to join that exclusive club. Their nukes allow them to strut and posture instead of walking softly, and to wave a very big stick to the rest of the world. If you assume that their arrogance is accompanied by restraint, that’s OK, but that’s quite an assumption. The Cold War avoided nuclear Armageddon only because the sticks of the two parties guaranteed a no-win situation—both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would have been destroyed.

That was a precarious situation, as the Cuban Missile Crisis showed. While that balancing act still continues with a shriveled Russia taking the place of the U.S.S.R., there are other states who can shake the stick—Israel, in spite of denials, has nukes, and that psychotic despot in North Korea is starving his people so he can shake that stick too. Iran was going down that road. It’s not clear that a détente between two theocracies in the Middle East, Iran and Israel, would be a good thing—Israel has shown some restraint, but Iran is unpredictable.

The Iran/Israel case also reflects U.S. hypocrisy. Jump on Iran for the good of peace in the Middle East? What about jumping on Israel? They’re both theocracies, and the current leaders of Israel often seem just as conservative as the Ayatollahs. There’s probably a guilt trip lurking in the background here. The predominantly Christian West, sitting between Judaism and Islam historically for the most part, would just toss a coin—again from the religious point of view—if it weren’t for guilt about the Holocaust.

Of course, I’m even wrong treating the Jewish Holocaust as unique. The Armenian Holocaust occurred earlier (World War One era, not World War Two–Germany just incurred the wrath of the Turks by calling it a holocaust) and others have occurred too—Cambodia and Yugoslavia, to name a few. Even the U.S. interned presumed enemies, Japanese-Americans during World War Two. All this was terrible; none of it is unique because human beings do terrible things to other human beings en masse on a regular basis.

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With apologies to Dylan (that phrase is justifiably part of American heritage now and probably international), I thought this would be a good title for an article about how publishing is changing in America and around the world. From readership to media and writers to retail, things are changing so fast that it’s even hard for people heavily involved in the business to keep up with things.

Readers have it good in general. With so many good books and so many good authors, in all fiction genres and non-fiction from how-to to memoirs, books for all ages and other demographics are being published. Given that even an avid reader maxes out at only 50 or so books per year, a single reader can’t hope to try them all. The only negative seems to be price—the traditional publishing establishment continues to expect readers to pay $10 or more, even for ebooks, but the indies, with most ebooks less than $5, solve most of that pricing problem.

Yet the number of readers is decreasing. If you’re on Goodreads, it looks like that number is huge, so my statement is a bit deductive and statistically flawed perhaps. I factor in the time people can spend on entertainment. People are generally working more and longer hours, so leisure time is decreasing. Yet the number of things they can do with that leisure time is increasing. Streaming video; computer games; YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other internet websites; sports, whether active or passive; and so forth—these all use up free time. People have to prioritize and curling up with a good book is becoming less of a priority with the multitude of other leisure-time activities available.

What number of books is too many, given this situation? The number of new books published each year varies from half a million to a million, yet most of them sell less than 250 copies per book, partly due to decreasing readership and partly due to simple saturation even if the number of readers were increasing. Google estimates that about 130 million books exist in the world, but that has to be ramping up considerably each year. The Bowker number for new indie books was 450k+ in 2013 alone (that counts both pbooks and ebooks), but Bowker only counts books with ISBNs—many get by just fine with Amazon’s ASIN number that’s assigned to an Amazon-exclusive ebook.

Ebooks are to pbooks what DVDs were to VHS tapes, CDs to LPs, and cassette tapes to eight-tracks. Media preferences often send shock waves through an entertainment industry. There are always hangers-on, of course. Many still prefer that LP sound (I still have a collection of 200+ classical music LPs, mostly because the performances don’t exist on CD). Some books—those doorstop biographies or graphics-intensive textbooks—don’t work well as ebooks, but trade fiction is better on my Kindle than weighing down my bookshelves with pbooks. There is no denying that the ebook revolution went hand-in-hand with the indie writing revolution, though. Ebooks don’t cost much to produce, a savings traditional publishers are loathe to pass on to customers as they continue to push their costly pbooks (environmentally unfriendly hardbounds and trade paperbacks).

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[If you’re looking for “Monday Words of Wisdom,” you’ll find them at the end of this article.]

…and it tells me a lot about the NJ primary election. First, the top line corresponds to NJ’s Dem establishment—the slate of officially sanctioned NJ Dem committee blah-blah-blah’s candidates. I’ll ignore that whole line and not just because Mrs. Bill Clinton leads that linear parade. I have no use for the Dem establishment anymore. It’s shown it’s true colors. Arrogant, entitled, presumptuous, anti-progressive—those are the best adjectives I have to describe it. The worst ones aren’t appropriate for a PG-13 blog post.

Second, Mrs. Bill Clinton gets top billing over Sanders. The town fathers can argue for that as simple alphabetical order. Or maybe it was decided by a coin toss—like those “fair” coin tosses Hillary won in many of those silly caucuses. I know a lot of people see Democrat and vote the top line. NJ is a blue state, the Dem establishment always wins here, so nobody bothers to look at the issues anymore. The leading local Dem group is called the Blue Wave—read “DNC Annex.”

Besides, Clinton is a well-known face, it’s time for a woman to be in the White House, that Sanders is just a spoiler, yadda-yadda-yadda. This is assuming Dem voters even bother to show up. NJ’s is among the last primaries, people have better things to do (the NBA championship games are in full swing and the irises are in bloom in the local Iris Gardens), and summer has already started so the South Shore beckons.

I hear that “spoiler” criticism about Mr. Sanders a lot. The electorate has no memory. Mrs. Bill Clinton won the 2008 CA primary over Mr. Obama in 2008—she was a “spoiler” by Sanders’s naysayers’ definition! How dare Feinstein and all her old Hillary cronies call for Sanders to drop out. Sexism can go both ways, old Dem has-beens! How ‘bout asking yourselves which candidate is more likely to beat Satan aka Mr. Trump? Mrs. Bill Clinton is going to struggle—you can bet on that. But Mr. Trump chickened out on debating Mr. Sanders. So did Mrs. Bill Clinton.

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OK, maybe they’re not.  You might be in love with those “original screenplays” featuring gratuitous but steamy sex, car chases, main characters (MCs) hanging from helicopters, and so forth.  You’re an audiovisual person who puts aural and visual stimulation over everything else.  Maybe a person addicted to video games and YouTube videos?  Lots of gunshots, bomb blasts, and marching zombies going off to war?  Why in the hell are you reading this article then?

For the rest of us (presumably the majority of the readers of this blog), you like a bit more meat in your Hollywood diet.  You expect a movie to take a carefully crafted story from a book and add the audio and visual components.  You’ll still have to add the odors of bodies in sexual heat, blood from dismembered bodies, and bowel and bladder cadaveric releases mentally (I just did a pretty good job of that, right?)—at least until Hollywood figures out how to add an odortrack to complement the soundtrack.

The story from the book pays more attention to plot, settings, characters, and dialogue than any “original screenplay”—and that’s the problem.  That screenplay is an outline for the director to follow, no more.  If it comes from a carefully crafted book, that director has another tool to use, a source that will fill in details the screenwriter cannot hope to include in her or his screenplay.  That additional step, if done well, can make a great movie out of a great book.  In some cases it can make a good movie out of a terrible book or a terrible movie out of a great book.  But that screenplay step is fraught with danger.  Yet not having a carefully crafted story available sends a movie to the plate with already two strikes against it.

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[Readers of this blog might recall that I reviewed Leah Devlin’s excellent mystery Ægir’s Curse last Wednesday.  Without further ado, you can now meet this multi-talented woman.]

About Leah: 

Steve: Leah, could you start by telling the readers something about yourself?

Leah: I’m American of Swedish and Irish descent.  I’m a mystery and thriller writer and marine biologist, the latter giving authenticity to the scientific background of the “Woods Hole Mysteries,” comprised of The Bottom Dwellers (2015) and Ægir’s Curse (2015), and The Bends (coming this summer). I love boats and the sea too, and that relates to the series, the “Chesapeake Tugboat Murders” consisting of Vital Spark (under contract), Spider (under contract), and The Death of a Chrome Diva (in progress), all with Penmore Press.

Steve: That scientific background probably took a few years to acquire, right?

Leah: The literary part too.  I have BAs in English Literature, Biology, and Environmental Science (American University, Washington DC), and an MS and PhD in Biology (University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI).

Steve: I now understand where all those scientific and technological details come from in Ægir’s Curse. This mix between creating science and creating stories isn’t completely unknown to me, but let’s hear how you got started writing those mysteries.

Leah on Writing:

Steve: Why, how, and when did you start writing?

Leah: I vividly remember the house of my childhood being full of books from the town library, in a time before bookstore super chains, when one wandered through the stacks and left with a dog-eared stack of books.  My writing career was delayed until my early forties, because I was employed as a biologist at a university where, for decades, I wrote research papers on the neuroscience of marine organisms.  During my time at a marine laboratory on Cape Cod [Woods Hole], I got the idea to write my first novel.  My children were older and more independent and I’d earned tenure at my university, so the pressure was off and I had more mental space to create stories.  I have a lot of restless energy and am always game to try new things. After writing my first “practice novel”—bad as it was—there was no turning back.

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[This post is an elaboration on several themes I’ve presented in earlier writing posts, my little course on writing fiction, in particular. BTW, I’ve compiled the lessons from that course into a PDF. You can receive it for free just for the asking. Note that I don’t keep your email addressed. My newsletter, out most Fridays, is completely online.]

I suppose “gurus” (agents, editors, publishers, PR and marketing experts, and even other authors) have been telling authors for decades (maybe centuries?) that the key to having a successful book is “writing to market.”  In our internet age, it’s almost become a mantra or an idol to worship and pray to. Many successful books prove it’s a false idol. Sure, authors can jump on a bandwagon.  (I don’t know how many stories about young magicians, mysteries titled Gone Something, or space operas that almost plagiarize Star Wars, itself almost a plagiarism, are out there).  That bandwagon might even carry them along to some success as far as book sales go.  But the whole thing just reminds me of those cute little lemmings that often commit mass suicide.

The counter to this sophistic advice from so-called gurus can run from the practical to the idealistic.  Let’s start with this quote: “Your best marketing is a book that sparks enthusiastic word of mouth….”—Mark Coker, Smashwords founder. On the surface, “writing to market” seems to mesh quite well with that, but that’s the wrong interpretation.  “Writing to market” implies there are already successful books out there you should emulate.  Coker’s advice is directed to how YOU can create a NEW market, getting people to talk and write about your book.  “It’s just like X’s” doesn’t create a market for your book; it’s an admission that you write parasitic literature that’s not original.

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Save your breath. Don’t worry about Death. A better praxis is to worry about taxes.

Have a safe and relaxing Memorial Day, but please remember what it’s all about–all the brave lives lost while protecting this country.

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“Clones and Mutants” on sale. Some authors bundle a series or part of a series. Here’s an alternative: from now until July 1, all three books in the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” are on sale AT SMASHWORDS, $0.99 for each ebook, reduced from $2.99. The clones make their appearance in Full Medical (coupon code VJ44L) as part of a complex government conspiracy, they combine forces with the mutant in Evil Agenda (coupon code LE48D) to thwart another plot, and they save the world in No Amber Waves of Grain (coupon code PZ86X). These aren’t comic book characters like X-Men—they’re real people who work to halt an apocalyptic future. Use the links and go directly to Smashwords to enter the coupon codes and get hours of summer reading for only $3. (Amazon addicts, did you know Smashwords also does .mobi files for your Kindle? They handle all popular ebook formats.) Pass the word about this sale to your relatives and friends.

In libris libertas….

Money Monster.  Jodie Foster, dir.  With Hollywood A-listers like Julia Roberts and George Clooney, Jodie can’t miss, right?  Wrong!  First, Jack O’Connell, as the mad guy waving the gun and holding the dead-man’s switch to a suicide vest, steals the show, as does the crowd at the end who sympathize with him in his quest to expose yet another Wall Street sleazebag.  Unlike Flash Boys, the book, which is real, this story about e-trading’s excesses seems a wee bit dated, contrived, and as farfetched as Clooney’s Jim Cramer-like character shapeshifting from Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll in ninety minutes—par for the course for a movie using a screenplay not based on a book, I suppose.

And Mr. Clooney really doesn’t have to act to play the role of a one-percenter, does he, considering his $30K per plate dinner invitations for Wall Street’s favorite candidate?  Roberts is OK stepping out of her comfort zone as everybody’s darling to take the role of the producer who tolerates the narcissism of Clooney’s character (again, some of that might be real).  But, in the end, I really liked that Wall Street crowd rooting for the guy brandishing the gun.  I felt like standing up and cheering like audiences did when Congress is destroyed in Mars Attacks or Debt of Honor, but Wall Street still survives, in real life and this movie. (Strong language and violence.)

The Man Who Knew Infinity. Matthew Brown, dir. Based on the book with the same title by Robert Kanigel. The moment I saw they released this movie, I knew I must see it. It is a celebration of genius and a tragedy, the story of Indian number theorist Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) and his journey to greatness under the tutelage of G. H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons). The film takes place in Madras (now Chennai) and Cambridge, England, contrasting the two different worlds Ramanujan had to bridge over a very short time on this road to greatness.

This is equally a tale about Hardy. The fight for opportunity defines the great debates currently going on in the U.S. at this time. It took Hardy’s genius to recognize another genius from a Third World country who deserved a chance, to be big enough to see that the man had an incredible gift that the world of mathematics needed to experience. Genius can come from anywhere, and so too the ability to recognize it, even in the stodgy, monastic halls of Trinity College at Cambridge University.

You’ll meet other mathematical giants like John Littlewood (Toby Jones), a frequent Hardy collaborator, and mathematician/philosopher Bertrand Russell (Jeremy Northam), who befriended Ramanujan but was later banned from Cambridge for his antiwar views.  The other Brits populating the place were less forward-thinking and filled with jealousy and bigotry, viewing Ramanujan as an upstart heathen. Like Mozart, the Indian genius died much too young at 32—the raw and damp climate at Cambridge, combined with malnutrition from the diet dictated by his religion and the lack of vegetables in a time of war, killed him. I’m inclined to blame some health problems on mental anguish too, caused by the hostile academic environment and a controlling mother who nearly ruined his marriage with her campaign to get him to return home.

Jeremy Irons is excellent as Hardy and Dev Patel does a convincing job of portraying the man who knew infinity in many ways. Hardy’s famous cricket bat only makes one appearance, though, and the famous cab with its plate number 1729 that caught Ramanujan’s interest when Hardy visited him in the hospital makes a cameo appearance twice—I suspect the second time shown in the movie never occurred.  The number theorist remarked that 1729 is the smallest number that is the sum of the cubes of two positive numbers. (Ever since, these numbers are called “taxicab numbers.”)  He said he received his insights from the Hindu goddess Namagiri. Like Hardy, I won’t give that old girl the credit—Ramanujan possessed a unique gift not seen before him and most likely not after.

The written epilogue at the end of the film represented a bit of new information for me: another notebook (two figured in the movie) discovered after Ramanujan’s death confirmed his claim in a letter to Hardy when Ramanujan lay dying that he had discovered a new type of function, what in later mathematical research came to be called mock modular forms.  Ken Ono, a mathematician from Emory University, in 2012 showed how Ramanujan’s functions could be used to help explain black hole entropy, making a direct connection between the Indian mathematician and Stephen Hawking, perhaps a better known genius at Cambridge University.

Considering recent movies about mathematicians—A Beautiful Mind (John Nash), The Imitation Game (Alan Turing), and The Theory of Everything (Stephen Hawking)—The Man Who Knew Infinity is the best by far and a must for fans of such movies, as it should be for anyone who likes powerful acting and well-drawn characters and wants to go beyond Marvel comics and other Hollywood schlock to fine movie making.

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Rogue Planet is now available for all reviewers on Net Galley.

The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan.  This novel, which is a bridge between the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” and the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy,” considers the following question: how will the U.S. government in the future handle all those old people with classified secrets in their head?  This is just a Smashwords sale.  The book will be priced at $0.99 until June 1, reduced from $2.99.  The coupon code is MP45S (type that in when you order—be sure and specify the format you want).  Pass the word to your relatives and friends.

In libris libertas…