I have a love-hate relationship with the NY Times Book Review: I’d love to see an author I know and respect be featured in it, and I hate that I don’t! Of course, I don’t need the Times to validate my reading choices either, so I just hate that they try to tell me what to read in their usual biased manner, neglecting to consider about 90% of the books published. Am I to believe the 10% they do consider are better than that 90%? No! My reading experience says otherwise.

Some non-fiction books deserve their exalted place in those biased pages so famous (infamous?) in the American literary scene. I haven’t seen any fiction book that does. In any case, I don’t read those fiction books recommended by the Times’s editors and critics who favor the formulaic gruel ladled out by the old mares and stallions in the Big Five publishing conglomerates’ stables, those pampered old horses hobbling along in their race to the glue factory. James Patterson Inc. (his staff of co-authors) produces gruel in all genres now, as seen in last Wednesday’s full-page Times ad. Stephen King hasn’t written anything worth reading since Misery (interesting if only because it shows there’s a fine line between an author’s fans and critics, although the protagonist was most certainly a Big Five author, so you can hardly blame the ex-nurse). I stopped reading Sue Grafton’s alphabet series after B, thank the Lord! Same for Jeffery Deaver’s after one Lincoln Rhyme book, whose best novel, Garden of Beasts, isn’t part of his forensic series (one can shuffle Sue and Jeff’s books like a pack of cards—and there might just be 52 formulaic tales between the two of them—and not know which book belongs to whom).

Although one of my mental roadblocks against the Big Five’s fiction offerings championed by the Times’s editors and critics are the exorbitant prices (an entire series of British mysteries costs less than one Baldacci book, which might be okay but not four times better), price isn’t the major one (in this time of economic fallout from the pandemic, though, frugality is an issue in my reading choices). Another major issue I have is that they all have at least one flaw (in plot, characterization, dialogue, etc.), and often more; in other words, all those hyped books are by authors who haven’t yet mastered the basic writing skills! (Of course, that probably means that the Times’s editors and critics don’t know what they are either. Maybe they all need visits to the eye doctor? They don’t see what I see.) But even if a Big Five novel passes the smell test of acceptable writing praxis, my major complaint is that the stories are boring, formulaic, and politically correct pulp for the masses, insulting no one by treating no important themes that interest me. Thinking readers deserve more.

Yet I’ll still peruse the Book Review’s pages, hoping to find readable fiction. At the end, I’d use them in a bird case if I had birds, but a short perusal does sometimes benefit me: They tell me what not to read! I’m a browser who makes my own reading choices—either in a bookstore, library, or online, but not in the Book Review—and I don’t need anyone, especially the Times’s erudite and stodgy editors and book critics, to tell me what to read, or even make suggestions.

Perhaps the Times should save some forests by eliminating the Review and firing their book editors and critics.? Any news from them is certainly not fit to print!

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Comments are always welcome.

A Time-Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. In my other life in academia, I had the pleasure of meeting Hartle, Feynman, Mandelbrot, Salam, Wheeler, Dirac, Lederman, Feynman, Mandelbrot, and Enrico Fermi’s last student—some in courses, others in scientific meetings, and all characters, but none like physicist Gail Hoff. Enrico Fermi wasn’t the last physicist who was both an experimental and theoretical genius, but Professor Hoff will never receive the Nobel Prize. She goes time-traveling through several universes of the multiverse on a wacky road trip far beyond any in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or The Time-Traveler’s Wife, never to return to her little lab in a small college outside Philly. Jeff Langley, her jack-of-all-trades electronics wizard, accompanies her. Their escapades, both amorous and adventurous, make this sci-fi rom-com a far-out sightseeing journey filled with dystopian and post-apocalyptic settings, first encounter, robots and androids—all that and more await the reader who rides along. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

I get tired of the writing advice “Show, don’t tell.” After all, what I do is storytelling, not story-showing. Writing classes and guides wind newbie writers around the axle with this advice; older writers too. Authors get so wound up that they write some awful prose as they try to “follow the rules.”

An application of this rule (or, just a dictum people who can’t write blather about) is something like a corollary: Avoid –ing words. Sorry, there can be a lot of zing in –ing: In action scenes, for example. Gerunds have all sorts of uses, of course, and they allow a writer to create compact prose that flows rather than stagnates.

Some MFA profs with nothing better to do will tell their students never to use something like “He was pounding a stake into the ground,” saying that “pounding” is an –ing word. What they probably mean (I’m trying to make them sound less stupid—after all, they’re usually academics) is that “was” isn’t a strong verb, but that’s patently wrong too. The writer of that phrase is only emphasizing that the action was continuous. “He pounded…” means the pounding was only done a few times and then it’s all over with. (At least that’s my take.)

This point is clearer to many speakers of some foreign languages. “Pegó  la estaca…” isn’t equivalent to “Pegaba la estaca….” in Spanish. Russian resolves the same problem by using two or more different verbs (action verbs sometimes come in triplets). And so on…. (Both Spanish and Russian often eliminate pronouns too when they’re obvious. English also probably should, and does so in hard-boiled or minimalist writing. Tricky! In any case, Russian, Spanish, and other foreign language speakers are more aware of the difference between limited action and continuous action. In the English phrase, that “was” with the gerund “pounding” indicates continuous action. There’s no other way to write it if the author wants to emphasize the continuity of the action.

Loose gerunds are a bit trickier. They have to be attached in some logical way. “Harry spotted the beach chair walking to the store…” still emphasizes the action, but the chair doesn’t do the walking! A correct usage would be “Walking to the store, Harry spotted…,” a bit clumsy but grammatically correct (unless the character is a young magician named Harry who made the chair walk!). The author could also use “As he was walking to the store, Harry spotted…” or “As he walked to the store, Harry spotted…” (the latter is okay because presumably Harry only came upon the chair once, not many times).

And, to end on a more conciliatory note offered to all those writing gurus out there, let’s consider this ribald church bulletin notice full of some different zing and misuse of –ing words: “This evening at 7 pm there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.” (Apparently church bulletins have no good editors.)

Be smart…and stay safe.

***

Comments are always welcome.

Soldiers of God. This is a bridge novel between the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” and the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” An FBI agent and a priest are out to stop a fanatical religious group’s terrorist attack plans. In the background, a maniacal industrialist is pulling the strings, using religion to further his agenda. Will they succeed? This is one of my evergreen books, and it’s available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas.

[Note from Steve: Long after the category “Book Reviews” was created, which contains my longer reviews, I started this category on my blog in order to archive shorter reviews (they’re still longer than most you’ll find on Amazon). I can’t believe I’m approaching #50! It’s hard to count all my reviews between Bookpleasures.com, “Book Reviews,” and these mini-reviews, especially since lately I’ve been binge-reading and reviewing entire series. The fact that I would have to do some serious work to count them all at least shows I do a lot more reading than writing. The reviews in this blog are hopefully useful to blog readers looking for interesting books too.]

Tough Love. Susan Rice, author (Simon & Schuster, 2019). With all the tell-all non-fiction from celebs and pols (or fiction, depending on your political proclivities?), it was refreshing to read Ms. Rice’s memoire that describes her life of service to this country. She’s a woman who considers herself black, and is my choice for Biden’s running mate.

Susan also has creds that far surpass any of the other potential candidates, which is why the Good Ole Piranhas will be gnashing their teeth and salivating as they prepare to attack her. She took a lot of heat for Benghazi until Hillary became a better target for them, but she excelled as ambassador to the UN (a welcome change after the hawkish Bolton) and as National Security Advisor under Obama. She has a Stanford BA and a masters and doctorate from Oxford (Rhodes scholar). Moreover, she got along with old Joe well and was Obama’s confidant. I’m sure she has no love for Donald Trump, der Feuerteufel (German name for Trump meaning “the fire devil,” as reported in a NY Times editorial), although Il Duce is only a footnote in this memoir, which is what I hope he’ll be historically after the 2020 election.

If I were Biden, I’d be giving her serious consideration. By the way, and contrary to what the NY Times claimed in a recent article, she has ample experience on the campaign trail, stumping for Obama in both his elections. But this marvelous book doesn’t look forward that much. It’s a nostalgic examination of a life of struggle and service that every American should read.

“Jack Harris” Series. John Dean, author (The Book Folks, various dates). Susan Rice’s book was a gift I greatly appreciated because I refuse to pay Big Five prices, even if a book looks interesting. This seven-book mystery/crime series set in northern England cost me $21 (7 x $2.99), and it provided me many hours of entertaining reading. Jack Harris, the DCI doing the hard work in a rural police station, and his DI Roberts and DS Gallagher have to solve crimes mostly committed by lowlifes who have come north to prey on their peaceful valley’s inhabitants. Manchester is the source of that flow, and Jack knows it well. He cut his investigative teeth there in the GMP (Greater Manchester Police). Roberts is a local woman who looks harmless but is as tough as nails. And Gallagher did time in Scotland Yard until his wife wanted to live closer to her parents.

This series is a bit darker compared to other British-style mystery series I’ve binge-read, but it’s worth a look from mystery and crime fiction fans. The dialect is a bit heavy at times, as well as the spellings (scroat for scrote, i.e. lowlife, is an example), but you can derive most of the meanings from context. I have never had any problems with across-the-pond dialects for that reason. While most of the themes aren’t huge ones (the motivations for serious crimes are often quite banal), both the good guys and bad are well-drawn and the plots full of enough twists and turns to keep any fan of the genre happy.

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Comments are always welcome.

Soldiers of God. This is a bridge novel between the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” and the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” An FBI agent and a priest are out to stop a fanatical religious group’s terrorist attack plans. In the background, a maniacal industrialist is pulling the strings, using religion to further his agenda. Will they succeed? This is one of my evergreen books, and it’s available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

The title here is the German’s nickname for Donald J. Trump, “the fire devil” (NY Times editorial page, July 25 edition). I still like my own nicknames, Narcissus le Grand and Il Duce (he of the imperial sneer), but you have to create bad nicknames for the jerk because he does it to everyone else.

In this blog, I’ve often commented on how America nowadays is looking a lot like 1930s Germany, and others are getting on board with that idea. Trump is a fascist and a wannabe dictator, and our whole country is his Reichstag as he makes his plans to torch it.

But the Germans are too nice. Let’s summarize some other qualities that have created the cult of personality of Trumpism and made him into the archetypal fascist:

Trump is a racist. His reaction to Charlottesville pleased bigots and racists, and Trump wants you to believe he loves Jews because his son-in-law is one and his daughter became one—Ivanka converted before marrying Jared. And if Mary Trump’s book only succeeds in exposing the racist tradition in Trump’s family where the n-word was common place, it has done its job. Any black or brown persons who vote for this man with a sick mind either has buried their heads in the sand or explicitly accepted his racism. In either case, it’s a vote for bigotry.

Trump is not religious. He panders to white, fanatical, right-wing Christians, ready to help them impose their beliefs on all Americans to get their votes. These people are anti-LGBT rights, anti-women’s reproductive rights, anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-Muslim, anti-black and anti-brown, and all for a state religion as long as it’s theirs…so Trump panders them by espousing those same beliefs. (Sometimes SCOTUS gets in the way of that agenda, but not often enough.) These people often make Nazi Jew-haters look tame, call the pope the Anti-Christ, and tolerate just about anything as long as they get what they want. And Narcissus le Grand, whose only God is himself, gives it to them. Standing across from Lafayette Park and holding up that Bible was pitifully stupid (there are claims that it was upside down, as if Il Duce were a practicing warlock), an affront to three great religions. As I’ve argued before in these pages, Trump has no moral backbone at all. A true Christian would never vote for him.

Trump is a sexual predator. I guess the Access Hollywood tape wasn’t enough evidence for Trump’s stupid supporters. Of course, the Christian right has had their share of reverent sexual predators, and Trump’s other supporters seem to look the other way too. Add to that the payoff to a porn star and Playboy bunny and other women complaining about his attempts at molesting, and you’d think people would get the idea. He’s also a misogynist. He hates the squad, Nancy Pelosi, and other female politicians, both for their unyielding attacks against home but also because they’re strong women. (Can you name one female leader of a country he actually admires?)

He can’t stand strong women. Apparently they can’t stand him either. Liz Cheney and Lisa Murkowski, members of his own party, have stood up to him (although Liz might just be looking to rebrand her family name—her father wore a virtual mask over his fascist face all the time he was VP). Hypocritical Melania and hell, maybe even Ivanka, are examples of weak women who go along with his perverted behavior within his own family (his exes were smart enough to show him the door). Again, I can’t understand why any woman would vote for Trump.

Trump is a hypocrite. All of the above can be summarized nicely by this statement. Hypocrites abound in America now—that group of old dinosaurs awaiting the asteroid, AKA the Good Ole Piranhas, is the most prominent group of hypocrites—so it’s not so unusual that their leader deserves this label. He’s the hypocrite-in-chief. He contradicts himself all the time, a badge of shame for hypocrites everywhere. There’s no consistency in the muddled, diseased mind of Donald Trump. And in that lies the danger for America…and the world.

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Comments are always welcome.

Soldiers of God. This is a good novel for the Christian right in America. It considers what kind of nation we might be becoming. It’s a bridge novel between the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” and the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” An FBI agent and a priest are out to stop a fanatical religious group’s terrorist attack plans. In the background, a maniacal industrialist is pulling the strings, using religion to further his agenda. Will they succeed? This is one of my evergreen books, and it’s available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

While COVID-19 and unrest over policing excesses has certainly affected readership and publishing, the Big Five publishing conglomerates have been struggling for a while. The reason? The digital revolution. In a couple of articles, the NY Times analyzed those struggles (7/16/2020 and 7/17). The first article can be summarized as women beginning to take over higher positions; the second is more about black women’s struggles to enter the Big Five publishing hierarchy. While these articles portray the biases in the old white boys’ environment of major publishers, something that needs to change, they barely mention the ongoing digital revolution.

The Times isn’t immune to that journalistic publishing disease of emphasizing scandal and sloppy reporting, of course. They’re part of the NYC publishing establishment, after all. Readers might think the latter is healthy. Simon and Schuster is making millions off Bolton’s and Trump’s tell-all books (that’s Mary Trump, the president’s niece, for those who haven’t been paying attention). Like many scandal and celeb books, I’ll ignore those as a reader. (I have some better non-fiction to read, and lots of good fiction too, none of the latter from the Big Five.)

To be fair, the Times’s articles are okay as far as they go—I’ll celebrate tearing down the old white boys’ institutions whenever it occurs, from Church leaders to publishers—and they do mention audiobooks (my, aren’t those Times’s writers twentieth-century tech whizzes?), as if they were going to save the Big Five. But if memory serves, only once do they mention “digital revolution.” And that just doesn’t mean ebooks, folks. The whole process is becoming digitized now, from editing to final product and beyond. Software is used to format books, be it Amazon, Smashwords, or Ingram’s, and once that template is made, POD can and often does take over. Why should a publisher endure warehousing costs for print versions when they can be printed as orders come in? Only doorstops like Bolton’s and Trump’s books are warehoused now. Ingram, the quintessential predatory dinosaur of the Big Five dinosaurs, won’t even warehouse small book runs anymore, so traditional publishers are warehousing with Amazon, if they warehouse at all. They do this even though they do POD with Ingram’s Lightning Source, what many small publishers are using to remain somewhat competitive.

In short, traditional publishing in general and the Big Five in particular, are dinosaurs waiting for the asteroid to fall! That’s the real news the Times should report. Their articles only report on the scrambling they’re doing because they see the approaching asteroid. Print won’t survive—even with POD, it’s too costly and caters to older people who still like print (we can call them the tree-killers), but they’re dying off; younger people read ebooks if they read books at all (ebooks are bargains, unless publishers artificially inflate their prices to make print versions more attractive); and the very young are illiterate and addicted to streaming video and computer games, so they don’t even know what a book is, except in their academic studies. (Educational publishing is changing too—when a syllabus requires only certain chapters, students buy only those chapters.) In brief, readership is down (in spite of COVID) and it will continue to go down.

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Last week you read some of the physics background for my new sci-fi rom-com. In this article, I consider some other reasons for writing it.

Maybe I’m too serious, but I have trouble writing humor. There’s some in my novels—humor is part of the human experience, after all. And I can be ironic, biting, wry, and cynical, from short stories to novels, but it’s hard for me to sustain a long, humorous story. There are no novels with a comedic flavor, only some short fiction…until now.

They say humor is the hardest thing to do on stage. If it’s like writing a humorous novel, I can understand that. Maybe my problem is I don’t want or like slapstick, food fights, or absurd, sexual situations. I want a story with a serious foundation with a frothy, humorous coating, something like a serious cup of Colombian coffee with a dash of Jameson whiskey and a whipped cream smiley on top.

Author Hiaasen seems to have mastered this kind of story. In Skinny Dip, for example, a husband tries to murder his wife by pushing her overboard on an ocean cruise. Not funny per se, but the wife’s revenge is funny as hell. That combines humor (maybe black humor?) with mystery—or call it a humorous thriller. I like Hiaasen’s writing all the more because I can’t do it! At least not for mysteries and crime stories. The latter are serious business.

So I thought I might try some humorous sci-fi. The characters in my short story “The Apprentice” were good ones. (You can find it in “Steve’s Shorts” category of this blog, or in the collection Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, Volume Two—see the list of free PDF downloads on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page of my website.) I first had to figure out more of the science—that old dentist’s chair was a bit too limited, considering where the short story ended. I needed to make the male protagonist a better foil for the female too. Then came the critical question: Can I sustain the humor?

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I have many complaints about the Star Wars and Star Trek movies. For the first, I’ve mentioned before in this blog that it’s really fantasy, although many fans and critics call it sci-fi. But let’s forget about that glaring disconnect and focus on something that Dr. Asimov would probably have liked cleared up: ‘Droids vs. robots.

“Robot” is the more general term. It wasn’t created by the inimitable Isaac but by Karel Capek in his 1920 play RUR (for Rossum’s Universal Robots, the English subtitle), yet sci-fi master Asimov made the term famous in his robot novels (Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun are also excellent mysteries), books which can now be included in his extended Foundation series. I insist that the term should be used for any device, stationary or otherwise, that can replace human functions. (Just ask UAW for some examples.)

R2-D2 is a robot running on wheels (many do). C-3PiO is also a robot (I prefer that rendering of its name because the P is Pi in Star Wars, a vocal error mixing Greek with English—P in Greek is “rho”). Neither one is an “android” like Isaac’s Daneel Olivaw, although I can’t remember if Isaac uses that word. An android is a much more complicated robot designed to act and look like a human. And the word “’droids” is basically Star Wars slang (hence the single quote) used incorrectly for both (although I suspect that George Lucas stole it from the sci-fi literature like he did many other things—the Foundation and Jedi warriors among them).

R2-D2 can follow humans around like an intelligent waste-basket shaped Roomba or canister vacuum cleaner, and it might be more sophisticated than your laptop. It’s used to add fire control to Luke’s Starfighter, but it’s still a primitive robot inre its human qualities. C-3PiO is very much like a drunken human, staggering around looking for people who need some translations done, but that robot is not an android either.

An android is an artificial human, a specialized machine like Daneel or Star Trek’s Data. As I stated above, I have trouble with that last series too, but at least Roddenberry outdid Lucas when it comes to androids. Roddenberry’s plot devices weren’t stolen from Asimov and Burroughs like Lucas’s, but they were mostly created to make things easier for the producer/director. The transporter, for example, smacks of magic, and it’s just used to beam personnel up and down from planets. So why do they need shuttles then (definitely in the realm of possibility—NASA used to have them) and a shuttle bay aboard the Enterprise? And while communicators are the harbingers of cellphones, they can do so much more in the series that it’s a fantasy gizmo too, something akin to Harry’s wand.

If you’re looking for honest-to-gosh androids in movies, you can forget about Will Smith’s movie version of I, Robot too. Except for a few names, it has nothing to do with Asimov’s robot novels, although the bad guys are indeed robots, not androids. But there are a few movies that stand out when it comes to androids AKA artificial humans: The androids in Alien and Aliens and those in Blade Runner exhibit both humans’ good and bad qualities (yes, Deckard was an android—Ridley Scott directed both Blade Runner and Alien).

Neither androids nor robots are ubiquitous in my sci-fi. The latter have some cameo appearances (Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! starts with a robot-bar, and one also appears in Soldiers of God as a hotel greeter and information center), and, if you look closely, you might find a Daneel-type that’s a main character in Rogue Planet. A. B. Carolan’s Mind Games has a few android armies. That’s about it.

My general opinion is that robots are better than androids, though. Humans are just too complicated to copy. Clones are cheaper. (See the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy.”)

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Comments are always welcome!

A Time-Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. Enrico Fermi wasn’t the last physicist who was both an experimental and theoretical genius, but Professor Gail Hoff will never receive the Nobel Prize. She wants to travel through time but discovers she can only go forward. She goes time-traveling through several universes of the multiverse, never to return to her little lab outside Philly. Jeff Langley, her jack-of-all-trades electronics wizard, accompanies her. Their escapades, both amorous and adventurous, make this sci-fi rom-com a far-out road-trip story filled with dystopian and post-apocalyptic situations, first encounter, robots and androids—all that and more await the reader who rides along. (And, if you’re looking for androids, there’s a whole world of them here—but no humans until Gail and Jeff drop by.)

Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars!

“In the beginning, all the universes in the multiverse were only bubbles in the multiverse’s froth…if there was a beginning. Did God see it all and call it good but play a grand joke on us mortals just for kicks? Maybe the bubbles keep coming? I’ll never know the answer to that question, of course. No mere mortal can know. But there is a multiverse, and it’s filled with universes, quantum states of a unique universe, and mostly filled with stars…and delightful and dangerous weirdness.”

That’s physicist Gail Huff writing, and it’s how my new sci-fi novel A Time-Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse begins (brought to you by Carrick Publishing). It’s a mishmash of hard sci-fi, mystery, romance, and humor that can be labeled a sci-fi rom-com. The romance and humor represent an experiment, a trek into genre terrain I haven’t visited before in my novels. The hard sci-fi is like all my science fiction, an extrapolation of known science into the future, getting weirder the farther it goes (in this case, multiple futures corresponding to multiple universes).

The major scientific theme, though, is quantum mechanics, not time travel, in particular the “Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.” You see, quantum mechanics even today is still an elaborate cookbook of collected algorithms used to explain the invisible world of atoms, particles, and fields. It’s a witch’s brew without any satisfying interpretation of how it works. You pick an algorithm for each particular system, turn the crank, and presto gizmo—you have the quantum states. No one knows why it works, but it does…and is very accurate. Of course, most of the systems are sufficiently complex that we solve the associated problems with a computer, making it all the more algorithmic. (Like everything else in physics these days, the easy problems have already been solved!)

Most physicists don’t spend any time on the problem of interpreting the quantum algorithms—they just turn the cranks like the monkeys writing Shakespeare. It’s easier laziness or an admission of defeat, because these physicists say it’s a waste of time to look for a sound interpretation of this mysterious theory. To be fair, some have spent time on making the cranks easier to turn. (Feynman’s approach to quantum electrodynamics is a famous example, although its accuracy achieved by throwing out the right infinities just adds to the mystery.) However, most practicing physicists are like prehistoric shamans chanting the quantum rules in the hope that their mumbo-jumbo bears fruit in their calculations.

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I haven’t been on Twitter very long. (Frankly I resisted it because of Trump and other bigots, racists, and haters.) As a newbie, I’m still getting used to it. The number of my followers climbed steadily at first but now has tapered off. I can’t remember that number, though (it can’t compare with Trump’s), because I never much cared—I was surprised that it grew. I can remember to whom I tweet, mostly the #readingcommunity and #writingcommunity, but also to my genial authors’ group #WolfPackAurhors (they have two anthologies now, royalties going to a good cause). And I often retweet when I see something that I want my followers to know about. (My Twitter handle is scattered around this website with more important information for readers and writers.)

I sometimes even tweet to @realDonaldTrump (Twitter fills all these long names in for me), but I don’t view Twitter as an effective political tool. (If you use it for that, it’s like shouting on the Little Prince’s planet—only his rose might hear you.) In fact, my tweeting has also plateaued; I mostly use it just to announce the week’s blog posts now. (Maybe that’s why the number of my followers has plateaued?)

What Twitter is really good for is teaching authors to minimalist writing. Many have problems writing blurbs for their books, for example—maybe not marketing objects per se, but blurbs should be short, literate, logical, legal, and to the point. (You-know-who usually fails miserably in satisfying that literate, logical, and legal criteria…unless someone writes the tweet for him.)

Twitter teaches minimalist writing because it’s always better to get what you have to say said in one tweet. Even I often go over my tweets and have to edit them to complete my minimalist mission. So it teaches editing as well, albeit towards minimalist writing.

Of course, you can argue that not much information is contained in a tweet. (In the case of you-know-who, it’s often disinformation.) But tweets require economical prose, just like blurbs and longer text, and that goal is a good one for any writer. It’s more about maximizing the information in a minimal number of words. Lean writing is a plus; verbose writing turns everyone off. You can’t use big words either (Trump doesn’t know any); the leanness also implies using a vocabulary anyone can understand (even Trump—he responds to me now…or some staff member does).

Does Twitter help authors sell books? I doubt it. It’s social media, after all, a way to socialize, in my case, with readers and other authors. (Not my goal, of course, when I tweet at you-know-who.) Like Facebook, it was originally created to keep tabs on relatives and friends. Its use and abuse has gone far beyond that, but I still think that’s its most important use.

But readers won’t find novels on Twitter. And when you do find one to read suggested to you by a tweet, be assured it won’t look like a collection of tweets (unless it is a collection of tweets like a recent Washington Post book). Maybe a blurb about the book will grab you, but tweeting doesn’t even qualify as flash fiction (unless the tweet is a Trump lie).

Twitter generally isn’t good for much except for that socializing aspect, as is most social media—useless in the sense that the only thing it accomplishes is to permit people many time zones apart to chin wag, as the Brits would say. That sense might be a good thing in these days of pandemic, of course, where virtual conversations are the norm. Before the internet, people were isolated. With social media, we’re part of a worldwide community. (Unfortunately that Twitter community also includes @realDonaldTrump.)

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Comments are always welcome.

Binge-reading #3. While I’m binge-reading other authors’ series, you’re welcome to binge on mine. In the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, Esther, a Scotland Yard inspector in the Art and Antiques Division, obsesses with recovering a Rembrandt stolen by the Nazis in WWII (Rembrandt’s Angel) and with finding St. John the Divine’s before others do (Son of Thunder). Interpol agent Bastiann van Coevorden tries to keep her on an even keel. You might not consider this series binge-worthy—there are only two books so far (#3 is in the works)—but there’s a lot of fun reading here. Available on Amazon and at the publisher’s website, as well as on Smashwords and at its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and library and lending services (Scribd, Overdrive, Baker & Taylor, Gardners, etc.). Enjoy!

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

[Note from Steve: If you’re afraid of the truth, don’t read this article…or maybe you should!]

“The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie, or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who steals your hat and is wearing it—while denying he took it.”—Masha Gessen, in Surviving Autocracy.

Of course, Trump’s lies are much more than that, especially in the danger they represent for American democracy. He says he won the popular vote in 2016 if you don’t count all the fraudulent votes; he didn’t, because studies have shown that the number of fraudulent votes was minimal. (He’s expanding that lie to mail-in voting.) He states that the Obama administration spied on him, even wiretapped him; there’s zero evidence for that too. (On the contrary, he encouraged the Russians to go after Hillary’s server—they obliged, releasing the emails via Wikileaks as organized by Roger Stone.) He claimed that Mexico would pay for his damn wall; it didn’t and won’t, and now Trump is now stealing funds that Congress allocated elsewhere to pay for that “beautiful wall” (after putting people in cages, including mothers and children.)

Some Americans (probably not his supporters, though, who always turn a blind eye) might remember that Hitler’s propaganda minister Goebbels said that if you tell a lie often enough, people will accept it as truth. Trump has taken that fascist trick even further: He states a lie as truth, the Washington Post or some other fact-checking “dirty liberal organization” show it’s a lie, but only once, so when Trump keeps repeating it ad infinitum a la Goebbels, the public forgets it was proven to be a lie. That’s how he’s destroying our democracy. It’s like trying to hear a pin drop (the proof it’s a lie) when there’s a pile driver running (Trump’s habitual lying). You can’t hear the signal (“It’s a lie!”) over the noise (Trump’s bla-bla-bla over and over again). His lies, in short, are exhausting.

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