It’s either very late Sunday night or early Monday morning as I write this, depending on how you feel about such things. Me, I don’t care what you call it—all I know is that my head hurts! I got hijacked by a story for a day and a half, so haven’t been online since, oh, call it Friday afternoon sometime. Came back to 100+ new loop messages. Now, when you realize that I’m on digest for everything but official-from-the-publisher loops, and that digests from Yahell tend to be packaged 25-to-1...
In a day and a half. That’s a fair bit of mail to sift through.
Worse than the sheer volume was the repetition. It’s Monday’s mail that I usually have to bribe myself into opening; since so many of the loops I belong to allow promos only on Monday, all the promo-ing authors blitz-mail each and every group. Apparently some of the more prolific posters on several loops decided this weekend was a great time for not-quite-outright promos, multiply posting anything that escaped the one-day-a-week-only ban. Special offers. News. Reminders of available releases. Etc., etc.
I like special offers, really and truly I do. But I like them a lot less the fourth and fifth time I’ve seen them in the same day! By the twelfth—and that’s an actual count, not hyperbole—I’ve added yet another author to my "No, never, not even for free" list. Quite probably through no fault of her own, as at least some of those messages referencing that book came from a promoter’s mail address.
I know I’m not the only reader to be annoyed by the over-saturation. I’m not the only author trying to find some middle ground between silence (my default) and cross-posting noise. I wouldn’t even be surprised if that author whose name now makes me grit my teeth struggles with this issue.
I know I now have yet another reason not to appreciate Mondays. But weekends? Oh, no. That will never do. So, next weekend, I shall attempt to post something that isn’t promotional in any way. Chatter or humor or good wishes or something! If only to wash the taste of all the week’s self-promotion away.
Too late to spare me the Monday headache, but at least I’ve gotten a head start on it. Things could be much worse.
If only I didn’t feel so obscurely guilty—not for feeling put-upon, or dismissing that author (you’ll notice I’m not using the name!) but because I’d planned to do a little not-quite-promo-ing myself. Not much, maybe just send out a few reminder-type notices of my own, with a brief announcement about Monday night’s RoL chat. (Oh! Aspen Mountain Press authors, including me! Realms of Love, starts at 9:00 Eastern, either one or two hours long depending on which schedule you check. And giveaways!)
But now I can’t bring myself to add to the noise.
Silently, then, until tonight at the chat,
as always
pxj
Sunday, September 23, 2007
The Monday Malaise is Spreading!
Friday, July 20, 2007
On View Right Now
Had sort of a mixed week, so here’s a mixed bag of a post—things I’ve seen that made me smile or think or go hmm. Call it a look inside what I use for a mind...which is as much of a warning as you’re going to get. Enjoy!
Everything Old is New Again
Advice from the CDC: Do It In Your Sleeve. (Sneeze, that is.) Of course, no one remembers that the reason men’s jackets have those useless buttons on the cuffs was to prevent this “uncivilized” behavior... Somehow, that thought led me to history and styles of men’s underwear—yes, well, do remember what I write!
And, hey, how’s this for a segue? Underwear between the covers: in the old days when people actually read paper books
The Light! It Blinds
That had to hurt The phrase “blinding flash of the obvious” comes to mind here: Networks admit that taking the show (Jericho) off the air might have hurt ratings! I thought this made a logical follow-up to old-and-new as these long-arc shows have a fair bit in common with the old radio plays and early television, but that mid-season hiatus is something Grandda et confreres would never, ever have pulled. Nor dear ol’ Boz and his ilk (just to bring things home to print). Ever feel like we’re on a treadmill, or is it just me?
Vocabulary-Building, Anyone?
Best new word I've seen in ages:
sapiosexual. N. One who finds intelligence the most sexually attractive feature.
Now and then, one does need a word Websters et al haven’t gotten around to indexing. This suggestion came with what might as well have been a love poem directed at Your Humble Hermit—
"I want an incisive, inquisitive, insightful, irreverent mind. I want someone for whom philosophical discussion is foreplay. I want someone who sometimes makes me go ouch due to their wit and evil sense of humor. I want someone that I can reach out and touch randomly. I want someone I can cuddle with.
I decided all that means that I am sapiosexual."
by Mr M. Ister May 26, 2004
Now tell me that isn’t perfect?! And, oh, "Reach Out and Touch Someone." Speaking of segues...but that can wait. Hope your weekends—and your lives generally—are filled with peace and x-rated joy
pxj
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A bonus link so that the DVD-watchers won’t miss it—
Wish fulfillment as advertising! Because everyone has that memory, of some parental unit dragging out some embarrassing family memory...
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Finding Sanctuary
Vanished again, I know. Sorry. No, I wasn’t hermitting—as some of you may know, I’m a freelance technical writer, and the latest gig involved many too many onsite hours. Lovely wifi they had there, but monitored. Yes, I know that still leaves the off-hours, but...I really wasn’t hermitting. Call it inspiration for future stories.
Tonight’s the first time in a while I’ve had some free time to just play online. So what did I do with it? Among other things, checked out Sanctuary.
What? I was curious! And it’s summer, season of popcorn flicks and bad faux-reality TV. Not to say I can’t live without television, or movies either, but...sometimes, I’d really a decent SF-nal something, y’know? And more than that, I’m always interested in new market models!
Not just in broadcast, of course; e-books, anyone?
So, Sanctuary. Direct-to-web short episodes. Monsters and gothic architecture and pretty people. Monsters! No ads. Did I mention monsters? I had to look. And after having seen the first two webisodes, I’d say Sanctuary seems like it has a chance. It’s visually stunning; they’re building on an established fan-base, what with all the ex-Stargate folks involved; SF fans are traditionally more open to innovative distribution models; and they’ve got the “social networking” thing going in overdrive. Want to know how effective that last is? Hey, I heard about it! And I’m a hermit.
Traditional broadcast television counts on word-of-mouth, too, but lately, networks don’t seem to feel they can afford to wait for that word to spread. Firefly is my favorite example: a show Fox didn’t keep around for an entire season, that had—that still has—a fan-base so strong it supports conventions and comic books and even a profitable movie. But the ultimate Space Western’s certainly not the only show nets cancel before they should: Jericho, canceled in May of this year, has just been resurrected for a short next season, as of yesterday, after a massive fan action. (I still want to know who thought up the nuts!) Seven more episodes, contingent upon yet more fan activity, with the dangled hope of more still. But if fans want the show to continue, says the network statement: "It [Jericho] needs to grow on the CBS Television Network, as well as on the many digital platforms where we make the show available."
Hmm. Viewer to CBS: I watched the show, I told people about the show, you canceled the show. I and my cohorts made a loud enough noise that you decided to bring it back, and now you want me to tell even more people, trusting that you won’t just pull the rug out from under us all again? You don’t know me very well, do you?
These days, a lot of shows find their best profits not in ad-supported broadcast, but in DVD sales, which don’t require a broadcast network’s fickle faith after the fans have found a show. Some items are now going straight to DVD, without even a stopover on the network circuit. New episodes of Babylon Five are due out soon! How long has that show been off the air? Straight-to-web isn’t all that unlikely, given the rise in broadband coverage and increasing customer willingness to pay for television programming. As with DVD sales, if you purchase the product, it’s yours, so you’re free of network schedules; no ads, so you’re free of those, too. And, hey, if you purchase a bundle, you know you’ll have all its contents! Much better than broadcast, these days.
Still... Am I—me, myself—willing to purchase episodes, to exchange actual cash for them? Well, why not? That’s all a DVD is, really. If you divide the cost of a DVD by the number of episodes... Hmm. Sanctuary’s an expensive proposition, by that scale, but not outside the bounds of possibility. I have to admit, I think part of the appeal, for me, is this idea of bypassing the networks. For the producer, it’s a way around a very limited distribution channel; for the customer, a real way to express a preference. Vote with your wallet! For me, it’s a way to thumb my nose at the folks who keep buying Tim Minear shows and then yanking them off the air again! With Sanctuary, I can buy the episodes just the way I’d buy e-books or songs. (And so can anyone else, naturally.) That’s a really, really nice idea.
And a gamble, counting on fans to shell out money instead of going the ad-supported route, but...I think it’s going to work. I hope it’s going to work. I might even defrost my very own credit card and shell out for a season. Or more. Not that I think it’s the best show ever or anything (that’d be something by Whedon), and I’m not sure the writers have really perfected that short-segment writing yet, going from forty-some-odd-minute episodes to fifteen, but it’s still pretty cool.
Don’t take my word for it, please! Low-res versions of the first four eps are (well, the first two are, and two more will be) available for viewing without charge; there’s a list at sanctuaryfans. Or go straight for the purchase option. Hey, four episodes cost about the same as an e-book...
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