Ethics disclosure: Justin has hired me to edit his upcoming novel.
@BrianNiemeier
Cultural commentary by Professional Editor, #1 Best Selling Writer and Dragon Award Winner Brian Niemeier
Hamill has a lot of thoughts on how Luke might have been reintroduced differently in The Force Awakens. He could have come in during Han Solo’s climactic scene with Kylo Ren, receiving some sort of Force-telepathy distress call from his sister, General Leia, but arriving too late to save Han from death. Or, perhaps, he might have materialized in the snowy forest of Starkiller Base, where Rey duels with Kylo. On his first read-through of the script, Hamill recalled, he got excited when the legendary lightsaber wiggled portentously in the snow. “The moment in the forest, when the saber rattles?” he said. “I go, ‘Oh, baby, here I come!’ And then it flies into her hands? I said, What the hell, she hasn’t even trained!”In another interview, Hamill elaborated:
“Now, remember, one of the plots in the earlier films was the telepathic communication between my sister and me,” Hamill said. “So I thought, Carrie will sense that Han is in danger and try to contact me. And she won’t succeed, and, in frustration, she’ll go herself. Then we’re in the situation where all three of us are together, which is one of my favorite things in the original film, when we were on the Death Star. It’s just got a fun dynamic to it. So I thought it would have been more effective, and I still feel this way, though it’s just my opinion, that Leia would make it as far as she can, and, right when she is apprehended, maybe even facing death—Ba-boom! I come in and blow the guy away and the two of us go to where Han is facing off with his son, but we’re too late. The reason that’s important is that we witness his death, which carries enormous personal resonance into the next picture. As it is, Chewie’s there, and how much can you get out of [passable Chewbacca wail] ‘Nyaaarghhh!’ and two people who have known Han for, what, 20 minutes?”He is absolutely right. the relationship between Han, Luke, and Leia is the emotional core of the original Star Wars trilogy. The fact that we never get to see all three iconic characters on screen together was an unforced error that's emblematic of TFA's wretched screenwriting.
Likewise, after reading Rian Johnson’s script for The Last Jedi, Hamill said, “I at one point had to say to Rian, ‘I pretty much fundamentally disagree with every choice you’ve made for this character.'"I didn't see Rogue One in the theater. I don't plan to see The Last Jedi at all. I'll probably read some reviews, though, because it'll be interesting to find out if the rumored Gray Jedi BS devolves the series into full-blown moral relativism.
This stunning space opera carries you all over the known universe - and outside of it.
-Author Russell Newquist
The book reminded me something that I could see Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle writing.
It used to be that when you were shopping for a new copy of a book and clicked “Add to Cart,” you were buying the book from Amazon itself. Amazon, in turn, had bought the book from its publisher or its publisher’s wholesalers, just like if you went to any other bookstore selling new copies of books. There was a clear supply chain that sent your money directly into the pockets of the people who wrote and published the book you were buying.
But now, reports the Huffington Post, that’s no longer the default scenario. Now you might be buying the book from Amazon, or you might be buying it from a third-party seller. And there’s no guarantee that if the latter is true, said third-party seller bought the book from the publisher. In fact, it’s most likely they didn’t.
Which means the publisher might not be getting paid. And, by extension, neither is the author.If a retailer is selling books produced by a publisher without first buying those books from said publisher, then those books are either a) used, b) pirated, or c) counterfeit. Amazon's policy states that the buy box can only link to retailers that are selling new books, so that leaves options b or c. In which case, the retailers are breaking the law.
Third-party sellers may have obtained the books they sell in any number of ways. They might be a used bookstore that buys stock back from consumers at a cheap cost. They might troll book bins where people recycle books. They might have relationships with distributors and wholesalers where they buy “hurts” (often good enough quality to be considered “new condition”) at a super low cost. They might have connections to reviewers who get more books than they can handle who are looking to offload. And this goes on and on.The last time I saw that many weasel words was in an MRK rant. To translate from the demagogue, they don't know. Note to Huffpo: "And this goes on and on" is not a data point.
This policy is part of Amazon’s ongoing, years-long quest to drive down the price of books. If Amazon succeeds, fewer people will be able to make their living as writers. That means fewer and worse books will make it to the marketplace.
Amazon routinely takes a loss on its book sales, often charging customers less per book than it pays publishers and swallowing the difference. It’s a priority for the company to be your preferred bookseller, even if it has to take a hit; its business model can accommodate the loss, because it generally makes up the extra dollars on the last-minute impulse buys customers toss into their shopping carts. Meanwhile, on the e-book side of things, Amazon’s low prices help drive sales of its Kindle. But that also means it has set certain customer expectations: Many Amazon customers now believe that books should be cheap — cheaper to buy than they are to make.
It is already punishingly rare for writers to make a living wage from their books. As Amazon drives down the cost of books, it will become ever more rare. That means fewer people will be able to invest the time and effort it takes into becoming a writer, which means a lot of talented writers — especially working-class writers and writers of color — will go unheard. All of which means that you, the reader, will be missing out on some excellent potential books.The value of commodities like books is subjective. If enough customers believe that a book should be a certain price, then guess what? That's how much a market-facing retailer should charge for it. They cover that in econ 101, but it looks like Vox.com was sick that day.
That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
Like most big corporations, Amazon engages in a primary business and a few dozen complementary businesses.
Ms. Grady’s post shows that she seems to have some understanding of these concepts. But she’s gotten it all backwards. Amazon’s loss leader isn’t books. Books (and, these days, other digital content such as movies and television) is Amazon’s primary business. Amazon may, indeed, occasionally take a loss on specific books. It most definitely does not do that on a general basis with books. Pay attention: Amazon sells more ebooks than print books, and has since 2011. EBooks tend to sell for less money. But because it spends less on distribution and storage costs, Amazon makes a lot more profit off of them. The same is true of streaming music and movies. Amazon has focused on the primary business of delivering digital goods for years now.
Amazon selling books through third party distributors isn’t a big deal for indie publishers or self published authors. As Brian notes, there’s no way for a third party distributor to get our books in the first place except through us – unless they’re engaging in practices that are already both illegal and against Amazon’s terms of service. This is just one more way for Amazon to sell more of our books. Ultimately, that’s a good thing.
Action flows quickly and keeps the reader on edge. At one point, I was at 30% read on my Kindle. By 5:00 PM that same day, I had finished the remaining 70%. I was so engrossed I could not put it down.
I need to begin this review by offering my friend Brian Niemeier a sincere apology. I promised him this review a long time ago. [Full disclosure: I received a review copy free of charge.] In my defense: The Secret Kings is the first non-Silver Empire fiction book that I’ve read in 2017. Yes – that’s for the last five months. Thankfully, I’ve had some time to catch up a bit. I’m I lucky, I might clear my backlog before Monster Hunter Siege comes out.
I should have made The Secret Kings a bigger priority, and not just because I promised Brian. This is a heck of a read. The story is crazy – and I mean that in the best possible way. Old friends return – beaten, battered, and bruised, and then thrown into the fire one more time. This tale will take you from one end of the galaxy to another – and it revisits the premise that started the series. Once more, the space pirates return to hell. Only this time everything is different, and the stakes are even higher.
This stunning space opera carries you all over the known universe – and outside of it. The intriguing characters will stick in your thoughts long after you’ve finished the book, leaving you thirsty for more. Furthermore, this book ties together books one and two a bit more clearly, pulling the whole thing into a cohesive whole.
If you loved Nethereal and Souldancer, you’ll love the latest five out of five star entry in the series. And if you didn’t, you should check them out now.I thank Russell for his glowing review and heartily second his recommendation.
Niemeier's skill with the non-human characters was particularly pronounced, they were understandable yet alien and they were fully realized instead of just being props for the main character to react to.
Music started to worsen in the 90s as the music industry sabotaged itself (so to speak) as sales declined and it was blamed on "taping." Bono correctly called out the real reason: crap music. Grunge was a fad, but it did succeed in blowing pretentiousness out of the water... until the champions of grunge also became pretentious.
It's a strange thing when someone like Tom Petty, in "The Last DJ," nails the situation that mass marketing has caused to music. You have ageist radio and marketing people blocking good music from older acts (why hasn't Pet Shop Boys' fantastic album, "Super," been played all over the place since its release 13 months ago?) in the name of shielding inferior acts from competition on the airwaves. Lame.
RIP, Chris Cornell. I put together a Google Play playlist today in your honor. I'm finding it weird how many albums you and Scott Weiland guested on -- separate but together, just like your grunge days' classification and radio play.Here is Michael's playlist in honor of Chris Cornell. If you're in the mood for several hours of good music, free; consider checking it out.
I think the record companies are reticent to put money into A&R and/or scouting the way that they did before. How else to explain YouTube folks getting record deals instead of garage or club artists? It's about saving money on the front end as they're losing money to the digital age. It's been recouped by convincing younger listeners that digital music is better than LPs, CDs, or cassettes, but that's my theory. Of course, ratings bonanzas like The Voice and American Idol help them find talent while raking in advertisement money from TV.
My good alternatives are found on indie labels, although most are older bands. The 77s, The Choir, The Lost Dogs, Michael Roe, Kerosene Halo, The Swirling Eddies, Daniel Amos, Terry Scott Taylor, and Steve Taylor are all intertwined and most of the bands have common members, but are my go-to "not mainstream" bands. Problem is, they're too religious (Christian) for the mainstream and not safe enough for the Christian labels because they dare ask questions rather than just write platitudes as lyrics. So, most of them release new records via crowdfunding now.
The pioneers of this era in music are virtually DOA -- or maybe we have lost creativity because artists are too busy "trying to say something."Message fic rears its ugly head again; this time in the record industry.
Imagine if Abraham Merritt read Galactic Patrol and said "Pshaw! I can do that!" then while writing his space opera he read Dune and watched some classic anime and decided to throw those in too.
-Author JD Cowan
A major difference between book publishing today and book publishing 25 years ago is the practical power of the author brand in marketing. Multi-book authors can not only build their own followings in ways that can be usefully exploited, they now have an unprecedented capability to help each other.
Of course, they can do that best if they’re “organized” in some way. But both of the most obvious potential organizers who deal with many authors — the publishers and the agents — have commercial and structural impediments to being as helpful as they could be, or as authors need them to be, at either of the new needs: helping authors be better marketers of themselves or getting them to act in a coordinated way to help each other.
Building an individual author’s digital marketing footprint is an important component of career development. And, in fact, the foundation of the author’s “brand” footprint has strong influence on the success of the title marketing publishers would see as their principal objective.
But the publisher has a book-by-book relationship, not an assured ongoing relationship, with authors so investing for a longer-term gain is not structurally encouraged. And agents live with pretty strict ethics rules limiting their compensation to a share of the author contracts they negotiate, so they also have a structural impediment against investing money and time in the author’s general welfare beyond getting the best possible deal they can for every book they represent.Big publishers have another impediment to helping authors exchange platform-building ideas. As Shatzkin explains in the same post, big New York publishers fear authors cooperating to pursue their best interests much like big business feared the introduction of labor unions.
Once they are capable at a basic level, being organized into mutually supportive groups, where they use their audience reach to help each other, is an idea that makes sense for authors. No author can “monopolize” a reader’s time. Most authors struggle to write as much as one book a year. Most of their readers need lots of authors to feed their reading habit. So even the most directly “competitive” authors can happily “share” their audiences. And readers would inherently “trust” a reading recommendation from an author they like.
But organizing authors to help each other in this way is also touchy for both agents and publishers. For agents, there are two obvious problems. One is that the best marketing partners for any particular author might be represented by a different agency. That makes things complicated. But the other is that the agent’s “job” is to get an author deals. Getting authors engaged in a perhaps-complex marketing consortium requires another level of understanding and persuasion that agents could rightly see as a distraction to what pays the bills: developing proposals and getting offers from publishers. From a publisher’s perspective, organizing the house’s writers and having them communicate directly is a bit like asking big-company management to organize the union. There might be good arguments to do it but for many it would provoke a visceral negative reaction.Shatzkin is right that authors can't monopolize readers. For one thing, novels aren't really bound volumes made from wood pulp or even strings of ones and zeroes. They're made of intangible ideas. The laws of supply and demand don't apply.
What OptiQly does is unique and McCarthy explained it. “We are looking at ecommerce product detail pages and funnel signals that indicate what is happening in relation to those pages. And we’re scoring that funnel against dozens of signals and rolling them into meaningful buckets of insights and activities. What is unique is what we score — the title and author. It will undoubtedly remind people of other SaaS tools that employ “scores”. In fact it already has! After all, it is SaaS with scoring. But that scoring is aimed at the things that matter to authors, agents, publishers, and others in the industry.”...
In addition, publishers went through a scary period a few years ago (with the fear from that time at least temporarily in abeyance) when it seemed that digital-first publishing would give big authors the capability to reach their audiences and make their money without a publisher’s help.It might be hard for you kids to remember back that far, but the scare that Shatzkin is talking about really did happen. For a minute there, it looked like there might've been a slim chance that trad publishing would go into decline as indie authors ate their lunch.
Space pirates in hell. Demons, space battles and plenty of well paced action.
Postmodernism is a labyrinth of fun-house mirrors. No matter where you look, you see yourself distorted and in the center of it all. It's all about how special you are.
It's the same issue with message fic. It's not about the story, the ideas, or the characters, but about what the very special message is. It's no longer about the audience at that point.
It might be an issue of creating to connect versus creating to reflect.
Or I might be spewing nonsense because it's late. Who knows?
"Pop Will Eat Itself" really was the most prophetic band name ever. Modern pop culture is filled with remakes, reboots, re-imaginings, and relaunches. Maybe if they would stop looking in a fun-house mirror all the time they might get a clue.Authors work for the readers. Those who write to reflect their own ideology or false images of themselves inevitably end up in the same unenviable position as the declining Big Five publishers.
If you want people to employ traditional virtues in service of civilization, they first have to be able to imagine them. Heroism and romance were suppressed specifically to make it easier to destroy a people. The poindexters hold loyalty in contempt and sneer at sacrifice. They think goodness is for chumps. And they have held the reigns of culture for decades.A CH reader left this trenchant reply to Jeffro's comment:
This, right here, is why the iconic comic lines are dying. Captain America, and Superman, are at their best when they are demonstrating the best ideals that we, as Americans, can aspire to. Those ideas include standing up for liberty, dedication to family, discipline and hard work, and a basic “can do” world view pared with a cultural orneriness that drives one to individual achievement and self-sufficiency.
The current crop of comics writers simply can’t imagine this. They cannot imagine anything good or inspiring in America, projecting their own failures and insecurities and insufficiencies on the culture as a whole, without realizing that they should have been among those propping up such icons.
The largest icon, of course, in this trope is Jesus. They can’t imagine him either.
I’m not a Christian. But you have to be daft not to credit Christianity’s influence on Western culture and (frankly) dominance in the world.
But they can’t imagine that. Reason number two is because of their self-imposed lifting of hypocrisy as the “ultimate” sin. It is better to not have a code at all than to have one and fail to live up to it. This is reflected in the method by which they try and tear down icons – hell, they even said it in Spider-Man 1 (Toby MacGuire), “the thing people like best is to see a hero fall.” (Paraphrased). They cannot fathom that the (a) the purpose of a code, even an unreachable one, is to set a goal for all people to strive to achieve, and (b) that you can’t live up to it all the time is because we are flawed, fallen, and human. However, (c) that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop trying.
As a people, a country, and a world, we’ve stopped trying.It bears pointing out that the commenter has identified the bait and switch at the core of the Morlocks' moral nihilism, apparently without realizing it.
There's a dictum in Thomistic philosophy which goes, basically, that there is nothing in the intellect that is not first in the senses. You can't know something unless you've first experienced something. You can extrapolate certain things, yes, but you need that primary experience to do so.
For the Thomist, the imagination is nothing but the internal senses. Stories, history, poetry are formative because they give to our imagination, the internal sense, what our intellect can then abstract. This is why, in the Catholic sphere, perhaps the most important of personal practices after prayer and reading of scripture is devotion to the Saints. These give to our imagination the model of being a Christian.
Science Fiction and Fantasy, at it's highest, are exactly this practice (minus, though not contrary to, religion proper). They give to our imagination those virtues and values which form us. The real danger in Hard-Bud Sci-fi is in diminishing the gift to the imagination of the properly humane values in favor of inspiring mathematical and technological "wonders".
This is one of the reasons I think the push against message-fic needs to be tempered. We don't want message-fic which is little more than warmed over didaction (looking at you Lewis) and especially not message-fic which is contrary to wholesome reality (looking at you, modern SF "literature"). But we do what messages in our fiction - messages that don't try to bash our heads with facts, but rather enflame our imaginations with the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, the virtuous, the holy. This need not mean "sanitization" (looking at you, "Christian fiction"), but can include the darkness entailed in this difficult endeavor (but not the denial of it's worthwhileness, looking at you, Grimdark).As the International Lord of Hate so aptly said, go ahead and put a message in your story, but put fun first!
Former Breitbart Senior Editor MILO has announced the founding of his new $12 million dollar media company, MILO, Inc.
In a Facebook post, MILO outlined his new business plan and the $12 million investment funding that it has received from undisclosed investors. He has reportedly hired a seasoned media executive to lead the new 30-person team that will be based out of Miami, Florida. The new company will manage MILO‘s books, tours, merchandise and radio and TV opportunities.
In a statement, MILO said, “This isn’t some vanity nameplate on a personal blog. This is a fully tooled-up talent factory and management company dedicated to the destruction of political correctness and the progressive left. I will spend every waking moment of the rest of my life making the lives of journalists, professors, politicians, feminists, Black Lives Matter activists and other professional victims a living hell. Free speech is back — and it is fabulous.”Further details emerged at the recent Cinco de MILO event in Miami, where Yiannopoulos unveiled his vision for the new media company. MILO Inc. will not only publish Dangerous, which soared to the top of Amazon thanks to pre-orders, only to be pulled before launch; the company will seek out other conservative rabble-rousers who would otherwise have been ignored by the legacy media.
We'll be launching a new supernatural Mil-SF book tomorrow, but due to the aforementioned date, the author and I decided that it is time to formally announce that the creative deconvergence project I'd mentioned a few months ago is not only in the works, but has now entered the editing phase.
An excerpt from FARAWAY WARS: EMBERS OF EMPIRE:
Not a day went by that Vel Exollar didn’t think about the war. His brief, but brilliant career as one of the Insurgency's ace fighter pilots remained a source of pride to him. But after spending his youth flying from one hidden base to the next in between hit-and-run strikes against supply convoys, shipyards, and imperial weapons installations, he’d been very much enjoying the relative relaxation as the captain of Lady Haut-Estas’s private starliner.
Now he marched through his ship’s alabaster corridors, sumptuously carpeted in scarlet. The air smelled of fear, tension, and spilled wine. Flanked by a pair of ensigns as he ordered richly dressed passengers who’d ignored the ship-wide order to return to their cabins, Vel was forced to consider the unfortunate possibility that his current employer's decisions might have spurred his old friends to new violence.
Vel trudged over the plush carpet lining the corridor as if it were a path leading to a gallows. He’d known perfectly well that Lady Jesla’s plan was not without risk. Some might have even called it rash, and once again he asked himself why he’d agreed to it. Had he simply grown restless after playing it safe for so long?
Perhaps she reminds me too much of her mother.
But regardless of whatever had led him to roll the dice one more time, the luck that had always sustained him had finally run out at Koidu. A galaxy cruiser belonging to the Commonwealth had shown up just as what was supposed to have been a harmless demonstration had gone to hell, and now it appeared that even a single misstep could lead to a second civil war throughout the galaxy.
Despite his worries, Vel tried to remain focused on the task at hand. Hiding in Anat’s cloud banks should buy us some time. The magnetostorm would render them essentially invisible to the deep space sensors of any ship that might be following them. What was critical now was getting Jesla to safety and scrubbing every trace of her presence on board. Deep willing, we just might pull this off!
A sudden shock that caused the deck to ominously vibrate derailed Vel’s train of thought. The two junior officers burst into action, casting about for threats and shouting demands for status reports into their comms.Read the whole excerpt at Vox Popoli.
For some time now, there have been tremors moving through the Alt Media; foreshocks of a coming seismic event. Recently these shocks have been coming more frequently, and are increasingly evident to audiences, as well as content creators. There have been several attempts to fight back against the growing wave of censorship, but thus far they’ve been reactionary: an attempt to fight back against a single node rather than the entire network, with the goal of maintaining the “Wild West” status quo of the internet, while ignoring the inevitability that periods of chaos always return to order.I can personally confirm the wave of internet censorship.
The conflict can be broken down into six primary nodes – or contradictions – each of which is moving towards an unknown resolution.For the sake of convenience, Aurini's six contradictions are as follows:
Where and how the shift happens is still unpredictable. When it happens, it will be a Black Swan; unpredictable, irrelevant even, but thanks to the time and place of it, the whole system will change overnight.
Sales of consumer ebooks plunged 17% to £204m last year, the lowest level since 2011 – the year the ebook craze took off as Jeff Bezos’ market-dominating Amazon Kindle took the UK by storm.
It is the second year running that sales of consumer ebooks – the biggest segment of the £538m ebook market, which fell 3% last year – have slumped as commuters, holidaymakers and leisure readers shelve digital editions in favour of good old fashioned print novels.There's no sugarcoating this. The Guardian story is simply a lie--and an easily disproved one.
...as a metaphysical fantasy, it delivers what The Wheel of Time promised but never truly realized: a story that shook the pillars of Creation and left it transformed.
-Nathan Housley