“If I hit forty,” she said as she shoved the thimble across the board, “and I’m still single, and you’re still single, too, let’s get married.” She laughed after she said it. He laughed after she said it. And they promised to never forget.

And then she left town. And he left town. And other towns came and went, and other friends, and every now and then he tried to find her. He looked, and he wondered, as he looked, if she looked, too.

He’s over forty, now. And still single. And he knows that she’s over forty, but doesn’t know if she’s still single. Sometimes, in his tiny studio, he sits cross-legged on the bare floor, like they used to, playing Monopoly by himself. She goes first, and he moves her thimble to Oriental, and Baltic, and Reading Railroad. He buys her properties, builds her houses and hotels, and pays her two hundred dollars whenever she passes Go. And when it’s his turn, and his shoe lands on something she owns, he pays her with a smile.

She always wins.

Full disclosure: I don’t own an e-reader. I’ve played with a few different models, primarily evaluating them for use in the classroom, but have never been able to convince myself it was something I actually needed. So, that said, know that while I am not altogether ignorant of these devices, my first hand experience is a bit limited.

That’s not, however, because I dislike the platform. Rather, the platform in it’s current (or past) implementations, just hasn’t given me what I needed and/or wanted. Specifically, the combination of DRM or proprietary limitations and minimal, dedicated functionality resulted in frustration at simply wanting to be able to do more than the device or content allowed. The good news is that there are well over 15 different e-readers and tablets either already on the market or lurking on the horizon, a few of which have more than piqued my interest.

Dedicated e-Readers, I think, are going to have tough go of it in the immediate future, especially with the number of tablets poised to invade the marketplace. The push by Sony for a standard format (EPub) is, I think, a huge step in the right direction, one that Sony learned long ago when their proprietary Betamax video format lost the consumer wars to VHS. With Kindle being the dominant device on the market, it will be difficult for EPub, I think, to gain traction, but as more and more devices come to market that will eventually and inevitably change.

Because, in the end, content is king. It’s what rules the world of e-readers. Amazon is the single largest retailer of print media, both digital and traditional, in the world. They have worked tirelessly at positioning themselves as the go-to source for books and, essentially, e-readers. It is impossible for publishers to ignore the impact they have had on their business, and it would be foolish for them to try. In their exclusivity, however, Amazon has, perhaps, unwittingly alienated themselves from the publishers whose content they sell.

And that’s where the future of e-readers resides… in the hands of the publishers. A new gadget can have all the greatest bells and whistles, but it all adds up to nothing without the publishers pushing content. Not just the traditional book publishers, either. I think that subscription-based publishers, who have, over the past decade, seen their numbers slowly dwindle, stand to gain the most, and I am surprised at how many of them don’t offer full electronic versions of their publications. I currently subscribe to about 10 magazines, and if just 4 of them published electronic versions I would go out and get an e-reader tomorrow. And if my local paper had an e-version I’d pay for that, too. I’d even pay a buck or so for a preview chapter of a novel I was considering, although I’d buy the hardcover if I enjoyed it, because… well just because that’s the format I like reading novels in. But short story collections and journals? I’ll take them all digital, thank you very much.

But not just yet. With the invasion of the tablet, the entire landscape of the dedicated e-reader is about to change, as evidenced by the Entourage eDGe (their spelling, not mine), a dual-screen folding device with a WXGA screen (running the Android OS) on one side and an e-ink screen on the other. The potential for this particular device within the education marketplace is tremendous, especially considering the outrageous pricetag retailers put on physical, print editions of college textbooks. It’s what, theoretically, at least, I have been waiting for… a functionally robust e-reader. But the question remains… where will the content come from?

Even with the marriage of the tablet and the e-reader, which is what I think must happen for either platform to succeed beyond anything other than techno-niche status, publishers simply must embrace the fact that e-versions of their publications, be they subscription based or single purchase, are essential to their long-term profitability. Traditional print media will not go away any time soon, but the impact the digital marketplace is poised to make on the publishing industry is, quite simply, staggering. Everything is going to, has to, change, from distribution methods to payment and financial models publishers have with their online retailers. It’s already begun, and that little Amazon dust-up earlier this year certainly won’t be the last. And while Amazon may well be the toughest kid on the e-reader block at the moment, with so many new arrivals to the neighborhood, especially Apple, whose online bookstore will go head to head with Amazon from day one, things are about to get a little dicey.

Unfortunately, until everything shakes itself out, and by everything I mean the content and the technology and the distribution and the DRM, I don’t see myself purchasing an e-reader anytime soon, regardless of how convenient one may be on my long summer road-trips. As long as there are dueling formats, disputed distribution models and hesitant publishers, I just don’t see the sense in investing in a technology that may well change in twelve, six, or even three months time. Make no mistake, digitized print media is the future. But that future isn’t here yet, regardless of what Apple and Amazon are shouting from the rooftops.

As a Holy pally i [ALWAYS capitalize] just love stacking just SP and Crit. i [always capitalize] dont [missing apostrophe] stack much haste dont [missing apostrophe and comma (run-on sentence)] really need it.i dont [missing space; always capitalize!; missing apostrophe] even gem for it Or [missing punctuation or improper capitalization and run-on] mp5 unless its [its != it's; D- mistake!] for the socket bonus if it a [missing verb (really? seriously?)] socket bonus of SP or crit. Y i dont [Y is NOT a word! You know better!; capitalization; apostrophe] gem for Haste? i [ok, now you're doing it on purpose] sit at 14% haste i [press the extra key, dammit!] like it and in [2 independent clauses must be separated by a comma before the conjunction] my spec it give [improper verb form] me 15% more hast everytime i [spelling; every time = 2 words, i = laziness] judg b/c [spelling, informal or shorthand abbreviations should be avoided in final text] of jugements of the pure [spelling; proper nouns should be capitalized]. and y i dont [/facepalm] gem for mp5 is b/c [informal abbreviation] we have Divine Plnea [?] this it [missing verb again]. I [holy cow! You did it!] sit at 27k mana i [doh!] have 2801 SP and 27% crit my flask heals crit for 10 to 12k thats [apostrophe; run-on sentence] almost the as much a my [articles almost never proceed pronouns] holy light Holy like [interesting use of repetition and assonance... Oh, no, wait… that's one run-on sentence followed by a misspelling and another run-on sentence. Nevermind.] hits for13k [missing space] no crit and i [sigh] never run out for mana i [I've run out of things to say about this] dont [and this] need mp5 and y i  dont [please, I beg you, quit killing my language] gem for int like the other pallys are yea int give [improper verb form, but at least you remembered it.] you SP but [run-on sentence] you get more SP out of +23 sp the +20 int and [run-on] the only thing Int gives pallys is just SP and Crit. thats [capitalization; apostrophe] it it dont give [Oh. My. God.] you haste are [?] mp5  but i think its [capitalization; D- mistake] just better to just gem for SP and Crit not much int or hast or mp5 thats how i heal as a pally in pve i love it and it soo much fun most of the time i out heal ppl unless they are doing a lot of overhealing I dont just spem flash heal on the tank i really only heal if needed and when i ahve to bubble i put hand of sacrife on the tank i even do that in pvp for i dont get cc but that Diff. [Capitalization; spelling; repetition; spelling; punctuation; R.O.; capitalization; informal abbreviation;  R.O.; apostrophe; did you mean sperm?; punctuation; capitalization; punctuation; capitalization; R.O.; capitalization; spelling; punctuation; capitalization; capitalization; spelling; R.O.; capitalization; apostrophe; R.O.; capitalization] lol [huh?] But i [u suck (is that easier for you to understand?)] heal diff. then other eveyone Diff. [I don't even know what this means] so just do what you do and if it works dont change it btw i love healing thats all i love really in this game if there was not healing in this game i would not play anymore [R.O. and some other stuff] lol [I hope this stands for Learning Our Language.]
but thats how i heal i hope it helps  [Good thing you heal more effectively that you write, because I think my eyes are bleeding.]

Additional comments: *name redacted*, your content is solid, but you are still struggling with the basics. Run-on sentences and capitalization remain your biggest stumbling blocks, but you’re getting there. Keep practicing, and one of these days it will all fall into place. Overall, a nice improvement!

I’ve created a new category of post, Snapshots, for some of my creative writing. In a nutshell, these are the very beginnings of ideas. Most will be in their earliest of stages, before much polishing or editing has been done to them.

That’s how almost all of my writing starts… a single scene, a title, sometimes a line or two of dialogue. I flesh out these moments, these snapshots, until I get to a place where I don’t know what else to write. And that’s when I start thinking of the story behind the moment, that’s when I start asking questions. How did I get there? What happens next? What does this mean? What is that watermelon doing there (for you Buckaroo fans, I’ll tell you later)?

Most of the posts will be less than 1000 words (for a frame of reference, this one is ~200 words) and likely closer to 500 words. Some will be completely fictional. Some will be non-fiction. Others will have a few elements of non-fiction buried in fiction. None, however will be “finished” or “complete.” Some, like the first entry, “Culture Clash” will even be nearly incomprehensible. They are just the starting points for something else.

It seems like every few months something controversial happens over at Amazon Corporate HQ that makes the news. It’s become regular enough to appear, to me at least, rather PETA-esque. I won’t go into the whole thing, as it’s been covered at length and from all sides at outlets ranging from little corners of the netosphere like this one all the way to the New York Times. To summarize:

While in their contract negotiations with book publisher Macmillan, Amazon wanted, the way I understand it, bigger price reductions on their e-books than Macmillan was willing to give. Both sides walked away from the table, and, as a result of the stalemate, Amazon decided to pull all Macmillan titles, including hardcover and paperback editions, from their virtual shelves, leaving them only available through their third party resellers. This includes all the books from Macmillan owned imprints, such as Tor/Forge Books and St. Martin’s Press (together perhaps the most prominent imprints on my own personal bookshelves).

Since I’m certainly not an expert on the situation, allow me to point you to a few of the more prominent sources of the controversy in case you want to look into it for yourself:

LA Times Article

NY Times Article

Huffington Post Article

Guardian Article

Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s response

John Scalzi, a Tor published author, has published extensively about all this on his blog as have several others.

If you look closely at that list, there’s a rather glaring omission… Nothing from Amazon. The only thing from the bookseller to come out about all this (that I have seen, anyway) is a post on their Kindle message boards from “The Amazon Kindle Team”

Basically, the proposal that Macmillan put forth was similar to the pricing structure used by the movie studios for film releases…

1. First run in a theatre: most expensive
2. Pay-per-view: cheaper, released after the first run in the theatre
3. Rental (Blockbuster, Netflix, etc): cheaper still, released after the PPV
4. TV: Free! Released well after the Rental and edited to fit your screen and for content

This type of staggered release schedule is referred to, if I make the connections correctly, as a Windowed Release model, which is what Macmillan was pushing for:

1. Hardcover: most expensive, released first
2. e-book: somewhat cheaper (I’ve seen $12-$16 floated around different articles), released after the Hardcover
3. Paperback: cheapest, released after the e-book? (release is my assumption, based on the pricing model)

Amazon, the way I read it, wants to set the price of their e-book titles at $9.99 and wants the release date to be the same as the hardcover release date. Macmillan feared a loss of revenue and said no, and that’s when the negotiations broke down and Amazon put a freeze on sales of all Macmillan and Macmillan subsidiary publisher titles, including the hardcover and softcover book versions.

Here’s my take on it…

It isn’t the price of the e-book that is foremost in Amazon’s mind, regardless of what “The Amazon Team” says. The $9.99 pricing model they want is geared to bolster the position of the Kindle as the #1 reader amid the onslaught of new readers making their way to market (the most important, perhaps, being the Apple iPad). Amazon’s talk of Macmillan holding a “monopoly over their own titles” is akin to saying that Nabisco has a monopoly over all it’s cookies and crackers. Or, perhaps more telling, it’s like saying Amazon has a monopoly over all the titles it distributes through the Kindle store. Using the word “monopoly” to describe intellectual property that Macmillan has contractually purchased from hundreds of individual authors is nothing but spin-doctoring a tantrum thrown by the Amazon execs when they didn’t get their way during the negotiations. The word “monopoly” has negative connotations associated with it, and it’s use is designed to set a very specific tone in the Amazon response. Compare it to the Sargent’s statement (a full page ad he took out in, I think, Publisher’s Weekly, as opposed to a random post on a company message board by an anonymous employee) and decide for yourself which company is the one attempting to “monopolize” the e-book market.

What’s worse, though, is the point that John Scalzi makes in this post.  While these two corporate behemoths butt heads, it’s the Macmillan authors that are paying the price. Scalzi says it far better than I could hope to, especially since he is an author who’s books have virtually disappeared from Amazon’s shelves, so go to his site and read it there.

What am I going to do about it?

Well, personally, this is kind of the last straw for me with Amazon. I was rather put off when they stripped the sales ranking from many gay and lesbian themed books. I was even more concerned when Amazon remotely accessed the Kindles of their customers and actually DELETED the George Orwell books Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four which their customers had legally purchased through the Kindle store without any kind of notification from Amazon (they did refund the purchase price, however). I have been toying with the idea of getting a Kindle for a while now, but, quite simply, I really don’t want to support Amazon any longer. I’ll use their site to browse, and to keep booklists and wishlists and giftlists for friends and family, but I’ll do my shopping at places like Powells, B&N, or any other place I can get a decent deal. Because it was never about the price at Amazon… it was about the convenience.

Additionally, I won’t be linking any more titles to Amazon. I’m far to lazy to actually go through and remove all the links I’ve already put up (and I doubt more than 10 books have been bought through those links since I started doing it), but I’ll make a point from here on out to not send them any more potential business.

As for e-book readers, that post is coming up soon. Suffice it to say for now… if I do ever purchase an e-reader, it sure as hell won’t be a Kindle.

Good news and bad news…

The upgrade is done. It’s not a whole lot of good news, but, hey… it’s done, dangit! The bad news is that it looks like my user database didn’t export along with everything else. I’ll try to find a solution for it, but you may need to re-register. This may well mean that I inadvertantly nuked all my feeds as well, which also sucks.

There also seems to be a bunch of functionality that got lost in the transfer (like the different pages/sections of the blog – About Me, About This Site, etc), so I’ll need to figure all that out as time goes on, too. And aesthetically there are some things which need to be addressed that are a result of Thesis upgrading their tab functionality. Maybe I’ll just slowly work on a site redesign.

Boy, it sure would have been nice to know all this back in December *cough*worthlesscsagents*cough* when I had over a month between semesters to work on it!

For the past month I have been wrestling with My SQL in a fruitless attempt to upgrade my database to something the newest version of Wordpress can actually run on. The help I have received from my provider, which for years has been spot-on, has been, in this particular matter, dubious at best. To be fair, much of it is likely my own lack of understanding, but it’s not like I’m a technical moron. I have at least a flimsy grasp of MySQL and how it works, and am able to follow directions quite well, thank you very much.

Depending upon how they respond to my most recent error-filled email, I may just switch over to wordpress.com and dump the web host altogether. It’s not like I have time to use it to its full potential anyway. I just always liked having goals associated to a more robust web presence that go beyond a simple blog.

Speaking of which, I do have  goal for the blog this year, something that is directly related to my writing that, in theory, will keep me updating on a much more regular basis. I was just waiting on the upgrade to launch it. Hopefully all this will get ironed ot this week and I’ll be able to start with my new bloject (yes, I made that up… blog+project=bloject… it’ll be in Webster’s within a year! ok maybe not.)

Update:

In spite of 5 different tech support specialists forwarding me a plethora of “how to” instructions on upgrading the SQL database from 4.0 to 5.0, it seems as though the only way to do it with my particular package is to nuke the current WordPress install and re-install into a new 5.0 database. Why they couldn’t look at my account info and figure this out back in December when I  first contacted them about it and had 6 weeks off from teaching I’ll never know. Since the new semester starts tomorrow, expect the site to go down during the football games today while I run through the installation process. Current odds of me borking the at least the layout stand at 2:1. Place your bets.

It isn’t often that I start a book but not finish it. I’d much rather struggle through to the bitter end clinging to some vague hope that there will be a payoff in the end. In fact, I can only think of three books I abandoned partway through. Two I went back to and eventually finished, but the third I have tried and tried again, only to set it aside each time for something else. Three books over the course of 30-something years of rather voracious reading… not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

Imagine my surprise, then, to start this year off with not one, but two books I put down by page 100. I wasn’t even going to post on them, but I received them through the Library Thing Early Reviewer’s program, and while a review isn’t mandatory the folks over at LT ask so nicely that I hate to disappoint. The question becomes, then, is can I honestly review a book that I didn’t finish?

It happens all the time. Book reviewing is a business, after all. Critics are under deadlines and have both public and corporate expectations to meet as far as timeliness goes when it comes to new releases. Most often they will receive advanced reading copies direct from the publisher which allows them, hopefully, to publish their review on or shortly after the book’s release date.

That said, I don’t really think it’s appropriate for me, personally, to give a thumbs-up or down kind of review for a book I didn’t even get a third of the way through. Instead, I’ll touch briefly on the reasons why I put each book down. Reading is, after all, a personal experience. The act of reading itself is what I have always focused my reviews on, and that doesn’t necessarily correspond to the “literary quality” of the book being read. Moby Dick may well be one of the greatest books ever written, after all, but I’d never know it. I’ve put that sucker down three times.

So, without further babblage, here are the two books that didn’t last more than a hundred pages:

Title: Vilnius Poker
Author: Ricardas Gavelis
Translator: Elizabeth Novickas
Publisher: Open Letter Books
Year Published: 2009 (originally published in Lituanian as Vilniaus pokeris by Vaga in 1989)
Pages: 485
First Sentence: A narrow crack between two high-rises, a break in a wall encrusted with blind windows: a strange opening to another world; on the other side children and dogs scamper about, while on this side – only an empty street and tufts of dust chased by the wind.

To be, for once, succinct, I was not at all ready for this book. Vilnius Poker is a deep, difficult read that I will absolutely return to. For whatever reason, however, I couldn’t muster the focus the writing demands of the reader. Realizing this, I set it aside and will try again at some point down the road.

That said, even though I struggled with it, I knew I was reading, or trying to read, something very special. Gavelis’ writing is, in a word, stunning. It is also packed with big, huge, tremendous ideas as the main character, Vytautus Vargalis, struggles to maintain what little grasp of reality he has left after being imprisoned and tortured in a Soviet prison camp.

In some ways I shared that struggle, as I found myself, more often than not, confused as to what was happening to Vytuatus. I never felt as though I had a firm stance on where the story started out, what the baseline was, and that left me frustrated and continually flipping pages backwards and rereading in an effort to clear things up for myself. I do not think, however, that this is indicative of a flaw in the writing itself. It is a result of the perspective of Vytautus and, I think, extremely important to the overall tone of even the short bit I struggled through.

Vilnius Poker is not for the casual reader or the faint of heart, and, now that I better understand that, I’ll approach it much differently when I next pick it up and start at page 1.

Title: Brideshead Revisited
Author: Evelyn Waugh
Publisher: Knopf (Everyman’s Library)
Year Published: 1993 (originally published 1945 by Chapman & Hall)
Pages: 315
First Sentence: When I reached ‘C’ company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.

I stopped reading because I was bored. That sums it up, really. The book started out strong with a prologue that set up the plot (or what I thought was the plot) extremely well. It was both active and introspective and presented a situation that was rich with both internal and external conflict for the first-person pov protagonist. But then the prologue ended, and with it all the tension it built up, and chapter one takes the reader back in time.

I assume that the final chapter(s) return to the present-day that the prologue established, but I didn’t make it far enough to find out. I found the story plodding and slow, with far too much focus on “realistic” conversation that seemed endless and ultimately pointless. I cared nothing for any of the characters, therefore I cared nothing for what they were talking (and talking, and talking, and talking) about.

Brideshead Revisited is shelved and there it will stay until, one day, when I once again run out of shelf space, I donate it to the local library.

Well, it took me about a week to break Thesis, although I have no idea what I have done to it.

I’ve never had issues with my rss feeds in the past. Granted, I don’t think I’ve ever had more than 25 subscribers, but still, everything always worked just fine. When Google took over Feedburner, I waited as long as I could, but finally migrated over to the “new” service a couple of months ago. For a few weeks, I didn’t notice anything, likely because I wasn’t posting much.

But then I got Thesis and started fiddling with things. When I started working on the footer, trying to get more usability out of it with some pretty hefty changes. Alas, none of the changes worked the way I wanted them to, so I went to bed after setting everything back the way it was. Or at least I thought I set everything back to the way it was.

I woke up the next morning with the following message waiting for me in my inbox from the good folks at Feedburner:

Sorry

This feed does not validate.

• line 1, column 0: XML parsing error: <unknown>:3:0: no element found [help]

In addition, interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendation.

• Feeds should not be served with the “text/html” media type [help]

Source: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/RobbFlynn

Looking into it a bit further, I discovered that I had also lost all my subscribers except for 1 (which I think is me, oddly enough. Guess I’ll find out when I publish this post!), and that the 2 “help” links were really anything but help. I know what Feedburner does, but I don’t know how it does it, so their explanations as to what is actually wrong with the feed doesn’t go very far in telling me how to fix it.

So right now, I have a subscribe link that doesn’t subscribe, and I’ll have to wait until the weekend to try and figure out a. how to fix it, or, b. some sort of workaround. Drag. If anyone has suggestions or random thoughts on the matter, I’d love to hear them.

The majority of the redesign work has been completed through the use of the Thesis WordPress Theme, which I am still getting comfortable with and will write about later when I have gotten a bit deeper into all the options it affords. Suffice it to say for now that I love not only the theme, but the support that the community offers pseudo web designers like me.

There’s still a bunch of changes that I want to make, but for now, this is it. The overall style has remained the same, and the goal now is to streamline and focus on usability and content. Most alterations will be subtle, with only a few drastic design changes (such as the currently gawd-awful footer) in the pipeline.

Feel free to offer up suggestions, especially if there’s something I have done (or haven’t done for that matter) that really annoys you. Unless, of course, you are using IE6. If that’s the case, then there’s little I can do for you. It’s bad enough trying to maintain compatibility for modern browsers. IE6 is… what… 8 years old now? Do yourself a favor and go upgrade. Personally, I recommend Mozilla’s Firefox, but I also have friends who are enamored with Google’s Chrome. Anything other than IE and you’re a winner in my book.