I had been using an iPhone 6 Plus that I’d purchased in May 2015. I believe in getting my money’s worth, but hey, at a certain point, you’ve got to upgrade.
My iPhone 6 had deteriorated to the point where it would no longer shut down, the silent toggle switch no longer worked, and various apps (including the text app) closed at random while I was using them.
Time to upgrade!
I bought a new iPhone 11 last week, and so far I’m very happy with it.
I’m particularly impressed with the video camera. It may even inspire me to give YouTube another try.
I recently decided to reread Stephen King’s vampire novel, ‘Salem’s Lot. This seemed reasonable enough, as I had first read the book in 1984. (After thirty-five years, just about any novel or film will seem fresh again.)
I have a lot of nostalgia associated with this novel, as I tend to have a lot of nostalgia associated with a lot of things. This was the book that birthed my adult interest in reading and writing.
In February of 1984, I was a sophomore in high school. During my free period, I worked behind the counter of the school library. That’s right: I was a librarian.
But I wasn’t a big reader. Not at that time, at least. I had been a very avid reader during my childhood years, devouring series like John Dennis Fitzgerald’s The Great Brain, and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators.
Once I hit puberty, though, I developed other interests: football and rock music, specifically.
I did play high school football for a while—if you can dignify what I did with that description. (I was a third-string right tackle, or something like that.) And I messed around with a few garage bands. I can still play the basic chords on a guitar. (But I was always much more interested in lyrics than in music.)
One day, when things were slow in the school library, I picked up a dogeared paperback copy of ‘Salem’s Lot on a whim, and started reading it.
I was immediately hooked. I checked the book out, and read the entire thing in less than a week.
After that, I read the rest of Stephen King’s oeuvre, as it existed in 1984. Stephen King fans tend to divide themselves between those who prefer his newer style—long, rambling books like Duma Key and 11/22/63, and those who prefer the tightly plotted, shorter novels of his earlier years. Put me solidly in the latter camp. The Stephen King books I most love: The Stand, Pet Sematary, Christine, Carrie, The Dead Zone, Cujo, and ’Salem’s Lot were already available in 1984. (’Salem’s Lot, in fact, had already been out for a decade in 1984, and had already been adapted into a made-for-TV movie, starring David Soul as Ben Mears.)
There is much about ‘Salem’s Lot to love. Let’s start with the way Stephen King pulls you into the small-town New England setting. I have spent most of my life in Ohio, and I’ve never been within a hundred miles of Maine. But when I read ‘Salem’s Lot, I had a deep, palpable feeling of small-town Maine life in the mid-1970s, when the story takes place.
The horror element of the story builds slowly, and is an organic part of the setting. The horror is embedded in the history of the town, and Ben Mears’s terrifying childhood experience in the Marsten House. When the supernatural phenomena begin to occur, they are believable precisely because Stephen King has already made you believe in this world of ‘Salem’s Lot, a small town in rural Maine.
It starts with the very prosaic, quite mundane details, as seen through the eyes of Ben Mears. It begins as Mears, still haunted by the death of his wife, is driving into the town where he had spent a few happy summers of his childhood:
…and he could see Schoolyard Hill through the slash in the trees where the Central Maine Power pylons ran on a northwest to southeast line. The Griffen farm was still there, although the barn had been enlarged. He wondered if they still bottled and sold their own milk. The logo had been a smiling cow under the name brand: “Sunshine Milk from Griffen Farms!” He smiled. He had splashed a lot of that milk on his cornflakes at Aunt Cindy’s house.
That, you see, is how a master horror writer like Stephen King suspends your disbelief. He begins by investing you in the characters and the settings. Then he introduces the paranormal—the scary stuff.
The vampires in ‘Salem’s Lot are old-school vampires. They are spiritually foul, evil creatures who pose a threat to your immortal soul. The best horror fiction involves the threat of death—either spiritual death or physical death. ‘Salem’s Lot involves both.
I will confess a love of the old-school vampires, done in the Bram Stoker mode. I moderately enjoyed Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, but it was a lightweight vampire novel compared to ’Salem’s Lot. A virus-created vampire is not a proper vampire. A proper vampire must be a supernatural, reanimated being. It must recoil from crucifixes, and be burned by holy water. A vampire is not a scientific accident, or a misunderstood antihero (more on that abomination shortly).
Stephen King maintains a pretty tight pace throughout ‘Salem’s Lot. Like I said, I read it the first time in less than a week; and I read it the second time at a similarly brisk pace.
Nevertheless, the book was originally published in 1975. Since then, much as changed. The reading public has become accustomed to 200+ channels on cable television, Jame Patterson-style minimalist thrillers, and…of course, the Internet, cell phones, and all the distractions of digital life. Attention spans are much short than they were in 1975, or even 1984.
I would like to declare that I haven’t been personally influenced by any of this, but I know better. As much as I admire Stephen King’s “world-building” in ‘Salem’s Lot, there were a few passages in which he spends a bit too many words going in-depth about the foibles and petty hypocrisies of small-town life.
Also, I was fifteen when I read the book for the first time. I was fifty when I reread it. In the intervening years, I have read many novels, and consumed countless television dramas, movies, etc. Perhaps my standards are more exacting than they were in 1984.
There is a feeling of pathos that the reader gets from ‘Salem’s Lot, and I believe that this is one of the book’s under-appreciated aspects. Much of the best horror fiction does leave us slightly sad and reflective. After reading a good horror novel, you should be like the wedding guest in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “a sadder and a wiser man” (or woman).
Ben Mears comes to ‘Salem’s Lot in order to recover from an existential tragedy, the death of his wife, Miranda, in an accident. What he encounters there, however, is yet another tragedy—this one even more profound and disturbing.
On a personal level, he briefly finds love again, in his budding relationship with Susan Norton. But that (spoiler alert) is not to last. His loss of Susan, moreover, will be closely tied to the vampire outbreak, culminating in a scene that is reminiscent of a scene in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
I love ‘Salem’s Lot, as this post probably makes clear. My own personal attachment to the book aside, I sincerely believe that it is a great novel, and probably the best novel of the vampire genre yet written.
I despise what Stephanie Meyer and her many imitators have done to the vampire genre. The vampire should be dark and terrifying. Twilight—and the many Twilight knock-offs—have transformed the vampire into a teenage girl’s romantic fantasy. (Search for “vampire novel” on Amazon, and most of the results will be YA romance novels. Gag me.)
But we still have ‘Salem’s Lot. If you like the idea of a real vampire novel, then you should definitely read this one, if you haven’t done so already.
This was one of the big teen movies of my youth. I saw it when it came out in the mid-1980s. I recently watched it again as a middle age (51) adult.
The basic idea of The Breakfast Club is immediately relatable: Five very different teens (a nerd, a jock, a princess, a basket case, a criminal) are thrown together in the enclosed space of their high school’s library. They are then forced to interact over the course of a day-long detention period on a Saturday. This is a small drama, but also a much larger one: The setup for the movie provides a concentrated and contained view of all teenage interactions.
Why we like The Breakfast Club
I liked The Breakfast Club, for all the usual reasons that millions of people have liked the movie since it first hit cinemas in February 1985. Everyone who has ever been a teenager can relate to feeling awkward and misunderstood; and The Breakfast Club has teenage angst in spades. The cast of characters is diverse enough that each of us can see parts of himself in at least one of these kids.
The Breakfast Club is free of the gratuitous nudity that was somewhat common in the teensploitation films of the era. There is no Breakfast Club equivalent to Phoebe Cates’s topless walk beside the swimming pool in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. (There is a brief glimpse of what is supposed to be Molly Ringwald’s panties. But since Ringwald was a minor at the time, an adult actress filled in as a double for this shot.)
Nor are any of the actors especially good-looking or flashy. They all look like normal people. No one paid to see this movie for its star power or sex appeal. The Breakfast Club succeeded on the basis of its script, and solid acting and production values.
What I didn’t see in 1985
I enjoyed the movie the second time around, too. I have to admit, though, that teenage self-absorption can seem a little frustrating when viewed through adult eyes.
I’m the same age as Michael Anthony Hall and Molly Ringwald; we were all born in 1968. The other actors in the film are all within ten years of my age. Nevertheless, this time I was watching their teenage drama unfold as an older person–not a peer. Teenage drama is, by its very nature, trivial (and yes, a little annoying) when viewed from an adult perspective.
The movie also makes all adults look corrupt, stupid, or craven–as opposed to the hapless and victimized, but essentially idealistic– teens. Every young character in The Breakfast Club blames his or her parents for their problems, and these assertions are never really challenged.
We get only a few shots of the parents, when the kids are being dropped off for their day of detention. The parents are all portrayed as simplistic naggers.
The teens’ adult nemesis throughout the movie, Assistant Principal Vernon, is a caricature, a teenager’s skewed perception of the evil adult authority figure. The school janitor, meanwhile, is no working-class hero–but a sly operator who blackmails Vernon for $50.
A movie written for its audience
One of the reasons you liked this movie if you were a teenager in 1985 is that it flattered you–without challenging your myopic, teenage perspective of the world. If you weren’t happy, it was probably because of something your parents did, not anything that you did–or failed to do.
That may have been a marketing decision. Who knows? The Breakfast Club goes out of its way to flatter its target audience–the suburban teenager of the mid-1980s. I suppose I didn’t see that when I was a member of that demographic. I see it now, though.
I have a tendency to dream, almost every night. I don’t want to get all woo-woo on you (or well, maybe I do), but I regard dreams as a gateway into…something. And by that I mean more than just my subconscious.
I certainly have dreams that I would rather not share. But within the range of what is shareable and family-friendly, these are the recurring dreams that I tend to have the most often:
1. The exam dream: I show up to a class on exam day. Oops! I forgot that I was taking the class. I haven’t been there all semester! But today is exam day! I’m screwed!
2. The chased by criminals dream: At least once per month, I dream that I’m being chased by a criminal gang. Sometimes they’re common hoodlums, sometimes they’re mafiosos. But they’re always in pursuit of me, for some undefined reason.
3. I’m driving on an expressway and I can’t get off. This might be attributable to the fact that driving has never been one of my favorite activities. I also get this dream multiple times per month. I’ll be behind the wheel of a car, on a narrow expressway. I’ve missed my exit, and there’s no way for me to get off the highway.
The exam dream, in particular, seems to be common. (There are a number of articles about it on the Internet.) The other two…I’m not sure about.
CNN breathlessly tells us that Jennifer Aniston’s debut on Instagram temporarily “broke” the platform, because so many people were intent on following her.
Are Americans really that celebrity- and social media-obsessed nowadays?
I have nothing against Jennifer Aniston, mind you (not that she would care, I know)… I used to watch Friends all the time…in like, 1998. I also enjoyed Aniston’s performances in Office Space (1999) and Derailed (2005).
Jennifer Aniston is a fine actress, and minimally annoying as Hollywood types go. But her signature venue, Friends, went off the air 15 years ago.
15 years ago.
Aniston is basically an actress of the 1990s and the 2000s.
Nothing wrong with that! Aniston has a net worth of $240 million. She doesn’t need to prove anything at this point, and heaven knows she doesn’t need the money.
But why do so many people feel a compulsion to follow her on Instagram in 2019? What’s the secret sauce here? What’s the objective? I don’t get it.
If following celebrities whose careers peaked nearly twenty years ago is the big thing on Instagram, then I’ll take this as further proof that I’m not missing out on much by ignoring the social media platform.
I watched the documentary Meeting Gorbachev on the NatGeo channel.
This is a very worthwhile documentary for old folks like me who remember the 1980s, as well as those too young to have been there.
There are many interesting tidbits in Meeting Gorbachev, even beyond the in-depth study of the ex-Soviet leader himself. For example, the deaths of three Soviet premiers–Brezhnev, Andropov, and Constantin–in rapid succession in the early 1980s. For a while, it seemed that the Soviet Union had a new head-of-state every other month.
Meeting Gorbachev made me nostalgic, but also a little sad. In 1986, the year I graduated from high school, the US, USSR, and the UK were governed by Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Margaret Thatcher. In China, a reformer (but alas, no democrat) named Deng Xiaoping was at the helm.
In 2019, 33 years later, we have Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Boris Johnson leading the US, Russia, and the UK. The Chinese ruler, Xi Jinping, is a short-sighted, saber-rattling autocrat.
In 1986, the world was far from perfect. The technology, moreover, was not nearly as slick and convenient as it is today. There was no Internet, no cell phones, and a lot less to watch on TV.
There was, however, reason to believe in 1986 that the world was in basically capable hands, and heading in a more positive direction.
A college student takes a summer job in a very unusual company in rural Virginia.
What’s unusual about the company? Everyone insists that George Washington—the George Washington—is the founder and owner of the firm.
Moreover, the great man himself will make an appearance before the end of the summer.
That’s the setup for the story, “I Know George Washington”.
This is one of those stories that came to me in a dream (as so many of them do).
Or, I should say, the basic idea came to me in a dream—not the complete story.
After getting the initial seed of the idea, I spent some time fitting it into a narrative. The result is not quite a horror story, but something that might be called psychological suspense, in the spirit of the old Alfred Hitchcock movies like Rear Window and Vertigo. (I am a big fan of Hitchcock, and his technique of playing with the protagonist’s—and the audience’s—hold on reality.)
It’s been unseasonably warm in Ohio for the past week. Today the mercury hit 93 degrees for the high.
I’m familiar with the term “Indian summer”, but this is ridiculous. We’re having dog days of August weather, with Halloween just a few weeks away.
This isn’t the first miserable Indian summer in the Cincinnati area. I distinctly recall the hellish September/October of 1985. I was in my senior year of high school, and running cross country. There were a few races in which I was sure I was going to collapse from heat stroke.
Homecoming 1985, on October 12th, I remember sweating in my suit and tie at the big dance.
Why I am telling you this (other than my natural tendency toward nostalgia)? This late-season heat is a bit unusual. But if we had October heat like this 34 years ago, then the world probably isn’t ending (though you never know, of course).
According to the forecast, things are supposed to cool off here tomorrow evening. And not a day too soon.
This is October, the month of Halloween. I am an unabashed and unrepentant fan of this dark holiday.
Halloween is controversial, among the finger-waggers of both a secular, as well as a religious, bent.
Ideological secularists believe that SCIENCE can provide the answer to everything. The celebration of Halloween is therefore irrational, as Dr. Spock would say.
But most secular types simply ignore Halloween. They spend Halloween night reading Richard Dawkins, or something. The real opposition to Halloween comes from evangelical know-it-alls, who believe that if it isn’t in Scripture, then it must be evil. They fear satanic influences on Halloween night.
It’s true that Halloween has some pagan origins—or at least some pagan associations. So too, does the concept of the afterlife (which can be traced back to the pagan Greeks). Also, the celebration of Christmas on December 25th. (Many aspects of our traditional Christmas holiday come from pagan sources, in fact.)
The uncomfortable truth is that in ancient times, Christianity and paganism existed side-by-side, and were often intermingled. Attempts to purge Christianity of all pagan influences are usually fruitless—and pointless.
Symbols change their meanings over time. The Christmas wreath has its origins in pagan Rome. But how many of us are thinking of the Roman pantheon when we hang a wreath in December? Common sense, people. You don’t become a pagan on a technicality.
Halloween is ultimately an expression of humility–a very Christian (and humanistic) virtue. The holiday is an acknowledgement that human beings must live in a world where dark forces exist, where bad things happen to good people, where much of life is uncertain.
That includes evil, however you define it. And the inevitability of death.
Sometimes, these two forces are tightly intermingled. Consider our anxieties over mass shootings and acts of terrorism. These instances of senseless violence involve both evil and death.
Here is where the evangelical Christian, the Dawkins-quoting secularist, and the lapsed Roman Catholic can find a point of common ground. As human beings, we are all ultimately vulnerable. Our loved ones are ultimately vulnerable. Death eventually comes for all of us, regardless of what we believe. And none of us knows, with absolute empirical certainty, what does—or doesn’t—come next.
If that uncertainty doesn’t cause you occasional moments of anxiety, then maybe you’re spending too much time watching cat videos on Facebook.
Halloween is a holiday in which we consciously choose to laugh and celebrate in the full acknowledgment that our world includes evil, death, and uncertainty. This is what the motifs of Halloween—skeletons, gravestones, and black cats—represent. Death. Evil.
The celebration of Halloween can, in this way, be an expression of Christian faith: a willingness to walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
No—a willingness to skip through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. For just one night each year.
I was technically alive then; but I was too young to watch the show during its original 1969~1974 airing. I was part of that generation that watched The Brady Bunch obsessively in rerun syndication.
More than forty years later, I am still a little embarrassed to admit it, but I’ve probably seen every single episode of The Brady Bunch, some of them multiple times. I know I’m not the only one, either.
I love my parents dearly, and I’ve always had a good relationship with them. I won’t deny, though, that if you would have asked me circa 1977 or 1978, I would have been open to the idea of becoming the seventh Brady child.
Who wouldn’t have taken that deal, given the chance to live in an idyllic Southern California household like that? The parents never argued, the mother was always cheerful, and the father was always ready with sage advice.
And those two hot older sisters, who weren’t actually your sisters…
Wow, come to think of it, the Brady Bunch universe sounds like a pretty good place to me now. When do we leave?
Marvel executive producer Trinh Tran announces that Marvel will continue to place ideology before story:
“This is the first step to more diverse characters and franchises. I am hoping for more down the line. We have so many characters in the Marvel Universe, it’s a matter of picking which one makes sense to the MCU.”
Many of these self-appointed mavens of diversity seem to believe that they discovered the concept.
Let us not forget that Wonder Woman dates back to the 1940s. There were numerous black and female characters on the original Battlestar Galactica of the 1970s.
Diversity is all fine and good when it’s a natural outgrowth of story. Organic diversity, in other words.
But when diversity (or any purely ideological goal) becomes the focus, then story descends into agitprop.
Agitprop seems to be what Ms. Tran plans for Marvel.
In honor of the approaching Halloween holiday, and the 1980s (two of my favorite areas of culture), I present Michael Jackson’s old music video, Thriller.
Thriller was released in December 1983 on MTV. Watch the thing, and you’ll see that it is really more of a short film than a traditional music video. Many music videos of the golden age of MTV told little stories, but Michael Jackson’s Thriller set a new standard.
This is an example of what is possible in the realm of short-form storytelling. In a little less than fourteen minutes, Thriller tells several nested stories, and casts a spell on the viewer.
As with most any cultural artifact more than a decade old, it is tempting to look at Thriller with a jaundiced eye, and describe it as campy, trite, and overrated.
Those arguments are yours to make. I prefer to see this as an interesting artifact from a time when creative artists were still more interested in creativity than mouthing off about politics. Thriller is also a relic of a time when the late Michael Jackson was relatively “normal”—an era when his more extreme eccentricities were either subdued, or not yet metastasized.
Oh, and this is also a video from a time when MTV was much, much better. You kids today, you don’t know what you missed out on…in so many aspects of our culture.
Wendy’s, one of the few fast food chains I can stand, has announced that it will be rolling out a new breakfast menu.
If I am not mistaken, the company attempted something like this before (around the time that Ronald Reagan was president, I believe), and it didn’t go well. Perhaps the second time will be a charm.
I love McDonald’s breakfast burritos. But there is enough fat and carbs in those things to keep an entire construction crew working for an 8-hour day.
Or you could have a Panera egg, spinach, and artichoke souffle. Only 540 calories, with 35 grams of fat, and 36 grams of carbs. (If you aren’t into counting calories and such, suffice it to say that those numbers are really, really bad.) I eat those things, and I can literally feel my waistline expand.
I look forward to seeing what Wendy’s will offer on its breakfast menu, and whether or not it will be safe to eat without a cardiologist present.
That’s bad, you’ll say. Well, of course it is; but there is a little more to the story.
It seems that the BB&T Bank mistakenly deposited $120,000 into the account of Robert and Tiffany Williams of Montoursville. (A teller in Georgia entered the wrong account number.)
The Williamses saw the money and decided that it was a windfall of some sort…Or maybe they’d just been racking up some interest of late?
Actually, the Williamses knew the money wasn’t theirs. They shouldn’t have done what they did.
But there is an old saying about keeping honest people honest. When banks start throwing six figures’ worth of money around like that, maybe that amounts to a kind of entrapment—if not legally, then morally.
And I couldn’t help thinking: Wouldn’t a teller want to be absolutely certain about the account number before depositing a sum like that?
Anyway, be careful before you spend the money in your bank account. Thanks to bank errors like this one, it might not all be yours.
I will openly confess that social media has never really been my “thing”. And I think that most writers have an uneasy relationship with it, at best.
Most writers get onto social media and immediately want to promote their books.
“Hey! Buy my book!”
“Did you know I have a new book out?”
“Have you seen my new book? Here’s a link to it at Amazon, for your convenience!”
And so on…
Did you see what I wrote? Did you?
I’m not quite that tone-deaf. I have rarely attempted the outright sales pitch on social media. I will admit, however, a tendency to use social media exclusively for linking to this blog.
“Hey, read this post I wrote yesterday. You’ve got to read it. World-changing stuff, I’m telling you!”
This is why I rarely use Twitter. Twitter is a place where people bitch about politics, and discuss material written on external links…by other people. And then they bitch about politics some more. And post some more external links. “Did you see what so-and-so said/wrote/did? Here’s a link.”
I’m not interested in doing that. I always want to post links to my material.
This makes me a bad Twitter user.
Reddit is not for me
But if I’m a bad Twitter user, I would be even worse on Reddit. I wouldn’t even think about getting onto Reddit, in fact. According to the Reddit terms of service:
You should not just start submitting your links – it will be unwelcome and may be removed as spam, or your account will be banned as spam.
You should submit from a variety of sources (a general rule of thumb is that 10% or less of your posting and conversation should link to your own content), talk to people in the comments (and not just on your own links), and generally be a good member of the community.
And furthermore:
It’s perfectly fine to be a redditor with a website, it’s not okay to be a website with a Reddit account.
But the thing is, I would be a website with a Reddit account. I know that. This is why I stay the heck off Reddit.
My ratio would be the exact opposite of what Reddit prescribes. About 90% of my links would be to my own content.
On social media, it’s all about links…and brief, snarky comments
Think about it from my perspective: Why would I want to post only “10% or less” of my own content, when I write content all day? When I have so much of it to post.
You egotistical bastard, you might counter. What, do you think you’re smarter than everyone else on the Internet? Or a better writer, maybe?
My answer to that is: I’m smarter than some, not as smart as others. The same goes for being a better writer.
But there is another way to look at this. I remember the pre-social media days, when “webrings” were the thing. A common complaint back then focused on websites that consisted only of links—with no original content. Often you would go from website to website, finding nothing but lists of links.
That was considered bad netiquette back then. But Reddit and Twitter are all about linking to content you haven’t created. A complete flipflop of the Internet ethos.
This doesn’t mean that Reddit and Twitter are bad, mind you. I also understand the deeper reasons for the draconian “ten percent rule” at Reddit. The platform’s members don’t want to be overwhelmed with “buy my x!” posts, which would be the inevitable result otherwise.
But this is also why I mostly stay off Twitter and Reddit, and other social media platforms that are all about linking to external sources.
And why wouldn’t I link to my own stuff?
The bulk of my time is spent creating my own content. That leaves me relatively little time to gather and curate content written by others.
And yes, there is an unabashedly selfish side to this, as well: After I’ve spent a few hours working on an essay or a short story, will my first impulse be to link to something a stranger wrote? Or an article from USA Today?
Hell, no. My first impulse will be to link to what I wrote. That’s only natural.
Curator or creator: know which one you are
But there is also an unselfish side to this. The Internet needs people to curate content, but it also needs people to produce content. If no one produces, then eventually there is nothing to curate.
The key is to know which one you are—a content curator or a content creator.
If you’re primarily a content curator, Twitter and Reddit are for you.
If you’re primarily a content creator, then you should probably stay off Twitter and Reddit. Your time would be better spent working on your own books and blog posts.
Give the curators something to find. They’ll find your stuff…eventually.
Amazon has recently released a new version of its cheapest Kindle yet and it’s gotten slimmer compared to previous versions.
For only £69.99 in the United Kingdom or about $89.99, Kindle now has a better screen and front light as well as higher contrast and better touch screen, which were previously only available to more expensive Kindle versions.
This was also the first Kindle under £100 or $130 with a built-in adjustable front light, according to Eric Saarnio, head of the Amazon devices in Europe.
The article also reports the demand for e-reader devices has been down since 2015.
I don’t think this is because people have suddenly stopped e-reading. They are still reading ebooks. But now they’re reading them on their phones.
You may have noticed that smartphones seem to have hypnotic powers, transfixing people for long periods when they should be driving, stepping forward in line at the bank, or generally paying attention to what is going on around them.
Here’s some good news: According to a recent study, podcast and audiobook consumption are up; Facebook usage is down.
Other highlights include:
More than half the US population now reports having used YouTube specifically for music in last week. This number is now 70% among 12-34-year-olds.
The study shows an estimated 15 million fewer users of Facebook than in the 2017 report. The declines are heavily concentrated among younger people.
That sounds about right. Aside from music, YouTube has mostly been reduced to adolescent humor and political rants (both of which have their place, mind you, but not in unlimited doses.) YouTube is a great place to watch the latest Def Leppard video. (Hey, I’m from the ’80s.)
As for Facebook: I use it to keep in touch with old high school friends. Beyond that, I can skip it. (And my younger cousins, all of whom were born since 2000, have zero interest in Facebook.)
On the other hand, I love podcasts, love audiobooks. I still prefer reading. But you can listen to podcasts and audiobooks when you’re on the go.
Hachette reported that sales of digital audio rose 30% across its publishing operations and accounted for 2.7% of total revenue, up from 2.0% a year ago. Ebook sales fell in the United States and United Kingdom, but still represented 7.9% of revenue.
One would imagine that the other publishers experienced similar numbers.
Granted, 7.9% is not nothing, but it falls short of expectations..and previous hype. A few years ago, all the pundits were predicting the end of paper, and the triumph of the ebook…So far that hasn’t happened.
I see similar results in my own books. Since I released the paperback edition earlier this year, 12 Hours of Halloween has been selling almost as many copies in paperback as it does in Kindle.
Amazon will end a practice that threatened to put the company in the crosshairs of antitrust enforcers:
Amazon will no longer tell third-party merchants that sell products on its platform in the United States that they cannot offer the same goods for a lower price on another website, according to a person with direct knowledge of the company’s decision.
Why it matters: Critics have said the so-called “most favored nation,” or “price parity,” provisions could violate antitrust law. But even without them, the company still faces a broader set of attacks on its size and power in the United States and around the world.
I do most of my selling on Amazon, so this doesn’t affect me at the moment.
Nevertheless, I know authors who have received angry emails from Amazon when their books were discounted on other retail sites, often without their direct involvement, or even knowledge. (This seems to happen a lot on GooglePlay.)
Jeff Bezos is no idiot. He realizes that the 2020 Democratic challengers are are all lining up against the tech giants (especially Elizabeth Warren).
Donald Trump, too, has been less than friendly toward Amazon.
This is a far cry from 1998 or 2000, when no politician wanted to take a position against anything that was being done on the Internet, short of outright hate speech or child porn.
The Internet and ecommerce are just normal parts of the landscape now. Ergo, they now are fair game for politicians on both sides of the left-right divide.
Although most of what I write can be classified as neither science fiction nor fantasy, I’ve been a faithful weekly listener of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast for about three years now.
Joe Lallo, Lindsay Buroker, and Jeff Poole never fail to provide good insights on the art and business of writing.
This past week, they announced that they would be “taking a few months off”.
That of course leaves the door open for a return. If the history of other podcasts, blogs, and YouTube channels is a guide, however, “taking a few months off” is usually synonymous with quitting for good.
I shall be sorry to see them go. Nevertheless, I can understand if their hearts are no longer in the endeavor.
Sometimes a podcast, a YouTube channel, or a blog simply runs its course… Sometimes for the audience…and sometimes for the creator(s).
Notice that I said, per finished hour. That means not only reading the material, but also editing out obtrusive plosive sounds, loud breaths, and overly lengthy pauses. It means mastering the files to make sure they meet certain technical specifications.
According to some estimates, five to ten hours of work can be required to produce a finished hour of audio for an audiobook.
Audiobook production requires a material investment in both hardware and software. There is also something of a learning curve, as sound engineering is both an art and a science. To become competent in sound engineering isn’t quite as difficult as becoming an attorney or a heart surgeon (I won’t speculate about the difficulty of becoming a high-class call girl); but it isn’t exactly simple, either. There are many new concepts to absorb and understand. Unless you have worked with audio at the technical level in the past, all of these concepts will be completely unfamiliar to you.
So hopefully I’ve made clear: No one should be resentful of the narrators who charge $250 per finished hour to deliver store-ready audiobook files.
That said, $2,700~$3,300 represents a significant upfront investment for most indie authors. If you’ve got a backlist of ten books, that means that you could buy a new Toyota Corolla for what it would take to convert your entire library into audiobook format.
It is only natural, then, that some authors are asking the question: Why not just do this myself?
Why not, indeed? This brings us to the debate. There are plenty of reasons for doing it yourself…and for not doing it yourself. I don’t believe that there is an absolute, one-size-fits-all, right or wrong answer to this one. As is so often the case in this life, the only succinct answer is: It depends.
To begin with, the writer who seeks to produce her own audiobooks will have to be comfortable reading her own work in a very public way. Many writers are painfully shy. I am amazed at the number of writers who are terrified to appear on YouTube or on podcasts. Many are too shy to even post their author photos on Facebook or their Amazon author pages. These authors almost certainly won’t feel comfortable reading their own fiction, and that will show in the results.
Narrating an audiobook is also a unique skill, above and beyond other forms of public speaking. I don’t believe that professional theater training is a prerequisite, but it would certainly help. At the very least, no author should attempt to read his own work for audio without first having listened to hundreds of hours of audiobooks as a consumer. If you don’t like audiobooks, if you aren’t a consumer of audiobooks, then you have no business narrating them.
And then there’s the investment and technical side, which I’ve touched on above. Some writers embrace technology, others shrink from it. Can you learn about RMS, noise floors, and hard limits as eagerly as you learned about three-act structure? Are you willing to plunk down the money needed to purchase a computer with decent processing power, a high-quality mic, and other equipment? Are you willing to pay for Pro Tools or Adobe Audition software?…Oh, and are you also ready to ascend the learning curve that it takes to competently use them?
In regard to this last point, I would offer one piece of cautionary advice. On writer forums, I occasionally see writers state that they are overwhelmed by Scrivener (a popular non-linear word processing program designed for writers). If you’re overwhelmed by Scrivener, then you probably shouldn’t try to produce your own audiobooks.
(I don’t mean to imply that you’re an idiot, by the way, if you’re overwhelmed by Scrivener….But I do mean to imply that you aren’t very technically inclined if you’re overwhelmed by Scrivener….We all have our own strengths and weaknesses. I can run a six-minute mile; but I can’t make simple free throw shots on the basketball court with any degree of reliability. Know thy strengths, know thy weaknesses.)
That all said, there are plenty of reasons for embarking on self-production…if you have the basic aptitudes and willingness.
One of the big arguments for self-production is this: The job that you hire out might not be any better than the job you could do yourself, with a bit of preparation.
There are few formal barriers to entry to the narrator field. Anyone can hang out a shingle as a narrator nowadays. Many of the narrators you encounter in the marketplace might be only a few steps ahead of you…or possibly a few steps behind you.
Let’s start with the quality of the narration itself. If you’re going to hire Scott Brick (the narrator of most of the Clive Cussler novels, among many other books) then Scott Brick is almost certainly going to do a better job than you. By all means, hire Scott Brick. Scott Brick is not only a consummate professional, he’s a “brand”. (I’m far more likely to consider an audiobook from an unknown author if Scott Brick is the narrator.)
I don’t know what Scott Brick charges per hour, but it’s probably more than $250; and his schedule is likely booked months or years in advance. I am therefore going to assume that you won’t be hiring Scott Brick. You’re going to hire some narrator from the online marketplace, whom you’ve never heard of before.
I’ve listened to many samples from lesser known narrators on the Audible site. Most of them meet a basic level of competence; but the indie author might honestly ask: Is that voice, that quality of narration, worth $250 per hour?
On the technical side, some of the independent narrators seem to be just as tech-averse as the average indie author. Many seem to have backgrounds in acting. When you think of someone who is technically proficient, is a drama major the first person who comes to mind?
It might therefore be easier to just bite the bullet, and learn about RMS, noise floors, etc.
Yes, it’s hard…but not heart surgery hard. It’s more like building-your-own-backyard-deck, or learning-conversational-Spanish hard.
You also have the option of recording and editing the audio files yourself, then hiring out the final mastering—which is not free, but which is far cheaper, in most cases, than $250 per finished hour.
The quandary of whether or not to narrate one’s own audiobooks, then, is a uniquely personal one that every author needs to carefully assess.
Whichever way you go, audiobook production isn’t going to be easy or cheap. Accept that from the get-go, or don’t even start.
The question is: Given your priorities, proclivities, and resources, are you better to sacrifice ease (self-production), or are you better to sacrifice cheapness (outsourcing)?
That’s the decision that you have to make; and whichever one you choose, you’re likely to encounter a bit of buyer’s remorse if your audiobook sales don’t meet your expectations.
I recently finished reading this latest novel by John Grisham. This is a very good book, although it is a little different from John Grisham’s previous offerings.
The standard John Grisham novel goes something like this: An attorney has happened upon a scandal of some sort, usually involving a big pot of money. (The money may or may not be held in a numbered account in the Cayman Islands.)
The attorney faces some moral quandary. Maybe someone approaches the attorney looking for assistance. Perhaps the attorney is threatened himself. The perpetrators of the scandal are invariably mafiosos or the corrupt managers of some Big Evil Corporation.
In the end, the attorney makes the right decision, solves the problem, and saves the day.
I’m not knocking the standard John Grisham Formula, mind you. (On the contrary, John Grisham is one of my favorite authors.) But The Reckoning substantially deviates from that formula.
The Reckoning opens in the fictional town of Clanton, Mississippi, in 1946. Forty-three year-old Pete Banning, a successful farmer, respected local citizen, and decorated World War II POW, is about to commit an inexplicable homicide.
Banning drives into town, where he shoots the pastor of his Methodist church, Dexter Bell.
Banning is arrested and charged with murder. Of course. When questioned by the sheriff, he refuses to say why he did what he did.
Pete Banning’s young adult children plead with him, as does his older sister. But Banning simply won’t say why he murdered Dexter Bell.
It is also revealed that while Banning was away fighting the war (and presumed dead) Dexter Bell spent a lot of time with Pete’s wife, Liza. When the story opens, though, Liza has been sequestered away in a mental institution.
Suffice it to say (mild spoiler alert) that the outcome for Pete Banning is not a pleasant one. After Banning meets his fate, the story jumps back in time, to cover Pete’s exploits during the war, as a POW, and later a guerrilla fighter, in the embattled Philippines.
In the final section of the book, we finally learn why Pete Banning killed Dexter Bell.
No, I am not going to reveal the reason. I would, however, caution you against assuming the most obvious answer.
Although I liked this book quite a bit, many readers did not agree with me. The book seemed to upset many readers who were expecting the Grisham Formula. Here’s a 1-star review from Amazon:
Crappy, pointless mess:
If I were a writer and knew that I would have to give up money if I didn’t have a “book” on my publisher’s desk by a date certain, and time was up, this is the kind of load of crap I would dish up. What passes for a plot is meaningless: the whole book is fleshed out with WW II history that needn’t be narrated as fiction, and arcane minutiae of criminal and civil procedure that couldn’t be more boring and, moreover, is woefully inaccurate. I actually felt that I’d been tricked into reading this steamer by being bamboozled by Grisham’s reputation, on which I can’t comment. BORING!!!!!!
The Reckoning is not “boring”. But you do need something beyond the attention span of an eight year-old to enjoy it. In many ways, The Reckoning is more like something that Stephen Hunter or W.E.B. Griffin would have written.
To be fair to the readers who didn’t like this book: John Grisham has now been publishing novels for about thirty years. To put a personal spin on this, when Grisham published his very first book, the initially overlooked A Time to Kill (1989), your humble correspondent was a bright-eyed twenty-one year-old.
I am now a not-so-bright-eyed, world-weary fifty year-old. My concerns and preferences are not what they were thirty years ago. I am a different person. So are you…if you were even alive in 1989.
Why then, should we expect that John Grisham is the same writer that he was when George H.W. Bush was president? The Reckoning is not The Firm, Grisham’s breakout success of 1991.
Why should it be, though? The Firm was a long time ago.
Longtime writers almost always evolve. Sometimes readers like the changes, sometimes they don’t. I used to read Stephen King’s early novels over the course of two or three days. But starting with It (1986), King adopted a meandering, bloated style that is a sharp departure from the taut, economical storytelling of the novels he wrote in the 1970s, and the first half of the 1980s. I now struggle to get through a Stephen King novel. I’ve been working on The Outsider for several months now, reading it in bits and pieces, while I’m reading other books.
(But that’s just me: Some readers prefer the new Stephen King.)
If The Reckoning is any indication, Grisham is moving away from the legal potboiler, in the direction of the literary thriller. This pleases me…But it clearly doesn’t please everyone.
To recap: The Reckoning is a very good novel, but you should not begin it with an expectation that you are about to get another helping of the Grisham Formula. Be prepared for something new, and different.
And if you’re not open to something new and different from John Grisham, then you might want to skip this one, and reread The Firm or The Pelican Brief instead. They’re still very good books, too.
