In the spring of 1986 I was a senior in high school. My honors English teacher, Mrs. Bollmer, assigned our class Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play, Cyrano de Bergerac. As part of the study of the play, we also watched the 1950 film adaptation starring José Ferrer.
Since I was a 17-going-on-18-year-old boy, I naturally focused on the play’s romantic plot, the homely Cyrano’s pursuit of the lovely but vapid Roxane, who is in love with the handsome but vapid Christian de Neuvillette. (Note for male readers: Cyrano’s method of wooing Roxane is not likely to yield any more satisfying a result in the real world than it did in the play.)
The awkward love plot is a necessary contrivance for a stage drama. What Cyrano de Bergerac is really about, though, is finding your individuality—and personal integrity—in an anonymizing world that seeks to crush both.
And in this regard, the play is relevant to everyone: men, women, the old, the young, and everyone in between.
This theme was certainly relevant in 1986, but that was long before the internet, social media, or the culture wars as we know them today. American culture, politics, and intellectualism were not without their flaws in those days, but they were generally better than they are today.
Take politics. When I was a young man, I thought that I was a liberal. As I entered full adulthood, I thought that I was a conservative. In the political landscape of 2026, I am simply an outsider. My opinions won’t please the personality cult of the MAGA base; nor would I fit in among the lemmings on Bluesky, who compliantly use unnecessary neologisms in the name of political correctness.
In the words of Shakespeare’s Mercutio, “A plague o’ both your houses!”
Listen to Cyrano’s monologue above (from the 1950 film adaptation). Now, more than ever, you need to find your inner Cyrano. Acquiescence to the whims and default opinions of the crowd probably wasn’t a good idea even in 1986. But today such acquiescence is toxic, and destructive to both the individual and society.
The internet has officially declared that Two Minutes Hate will be exercised daily for Keith Ervin, the Tennessee school board official who hugged a 17-year-old female student and told her she was “hot”. Ervin has also been charged with assault.
The incident itself (you can watch it on video) was certainly eyebrow-raising and inappropriate. Did it rise to the level of assault? The hugged girl subsequently gave a speech about how offended she was, and this is not the first time Ervin has been in hot water over similar actions. Make of it what you will.
I’m not here to defend Keith Ervin, or to brand him a combination of Osama bin Laden, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Attila the Hun (as so much of the internet seems intent on doing). I’ll address this from a more practical perspective.
Modern life requires one to read the zeitgeist. In 1985, the year I turned seventeen, 17-year-olds were considered “almost adults”. We did not want to be classified as “children”.
Also in 1985, an older man could have gotten away with referring to a 17-year-old girl as “hot” without a national emergency being declared. (But even then, it would have raised some eyebrows.)
This is not 1985. This is 2026. Older teens are now widely regarded as “little children”. The country is in the throes of pedophile hysteria, with the definition of “pedophile” being expanded weekly. A 50-year-old man who expresses amorous appreciation for a 25-year-old might well be branded a pedophile in the current climate; so what the heck did Keith Ervin think he was doing, making such a remark to a 17-year-old?
I graduated from college in 1991, the year of the Tailhook scandal, and the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. I have heard that corporate workplaces were freewheeling, Wild West environments in the 1980s; but I was a teenager then. Sexual harassment avoidance indoctrination was part of my workplace training from my very first day on the job.
The message I received in such training was simple: when in doubt, don’t do it. Don’t say hello to that pretty coworker who ignored you the last time. And—for Heaven’s sake—don’t tell her she’s pretty. That’s an immediate firing offense. Keep your eyes forward at all times. Adopt the air of a polite eunuch.
And this is in a workplace environment with only adults. I haven’t been in a K-12 classroom since 1986. But the behavioral standards in an educational environment, with minors present, must be all the more stringent.
In other words, there is really no excuse for making a mistake like this in 2026—not unless one has been living under a rock for the past 35 years. Keith Ervin is around sixty years old. He had plenty of time to get the memo. What was he thinking?
There are many things I don’t like about how indie publishing has evolved under the influence of the “gurus”. One of these is the practice of review-begging.
(Note: Dean Wesley Smith gets credit for inventing the term review-begging. But it is too apt not to coin.)
Online review culture is a fact of publishing. As one of my former corporate bosses told me, “you can’t stop people from talking.”
And allow me to be clear here: there is nothing inherently wrong with readers getting together in spaces like Goodreads (or on Amazon, for that matter) to discuss their reactions to various books. This is no different from people discussing their preferences for anything else in the online world.
Online reader reviews, like everything else one finds online, is a mixed bag. Your mileage may vary.
I’ve seen some reader reviews that are extremely thoughtful.
On the other hand, I once saw a reader review that gave a book a one-star rating because the book did not have any dragons, and that reader only read books with dragons. Okie dokie.
I came across another reader review that gave a book a one-star rating because a dog happened to die in the book. The one-star reviewer then pointed out that he “didn’t read books in which animals die.” (One assumes that this particular fellow never read Old Yeller.)
I reiterate: there is nothing wrong with any of this. Everyone has a right to broadcast their opinion on the internet. (That’s sort of what I’m doing now, isn’t it?)
What is deleterious is that a handful of indie author “gurus” have convinced writers that they must behave like Instagram models. They must constantly primp and wheedle for reader reviews and ratings, like a teenager desperate for approval. There have been cases of writers giving away cash prizes, Kindles, and even laptops in exchange for reader reviews. The whole thing has become absurd.
And as is always the case, there is no easier mark than an indie author who is eager for success. The practice of review-begging has given birth to a cottage industry, eagerly filled by companies that make money by putting indie-published books in front of advanced reader copies (ARC) readers. The only qualification of said ARC readers is that they are willing to give their opinions about books online. What could possibly go wrong?
On the contrary, I have learned to actively distrust review averages on Amazon. Some of the best books I’ve read in recent years have had middling 3.5-star review averages. On the other hand, some of the astro-turfed 5-star average books have been mediocre at best.
(Note: whenever you see the reviews for a trad-pubbed book, you can assume that the review averages have been gamed in one way or another.)
I reiterate again: I have no desire to censor, quell, or discourage anyone from expressing their opinion about a particular book, movie, television show, or piece of music. That’s the consumer side of the equation. I’m opining from the creator side now.
When you start writing for the folks who are the most vocal online, you’re not just writing by committee (which is bad enough). You’re also writing for people who may not even be your primary readership. Most avid readers seldom review, or even rate, books. They’re too busy reading.
This is why I’m no fan of review-begging, or the self-appointed gurus who advocate for the practice.
As this video from Coin Bureau Finance explains, the OnlyFans gold rush is already over, and more changes are coming. The platform is inherently risky for investors and credit card processors; but that isn’t the only problem. The OnlyFans ecosystem is also subject to the aggregating forces that are present in any creator-based economy.
Henceforth, OnlyFans will likely be moving in two directions, neither of which is promising for the much-ballyhooed individual creator on the platform.
The first is the superstar creator. Often this will be a celebrity. Recently, there has been an influx of aging female celebrities joining OnlyFans. These are actresses who have aged out of leading-lady roles (don’t look for Sydney Sweeney or Zendaya to join anytime soon) but who are still young and attractive enough to draw in millions of simps with credit cards. Shannon Elizabeth is the most famous recent example, but she is far from alone.
The second direction is that of the AI-powered OnlyFans agency. In these cases, there may be a real live human female somewhere, providing some of the content. Increasingly, however, content that does not feature a celebrity will rely on artificial intelligence.
And according to the above video, artificial intelligence is already powering many OnlyFans accounts. The thirsty males who plunk down their credit cards each month think that they are gaining access to the woman on the other side of the screen. In reality, they are most likely chatting with a woman (or possibly even a man) in a call center-like facility in the Philippines or Vietnam.
Which brings us to another familiar realization: OnlyFans subscribers really are a gullible, pathetic bunch of men.
David Van Dyke Stewart is waxing pessimistic about the state of indie publishing. In his view, indie publishing is so threatened by AI slop and genre slop that it is no longer worth doing anymore.
He announces in the video below that he intends to “step away” from indie publishing. He’s even flirting with the idea of unpublishing some of his existing novels, because he does not want to be associated with some of the ridiculous excesses that we now see in indie publishing.
A part of me fully sympathizes. As I’ve written previously, I can hardly stand to enter indie writing groups on Facebook anymore. 90% of the authors participating in such spaces are now writing shifter romances, reverse harem—and similarly ridiculous books adorned with man chests. Then there are the dogs and cats solving mysteries, the witch cozies, etc. It is possible for one to feel ridiculous by association.
As for AI…yes, that is a problem of an entirely different magnitude.
And yet…I remain optimistic, if not in the short run, then at least in the long run.
Why? Because I’ve seen this movie before. I remember almost twenty years ago, how everyone was predicting that the entire internet would be taken down—not by AI, but by content farms.
For those of you who don’t remember (or who are a little fuzzy) on the history, content farms were junk sites that were hastily written to maximize clicks in Google search results, and thereby maximize AdSense income. For a few years they represented a real threat to the integrity of the internet.
But the content farms eventually went the way of the pterodactyl. Google changed its algorithm. Search engine users became more discriminating, and learned to recognize query results that led to content farms. The economic incentive for the content farms went away.
That’s what I expect to happen with AI slop (and—to some degree—genre slop). How long can it remain profitable to turn out template-driven trashy romance novels, for instance? Even for the voracious porn/romance readership?
And once you throw AI into the mix, the race to the unprofitable bottom is inevitable. I look for the genre slop writers, and the AI slop producers, to eventually be driven out by their own excesses.
One irony here is that AI slop and genre slop have a mutually destructive, symbiotic relationship. Template-driven, repetitive genre novels are the easiest to produce with various AI programs.
What does concern me is that before it all goes away, it will completely undermine the Kindle Unlimited ecosystem. This is a real threat in the short- to mid-term.
But I don’t look for AI and genre slop to take down indie publishing as an industry. As long as the internet has existed, there have been both outright scammers and individuals who seek to maximize profit by turning out low-effort, repetitive content. That problem is not going to go away. One bag of tricks will simply be replaced by another.
The rest of us will soldier on. As for David Van Dyke Stewart, I hope that he soldiers on, too. I haven’t read any of his novels; but I have watched some of his YouTube content. He strikes me as a thoughtful fellow.
Way back in 1973, a French writer named Jean Raspail penned a dystopian novel called. Le Camp des Saints, or The Camp of the Saints in English.
The Camp of the Saints presented an overwhelmingly negative view of mass immigration. The thesis of the novel was that Western societies are being destroyed from without by mass immigration, and from within by those who are sympathetic toward the waves of immigrants from the developing world.
Whether you agree with that argument or not, it is not exactly an original idea. Perhaps it was in 1973. It is certainly not an original idea in 2026.
Jean Raspail’s more than 50-year-old novel had long ago passed into obscurity, at least within the English-speaking world. Then a group of busybodies on Reddit learned of the book’s existence, and decided that here, alas, was an opportunity to engage in some performative outrage.
Members of the subreddit r/bannedbooks worked themselves into a lather, then pooled their efforts to get the book temporarily removed from the virtual shelves at Amazon. (Demonstrating the lack of self-awareness that is typical of such folks, they failed to see the ironic connection between the name of their subreddit, and the fact that they were actively seeking a book ban. But I digress.)
The Amazon book removal was quickly overturned, of course. But the controversy generated interest in a book that no one would have heard of otherwise. As a result, The Camp of the Saints skyrocketed to best-seller status at Amazon, finally peaking at #6.
If we didn’t know better, we might suggest that this was a false-flag publicity stunt, perpetrated by the original publishers of The Camp of the Saints. But we do know better, because we’ve seen this before.
The 2010s were the high point of the “social justice book mob”. This is how it worked in those days: A member of the so-called “book community”, who was active on social media, would find a passage, theme, or character in a novel that could be broadly interpreted as “racist”.
They would then make some posts on social media decrying the evils of the book, and stir up an online mob. The online mob would do the rest.
Such mobs were particularly common in YA fantasy literature. Notable mob targets from a little less than a decade ago include: The Black Witch by Laurie Forest and Blood Heir by Amélie Wen Zhao.
Sometimes these mobs did real damage. Amélie Wen Zhao was so traumatized by the outcry against Blood Heir that she briefly delayed the publication of the book.
But patience with the social justice book mobs eventually ran thin for two reasons. The first was that, like most mobs, they overplayed their hand. Chinese American author Amélie Wen Zhao was no one’s idea of a white supremacist. The claims against her and her book were so ridiculous that almost no one could take them seriously.
Secondly, there was the “unintentional false flag” effect. Cancel mobs have repeatedly proven themselves effective at promoting the books, films, and artists that are their targets. The recent success of The Camp of the Saints is the most recent case in point.
I’m in my 50s. I haven’t read much YA fiction for many, many years. The last time I was in that market, Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys were cutting edge. I heard about The Black Witch and Blood Heir, though—because the online morality patrol was loudly denouncing these books in public.
This works both ways, of course. Almost thirty years ago, I heard about Heather Has Two Mommiesbecause conservatives were kvetching about a children’s book that portrayed LGBTQ families and parents in an approving manner.
None of the above is meant to imply that we shouldn’t debate controversial social issues. We should, however, not get too worked up about the impact of “message art”. This is true for you, too, regardless of where you stand on the political continuum.
Novels and films with political messages are most impactful early on, when no one has yet named the issue in public, often out of public reticence about a topic. Heather Has Two Mommies might have been able to make that claim when it was first published in 1989. Today, however, a book or film describing LGBTQ individuals in hagiographic terms is so commonplace that we merely shrug and move on. Likewise, it has been virtually impossible to write an original novel or screenplay about race in America for at least 30 years. The topic has literally been done to death.
Beyond the earliest stages, message films and novels usually devolve into repetitions of well-worn talking points. In this way, most message art is derivative, just like most political speech.
Outrage over such materials now also follows a predictable pattern, as the recent bestseller status of The Camp of the Saints demonstrates. Here is the takeaway: if you don’t like what a particular book or movie is saying (or seems to be saying), your best course of action is to ignore it. In this era of online cancel mobs and counter-cancel mobs, all your efforts to censor a work of art will be in vain. You will only contribute to its popularity, which may have been a long shot otherwise.
One of you asked me the other day which online writers’ group I recommend. Many of these groups exist on Facebook.
Ten years ago I would have been able to heartily recommend several of them.
Today, there are none that are very useful to me. Here’s the problem.
Over the last five years, the online writers’ groups have become inundated with writers of “spicy” (i.e., sexually explicit) romance and outright erotica (i.e., even more sexually explicit material).
Now let me be clear here. I am no prude. Oh…far, far from it. I am quite sure that some of my off-hours activities would shock and/or offend the prudish among you.
But there is a limit to how much I enjoy talking about sex, writing about sex, and creating stories around it. My tolerance for that sort of thing is fairly limited.
I don’t like sex stories for the same reason I don’t like pornographic videos: watching other people have sex is a bit like watching other people eat.
Similarly, talking about sex is like talking about eating. I eat lunch every day. But I don’t wish to spend more time discussing my lunch than I spend actually eating it. I have a similar approach to matters of the bedroom. Some of these writers and their readers need to spend less time with their noses in books, and more time with living, breathing people. (Nothing cures a chronic preoccupation with sex like a little of the real thing.)
From a business perspective, the marketing of romance/erotica has much more to do with the marketing of OnlyFans or other pornographic material than it does with traditional book marketing. A person who picks up a Michael Connelly novel is not responding to the same motivations as a person who watches pornographic videos, or who reads pornographic stories.
No ill will for all the “spicy” romance and erotica writers out there, mind you. But they’ve made the online writing space more or less useless for everyone else, with their sheer numbers.
Draft 2 Digital is a company that provides indie authors and small publishers with a single interface for “wide” distribution of ebooks to a host of online retailers. The company has historically taken a small percentage of sales revenues in exchange for its services.
But in recent years, AI slop has invaded and overwhelmed the publishing world. There is now an entire online ecosystem of low-content and junk content churned out by AI writing tools. This “book spam” is clogging up online bookstores and retailers with content that no one is ever going to buy in any meaningful quantity. And with AI tools, the book spammers can do this at scale.
To make matters worse, there is also now an ecosystem of YouTube and TikTok hucksters, teaching others how to “make millions!” with these techniques. This is like the content farm problem of the 00s, but exponentially larger.
Draft2Digital has addressed the problem in a number of ways. Some time ago, the company announced that it will no longer handle nonfiction titles covering topics that are low-hanging fruit for spammers (exercise, cryptocurrency, diet, and various New Age subject matter).
D2D also announced that it will begin charging a $20 set-up fee for new accounts, along with a $12 per year account maintenance fee for any publishers who earn less than $100 per year.
In other words, less than $8.33 per month.
Needless to say, there are people kvetching about this on the Internet. As for me, I am 100% in favor of it.
This is not because I want to see more fees for their own sake. But rather because something needs to be done about the sheer volume of online garbage.
And when I use terms like “online garbage”, I’m not talking about stories and books that don’t suit my taste. Hey, if someone has labored over their billionaire, reverse-harem cowboy hockey player romance novel, and they want to publish that, let them go for it. (Although to be perfectly honest, I would prefer that they didn’t. The romance genres have become as trashy as Pornhub in recent years. But I digress.)
I’m talking, rather, about the low-content and extremely low-effort books produced, often with AI tools, for the sole purpose of manipulating bookstore algorithms and exploiting subscription services like Kindle Unlimited. No one benefits from the presence of that—including the authors of billionaire, reverse-harem cowboy hockey player romance novels.
A modest per-book monthly or annual nuisance fee would prune the sheer volume of junk that is accumulating on online bookstores. (Listen to Mal Cooper’s video below.)
I know the nature of the internet. There are people out there who believe that anything on the Internet should always be free, no matter what it is, and no matter what costs are associated with it, simply because it’s on the Internet. That’s an argument that goes back at least 25 years, to the original debates over file-sharing and NAPSTER.
But AI slop threatens to undermine, if not destroy, indie publishing. Online retailers and distributors will never have the manpower to meticulously vet every title. In lieu of that, per-title maintenance fees may be a necessary evil for combating AI slop.
The early 1980s gave us a famous song named after a phone number: “867-5309”. Even if you do not remember the early 1980s, you are probably familiar with the song.
The song was alternatively known as “Jenny”. Often the song was identified with both names: 867-5309/Jenny.
In the song, a male narrator describes his obsession with a woman named “Jenny”, whose phone number (867-5309) was written on a wall, presumably in a men’s room. (That was a common prank back in the 1970s and early 1980s—writing random women’s names and phone numbers on the walls of men’s rooms. Don’t ask me why.)
Tommy Tutone is the name of the musical act that performed 867-5309.
Tommy Tutone is not a single artist, but a California-based group. The original lineup of Tommy Tutone was formed in 1978. The band still exists today. Tommy Tutone released six studio albums between 1980 and 2019. But the band owes most of its name recognition to 867-5309.
867-5309/Jenny was released on November 16, 1981. By the end of the following year, everyone with an FM radio had heard it.
867-5309 was, and remains, a cultural phenomenon. Not everyone was pleased about the song’s fame, however. After the song became popular, homeowners who happened to have been assigned the number began receiving prank phone calls. Many changed their numbers. Some even unplugged their phones in desperation.
Still others went out of their way to acquire the suddenly famous seven digits. Now that the initial fervor over the song has long since died down, this is the more common trend. It would probably be difficult—if not impossible—for you to obtain 867-5309 as your personal phone number. But your odds will increase in less populated areas, and as the time between the heyday of the song and the present year continues to grow.
In late 1981, I was in the eighth grade in Cincinnati, Ohio. One morning—it must have been a few weeks before the Christmas holidays—I heard a girl in my homeroom say my name. When I turned around, she had a smile on her face. I sensed good things ahead. Continue reading “867-5309, and a lesson in the value of skepticism “
The book haul video is a thing on the Japanese corners of YouTube, just as it is among English-language booktubers.
As in English, the Japanese book haul video (and the entire booktuber sector) is dominated by young women. No complaints here, except to point out that men of all ages, in all countries, should read more.
I have not been to Japan for more than a decade now. One thing I really miss about being in Japan is browsing bookstores, and looking for new books to read.
Even with the Internet, the acquisition of Japanese-language reading materials remains something of an ordeal in the United States. The US division of Amazon stocks relatively few Japanese-language titles. The demand simply isn’t there.
At the same time, US-based, independently owned mail-order Japanese bookstores have mostly gone out of business. This is yet another case of the Internet ruining a business model without providing an acceptable substitute.
I recall Sasuga Bookstore of Cambridge, Massachusetts with particular fondness. I purchased many books from them throughout the 1990s and early 00s. (Sasuga closed its doors for good in 2010. 残念でした.)
I am a diehard fanatic of only a handful of books, movies, and musical oeuvres. And I evangelize only a subset of those.
For example, I love the music of Rush and Iron Maiden; but I don’t consider the appeal of these bands to be universal, by any means. Likewise, I realize that a coming-of-age movie that spoke volumes to me in 1984 might not have the same significance for a teenager of 2024. Or for a Boomer who was a teenager in 1964, for that matter.
But everyone should see The Americans.
The Americans is part family saga, part period drama, and part espionage thriller. The show is set in both America and Russia during the last decade of the Cold War.
I watched The Americans in its entirety during the show’s original primetime run on FX from 2013 to 2018. During those years, I looked forward to each new episode.
I loved the series so much, I recently decided to watch it again. But as is so often the case with these modern conveniences of ours, the situation has been made less convenient than it would have been in pre-Internet days. No longer do non-primetime shows circulate to rerun syndication in non-primetime hours. They move to paid streaming platforms.
If you want to see all six seasons of The Americans in 2024, you have several options. You can pay to download each episode from Amazon, or you can purchase a subscription to Hulu, where the series is now streaming.
Or you can purchase the complete series on DVD. I determined this to be my best and most cost-effective option. The above package arrived on my doorstep from Amazon yesterday.
I look forward to watching this series again from beginning to end. And if you haven’t yet seen The Americans, you might consider buying the DVDs, too. They are still in stock on Amazon.
