Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
The problem with publishing? Clearly, not enough statistics.
Baseball has wins and losses, RBIs, home runs, strikeouts, saves and ERAs. But those are so twentieth century!
Today what matters is OBP (on base percentage), SLG (slugging average), TBs (total bases), DICE (defense-independent component ERA) and RF (range factor).
Continue reading “The Stats Solution”
Our desire to know the future seems limitless. Our ability to know it, however, is very limited. So how are we to satisfy those longings that even Snickers can’t satisfy? Here’s a clue: it’s not measuring how many hits you get when you Google something because everything gets a gazillion hits.
Continue reading “Don’t Just Spot the Future, Make the Future”
I’ve never been much of a mystery reader. And not much of a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast either. I found the Robert Downey Jr. movies enjoyable but not enthralling. Nonetheless I have become of megafan of the new Masterpiece Mysteries series. Definitely watch the premier of season two of Sherlock this Sunday. The writing is fabulous, the casting perfect, the production values high, the setting fresh (present-day London), the soundtrack terrific, the balance of humor and tension spot on.
Continue reading “Sherlock and Me”
I finally read my first e-book.
OK, call me late to the party, late adopter, troglodyte. Tell me, “Welcome to the twenty-first century.” Ask me if I have indoor plumbing.
So, here’s how it went.
Continue reading “I Finally Read My First e-Book”
How important is the title of a book when sending a proposal? Very important and not at all.
Sometimes a title can be so bad the editor can’t get past it and rejects the project before ever looking at the proposal seriously. A proposed title can also be so good that it sets expectations sky high. But often the title doesn’t help or hinder, so the editor has to engage the proposal to make a determination.
Continue reading “A Book by Any Other Name”
“We used to do that with a slide rule.”
Blank stare. “What’s a slide rule?”
“It’s a device they used before calculators to do division, multiplication, square roots, squares and trig functions.”
Blank stare.
Continue reading “Slide Rules and Blank Stares”
Massive box office smash. Best selling books. What’s the appeal of The Hunger Games? My take is that boys love the action. The girls love it as a romance. The guys love it as a video game/reality show mashup with not-so-virtual violence. The girls love the idea of being torn between and pursed by two courageous, honorable hunks, especially as that is played out more in the second and third books.
Continue reading “Hungry for The Hunger Games?”
Postmodernism tells us there is no purely objective observer. We all have a bias when we come to a subject, no matter how well trained we might be in science or law or history. This would seem to be a rather difficult problem to overcome. How do we say something is true when it will inevitably be colored by our own perspectives?
Continue reading “Not a Straight Story Line”
Kitty Genovese was murdered in Kew Gardens in Queens, New York, forty-eight years ago today. It rocked the nation. The New York Times article about the incident famously began, “For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.”
Continue reading “Murder, Apathy and Urban Legends”
Would you join me in a thought experiment? What if you had to answer the following questions?
Continue reading “What If You Wanted to Publish?”