Here’s The Stripes, a Japanese dance troupe, performing the tap dance that appears at the end of the movie Zatoichi.
If you’ve never seen the film, go find a copy. ’tis brilliant. Enjoy!
Friday already? Wow, that week went *fast*.
Anyway, while I’ve been writing, I’ve been reading around on eBooks (as you might have noticed from a previous post), publishers, and publishing in general. The prevalent advice I keep reading about marketing any product is that you need to have at least a basic understanding of the market you’re going to be pitching into (eventually).
I was amazed the other day when I came across a struggling, would-be writer who had decided that he had had enough of refusals, and was instead going to publish through a vanity press. I even went and found the vanity press website, because I was intrigued as to how much he paid, and what he got for it. Stunning stuff. Perhaps I should say frightening. I went hunting, and found it listed on Amazon, with a “look inside” feature and everything, which means he paid at least $1100 for all that, and if that’s the case there are only 10 copies in existence. Why even bother going for an Amazon listing (including fake author review – lol) when you could run 10 copies off on a laser printer for pennies?
Hopefully I’ll never become that desperately self-deluded, or at least I hope my friends and family will come together to slap some sense into me if I ever verge upon it.
Back to the Word document while I wait for this fridge engineer to show up. Maybe I’ll make a coffee first, though…
…nope, never mind, he’s arrived and is now tinkering. Moving the fridge reveals that the previous tenant apparently opened a bag of crisps and distributed a pile of them under it. EWWWWW. Coffee on hold for the moment while I gag.
Let’s ignore for a moment that the Kindle, Amazon’s wonder-engine that will push the world forward into the future of publishing is not available outside of the US. Let’s ignore, also, that the current level of control Amazon hold over content distribution on the Kindle is a God-damned joke.
Back in March, I got a Sony PRS-505 eBook reader for Lisa, for her birthday. I had high hopes for the format. I still do.
But really, who pays £200 for a reader when there’s no financial incentive to purchase content for it?
Fair enough, I didn’t expect publishers to want to pass on the savings immediately, I mean, the financial sector isn’t keen on it, so why should an industry with a notorious margin of 4-5%? But when eBook content is more expensive than the same title in hardback, it kind of takes the biscuit.
For the record, I doubt eBooks will ever replace print as a medium. Not entirely. But until we see some real incentives to start the ball rolling on getting eBooks into the mainstream consciousness, they will remain distinctly on the fringe of things.
Sadly, Amazon and Sony’s DRM-heavy content models do nothing but push the ball back up the hill a bit. Now the Associated Press have started pitching a DRM format for news reports, replete with nonsensical diagrams that explain in no real manner how this micropayment/subscription-based system with lo-jack tracking of your reading habits is different from any other, previous system, or that it will work at all. It’s snake oil, essentially. Those naughty news pirates won’t stealz your intarwebs, it cries. People smarter than me are already picking it apart, and mocking it for the sham it is.
Or tie a bit of string round it, like with a skin tag.
Went to the doctor today to get a mole removed, but it turns out the days of sloshing liquid nitrogen over it (I had a mole on my stomach removed in this manner when I was 18) are long gone, and I now have to sit on the waiting list for a surgical clinic where they can cleave it from my flesh and then send it off to be tested for malignancy.
Lovely.
You’ve got to wonder what they are teaching medics these days when the doc asks to have a look at your back, you expose said expanse of skin and she then JABS her finger into you and asks, “THIS ONE?” Well, duh…I guess the circular lump of melanocytic skin sitting in a field of pasty whiteness wasn’t a big enough clue on its own, and poking it with savage eagerness was required as well.
I should really go write something.
In the space of eight days I’ve written 11,000 words of a story that was, in its germ-of-an-idea state, bugging the shit out of me while I was trying to get to sleep at nights. Now it bugs me less, but I still lie awake thinking of the plot and where best to put the time-jumps. It’s better than playing Advance Wars in my head, I guess, and arguably more productive than spending the time playing other games, but I guess that’s a point of view until I can get something into publishable form.
Anyway. The Manchester Fiction Prize entry is *in*. I am now fifteen quid poorer because of it, but here’s hoping something good happens. Even if it doesn’t win (or get shortlisted, probably the best hope) I can try and use it somewhere else, although at nearly 5,000 words it’s a touch long for most competitions. I’ll keep it in hand anyway and maybe something will crop up.
PS in the first draft, for some reason I decided that the word to describe a germ state was ‘germinal‘. I am a moron.
OK, so you see a guy riding on a bike with his son in a child seat on the back. The road is maybe a little too busy for that, you think, so what do you do?
Pull a gun and shoot him in the head, of course. (found via boingboing.net)
I love how real life perpetually conspires to make things like CSI seem plausible and understated.
Anyway, I just finished reading Isabel Allende’s Zorro. It’s really entertaining, colourful writing. I was kind of wary at first because, once translated from the Spanish, the writing is really heavy with bold, declarative sentences that feel a little too strong. However, I soon got used to it and was really won over by the strong thread of humour that runs through the entire piece, preventing it from getting bogged down by the descriptive passages. To give an example, when introducing Juliana and Isabel, there’s a page of description of the former that would feel clunky and overly emphatic on its own. However, Allende follows it with an equal but contrary description of the flaws of the latter. It’s funny and brilliantly constructed and totally at odds with my normal expectation of how the best character portraits are put together.
The lesson? Read more, shoot people in the head…less.
Meanwhile, our fridge/freezer has died and the letting agents who are contractually bound to replace it are playing at being incommunicado. Oh the joy of it!
We went to the cinema to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I always feel a little embarrassed when I come out of the showing and everyone is playing the “so what did you think?” game*and I know that some of my friends loved the movie whereas I couldn’t wait to get out of the cinema. That said, I had already sat through a meal where two of the people at the table discussed how much they loved Twilight (as a book, not the film) and I buried myself in my food to avoid having to comment, so I really should have been expecting the question.
As movies go, it felt emotionally dead. It’s great looking, certainly, and the screenwriters have done a decent job of extracting the majority of the salient plot points from a pretty long book and packed them into a reasonable amount of screen time, but I just wasn’t caught up in the story. The story can no longer really be carried by the efforts of the adults (although I still enjoy seeing Alan Rickman streeeeetching out his lines to breaking point) and it’s almost too much to expect from the still-growing talents of the younger cast (mind you, they’re all about twenty now, so maybe I should revise the description). Daniel Radcliffe has some great moments, and seems to cope a lot better when he’s given something lighter to handle, but in the end it’s not enough to sweep us along. I got the feeling that the movie was depending on prior emotional investment primarily through the novels, and possibly through the earlier movies – although if the latter was their intention then the release delay pretty much killed that stone dead for me.
At home, we watched the Bollywood hero movie, Krrish. That was quite fun, although I’m still unable to cope with the devastating length of Bollywood movies. It’s amazing that Hollywood churns out crap like Elektra (I’m not even providing a link for that guff) and meanwhile there are movies like this that are full of humour, charm and romance.
At the opposite end of the scale, we watched Monster. Not an easy watch, and super-grim. By the end of it, I was starting to wonder what I was meant to take away from the experience, aside from the advice that if Bruce Dern tells you to do something, you’d better bloody listen. Silent Running 4 lyfe, yo.
*where you try and see what everyone else thought before you accidentally look like an idiot who didn’t “get” the film.
Been wandering around all day with a head like an angry bear, due to waking up with a headache I’ve been unable to shift. Always fun.
I kind of flaked out on making dinner last night, and Lisa ended up cooking her own, so to redress things I made a nice lunch today of soba noodles in broth. I always get a bit frightened cooking Japanese food, as my normal approach to seasoning is the classic student approach of adding enough fistfuls of pepper/garlic/chillies to completely kill every other flavour and claiming that you have created a dish with bold, invigorating flavours.
Since we ran out of instant dashi, I had to make my own stock. It’s kind of awesome, as it involves boiling kombu and dried, flaked bonito in water and then straining off the resulting liquid. What you end up with is water with a pale, pale yellow tinge to it, and the slight odour of fish – basically the total opposite of what my cooking instincts would consider suitable stock (maybe with some garlic and chillies, though…). So I added mirin, salt, sugar and soy sauce, then tasted, then a little more mirin, then tasted, then a little more sugar, then tasted, and then I thought to myself that if I kept on with the tasting and adding, I was going to gallop away from the light, refreshing broth I was meant to be aiming for. So I stopped, and instead made the noodles.
One of my only real gripes about Wagamama is that they purport to serve a number of soba dishes, but they use the same noodles they use for their ramen and just call it soba. I did call my server’s attention to the discrepancy once, just to be an awkward little bastard, but it was like telling a termite that its nest is two feet too far to the right of where it should be. Anyway, I found some actual soba noodles in Sainsbury’s, which led to me deciding to make them for lunch.
I was really tempted to go for the classic cold noodles and cold broth to dip them in, but I know Lisa’s tastes tend towards a hot meal such as ochazuke (rice covered in green tea) or ramen that she can guzzle down.
So, yeah! Soba noodles in broth, with spring onions on top. Yum. I’d have taken a picture but we ate it all up in about a minute flat.
Very grumpy this morning. I was brewing up a cup of the really nice tea that Lisa bought for me, and I was just about to add some sugar when suddenly I had this weird, unconscious spasm, that made me jerk both hands up suddenly. No idea what brought it on, but the end result was that I hit myself in the face with a full box of sugar, emptying the contents over myself and the kitchen floor.
So I spent the rest of the morning playing ‘hunt the sugar’ before cleaning out the hoover and then sneezing my head off because cleaning out the hoover aggravates my hay fever. Lovely.
One thing I forgot to mention about my trip to London was that before we left, I made sure to read through sections 1,2 and 3 of the PACE Act, and section 44 of the Terrorism Act so that I was fully aware of my rights should I, or anyone else I was with, get stopped by the police for photographing a bin or some other meaningless reason.
