Thrillers: How to Write One, by the Experts If you have dreams of penning one of those glitzy novels with a blurry cover image of someone running, presumably for their life, here's the ultimate how-do-you-do. Culled from the wisdom of ThrillerFest, held in Manhattan this month, comes advice from some of the top hitters in the field. Good advice, not to be missed… (Library Journal 18 July 2011)

    Dennis Latham: Today's Funniest Writer, also Scariest. More than a decade ago, several story submissions from Dennis Latham, a Marine Corps and U.S. Postal Service combat veteran entrenched in a small Indiana town near Cincinnati, Ohio, caught our attention at Deep Outside SFFH (later Far Sector SFFH)—historic online magazines of speculative and dark fiction. Dennis Latham's novels and short stories, including Jumpers and Shrieks, reach a level of classic accomplishment that would be appropriate with the best of Hitchcock. An excellent collection of his short stories is Sudden Victims—the marketing blurb at Amazon says it all: "…On the Alternate Reality Train…You'll meet ghosts and demons, killers and warriors, the psychotic and the suicidal, the good, the bad, the innocent and the tormented…Discover why a man's friends commit suicide when he's with them. Find out what happens when shadows bite. Spend a night in jail with a body dragged from the river. Witness the long term effect war inflicts on the warriors. Visit a gambling boat with a demon who cheats for you, and try to survive a night in a haunted nightclub. The train has arrived and you have a ticket." That's the scary and suspenseful author. Then there's the funny writer who will often make you laugh out loud. For example, Latham has assembled his thoughts in Waiting For An Open Bed (in the Sunnyvale mental institution)… (PIN 25 July 2011)

    E-Textbooks: New Frontier. This is a shoe we've waited over a decade (or an eon in web years) to see drop. Brian Callahan's prediction in the late 1990s was that the print house of cards would collapse once states demanded digital textbooks, to save money, to provide searchable, intelligent files, and to save children from back injuries lugging dead tree limbs slathered in ink. Now the discussion is on the table… (Betanews 15 July 2011)

    Five Reasons (at least) Why Borders Failed & What's Next. Here is one analyst's list of five reasons why Borders went under, and what will take its place. There is common consensus that Borders brass were too late to the Web (or arrogantly refused to move forward); opened too many stores (and usually too big, but not too big to fail); took on too much debt while not understanding the evolving fundamentals of the retail book business; took some major wrong turns, like into the failing music business, and into foreign ventures that were probably several web eons behind the curve, locked into the past that was dying nowhere faster than in the USA. I have long maintained that, while the collapse of the print monopoly will be good in every imaginable way for everyone in the USA, from writers to readers, one fact of life will never go away. People love to browse in bookstores. People love to go out, be among people, shop, drink coffee, sit and watch other people. The next generation entrepreneurs already understand this, and soon we'll hear about some wonderful new mall experience. I wrote about it earlier, picturing a cool, darkish environment smelling of fresh coffee, full of glowing marketing image displays, and people eagerly browsing the movie poster-like promise of their next digital read… (Time 19 July 2011)

    Straight Talk About Typos. The world is run by people who know very little about grammar, punctuation, or usage—and they waste no time elaborating on the lack of need for such skills. As one manager once told me, in regard to a deliverable manual—which is typically part of the contracted end-product— while dismissing my 'English teacher' ideas and referring to the less-ignorant as the 'comma police': "I learned everything I need to know about writing in the Fifth Grade." Judging by the skill level of too many managers, that would be more accurately expressed as "I stopped learning in the Fifth Grade." This is especially true across engineering, business, and similar industries, where writers managed by non-writers are usually responsible for manuals and other documentation that reflects on their company's professional (or not) image. Similarly, while the print industry has made much of its alledged grammatical Tour de Trance, the fact is that haste and waste increasingly became part of the Big Six conglomeration. In the hands of non-publishing professionals, who drove the bus over a cliff seeking the next elusive best seller, the publishing establishment became prone haste and waste. They practiced what one non-dictionary-believer I knew self-deprecatingly called 'foo-bars'. Teabaggers will be especially disturbed to know that he referred to a French word ('faux pas,' literally a wrong dance step at the 18th Century court of the Sun King)—therefore, surely deserving of a forty-minute, street drug-induced Limburger rant. Lots of subtle insider info in this article… (Time 19 July 2011)

    Retail: A Hard Look. We take a hard look at what is already obvious to many, but with our own twist. Dirges and antiphons are being sung on the funeral pyre of Borders and other big-box media retailers. The same lack of vision that refused to understand why a digital revolution was inevitable (it's far cheaper and more efficient, Bongo) are now unable to see that a store full of crinkled and dog-eared paper is just his side of absurd. Don't get me wrong—I spend on average an hour a day, every day, in such places inhaling the scent of newly-mown paper, sometimes even a toxic whiff of fresh ink. This video contains scenes of happy shoppers wrestling with unwieldy magazines and trying not to break the spines of books (nobody tells you that, but you can see the anguish in mute display). The commentator speaks as if the loss of paper will mean the end of the world for those addicted (which is most of us) to the retail experience. Relax—the mall, the retail, the coffee, the people-watching can only get better. Someone will invent a new retail experience involving thousands of glowing images that promise the eager browsing person all sorts of joys to be found in the latest book, song, or movie. The package is changing, but the book and the mall will loom ever more heavenly on our horizon. Just stop and think of how ridiculous the thought is that this means the end of books, or intellectual life, or mass-produced pablum by write-compoops bought and paid with korporate payola in support of the Patrician oligarchy on these Roman streets. Marketing, my dear Figaro, is no more dead than the sound of your razor on a smooth leather strap, or the melodious yodeling that rises on lira-wings from your happy shop. First, of course, we have to get past this minor irritation called "If you're unemployed, it's a recession; if I'm unemployed, it's the Second World Depression"… (CNN Money July 2011)

    Another Funeral Hymn for Borders Inevitably, amid the genuine sorrow for nearly 11,000 US workers who are losing their jobs, and the resulting negative impact on an already hurting economy, there is the occasional stop for a moment of levity and absurdity. One such moment is the observation, by Salon's Annie Lowrey, that "…I don't think that you will ever see the physical book die out as a form. I think that 50 years from now, physical books will still exist and I think people will still be buying them in bookstores." Yes, like people still ride horses. Gottlieb Daimler invented the first practical automobile around 1885 (the same time frame in which Bismarck made Germany the first nation to adopt universal health care, which is still considered godless Communism in the USA). To contemporaries of Daimler, it must have seemed unthinkable that people would no longer use the horse to go to work, or to pull farm equipment. After all, the animal was domesticated during the Neolithic revolution (toward farming and animal husbandry) nearly 10,000 years ago. In 1885, it was still the best way to get around. How could one imagine a world in which horses are largely used (by 99% of us, anyway) for gambling, or a fun hobby? That's the metaphor I have long used to gauge the importance of the shift from print to digital. Lest we get carried away, there is no doubt that most people riding in cars today are no smarter than those who parked their derrieres on a horse (in parallel with their own derrieres). What's the old saying? "There are more horse's asses than there are horses." The real ass, of course, referred to a smaller equine animal that often kept the farm horse company. But that kind of horse lore is lost today, as fifty years from now nobody will be able to imagine what it must have been like to buy a pound of dead wood, slathered with ink, purporting to convey intelligenced info, in a specialty store resembling an enormous wood shop, hung with paper placards and staffed by under-employed English majors. To be fair: I will miss the Borders experience. We all have a reprieve as Barnes & Noble lumbers toward a similar demise in the next few years. By then, hopefully, the real 21st Century shopping mall will be bringing us joys undreamed of by those still riding horses and lugging paper books around. As another example of this kind of myopia, can anyone today really claim that it is statistically possible that we are the only life in the universe, given that we already know the cosmos is top-heavy with planets for every occasion? Better yet, are all planets going digital? Do they have e-books on Altair IV, capital of the Vyzantine Empire? Do dogs on Sirius X have black lips? The questions are endless at a deeply philosophical moment like this… (PBS 21 July 2011)

    Borders: Who Loses? On Thursday, 21 July 2011, the day before Borders officially went into liquidation, I bought my last book there. I brought a coupon, and even got my last $5 Borders Bucks. Like many customers, I said goodbye and wished some of my favorite clerks best of luck. They are good workers, and I hope they'll find an appreciative new employer. As I engaged in a handshake and some final words at the checkout register, the clerk said dourly: "The publishers tried to play hardball with us, and now they are among the biggest losers. Here we are." The list of debt owed to Big Six publishers is shown in this article, and is considerable. What were they thinking? But then again, those are the same people who have saddled the horse backwards for so many years. When he says hardball, I think he meant that the publishers, for the first time, backtracked on a deal offered the retailers during the hard years of the Great Depression. Book selling has been the only industry I know of that was run entirely on the consignment model. In most retail industries, the retailer buys goods at wholesale and sells them with their own markup (often 100% or more). In the book industry, saddled backwards, nobody got paid until the customer plopped down the bucks. Not only did the money filter up the pipeline backwards, but in recent years, there have been astonishing numbers of returns—often 50%, as customers take the book home, find that it's more mechanical pablum from the word-grinders in Manhattan, and broughtit back for an angry fix. Then the money flowed back the other way, out, which is called a refund. It was an industry running on fumes for generations, secured largely in the knowledge that it was a monopoly. The customer had nowhere else to go. Neither did the author, the editor, the marketer, the wholesaler, the agent, or the retailer. Publishers were belatedly trying to behave in a sane manner, which would not be hard-ball in any other industry, just common sense… (Paidcontent.org 19 July 2011)

    New Yorker Takes a Wider View. A classic bastion of the short story takes a look at the bigger picture in the Borders end-game. What metaphors do we seek, to frame this woeful chapter? (The New Yorker 19 July 2011)

    Librarian Tell All. This librarians cuts us in on the skinny from her perspective. We gain lots of insight about ourselves, about how books are purchased, and about our society… (Library Journal 19 July 2011)

    Comi-Con 2011 San Diego. San Diego's biggest annual convention event closed Sunday, after not disappointing its thousands of attending fans. Over 130,000 avid fans, industry professionals, and deal makers were expected to attend… (Comi-Con 25 July 2011)

    America's final city: Sigh-Fie Dreams & Cold Sweats. Speaking of San Diego's shining moment as host of Comi-Con every July, a local journalist reflects on how San Diego is treated by the purveyors of what gray, non-SF people double-disparagingly call sci-fi (pronounced the way it sounds, 'Sigh-Fie'), with a long, rolling hiss of puritanical disapproval of imaginative literature. Fun article by Dave Maass, in any event… (San Diego Citybeat 14 July 2011)

Umnitsa: The Good Girl Historical/Espionage/Love Story In the tradition of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, John Le Carré's Naive and Sentimental Lover, and Graham Greene's The Third Man, but Umnitsa is ground-breaking and in a class of its own. At key moments, it will also remind readers of the movie Chinatown starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. Umnitsa: The Good Girl This unconventional love story is complex, and by turns tragic and exhilarating. Its style and themes recall Boris Pasternak's writing textures and themes in Doctor Zhivago. If Pasternak's novel is an enigmatic slice of life in Russia at a historical pivot, then Umnitsa is likewise an enigmatic slice of life in the U.S. at its greatest historical turning point. San Francisco, in 1945, at the intersection of two epic wars (World War II and the Cold War) is a mad and brooding capital of rioting and passion. A dark, heavy atmosphere of espionage envelops the founding of the United Nations that summer, as well as the final preparations to drop the world's two first atomic bombs in war. Framing the story is the 1991 search by a wealthy French countess for her long-lost father. Marianne Didier is a wealthy, glamorous, but troubled French jet-setter. She was adopted as a toddler, out of squalor and hopelessness in post-World War II Siberia. Her legacy from her long-dead mother includes the affectionate term Umnitsa, good or clever girl. Though she has everything life can offer, she is missing one all-important piece. From her base in Paris, she goes on a search for her long-lost father while the Soviet Union collapses in 1991 and the world changes. Her journey takes her around the world, and frames the story (1942-1945) of her long-lost father back in his prime during World War II. During World War II, courageous, handsome young U.S. Navy officer Tim Nordhall pursues a Soviet-Nazi-Allied triple agent (Jaguar), who is deeply involved in atomic espionage. Tim Nordhall's adventures take him from the deserts and jungles of Africa, to London during the Blitz, and finally wartime San Francisco in 1945. In London, the naive clockmaker from Connecticut encounters the great, beautiful love of his life, a Free Polish Army nurse named Anna Stokowska. One of the women in Tim's life will bear him the lost child around which the entire novel circles. Anna, Tim, and other memorable characters fade in and out in the fog of war, while the ruthless espionage services of the Great Powers ply their shadowy and ubiquitous trade. San Francisco, like Paris a world-class City of Love, is in 1945 a wild brawl of war-weary young men and women. Atomic bomb material destined for Hiroshima and Nagasaki passes through en route to Tinian. Secret agents from around the world conduct shadowy warfare, including two remarkable women spies who become Tim's lovers. Tens of thousands of lusty, brawling young men and women party and work in the waning months of an epic war. San Francisco is a rainy neon blur, whose slick streets rattle with gunfire from passing cars, whose windows glow with parties and jazz, and whose dark doorways shelter terrified and curious eyes. The title, Umnitsa: Good Girl, refers to a common Russian term of endearment for a girl-child, and is key to Marianne (Countess) Didier's desperate, lifelong search. Time flows inexorably, but sometimes its mysteries form an infinite circle that keeps doubling back upon itself… .