Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I've seen " tweeted about several times. I have some thoughts.

1: the article (and possibly the study, though it's hard to tell) presumes a pretty narrow definition of strength. So Buffy and Olivia, who hurt people with weapons, are strong women, wheras Lorelai Gilmore, who left home at 16 to raise a daughter by herself, is not.Ìý (Gilmore Girls is in the "control" group.) (Also I was a big fan of that show.) (And not just because I had a crush on Lauren Graham.) (No really--I hate Parenthood.)

2: the article says Masters of Horror is "slasher-esque".Ìý That is certainly true of some episodes, but Masters of Horror is an anthology show with different writers and directors and storylines on each episode.Ìý I'd be interested to know which episode or episodes the study used. I've certainly seen ones with strong female characters.

3: The article suggests that men view women more positively when they see violent women on screen.Ìý I do not question this conclusion and hope it leads to a lot more shows where women kick a lot of ass.Ìý But it also states that women test subjects had more negative attitudes toward women after watching 7th Heaven and The Gilmore Girls. The author of the article breezes right past this piece of info, which is incredibly weird and probably deserves more investigation.Ìý

Am I reading this wrong? Here's the admittedly badly-worded paragraph in question:Ìý Males who watched sexually violent shows with submissive female
characters reported more negative attitudes about women than the control
group. This effect did
not occur for men who watched shows with powerful women. Women
actually reported more negative attitudes after watching the G-rated
shows, but how female
characters were portrayed did not affect their beliefs.

This really kind of flabbergasts me, and I'd love to hear more about what the authors of the study make of this.

What are my conclusions?

1.)Like most articles reporting the results of some study, this is poorly written and raises more questions than it answers while purporting to trumpet some bold conclusion. (Also, who's the "we" the headline refers to?Ìý The data suggests that men benefit from seeing strong women on TV, but that women maybe benefit from not watching shows about domestic life.Ìý Or something. Really, that's a very perplexing piece of data.)

2.)Though my only info comes from the poorly-written article, this seems like an odd and badly-designed study.

3.)We love us some violence here in the USA.

4.)Our responses to art are complicated.

As I have noted, the entire text of It Takes a Worried Man is . I popped a google analytics code on there, and I thought I'd share some of the data I've gotten in case any of you are pondering conducting a similar experiment. Ìý

Traffic Sources:

All but about two total hits on the site have come from referrals from facebook, twitter, or goodreads. Ìý(Thank you again to everybody who has directed people there! ÌýYou rock!). I'm very lucky to have a network of awesome people who have been willing to promote this book. ÌýIf you're starting fresh, I think you'd have a bit of a harder time driving traffic. ÌýI know very little about SEO (except the acronym, which I like to throw around so I look smart), but literally 2 hits on the site have come from search engines. Ìý So I guess I would say just putting up a page and hoping people will find it through search is probably a bad strategy.

Visitor Behavior:

This is pretty interesting. Half of all visitors to the site leave within 10 seconds. ÌýThis means they've clicked on the link and seen the page and that's pretty much it. But a third of visitors are staying for over a minute, which means they're staying long enough to read something, and ten percent are staying for over ten minutes (the point at which google stops counting). ÌýThose ten percent of visitors account for half the page views on the site, so they're really reading a fair amount while they're on the site. Ìý

Pages:Ìý

A cool thing that google analytics will allow you to do is to rank the pages by the number of visits. ÌýAs you might expect, the first couple of pages are the most popular, and it goes down from there. ÌýI suppose this might be interesting with a novel because you could see exactly where people tend to stop reading. ÌýI thought the "where are they now" part would be pretty popular, and so it is, but it's the 8th ranked page on the site. ÌýThe "buy" page is 88th out of 99 pages, but I'm not going to draw any big conclusions from this because I assume that most people who do buy are doing it on their e-readers and not on the web.

Ìý

Conclusions:Ìý

Ultimately, making the book avaialble for free on the web seems like a decent thing to do. ÌýIt gives people a chance to sample the book, which will probably lead to more happy customers. ÌýIt's kind of tough to tell exactly, but it looks like the number of people who read the whole thing on the web is about half the number of people who have bought copies. Ìý(And some of those may be the same people). ÌýI really don't think there's much to lose in doing this. The question for your free book website, as for all websites, is how do you continue to drive traffic there? ÌýIf I figure that out, I'll let you know.

He's been in hibernation for a while, but Seamus Cooper, author of The Mall of Cthulhu, is back!

We sat down for a wide-ranging conversation over a couple of beers.Ìý (Yes, we are technically the same person, but it seemed only fair that we each get a beer.)Ìý The transcript follows.

Brendan Halpin:Ìý So what are you working on?

Seamus Cooper:Ìý Well, I've got one and a half books done at this point.Ìý One, Terror at the Shore, is a Lovecraftian tale of terror in a beach resort town...with a secret.

BH: So you're the Lovecraft pastiche guy?Ìý Is that it?

SC: Nice.Ìý Mall of Chtulhu is not a Lovecraft pastiche.Ìý It's a comic adventure with a Lovecraftian background. And Terror at the Shore is not a Lovecraft pastiche either.Ìý But there are Lovecraftian elements, as there are in about 30% of horror fiction.Ìý And, the other book is a sword and sorcery parody tentatively entitled Blomi: A Sorcerer's Tale.

BH: Blomi.Ìý Well, that's mature.

SC: It's also full of fart and poop jokes. And gore. And some heartwarming moments, too.

BH: I thought I was the heartwarming moments guy.

SC: Yeah, well, I guess you've contaminated me.

BH: So what ever happened to the Mall sequel, Dog Walk of the Dead?

SC: Well, as you may remember, your need to make money kind of put that book on the back burner for a while.Ìý And now as I look at it, I think it might be fatally flawed.Ìý Also, in the years since I started that book, I feel like zombies have pretty much been done from every angle by better writers than me or you. ÌýI'm no longer sure what my take would add to the genre. ÌýAlso I think the magic stuff I wrote in that book is stupid. And, finally, I'm just not sure I had the chops to sustain a series at that point. ÌýI'd like a do-over.

BH: So we'll never see Ted and Laura again?

SC: I wouldn't say that.Ìý I am cooking up a multi-generational supernatural detective saga involving a lost book and a lost album.Ìý Ted and Laura may need to solve the modern-day version of that.

BH: So who's doing your books?

SC: Well, Terror at the Shore is out on submission right now.Ìý But, you know, it being summertime, nothing's really happpening in publishing.Ìý I should know something soon.Ìý I think I may need to do Blomi myself.

BH: Tee hee!

SC: You know what I mean.Ìý Publish it myself.Ìý Ebook style.Ìý Like you did with Worried Man and Forever Changes.

BH: So when's this happening?

SC: Soon. I'll have more info once I find out what's happening with Terror at the Shore and how that publisher, assuming I find one, feels about me doing Blomi myself.

BH: You really have to stop saying that.Ìý Say "publishing the sword and sorcery book on my own" or something.Ìý

SC: Okay, whatever.

(Awkward silence)

BH: So, great!Ìý I've missed your work!

SC: So much that you started doing my stuff.

BH: What do you mean?

SC: I mean you've gone from bittersweet family dramadies to a book about a teen superhero, that thing you're writing with Emily dealing with some kind of science fictional event, the book you're writing with Trish which is also about superheroes, and the book about the girl who disappears.

BH: Interstices.

SC: Interstices? That's a terrible title!Ìý

BH:I like it.

SC: Really?

BH: It's a working title.

SC:Anyway, my point is that you created me as your kind of genre fiction alter ego, and now you seem to be writing only genre fiction.

BH: And?

SC: Yeah, exactly. And...?Ìý And what? Am I going to continue to exist, or are you gonna integrate me into your personality like in Three Faces of Eve?

BH: Uh. Nothing in my life is like Three Faces of Eve. But, I mean, I don't know.Ìý I think you're more of a tongue-in-cheek kind of guy. Enter the Bluebird is not tongue in cheek at all. I feel like it took me a while to develop the confidence to write genre fiction without my tongue in my cheek.

SC: Which doesn't answer my question. ÌýIt kind of seems like I'm taking over, creatively speaking.

BH: Well, I like to think of it as I'm embracing all my interests in a more public way. ÌýI have spent some more time in geeky circles, playing RPGs and going to New York Comic Con and such, and I feel at home in those settings. ÌýComic books and horror novels were the things that hooked me on reading, and more and more I feel like those are the stories I want to tell. Ìý

SC: You are totally ducking my question. ÌýWhy continue to use your name at all? ÌýI've got some credibility in genre fiction. It seems to me that if I'm taking over creatively, my name should be on the marquee!

BH: (takes a gulp of Troeg's Perpetual IPA)

SC: How's that beer, by the way? (sips Cisco Indie Pale Ale)

BH: I like it better than yours.

SC: Figures.Ìý

BH: It was the last one!Ìý Anyway, your name will be on the marquee for at least two of these projects.Ìý But since both Bluebird and Interstices have teen protagonists, it seemed to make sense to have my name on them.

SC: Terror at the Shore has teen protagonists.

BH: Yeah, but...but...You've got a book and a half done, I've got a book and a half done, and we can't put all that stuff out under one name in a short period of time.

SC: Hmmm....I'm not buying. I think you're just vain.

BH: I definitely think this song is about me.

SC: (silence)

BH: Nothing?

SC: I'm not impressed by your pop culture references.Ìý

BH: Says the guy who wrote the line,Ìý "Whatchutalkinbout, Cthulhu?"

SC:Well, yeah. That's one of my pop culture references.

BH: All right, this is starting to feel self-indulgent.

SC: Starting? You're interviewing yourself. That's pretty much the definition of self-indulgent.

BH: Okay, so what should people do if they want to stay informed on what's going on with your writing?

SC: Well, I guess they can watch this space. I also just started a , so they can go like that too.

BH: Great! Well, thanks, and good luck with all your projects!

SC: Same to you!

Ìý

I've got fifteen years of teaching under my belt, so perhaps it's statistically inevitable that I have former students who have died.

Still, it's awful every time I hear about it.Ìý

It's also weird because the teacher-student relationship is kind of odd anyway. ÌýYou spend a lot of time in each other's company but fundamentally don't know a lot about each other.

I think what most of us want most of all is to be remembered after we die. Ìý

I have been trying to write this for three days, and all I can come up with is a bunch of maudlin, anonymous-sounding crap that doesn't do the people I'm writing about justice. It's also strange to try to stitch into words the weird, fragmentary memories I have of people I knew only as students.

So here's what I will say: I knew these people when they were young and full of potential and had most of life's doors open to them. ÌýAnd I am really sorry that they died so young. Ìý

Ìý Melissa Barrowclough died in a car accident in 2001. ÌýShe was twenty-one.

Cushings Fortuna was shot dead in 2006. ÌýHe was twenty.

Sean Jackson shot himself to death in 2011. ÌýHe was twenty-six.

Joshua Wright died in a car accident in 2012. He was twenty-six.

ÌýBurrell Ramsey-White was shot to death in 2012. ÌýHe was twenty-six.

If you're reading this and you know me as a teacher and I've missed anyone, please let me know. Ìý

And be careful out there.

Hi folks!Ìý One week ago I made It Takes a Worried Man available as an ebook, available for purchase on , , and , and available to .

The ebook of It Takes a Worried Man outsold every one of my other books in any format during this week.

(this is according to the bookscan data I get from Amazon, which, strangely, doesn't include ebooks sold on Amazon, and the info I get on the kindle direct publishing page.)

*(This is what I mean by bestseller.Ìý It's my personal bestseller.Ìý Number one on the "Books by Brendan" list.Ìý Not on any other bestseller list.Ìý But still.)

This is a pretty extraordinary achievement for a ten-year-old book released in the dead zone of mid August.

So, first of all, a big thank you to everyone who has shared the link on twitter or facebook or face to face.Ìý Word of mouth is clearly how things sell, and I really appreciate your helping me spread the word about this book.Ìý I'm really quite honored that people like this book enough to continue to recommend it to people ten years after it first appeared. I've said this before, but your support makes my writing possible.Ìý And, I should add, the writing of most of the other authors you enjoy is also made possible by your evangelism.Ìý Reader recommendations are way more powerful than professional reviews, author begging/twitter spamming, and any of the other techniques people use to try to sell books.Ìý So, yeah. You rock. And please keep it up!

So besides the awesomeness of people who like my books, what other conclusions can I draw?

1.) I think it helps to have the book available for free on the web.Ìý I find extended reading on a website kind of clunky, so I don't think I'm losing a lot of sales, and judging by what google analytics tells me, most people are spending between 3 and 30 minutes on the site, which means they are actually reading. Does this mean I should make Forever Changes free to read on the web as well?Ìý Given that this ebook has sold far less than the ITAWM ebook, I suppose it couldn't hurt.Ìý However, I suspect that...

2.)Memoirs are different.Ìý This is all speculation, but I think most of us would take a chance on a memoir by an author we don't know if we're interested in the events that the memoir describes.Ìý Whereas I think novelists have a higher bar to clear.Ìý I also think that ITAWM has a certain amount of narrative drive that Forever Changes really doesn't have.Ìý Don't get me wrong--I love Forever Changes, but it doesn't have the runaway train momentum that's going to suck people in.Ìý At least, I don't think so.

3.)Wow, way more people have Kindles than Nooks or Kobo readers.Ìý The Kindle edition is outselling the Nook edition by at least four to one.Ìý I have yet to sell a Kobo edition.Ìý Does anybody have one of those?Ìý I have heard that they're big in Canada.Ìý Canadian friends?Ìý Do you see any Kobo readers on the bus or the subway?

4.) is awesome.Ìý I've been using the service for free, and you can too, for up to five books. (I have no financial stake in this company. Sadly. ) It's just a basic Wordpress interface that will kick out an epub or a pdf or both at the end, and boom--you've got a real-looking ebook! It also makes it very easy to rearrange chapters and stuff. If I were certain that I was writing only for self-publication via ebook, I'd probably use their interface to write the book.

5.)I'm not sure whether authors should pay for "distribution."Ìý This seems to be the basis of Smashwords' business model--just hit "publish" once, and we'll put it everywhere ebooks are sold!Ìý But it's trivially easy to publish to Amazon, B&N, and Kobo. Seriously.Ìý It literally took me five minutes at each site.Ìý So why pay Smashwords 10% of your revenue to do it? (You'll get 70% if you do it directly and 60% if you do it through Smashwords.) (Pressbooks, to be fair, is also rolling out a pay-for-distribution model)Ìý Maybe I'm missing something.Ìý Well, I am missing something--the iBooks store.Ìý Apple will only sell your book with an ISBN-- the number that tells the world "I'm a book!" These are prohibitively expensive ($250!) to buy individually but very cheap to buy in bulk, so Smashwords (and traditional publishers, and soon, Pressbooks) buys a big chunk of 'em to parcel out.Ìý So if you want an ISBN, I guess go with Smashwords.Ìý However--the is that the iBooks store has slightly less market share than B&N.Ìý So slightly less than 1/4 of Amazon's market share.Ìý So given the current market conditions, paying for distribution doesn't look to me like it's worth it. I don't think I'm missing very many sales by not being in the iBooks store. (I know Smashwords has many fans, so tell me if I'm missing something here.)

6.) Most of these places make you price your book at $2.99 in order to get the 70% royalty.Ìý The 30% royalty you get on books you price at 99 cents makes it hardly worth your while to do that as anything other than a promotional gambit.Ìý It's probably a decent idea if you've just released a sequel and you want to hook people in to your series, but otherwise I'm not sure it makes any economic sense.

7.) I'm leery of making any sweeping statements about traditional vs. self publishing based on this experience.Ìý Most of the people who consider themselves fans of my work who are not people I am related to or went to school with are people who found my work because I was traditionally published.Ìý Also, I got free editing, so the finished product I'm able to put up looks more polished and professional than something I'd be able to do myself. I do wonder whether covers are really that important in the ebook world, though--I made the new cover for It Takes a Worried Man in Microsoft Paint. I really like the photo and the fact that I'm half out of frame looking at Kirsten, but I'm under no delusion that this is a professional-quality cover.Ìý It hasn't seemed to matter, though.

Ìý

Well, after a grueling week of revisiting one of the worst periods of my life and changing all the straight up and down quotation marks to curvy ones, I am pleased to announce that the ebook of It Takes a Worried Man is finally finished.

It's available for , , and readers for the bargain price of only $2.99.

In the meantime, I'm trying an experiment. Ìý

The entire book is available to read for free online at . ÌýIt's my hope that this will help introduce new readers to the book. ÌýI guess it will also help old readers (I mean, readers who've already read the book--you look fantastic today, by the way) to easily access their favorite parts of my masterpiece from anywhere in the world. I've also left comments open on every chapter, so if you've got something you'd like to say about a particular part, you should feel free to sound off.

It occurred to me to add a lot of links to the songs and movies and stuff that I mentioned in the book, but, in the end, I didn't have the emotional strength necessary to spend any more time on this book. ÌýI love it, but, man, it's pretty brutal to put myself back into that time.

I didn't end up changing very much about the book--the occasional comma that I disagreed with the copy editor about, and I put my Home Despot joke back in because removing it was the amazing Pamela Cannon's sole editorial misstep, but otherwise, it's just as raw and funny and sappy and mean and balls-out as it ever was, for better and worse.

If you haven't read it in a while, please feel free to check it out on the web. ÌýI wrote a new afterword explaining a little about how my life has changed in the last ten years, so that's new.

And please tell your friends, neighbors, colleagues, and random people on the street that they should read and buy this kickass book. ÌýThank you!

The internets are afire with links to two lists.Ìý

One is the list.

The other is the list.

Both lists are stupid.Ìý

Because you didn't make them.

(And also because--Vertigo? ÌýEcch! That's not even the best Hitchcock movie! ÌýRear Window is!)

It's fun to make lists, and it's fun to argue about lists (there are at least five books on that npr list that aren't even good enough to wipe your butt with), but we shouldn't lose sight that none of these lists are authoritative because our responses to art are subjective. ÌýIf you made the effort to watch all those movies or read all those books, you would definitely find at least one that provoked the response "I can't believe this piece of crap made that list!"

So why are so many people taking these lists seriously? ÌýGo make your own list! ÌýOr ask someone who likes the same kind of stuff you like for their list! ÌýHere are two lists that are every bit as valid as the lists I linked to above, which is to say not at all. ÌýBut lists are fun! ÌýAnd if you do them as a slideshow, you get a lot more clicks to show your advertisers! Which doesn't apply here, but still.

The Best Ever Novels For Teens: The Authoritative List, featuring some books by my friends but still authoritative nonetheless, how dare you accuse me of bias?

1. King Dork, by Frank Portman

2.Shadowland by Peter Straub

3.The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub

4.The Summer I Learned to Fly by Dana Reinhardt

5.The Blue Girl by Charles DeLint

6. Generation Dead (series) by Daniel Waters

7.I Love You Beth Cooper by Larry Doyle

8.Kendra by Coe Booth

9.The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey

10. Last Night at the Circle Cinema by Emily Franklin

Ìý

The Best Movies Ever

1.Lord of the Rings (series)

2.Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn

3.The Godfather

4.Monty Python's The Meaning of Life

5.Suspiria

6.Dawn of the Dead (1978)

7.Halloween (1977)

8.The Philadelphia Story

9.The Wizard of Oz

10. Duck Soup

If I look at these lists tomorrow, I will remember things I should have put on them, or I will want to rearrange the admittedly arbitrary order because lists suck. Even these, that I wrote, are not authoritative even for me. Ìý

So have some fun with my lists, or the npr or Sight & Sound lists by all means, but please don't think that any of them actually mean anything.

Ìý

There is something going on in popular culture right now that I'm trying to figure out. And it's this: an astonishing number of crime-related shows now feature the older single parent of the protagonist.

Now, I have nothing against this: for one thing, it's giving a lot of work to people who were on TV when I was a kid, and this provides a sort of reassuring continuity every time I turn on the TV.Ìý

And I suppose there might be nothing more than imitation going on here: somebody saw this in a show they liked and decided to put it in their show too. Ìý(There also seems to be some sexism going on: the single dads mostly get to dispense words of crochety wisdom, while the single moms get to be whiny pains in the ass.)

Crossing Jordan, featuring Ken "The White Shadow" Howard as whatsherface's dad with a laughably bad Boston accent was the first one I remember seeing, but since then, we've gotten:

Burn Notice- Sharon "Cagney & Lacey" Gless as Michael's mom!

Psych-- Corbin "L.A. Law" Bernsen as Sean's dad!

Prime Suspect-- The fat guy from Homicide as, um, the main lady's dad!

Rizzoli & Isles-- Lorraine Bracco from the Sopranos as Jane's mom!

Castle--Susan Sullivan from It's a Living and Falcon Crest as Castle's mom!

Here are my questions: why are the older parents always single? (Notable exception: The Closer, but her parents haven't been regular characters)

Why are so many writers using this idea, and why always in the crime shows?Ìý

Is there no room for Carl Lumbly in this trend? Or Daniel J. Travanti? Or Pam Dawber?

What does it all mean?

Ìý

Hi folks! ÌýJust because I like you, here's the first 28 pages of Forever Changes, in fancy PDF format. Okay, just regular PDF format. ÌýÌý

If you like it, you can check it out of or buy the DRM-free ebook for your , , or Kobo reader. Ìý

Hi everybody!Ìý So, as promised a while ago, my excellent novel Forever Changes is back!Ìý

Forever Changes is about life, death, love, friendship, music, and math.Ìý I am incredibly proud of it.Ìý But don't take my word for it:Ìý check the goodreads reviews here!

You can now purchase it, with a new and awesome cover by the formidable Kylie Nelson, on the , the , and, coming soon, the Kobo store for the bargain price of $2.99!Ìý Check it out! And if you like it, tell your friends!Ìý And thank you!