Month: May 2014

Oh, for Heaven’s Sake

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 3 Comments

(Or, Dr. Doyle is peeved, again, and thinks some unkind thoughts.)

How to be self-pitying and self-aggrandizing, both at once. If the literary novel is a moribund art form, maybe it’s because this is the sort of person who writes them.

Of course, my opinion isn’t worth bothering with, because I read and write genre fiction — the sort of stuff the writer characterizes as “the kidult boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy” — as opposed to serious, difficult fiction.

(Right. I spent seven years studying literature written in languages nobody even speaks any more because I’m scared of difficulty. Pull the other one; it’s got bells on.)

Radio Silence from the Northland

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

This hasn’t been much of a week for posting stuff, for which I am sorry.

Then again, it hasn’t been much of a week for doing anything. I’ve had one of those springtime bugs that only make you feel really lousy for about a day or so, but spend about two days creeping up on you beforehand and leave you enervated for another three or four days afterward, and the next thing you know there’s a whole week gone.

Meanwhile, today’s publishing news:  Harlequin (with its assorted publishing lines) is being sold by its parent company to HarperCollins.  Harlequin’s authors, not surprisingly, are worried – changes in the publishing industry are almost never good for authors, at least in the short run.  Most of us have our survival strategies exquisitely fine-tuned to the present moment (trust us, we’d love to have them fine-tuned for the future as well, but life has unaccountably failed to provide us with working crystal balls), so any sudden alteration of the status quo has the potential to throw all our careful arrangements into disarray.