Dammit, CNN

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

How am I supposed to respect you as a news source if you can’t even get your grammar right?

From this article:

TV and film adaptations of dystopian literature has dominated recent popular culture, from Suzanne Collins’ ‘Hunger Games’ trilogy, to Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, to the upcoming HBO version of Emily St. John Mandel’s ‘Station Eleven.’ Each is set in a future society that has devolved into a worse-case-scenario. In utopian fiction, on the other hand, the writer creates a world based on a set of ideals and values they deem important. Both utopian and dystopian fiction matters, as each can be used as a tool to prompt change by pointing out how things could go right — or wrong — in a society.

Do I really need to point out that it should be “TV and film adaptations have dominated” and “Both utopian and dystopian fiction matter“? A plural subject (“Both A and B” is a plural subject) takes a plural, not a singular, verb.

For heaven’s sake, people. If your content providers or whatever you’re calling copywriters these days don’t actually have the grammatical chops to get something that basic right on their own, at least train them to run a grammar-checker over the text before they hit SEND.

Three More Days

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A friendly reminder that my Seasonal Sale ends at midnight on 5 January 2020.

(That’ll be midnight-where-ever-you-are, rather than midnight-where-I-am, just to keep things simple.  I’m certainly not going to slam the door on somebody just because they don’t live in the same time zone as I do.)

Treat yourself, or treat a friend; prepaid services can be claimed at any convenient (for you) future time.

Somebody Else’s Train Wreck

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As a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (a famously contentious organization that once took six months of vicious internal debate and a nonbinding poll of the membership to decide how to abbreviate its own name†), I’m watching the current explosions over at Romance Writers of America with a connoisseur’s eye.

The thing that boggles me is that the so-called “ethics complaint” that their ethics committee (or maybe — it’s confusing — not the official ethics committee, but some sort of double-secret private ethics committee) brought against Courtney Milan boiled down to “Courtney Milan made mean comments in public about another member’s book.” To which all I can say is, if that were an ethics-complainable offense in SFWA, there wouldn’t be more that three or four of us who weren’t thrown out of the club for it.

Back in the pre-Web days, when the romance writers and the sf/fantasy writers were first meeting up with each other on GEnie and other online fora, there were some real first-contact cultural clashes that went on, a lot of them over the way that the sf/fantasy people were “rude and mean” and the romance people were “too sweet to be real.” Things calmed down after a while, and everyone got used to the idea that “fuck you” in one forum could be the equivalent of a friendly punch on the shoulder, and “bless your heart” in another forum could be the equivalent of a shiv between the ribs, and everybody got together behind the idea that writers deserved royalties and certain publishing houses were scum.

But I think now we’re seeing, among other things, the failure mode of the Culture of Nice: The ride may be smoother than you get with the Culture of Contention, but when the wheels come off they fly in all directions.

†SFWA. Per  eventual official decree, the actual acronym is SFFWA — with the second F superimposed upon the first. It also says a lot about SFWA that the membership accepted this as a perfectly logical compromise.

Welcome Back to the Sun!

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate it, and to all of you who don’t, may you have the happiest possible midwinter (or midsummer, if you’re in the other hemisphere) holiday of your choice!

(And if you don’t do holidays, have a pleasant non-holiday doing what you will!)

Also — it’s not too late to take advantage of my seasonal editorial sale, which runs through Twelfth Night (5 January 2020.)

 

It’s That Time of Year Again

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Xmas Promo

Maybe you’ve finished up your NaNoWriMo novel and want to give it a thorough revision and polishing-up now that the first draft’s done. Maybe you’ve got a finished novel that you want to take to the next level before sending it out on the next stage of its life journey. Or maybe you’ve got a friend or a relative who has written, or is writing, or hopes to write a book, and you’re looking for a Christmas present that will help them make their dream a reality.

It’s for people like them — and you — that I’m running my annual holiday special, where from now through Twelfth Night (5 January 2020) my usual rate for a standard-sized novel goes down from $1500 to $1000, and my rate for doorstop-sized novels of 120,000-plus words goes down from $2K to $1500.

As usual, the gift of editorial services (no matter whether you’re giving it to yourself or to a friend) can be purchased now at the seasonal gift rate and redeemed at whatever later date is convenient to the recipient.

Details of payment, format, and so forth can be found here.

Nashua Winter Holiday Stroll

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jamesdmacdonald's avatarJAMES D. MACDONALD

Come see the Granite State Magicians (including your handsome young friend, me) at the Holiday Stroll this Saturday, November 30th, in Nashua NH.Jim Macdonald, Magician

We’re putting on a free magic show as part of the festivities at 30 Temple Street, Lower Level, between 7:10 and 8:10 pm.  The performers will be Lord and Lady BlackSword, Wayne Harmon, Jim Macdonald, and Corky the Clown.

I promise you a good time! (And don’t forget all the rest of the events at the Winter Holiday Stroll….)

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Happy Official Start of Leaf-Peeping Season Day!

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

Hey, if we’re going to continue with the grand renaming of everything, I might as well plump for my own candidate.

This date has long been the time when the New England autumnal colors start to peak, up here at the northern end of their range.  A dedicated leaf-peeper can start up here and follow the colors southward to finish up in Connecticut, by which time we up here are looking at bare trees and starting to fret about the first snowfall.

Sigh.

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I wake up and scan CNN for the morning news and find this:

“The “OK” hand gesture is now a hate symbol, according to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League.”

I really really hate it when something long-time innocuous or even positive gets co-opted by the alt-right extremist nutjobs, so that it’s no longer available for use by normal people. Because while I may think that the proper response to such highway robbery — and it is robbery; they are taking something from us without our consent — is not passive acquiescence but active pushback, that is not how it works in today’s world.

(I mean, you can’t even fly the goddamned flag any more without people thinking that you are, at best, a MAGA-hat-wearing right-winger.)

And the most annoying thing about the OK-sign story? The part where it all started as a hoax on 4chan. I mean, I said to someone a while back that I could probably pick something — anything at all — and start a rumor that it was linked to something else despicable, but I hadn’t realized that someone had actually done it.

So We Watched Veronica Mars Season the Next

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They call it Season Four, but it’s post-VM-the-Movie, so I suppose we’re supposed to regard the movie as Season Three Point Five?

Anyhow . . . good show, better than Original Season Three, also better than VM-the-Movie.  And like everyone else on the internet, I have opinions about That Ending.

SPOILER ALERT

SPOILER ALERT

SPOILER  ALERT

SPOILER ALERT

SPOILER ALERT

Actually, I think it was a good ending for the season, mostly because it could be worked multiple ways depending upon the future, if any, of the televised Mars-verse.  To wit:

If there are no more Veronica Mars series, specials, movies, or related works, then the fact that Logan died is genre-appropriate, since VM takes place in one of the sunny California suburbs of the Land of Noir, and in noir detective fiction everything always ends up sucking, especially for the detective protagonist.

If there is another series, or another movie, then the “we never saw a body” and “nobody ever actually says the ‘dead’ word” factors come into play, and more choices open up.  Again, to wit:

If they can’t get Jason Dohring to come back, or if he doesn’t want to come back, or if they just don’t feel like working with the character any more, then Logan stays dead as a string-art nail.  Dead!Logan could either just be a part of Veronica’s Tragic Past, or he could be the heart of her next investigation, since another of the rules of the Mars-verse is that nothing is ever what it seems to have been the first time around.

If, on the other hand, they do want to keep on working with the character, and we’ve got NotActuallyDead!Logan in play, then we’ve got the how and the why of that to drive a future season. The current season made a lot of hay out of Logan’s intelligence work, including sudden summonses to active duty while he was supposedly on extended leave, and references to combat experience, and the fact that he’s learned to speak Arabic — not an easy thing; Uncle Sam will teach it to you if he thinks you’ll need to know it, but the course is no picnic — and maybe it was just window-dressing, but it could also have been positional play for possible future stuff.

(And am I the only person who thinks that the tale of how Logan Echolls transformed himself from “aimless layabout with anger issues” into “responsible US Naval officer with what looks to be a good career going for him” would actually have made an interesting story all on its own?)

Also — I initially tried to hide the spoilers more subtly with a cut tag, but my html-fu wasn’t up to the task.

HORROR FOR THE THRONE

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Over on Jim Macdonald’s blog, an ANNOUNCEMENT:

jamesdmacdonald's avatarJAMES D. MACDONALD

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Ian Randal Strock’s Fantastic Books has contracted with James D. Macdonald, Judith K. Dial, and Tom Easton for an anthology of 40 short horror stories to be called

HORROR FOR THE THRONE

ONE-SITTING READS

We will open for submissions on August 8, 2019. Submissions will close September 15, 2019.  Proposed publication date is early 2020, in all the usual paper and electronic formats.

We’re looking for reprints.  Previously published where the rights have reverted to the author.   500-2000 words.  Pay is $20 flat fee for non-exclusive reprint rights.  The stories should NOT involve bathroom horror.

Send submissions (and questions) to Tom at profeaston@verizon.net.

The book will join SCIENCE FICTION FOR THE THRONE and FANTASY FOR THE THRONE on Ian’s dealer table at numerous conventions (as well as on his website at fantasticbooks.biz and on Amazon etc.). With luck, everyone will decide they just have…

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