Category: Writingthoughts

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And Then There Are Those Things That Refuse To Be Said

Why, yes: I am writing about schlock and the myth of “so bad, it’s good” over at Time Entertainment today.

I was talking to a friend the other day about the problems she was having writing a paper for school; she was telling me that she kept writing things and then realizing that it was all in the wrong order, and that she wanted to keep changing everything even though she wasn’t even finished a first draft, leading to a particularly distracting, frustrating experience. That was this piece, for me; it stubbornly refused to come together, and I was tearing my metaphorical hair out trying to get it into some semblance of coherent argument (I’m not entirely sure I succeeded in the end, to be honest). There was one point where what is currently a paragraph in the first third of the piece was the final paragraph, then in the middle, then somewhere towards the end, and so on and so on. Some things just don’t want to be written, it can feel like.

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“I Don’t Think I Lose A Print Sale By Selling in eBook”

My own guess, based on watching my sales profile over the years, is that print, eBook and audiobook do not inherently cannibalize each others’ sales — it seems to me that for each there is a class of reader that is “native” to each — that is, there is a group of readers who strongly prefers print over eBook or audio, another group who prefers eBook strongly to the other formats, and a third group (correlated, I imagine, with people who have long commutes) who strongly prefer audiobook. I don’t think I lose a print sale by selling in eBook, or an eBook sale by selling in audio — rather, that selling in each of these formats is allowing me to expand my overall audience. Once again, this is an argument for remaining actively involved in all of the formats rather than throwing one (or more) overboard and putting all my chips on a single format.

From here.

John Scalzi breaks down the sales of his last novel, Redshirts, across formats now that Tor has moved the title from hardcover to paperback in print form, and it’s the kind of thing that’s fascinating for someone like me, who’s unnaturally geeky about this kind of thing. The part about digital and audio and print not cannibalizing the other format’s sales is of particular interest to me, because I’m beginning to suspect that the negative sales velocity that digital brought to analog music and movies just doesn’t exist for either books or comics, perhaps because the latter two are more active pastimes and therefore have more engaged audiences with more specific interests and habits surrounding their preferred format.

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On Accidentally Writing Linkbait

And then there was the time that I wrote about Star Wars and Star Trek becoming more generic science-fiction for Time Entertainment, in response to the stories about ABC potentially reviving the oft-mooted Star Wars TV show. It was another piece that I could have done with another day on, but deadlines disagreed; what really happened was that Monday, as I’ve already suggested elsewhere, was a very distracting day for reasons that’ll become apparent soon, and so writing didn’t come easy. I gave it a pretty major overhaul before submitting yesterday, but I kinda wish I could get just one more swing at it, you know…?

It strikes me now that this piece is almost definitely link/troll-bait, accidentally (No, really, I swear that wasn’t on my mind when I pitched or wrote it for once). I’m reminded of a SpinOff piece I wrote about whether or not Spider-Man’s portrayal across different media had to be consistent that, to my utter surprise, got linked on io9 soon after going live, and my mix of “It’s got to be a really slow news day” and “It’s very weird to see someone write about you as if they’ve never met you; they even use the ‘referring to person with the last name only’ thing” when I saw it. I’d initially written it thinking it was relatively throwaway.

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“Which Is Total Nonsense, And They Know It”

You can’t put the genie back in the bottle on this one, people. And the networks and cable channels that are so easily offended need to get over it. Like pretty much every critic or writer I talked to, I stand behind everything I tweet. Did I just say your entertainment president was spinning the truth? Why, yes I did. That line about how the upcoming Monday night procedural or Thursday night comedy is heinously bad? Give me another 140 characters and I’ll say it again, only with exclamation points.

It seems to me there are two main complaints here about critics/writers and Twitter: 1) They don’t like the content, and 2) they think all we’re doing is tweeting and not writing stories. Which is total nonsense, and they know it. A good deal of people write their stories right there in the sessions. Others will write full reviews, interviews, feature stories, etc., back in their hotel rooms or at home if they’re local.

From here.

Tim Goodman reacts to criticism that Twitter use has resulted in a boring Television Critics Association press tour this month, and it’s pretty great. Coming as I do from a comic book culture where creators feel similarly about Twitter/social media/dismissive of the Internet in general, I found myself nodding in agreement a bunch.

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Hashtag Vague

Well, today was an interesting day. Hopefully good interesting, but definitely things that I find myself excited about, and also a sign of getting my professional self in gear just a little better than I was doing before. It’s also been a day that kind of knocked me sideways in terms of getting work done – That’s how these things tend to go, after all – and so it’s almost 6pm and I’m pretty much where I’d have wanted to be an hour ago at the very least. And yet… Yes. Good news, today, albeit news that I don’t think that I can properly reveal for awhile yet.

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Do You…

It’s the kind of week that’s just full of stuff – entirely work-related – which leaves me forgetting things like, Hey! It’s Wednesday, and I should link to my Time Entertainment essay! It’s all aboutChoose Your Own Adventure making a comeback in pop culture, because that’s the kind of thing that I think about. Go read.

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The conversating/The price is what?

So, I spent part of this weekend trying to catch up with Misfits, inspired and shamed in equal parts by Jeff Lester during a Wait, What recording last week; I made it through five episodes of season three in one sitting, and the opening of season four, before I realized that I’d stopped caring about the show. It’s not that the series had dipped in quality so much between seasons three and four as much as it was that season three had, to all intents and purposes, finished the show altogether. Characters died, arcs were completed, and the thread started in the first episode was pretty much cut quite cleanly.

I started watching the first episode of the fourth season with the strange feeling of “How are they even going to try and convince people that this is viable as a continuing property?” only to discover that – seemingly, they were just going to ignore that altogether and continue as if nothing was any different. It’s odd, when you realize that the only reason you’re going to continue to watch something is through skeptical eyes, waiting to see it wake up and wonder what has gone wrong.

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“There’ s A Powerful Downside to This Level of Output”

This is a lot of work, point blank.  It’s too much work and there’s a powerful downside to this level of output, most importantly being less time with the family and impact on my health.  2013 will likely be just as busy as none of these projects are ending anytime soon.  Most likely as Mara ends I’ll replace that with Anthem.  I have 6 issues left on my contracted Star Wars run but that was always open to be extended and depending on how things go I may re-up that.  I have 7 issues left to go on Conan The Barbarian.  The Massive will continue through 2013, and I’m assuming I’ll keep writing Ult X-Men for the foreseeable future.  ”Not Yet Announced” will be announced soonish.

The goal of this heavy workload was to build a “secondary backlist”, a somewhat panicked but justifiable reaction to my sudden departure from DC and the steady and substantial income I make off the trades of my Vertigo work.  Not knowing what my future was – I was literally ejected from DC with no warning – I overcompensated and needed to get as much work in print and earning money for my babies ASAP.  My next goal is to start to scale that back and settle into a roughly 880-page yearly output, giving me some breathing room and space to do more personal projects.

From here.

I saw this last week and sympathized completely, both from the “I am working too much and that is bad for me” viewpoint but also the “I ended up without this job suddenly and I got scared and said yes to too many things” one. I promised myself that 2013 would be the year I’d work on that, but judging on my workload from this first week, I appear to be doing a really bad job at it.

Onwards, ever onwards.

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Two Days Late, But Also Four Days Early

But what makes Downton Abbey such a guilty pleasure? What is it about watching Lady Mary and Matthew flirt and fight in secret with the sexual tension thick enough that everyone else can barely breathe that we can’t say no to, that makes the sight of Bates sitting there, glowering with moral superiority as the world falls to pieces around him so bizarrely appealing? Since Downton premiered in 2010, there have been attempts on both sides of the Atlantic to try and duplicate the show’s success – The BBC’s dour, Nazi-filled revival of Upstairs, Downstairs, which aired in the US alongside Downton as part of PBS’ Masterpiece series, and the international miniseries Titanic that aired on ABC last April, to name just a couple – but none have quite managed to get it exactly right. What is it about Downton Abbey‘s DNA that makes it quite so hard to clone?

A mostly-removed paragraph from today’s Time Entertainment piece, which proved to be a beast to write, and in a compressed time frame compared to the usual schedule due to the holidays (Traditionally, there’s a full week between pitching and the piece going live, allowing for multiple days writing/researching, then a day of edits and re-writes; this time, there were three days between pitch and the piece going live). You’re welcome, Internet.