BilmBlog500

So that's me, looking very British I must say, taking the High Road in Layer-de-la-Haye on the English Country Walk I took during my London Book Fair trip. This was serendipity at its very best. Whenever I travel, I think it's always nice to touch base with Persons of Interest in the areas I'm visiting. When I discovered that David Wenk , the webmaster for Peter V. Brett , lived in London, I decided it might be nice to try and hook up with him on my UK trip, and then to make things more interesting I found out one of the other hats he wore was that of running English Country Walks, which is oddly enough exactly what it sounds like. You go out into the English country, and you go on a walk. I like very much to walk, and I think the country is a very nice place to visit though I wouldn't want to live there, so this sounded very enticing. Not a sure thing, since I have only so much free time on the trip. I don't know if I would have gone on the walk if London w...

So I just got back from seeing a ballgame at Nationals Park with a friend. Now, even in the height of the fluid rule stuff when flying, when you couldn't bring on any liquid of any sort at all, I was able to bring on an empty plastic bottle which I could ask the flight attendants to fill up for me the moment I got on so that I would have some water at my seat during the flight. Even once when I had to go thru the security check with my empty bottle and then one of the random checks they were doing when you boarded. Even today, I still bring an empty half-liter soda bottle with me so I can go to the drinking fountain and have water without having to buy a new bottle of bottled water all the time. So when I read up on the Washington Nationals web site about their security rules and saw this "one per person, a factory sealed water bottle of up to 1 liter," I decided to test it. Knowing I was doing evil, I had an empty 16 oz plastic bottle in my bag, which I hoped to fill ...

Once upon a not so very long time ago, it was virtually impossible to sell audio rights to anything in the way of science fiction and fantasy. This, to me, was not a good thing. Why was this? I do think sf/fantasy is an acquired taste, so much so maybe it's in the genes, and for some reason it's been an acquired taste that is looked down upon. To the rest of the world, the entire sf convention is going around in Star Trek costumes and taking Klingonese lessons from Lawrence Schoen . Why do indie bookstores have better mystery sections than sf if they deign to have an sf section at all, why do libraries have better mystery sections. Do sf readers avoid libraries because they don't have sf, or do the libraries avoid because sf readers have an allergy. That's clearly part of it. In order for them to buy sf/fantasy they first had to be educated about it. There were also these rules. Fixed cost in audio can be high because of recording costs. You need to have some p...

Seen April 20, 2008, Sunday morning/afternoon at the AMC Empire, Auditorium #9. 1 Slithy Toad. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And I guess even this occasionally funny but too often flat attempt at comedy might seem to be good, considering how dismal the movie choices have been in recent weeks. I'd like to like Street Kings, but the reviews have been so awful I can't bear to go and the 68% drop in the second office box office... Prom Night has some eye candy and probably isn't bad (there are some decent actors in the cast, even), but I'm not 16 any more and have seen this one before. There are so many things to like about the idea of Leatherheads, but again it just seems so mediocre from everything I've read that I couldn't bear to go. I even had a chance to see it on the mammoth Odeon Leicester Square in London, or on the biggest auditorium however big it might be at the Odeon Kensington, but when I didn't want to pay $7 to see ...

So the fun of London Book Fair begins tonight with a reception at the Authors Club, then it's 55ish appointments Monday-Wednesday at Earl's Court. I still haven't read my Saturday newspapers, and if I don't start in on those real good by tonight... The weather's been very nice!

It's super-busy time at work right now. Ongoing con obligations, Novelists Inc., I-Con, London Book Fair, and Malice Domestic, on four out of five weekends, so there goes the reading time. We have more business with the kind folk at 375 Hudson St. than anyone else, and Penguin (Ace/Roc/Berkley Prime Crime) and DAW royalty statement have both come in the past week, which means dozens of statements to be reviewed and spreadsheeted and shared with clients. We're updating the IT, so it's not only entering on to the spreadsheets but bringing them all over from the old format to the new. For 21 years in the business I could hardly sell audio rights, and now all at once they're hot for sf/fantasy so there are conversations aplenty. This doesn't leave so much time for blog posts. In fact, it's been so busy I had to catch up on four days worth of funnies this morning. I sent this one to my friends in Green Bay. Peter V. Brett wrote large chunks of his fantastic...