BilmBlog500

So getting back to tennis on the blog... Instead of keeping day by day, I'll do posts for two players I watched on both the third and fourth days of qualifying.  We left off in the middle of day 3, and I'm looking for my next match. I try one that just seems boring boring boring and go off looking if there's any alternative. I decide I'll check out a Polish player, Jerzy Janowicz . No idea who he is, but I walk over to the court and he looks like a really young player, like one I would enjoy watching. His opponent I seem to think is not so young.  I am right on both accounts, Jerzy is still a teenager, won't turn 20 for another couple of months. Frederik Nielsen is the typical journeyman, never above 200 in the rankings and heading from mid twenties to upper.   This ends up being one of those nice quallies moments.  It turns out the young guy can play, so he is fun to watch and I do feel I'm getting an early glimpse at something maybe good. And when he wins, th...

As I type this I'm a few hours away from boarding a plane to Melbourne, Australia for WorldCon with some travel Down Under following.  I may not be able to do all the cross-linking and such I try and do usually because the Blogger site I post in is a little more cumbersome to use on an iPad. This post an example of that.  But I will try and do some posting.   A few business things to mention before I go... Borders is going live with their AreaE sites this week, and we've been watching them go from big red tables to more fitted out but I'll be away for the official launch. Not impressed. At some stores these big red tables are replacing and thus doubling as the information desk, so customers trying to test a Sony or Kobo will compete for attention. Can't wait to see how that works on 21 December. And even where the table is dedicated AreaE most of the table space is taken up with computer stations, not eReader display space. The center of the table will have room for a f...

Wonder Woman 602 was a disappointment. First issue at least intrigued but instead of moving forward I thought this 2nd issue in the J. Michael Straczynski run became incoherent. Peter Brett and I were discussing if it's possible for anyone to do a good Wonder Woman because of the inherent flaws of the character herself, and this perhaps further proof it might not be.  Better news from the Straczynski revamp of Superman.  This was a solid second issue, #702, at least to the extent that if you like what he's doing there's more to like here, and I still like the art by Eddy Barrows and JP Mayer which well suits e story. The larger lingering question is if the "socially relevant Supes" is the right direction.  I just don't know what to make of the Paul Levitz run on Legion of Superheroes there and in Adventure. I liked the story in Adventure 517 more than the first installments, but was seriously disappointed with Legion #4. The last issue suggested a major new st...

Window Shopping at the Louvre So when we left off on this here , Eddie and I were collapsing in our hotel rooms after a very long day full of unexpected surprises on the way to London Book Fair. One bank I got a pretty decent night's sleep, and I had one goal for my morning in Paris before we headed off to catch the Eurostar. I wasn't in Paris if I didn't go to the Seine, which looked close enough for a round trip walk if I kept about my business. Down by the big department store and the opera house, stop at one chocolatier that's been around for 80 years then on next block see one that's been around for 90 years and realize you picked the wrong one. Down to the Louvre, walk along both banks of the Seine because I don't want anyone to think I'm slighting the left or the right bank or vice versa. Emerge near big old buildings and think "gee, I bet Benjamin Franklin visited some of these." Another bank It was a wonderful and delightful morning, i...

After two days of bad weather, Thursday was wonderful for tennis, and the tennis was amazing. Good matches, good young players, epic struggles, an amazing day. I decided to be somewhat monogamous for Court 10, which has nice seating and was having three straight matches featuring seeded players for the qualifying. The first was the #9 seed Ricardas Berankis of Lithuania, just turned 20, against a 24-year-old Columbian Juan Sebastian Cabal . This was good, solid play, but Berankis, who is up and coming and around #120 in the rankings, clearly deserved his 7-5 6-3 victory. The second match also had some good tennis, but no real takeaway moments. The 25-year old #7 seed Adrian Ungur of Romania is at his career high rank of #122, but lost in straight sets to a 27-year-old Italian, Simone Vagnozzi , who is ranked something like 40 spots lower and has never gotten into the top 150. Bad tennis, no. But Vagnozzi's 6-3 6-4 victory seemed to be as much about Ungur not taking it as o...

When Borders started expanding nationally in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the DC market was a major one. Borders #10, #29, #45, #50, #89, #112, an overrepresentation of their best stores. Borders #50 at 18th and L Sts. in downtown Washington was probably for a very very long time one of the best Borders in the country, maybe even one of the best bookstores in the country. An incredible depth of selection, sold tons of books, lunchtime at the store was like a gold mine five days a week. So ten years ago, when Borders opened up a new store in downtown DC around a mile from their downtown flagship and right by the White House, big things were clearly expected. Huge store on two main levels each with one or two mezzanine levels, filled with books in all shapes, sizes, varieties. And it was a white elephant. It just never sold the quantity of books that you'd expect from a store that was clearly designed to be a major store. Not even close. Maybe it was because it was a downtow...

The weather was even worse on Wednesday than on Tuesday. Rain all morning. Instead of a cameo appearance at the office I worked a full half day, then went into Manhattan for Wednesday comic shopping (the bright side of the dreary day) and visited a couple bookstores before heading out to tennis. Got there 3:15-3:30 and court drying started 3:40ish. Court drying for qualifying is not done with the same speed as what you might see after a main draw rain delay on a show court. Not near as much manpower put on the task. Several years ago armies if squeegee people were put out. Now they have zamboni like machines to suck up moisture and modified leaf blowers which are incredibly obnoxious to be near. A few minutes quicker than with the squeegees but so unpleasant. Drying starts on the larger outside courts then outward to the most outlying where the least interesting matches have been put. I started out watching a women's match on Court 7 because it was dry and going around 4:40 and I...

The forecast kept getting worse and worse as the day approached but I was still excited, after missing event in 2009, to be hitting the USTA National Tennis Center on Tuesday August 24 under cloudy skies for the first day of qualifying for the US Open. But which match to see. It is nice to see players I've seen before but not nice to see players who have been qualifying since forever. Nice to see new faces but not nice to spend three hours watching #203 vs #258 while both adequately demonstrate the correctness of their rankings. I ended up going to Court 7 to see American Ryan Harrison against a Frenchman Jonathan Dasnieres de Veigy . Him I knew nothing about. Harrison had received a wild card two years ago as a top high school player. He looked very young then, had lots if baby fat, but played impressively for his age. Now 18, Harrison is noticeably thinner and very collegiate. Alas, drops started to fall not very long into the match and then more than drops and there was a ra...

I ended up going on a bit about Animal Kingdom, let's so some quick takes. Sunday August 22 I saw Eat Pray Love at Clearview's Ziegfeld and then The Other Guys at the AMC Lincoln Square, Aud #4/Olympia. Other Guys had higher highs and lower lows and Eat Pray Love was more consistently mediocre, so I'd give a slight nod to seeing The Other Guys. The best parts of Other Guys are in the first half hour and are often genuinely good and genuinely funny. There's good chemistry between Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. But as many of the reviews I read quite accurately point out, in the last half hour the movie becomes too much that which it is supposed to be spoofing, and I tuned out totally and completely. It was good to see Michael Keaton with a decent role in a mainstream movie. Where did he go? Eat Pray Love isn't without its pleasures. Julia Roberts, exotic settings, lush feel, eye candy in some ways. But it's flat. The script is kind of flat. I don't...

Animal Kingdom is an excellent Australian gangster movie which opened in New York on August 13 and which will be arriving in other cities in the weeks ahead. It's well worth -- well, well, well, well, well worth -- seeking out. It's a double debut, both for the director David Michod, and for his lead actor, James Frecheville. Frecheville is so new nobody's bothered putting his DoB on IMDB, but we're told by Wikipedia that he's pretty much fresh out of high school and had to fit filming for Animal Kingdom around his final year studies. Frecheville plays Joshua "J." Cody, whom we meet at home where he's calmly if not very assuredly calling 911 following a fatal heroin overdose by his mother. Out of desperation, he moves in with his aunt, who's the matriarch of a suburban Melbourne crime family that's seen much better days. The Melbourne police have taken to resorting to extrajudicial means to deal with a crime outbreak, and J's outlaw ...

Lebanon, one of two movies seen on Monday night at Landmark's Sunshine in Manhattan (aud # 5), is yet another overrated art film; Fandango has a pretty solid 83 critical score, and a typical viewer rating of no, and the viewers have the better of it. It's set in a tank during the opening day of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. It's supposed to be autobiographical for writer/director Samuel Maoz. I hope if I ever write an autobiography and it turns out my life is as cliched as his was that someone will stop me. This is the kind of movie where you have a soldier asking his CO to call mom to let her know he's alright with 2 weeks theoretically to go in his enlistment. You want to guess what happens to this short timer? The kind of movie where the tank's gunner can't bring himself to fire when circumstances first require. Can you guess what happens? And when he does fire the second time he's supposed to, will it surprise you to find out that this ...

When I started my dialogue with Dean Wesley Smith, the starting point was a post he did, which you can find here , that was kind of on the question of whether your money should go to your agent before it came to you, though it did go off in a lot of different tangents and take on a lot more than that one question. But let's look at that question, as an example of why I think Dean's posts have kernels of truth but are not, as a whole, totally to my liking. Kernel of truth: Once upon a time, the marginal cost to a publisher of cutting each additional check was extremely high. No computers, royalty statements done by hand, checks cut by hand, do you want to have 820 or 8298 payees you have to send checks to every six months? In that context, I think it reasonable that a standard practice developed whereby publishers paid agents, and agents paid authors. The agents did need to get paid, the agents did need to see the paperwork, you can agree or disagree on the practice being es...

One of the major appeals of the CD in spite of the audiophile accusations of diminution of sound quality was that it liberated us from having to get off our duffs to change sides on an album complete with cleaning album and stylus. As I finally start to burn my CDs and put them on my iPad now I see why this whole MP3 thing is so popular. No longer do we need to get off of our duffs to change CDs or even to change our six CD changers. No, we just sit in the easy chair and play 49 straight CDs without getting up, all we need is someone to feed us grapes or Skittles (grape Skittles!). And the audiophile snobs still think any of it's about sound quality. Yeh. Right. What they need to think about are the cunning evil aliens now one step closer fattening us for intergalactic slaughter.

You can go here to find a guest post I've done for the Clarion blog, wherein I discuss the quickening pace of the e-book revolution and the roles of publishers and agents in the current age. Lots of other interesting stuff to be found on the Clarion blog, so if you go and visit, stay a while!

Things were so busy after London Book Fair, not just with work but with getting settled into a new apartment, that I never got around to sharing some pictures of Josh(ua) & Ed(die)'s Excellent Adventure getting there. So Eddie and I are just kind of flying along to London, we're kind of on the Irish leg of the trip, and I do notice that we do a turn over Ireland at a point in time when I'm pretty much expecting a straight flight until maybe you go into holding getting into Heathrow. And then a little bit later the pilot comes on with some bad news from the cockpit. So let me say, very clearly, that there are worse things when you hear about bad news from the cockpit to be told that you're getting to go to Paris. Which is what we're told. Maybe you've been hearing about this volcano in Iceland, and there's this ash cloud, and Heathrow is closed, and so we're not going there. The moment I heard this, I'm kind of excited. I've never been to...

Publishers Marketplace reports that long-time NAL publisher Elaine Koster passed away earlier this week at the age of 69. Elaine was kind of the go-to person during the early years of my career when I was selling Simon Green and Rick Shelley to the NAL list, the person editors like John Silbersack and Chris Schelling and later on Laura Anne Gilman would need to go to for the thumbs-up on an acquisition. I'm told by many of these people that she could be hell to work for, but was at the same time one of those people that a lot of good people would all learn a lot from working with. After she left NAL, she became an agent. John and Chris did eventually as well, actually. But we'll forgive her for that. And remember her support of the genre.

A fantasy writer was asking me if he should write a big epic 250,000 word fantasy as the first in a series as the next step in his career arc. Because there's no midlist for fantasy, and so you need to be big and meaty and epic to stand out. I thought my response was worth sharing. What I think we're seeing is pretty much this. The mid-1990s, we saw Terry Goodkind take the fantasy community by storm. Every publisher suddenly wanted to have Terry Goodkind, so the fantasy market from mid-to-late 1990s for many many years was full of people trying to forcefeed the next Terry Goodkind onto the marketplace. None of this worked. I'm hard-pressed to think of a truly major guy fantasy debut between Wizard's First Rule in 1994 and Brandon Sanderson's Elantris in 2005. By which I mean, there may have been some first books that sold well in part just because there were so many copies pushed into the market for people to buy, but you didn't find people whose second ...

But then you have pleasant surprises like the forthcoming release Mao's Last Dancer, which Moving Image presented on August 3 at Scandinavia House's Victor Borge hall. Mao's Last Dancer is an actual true story unlike the very loosely true Get Low. In the early 1980s, the Chinese government lets a promising ballet dancer study with the Houston Ballet. He falls in love. When it's time for him to return home, he decides to marry instead and defect to the US, which of course the Chinese government is not very happy about. There's a stand-off at the consulate... Can we say I don't rush to see movies about ballet? Li Cunxin eventually ends up in Australia as a dancer for the Melbourne ballet. This might explain why his story came to the attention of semi-noted Australian director Bruce Beresford. Beresford was part of a wave of Australian directors circa 1980 who made a big splash on the international film scene when the Australian government started financing m...

Get Low is a big giant "enh" for me. What a cast! the first pairing of Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek, add in some Bill Murray. If only I found what they were doing in the movie to be way more interesting than I did. The movie's based in the most very loose of ways on the story of a man who arranged to have his funeral while he was alive, back 80 years ago or so. It's a true story but as much a legend with a lot of the details not very well known, so the movie's essentially taking this very basic concept and inventing an entire story around it. In said story, Duvall is a hermit with fierce reputation in town. Murray is the funeral director who helps to set things up, with an assistant played by Lucas Black. Sissy Spacek is an old flame of Duvall's who so happens to be in town. But I didn't care much about Duvall or about whatever secrets lay in his past, I didn't care about his relationship with Spacek. I just didn't care. This isn't s...

I've been a literary agent for 25 years, I think I'm a pretty good one, I'm kind of partial to the profession in general. If you want to read another perspective, go at Dean Wesley Smith's "Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing," which you can find here . If you read through all of his posts he'll often go to great lengths to say that he doesn't dislike literary agents, some of his best friends are literary agents, this post is about the bad literary agents for of course there are plenty of good and wonderful ones, and that post he's just talking about the newfangled agents and not the old school agents for which of course none of this applies. But all caveats aside... close to half of the sacred cows he wants to kill in these posts deal with literary agents directly, and some of the other posts deal with them tangentially. One of the posts talks about the "hundreds and hundreds" of scam literary agents. Which would be almost all of t...

The Kids Are All Right is one of the specialty hits of the year at movie theatres, and deservedly so. It's one of the rare, maybe handful a year, stunningly raved about art movies that can legitimately be stunningly raved about. Julianne Moore and Annette Bening play a lesbian couple with two children, a daughter just about to head off to college and a son a couple of years younger. The son is wondering about who his father is, now that his sister's 18 she can ask for the information, and he prevails upon her to get it. Dad turns out to be a charming organic restauranteur cad played by Mark Ruffalo. He comes into their lives, and things get real different real quick. It's the strangest recipe for a movie I'd really like. Co-written and directed by a director, Lisa Cholodenko, whose one previous major release, High Art, I had zero interest in seeing a dozen years ago and who has done little since. Add in two actresses that I view with at least some hesitancy. I d...

On or about the 17th, I will be doing a guest post for the Clarion Blog where I talk some about various e-book issues, so keep an eye out for that. In that post, I briefly mention but don't really discuss some of the big news from last week, which was the decision by Dorchester Publishing to do away with their mass market publishing and focus entirely on e-books, with a limited trade paperback POD component either for their book clubs or selected titles for retail. You can read the Publishers Weekly article here . I guess the big question is whether this is the harbinger of a trend that will play out across the business in the very near future, if it's a one-time act of desperation that nobody else will follow, or a bold stride into a new era that will force the issue even where it's not heretofore been considered. Dorchester is an independent mass market house. They were founded in 1971. Their best-known imprints are their Leisure Books imprint for horror and thrille...