BilmBlog500

I guess it's that time of year when we talk about the year that was... On the business end of things: When you're a literary agent, your work often comes ahead of the reward.  With the time lag between a book selling and the royalty reports coming along, a book that sells in January might not bring a royalty until November or with reserves against returns until the following May.  So in 2009 and 2010, we were getting paid for when there were 8 or 9 Sookie Stackhouse books on the bestseller lists in 2008 and 2009.  We were getting paid a lot.  It was also a bit like a one-legged stool, a bit unstable because so much of the income was coming in just a couple checks each year. In the years since, the business has become more stable.  The Charlaine Harris business is still huge, not as big as when there were 9 books on the bestseller list but still big.  Other authors have gotten bigger in the past few years, Brandon Sanderson or Peter Brett or Jack Campbell. ...

In my last post I dumped a little on the critical herd for film reviewers.  They ain't the only ones. I've seen a lot of theatre, this year I added a second off-Broadway subscription because it looked like a very good season at Playwrights Horizon.  I'm glad I did, not so much because all those plays have been wonderful but because the Broadway season -- there isn't a show on Broadway which I really want to see and haven't yet, so if not for the off-Broadway stuff I'd be going without. Recently, I've seen a lot of plays that have had varying degrees of critical fawning but to my eyes are falling a little bit or a lot short, though unlike things like Harper Regan , which I walked out of, or Detroit , which collapses into inanity if it doesn't start there, are interesting failures. The Whale by Samuel Hunter.  So you've got this really really fat guy brilliantly played by Shuler Hensley.   We're talking 600 lbs fat.  At first, it's hard to appr...

So I saw five movies the weekend before Christmas, and am happy to say I didn't entirely like any of them. First up was Barbara, a German movie which has been getting excellent reviews.  It isn't so excellent.  The eponymous lead character is a doctor in East Germany in the early 1980s who has been assigned to work at a new hospital.  We see her working at the hospital, getting attached to another doctor in a romantic way, and to a patient or two in an empathic way.  The German secret police come by every so often to her apartment and search it up and down, then have a female agent come in to search her up and down.  We see her biking all over town, sometimes to have a romantic tryst with a government official.  Well made, yes.  But sometimes I think critics are hampered in their judgment because they go to a movie with the press kit, or they go to a play and are given a copy of the play.  And this is one of those times.  Barbara is so suffus...

Haven't done a business post in a while.  I keep thinking my work must be interesting, but I'm not sure what to talk about.  Part of it is probably ennui, I've been doing this thing for almost 27 years.  Part of it, maybe that I get to watch while other people have the fun, a lot of my own job has changed to being the mastermind of a business that isn't as small as it used to be.  Eddie takes on new clients and sells first novels, Brady gets to talk to our global partners and sell foreign rights, I get to be their boss. My current fun task is overseeing an upgrade of our databases. I don't know if this is something we, like, need-need to do.  The current databases have kept the business running for five years. But I don't like to settle.  One of the reasons JABberwocky and its clients do well is that we don't let ourselves, try not to let ourselves, get complacent, sit back and be happy with some good news when the right thing to do is ask how that bit of g...

Even though I am a liberal, I have some mixed emotions regarding the environmental movement. If we end up with a choice between the last seal in the arctic or the last un-fracked farm and keeping human civilization going for a while longer, we'll keep civilization and nuke the seals. So I'm not sure what to think of Promised Land, a film directed by Gus Van Sant which has been doing the screening circuit ahead of an opening later this month.  The Variety Screening Series Q&A had producers/co-writers/stars Matt Damon and John Krasinski along with co-star Rosemarie DeWitt. Just to back up a bit, if you're not aware, "fracking" or hydraulic fracturing is a method of getting at natural gas which involves drilling down into shale, using a combination of water and chemicals to break up the shale and release the gas that's inside of it, and then get the gas above ground.  It's made a lot of natural gas more accessible.  As with clear-cut or mountain-top coal ...

One of the nicest things I've started to do in the past six months if host regular games events at my apartment.  It's a mix of people from my twice-monthly Scrabble club with JABberwocky employees and other writing and publishing types.  These are a lot of fun.  I've always felt a little under-gamed in my life. I've played with my Scrabble club regularly for over 20 years, but you look at the games room at an sf convention like Boskone or Balticon and you realize the world is full of wonderful games, and I've played all too few of them. So let's start to review a few of the games, and we'll start with Carcassonne, which has become a real favorite of mine. Why? Well, first, I like games that have a combination of luck and skill, and Carcassonne is very very good at this. For those of you who haven't played, it's a land-building game.  In the basic game, there are tiles that have pieces of road and/or pieces of buildings on them.  You can claim a road...