BilmBlog500

This wasn't the best year I've had at the US Open. As an example, in 2010 I enjoyed seeing: Bernard Tomic, an Australian with a good run or two at the Australian Open who maybe isn't the next big thing but is still a solid and reckonable player Ryan Harrison, a definitely up-and-coming American who's had too many bad draws, constantly facing top players in early rounds and not yet beating them, thus not as many ranking points as if he had a few easier early round opponents, but definitely going places Jerzy Janowicz, a Polish player who had a really good Wimbledon this year Ricardas Berankis, a Lithuanian who advanced to the final of the DC tournament this summer, helped since the field was weakened because of the Olympics, but still if you can get to the final of an ATP mens tournament that ain't chopped liver. So this year I thought I was really lucky that Berankis had his breakthrough to late to get into the US Open automatic entry, so I could watch his coronati...

I'm saddened to hear that Josepha Sherman, a long-time writer and editor and one of the first people I met in the sf genre, passed away on Thursday. She was 65. Those of us who are experienced at reading and evaluating manuscripts, it's sad but true that we can often tell in a matter of sentences whether there's any "there" there in a manuscript. Jo might have the best raw evaluator I'd ever come across, she could tell more in ten pages than anyone I've ever come across, and when I started out doing freelance work for Baen almost 30 years ago, Jo was someone I'd look up to in awe and amazement. She was always willing to put in that little something extra in giving feedback to an author who had earned it. My respect for Jo was such that she was one of the first people other than myself to do work for JABberwocky. When it was getting to the point that I had a hard time just doing triage on the requested partials out of the query pile, I asked Jo to h...

What do you say about Tony Scott? Well, I don't think you'll be hearing this too many times in the obituaries and reminiscences that are going to be out and about in the wake of his tragic suicide, but I think I'd compare him most to Martin Scorcese. Yes, Martin Scorcese. Because I think the experience of going to the movies isn't just about if a movie is good or bad but about the memories it creates. There are directors who don't create memories at all, I can't rouse myself to like or dislike a Betty Thomas film, let's say, Beverly Hillbillies wasn't good but I don't dwell on it. But at both his best and at his worst, Tony Scott created great memories. There's Top Gun, which I'm now watching on Blu Ray. It was made 20 years before Blu Ray and yet if you're wondering if it's worth upgrading from a regular DVD, Top Gun could be the test reel. It wasn't the first movie I saw at the Loews Astor Plaza , but it was the first I sa...

I should be reading a manuscript but it's late and I'm tired and it's not the right conditions for work reading. So instead, let's reflect on one year of life after Borders. Technically I could do in September, but this week marks the real end, the week when the liquidation became official, when the theory of the Borders bookstore gave way to the going out of business sale. And it still sucks. To tackle some good news first, the end of Borders wasn't the end of publishing as we know it. I don't know of any publishing company that went under because they were left holding a bag with a hole in the bottom of it. At least not yet. I'm also not aware of any publisher with cash flow issues where our receivables get kind of long in the tooth that's had its circumstances improve over the past year. But that's about the extent of the good news, that the Borders bankruptcy wasn't the start of some fancy game of dominoes where we could watch them all m...

There's no doubt that there's a stretch in 1980/81 that was the most formative in forming the film-loving part of my self. May 1980, when The Empire Strikes Back opened, and we drove down to see it in 70mm on the huge screen of the RKO Stanley Warner Route 4 Paramus Quad. Around that same time, that I saw The Shining. December 1980, when I saw Altered States at the Loews Astor Plaza . The summer of 1981, when I was on my own in Boston for several weeks. So it's with extreme sadness that I read on Monday in the New York Times that the AMC Loews Harvard Square theatre has shuttered. According to Cinema Treasures , the theatre opened in 1926 with 1700 seats. Who knows how many seats it had in 1981, and I'm not sure that the balcony was in use at that time, but it was still one massively mammoth theatre with one humongously huge screen, and it showed a different double feature every night. And you could buy a card for ten prepaid admissions for, if memory serves, $18. I ...

There are a gazillion things I could/should be doing, but as we settle into our new office, our first office office, a little bit of reflection... When I started JABberwocky almost 18 years ago, the business plan wasn't much. A piece of memo paper where I had determined I'd need around $24-25K in gross commission revenue to break even, that I was sure of having at least $12K the first year, and that I would surely sell another book or two over the next year. It wasn't a get rich quick scheme, that's for sure! As things turned out, I did somewhat better than break even, with total commission revenue in the low 30Ks. What I didn't realize, and I don't even know if I'd have started the agency if I had realized it, was that my revenue wouldn't grow for a long time. It was five years before gross commission revenue moved from the low 30Ks to the mid 30Ks, five years before I finally started to have a smidgen of breathing room. On the other hand, I don...

Trying to order something from Ikea, it only tells me after I've entered by billing and delivery addresses and my e-mail that the item I want isn't in stock and can't actually be ordered. Yeah, right. Adobe Flash Player sends out notices around every two days that they have a new version they need for you to install. All of them do the exact same thing, so you can never tell one update from the rest, it's like groundhog day and you just install Flash Player over and over again every single day. They tell you, no need to restart in order to install the update. But like a mini-Ikea, they only tell you when you're midway through the update "oh, by the way, be sure to close all the programs that might be using Flash." Wouldn't it be better for them to tell you at the start of the process? I've had a lot of good karma with the NY Times bestseller list, with books that have placed several spots higher than the Nielsen Bookscan ranking of actual reco...