Quacking Alone

What theme does Shonda Sunshine want to explore on the sixth season of Grey’s Anatomy?  I think it’s her take on the old adage – You Are What You Think You Are.  Although the theme is rather conventional, I expect that Sunshine’s take on it will be anything but standard.

Who set the theme?  Why, it was Lexie’s question to Callie:  “How gay are you?”  Don’t forget, Callie had been wandering around in states of half dress right in front of Lexie’s beau Mark.  Callie even darted in to speak to Mark while he was wearing nothing but steam from his shower.  So Lexie put the question to Callie who could have answered it straight out, proclaiming herself a lesbian and any future romantic escapades with McSteamy impossible.  She didn’t do that.  Instead, she said Mark didn’t see her boobs anymore and that meant he was committed to Lexie. 

Ahmm,  yeah, right.  So now, Lexie must measure the status of her thing/fling with McSteamy by checking the degree of his boob blindness.  Can he see other boobs today?  Some boobs?  All boobs?  No boobs?    He’s only as into her as he thinks he is.  So she should watch out for the cry - Boobs ahoy!

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Amazon’s strategy for marketing the Kindle makes me think of a dictator who decides he wants all the citizens of his country to live in one city. 

People being, well, people with individual patterns and practices, likes and dislikes, it’s not likely that all them will ever live in one city.  But the dictator could certainly get more of them there by showing that his city is a safe place with the best streets and parks and the most jobs.  That would attract interest.  Then he could point out that his city opens its arms to everyone and respects their differences.  I’d bet that dictator could then watch the steady influx of folks from hamlets all over the land, willing to try city life because it lets them keep big parts of the things they loved about their hamlets while letting them have more jobs, more choices,  and more possibilities. 

Or, if the dictator is maddened with power and crazed with the determination to have it all his way, he could use a different strategy.  He could simply kill all the citizens who live anywhere except in his favored city.  Guess which strategy Amazon has chosen to market the Kindle?

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If a genre is saving an industry, wouldn’t you think it would be entitled to a little respect?  Well you’d think so, or most of us would, anyway.  But not so with Romance.

Romance is the Rodney Dangerfield of genres. 

A recent article in Time Magazine (which I found from Scott Eagan’s blog – see my sidebar) credits romance novels with “helping some publishers hide from the worst of the recession.”  According to the article, 1.4 billion dollars of romances were sold last year.  That was the largest share of the book market.  More than 1 out of every 4  books sold is a romance novel. 

If romance is the 1.4 billion industry that’s accounting for a large portion of sales, you’d think it would be entitled to a little respect.  If romance is the drain plug keeping the circling publishing industry from going under, it should be entitled to respect – and a lot of it.  But like Rodney, romance don’t get no respect.

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Once upon a time, a handful of publishing companies decided what Americans could read.  Those companies lived in the great literary castle.  No common writers were admitted to the castle.  The publishing royals would periodically admit certain citizens that they deemed worthy to petition them on behalf of the common writers. By and large, most of the worthy citizens had either worked in the castle in years gone by, or they had worked for other worthy citizens that the royals had known for years. It was an insider’s paradise and no outsider need apply.   

The worthy citizens had the loathsome job of dealing with the commoners in the Kingdom.  Someone had to do it and it wasn’t going to be the royals themselves.  After all, the royals couldn’t dirty their hands by working directly with those who created the products that paid for their castle.  No, let the worthy citizens deal with the rabble.  Best of all, the worthy citizens not only protected the royals from the rabble, the royals didn’t even have to pay the worthy citizens.  The worthy citizens took their fees from the rabble’s proceeds.  A cut of the bounty paid by the royals to the rabble rightly belonged to the worthy citizens. ’ Twas a small enough price for their having to deal with the commoners and sort through their barrage of products to find the work that worthy citizens thought would be deemed acceptable by the royals.

Most of the commoner’s notions got rejected by the worthy citizens.  Those esteemed folks worked and socialized directly with the royals and knew what the royals would and would not deem worthy.  Or at least, they believed that they knew.  And the worthy citizens did not, as a rule, challenge the royals to accept something too new or too different.

And thus was born — the sacred system.

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Mary Anne’s husband here.

I’ve made a few tweaks to the website so that your visits here will be more enjoyable.

• Disabled the Snapshot feature.

You know that little cartoon speech bubble thing that would pop up when you hovered your mouse pointer on a link and show you a preview of the page being linked? I personally found it entirely too sensitive and annoying. It also took up precious bandwidth and memory. So whoosh! out the door it goes. I can put it back if enough people want it back, but I don’t see that happening.

• Added paperback book cover images and created special “large cover image” pages.

Mary Anne wanted me to show off my paperback book covers as well as the full-sized e-book covers already on the site. Doing this necessitated changing the way cover images were displayed, because I was just linking the raw large-sized e-book cover before. I decided to create a page for each book’s covers, which can be accessed from the side bar under Sections or from the individual thumbnail images on the Complete List of Books page.

Who knows, you might even want to buy a paperback after seeing one of my covers or want me to design a book cover for you. E-mail Mary Anne if you would like to arrange for me to design a book cover for you. I’m sure we can negotiate a great deal in exchange for a testimonial or inclusion in a future portfolio.

• Assigned categories to blog posts.

It’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here. I had to wait awhile to see what kind of things Mary Anne would blog about so I could create categories and assign them. Now, if you want to see just stuff about the trashy TV shows she watches or about Michael Jackson or Donny Osmond, you don’t have to wade through stuff about her personal life. You can just go to the sidebar, scroll down to Filter by Category, select Other Entertainment in the drop down list and VICHYSSOISE! you have all of her posts about the abominable Durrrrrrrr & Murrrrrrrrrr from Grey’s Anatomy (or as I have titled it, Young Doctors Who Like To Screw So Much That Their Patients Croak and They Have Nervous Breakdowns), or whatevs. So try that out and see how you like it.

Let me wrap this up with two last things.

I wanted to make sure you knew that Sixth Sense is now out in paperback on Amazon, so click on the link and check that out.

Finally, I’m working on getting E-mail Enticement ready for paperback, which includes redoing the cover, formatting the book using our old & busted copy of MS Word, et cetera, et cetera. So you should be able to get a molecular copy of it fairly soon to launch at a loved one’s head and put a romance-novel-shaped dent in a much adored skull.

Until next time… AOFM signing off.