I haven’t joined the Borg.  I have not been assimilated.  Heck, I’m not even a Star Trek fan – though I live with three (3) men who are.  That’s why I know about the Borg. Their bloody phrase seeps into dialogue at the Casa de Graham.   I know the phrase.  I know the meaning, but it doesn’t fit.  I have NOT been assimilated.  What I’ve been is the victim of a marketing plan crafted by Mr. Quack, my resident diabolical genius.    

Quacking Alone Romances has had a Facebook page for a few weeks.  It existed and I left it alone.  I operated under the theory that if it didn’t bother me and I didn’t bother it then we’d both be okay.  Then I started trying to keep this blog refreshed with daily new content – which I thought would be a good thing – by going in each morning and posting a thought for the day.  

Mr. Quack sat me down and told me that I was getting it wrong.  I didn’t want to update the blog content everyday, I wanted to put the new stuff on the Facebook page.  He said short thoughts don’t belong on the blog, to put that stuff on Facebook.  So, I moved the thought for the day over to the QA Facebook page.  And, I’ve been trying to keep the page updated with new content by going in and posting my thoughts about books, TV shows, the universe and everything. 

Then Mr. Quack sat me down and said I’d gotten it wrong again.  He said that the Facebook page for QA Romances should stay static and only get updated by blog posts.  He said I needed to work on the Facebook page he’d started for me by reaching out to “friend” folks in my network of family and friends and by posting my thoughts there.  He says that social marketing is a necessary evil. 

Well, I’ve gone out to FB and put in some of my favorites there and I’ve started reaching out to “friend” old friends, college and law school buddies and family members. It’ll be nice to have a way to stay in touch with them, I suppose.  But I wonder if my youngest son isn’t right about Facebook.  Sam says that the number of friends you have on FB isn’t about friendship or connecting.  He says it’s just a modern day status symbol. 

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Today will be a brief post.  Blame it on the day job.  You know, the one that pays the bills?  I exist for the day when I can write full time, but this ain’t that day (yet).  My boss – the trial lawyer at the firm where I do research and legal writing – is trying a big case next week.  I also have a brief due to the Court of Appeals next Friday so next week promises to be a real ole’ humdinger.

Thought I’d post a brief mention about my great experiment on Amazon.  I’m playing with book blurbs or product descriptions again.  Or maybe I should say that I’m playing with book descriptions still.  It’s sort of an ongoing battle.   See, my contemporaries - Griffin’s Law and E-mail Enticement – haven’t yet found their audience.  And I’m convinced that if I describe ‘em just right people will check out the sample and then buy the ebooks for their Kindles. 

Oh, I know, everyone says that nobody reads contemporaries.  Everybody says that contemporary romances don’t bloomin’ sell as well as historicals unless Oprah picks ‘em for her book club or Shonda Rhimes, Ron Howard, or Stephen King or Spielberg (or whoever) buys the movie rights.  I’m still waiting for the call from Oprah or a film mogul.  But despite that, I’m convinced that readers would enjoy the books if they gave ‘em a shot.

I’ve been changing the descriptions of E-mail and Griffin’s on sort of an ongoing and manic basis.  (I’ve been waiting for the guys at Amazon’s DTP to call the rubber room police to come get me.)  First, I changed both to add the blog posts describing my process of writing each book.  Nada.  Just, nada.  Then I went back and wrote a pithy, catchy 3 or 4 paragraph description of each. 

You know what happened?  Yep, more Nada. 

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To paraphrase Rev. Wright, some of my roosters have come home to roost. And we all know that there are good roosters and bad roosters.

The good rooster is my eldest, Zack. He’s home for the weekend from UCF in Orlando, Florida where he’s studying to be an engineer. He flew home on the rails, thanks to Amtrak and the Student Advantage program that gives travel discounts. We’re looking into flying him home next time because Spirit Air has some good discounted rates and because I dearly love Amtrak, but their train schedules aren’t what you’d call convenient. I had to get up at 3 a.m Thursday night/Friday morning to pick up the returning rooster from a train station a couple of hours away. I don’t mind the trip – just the hour.

HOLLA at the Fall Rally Harley bikers and weekend visitors who were travelling to Myrtle Beach in the wee early hours on Friday morning. No, the woman whose car lurched randomly at one point wasn’t coming home from a really good party. She was just sleepy. The kidlets (the newly retrieved oldest and my youngest, Sam) jolted from their comfy sleep to wide-awake and terrified consciousness and insisted that Mom visit the nearest convenience store for a good dose of caffeine.

I’m not so sure about the Spirit thing though. Their air fares look reasonable ($50.00 to fly from Orlando to Myrtle Beach) is a damned good looking rate. But sometimes the good looking ones don’t turn out to be so good when you look at ‘em close. The eldest pointed out that the fine-print on the Spirit site talks about fees and other charges not being included in the $50.00 fare. Those fees could up the cost considerably, making what looks like a good deal, not be such a good deal after all.

The one thing I can say about Amtrak after a lot of experience financing my son’s trips home is that what you see is what you get. The round trip on the rails costs about $85.00 and the fare they quote is the full fare. There are no extra costs or charges (unless, possibly, you take a heck of a lot of luggage or something, but that’s not a college kid problem). If Spirit offers a fare where what looks like a bargain turns out to be an actual bargain then we might give ‘em a shot next time. Flying him right into Myrtle would be nice, but in my present economic circumstances, it’ll only work if its nice and cheap.

My eldest is a rooster who’s welcome to return home to roost any time. The sky is brighter, the air smells sweeter and life is better when all three of my resident roosters are roosting in their home coop.

The other rooster is a dose of cosmic karma, and it’s a bad, bad, evil and downright nasty kind of rooster. It slapped me in the face this morning when I was boogling around my customized Google News page. A couple of years ago Mr. Quack and I were looking for an economical and LEGAL way to download some music to burn some CDs. For me, that means mostly songs of the 70s and 80s. Has any good music been written since the 80s? I think not. (Or mostly not. Charlie Daniels has a new one out called What This World Needs Is A Few More Rednecks.  I’m not too much on country, save for a few tunes and everything by Charlie Daniels).

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Last season the halls of Seattle Grace Hospital got too crowded.  The merger with Mercy West brought in a herd of new folks.  All of the Mercy Westers seemed to be in a continual hunt for patients – and for screen time.  The fans of Grey’s didn’t know or care about the new faces.  They were invaders stealing screen time from the cast that now seems like family.   A bunch of ‘em needed to go.

The problem with that was that Derek was running SG and in typical McDreamy fashion he didn’t want to hurt anyone.  He’d been trying his best to integrate them into the hospital and had even taken one on (April) as his assistant.  Besides, in the economic tsunami of the current economy, most viewers had a downsized somebody right in their household and we wouldn’t view any administrator who downsized a bunch of workers as McDreamy.  (Not even the Mercy Westers who by and large aren’t liked much). 

There were also some story lines that needed to be turned upside down to move characters to another emotional place.  And now that the writers were gonna have time to coddle and confound our favorite characters again, the writers needed them to be ready to make some big changes.  I guess what I’m saying is that SG and its team had driven into a rut and couldn’t get out even though they were headed in the wrong direction. 

One event, one man with a gun, solved the overcrowded staffing and the rut entrenched storylines.  I think of it as Grey’s 9/11.  It blasted away the old SG and forces the staff to start over and build something new.  Just as 9/11 did, the explosion made heroes of folks who didn’t set out to do anything extraordinary.  It made some of them make choices and sacrifices at the point of a gun that they’d never have made after cool reflection.  We’ll watch our heroes who endured so much and lost so much do the most heroic thing of all - get up, start over and move on.

But they’re moving on from a different place.  They’re moving on from the place they picked in the heat of battle.  It’s like I tell my kids all the time – and I had to tell myself very recently – you have to pick the hill you want to die on.  A bunch of the doctors at SG had to pick that hill at the point of a gun.  This season is about dealing with the consequences of those choices.

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After a fairly lengthy absence, I’m finally on the road to recovery. 

No, I haven’t had the flu or been diagnosed with some dread disease. It wasn’t really me who was MIA.  I could deal with little ole’ me being down and out.  This was much, much worse.  This was every writer’s worst nightmare.  Yeah, that’s right – my Muse bolted. 

Too much stress at work, too much stress at home and WAY too much of a very bad reality everywhere sent Muse on the lam.  Reality kidnapped my Muse.  As days stretched into weeks and the long Labor Day weekend passed without my fingers touching a keyboard, I started fearing the worst.  Maybe Muse wasn’t just on vacation.  Maybe she’d taken up residence elsewhere.  She might even be … dead. 

It took several things to bring her back, and that’s what this blog post is about.  There’s more than one way to lure your muse to return.  

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I have always loved public libraries. 

The library was always a little like church, wasn’t it?  You had to be quiet and you had to respect the fellow patrons.  But you could stroll through the library on any weekend day and find tables of people with books spread out around them.  They were clearly working on some research paper or project.  You could walk the aisles and find a couple of friends chuckling quietly over the pages of some slightly scandalous book they were checking out on the sly.  Or you could have real fun and take a tour through the kid’s section.  There you’ll see the little boy tearing down the aisle back to Mom, excited to share his newly discovered book.

The public library has always been everyman’s temple of knowledge.  And I was always every(wo)man.  Oh, I know that out there somewhere are folks who grew up rich or at least well off.  They rarely visited a library.  If they wanted to read a new book, they’d go to a bookstore and buy it.  Why borrow when you could buy? 

Well, I borrowed because I couldn’t buy.  I grew up POOR – very, very poor.  Can’t buy groceries, holes in the floor kind of poor.  Bill collectors calling kind of poor. There were many things that got sacrificed out of necessity – but books were never amongst those things.  Thanks to the public library, the wonderful world of books was always something I didn’t have to sacrifice. 

Then life moved on and despite our poverty, my Mama (God Bless Her Soul) worked very hard to be sure I got an education.  I did college and law school.  If I ended up as a writing kind of “scholarly” lawyer instead of a rich ole’ trial lawyer, well that surely wasn’t my Mama’s fault.  She gave me the world and even though driving terrified her, at least once a week she’d load me in the car and drive me to the library.  She never checked out a book that I recall, likely because her life was too full of taking care of 2 houses and her sick parents.  But she made sure I worked at my schoolwork and she made those weekly trips to the library for me to make sure that the world of books would be my world.

Things went pretty well after law school.  I was never rich but for many years I met one of my most important goals – I was never poor either.  That was true for most folks for a lot of years, I think.  We became a country of folks who could afford to go to the bookstore and buy.  During all those years the library was still there and I’d pass one and remember when.  But you know, it really is true – everything old becomes new again.

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This post may be a bit brief (for me) because we’re editing the first part of Duke of Eden, the serialized novel I’m going to publish exclusively on Kindle for the amazingly low price of 99 cents per installment.  I’ve still got to write the product description but, Yes Virginia – the man tittie cover will hit Kindle next week.  Be sure to check out the book then!

The serialized publication/value price of Eden  actually relates to this post.  As I was working on edits yesterday, I clicked over to Google News – my home page for Internet Explorer.  I’ve customized my version to show certain types of stories, and yesterday up popped a Bloomberg Businessweek story of all things.  Naturally, I got distracted from my work and had to read the piece right away.  The romance genre meriting a piece on a prominant business site was worthy of notice, and its worthy of mention here.

The piece was titled:  Romance Fiction:  Getting Dirty In Dutch Country. It focused on how romance fiction is – even in this Friday the 13th of economies – on the rise.  The story mentioned the writer’s opinion that  the many and varied categories of romance, including Amish, knitting and paranormal specifically, helped keep romance climbing towards the top.  I don’t really disagree with the piece, I just don’t think the writer attributed the rise to all the right factors. 

  According to the article, publishers say that book sales declined by 1.9 percent in 2009 after a 3 percent drop the previous year and books appear to be “suffering a slow and rather boring death.”  The article doesn’t talk about ebooks, which have been undergoing dramatic growth. 

The piece notes that despite declining sales in books overall, one genre has been experiencing “steady and unusual growth.”  Yeah, that’s right, ROMANCE.  The Romance genre increased to $1.4 billion, up by $100 million, or 7.7% from the prior year.  In a down market and a down economy people are buying more romances than ever.  Well, duh.  When have we ever, ever needed to believe in happy endings more than today?

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Angry Old Fat Dude here, and I’ve been especially steamed recently. Why? Because computers suck and everybody knows it, that’s why.

How strange this is coming from a computer guy, right? 24 years in the industry. I was there at the birth of both the home computer and the publicly accessible Internet. You know what I never witnessed? The promise of a truly easy-to-use computer interface being fulfilled. If you’ve ever had to read instructions on how to simply make the computer do what it was designed for, then the computer isn’t really easy to use.

You don’t need to read a set of different instructions every year to operate a car. Even different makes and models of cars. They all work pretty much the same. They have practically the same interface.

How about other electronics? CD and DVD players work the same way, with the same sort of buttons coded in a universal fashion to tell the user how to operate the machine.

Before the smartphone, plain old phones all worked the same way. You input the unique number of the person you want to talk to, their phone makes a noise indicating that someone wants to talk to them, they pick up the phone and put it to their ears and mouths and you talk to them. This didn’t change for over 100 years.

Now, hold on, you’re probably saying “But AOFM, computers are open-ended devices! They’re not designed with just one thing in mind! They can do ANYTHING!”

Well that’s the problem in a nutshell. It’s a machine that emulates other machines. To do this, a programmer must either utilize the most commonly attached devices – the keyboard, mouse, monitor, and printer – or propose an entirely new device – another machine to be bought, attached, and configured.

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There’s no doubt about who’s winning the  American Indie Revolution.  The castle walls of the old publishing royals stand in ruins.  Even former staunch allies like Barnes & Noble have defected to the insurgent writers.   

“Digital publishing and digital book selling will soon become the most explosive development in the history of our industry and will sweep aside those who aren’t participating,” Leonard Riggio, B&N’s founder and chairman, said during a recent presentation highlighting the company’s expanding forray into the digital market. 

The e-reader market is in the midst of a price war that is putting more and more of the devices into the hands of the book-buying American public.  Fewer readers visit the brick and mortar bookstores as more readers demand that the bookstores come to them, via their PCs, Macs, e-readers, iPods and cell phones.  Via America’s strong and ever expanding wireless networks ebooks get delivered to readers instantly. 

When American publishers lost control of the distribution system, they lost control of the readers and the writers.  Today authors like Joe Konrath have chosen to forego offered publishing contracts for some books, electing to get them out in print and ebook format on their own, thank you very much.  Books of writers doing it their way are, more and more,  transitioning readers to expect stories undiluted by editorial changes demanded by publishers.  An American indie book or ebook is becoming an intimate experience shared only by the writer and the reader.    

But even in the present economic downturn, America’s companies invested the time and resources to build the pipelines that allowed the Indie Revolt to succeed.   Those pipelines are being strengthened as demand encourages more investment.  Our writers can now write their books, publish them, sell them to readers and get paid via those same magic pipelines that funnel money directly into their bank accounts. 

In the heady atmosphere of power and possibility now held by the creators themselves, it becomes rather easy to forget that America’s Indie Revolt is not yet the world’s.  Imagine an American publisher today saying the following:  “Everyone knows that almost all publishers cheat their authors on their royalty payments, and there’s ­nothing the authors can do about it.”

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

–  An excerpt from the second paragraph of the United States of America’s Declaration of Independence from the British Crown.

Happy Birthday, America!

Also, this.