I spent the last several days trying to figure out what this week’s post should be about, but must admit to being distracted thanks to the fact that I’m on vacation at the wonderful world of Disney with my two youngest kids. (Actually, that should be at the “holy shit I can’t believe it costs this much” world of Disney, but that’s a different post!)
Rather than focus on any one issue, I decided that I’d do a bit of a stream of consciousness post this week, show you some of the stuff that I’ve been thinking about industry wide over the past week and maybe get your thoughts on the same.
As I write this, Avatar is about to earn something in the neighborhood of 2 billion dollars. Frankly, I’m amazed by this. Not because it wasn’t an enjoyable film with great special effects (it was) but because Avatar has the most predictable overused storyline that I’ve seen in years. If you are one of the few people on the planet who apparently haven’t seen it yet, please skip to the next paragraph. For the rest of you, tell me this wasn’t Dances with Wolves in space? Guy sent to study the natives and find their weaknesses, falls in love with native woman, changes sides, and then must fight his own former comrades to save his new friends. We’ve seen this story a hundred, nay a thousand times before, people. Stop spending so much money on what is basically a very unimaginative film!
The fight between Amazon and MacMillan over the price of ebooks goes on. At this point Amazon has admitted that it must eventually cave to MacMillan. They say they’ll restore MacMillan’s books to the site so customers can buy them, but right now all they’ve done is put “buy buttons” back on used copies of MacMillan’s books. Gee, thanks Amazon! Way to screw the author. Then again, that’s not something new for Amazon, now is it?
I spent the last week putting together a proposal for a steampunk zombie novel, because an editor I’d like to work with asked for one from me. I probably wouldn’t have decided to write one on my own, as I’ve never been a huge zombie fan, but once I got into the planning and developmental aspects of putting together the basic idea I had a lot of fun. Now I hope the book sells for the simple reason that it I’m actually looking forward to writing this story. Think the Blue Max meets Dawn of the Dead by way of The Dirty Dozen and you’ll have some idea of what I put together.
So what else happened this week? Oh, yeah, right, the unveiling of the iPad, the supposed ebook game changer. All I can say is…yawn. No surprises and actually some real disappointments when it came to the feature list. I’ll wait until the next generation before I line up to get one, as I want the benefit of all the changes the early adopters force Apple to make.
And finally, on the flight this week I had the pleasure of reading Cailtin Kittridge’s latest, Demon Bound, which was the sequel to Street Magic. I heartily recommend it! (But don’t expect to buy it from that link above, however, because it is published by St.Martin’s and guess what – they’re a MacMillan company!)
