So, presumably everyone’s familiar with the agency pricing model for ebooks, right? Essentially, publishers set prices rather than the retailer (such as Amazon). This generally results in more realistic pricing for ebooks vs their print counterparts, and keeps open the possibility that some publishers and authors might actually make money on books.

But that’s no good for consumers, apparently. Media Bistro (among many, many others), points out that a law firm is representing two clients (and opening up for more) in a class-action lawsuit against five big publishers and Apple.

I could explain the details but you’re better off reading some of the media reports, along with the (obviously slanted) post about it on the Hagens Berman website.

Wow.

Discuss.

Today’s the big day. Not the day I buy my first house (that was in April), not the day I celebrate being married five years (that was in May), not the day I see the first ultrasound of my child (that was two weeks ago). No, today is the day I see my other baby: the first book I signed as editor at Gray Dog Press is being released today.

There were others that saw the light of day first, several books that have my name on their contracts, but they were already accepted before I started at Gray Dog; my signature was merely a formalizing of a previous decision. My work on those was largely proofreading and light copyedits, some cover design. And there’s the Zafiro book, And Every Man Has to Die, that I signed after BP, but he’s penned several books and it, too, was pretty well accepted before I started here. Burning Paradise is different. I picked it out of the slushpile, vouched for it when the time came, and now I’ve seen it through from a twenty-year-old manuscript to a brand-new novel. In many ways it encapsulates my experience as Senior Editor at GDP. Along the way there were many moments of confusion, frustration, exhaustion, celebration, and primal piss-in-your-pants fear.

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Following Scott’s pithy post last year, here’s a picture for y’all.

Due December 30th.

(Sorry if I missed a Bark baby in between. Have there been others?)

This article came up in my twitter feed today: Learn the F*cking Rules.

It worries me. Not that there are people concerned about grammar and language (that’s a great thing), but that they hold them to be the most important aspect of a written work. And that these people are professional editors with lots of experience in publishing.

Isn’t there more to writing than noun/verb agreement? Important? Of course. But not the end, just part of the means.

Went to an estate sale on Saturday for a guy who’d owned a used book store for many years, then closed up shop and took all his stock home. Basement was literally waist deep with books, the main floor and upstairs only knee deep. Had to climb on piles of books to get to other books.

Like nothing I’ve ever seen, and so terribly sad to hear the sound of pages rending from their spines when stepped on.

And so terribly sad to hear the estate salespeople say that it was the last day of the sale, 50 cents a box, on Monday they were all going to the dump because nobody wanted them. They’d tried the local libraries, high schools, prisons.

And so joyful to see so many people enraptured by all those old books, climbing to find treasure. And so terribly sad to know that all of us combined would barely make a dent, and in a day or two they would be food for a landfill, to decompose in its endless plastic belly and covered by old mattresses, broken vacuum cleaners, rotten leftover chicken.

Among us one old man on his hands and knees in the corner, picking trampled books off the floor and arranging them into neat stacks twenty books high, doing so when I got there and still doing so when I left.

In two hours I read a thousand titles, fought the urge to find a shovel, stopped and nearly cried once, nearly shouted with glee once, nearly elbowed a young woman to get at a hardcover set of Updike, nearly found the December 1923 National Geographic for a middle-aged man with a box full of faded yellow covers and one book on building patio furniture.

I saved seven boxes that day, and that night I mourned for the rest.

1. The rain. It’s good that I don’t live in Portland anymore, or Seattle. Rain smells good but only when it comes right after weather that is not rain. In the summer when it’s been dry, in the spring to soften the blunt force trauma of the pollen, in the winter when it helps wash away the frozen angled remnants of snow pushed up against the curbs.

But not when it comes after rain. Then it smells like nothing; it has served its purpose and now what? There are places in the world, in the country, in the state, that don’t get enough rain, that would kill—have killed—for the water I find merely annoying. And this adds to the hatred, because I hate the rain, and I hate hating the rain, and I hate spending time thinking about hating hating the rain. And about how rain is water and how easy it is to extend it as a metaphor, how sloppy and almost pedantic in a way. How I too often did before I knew better. How I now know better. How I have no idea what else I am doing wrong.

2. Writing. Read more »

I’ve been gone a while. Some folks actually noticed, and thank you. I used my time away to buy a house. I’m already sketching out shelving designs for the library (screw refinishing the floors!).

If you feel like writing:

Isn’t a train the perfect getaway vehicle?

Should prisoners on death row be allowed to choose their method of execution?

Can a zombie commit suicide?

Remember the first time you went back home and found that the cupboards had been rearranged in your absence? How long did you cry that night?

Continue: “Last night was the worst of the storm. The vase had broken, the dead flowers scattered over the rug. Everything shook; the whole room shimmied against the fireplace. Now, this morning, the vase was gone, the flowers back on the bushes outside. And the woman from the hardware store was on the couch again.”

I want one of these: http://noteslate.com/

And I want it now.

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Shira writes a notable post, as always. On what is writing, what is the method? There is no method, we all say. There is a method for each of us alone. Nobody can tell us what to do, but it sure would be nice if someone could tell us what to do. To make it easy, a formula. A recipe: combine two daily hours with half your daydreaming moments and bake each morning (or afternoon or commute or conversation with spouse). Let cool three weeks, then break apart (per Sam) and repeat. Continue repeating until either dead or famous or willing to let it go.

This is what happens to me when I take the approach of just writing, of not waiting and perfecting and nurturing and combing as I go along. This is, I think, emblematic of the effect such go-forwardness has on art. There is a beauty, a naturalness, a manic flavor to it; it is art, but it is somehow wrong. For me, the same with writing. Go go go and end up in the same place but with no way to trace the way back. When you push forward at every cost, refusing to examine what it is you have created, how can it ever be perfect? How can it ever be corrected? Do words not bond as tightly as spider silk? What are we to catch if what we build is so full of holes?

My mother decided I needed to have a subscription to Reader’s Digest, so she bought one for Christmas. I received the first issue a couple of days ago and leafed through it last night. One page had a reprint of thirdway.org’s taxpayer receipt, which you can find here.

Page three shows a breakdown of where money went for the 2009 median taxpayer earning $34,140 and paying $5,400 in federal taxes. Near the top are interest on the national debt and combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which combine to cost $516.20 for this hypothetical taxpayer. Combine the amount spent on education funding for low-income K-12 students and Pell grants for low-income college students, and it’s only $67.92. The FBI gets $11.21.

And way down at the bottom of the list is the line item “Funding for the Arts.” Its piece of that $5,400 pie? Twenty-four cents.

Sorry for contributing to the “woe is me” attitude of writerly types. Let’s all give one more frustrated sigh and move on.