Talking White Privilege

With all the hubbub ignited by Trump about athlete protests, I was reminded of a book I reviewed last May by one of my favorite authors, Michael Chabon.  Telegraph Avenue is about a neighborhood in Oakland that like many in Detroit has come on hard times.  The main couple is Gwen and Archy.  They're a black couple who run a New Age midwife business and record store respectively.  Most of the novel is OK, but it's the ending where Chabon trips up and lets his white privilege show.

After a host of complications, Archy winds up selling his stake in the record store to go sell real estate and Gwen becomes a nurse at a normal hospital.  Maybe I'm being too sensitive, but it seemed pretty awkward that you have a well-to-do white guy writing that these poor black people should just give up on their dreams and take "respectable" jobs.  It echoes a part in the book where a white doctor tells Gwen she should get her hair straightened and stop practicing "voodoo."  I think we'd all agree the doctor shouldn't say that, so why should the author essentially be telling us the same thing?

And Chabon is a liberal academic about as far removed from Trump or Rush or Alex Jones as you can get and yet subconsciously most of us white people are still guilty of letting our privilege show and telling minorities they need to conform to what we think is right.

That's the heart of this NFL kerfuffle.  You have a rich(ish) orange white guy telling black athletes, most of whom grew up in poor and/or crime-plagued neighborhoods like Telegraph Avenue, how they should protest against injustice.  Not only that you have this white guy telling NFL owners (most of whom are white) to fire those black athletes on the spot for their protests.  It's the Chabon example above dialed up to 11.

My take has been and continues to be:  I don't give a shit.  Kneel before, during, and after the anthem if you want.  It's no skin off my ass.  And as a middle-aged white guy, even if I'm not rich, it's not my business to tell black athletes how they should express themselves, so long as no one is being hurt.

Of course a lot of people getting butt hurt about this are buying into the Trumpian, Fox "News," Info Wars lies.  This isn't about hating on the anthem or the flag or veterans; it's about protesting racial injustice like all those police shootings in places like Ferguson.  One of those greet thoughts being Tweeted about is that saying this is about the anthem is like saying Rosa Parks was protesting the bus or black people at lunch counters were protesting the food.  It's completely missing the point, but then with Trump when isn't he missing the point?

White people, starting with Trump, need to just STFU because they honestly have no fucking clue what they're talking about.  Instead of whining about the precious anthem (during which time half of the people in most stadiums are usually in the bathroom or concession lines anyway) we should be focusing on fixing the inherent problem so athletes don't feel they have to protest.

Speed Demons!

At the start of the year I wrote a full-length gender swap novel called Secret Origins that was like Batman v Superman meets my previous superhero gender swap novel Girl Power.  The idea was that an alien artifact inadvertently turns a Batman-type hero and Superman-type hero into teenage girls.  They go to high school with the Superman-type hero a popular girl and the Batman-type hero a nerd.  Ultimately they wind up fighting each other and then joining forces to stop an alien monster.

The epilogue was like a cookie scene in a movie, something to help set up the next story.  In that we introduce Dr. Alan Bassett, a scientist studying the alien artifact that crashed.  Except when the artifact splits open to release the monster, radiation from the artifact changed Alan into a hot teenage girl--a hot teenage girl with super-speed!  So yes she's the Flash to the Batman and Superman characters.

Something I learned about this is if you don't have your sequel all lined up, you really don't want your cookie scene to get too specific.  Because then I kind of had to tap dance a little to get everything to line up for the most part.  So when I wrote a cookie scene for the sequel I made sure to keep it a little more generic so it could fit in anywhere.

It took a while to come up with an idea for the sequel.  I actually ran through like 3 outlines before I got one I liked.  And then I didn't use a lot of that one, though the overall framework was pretty much the same.

Since we're dealing with a Flash character in my first attempts I tried basing it on one of the more iconic Flash stories, 2011's Flashpoint where the Flash goes back in time to stop his mom from being killed, which in turn creates an apocalyptic present.  They half-assed used it on TV and rumor is they might be using that for the movie Flash--provided they ever get their shit together on that; I mean I think they've gone through like 5 directors already.  Anyway, my first outline more or less did that the same way.  It didn't really seem right.  I tried another way where instead of going to the past, the Flash character fucks things up in the present and accidentally is thrown into an apocalyptic future.  I got that one all roughed out but it still didn't seem right.

So I decided to nix the whole time travel thing.  I don't really like time travel stories that much anyway.  The final version then stayed entirely in the present.  The first quarter or so of the book is just Allison learning to adjust to being a girl and a superhero.  She goes through quite a few growing pains with both.  At the same time she tries to reconnect with her former wife and young daughter and winds up becoming her daughter's babysitter while her former wife goes on dates with the guy she was cheating on her former husband with.

But ultimately the Batman-type hero from the previous story finds her and brings Allison back to her mansion to give her a real place to stay and to train her to become a hero.  Again there are some growing pains, but she seems on the right track until she tries to foil a hostage situation by herself.  One of the hostages is a girl named Naomi who has a superpower of her own:  like Rogue of the X-Men or Superman villain Parasite, Naomi can drain someone of powers.  She uses this on Allison, who then has to find a way to get her power back and save the world from Naomi.  (In one of the later outlines she was supposed to give up her power willingly like Spider-Man 2 but then I decided to make it involuntary.)

Allison as Bluestreak! (ie Power Rangers costume with Captain America mask)

Allison's friend Melody as Electric Girl!

This was the kind of story that starting out I didn't think it'd be all that long.  Then almost a month later it was nearly 80,000 words!  It's been almost two years I think since I wrote anything that long.  So hopefully it does well. Buy it here.

I already have an idea for the third one roughed out.  It's supposed to be more like Civil War as the government creates its own superheroes to take down Allison and her friends.  I'm not sure when that will be done, but probably by the end of the year.  Here are the initial Sims of them:

Janet

Lucy

Megumi

Rose

More Stuff I Watched Since the Last Time

More Stuff I Watched Since the Last Time...

Max Steel:  This was based on a Mattel property I don't remember.  This kid moves back to his hometown and starts manifesting liquid energy and then an annoying robot partner shows up and then there are bad guys and...I didn't really follow most of the exposition.  It's otherwise an OK movie that wastes the acting talents of Maria Bello and Andy Garcia.  The latter looks especially ridiculous in an Iron Man-ripoff suit.  At least they didn't seem to try too hard to set up sequels or a "cinematic universe" because I'm pretty sure it didn't make enough money for that. (2/5)

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 2:  Maybe if I'd watched this in the theater, where I was a captive audience, I'd have liked it more.  The middle of this especially seemed to drag to the point I was getting bored and playing on my tablet and such.  There just didn't seem to be much of consequence going on.  Star-Lord finds out his father is a "Celestial" who has his own planet and often takes the form of Kurt Russell.  Considering the two-part Avengers Infinity War starts next year you'd think they'd want to do more to position the Guardians for that, but I think the cookie scenes did more for that than anything in the movie.  Though the end with Yondu was nice.  Not sure why Sly Stallone was cashing a paycheck as the Ravager leader; it seemed as pointless as the rest of this.  But I don't know, maybe if I watch it again at some point I'd like it more.  I might have just been in a grumpy mood. (2/5)

Alien:  Covenant:  After Prometheus, one of the main complaints was how fucking stupid these "scientists" were, taking off their helmets and running around like Scooby and Shaggy in a place filled with killer aliens.  So what does Ridley Scott do?  He has a bunch of idiots go to an alien planet with no spacesuits or masks or anything and they get infected with aliens and shit.  Because, well, I guess a computer told them the atmosphere was OK.  I mean sure they do this on Star Trek but that's not supposed to be realistic while this is supposed to be more so.  Anyway, somehow the android David from Prometheus--who was just a head--got a body and killed all the "Engineers" (and Noomi Rapace) with some spores and decided to create aliens that wind up killing the dumb shits who land on the planet.  But two dumb shits escape except they can't tell the good android from the evil android and so wind up fucked.  Like Transformers 5 it doesn't seem like they really learned from their previous failure and thus repeated it. Ridley Scott will need Blade Runner 2049 to do better to regain some of the goodwill he got from The Martian. (1/5)

Ghost in the Shell (2017):  I never saw the anime, so I don't have any idea how accurate it is.  Basically it's like Robocop in that a dead woman's brain is put in a robot, albeit this robot looks pretty normal.  Then she's put in a secret unit to fight bad guys.  There's no training montage or anything; one minute she's waking up for the first time and the next she's killing bad guys.  Would have helped to have something in between maybe.  Like Robocop she starts looking for bad guys and ends up being hunted instead.  There's even a robot vs cyborg fight that isn't quite as good as Robocop vs ED-209.  The story is a little muddled, but it's at least better than the Robocop reboot. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The issue of "whitewashing" was brought up since this was originally a Japanese comic and anime.  You'd get the comic book fansplainers then saying "Well actually" but the character in the movie is literally whitewashed as an Asian woman's brain is put in Scarlett Johannson's body.  When her robot body emerges for the first time there is a white shell around it that flakes off, just kind of hammering the point home.)

Batman & Harley Quinn:  I wouldn't have watched it but it was almost free from Redbox, so fuck it.  Fuck it is basically what Bruce Timm and DC Execs said with this.  Instead of adapting graphic novels and such they just slapped together something with their two biggest and most overexposed characters.  It's made in the style of the animated series from the 90s with Harley Quinn getting released from jail and working at basically a superhero-themed Hooters.  Meanwhile Batman needs her help to track down Poison Ivy and some Swamp Thing-like dude from another dimension.  They're planning to release a virus that will make everyone into plants.  Despite this being a cartoon there are some PG-13 moments like the superhero-themed Hooters and when it goes into Batman 66-type captions that read "Ow, My Balls!"  The end just cuts off without really resolving much as Harley decides to just light Swamp Thing-type dude on fire.  Did they get the virus back?  Meh.  Who knows.  Or cares? (2/5) (Fun Fact:  Fortunately they're getting back on track with their next project:  an adaptation of the graphic novel Gotham By Gaslight, which imagines Batman in the Gilded Age battling Jack the Ripper.)

Marvel's The Defenders:  I binged this entire 8-episode miniseries one Sunday.  The four Marvel Netflix heroes (Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and Iron Fist) are all brought together to fight the evil Hand, led by Sigourney Weaver.  Under her direction the Hand brought back Daredevil's lady love Elektra and brainwashed her into being their "Black Sky" super ninja.  It takes the first couple of episodes for the four heroes to finally get together at Midland Circle in Manhattan. What's kind of lame is how easily Luke Cage is freed from prison by Foggy Nelson; it makes the end of Cage's first season kind of anticlimactic.  Gradually things ramp up as the Hand needs Iron Fist as the key to their great McGuffin that turns out to be the corpse of a dragon buried underground that has some kind of secret sauce to give people eternal life.  This is kind of silly, but it's played straight as Daredevil and Elektra seemingly make the ultimate sacrifice, but well, of course not.  It'll be interesting to see how this affects the next seasons of these shows but next up is The Punisher.  Overall it's good for TV but not exactly on par with The Avengers.  (3/5)

The Tick:  I watched the original live action series a few years ago, but I never watched the animated series or read any comics or anything.  This revival on Amazon was greenlit last year with the pilot episode.  It mostly deals with an accountant named Arthur whose father was murdered by "The Terror" years ago and so has become obsessed with finding the villain.  One night while tracking some bad guys, Arthur meets the Tick, a big blue superhero who at first it seems like is a figment of his imagination, but later other people start to see him too.  Arthur gets a weird Russian suit with wings and is stalked by a Punisher/Deathstroke-type anti-hero called Overkill.  It was good for the most part, but unfortunately there are only 6 episodes so just as we're starting to get answers, it ends.  I hope there will be more later. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Overkill has a sentient boat called "Dangerboat" that's voiced by Alan Tudyk, which might be why it sounds like K-2SO from Rogue One.)

Voltron Legendary Defender "Season 3":  As I predicted, the first couple of episodes reengineer the Voltron team into the familiar 1980s configuration as Keith takes over the black lion, Lance the red one, and Princess Allura the blue one.  Meanwhile former black lion pilot Shiro escapes the evil Galra and rejoins the team.  And the evil but charismatic Lotor is taking over the Galra and hatching an evil scheme...and then it abruptly ends after 7 measly episodes.  Christopher Dilloway says there will be more episodes in October, so it just seems silly to start now, barely get anything started, and then have to wait two months. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  In one episode they go to an evil mirror universe where Shiro is actually a guy named Sven--a callback to the original blue lion pilot in the 1984 series.  Sadly in the evil mirror universe no one had a goatee.)

Bojack Horseman: Season 4:  This at least was a full season.  Unfortunately it wasn't as good as previous seasons.  For a show called Bojack Horseman, he was almost a secondary character in his own series.  Literally about a quarter of the season was dedicated to episodes where he hardly appeared!  The problem is the other 3 seasons all had a more focused approach.  In season 1 Bojack was having a book written about him; in season 2 he was making a movie about Secretariat; and in Season 3 he was promoting said movie for the awards crowd. But this time he doesn't really do anything; he just hangs around with his daughter who we find out at the end is really his half-sister.  Meanwhile the supporting characters are all off doing their own thing so nothing really comes together.  If there's a season 5 it would be nice if it got back to putting the focus where it belongs:  on the horseman! (2/5) (Fun Fact:  There was a fake-out at the start of the season where you think at the end of Season 3 he's going to run with the wild horses, but really he goes off to Michigan to hide out in his ancestral home.)

Handsome:  I guess this was supposed to be like a funny, foul-mouthed Columbo since Steven Weber tells you right at the beginning that he's the murderer.  But really it wasn't all that funny or even a very interesting mystery.  There are a lot of extraneous characters who don't really add much like a neighbor and his accordion-playing wife, a detective who likes to speculate wildly, another one who's a woman who dresses in men's clothes for...reasons, and a chief who's alternately hitting on the eponymous detective and telling him to file his retirement papers.  None of it really adds much to the story, such as it is.  Basically a woman who babysits a kid next door meets an actor at a party so she can score some swag from his gift bag and winds up being murdered by him later.  Saved you about 80 minutes of boring crap.  Netflix has some good original series (see above) and movies but this is one I wish they hadn't spent my subscription money on. (2/5)

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword:  As I said on Facebook, it would help if you can purge from your memory any knowledge of the actual King Arthur legend like the movie Excalibur.  I mean there's very little of that in this other than some names and vague ideas.  Instead director Guy Ritchie and his writing team try to melt together an Arthurian movie, one of Guy's London crime movies like Snatch, Robin Hood, and probably a few other things so that you end up with Arthur floating to London as a baby like Moses only to be adopted by prostitutes until he becomes their pimp.  Meanwhile King Uther's brother has made a deal with "syrens" (a weird squid lady creature) in his basement to build a tower that will somehow give him ultimate power.  The simple way to review this is to quote the old lady behind me in Transformers 2:  This movie is so stupid.  (1/5)  (Fun Fact:  N/A)

Kong:  Skull Island:  Last year Warner Bros backed its way into a DC cinematic universe and this year they're backing their way into a "Monsterverse" with this movie.  The way BvS followed Man of Steel, this follows the 2014 Godzilla remake.  It takes place in 1973 when some scientists and military guys go to Skull Island and are knocked out of the sky by Kong and then beset by a number of giant critters, chief among them weird lizards with skull faces.  The whole thing feels largely empty, like a commercial for future movies though it isn't until the cookie scene at the very end that we get to introducing Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and others. (2/5)  (Fun Fact:  To back into their cinematic universe, they cast at least 4 members of the Marvel Cinematic Universe:  Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Samuel L Jackson (Nick Fury), John C Reilly (Nova Officer, GOTG), and Brie Larson, the future Captain Marvel.  I guess they're hoping for some kind of cinematic osmosis?)

Gold:  Finally, a movie about a white man raping a Pacific country for its minerals!  But seriously, Matthew McConaughey is a prospector who's been down on his luck in the 80s.  Then he contacts a geologist who thinks there's a big gold strike in Indonesia.  When they find some gold dust it seems they're on the right track and they start selling stock to a lot of investors, led by Corey Stoll.  But, spoiler alert, it turns out the geologist planted the gold dust and then ran off with some money, leaving McConaughey holding the bag.  It's an OK drama but maybe a little too long.  Seems weird that with a star like McConaughey and a strong cast I hadn't even heard of this until it was released on DVD; I'm not sure it ever got past the "limited release" in theaters. (2.5/5)

Forces of Nature:  I fell asleep while trying to watch this online a month or two ago but it was on Showtime so I got to finish it.  I kinda wish I didn't.  Ben Affleck is a guy getting married in Savannah, Georgia but his flight out of New York skids off the runway, leaving him stranded.  His seatmate Sandra Bullock is also going to Savannah so they set out on a Planes, Trains, and Automobiles style trip that did start in a plane and then go to an automobile and then a train and then back to an automobile.  Along the way they hook up, but...spoiler alert...Affleck ends up marrying his bride-to-be Marua Tierney even though she looks about 10 years too old for him.  And Sandra Bullock makes amends with her estranged kid.  So, yay?  I guess, but it seems kind of pointless, like if Planes, Trains, and Automobiles had ended with Steve Martin getting home and slamming the door in John Candy's face.  Not very satisfying. (2/5)

What We Did On Our Holiday:  A dysfunctional British family travels to Scotland for their father/grandfather's birthday.  Along the way the parents fight almost nonstop, except when they fall asleep and one of the kids steers the car.  Once arriving in Scotland, the grandpa takes the three kids to his favorite beach, where they have plenty of fun--until he dies.  Instead of freaking out, the kids (aged 10-5 or so) decide to give him an impromptu Viking funeral he joked about by assembling a raft and lighting it on fire.  Now if I were 10-5 I think I would have been freaking out and run screaming.  There is some trouble with the cops and reporters then before a not entirely happy ending.  At times funny and at times sad it's a decent movie. (3/5)  (The divorcing couple are played by Rosamund Pike of Gone Girl and David Tennant of Dr. Who/Jessica Jones, which when you think about it the crazy wife from Gone Girl and the Purple Man would make for a pretty terrifying couple.)

Cooties:  The credits might put you off chicken nuggets for a while as it shows a diseased chicken getting ground into a gross nugget that is eaten by a little girl.  The kid turns into a zombie and it starts to spread while only the adults are immune to the effects.  So a bunch of dim-witted teachers led by Elijah Wood and the forehead guy from The Office have to find a way to escape.  One stupid thing is in the teacher's lounge is a block full of knives, which seemed weird.  I mean who needs a bunch of knives in a teacher's lounge?  Except to repel zombies.  But when the zombies start running around, no one grabs the knives.  It violates that thing that Chekov and/or Hitchcock said about showing a gun in the first act.  Anyway, it just ends seemingly at random with lots of stuff left unresolved, but it's pretty amusing if you don't take too seriously it's a movie about murdering children. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Two of the executive producers are Hayden and Tove Christiansen, who I'll assume are brothers.  Lucky for us they don't act in the movie.)

Birdemic:  Rifftrax episodes frequently reference movie so it was nice to have a chance to see it.  The movie is hilariously inept with pathetic acting and even more pathetic CGI effects.  Since apparently they couldn't hire a bird wrangler they use terrible CGI birds that often hover, despite that being impossible.  When the birds first attack, it's hilarious there are all these bad CGI explosions, like the birds are bombing the town.  Besides the frequent shots of parking and gratuitous story about solar panels, stock options, and Victoria's Secret, the most hilarious thing is that while the actors are freaking out and shooting birds, you can see cars and people in the background acting totally normal.  And then for no reason at all the birds fly away.  The end.  This is the best worst movie you'll see. (5/5)

Mystery Team:  Three nerdy kids led by Donald Glover have been junior detectives since elementary school.  Now that they're almost graduating high school they want a real case and so start investigating the murder of a little girl's parents.  Except they really know even less than Scooby and the Gang about investigating crimes greater than someone sticking a finger in a pie.  What I saw was pretty funny but then I fell asleep.  I woke up for the end to see who did it--no rubber masks were involved. (2.5/5)

Radical Jack:  All you really need to know is this 2000 movie stars Billy Ray Cyrus, who at the time was still the most famous person in his family.  You might wonder why someone would cast the guy behind "Achy Breaky Heart" but then Hollywood had already cast Brian "the Boz" Bosworth, Shaq, Dennis Rodman, and Vanilla Ice in movies so why the hell not?  The plot is pretty much Roadhouse if Patrick Swayze's character had been coerced by the CIA to take a job as a bouncer to spy on small town drug dealers.  And maybe if it had starred Patrick Swayze it would have been slightly more tolerable. (1/5)

Bermuda Triangle:  A very long, boring, inept 70s movie about a boat that gets lost in the Bermuda Triangle while looking for "Atlantis."  They find a doll that apparently was a little girl who died a century or two ago, which supposedly talks to a little girl who starts saying creepy things in a badly dubbed voice.  When they go underwater they murder three sharks for little reason.  I mean the sharks weren't even threatening them and they just shot them!  Plus there's a black cook who's so stereotypical even Donald Trump probably couldn't excuse it.  Not even Rifftrax can do much with this turkey. (1/5)

Deep Web:  The "dark Web" is the seedy underbelly of the Internet and now a go-to plot device for lazy screenwriters when someone needs illicit goods or services.  Silk Road was a major dark website that mostly sold drugs for Bitcoins.  The administrator for the site called himself "Dread Pirate Roberts" after the character from The Princess Bride (Cary Elwes in the movie version).  Eventually the FBI caught him and he was put up for trial.  Unfortunately Writer/director Alex Winter (aka Bill S Preston, Esquire) has his buddy Keanu Reeves (aka Ted "Theodore" Logan) narrate in such a monotone that it put me to sleep so I don't really know how it all turned out. (1/5)

Banking on Bitcoin:  This documentary goes hand-in-hand with Deep Web above as much of Bitcoin's rise and popularity was thanks to the Silk Road allowing people to buy drugs online.  The site and its operator are featured in this documentary and even some of the same writers and such are interviewed.  Like when I watched a Minecraft documentary, this didn't really do what I hoped for, which was to explain just what the fuck Bitcoin is in layman's terms.  At one point it goes to a group of old people and one asks if you buy something with a Bitcoin, how do you make change?  But the movie never really answers the question.  As far as I can tell, other than drugs people don't really buy much with Bitcoins; they just hold on to them like stocks or bonds.  I suppose it's a good idea whose time hasn't come yet.  (2/5) (At its height around 2013 there were Bitcoin exchanges that soon went the way of EBay consignment stores.  They even sponsored a college bowl game on ESPN, which was one of the first times where I thought, "The fuck is a Bitcoin?"  Still wondering.)

Lo and Behold:  This Werner Herzog documentary starts with a history of the beginnings of the Internet.  Then it just goes into some random things vaguely associated with the Internet:  artificial intelligence, solar flares, robotics, Internet addiction, and a place in West Virginia where due to is proximity to a radio telescope there's no cell signals, which makes it a haven for people who don't want to use the Internet for whatever reason.  It's mostly interesting but doesn't really have much cohesion. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: the title comes from LO, short for LOGIN, which was the first-ever email between UCLA and Stanford.)

Boobs!:  Who wouldn't want to watch a documentary about boobs?  What's America's obsession with boobs?  I think the answer is pretty easy if you use Freudian psychology:  it involves an Oedipal complex.  Rather than ask psychologists or anything, this mostly talks to random people and Tom Arnold.  Like Lo and Behold it goes into random tangents about breast enhancement/reduction and porn and all that.  If the production values weren't like an 80s local news broadcast it would be better. (2/5)

Ashley Madison:  Sex, Lies, and Cyber Attacks:  Ashley Madison was a site dedicated to letting married men hook up with chicks.  Its parent company also owned sites like Cougar Life and Established Men.  Basically any fetish, they had a site for it.  Then in 2015 a group of hackers called "Impact Team" hacked the Ashley Madison site and threatened to release the personal information of subscribers.  When the company didn't pay, they also published company emails, which leads some to believe the hack might have been an inside job.  Since no one has been charged (as of the date of the documentary) there's no real conclusion.  It's just some stuff that happened.  (2/5) (Fun Fact:  The CEO of the company stepped down and the company rebranded itself after the email scandal.)

Man vs Snake:  Back in the early 80s there was this video game called Nibbler where a snake eats pellets, getting bigger and bigger.  There was a game called "Snake" on late 90s/early 2000s Nokia phones that was pretty much the same.  Anyway, this guy named Tim McVey (not related to the OKC bomber) set the record for a billion points.  Many years later he and some other people try to do it again.  First he tries to do it at a convention in DC but fails.  Then fails at home a couple of times.  Finally on XMas in 2011 he does it.  His victory is short-lived, though, as someone beats his score the next year.  And someone beats that score...and so on...so it was fun and interesting, but kind of pointless.  (3/5)  (Fun Fact:  McVey was originally from Ottuwah, IA, the oft-mentioned home of Radar O'Reilly in M*A*S*H)

The Kid Stays in the Picture:  Robert Evans started as a maker of women's pants with his brother.  Then he acted in a couple of movies thanks to a chance encounter in a Beverly Hills swimming pool.  Eventually he began producing movies.  In the 70s he had a string of hits like Rosemary's Baby, Love Story, The Godfather, and Chinatown.  In the 80s coke and tangential involvement in a  murder trial sunk his career.  He did a few movies in the 90s like The Two Jakes (a sequel to Chinatown), Sliver, Jade, The Phantom, The Saint, and The Out of Towners, none really big hits.  One thing he never mentioned is really his decline began around the same time Jaws and Star Wars ushered in the era of the blockbuster.  Since Evans handles all the narration (and there's also footage from interviews and such) it's hard to know exactly how truthful it all is.  Still, it was pretty interesting. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  Apparently Evans is still alive, though he hasn't been very active the last 15 years; the last major picture he produced was How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.  Also while he did most of his work through Paramount, this documentary was distributed by Universal.)

Hidden Rules of Life:  Algorithms:  An Oxford math professor demonstrates how useful algorithms are in our daily lives. Algorithms are mathematical procedures for solving simple problems; the first recorded one can be used to find out the number of tiles you'd need to cover a floor.  It talks about some early computing ones and then the original Google PageRank algorithm that made the site so popular and how it can be applied to a soccer team.  For a show about math it's not that boring. (3/5)

Room 408:  I accidentally watched this while building a set of Legos.  I think it's based off a Stephen King story, which is why the main character is a writer.  A writer who checks into the eponymous room that's supposed to be haunted.  Then he starts to experience a lot of weird phenomenon.  It's kind of like Inception at the end as you wonder if he really got out of the room or not.  It's OK but not particularly scary.  Maybe if you're 12 or the sort who gets scared by the standard haunted house.  (2.5/5)

The Saint:  This was a book series that I think started in the 1930s featuring master gentleman thief Simon Templar.  In the 60s there was a British TV series starring Roger Moore that helped him get the Bond role.  In the late 90s Robert Evans (see above) produced a Val Kilmer-starring feature film that didn't do all that hot.  This version on Netflix stars nobody even close to A-list and has TV movie production values.  Templar and his computer hacker assistant have to find $2.5 billion dollars  destined to help Nigeria that were stolen by some people.  I'm not sure if this was the pilot for a series or what, but it was kind of dull; I stopped paying attention after a little while.  A couple of times it seemed like an actor botched his/her lines and yet they left it in.  Not nearly up to Robert Evans caliber. Ha. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  the late Roger Moore has a small role in this as Jasper, whoever that was.  I read the first book in the series a while back; it was OK.)

Looney Tunes: Back in Action:  I guess you could call it the "spiritual sequel" to Space Jam as it pairs Looney Tunes characters with live action people.  Brendan Fraser and Jenna Elfman this time with Daffy and Bugs.  They're trying to get a diamond called the "Blue Monkey" before the evil Acme corporation led by Steve Martin.  The hi-jinks became grating after a while.  Like later Muppet movies it's kind of annoying that a lot of the voices sound similar but aren't really the same. (1/5)  (Fun Fact:  Read Nigel Mitchell's Toons series instead.)

God's Pocket:  The eponymous neighborhood in Philly is a real shithole, only in the 70s or whenever this was supposed to be it's still mostly a white shithole, unlike say Detroit.  The late Philip Seymour Hoffman is a meat delivery guy or something who moonlights as a low-level mob guy too and then his messed-up son is killed in a construction accident that no one really gives a shit about.  He has trouble then paying for the funeral to the point the funeral director throws the body on the roof or something and so he puts the body in his meat truck to preserve it.  When he tries to sell the truck, someone takes it for a joyride and it gets into an accident, spilling the body onto the road to "die" a second time.  Meanwhile Hoffman's wife and a reporter who was supposed to be looking into the accident go off and fuck in a meadow.  In case you haven't figured yet, it's not an uplifting story.  But it's well-made and less obnoxious than say the movie above. Just saying. (3/5)

Term Life:  Vince Vaughn with a stupid haircut is a guy who plans robberies and then sells those plans to interested parties.  But when a party is murdered by crooked cops, he has to go on the run with his teenage daughter.  It was largely a lot of boring cliches strung together.  A better movie about a criminal bonding with his estranged daughter is Ridley Scott's Matchstick Men. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  Bill Paxton plays a crooked cop pretty much like the one he was playing in the Training Day TV show when he died.)

Cursed:  In Hollywood, a brother and sister (Jesse Eisenberg and Christina Ricci) are attacked by a werewolf and then start becoming werewolves.  They eventually have to find and kill the werewolves who changed them:  Joshua Jackson of Dawson's Creek/Fringe and Judy Greer of Archer/Arrested Development.  It's one of those that seems to shift in tone from serious to campy. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  In an episode of Archer they joke that Judy Greer's character spent months thinking she was a werewolf.)

Comic Review Sans Reader

Here are some more comics I've read since whenever the last time was.  A few months I think.

Batman: Rebirth, Vols 1 & 2:  Like when the "New 52" last rebooted Batman it isn't really a reboot.  It doesn't go back to Batman's origin and it references past characters and stories and so forth.  It's more of a renumbering like what Marvel has been doing steadily for the last 5 years or so.

With Rebirth, the writing duties on the title shifted from Scott Snyder to my new favorite comics writer Tom King.  I've read and loved King's Omega Men and Vision series, both of which ended at 12 issues.  This finally gives him a chance to do a really ongoing series.  The first volume is pretty tremendous.  It starts with a plane crashing in Gotham City.  Superman and other heroes are off somewhere so it's up to Batman to save the day...somehow.  It's really touching how as Batman is on top of the doomed plane, using drone engines to steer the thing for a water landing, he talks to Alfred about letters he wrote for his current/previous Robins, and whether his parents would be proud.  It sort of references The Dark Knight Returns as he talks of "a good death."

But Batman and the airliner are saved when two new super-strong heroes save the day.  Probably the lamest thing about this volume is the names of the heroes:  Gotham and Gotham Girl, who are brother and sister.  Unlike Batman v Superman, where Batman is instantly threatened by a super-strong hero and tries to murder him, this Batman recognizes that there are situations which he--even with his training, resources, and money--can't handle, such as the crashing airliner.  He tries then to work with the new heroes and steer them in the right direction.  It all goes fine until they run afoul of the "Psycho Pirate," who infects Gotham Girl with intense fear and Gotham with paranoia and rage.  So of course soon Batman has to fight Gotham.  He brings in Superman and the Justice League, but since it's Batman's title of course that doesn't work.  And for good reason:  Gotham's power amps up as needed.  What Batman soon figures out is the only way to stop Gotham is to burn him out by making him overdose on power.  Meanwhile Gotham Girl pulls a Britney Spears and shaves her head but still can't shake her fear.  Only the Psycho Pirate can do that but he's been kidnapped by Bane.

So in Volume 2 Batman recruits villains Catwoman, Punch & Judy, Bronze Tiger, and Ventriloquist to go to Santa Presca Island, which Bane rules in the buff.  In the comics since he was introduced in 1992 Bane has been on and off "Venom," the super-steroid that originally allowed him to break Batman's back.  This time he's off Venom--and clothing, for whatever reason--and using Psycho Pirate as sort of his personal shrink.  Or guru maybe.  Whatever.

I didn't really like these issues as much.  For some reason Batman keeps repeating the same mantra over and over until I thought he must be a robot or something.  Punch, Judy, and Bronze Tiger don't do a whole lot.  Catwoman is more interesting for stuff that has nothing to do with this, like why she's accused of 237 murders.  But the Ventriloquist's role was pretty good:  he's the only one Psycho Pirate can't control because he listens only to his puppet, who is often a dummy but this time is just a literal sock puppet.

The last couple of issues are better as it involves a tender love story between Batman and Catwoman.  They've been on-again/off-again throughout the years and now they're on again.  Batman is supposed to return Catwoman to prison in the morning but first they do some crime fighting and making out.  It's funny when they give conflicting versions of how they met:  one references their original meeting in 1940 or so and is drawn in that style and the other references Frank Miller's Year One and is drawn in that style.  Like Grant Morrison's run, King knows how to work in some of the older Batman material and characters to freshen them for the modern age.  Like Kite Man--hell yeah!  From what I've read, King is building towards Bat and Cat getting married, which seems destined for failure just like Peter Parker/Mary Jane Watson or Clark Kent/Lois Lane and so on.

Like the other books from King I've read the best thing about it is that King knows how to humanize his comic book characters to make them vulnerable instead of larger-than-life.  That's not to say he makes them wimps, but only that they are human, not gods.  I really need to take down that copy of King's superhero novel A Once Crowded Sky and start reading it.

Volume 1:  4/5
Volume 2:  3/5

Detective Comics:  Rebirth, Vol 1:  This is a far more traditional Batman comic.  Though it's really more of a Batwoman comic as Batwoman's army colonel father has trained an army in the style of Batman and set them loose on Gotham City.  Batman recruits Batwoman, Red Robin (former Robin Tim Drake), Spoiler (former Batgirl Stephanie Brown), Orphan (former Batgirl Cassandra Cain), and Clayface (former villain) to combat evil.  For whatever reason he doesn't recruit Batgirl (Barbara Gordon), Bluebird, Nightwing, Red Hood, Robin (Damian Wayne), or the half-dozen other vigilante people in the Gotham City area.  It's an OK read with a touching moment as Red Robin "dies" though it's quickly spoiled when we find out the mysterious "Mr. Oz" (Jor-El?  Ozymandias?  Whoever.) has for whatever reason teleported Red Robin from danger at the last moment.

There is one redeeming thing about this series:  Azrael is back!  Jean-Paul Valley's Azrael took over as Batman from 1993-1995 but was killed off at the end of his solo series in 2003.  But now he's back, though they fused him with the Michael Lane version of the character in making Valley super-Catholic.  He's not in this much after the first few pages, though in future issues he's got his sweet Batsuit back, so eventually I'll have to read that. (2.5/5)

Batman:  Gothic:  From the early 90s this was Grant Morrison's second Batman story after the legendary Arkham Asylum a few years earlier.  In Morrison fashion it's kind of a gonzo story that features an undead killer who's trying to cheat the devil by trapping souls in a cathedral.  To get souls he plans to release plague into Gotham and only Batman can stop him.  It's weird and wild and yet wonderful in its way. (3/5)

X-Men:  God Loves, Man Kills:  This 80s limited series was the basis for the 2003 X2: X-Men United movie.  Only in that (and later movies) William Stryker was an evil general but in this he's an evil reverend, sort of a televangelist who is on a crusade against mutants.  After a TV debate with Professor X, Stryker has the professor, Cyclops, and Storm kidnapped.  Kitty Pryde is able to follow them and find their lair.  Eventually Stryker hosts a big broadcast from the World Trade Center during which Professor X's mind power is being used to target mutants around the world.  But naturally he's saved.  It's an OK story but as someone mentioned on CBR or something Chris Claremont has a real fascination with mind control, in the same way Alan Moore has a fascination with rape. (3/5)  (Fun Fact:  The Batman story The Cult is largely similar to this, including the religious nut breaking the main character.  They came out a few years apart; I think the X-Men one was first.)

A neat thing I found out is Amazon offers some older Marvel titles free with Amazon Prime.  So I downloaded a few of those since I had nothing better to read.

Deadpool:  Secret Invasion:  This was another volume 1 of Deadpool, though I'm not sure exactly when.  During the Secret Invasion event when the shape-shifting Skrull aliens were secretly invading the Marvel universe, which I think involved Spider-Woman being their queen or some shit.  Anyway, Deadpool defects to the Skrull who try to clone him, with disastrous results.  In reality Deadpool is trying to steal info for Nick Fury but it's intercepted by Norman Osborne.  The rest of the volume involves a broke Deadpool undertaking a mission in Europe to kill a mercenary's wife and some zombies.  But then it all goes sideways.  It's OK, but not really anything special. (2.5/5)

Punisher, Vol 1: Black and White:  This is a more recent Punisher renumbering.  Frank Castle has moved to LA in pursuit of drug dealers.  But then traditional Spider-Man villain Electro gets involved while Castle is hunted by the Howling Commandos as well.  Overall it's pretty much your typical Punisher comic with him killing bad guys and stuff. His "costume" is a little more updated with a bulletproof vest decorated with a skull and a Crossbones-type mask he sometimes wears.  (2.5/5)

Immortal Iron Fist, Vol 1:  This was from about 2007 shortly after the Civil War story.  Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and Daredevil are all around but "unregistered" which makes them outlaws really.  That doesn't factor much into things, though.  What this is mostly about is Danny Rand finds out there's another Iron Fist, one who fought in World War I and later left in disgrace.  He and Danny team up to battle the Steel Serpent and HYDRA.  It's written by Ed Brubaker, who's better known for his Captain America run that was the inspiration for the movies and for grittier comics like Gotham Central.  Mystical kung fu stuff isn't really his thing.  If you didn't think much of the Netflix series, I don't think this will really change your mind. (2.5/5)

Legendary Star-Lord, Vol 1:  Long ago Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord, was a pretty typical superhero guy.  But in recent years Marvel turned him into the wisecracking goofball portrayed by Chris Pratt.  This series continues that as his costume is exactly like the movies and so is the attitude.  It's kind of a grab-bag as he escapes from bounty hunters, meets a half-sister, fights Thanos, and runs afoul of someone called "Mr. Knife."  I guess if you like the Chris Pratt version it's fine.  I could take or leave it. (2.5/5)

44:  The title for this comes from Stephen Blades being the 44th president.  The day of the inauguration he gets a letter from 43 (a thinly-veiled W Bush) who reveals that something has been detected in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and a ship was dispatched to investigate.  A ship that will be making contact in just a couple of months with whatever is out there.  And what's out there is a big "chandelier" that could be a gun or maybe not.  I liked it for the most part though I didn't like the artwork.  It's one of those newer styles where people aren't really drawn like people; the dimensions seemed all off to me.  So mark it down a little for that. (2.5/5)

How Much is Too Much?

Continuing the theme of the last couple of posts, let me whine about another way authors can lose plenty of money quick:  audiobooks!  In July Draft2Digital announced they were partnering with Findaway Voices, a service to create audiobooks.  It said there was no fee to join or anything as long as you were a Draft2Digital member, so I figured I'd go check it out. 

I went through and submitted A Hero's Journey as I didn't think one of the gender swap books would be appropriate.  After a few days later I get an email that they have some recommendations for narrators.  It gave me a list of five or so ranging from $75/completed hour to $250/completed hour.  I have no idea how many hours my book would take, but I think most audiobooks are a few hours.

So no I didn't go through with it.  I mean it'd probably be like $300 minimum and you think I'm going to get that $300 back?  Hell no.  While it might be neat to hear someone other than Amazon's Text-to-Speech reading my book, I don't have the money to waste on it.

Amazon's ACX lets you exchange royalties instead of paying a set fee.  Though I think that would just be a waste of the narrator's time and money as much as mine.

There are just so many ways for authors to waste money that might sound like good ideas but really aren't.  Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice (or more), shame on me.

Killing the Golden Goose

Last Wednesday on the blog (not that you noticed, I'm sure, though I'm writing this rebuke a month in advance--prove me wrong, assholes!) I talked about how "Goodwill" or giving shit away for free can often backfire on an author because people are assholes and just take the free shit and run.  Now here's a trend I've noticed the last couple of months that could be part of what's killing my golden goose:  it's these mega-bundles of 30, 40, 60, 80 "books" that are sold ridiculously cheap for as low as 99 cents.

Here's a case study for you: 

EROTICA:TABOO: DADDY COME INSIDE: 44 SEX BOOKS -- First Time Virgin Taboo Sex Romance Collection Bundle

 At the time I'm writing this it's #1 in Victorian erotica, #2 in Transgender erotica, #2 in Historical erotica.  The page count is 370 pages, so if you do the math with 44 books that's only an average of 8 pages per "book."  Considering the real average is probably less than that these are more flash fiction stories than books.

And really you wrote 44 books of virgin taboo sex?  And this "author" has tons more of these collections.  To write that many stories you have to be even faster than me.  And far more focused on just doing one type of story over and over again.

Here's another case study just at random:

Dark Rough Erotica Sex Taboo Romance:  80 Books Mega Bundle, Deep Inside, Bisexual & Threesome Submission, Explicit Menage Stories for Women and Men  (Not so much a title as a bunch of keywords sandwiched together)

At this time it's not really doing as hot.  Only #38 in Transgender and #47 in Historical.  Unlike the other one it's a whopping 2326 pages, so the stories are more like stories at a 29 page average.  And yet think about this:  2326 fucking pages!!!  And you're selling it for 99 fucking cents?  That's like if I took my entire Transformed gender swap series and sold the thing for 99 cents instead of selling most of the book separately for $2.99.  I might make some money, but I'm still probably losing money because I'm only getting like $0.35 per copy.

And that's the whole problem.  These people are devaluing the product to such an extent that how can I possibly compete with them?  Let me put this in a simplistic example not using books.  Let's use soda pop instead.

For a couple of years I've been selling Grumpy Bulldog cola regionally and I've been doing pretty well.  I mean not as much as Coke or Pepsi, but more like RC Cola--or Faygo in Michigan.  For every 12-pack of Grumpy Bulldog cola I charge $2.99.

Now along comes some huckster selling Bubba Cola at 99 cents for a case of 80.  So what am I supposed to do?  I can't afford to sell my cola for 99 cents in a case of 80; I'd go out of business in a month because the sales couldn't possibly cover my expenses.  

And if Bubba Cola wants to actually maintain a business, they can't keep selling cases of 80 for 99 cents either.  But maybe they don't have to.  Maybe they just did something unsavory like take a bunch of flat, expired soda from a dumpster, slap a new label on it, and resell it for ridiculously cheap because they don't have much in the way of actual costs.

Or if you want another example, let's say I'm selling meth (though I'm not DEA, pinky swear) and I'm selling the pure blue Walter White shit for $2.99 a rock.  But then Gus Fring comes along and rips off my dealers and starts selling my product for 99 cents per pound.  He can do that because the product hardly cost him anything.

Which goes to my theory that I sincerely doubt these books are legit.  I think what these "authors" did is scoop up a bunch of stories off message boards or pirate sites or other books on Amazon and then slapped them together into a bundle.  I mean how else do you sell it so cheap and actually make a going concern?

The problem is like in my simplistic examples:  how can I compete with that?  Who wants to buy my one book for $2.99 when they can have 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 books for 99 cents?  Now in my cola example I would immediately think if you're selling 80 cans of soda for 99 cents there must really be something wrong with it.  Like if you say your car is is only $1 I'd immediately think there must be something terribly wrong with it.  But I don't think book readers are necessarily that discerning.  I don't think most of them really give a shit enough to think, "44 books by one author for 99 cents?  What's the catch?"  They just scoop it up because what the hell it's just something to jerk off to and if it sucks it only cost a buck, right?

Going back to Wednesday's post, this is frustrating as an author who would like to actually make some money off his writing.  This isn't exactly giving the book away for free but 99 cents for 80 books is pretty well giving it away for free.  And even I don't have 80 books a month in me.  Or even 44 "books" if they're all on the same theme.  That would just get so repetitive so fast.

Now to be fair some legitimate authors have been doing this too.  Recently Jay Noel posted about a collection of steampunk novels he contributed to that made it onto the USA Today bestseller list.  These I can be pretty sure are legit because it lists all the different authors.  It's not one person claiming to have written 22 steampunk novels.  As great as that is, though, it's largely like giving books away for free as you're hoping people will read your book in the collection and go buy more by you.  How many will?  And even when you sell a bunch of copies, at 99 cents split between the publisher and 22 authors, you're making maybe a penny on that.  Which is why I never made any money off the flash fiction collections I wrote with Neil Vogler and Sean Craven (and others on the second one); they sold it for 99 cents and when you split the 40% for the authors among three people that's 13 cents apiece.  To make $10 then we'd have to sell 77 books.  Now if you have 40% (or 40 cents per book) split 22 ways that's 1.8 cents apiece so you'd have to sell more than 500 books to make a measly $10.

You see what I'm saying there?  As a promotional tool that might be helpful--though from my last post I'm skeptical--but as a way to generate immediate money it's a losing proposition.  Unless you're getting your material for free or almost free and thus whatever you make is pretty much pure profit.  Which is great for you but now all of these collections are clogging up the bestseller categories on Amazon, making it harder for people like Yours Truly to get their books seen by readers.  It's like if I'm at a convention with my booth and this other person puts up a booth three times the size of mine smack dab in front of mine with all kinds of expensive pyrotechnics and whatnot; who the hell is going to notice my booth, right?

I'm not saying that's the only reason for a sales slump the last few months, but I think it's one reason.  I should go track down some proof and maybe convince Amazon to shut down these people, though Amazon will likely be too lazy to do anything (sellers like me they treat like garbage but scammers they just love) or the offenders will just keep coming back under other names.  Like with pirated movies, music, and so forth it's really up to the consumer to demand better product.  Drink Grumpy Bulldog Cola!  Er, buy my books!

Goodwill Games

This post seems appropriate for what should be the Insecure Writer Support Group day.  (As an aside, how long has that been going?  Years, right?  How many insecurities do you people have?  Jeez.)

In accounting there's a sort of bizarre concept known as "Goodwill."  It happens when there's a merger and one company ends up paying more for the other than it's technically worth.  I guess the idea is you need a way to balance the books without fudging numbers so you throw in this thing called "goodwill" which is kind of like saying, "Well, we paid too much but you got to spend money to make money."

Authors know all about paying for benefits that aren't immediately tangible.  Free books.  Bookmarks.  Ads.  All the costs of conventions.  Or even if you buy a new computer or pen or whatever.  (In my case also frappes at Biggby Coffee, Starbucks Coffee Beanery, etc.)  Think of all the money and time and energy that goes into writing, editing, publishing, and then promoting a book--especially for a self-published author.

Can you believe this asshole spelled the title wrong on the fucking cover?

Just about 25 months ago now I started a newsletter.  Using a template from a book I read I put my newest release on top and on the bottom I put a free book.  The free book I most often just go to the "top 100 free" of Amazon's Transgender erotica list, because often I can find something there.  Sometimes if I can't I'll use one of my own books.

Here's the rub:  when I look at my MailChimp stats, what site are most of the "clicks" from the newsletter for?  (Ie, which link do people click the most?)  The FREE book, of course!  When it's one of my books for free, the clicks go way, way down because people probably already have that book.  One time I couldn't find anything good on the list so I put up a link to a book on sale for 99 cents by another author.  Clicks nosedived to hardly any at all.

Look, I get it, we all love free shit.  I love getting books for free as much as anyone.  I'll scoop them up if I'm alerted to a sale.  I use Amazon's borrowing once a month quite often to get one book for free--though at least the author does get a small portion from the pages read.  Prime members can also download some other books like the first Harry Potter, a couple of LOTR prequels or whatever by JRR Tolkein, short stories by some better known authors, and some volumes of Marvel comics for free.  So hey I take advantage of that.  Again I assume the authors get a chunk of the pages read or something.  I don't, however, stoop to piracy sites.  Not just for moral reasons, but also I worry too much if those will give me a virus or spyware or malware or whatever that could help Trump win another election.

In the early 2000s like many other people I used some file-sharing services like Limewire, Bearshare, etc (not Napster) to download music.  This was before iTunes, Amazon music, etc made it fairly affordable to buy a single.  I will say, though, that many of the songs I first downloaded for free I later bought legitimately because I wanted to hear more of the band.

Now that's where we get back to Goodwill.  What's supposed to happen is I offer you a free book and you go and pay to read my other books.  Or in the case of my newsletter I offer you someone else's free book and you say, "What a guy this is!  What a prince among men!"  And you go check out my books.  But too often I think people are like someone who goes into the supermarket, eats all of the free samples, and then leaves without buying anything.  People can do that and they get fed, but the supermarket doesn't make money.  In fact, the supermarket is losing money not just on the food but on the electricity, wages, and so forth.  There are all these hidden costs for that "free" book.

So I guess the irony is that 10 years later or so I finally get you, music industry.  It really sucks when people just take shit for free. 

That's not to say it never works.  I mean one day in August I sold 44 books, which was maybe an all-time high.  Since the counter jumped from like 2 to 42 in the span of an hour and there was no rush on one title, I assume it was one person (or small number of people) who read a book and wanted more.  Just like I sold a lot of copies of Second Chance and Last Chance by giving away Chance of a Lifetime for free.  Now still I gave away probably many, many times what I sold of the other two books, but it was not completely terrible.  That's the chain-reaction an author wants.  That's why we're giving away the books and the "swag."  It's why we have a booth at the conventions or posting ads on websites.  Just like the big authors, we want to make a living doing this.  Sure there's some love involved, but we also need money because this is a capitalist society.  So if you want us to continue writing books, you need to actually BUY books.  And not buy them and then return them within the week like a dick, but buy them and KEEP them so the author makes his or her 70% from Amazon.  That's how you keep us in business.  And, duh, selling books is a feather in our caps so the more people buy the less insecure we are.  (See what I did there?)

Side Hustle n Cash Flow

On the local news about a month ago was a story on "side hustles" or "gigs" like Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft.  The results were that on average these side hustles don't really generate a lot of cash.

Airbnb led the way with $400 a month and then Lyft and Uber with about $150 a month, and then one for delivering food that was only about $100 a month.

So in most of these cases you'd be better off getting a part-time job for like 20 hours a week.  Even at minimum wage you'd be taking home more per month than any of these "side hustles."

Right now my side hustle--selling books--generates more than these other ones, but when at some point it no longer does, that's really the point to think about finding a real second job.  For most authors, writing is a nice hobby, but it doesn't produce even as much as any of these "gigs."  It's certainly not something you should do if you want to make a lot of money.

This is also a good reminder that the "new economy" isn't really working out all that well for most people.  Especially when you consider the cost of potential renovations for the Airbnb--and fixing any damage that occurs to it--and for Uber and Lyft if your car doesn't meet their standards you have to buy a new one that does, though it's unlikely you'll be making enough off of the fares to make it worthwhile.

But it does beat selling Herbalife.

No post on Labor Day, so see you Wednesday...or probably not...