I made a twitter account. Strangely, my name was taken, and so I called it nosubstance.

I don’t know what to do with it yet. I added a bunch of people and a lot of it is a wall of text, so I figure I’ll have to cut that back, and then I’ll figure out what use it has

From Deb Layne (wheatland_press)

Starting right now and ending on July 31, 2009 at midnight (Pacific Time), buy any two Wheatland Press titles and get a third title absolutely free. Just specify the title of your free book choice in the comment box of the PayPal form.

As always, if you prefer not to use Paypal, you may email your order to me directly (inquiries(at)wheatlandpress.com).

Wheatland Press.

Thank you for your support!

Wheatland Press is the publisher of 26lies and a bunch of other fine books, so you could do worse than going over there and picking up a couple of books. In fact, you should, so you can make her rich as a Nazi, and then she can fund my experiments.

Yes.

The other day I got an email from Sean Wallace who told me that there was a sudden spike in Black Sheep sales in June. He had no idea why, and neither did I, though I figured it had everything to do with German students who read the excerpt in their exam.

I found the information somewhat frustrating, actually. Ever since I found out that the book was used in the exam, I’ve had this half idea of a notion that there’s a touch of a potential audience within the country, and I’d like to try getting the book to a publisher there, either in English or German. It feels like an opportunity, though if it is one or not, time will show–but at the moment, I have no way of getting into the market. I don’t know it well, obviously, and my attempts to find someone interested in representing the book have met with silence. I can’t rely on a current agent either to press the matter, since I left mine a couple of months ago. There’s really no gossip to be had. I’d been there for a while and it just wasn’t working out for me: A Year in the City was too Australian and the contacts weren’t there, and in eight months, one publisher read Beneath the Red Sun. It’s a bad time in publishing, but I’d like to be working more, so I figured I’d try my luck, picked up my bags, and went looking round for what was out there. No harm, no foul: nothing works out all the time, and they were nice guys. Others had success, but it wasn’t mine.

So now, I’m out on my lonesome, and there’s things I know, and things I don’t, and one of the latter is the German market, and it frustrates me some. It feels like I’m cut off from being able to try my luck, and that’s the suck, as they say.

That’s probably the worse part of being a writer, actually. The publishing industry is its own little community, much in the way that any job is, but after you’ve written the work, you can feel as if there’s no real time or place for you. It can be made worse by the fact that it can feel so large and so fractured, divided by the boundaries of genre, place, commercial interests, personal quirks, and country. This, of course, is no different to how any job out there is, but then I was never a fan of that in other jobs, and it’s part of the reason that I work for myself.

Ah well.

Time to look round some more, say hi, and see how I go. Drop me a note if you know a person or place in Germany worth trying.

Apparently, every second adult in Australia will have bought an Oz Lotto ticket for the 90 million jackpot tonight.

You may refer to me as number 2 for the rest of the day.

(Arts grants are due today, but I’ve been a little too fucked up and all over the place for that of late, so this is how I am compensating. Given my previous attempts to get Arts Money, I suspect my chances are much greater with lotto.)

Well, I thought that was alright.

I got a few.

I’m not going to write a list or anything.

Michael Bay?

The plot of the first film was that giant robots help you get hot girls.

The plot of the new film isn’t even that different. Giant robots help you keep your hot girl. I wish I had a giant robot.

What else are people complaining about?

You have a list with you?

You need a hobby.

As a hobby?

They’re racist?

Why don’t they just say they’re a negative representation of British royalty?

Well, I don’t give a shit about this one. There’s real issues of racism to be addressed in the world. Turn on the TV, see the white people. Look at the way prose doesn’t describe white skin, just leaves it as natural, Steven Spielberg’s portrayal of Germans… the green and blue robot twins in Transformers is pretty low on my needs to be addressed list for the representations of race.

Why?

What else you got?

Yeah, I laughed there too.

Really?

Look, if you stayed after the dog fucking scene, complaining about the giant dangling balls of a giant robot that John Turturro was forced to gaze upon is somewhat redundant.

Okay, okay, that’s enough. Gimme that list.

It’s gone.

Fine, just what’s the point of these complaints? The first Transformers film wasn’t art by any means–it just didn’t suck, which given the standards of films lately, makes it seem like high fucking art, but it wasn’t that at all. It was just this amusing, expensive waste of time about giant robots and a guy who wants a girl. The characterisation was minor, the action scenes nothing special, and the giant robots giant. This one felt the same to me. A lot of money that could’ve gone towards giving people, I dunno, medicine, or water, or something like that; but it kept me entertained enough and it was what you could expect from a director who made Bad Boys, the Island, and all those other expensive, stupid films he’s made. You’re getting what you’re getting with him so why bother complaining? He’s what we made him, and his film is what society has made films into: dumb, expensive pieces of rubbish with giant robot balls bashing together in some eight year olds attempt of humour.

Complaining is useless. Just enjoy the ride. You made it.

Are we even talking about art?

Then I think we should just leave the building.

In the Philippines, the inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center did a performance of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ to honour him in his death.

Here’s Lucius Shepard (lucius_t at theinferior4) writing about the same man’s death:

My reaction to Jackson’s death is, hey, put on your party hat, because I don’t ever think it’s bad news when a pedophile bites the dust, especially one whom I believe was a child molester. I don’t care if he was sad or confused. Fuck that. The media trots out that bullshit line every some Holllywood trainwreck dies before his or her time, and people can’t wait to echo it. I don’t care if his mommy and daddy were mean to him—plenty of people are fucked up by their parents, plenty suffer abuse and grow up cursed with self-hatred and work their way out of it and don’t end up as pathetic deviants and drug addicts surrounded by a coterie of users.

I don’t put any credence in the idea that our consensual adulation helped doom this beautiful young mutant, at least no more so than it ruins the average run of spoiled, self-involved asshole rock stars. Jackson stands out for me in that his death trip was the most grotesque and the most reeking-of-corruption of any to which I’ve been witness. He was a pharaoh-like figure, flaunting his eerie perversity behind a screen of wealth and the trappings of his estate…yet without the bucks, he would have been just another chicken hawk. He succeeded in avoiding accountability for his sins in life by paying out tens of millions of dollars, but he certainly should be held accountable in death. Iconic? Sure, but an icon of dissolution and decay, his life a weird riff on Dorian Gray that carried a taint of putrefaction. His legacy to pop culture? He invented the moonwalk and helped to popularize the music video? Stop it! I mean, seriously.

Me?

I thought his life was somewhat tragic, but then I enjoyed the spectacle that it became. Other than that, I’m not particularly moved to state or write anything about it other than he probably did fuck those kids.

Which is why the prison tribute is not only funny, but fitting.

There will be enough jokes made about ‘Drop’ that I don’t have to do any, but I have to say, it’s an awesome idea:

A Japanese author famous for his horror stories, including cult Japanese and eventually Hollywood film The Ring, has bizarrely produced a novel to be printed on rolls of toilet paper by manufacturer, Hayashi Paper.

The Koji Suzuki novel called “Drop” will be printed in short form on millions of rolls of toilet paper in a marketing coup for the Hayashi toilet roll company

Each roll will carry several copies of the new nine-chapter novella “Drop” by Koji Suzuki. Who knows the story may even be made into a cult film.

“Drop,” is appropriately set in a public restroom. The Drop toilet paper novella takes up about three feet or 90 centimeters of a toilet roll. Koji Suzuki’s “Drop” can be read in just a few minutes, according to manufacturer Hayashi Paper.

Hayashi promotes the toilet paper, which will sell for 210 yen or US$2.20 a roll, as “a horror experience in the toilet.”

Link.

From Nick Kaufmann (nick_kaufmann).

Lately, I’ve been seeing a little bit about Bookscan being talked about. Bookscan is, or so it sells itself, a tool that monitors the sales of books in the marketplace. What’s interesting about it, however, is the complaints:

“Our rule of thumb is that Bookscan captures about 70% of retail sales, give or take. In this case, Bookscan shows sales of just over 7,200 copies for the ___________________ book, so it seems that the accepted formula may be a bit low here. 14,000 copies is a strong performance for this title, and it’s great that this one has earned out for the publisher.”

A bit low?! Bookscan is reporting half of what the author’s own royalty statements show and, in the case of the author’s second book, Bookscan is reporting approximately ten percent of what the statements show.

Are publishers really so dense that they haven’t compared Bookscan’s figures with their own sales figures? Surely if they have, then they would have stopped paying Bookscan for its clearly and outrageously wrong data and put it out of business for lack of subscribers. Because, you see, Bookscan is pretty much only of use to publishers and to, say, news organizations writing about publishing. Sure, it’s supposed to be the Nielsen Ratings of books, but Nielsen Ratings for TV and radio have a purpose: they tell advertisers where it’s worth spending money on what shows. But books have no ads, so what is the purpose of Bookscan? To prove that the NEW YORK TIMES best-seller list is wrong? That the number one book this week is not RELENTLESS, by Dean Koontz? That the number two book isn’t THE PHYSICK BOOK OF DELIVERANCE DANE? (Really? That’s the number two book?) Do we need some ultimate decider beyond the NYT or Barnes & Noble or Amazon? I don’t think so.

I am one-hundred-percent sure that if Bookscan were reporting higher numbers than publishers, publishers would pull their subscriptions and put them out of business. Why? Because agents and authors would be hammering publishers and demanding to know why the publishers are reporting lower numbers and where the hell are our royalties?! But because Bookscan reports lower numbers, publishers happily use its data to crush authors and insist that they can’t pay what the author or agent believes a book is worth because Bookscan says the author isn’t selling as many copies as the author says he or she is. Even presented with actual royalty figures, publishers seem to still favor Bookscan, which I think puts a burden on publishers to ensure that Bookscan gets it right.

Link.

Harry Joy was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect on him, and it is his first death which we shall now witness.

So begins Peter Carey’s first novel, Bliss, which I began reading tonight.

It’s not the first Carey book I’ve read. I’m, perhaps oddly since I’m not usually a fan of novels that win awards, rather fond of his The True History of the Kelly Gang, in which Carey showed how well he could mutate his style to capture the voice that he needed. He did a similar thing in Theft, where he switched between voices, though I didn’t like the voice of the mentally challenged brother and I thought the crime aspect of it to be somewhat lacking. But, even then, Carey had a fine stylist touch to his writing and the book was engaging. And Care’;s voice has always been strong and defined throughout his other novels. That voice is there at the start of Bliss, and I’ll be curious to see how it plays out over the book, whether it stands up throughout, or if it has rough patches, if some of the finesse is missing, and so forth. Take from it what you will, but there’s a certain enjoyment to be had in early novels when you can compare them to later ones. You get to see the author’s ticks, tricks, and twitches, and how he or she has used or abused them throughout the years.

Of course, sometimes it’s the early novels that are the strongest, and the author, in his or her later novels, tends to just repeat themselves. To a degree, I think Haruki Murakami has done that. Of course, with that said, Murakami’s first novels aren’t very good–it wasn’t until Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and the Wind Up Bird Chronicle that he became interesting, at least to me (it was Norwegian Wood that reportedly made his name, though I think it’s a very simple and uninteresting novel).

Anyhow, random connection between the two, but I enjoy both authors, and that’s good enough for me.

It’s always good to see my HECS debt. I could never afford to pay for Univeristy, so I did the deferred payment method, which was HECS. I believe it might be called HELP now. Either way, I did my BA and my honours on it, though my PhD was oddly enough free if I did it in four years. Anyhow, the HECS debt that I have is addressed to Dr Peek and it keeps gaining interest every year. Perhaps one day I’ll be in a position to begin paying it off, but until then, it’s like an old friend, growing fatter with the passing of time.

In other news, Placebo released an album that sounded like Placebo, which is both good and bad. I liked Meds more.