Newsflash: I'll be posting here
THURSDAY beginning next week.
Now onto the important stuff--
Winner of MBR and magnets--
Vickie! Email me at jeanne@jeannestein.com with your info and your copy of Many Bloody Returns (along with a few other goodies) will be on its way. Thanks to everyone who played and don’t despair—I’ll be holding another contest next week so stay tuned.
Just got the new cover for Retribution:
What do you all think? I must admit, I like this one. Anna's fifth adventure will be released in September. More important, though, is what YOU think.
From MarioLand: Jailbait Zombie released! Get your copy now!
Eos is doing a feature on Jailbait at this
link so check it out.
Some items cross-posted from my blog over at The League of Reluctant Adults in case you missed them.
On March 23rd, another Whedon Alum, Nathan Fillion of Firefly/Serenity/Dr. Horrible fame begins his new show on ABC, Castle. We’ll be discussing that on The Biting Edge, too, I’m sure.
Some interesting (at least to me) factoids about bookselling and numbers. For 2008, the top ten books in terms of numbers sold were:
1 Breaking Dawn Meyer, Stephenie 3,310,000
2 Twilight Meyer, Stephenie 3,175,000
3 A New Earth Tolle, Eckhart 3,146,000
4 The Last Lecture Pausch, Randy 2,705,000
5 New Moon Meyer, Stephenie 2,667,000
6 Eclipse Meyer, Stephenie 2,563,000
7 The Shack Young, William 2,551,000
8 The Tales of Beedle the Bard Rowling, JK 1,822,000
9 Brisingr Paolini, Christopher 1,312,000
10 Eat, Pray, Love Gilbert, Elizabeth 1,274,000
For the top fifty list, go
here. I think what interests me most is how the numbers fall off after the million + sellers. Number 50 sold 377,000 copies. Also, note the correlation of genre writers to literary/memoir entries. We must be doing something right.
For Tolkien fans, an early unpub’d work is coming out. From the
AP:
"The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun," a thorough reworking in verse of old Norse epics that predates Tolkien's writing of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, will be published in May by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. According to Houghton, the book will include an introduction by Tolkien and notes by his son, Christopher Tolkien. J.R.R. Tolkien, whose fantasy novels have sold millions of copies, died in 1973. "The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun" was written in the 1920s and '30s, when the author was teaching at Oxford University.Cool.
Okay, here’s something REALLY cool: You can help name the new NASA node. Voting will be open from February 19th to March 20th, 2009. NASA will announce the winning name in April 2009.
Choices are:
Earthrise
Legacy
Serenity
Venture
While I’m partial to Legacy for personal reasons, Serenity is up and away the favorite—You’ll see what I mean when you
vote.
Okay, I have to interrupt here- I just saw this morning's newspaper. Some assholes opened up on a Mardi Gras parade injuring 7 people, including a toddler. What the friggin' hell is wrong with people? At least they have the idiots in custody.
Back to the program.
A couple of writing contests for you aspirants out there:
1. Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Contest
-Write a short story of no more than 8,000 words, that shows the near future (no more than about 50-60 years out) of manned space exploration.
-No entry fee. But please only submit one story...your best one!
-All entries must be original works in English. Plagiarism, poetry, song lyrics, or characters from another person’s works will not be considered.
-E-mail submissions only. Send entries as .rtf attachments to: baen.nss.contest@gmail.com
-Please put the word SUBMISSION in the subject line when sending a contest entry and QUESTION in the subject line for questions to the contest administrator.
-Please include the following in the body of your email: The title of the work, the author's name, address and telephone number, and an approximate word-count. The manuscript should be an RTF attachment, in standard manuscript format and should be titled and numbered on every page, but the author's name MUST BE DELETED to facilitate fair judging.
-Employees of Baen Books, Jim Baen's Universe, NSS and previous Grand Prize Winner are not eligible. Previous Second and Third place winners are eligible.
-Deadline - April 1, 2009.
2. 78th Annual Writers Digest Competition
Compete and Win in 10 Categories!
* Inspirational Writing (Spiritual/Religious)
* Memoirs/Personal Essay
* Magazine Feature Article
* Genre Short Story (Mystery, Romance, etc.)
* Mainstream/Literary Short Story
* Rhyming Poetry
* Non-rhyming Poetry
* Stage Play
* Television/Movie Script
* Children's/Young Adult Fiction
Entry Fee: Poems are $15 for the first entry; $10 for each additional poem submitted in the same online session. All other entries are $20 for the first manuscript; $15 for each additional manuscript submitted in the same online session.
Add $5 per manuscript to all entries postmarked after May 15, 2009. Entries postmarked after June 01, 2009, will not be accepted.
Complete details at the links provided.
Okay onto Whedon news for the week.
Some disheartening statistics just posted on the Buffy & Angel & Firefly website:
"Dollhouse" Tv Series - 1x02 "The Target" fell 15% in the ratings Sunday 22 February 2009, by Webmaster The numbers are disheartening, if not entirely surprising. The second episodes of Fox’s "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" and "Dollhouse" failed to improve on their premieres last week, even though Friday’s biggest usual competitor from a numbers standpoint — CBS’ crime dramas — aired repeats.
"Dollhouse" (4.2 million viewers, 1.7 preliminary adults 18-49 rating/7 share), fell 15% in the ratings. This is an almost-typical second-episode slip and the show placed second in its 9 p.m. hour, topped by "Supernanny" (5.2 million, 1.8/5).
At 8 p.m., "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" (3.8 million, 1.3/5) was roughly steady, falling a tenth of a point from last week’s midseason return to tie a repeat of "Wife Swap" to place second in the hour. Given it’s a Friday night, neither "Terminator" or "Dollhouse" pop out as a jarringly low rating on the grid. But Fox’s shows are relatively expensive scripted dramas that typically require higher numbers than a competitor’s repeats or newsmagazines such as "Dateline" and "20/20," regardless of what night they’re on.
Damn—I do not want this trend to continue so you’re assignment for this week is to tune in!!!
Here are a few more comments from my Buffybuds on Episode 2:
Dina: Anyone watch this week's offering? I thought it was much worse than the first one and ended up fast forwarding through most of it. I think the episodes will vary greatly depending on how interesting the main story is. Here it had too much of The Most Dangerous Game for me. And Echo as 'girl friend' which is just plain rape so I don't like that either.
Maryelizabeth Hart: A few thoughts about the Steven DeKnight episode: What, no one in the Dollhouse reads? The hunter's fake name was the name of the author of The Most Dangerous Game! Although I speculate that the British chick suspected what might happen, and just didn't care. And if he found the Dollhouse and got in with fake credentials, what's slowing down our friend from the FBI? I did like getting some background filled in on the other rogue "doll." And I agree with Dina that making Echo be in relationships, physical and emotional, is rape -- and I don't think we are meant to support it. I think it's meant to be seen as abusive.
Maria Lima: As to Dollhouse, I must admit that I have very mixed feelings. (1) VERY skeeved about the premise of the "dolls" (2) 1st ep fell very flat w/me, so much so that I stopped watching after 30 mins (3) Miss the Joss-verse touch (like many of you said) - the quips, the smart snarkiness, etc. (4) As much as I enjoyed ED as Faith, I'm afraid she doesn't have the acting chops to pull off this role--maybe in a few years
Charlaine Harris: Like most of you, I wasn't sucked in to the narrative of "Dollhouse," but I'll keep watching.
And these are comments by hard core Whedon fans. It does not bode well.
Here's the HULU link to the second episode, The Target, it you care to watch.
I am in a quandary about how to handle two blogs—So here’s the question for the week—does it bother you to have a repeat of some items? Should I skew either blog one way or the other? Do you care? Give me feedback—
Next Saturday on the
League, there will be another installment of Writers’ Rooms and a rundown of all new releases by League members. There are a lot of them this week and next. We are talking some damned good writers here, so give them a shot.
I do love contests. I think I’ll solve the problem of where to post a contest by posting it on BOTH—So next Thursday, we'll have a new contest for another cache of
FABULOUS prizes.
From the one more thing to worry about file:
Web sites may harm health
Too much time networking online faulted, study finds
Like we have a choice in the matter. Didn't even follow up on this one.
PS Notice I added
COLOR to some of the text. I didn't know I could until I noticed an extra little COMPOSE button on this blogger thing. You'd think someone would have told me.... thanks, Mario. Thanks a lot.