A-Rods Worst Night in Chicago

Well we do live in a class society. If you are at the top then the rules do not apply to you . Take Alex Rodriguez who thumbed his nose at Major League Baseball and played in Cellular Field on Monday night even though technically he was a suspended. And  he is innocent until proven guilty. Ok. But it would seem he sees himself above the rules that the rest of the players have to follow....everyone else accepted their suspensions (13 other players)

And A--Rod was booed. That had to be a new experience for a guy who is used to people telling him how great he is 24-7. It had to be a shock. I mean what he must have thought standing there with a stadium booing him...not his play...but him. They were booing because people disapprove of someone who does not play by the rules. They disapprove of the fixed game. And the fix was in. He would play regardless what baseball said and Americans may admire talent but they hate it when someone cheats. The fact is he gets his sixty million by playing last night and finishing the season. Can anyone say retirement?

And this is cheating. He is cheating by saying he can still play because he wants to play. Doesn't Alex know in that moment he lost all credibility? Midwesterners  hate entitlement. Someone who thinks they are above it all and can do pretty much what they want. We stick our Governors in jail who think that way. We are unforgiving and baseball is pretty sacred

So yeah. A Rod played in Chicago on Monday night and Chicago  let A-Rod  know what they thought about him. Not much.

The Pitcher...Sometimes a dream is all you have



 

Hunger Games for Authors

Hmmm...young adult his hot right now. Very hot. If you can write a YA novel that gets on board the Hunger Game juggernaut then you are set. The problem of course is that young adult novels were dead for a very long time until they wern't. The genre became inflamed with Harry Potter and it has been a red hot hand for YA authors ever since. You think writing a YA novel would be easier than writing an adult one but this is not true. Walking the line between what entices teens and adults is a strange blend of writing for different worlds.

You take the old books like Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird. Adult YA I would call them. Take Harry Potter. YA that adults can read too. The problem is that if you read YA novels a lot of them just aren't that good. They are written down for kids and read like army manuals. Many of these books are series if not all of them and they get progressively worse. So why is it that something like Hunger Games would catch? Well, kid gladiators. High concept plot maybe. Or just that strange weird thing called mystical kid appeal.

You cannot write for this market and not be in it. You have to live through your character and so you must find a portal into the young adult world. My first novel was YA but it was more traditional and did not ignite the minds of young adults the way later mystical dystopia novels would. Harry Potter books are wizards and magic and well written for their genre. To take aim at this market with the intent to make money brings on failure and disaster. You simply can't slot a book, though many try.

And so we watch over the fence as Hunger Games tears up the book selling world and now with the smash movie. Hey man. More power to that author. You never know what is going to hit and you never will.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Millionaire Troll Author

By now you have heard of the girl in Minnesota who couldn't get published or considered by agents and so she shot her troll based novels out on Kindle and made a cool million dollars then got a big contract with a publisher and made even more and now her books are being made into movies and life is good for the twenty something (barely) who took a chance on herself and hit the lottery of new technology and sidestepped publishing and essentially hit the lottery of mass entertainment. So what does all that mean to authors and publishers?

Well nothing new under the sun. We have heard of these stories of the unrecognized author who is dug out of the slush pile or self publishes and the world is introduced to a book that would have suffered the fate of most rejected manuscripts: the moldy box in the basement. But what backs this story into something new is the ease in which this author broke the back of main stream publishing. She simply uploaded her books and people started to read them and  more people started to read them and then more people started to read them. The digital bestseller is a bit like an atom bomb. Fission is possible.

But of course for most of us this does not occurs. The atoms do not bang up against each other in the proper sequence and the uploaded book takes it lonely place in cyberspace, unreviewed, unread, a little catalog of bits and bytes. But here it worked fabulously. Expect troll books up the ying yang. YA will be seen as even more of a gold mine than it already is. Expect more ebook success stories. Expect publishers not to change. Expect authors to remain frustrated.

Publishers cannot recognize the gold in front of them because they don't know what it is anymore. Especially now. Large conglomerates push down hard on editors and the bottom line long ago pushed over literary merit. The divining rod has clearly bent to commerce if it ever bent away in the first place. Weird things happen. People get struck by lighting, win the lottery, publish books about trolls that make millions of dollars. Does this matter to the writer? Yeah and no. It is good to know it is possible, but you view it the same way you hear about someone who gets the catastrophic disease or writes a hit song. How does that happen? What must it be like to be that person.

Ultimately though, you pick up the pen and start again. Hmm...lets see.  Ok. I got it. A boy wizard who turns into a troll! What?  It might work....I was seriously thinking of a troll book even before Mrs. Minnesota. No, really. You don't think I would follow a trend for money. Please.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic...surviving as a writer
Rocket Man...keeping your house shouldnt be this hard