Dispatches from the City of Angels
I'm a writer and humorist living in and writing about Los Angeles. You can catch my novel LOSING CLEMENTINE out March 6 from William Morrow. In the meantime, feel free to poke around. Over at my website you can find even more blog entries than I could fit here, as well as a few other ramblings. Enjoy and come back often.
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"Taint what a horse looks like, it’s what a horse be." - A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett
"Trying to take it easy after you've finished a manuscript is like trying to take it easy when you have a grease fire on a kitchen stove." - Jan Burke
"Put on your big girl panties, and deal with it." - Mom
"How you do anything is how you do everything."
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Amazon - Shame on You
Writers and readers are all a-Twitter.
Also a-blogger, a-yeller and a-screamer. Amazon.com has taken to "de-ranking" books with what it deems to be inappropriate content. They still carry the books. You just can't search for them like other Amazon-thought-police-approved books. If you know the exact title, it's yours. Should you just be searching for, say, a non-fiction work on gays in the military by subject, you're - pardon the expression - screwed.
The book will also fail to show up on Amazon's best-seller lists no matter how many copies are sold, which is a great disservice to the author, indeed.
Inappropriate, as you might have guessed, only seems to mean mostly anything to do with sex or anything to do with gay, whether it's actually about the act of sex or not. Unfriendly Fire, for example, has been de-ranked, despite being a well-regarded analysis of the military's policy on - you guessed it - homosexuality.
Have no fear. The Hannibal Lecter books are still ranked. Cannibalistic serial killers apparently do not rise above the "adult" bar set by the online bookseller.
The uproar - as it rightly should be - is nearly deafening. Amazon execs have begun blaming a "glitch" for their moralistic, puritanical, highly discriminatory, new practice. Questions from the L.A. Times on just how such a "glitch" might have occurred have gone without proper answer.
If you, like me, have had really quite enough, may I direct your attention to either your local independent bookseller, who will be very grateful for your business, or, if you prefer to shop via keyboard in your underwear - possibly while having lots and lots of gay sex - there's always Powells.com, an enormous independent with a stellar online shop to rival Amazon.
Happy reading.
Also a-blogger, a-yeller and a-screamer. Amazon.com has taken to "de-ranking" books with what it deems to be inappropriate content. They still carry the books. You just can't search for them like other Amazon-thought-police-approved books. If you know the exact title, it's yours. Should you just be searching for, say, a non-fiction work on gays in the military by subject, you're - pardon the expression - screwed.
The book will also fail to show up on Amazon's best-seller lists no matter how many copies are sold, which is a great disservice to the author, indeed.
Inappropriate, as you might have guessed, only seems to mean mostly anything to do with sex or anything to do with gay, whether it's actually about the act of sex or not. Unfriendly Fire, for example, has been de-ranked, despite being a well-regarded analysis of the military's policy on - you guessed it - homosexuality.
Have no fear. The Hannibal Lecter books are still ranked. Cannibalistic serial killers apparently do not rise above the "adult" bar set by the online bookseller.
The uproar - as it rightly should be - is nearly deafening. Amazon execs have begun blaming a "glitch" for their moralistic, puritanical, highly discriminatory, new practice. Questions from the L.A. Times on just how such a "glitch" might have occurred have gone without proper answer.
If you, like me, have had really quite enough, may I direct your attention to either your local independent bookseller, who will be very grateful for your business, or, if you prefer to shop via keyboard in your underwear - possibly while having lots and lots of gay sex - there's always Powells.com, an enormous independent with a stellar online shop to rival Amazon.
Happy reading.
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