Falling In and Out of Love

As if I needed more reasons to love my local library, now they're doing me the favor of bringing in my writer friends as guest authors for library events, so I can walk a couple of blocks and see writer friends I normally only run into at conferences and conventions. This weekend, the guest was Rachel Vincent, who writes the werecats series. While I was there, I found that they now have my whole series in my neighborhood branch (and they are trying to schedule me to do a guest author presentation, so they're not ignoring the author in the neighborhood while bringing in outside people).

It does seem to be obligatory at almost any book/author event that someone will ask a question about how much the author paid to get her book published. I suppose I have a skewed perspective on this, since I've been involved in writing groups and the publishing industry for going on twenty years, but I don't think it ever crossed my mind that I should have to pay to get published. Even when I was in junior high and first got the idea that I wanted to be a writer, I knew that the idea was to get paid and I knew that something was wrong if you were expected to pay a publisher. In seventh grade, I knew which publishers published the books I liked (at that age, it was mostly Ballantine/Del Rey), and then I found the Literary Marketplace in the school library and looked up information on how to submit a book to them, which told me how much they generally paid. I suppose with computers being more common there are more people trying to write and it's easier to get into "publishing" so there are more scams, and the Internet makes it easier to market scams. But the Internet also makes it easier to research the publishing industry. I just don't see how someone with any interest in being an author could manage to be so oblivious about the business that she might think it's normal to pay a publisher to get a book published. It's terrible that there are scammers out there preying on people's dreams, but authors also have to take responsibility for themselves and do at least a little work to learn about the business they want to get into.

This weekend, I fell back in love with a TV show and out of love with another. I had cooled somewhat on Battlestar Galactica over the past season or so. I liked the space adventure with depth that had good drama and space battles with those cool little flippy Viper ships, or else good chases and gun battles and all that. I got pretty bored when they started focusing on Cylon mysticism and politics. I don't like hearing people talk about politics in the real world where they actually affect me. I certainly don't like spending hours listening to imaginary people talk about fake politics that don't affect me. It was like C-SPAN in space with more attractive people. But the last two episodes brought back so many elements of what I loved at the beginning. Plus, we had Starbuck and Apollo back as a team. In the first couple of seasons, their relationship was one of my favorite TV relationships ever. I don't mean that in a romantic sense. I just loved the idea of them being best friends and comrades in arms, how they could be so badass when they were together in a tense situation but then they could also be silly and act like kids when they were having fun. She was the person who could make him smile and laugh, and he could make her think. They could say horrible things to each other and then get over it and remain friends. And, yeah, they were maybe a little in love with each other but were both afraid of dealing with that, so they didn't. I really hated what they ended up doing with that relationship, but in the last couple of episodes, it seems like we got a bit of that back, with the two of them working as a seamless team, taking names and kicking ass and even being a little funny, in spite of how dire the situation was. It was enough to make me get out my DVD of the original miniseries. Ah, how shiny and new everything looked, and how young and innocent everyone was. It was a little sad knowing what would become of so many of those people, but it was also fun to see the seeds of what was to come. I may move on to season one tonight, since there's nothing else on.

At the same time, I think I've now given up on House. I had remarked when my parents hooked me on NCIS that it was a good thing House was moving because I would have switched loyalties -- but then it turns out that there are two networks rerunning NCIS (ION and USA) opposite House on Mondays, and I'm still catching up, so most of those episodes are new to me, and now Chuck is back in that same timeslot, so House lost. They show the previous week's House on USA on Friday night, and it seemed like the perfect way to chill after Battlestar Galactica, so I thought I'd catch it then. And I actually turned it off in mid-episode. I realized that not only did I not care, but I also found those people highly annoying. It's a little sad because that used to be one of my favorite shows, but they got rid of characters I liked (well, they kept them, but marginalized them), are focusing on characters I dislike, and they've lost track of what made House himself interesting. I guess I may still occasionally try to catch the USA rerun, but I won't worry at all anymore about Monday night VCR priorities. (Plus, they now have Chuck OnDemand, so I can watch it whenever, and the OnDemand version of the 3D episode wasn't in 3D, so it wasn't painful to watch.)

And now I will spend the rest of the day delving into my characters' childhoods.