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Most authors dream of writing a book that changes people’s lives. Even yours truly has entertained the thought every now and then–although it never crossed my mind that a sci-fi action thriller like HAMMERJACK would be that book. Hell, I just counted myself as lucky when I got some good reviews. But reader Bertie W. from the UK informs me otherwise:

Your book got me into trouble, by the way, with my girlfriend. I found it while I was on holiday in New York, and read the back cover thinking that this sounds like all the stuff that I love about neo-noir and science. I started reading it that night and I was hooked. The next day, my girlfriend and I went to the US Open and I decided to bring the book. We sat down and I spent pretty much the entire tennis games just reading. My girlfriend was not happy. We split up once we got back–but I wasn’t really enjoying her company, so thank you for making a good read that saved my holiday and made it worthwhile.

No problem, Bertie! Sorry about the whole girlfriend thing, though. One of these days I’ll have to write something that brings people together–but allows me to blow stuff up at the same time. A guy’s gotta have his standards after all…

My buddy Steve, an engineer in Colorado, sent me this interesting artlcle about firms that will–for a more than modest fee–propel your book to the top of the charts at Amazon and other online retailers, even if it’s just for a little while. One gets the notion from the tone of the piece that the whole thing is just a big scam, and I’d have to say that I agree. I mean, sure–I’ve followed my own numbers on Amazon with more than a casual interest (we authors are, after all, an insecure breed), and I’ve done a little dance or two when I saw the rankings shoot up; but never did it cross my mind to actually pay somebody to gin up my position on a strictly temporary basis.

The whole thing strikes me as something like a vanity press: yet more people who take money from authors who are desperate to get their stuff moving, no matter what. Sure, there may be a success story or two for writers who go this route (Steve Alten comes to mind), but for the most part you’d probably be better off spending your hard-earned cash on beer and pizza. As for my own example, I swore when I started writing that I would never, ever pay somebody to review or market my work–because it then becomes impossible to tell whether the “professionals” selling you advice actually think your work is marketable or if they just want to milk a few more more dollars out of your pocket.

That’s not to say that hiring a real publicist to help promote your work is a bad idea, but there’s a big difference between that and some firm that promises to inflate your numbers by getting some mercenary authors to recommend your book for a fee. Those are the kind of plugs I can do without. The authors who have endorsed my work (God bless ‘em) have done so because they liked my books–not because I offered a bribe. The same goes for those members of the media who have kindly helped me get the word out by doing interviews and profiles. It involves a lot of legwork, to be sure, but ultimately it’s the only real way to get things done.

Besides, being a bestseller for a day isn’t going to help sales all that much. Better to start slow and build momentum over time, and find an audience that enjoys your work and tells other people about it. I’ll take that over a flash in the pan any day of the week.

Occasionally you see something that makes you wish you’d thought of it yourself:

http://www.rap-cat.com

I swear, they’ll be studying this one in the business classes of tomorrow.

Kids are funny creatures when it comes to a lot of things, but none moreso than their movie tastes. For a few weeks Lexie and Christian will totally obsess over one movie to the exclusion of all others, and then BAM–you couldn’t pay them to watch it again. Luckily this kind of thing goes in cycles, so once enough time passes I can get the old favorites back into rotation again. Even the Baby Einstein videos get resurrected every now and then–which, for some reason, hold a strange fascination even for me. Must be an infant flashback thing.

Anyway, the current fave is Cinderella. We used to run the thing four or five times a day, but now we’re down to a more reasonable two (unless Hannah Montana is on). And even though I’ve now seen it enough times to sing all the songs by heart, it still steams me whenever I see that passive-aggressive stepmom and those two homely sisters treat our titular character the way Mel Gibson might treat a traffic cop.

That got me thinking: What might Cinderella have done to them after she ran off with the prince and became ruler of the kingdom? Did she seek revenge? Or did she just let it go, the class act that she was? My wife thinks she probably shipped the ex-family off to some other town, paying off the local potentate to take the twisted sisters off her hands. As for me, I’d like to believe ol’ Cindy put the gals to work at the local DMV, where their finely-honed social skills would take them far.

As Paul Harvey might say, what was the rest of the story? Feel free to write your own ending right here…

By now, you might have heard rumblings about Al Gore’s robust use of electricity at his home in Nashville, Tennessee. It seems that the place has a rather healthy appetite for power–twenty times the annual rate of Joe Sixpack’s average home, which adds up to around $30,000 per year give or take. Now I’m not sure how that compares to your normal millionaire’s energy consumption, but I would probably guess that it’s in the same neighborhood as a Bill Gates or a Rush Limbaugh–so there’s really nothing too shocking about this revelation, unless you’re one of those wonks who likes to keep track of these things just for giggles.

However, given Gore’s crusade against climate change–not to mention his recent Oscar win for An Inconvenient Truth–there are those who would consider this the perfect gotcha moment. As for me personally, I take a pretty libertarian attitude about the whole thing. The man has his own money, after all, and if we wants to blow it on enough juice to make Reddy Kilowatt blush then that’s his own business. I also thought the same thing back in 2003, when Bill Bennett–a prominent conservative and the author of several books, including The Book of Virtues–got outed for dropping a few million at tables in Atlantic City and Vegas.

Which brings us to tonight’s rant. You might recall that newspapers everywhere spilled a lot of ink over this outrage, pointing out how terrible it was that Bennett would dare preach to us mere mortals about virtues when he was cutting some hefty checks to pay off his bookie. Fair enough. But where’s the same outrage when it comes to Al Gore and his power bill? I don’t know about you, but I just haven’t seen a lot of that in the mainstream press–certainly not my local paper, which did its best to knock Bennett down a notch or two.

The name of the game, my friends, is intellectual honesty–and if you want to know why the MSM is taking lumps for bias, this is a clear case in point: Al Gore’s global warming agenda fits into their worldview, the virtues of Bill Bennett do not; so the media hype Bennett’s moral vanity while giving Gore’s a pass.

I got news for you newspeople, though–you ain’t helping things. By covering for Gore, you’re actually allowing him to engage in behavior that undermines his cause. That leaves ordinary average guys like me shaking their heads, wondering why I should listen to someone who tells me to stop spewing carbon while his home is a veritable Disco Inferno. After all, if Al had to face the same tough questions as the right-wingers, he just might think twice about his own lifestyle and try leading by example.

Because if you really believe madmade activity is causing climate change, you need to start demanding some hard answers.

If there was ever any doubt about the state of weirdness in Florida, the argument got settled flat last week. In the space of less than four days, we not witnessed the nervous crackup of a NASA astronaut at an Orlando airport, but also the sudden end of a certain tabloid celebrity’s life in a Hollywood hotel. Hot on the heels of our hurricane problems, election debacles and inexplicable attraction for serial killers, it seems that the Sunshine State is a magnet for all sorts of strange behavior.

Of course, all of this is nothing new. For years, writers like Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey have made tidy livings writing novels about the colorful goings-on down here. From crooked politicians to trailer park divas, we never seem to run short on material. In fact, the best stories are the ones you just can’t make up. There truly is no fiction that could possibly compete with real life in the gator swamp.

To put it in restaurant terms, if the rest of the country is a Bennigan’s or an Applebee’s, then Florida is most definitely the Denny’s: you know, the place where everybody ends up at three in the morning after doing a few too many Jaeger shots. Maybe it’s just the heat or something in the water, but there has to be some explanation. After all, we’re the state that gave the world Debra Lafave and the hanging chad, not to mention the first ever topless doughnut shop. How many other places can claim to have made that big an impression on pop culture?

On the other hand, at least things are never boring. You never know what might happen the next time you turn on the TV news. Hey–isn’t that my neighbor getting hauled away in handcuffs?