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I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Upstart Crow client Andrew Brumbach over at the Literary Rambles blog, where we discussed the release of his debut novel, THE EYE OF MIDNIGHT the harrowing submissions process, and the joy of getting “the call”. Pop over the blog for the full interview, and do be sure to put THE EYE OF MIDNIGHT on your “to read” list today!

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Recently at the New Yorker, tetchy old fogey and lousy former film critic David Denby has published a lament about how few teens are reading books these days. He has one great overheard line—a student saying “Books smell like old people”; and he builds in a few caveats (“It’s very likely that teen-agers, attached to screens of one sort or another, read more words than they ever have in the past”); but mostly he is describing a decline of western civilization via smartphone. “If teachers can make books important to kids … those kids may turn off the screens,” he wraps up, making clear his real issue here: a favored primacy of one form of technology (ink on paper) over another (e-ink or pixels on screens).

Here’s the thing: He’s casting a transitional period … [more]

Are e-books damaging society? I’ve been thinking a lot about the piece that appeared in the Telegraph this week citing Franzen’s hatred of e-books.

I was fully prepared to be annoyed by the article when I read the headline. While I’m not fatalistic enough to link the downward trajectory of society to e-books (or at least not solely to e-books), I enjoyed some of Franzen’s points, particularly this one about permanence of physical books:

“I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.”

I like thinking about books this way. Sure, I own an iPad and a Kindle, and I have a slew of e-books on both of ‘em. I love being able to purchase books on a whim–in the middle of the night, on a rainy Sunday, whatever– from the comfort of my own home. But I often feel a certain hollowness when I’ve completed a download. I like the way a real book takes up space in my life the way an e-book can’t. If I download a book,  visiting friends can’t pull it off of the shelf and thumb through it. My infant son can’t grab it and chew on the corner, leaving little dimples in the jacket (which annoys me now and which I will feel nostalgic  about later when he stops chewing on things).  I can’t slip a piece of paper into the book to mark my place, or tuck the paperwork I’m carrying around with me between the front cover and the title page. I can’t scrawl a friend’s phone number on the inside back cover.

I asked my interns to share their thoughts..”I actually bought both of Jonthan Franzen’s books on my Kindle,” one intern said sheepishly. ” They’re 600 pages long! Who wants to lug that around with them all day?”

Ha ha. Touché, Jonathan Franzen.

I read a lot of queries this week–about one hundred. I sent a lot of rejections this week–about ninety-something (I requested four manuscripts).

Getting rejections is never easy (remember: I get them, too!). Sending rejections isn’t easy, either. But when I pass on your project and tell you to keep writing, I mean it. The passage below explains why. So even if you think I’m a jerk with no taste for passing on your project, you should listen to Ira Glass, because he’s a really smart guy.

Keep writing.

Some web work is better left to the experts. That is, people with skills and understanding. That is, people other than me.

We are back—not just from vacations and working holidays, but from the netherworld that is 404 status for the blog. In a heart-breakingly comic series of mishaps, I managed to delete both the company blog and, in trying to restore that, the entire desktop from my computer (where I’d unwisely stored thousands of files), and my Time Capsule backups of same were no longer recognizing his computer. Much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Enter the tech monkeys at Apple, the friendly folks at our web hosting service, and the snarky genius who is Symon Chow, and it is all back up and running. I’ve aged a few decades in the past couple of days, and I lost two weeks’ work on a couple of books, but you know what? That feels like a small price to pay considering the alternative.

All of which is to say only this: Backup early and backup often. Your work is more fragile than you suspect.

Do you like books? Do you love books? Do you have more of the damned things than you know what to do with? More than you can read in a lifetime? Do you sacrifice the love of spouses, friends, pets, whatever because of the many volumes that clutter your home like snowdrifts after a blizzard?

Well, my friend, join the sorry ranks of us book-loving fools. And take shelving inspiration from the awesome pictures at Bookshelf Porn, a website dedicated to … well, to what its name suggests: Photographs of groovy bookshelves. Up there and to the right is Karl Lagerfeld’s bookshelf in his apartment. (He also owns the bookstore next door, which I suppose you can afford when you’re a super-wealthy creepy looking living dead fashion designer). But there are just as many other cool/strange/head-scratching shelves on the site. Makes you want to redesign your home, doesn’t it?

As we zoom into another week, I thought it might be fun to start out with a light post, a little game of sorts, to see what you’re reading these days.

As a devoted lover of books, it’s not unusual for me to have many books and magazines stacked haphazardly on my bedside table, some of which I’m in the process of reading, some of which I’m hoping I’ll be in the mood to read soon, and some I’ve already read (multiple times) and love so much that I just can’t stand to put them back on the bookshelf just yet.

The books on my bedside stand are a reflection of my mood, of inspiration, and my goals. Books are my greatest pleasure, my stolen moments, and my meditation. I simply cannot fall asleep without reading at least a few pages of a book. And oftentimes, I like to wake up in the very early morning before the day gets too crazy, grab a book from my bedside table, and tiptoe into the living room (so as not to wake The Husband or The Daughter), and spend a delicious, silent hour curled up on the couch, reading.

And so, dear readers, I present to you, my list:

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, Book I by Maryrose Wood
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The American Woman in the Chinese Hat by Carole Maso
Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child

And on the floor next to the bed: Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems, which my daughter flung to the floor this morning in a joyous fit of giggles once we finished reading it.

What about you? What’s in your reading pile (or, for those of you techie folks out there, on your Kindle/iPad/e-reader thingy) at the moment?

Kurt Cyrus’s fabulous Big Rig Bugs was published this past spring. It’s a near-perfect model of how to do a lot with a little: In seventy-six words, it tells the story of a bunch of bugs clearing away some litter from a construction site. And, because that’s not near enough, it also a slew of great parallels between how some construction devices mimic what bugs do in the natural world. Kurt is a poet and an artist, and he excels in both realms here—this book is a crackerjack read-aloud perfect that should please the youngest fans of big rigs or bugs.

But that’s not what this post is about. No, this post is merely to present this nifty book trailer Kurt made for the picture book, just as a side project while he finishes up something else. For all the bug-obsessed kids out there, no matter their age.

My complaint is a simple one.

Look at the picture there on the right.

See the stack of books to the right? See the stack of books on the iPad? Which one reminds you of the stories still to be read, the books you want to reread; which one literally occupies a space in your conscience (as well as on your bookshelf)?

But I’ve found in my experience that when I look at my iPad, I don’t see books. I see an iPad. On the device is Middlemarch, a Jonathan Ames novel, a Charlie Huston mystery, a couple of P.G. Wodehouse books, and a half-dozen nonfiction books I thought I wanted to read once upon a time.

This could just be a sad side effect of the way I consume books: Some people buy and read books on a strictly one-at-a-time basis. Me, I tend to buy three at a time and leave them on the bedside shelf so that I have an array of choices when I finish one book and move to the next. Today I’ll put up Mockingjay and then go back into the final hundred-and-fifty pages of Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. And then I’ll browse my shelf to see what matches my mood, and that’s what i’ll read next.

But I don’t “see” anything to read when I glance at the iPad. And when I open the iPad, I am distracted by the many other applications available on it. So instead of making reading more of a presence in my life, it has the opposite effect: It makes reading just one more media application. Provided I even remember the dozen or so books I have downloaded on the device.

I love e-readers—honest, I do. Before I had the iPad, I read on a first-generation Kindle, which comically ugly and poorly designed, was still a damn sight better than carrying around a satchel full of books and manuscripts. And the iPad’s reader is pretty spiff, as are the other reading apps—GoodReader and Nook—but the iPad (and before it, the Kindle) don’t fit into my head and consciousness in the same way.

Am I alone in this? Or is anyone out there finding that these e-readers make books out of sight and out of mind?

It’s award season and the results are finally in!

No, no, not those awards, which remind us that the people who create children’s books are artists as well as craftspeople.

No, I’m talking about the Bulwer-Lytton Awards for worst opening sentence. It is Edward George Bulwer-Lytton whose 1830 masterpiece Paul Clifford begins:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

In his honor, each year hundreds of writers compete to write similarly overwrought and overextended sentences, and they are always a riot. Mere badness isn’t enough; these entries are all hilariously awful. Check them out at the link above!

(Was going to post this after seeing this movie in preview, but then decided that would be a bit of a spoiler. Lots of people probably wanted to see this movie as much as I had; no reason to kill their joy early. So I drafted it and set it aside til now, when it appears that Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief will be lucky to gross a hundred million dollars. Effectively, this film franchise is already over.)

The wretchedness of some bad movies is forgivable.

You know the ones I mean: There is an artistic vision of some kind behind the mess, a storyteller who got terribly lost. And even though the end result is painful to behold, it still feels like it came from someone who cared. About the wrong things, sure; or about a story no one in their right mind could be bothered to give a damn about, maybe—but whatever the case, you sense someone behind the shambles. The unwatchable hot mess that is Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus falls under this category. As does John Boorman’s Zardoz, and Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic, and—well, a lot of Boorman. You get the picture.

And then there are movies made by witless mediocrities such as Chris Columbus.

His refrigerated blandness has been with us since the eighties, when he wrote the screenplays for Gremlins, The Goonies, and Young Sherlock Holmes; later he directed Mrs. Doubtfire and Nine Months and lots of other stuff that is memorable only in how unmemorable the movies were. His work is distinguished by a glib commerciality,  a lack of any real sense of the world: divorced from anything genuine, their only touchstones are other movies.

Even if you don’t know those movies, you know well the bland stamp of his work. Before steamrolling the joy out of Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, he brought his leaden touch to the first two installments in the Harry Potter franchise. I remember well watching the first one in the theater and muttering aloud, “Cut. Cut. CUT, damnit!” when he’d hold long, long shots on Harry’s face as Harry registered wonder. Or joy. Or dismay. Or indigestion. God only knows. I stopped believing in the characters in such moments and started sensing the director behind the camera saying, “Okay, Daniel, now show me SENSE OF WONDER! Come on, raise your eyebrows higher! That’s it! Oh, God, yes!” Overacting in close-up is never the fault of the actor, but of the person who is guiding them.

And I know Chris Columbus is to blame because there are similar moments in Percy Jackson. Not as many and nowhere near as egregious—because the actors here are older, more experienced, doubtless confident enough to shrug off the insecurities of a director who hasn’t got any idea how real people look and act when they feel emotion.

But the sins of the filmmaking extend beyond even that. The fight scenes are wholly unconvincing. The interplay between the leads feels underscripted and false. The whole enterprise feels undertaken by someone who didn’t have the decency to treat the material as a serious source. Instead, this feels like hackwork plain and simple. The movie’s biggest sin? It’s witless. The novels are very witty—that’s part of the great pleasure of reading them—but this movie is about as clever as an old David and Goliath cartoon. Which is a damn shame, because the series of novels is pretty great.

What about you, what did you all think of

Last night I had the place to myself and fired up the first two episodes in the latest season of Fox’s long-running, melodramatic, completely unrealistic counter-terrorism show 24. And I loved it.

I resisted the adventures of Jack Bauer for a while, despite the claims of friends and family that I’d eventually come to not only enjoy the show, but also yell at the screen in joy, anger, or pure, raw emotion. A friend said, “Trust me, if you watch it, you’ll find yourself screaming out Jack’s name.” He was completely correct.

24 is not art. Let’s get that straight right away. In my DVD collection, the seasons I own are hidden away behind things of more merit. And to be honest, it hasn’t been great since Day 5. But what can I say? I enjoy it.

We all have our guilty pleasures. Whether a show about the ridiculous adventures of a gun-toting patriot, films featuring talking animals, or Shania Twain albums secretly mislabeled in our iTunes library as Megadeth (these are just hypothetical, people!), we all have those indulgences we enjoy but we’re a bit embarrassed by.

This happens to me with books, too (in case you were wondering where I was going with all of this rambling). For my job, I try to read books that have been successful so I can get an idea of why they work and how they fit in the children’s market. With many successful books, including most involving vampires, I’ll read one in a series and put it down, content that I understand the appeal or, in some cases, remain completely baffled, without having to know if the heroine choices the one bad guy with fangs, the other bad guy who also has fangs but they’re different or something, or maybe some third bad guy who is like made of fangs or some junk.

In truth, I don’t have time to get overly invested in a series, since I have manuscripts and queries to read, blog posts to write, and episodes of 24 to watch. Sometimes, however, I’ll find myself reading the first in a series with the intention of seeing how a work fits into the market and find myself being pulled in. These, too, I consider to be guilty pleasures, because I’m no longer reading for work, but because I find myself enjoying a story aimed at 10 year-olds and want to see what happens. I can’t help it, people, if Greg Heffley is so darned funny or I need to know what crazy situation Percy Jackson will find himself wrapped up in next!

So how about you? What books do you hide away and pull out when no one is around? And what appeals to you about these little secrets?

(Crow and Companion shopping during the holidays in high-tech Spend Bucks store packed with people.)

From next aisle over, Voice #1: Yo! What’s the name of that talking pig in that movie!

Voice #2: What movie? What pig? What are you talking about?

Voice #1: You know, that movie with the pig that talks—what’s it called? Babe. What was the name of the talking pig in that movie, Babe?

No, I’m not talking about the indentured servitude contract Chris Richman and I agreed to when we booked passage here from the Old Country. We’re still in thrall to our master and doing dishes to earn our room and board. Rather, I’m talking about a little piece of shareware called Freedom. It forcibly stops users from accessing the internet. (That little clock to the right is its desktop icon.)

If you’re anything like me, then you find it hard to stop yourself from checking things throughout the day. Your four email accounts, your Twitter feed, internet messenger windows, that time-suck called Facebook, Goodreads, this blog, and a bazillion other inveigling things worm their way into your serene office and distract you from the Work That Must Be Done. Some of you have self control and practice “restraint.” (What is that?)

Well, bully for you. Me, I got no self control. Instead, I use Freedom. I turn it on, enter the number of minutes I want to work undisturbed, and then get down to business. The only way to turn off Freedom once it is activated is by shutting down and rebooting the computer. Kind of a drastic measure, some might say, but I don’t know: I’ll sign on for drastic measures if it helps me get my work done.

But how do you disconnect from the welter of the outside world? How do you unplug? Or am I the only one with this ridiculous little problem?

(Freedom is for Mac OSX; all of you PC people will have to go the simpler route of just turning off your WiFi and exercising some self-restraint already.)

Oh, Jeff Bezos. There was a time when I was a true believer. I bought the first generation Kindle relatively early on—March or April of ‘08, thereabouts. I was impressed (or flattered, anyway) by the letter from you that came with it, complimenting me on being a daring early adopter, one of the few, the proud—

The ripped-off.

Mind you, it did work for just over a year. Sure, the back came off all of the time, and the clumsy design meant I was always turning pages by accident (seemed like every edge of the damn thing had a page flip button). Sure, reading off of a gray screen is nowhere near as fine as reading off of a crisp page, but hey, it’s a new technology! It’s trailblazing of the sort that heralds a new era! It’s—well, how the future looked back in 1982! Sure it’s a homely little device, but who besides Steve Jobs ever said technology should be pretty and appealing?

For my four hundred bucks, I got about thirteen months of use out of it before the screen froze up. Now half of the screen is one of those cutesy sleep screens, and half of the screen is functional—there are still books and manucripts there, half-legible behind the stuck phony prettified image of Emily Dickinson.*

When it froze up, I shot Amazon an email. I was told that the warranty was only for twelve months and to call them to be walked through a hard reboot of the device. I dawdled on making the call, because I was launching a business and so on, and everything else in life fell by the wayside.

Finally I called. Rebooting? Didn’t really work. But I was informed that, despite being out of warranty, I could send in my Kindle and another hundred bucks to Amazon, and they would send me a refurbished Kindle. Which, judging from how these things work, would last about a year. Could I get a further discount on the new Kindle, which is already discounted to $260 or so? No. I could only get the old, tired, lousily designed first generation. Because that, my friends, is the reward for early adopters.

So instead, I used my Kindle to support my off-kilter kitchen table and decided to wait for the Apple iSlate. Yes, it will be a backlit screen that will tax the eyes, but a person can dim that to a point where it will be less bothersome. And page flips can be done with a dragged finger. And doubtless I’ll be able to edit on it. And I can’t help but think that there will be many, many, many options for downloading books that will allow me to avoid Amazon’s proprietary e-book system entirely. And customer service at Apple is a wonder; when my first iPhone went on the fritz, the service guy there said, “Hmm, did you drop it? It looks like there’s a dent here.” I said, “Umm …” And he said, “Let’s just say that you told me you didn’t drop it, and I’ll give you another phone.”

And just like that, they won my business for the rest of eternity.

*That digitized image of Emily Dickinson featured on the Kindle save screen? It is a bastardization of the only known photograph of ED, which is of her in a black dress with her hair pulled back. Shortly after her poems became popular after the turn of the century, she was included in an anthology, but the editor didn’t like the original image—thought it was too severe. So the image was doctored—she was given ridiculous bangs and a fluffy white collar and dress. When the ruse was discovered, there was an outcry and the image was removed from circulation by most self-respecting publishers. Leave it to Amazon to unearth this horror and to repeat exactly the judgmental, pru