Browsing all posts in Asides.

The New Cyber Gatekeepers of the Book World – Same Old, Same Old

From tech blog Gigaom comes a techno-view of publishing’s future” Hot on the heels of Amazon signing publishing deals with authors, and thus doing an end-run around their publisher partners, another major e-reader company says it plans to do the same: Kobo is launching its own publishing arm and looking to sign deals with authors […]

Used Book Stores: The Only Survivors Of The E-Book Wars?

I’ve got a house full of books. I love books, the feel of them, the smell of them as they age. They are like old friends, to be held and read again and again. As a writer, most of my books are not there for pure enjoyment, but as research. I know them. I know […]

The Help – Wonderful, Evocative, Authentic

The Help rang true for me as an author (Perfect Killer) and as the scion of a Mississippi Delta cotton plantation family, born in Greenwood, raised in Jackson during this book’s time period and kicked out of Ole Miss in 1967 for leading a civil rights march. If Katheryn Stockett had added every possible thing […]

Michael Hart – The Father of E-Books, R.I.P.

A belated send-off for Michael Hart who created and sent the world’s first e-book, way back in the mainframe computing days of 1971 and went on to found Project Gutenberg. He died September 6 at the relatively young age of 64. A full obituary is here in the Economist.

“Governments do not rule the world Goldman Sachs does” – Trader Echoes Zaibatsu Thriller

Trader Alessio Rastani’s wildly popular BBC interview on YouTube shocks the world and echoes the central points in two of my financial thrillers, Zaibatsu which was the sequel of The Delphi Betrayal (The really good parts of this video begin about 38 seconds in) Those points are: That corporations control most of the world’s cash, […]

World’s Highest-Paid Authors (Damn! Missed The List Again!)

Forbes Magazine has listed the world’s highest paid authors. I can’t BELIEVE it, but I missed the list AGAIN! (What? What was that? … My wife just reminded me that our checking account balance is way closer to the decimal point than these folks’s.) First, Forbes gives us the bad news that most authors are […]

Nada, Nada, Nada: Thoughts on Hemingway & Existential Flames In The Head

I’ve just reduced my latest manuscript from 144,000 words to 83,000. And lost nothing at all but fat (the manuscript, not me ….wish editing/writing could be more aerobic). The editing, and a Facebook conversation with friend Mark York reminded me of Ernest Hemingway, one of the all-time masters of tight, powerful writing. He wrote terse […]

Stieg Larsson, Outliers, Black Swan Events and Bestsellers

My good friend Billy Ethridge got me to thinking about the following question: Q: What do Stieg Larsson, and John (A Confederacy of Dunces) Kennedy have in common? A: Nobody gave a damn about their books until after they were dead. Obviously, being dead is no guarantee of writing a bestseller. All the forgotten dead […]

500+ “Moderate” Muslim Scholars Support Blasphemer Assassination

If there were any doubt that insanity reigns among the world Islamic community’s leadership, the article, below,  should erase any doubts (along with other things like murder plots over cartoons and death decrees for those who question the inerrancy of every word in the Qur’an.) LAHORE, Pakistan (Associated Press) — More than 500 Muslim scholars […]

Why I Couldn’t Write Perfect Killer Before My Mother Died

Perfect Killer is a substantial departure for me and a book that had to wait for my mother to die before I could write it. My mother, Anabel Bradford Perdue Ellis was one of the last of the “Steel Magnolias,” born on one of her her father’s two cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta (Saints’ […]