Ooookay…still pondering…

Continue Reading “LAST NIGHT’S ANGEL (SPOILERS)” →

Folks have been asking how DC is planning to market “The Fallen Angel.” There’s some concern that it will receive little-to-no attention, and just be tossed out there so it can safely sail under retailer radar and quickly vanish.

Thus far that doesn’t seem to be the plan. According to what I’ve been told, “The Fallen Angel” is being promoted as the anchor book of three new titles featuring female leads that will–ideally–appeal both to male readers, and also attract that great untapped resource, women. There will be a major marketing push for these three books, of which “The Fallen Angel” will be the first, with the other two following shortly thereafter in subsequent months. I’ve suggested the collective marketing hook of referring to the new titles as “Dangerous Curves.” We’ll see if they go with that.

I believe “Fallen Angel” should be in the next Previews. Here’s hoping the book gets good positioning.

PAD

I was so involved with tending to Caroline yesterday that I missed the Mets opening day game…a game that such stalwarts as Bob Greenberger were attending, and I’d missed somehow the e-mails they’d sent me asking me if I wanted to go with them. So I was *really* annoyed with myself.

I tuned into MSG late and they were talking about the game, but they weren’t putting up the score. Then they posted the stats on Glavine. I took one look at his ERA–12.73–and thought, “Oy, THIS can’t be good.”

15-2. The most runs the Cubs have gotten on opening day since ’99…1899.

Oy.

PAD

There is much talk and outrage over Marines shooting up a vehicle filled with women and children that was apparently fleeing Baghdad.

Not to diminish the tragedy of it, but not only was it inevitable, it’ll happen again. Look at the situation. Iraqi soldiers hiding behind civilians. Iraqis signing up as suicide attackers. Car bombs being driven into soldiers. All that must have been going through the soldiers’ minds.

A major point of contention seems to be whether warning shots were fired in time. I’m thinking it wouldn’t have made a difference. Iraqis are being told that one of the requirements of being a marine is that you have to kill and eat a baby. I think they were planning to try and run the check point, not to ram it, but to get past what they perceived as a horrifying enemy invading their home. If they’d approached slowly, gotten out of the car, arms raised, they’d have lived. But they didn’t know that. They probably thought if they’d done that, the Americans would have taken their children and turned them into K-rations.

PAD

While trying to block some folks from posting garbage, I appear to have blocked a number of AOL subscribers from posting– including Peter, even.

We hope that the problem has been addressed, and we apologize for those folks who were blocked in the meantime.

You can let go of my throat now, Peter…

Had a good time at I-Con this weekend, despite the miserable weather that swept up on Saturday evening and remained all through Sunday. Did a bunch of panels, signed a few autographs.

It’s the first I-Con in a while that the entire family was there for, although there were almost no times when we were all together at the same moment. The major problem, as pointed out earlier, was they scheduled me for two solid hours opposite Harlan’s major talks on Saturday night. Bob Greenberger, however, made both of those panels go away, so that was nice.

PAD

I will indeed be attending I-Con this weekend at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. It’s pretty amazing: I’ve been attending the convention since it occupied exactly one small building and had a dealer’s room about the size of my living room. Now the dealer’s room occupies the entirety of a sporting arena and the convention itself is sprawled over four buildings all over campus (which makes going from one panel to the next very exciting.)

The ever-reliable Glenn listed a link below, although if he wants to repeat it RIGHT HERE, he can go ahead and do so. I’m not sure what my schedule is, although I know I do have an autographing Saturday from 11:30 to 1. Also, they’d originally put me on a panel Sunday at 2 PM that was supposed to be about how New wave 1960s SF continued to resonate today. When I discovered the panel also had Harlan Ellison, Barry Malzberg and David Kyle on it among others, I dropped out. My feeling was that I had zero to contribute to the panel that guys like that couldn’t cover and then some. I’d rather be in the audience.

I will not be attending today, Friday.

PAD