Friday, January 01, 2010

2009: The Year in Hornswoggling

This was a meme, several years ago, but I don't believe in doing anything just once -- so this will be the fourth year that I present the first and last lines of Antick Musings of each month of 2009.

(Standard posts have been silently omitted, in the interests of interest. So January begins with the first post that wasn't a look back at 2009, and so forth.)

Consider this the speedreading version of the 855 posts from Antick Musings this year.

January:
Way back in the year eight, I linked to a start-up company, filedbyauthor, that was entering a beta phase, announcing itself to the public, and starting to provide free homepages to any authors who wanted them.

Marketing managers with experience in finance preferred required.

February:

I find I'm only buying movies that I know I -- or, more likely, the smaller persons in my house that I call Thing 1 and Thing 2 -- will be watching multiple times.

But, that said, it's a very enjoyable movie, with a bunch of funny scenes, and Michelle Williams is a real cutie here, fulfilling the most important role in a rom-com: being the person that you look at and say "Of course the main character should be with her!"

March:
Good news: there's a warehouse full of books, and the owners want people to come in and take away everything they can carry.

I think I'm ready to read some words that don't have pictures attached to them for a couple of days....


April:
"Ebooks, if successful, will sink the trade publishing industry."
- "
Why Ebooks Must Fail," Evan Schnittman

Happy Free Comic Booking!

May:
I got to settle back down this month, after the storm of Eisner reading that ended March, and just read things because I wanted to.

See you after that for possibly more substantive blogging, particularly if anything happens that's worth fulminating about.

June:
I doubt any readers of this blog will care, but the fruits of a lot of my work for the last four months (as well as much, much more work by many other people) is now available, in the form of Wiley's Fall 2009 Trade catalog.

It's a brand-new review of a two-year old book, just because.

July:
This is the second in a series of posts called "Book Marketing 101," about various things marketers like me do to promote books as well as about the things authors (and even other interested parties) can do to promote their own books.

(Mr. Firth makes no appearance in this production, but his spirit pervades it.)

August:
Mockumentaries are a surprisingly rich field these days -- perhaps because there's always new material to mock, or perhaps because filmmakers only watch movies these days, so that's all they know.

It's got a very low-key, serious package, but it's full of good, interesting comics, so I hope it doesn't get overlooked in favor of flashier competition.


September:
This is the last Bond novel by Fleming; he didn't consider it finished when he died in 1964, and the question of just who made it publishable (and how much work went into that effort) has been hotly debated since then by the kind of people who care about such things.

At the moment, they're a huge money sink, and the only reason publishers do it at all is in the hope that someday they might only cost as much as print editions.

October:
After my epic dual-review mountain of invective and bile on Monday, I stepped up to the plate at ComicMix again yesterday to cast scorn at a couple of books that are demonstrably better than at least 80% of the comics being published.

Don't do anything too ridiculous while I'm off the grid, O Internet, and I'll see you in a week.

November:
What is science fiction?

So I'm posting here partly to pad that very low post count and partly to solemnly swear that it's not going to happen again...I think.

December:
Just like last year, I disappeared on vacation for the first week of November, which made the rest of the month overly crowded with incident and left me with less time for reading and blogging than I have most months.


And perhaps W&S will explain more about Literals -- or keep throwing more of them in, willy-nilly, and hope that each reader works out a plausible explanation individually.

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