The Night Shade Writers of America

Usually I try and refrain from posts that will ruffle too many feathers, but I can't tell everyone else we should be talking about the dissolution of Night Shade in public and then not do so myself.

For those of you who don't know, Night Shade Books is a highly regarded -- well, artistically highly regarded -- publishing company specializing in sf, fantasy and horror.  It has published many excellent authors, with beautifully packaged books, published with great love.  It was a company that I wanted to be in business with very, very much.

Unfortunately, the company was poorly run. In 2010, this became public knowledge.  There were issues with late royalties, and with e-books being published by Night Shade when their contracts did not give them e-book rights.  We were aware of those issues already, and we had stopped submitting to Night Shade.  It wasn't just that they were so often late, but that we never felt entirely comfortable with the excuses or forthrightness of the people who ran the company.  But we hadn't gone public.  Authors don't like to admit they aren't being paid, and what high-powered literary agency talks about not being paid?  You wonder: Do they just not want to pay us?  We don't have the clout and everyone else is getting paid?  

In fits and starts over the past few years Night Shade would occasionally make some payments and seem to be making progress, but never went a few royalty periods in a row without having problems.

And now, Night Shade has sent out a letter, the opening paragraphs of which can be found here.  They can't continue as a going concern.  Saviors have been found in Skyhorse Publishing and Start Publishing LLC.  Not to actually purchase the company, but to maybe buy assets if enough people agree to sell them.

So the first thing to notice is that the letter starts with a sentence that, um, nightshades the truth:  "Night Shade Books has had a difficult time after the demise of Borders."

Let's be clear.  For all the artistic contributions Night Shade has made to sf literature, it's had problems paying royalties that go back five years.  For those five years, they have repeatedly promised better things, adding new staff or new systems.  I can't call this opening sentence a lie, because Night Shade has certainly had a difficult time after the demise of Borders.  But since Night Shade's authors have have problems with royalties that long predate the final days of Borders, it is disingenuous.

Even though the e-mail which sent me this letter and the letter itself don't contain any confidentiality language, everyone is acting like it's a secret.  They shouldn't, and these are highlights of the terms and conditions (Scribd is hosting a copy of the letter.):

Your print royalty will become 10% of net proceeds.  This means an effective royalty rate that is likely at or a little under 5% of cover price.  This is not an unusual royalty rate for publishers outside of the orbit of the major NYC publishing companies.  But it is for many Night Shade authors half or less the royalty rate on their current contracts.  It is also an across-the-board rate for all formats.  All publishers usually offer higher royalties on hardcovers than paperbacks.  I can't imagine there are many Night Shade authors that are better off with this royalty rate.  Most are worse off; how much worse depends on publication formats and specific details of current contracts.  Skyhorse handles your print books.

If Night Shade has e-book rights (for some books, it does not), those go to Start Publishing.  The royalty rate is given as the current industry standard of 25% of net receipts.  I am told but have no first-hand knowledge that some Night Shade contracts had offered more.  I'll go off the agent's reservation here, and say no one can complain about this provision by itself.  Authors and agents have often insisted on having re-visit provisions if e-book royalties go up, and if here someone has to reduce a royalty that is above the current industry standard, how upset should you be?

Regardless of what your contract currently says, you have to give Skyhorse and Start the audio rights and second serial rights to your Night Shade book, unless you have sold or are about to sell those rights yourself.  This is significant, because these rights have value.  Even if the underlying print book is caught up in a bankruptcy proceeding, these rights may still have value.  Any author who gives up these rights has to weigh that value against the value of royalties to be paid when signing this letter, and that has to be part of the overall evaluation of the proposed assignment.  The meaning of audio rights is very clear, but I'm not clear if "second serial" is intended to include only "serial" rights as narrowly defined, selling to magazines, or related rights, like selling an excerpt from your novel or a short story from your collection to an anthology or for use on a reading comprehension test.  Without knowing that, it's hard to say if a client with a short story collection is giving up a lot or a little in potential future revenue. Revenue from these relinquished rights would be split 50/50.  The standard practice is that the author's share will be applied against any unearned advances, and because of the lower royalty rates, your advance will earn out more slowly.

If you agree to this, and if enough other authors agree to this, you get paid your current royalties owed. Which is a good thing, but one that has to be weighed against what you relinquish in future royalty rates and other rights granted.

Author Michael Stackpole has an excellent post going through the above provisions and others in very good detail; keep in mind that he is opposed to the agreement, and as he says in his post, he can afford to be.

The alternatives:

If not enough authors agree, Night Shade goes into (probably Chapter 7) bankruptcy.  The contracted rights for your book are tied up in the bankruptcy.  Who knows when or if you get paid royalties and advances currently owed, or how long it will take to resolve.

If enough authors agree, the authors who agree are now with their new publishing companies and get royalties currently owed in exchange for granting new rights and for accepting a (most likely) substantially reduced royalty on future sales.

If enough authors agree but you do not, the rights to your book remain with the partners in Night Shade.  Will they subsequently liquidate/go bankrupt?  Who knows?  None of us are being told how much is being allocated to pay off other creditors, and we have no way to determine whether books left behind will be tied up, or reverted, or in purgatory.

Author by author,  it isn't for me to say if this is a good deal or a bad deal.

For one of my clients it's clearly a bad deal.  The audio and second serial rights to be given up have more prospective value than the present value of anticipated royalties.  For another author, maybe you've already sold audio rights so that doesn't weigh down on the equation, or maybe your unpaid royalties for 2011 are so much bigger than likely future royalties that it is more important to get full payment for the past than to worry about the reduced royalties in the future.

But even if I had a client who might benefit from the deal, I'd have a long hard talk with myself and with my client if any of my clients should sign off on this.

Most important, the deal is structured in such a way that authors who might benefit have to start arm-twisting to get authors who shouldn't sign to sign anyway, to be sure the mysterious unknown threshold of authors is met.  This isn't a hypothetical.  I am told but haven't seen for myself that this is already happening, with authors who want this getting on other authors who do not.

To put this another way, the deal is structured to encourage authors to band together to take what is for some of them clearly a bad deal, rather than to band together to get a better deal for all.

Also implicit in the structure of the deal:  Night Shade authors get to spend the rest of their lives looking at one another, wondering who's gotten the better deal in this process.  There's a mysterious process by which there is this rumor that some authors are going to Skyhorse and negotiating changes, but is anyone willing to tell us whom they've spoken to and what changes have been agreed to?  Tony Lyons isn't responding to my e-mails yet.  Is he too busy?  Is the book I want to talk about not important?  Will the company be willing to offer global changes based on comments it is hearing in these side negotiations?

Authors are being enlisted to fight against one another, but without knowing what constitutes a win. Is the acceptable number of assignments received based on number of authors, number of books, percentage of Night Shade's sales billing?  A book like Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, which won every award in the field and sells well, is clearly worth more in this process than any Night Shade book by a JABberwocky client, but I don't know if or how that is reflected in determining if the deal goes through.

The "or else" to the process: The alternative is a bankruptcy proceeding where authors might get pennies on the dollar and have their work tied up for years.

This is quite true.  Authors are unsecured creditors, and are at or toward the back of the line in a bankruptcy proceeding.  Some publishing bankruptcies have dragged on for years and had unpleasant outcomes.  Here is an article from a while back about an author caught up in the Stein and Day bankruptcy that inspired a jeremiad about the process from one of the owners.  This was a poster child for a bad publishing bankruptcy in my early years in the business.

I am not a bankruptcy attorney and don't know how a Chapter 7 might differ from a Chapter 11 (the kind big public companies, which Night Shade is not, go through, which we read about in the news) or other kinds of bankruptcy.

But any bankruptcy is a public filing, and it goes before a judge.  Creditors are put into classes.  Writers might be unsecured creditors and somewhere back in the line to get paid, but our interests would be represented as a class.  It might also be possible for authors to group together as a class to hire attorneys to represent us as a class.

The current process is a private free-for-all with no supervision, and we are relying on the same people who've had challenges paying us royalties for several years to now do the right thing for all of us in the private sale process.  If you wonder why this concerns me, you can check out Staffers Book Review which has a "what went wrong" about Night Shade business practices.  Where that post overlaps with my personal experiences, I can concur with everything that's said.

We would also know in public how much Night Shade owes to unsecured authors vs. secured creditors, to authors vs. the printer or other non-author creditors, how much it owes in total vs. its assets.   Nobody is volunteering and nobody is asking for any of these important pieces of information to be provided to us in this private process.  These are important questions.  Sometimes a bankruptcy proceeding drags down the benefit to creditors.  In going bankrupt, Borders was able to pay far less to its creditors than suggested by the straight-up asset/liability calculation because the assets were liquidated in going-out-of-business sales at fire sale prices and a lot of expense was incurred just to go through the process.  But it's still helpful to know in evaluating just how deep the hole is.

With the current process, it is very difficult if not impossible for another bidder to emerge.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) has been on Night Shade for the past three years, since their issues became public in 2010.  The organization can be a forceful advocate for writers.  Just a few weeks ago, SFWA got a lot of good press for putting public pressure on Random House (each word there is a different link; I want to make it very clear how much well-deserved good press SFWA got here) regarding the contract terms for some new e-imprints that Random House had started up.

If SFWA thinks this is a good deal, it should be willing to be as public in its support and its discussion of the terms being offered as it was in sharing the terms of the Random House e-imprint contract that was provided to it.

But with this Night Shade situation, SFWA is communicating to members or a subset of members known to be published by Night Shade like this:  "The purpose of this report is to answer some of the questions we have been receiving from you. We ask that you not share this report outside the membership."  Their annotated version of the Night Shade assignment letter is hidden in a non-public area of their website.  And most of what they do say is always accurate as far as it goes, but it's what they choose to say or not say that tilts the entire conversation.  All the risks of saying "no" are prominently highlighted, all the risks of saying "yes" are obscured.  SFWA makes it abundantly clear that there are huge risks in bankruptcy and you may get pennies on the dollar and have your book tied up for years, but the best it can do on the print royalties is say (paraphrasing) "maybe it's better, maybe it's worse" when I suspect the typical author will see a considerable reduction.  It tells us that the 50/50 split on audio and second serial rights which you relinquish is industry standard, but it doesn't say with similar clarity that you are giving up control and one-half of potentially valuable rights in order to get your royalties currently owed. SFWA is right to add the "talk to your agent" disclaimers, but why in this instance vs. almost every other instance is SFWA not informing its members regarding the best right questions to ask when having those discussions.

Another example:

The secret SFWA e-mail says "The branch of [Start] involved here is the publishing subsidiary, headed by Jarred Weisfeld. They indicate they are acquiring Night Shade’s assets specifically because the owner of Start has a passion for science-fiction and wants to be in this genre."  Wouldn't it be preferable for SFWA to ask about and actually identify the owner of Start, instead of only telling us about the mystery owner's passion for sf?  Is SFWA aware that Jarred Weisfeld is also a principal in a literary agency, Objective Entertainment, and is this information that SFWA might wish to provide?  As another example, if you look at the books from Start Publishing that are for sale on Kobo, it appears that their current publishing program is public domain work.

With regard to Skyhorse, the sf/fantasy genre isn't currently represented on the company's website.

None of these things are, prima facie, bad things.  Perhaps: (a) The mysterious owner of Start has been practicing with public domain waiting for a moment like this to have a strong list of copyrighted titles.  (b) The owners of Skyhorse recognize the sf/f genre is an important one where they need a presence and have a plan for entering the genre successfully.  (c) The objections in the sf/f community to having literary agents as publishers have died down for good reason in the 30 years since SFWA objected to having Scott Meredith run an sf/f program for Baen Books, and Richard Curtis has run eReads for many years now.

But why is SFWA leaving me to do the research?  Why aren't they informing authors of relevant facts so authors can make good decisions in consultation with their agents, representatives and IP attorneys?

Since SFWA was aware of the process, does SFWA know if Night Shade was approached by these two companies, or if Night Shade did a vigorous search for other buyers before concluding that these two companies were the best or only alternative to bankruptcy?  Does SFWA know why Skyhorse and Start are splitting the assets, when Skyhorse can publish the e-books itself?  There might be details that would violate confidentiality, like other potential buyers who kicked the tires on the Night Shade car, but total silence leaves me queasy.  If you've ever read a formal SEC filing from a company asking for merger approval, it includes a history.  Written by management, likely self-serving, but with this kind of information presented.

I'm not a big fan of this deal.  But I have tried in this blog post not just to rail against it.  Rather, I'm trying to suggest questions we deserve answers to, either collectively or to grapple with in making our individual decisions. How rigorous a sale process was there?  If bankruptcy puts us at the back of the line, how long is the line?  What is the value of receiving my current royalties in full vs. the reduction in my future royalties, or the value of my current royalties against having full control of my audio rights?  If such a thing could be found would it be better to have a buyer purchase the whole company instead of select assets, even if it meant secure royalties moving forward but a hit on current royalties owed, rather than getting all royalties owed today in exchange for future concessions?

Last but not least, to what extent should my decision on the deal itself be influenced by the structure of the arrangement, the effect it has on the community of sf/f authors as whole?

AN UPDATE:

Jeremy Lassen, one of the partners in Night Shade, has replied to critics of the deal.  You can find that via Charlie Jane Anders at io9.  Jeremy's main argument is this.  "This deal is the last chance I have to keep my promise. This is the last chance I have to make sure that ALL OF MY AUTHORS GET PAID ALL OF THE MONEY THEY ARE OWED. Right now the deal is in the hands of the individual authors, and their agents. I am asking you. Please. Sign off on this deal. Help me make sure all my authors get paid."

One comment I will make:  You can't be so fixated on one specific goal in life that you lose track of the big picture.  The goal of Night Shade here is admirable.  Who wouldn't want every Night Shade author to get the royalties they are owed.  But as I've discussed above, every author needs to evaluate the benefits of getting paid what they are owed today against the costs of this tomorrow.

FURTHER READING:

This post by literary agent Andrew Zack fills in, very nicely, some gaps in my own post.  He knows the people at Skyhorse better than I, and asks directly why, when as he puts it:

In a sense, this entire deal seems to me to be:

Bottom-feeding
Extortionist
I recognize that these are terms that both publishers might find offensive, but surely they must understand how offensive this deal is to the authors involved.

the publisher doesn't want to step up to the plate and be proactive in making people feel more comfortable.

And something Jeremy Lassen would disagree with, also in Andrew's post:

The fact that they want to change the contracts and get extra rights seems to me an attempt to ensure they have jobs when this all gets wrapped up, but if authors are going to lose money in the form of lower royalties and new rights granted, shouldn't these guys lose something, too?  Where is their skin in this game?  If this all goes through, they are in a better-than-ever situation, it seems:  free of the burdens of administration, free of debt, employed, and walking tall.  That hardly seems fair, does it?

The Bargain Bin

One of the people we follow on Twitter recently tweeted that he felt bad upon seeing a friend's book in the remainder bin, and I thought this deserved a blog post.

Simply put, there is no reason to be upset at being in the bargain bin.  Everyone in this business is remaindered.  Everyone.  It is part of the life cycle of being a published author.  It is built into the economics of the industry.  It is probably better to be remaindered than not. The only good way to avoid being remaindered is to avoid being published.

I understand you're human, you're going to feel this twinge of rejection, of insecurity, of having failed, when the day comes when the publisher sends you that letter inviting you to buy copies of your about-to-be-remaindered novel.  Get over it!

Let me again emphasize this basic fact:  Everyone gets remaindered.  Your favorite bestselling author gets remaindered.

You've got to start by keeping in mind that every book a publisher sends out is returnable.  Maybe if we could go back in a time machine we would change that fact, but until that happens, that's a basic starting point for understanding the publishing industry.  Every book is returnable.  When the publisher buys your book, they offer you an advance based on a profit and loss statement, a P&L, and in this P&L, they factor in that some percentage of copies will be returned.   And there's a good chance they will even factor in that some of those returned copies (or copies that never leave the warehouse) will ultimately be sold to a remainder house, and even an itty-bitty first novel for Tor may have $1000 in remainder revenue sitting on the P&L statement.

So for better or worse, the publisher decides what advance they can afford to pay you based on the idea that there will be 1500 books that will be remaindered for $1000 in income instead of selling to bookstores for $15000 in income.   Since this remaindering is factored into the publisher's most basic economic calculation of the book's worth, there's no shame, no scarlet letter "R," no nothing, attached to you if in fact the book gets remaindered.

Publishers and booksellers can make decisions on your book that might increase returns and thus increase the chance of a remainder that are nonetheless good for you and your book.  As an example, Costco decides it will stock you!  Costco can sell lots and lots of copies, but they aren't going to keep your book on the warehouse shelf as sales diminish and until the last copy sells.  Nope, even if your book is quite successful for Costco, there might still be Costco-sized returns at the end of the day, way more returns than what might be expected from Barnes & Noble.  But that isn't a bad thing, that Costco took your book.

Publishers don't advertise a lot.  However, your cover is a little billboard, each presence of your book with its cover someplace might be the only "advertising" that your book gets.  So let's say it's the holiday season, and Barnes & Noble decides to take a huge position on your book.  Your book is all over the store, in stacks on the floor, during the holiday season.  Now guess what, neither Barnes & Noble nor the publisher is actually expecting to sell every single one of those copies.

And in all of these instances, the returns and the subsequent remaindering aren't negative things in and of themselves.  They may be negative, but it might just be a cost of doing business.  The publisher might be happy because they remaindered "only" 15% of the print run, when the P&L was based on remaindering 20%.

Furthermore, if your book isn't remaindered, there's a good chance that the publisher didn't print enough copies of  the book, didn't ship copies aggressively enough, underestimated the potential of your book and reduced your earnings.  Real-life example, there were no remainder copies of Peter Brett's Desert Spear.  Because the publisher didn't print enough copies and didn't go back to press.  Let's say The Desert Spear cost $3 to print and ship off to retailers, that Del Rey had printed an extra 2000 copies, and sold only 1000 of them.  The publisher would have spent $6000 on the printing, $4000 in royalties to Peter Brett, and probably made $2000 in profit.  And then had 1000 copies that it could have sold to a remainder house for an extra $1000.  Should Peter Brett be happy because he lost $4K in royalties, his publisher $3K in profits??  I as Peter Brett's agent wish his book had been reprinted and remaindered.

Bottom line, having your book in the bargain bin 15 months after publication says nothing, in isolation, about you or your book or your profitability to the publisher or the prospects for your career.

Everyone gets remaindered.

Some free advice on your contract.  The publisher should be obliged to offer you remainder copies before offering them to their remainder house.  This might be the opportunity you've been waiting for to fill your garage with $2 copies of your hardcover that you can sell at conventions or over the internet for $25.  If you're one of the authors who can do that, you don't even need to get rid of that many boxes before you're making some nice money off of your remainder, you could even make more money selling your remainder copies than from your advances and royalties.

Even when your publisher is obligated to offer books to you, what price are they offering at?  One publisher, they offer books at an 80% discount off of cover price, which sounds very nice except that for a $25 hardcover, they want you to pay $5, and a remainder house will probably pay under $2.  Is that fair?  Another house might offer the books at their manufacturing cost, which is a little fairer but still probably more than a remainder house will pay.  And the publisher won't bend over backwards to cut you a deal if you intend to buy 48 copies at their remainder price of 4,629 copies they have left.  But let's say they have 1,169 copies left, and you have a big garage, and you decide to buy 1,169 copies.  Don't you think they should cut you a deal if you're willing to buy out the entire stock right away, when they might otherwise be waiting two or three months to get paid for selling to a remainder house?

So this is the sort of thing we will explore when we negotiate your contract which you might not think to explore on your own.  80-90% of our clients don't care about this, but for those who do care and do have a big garage, this could be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars to you at the back end.

Everyone gets remaindered.

Click here, it will take you to the BN.com page with sf/f bargain books.  Look at the authors there, it may be a different assortment in a week than today as new books come in, but I think you'll happily trade places with a hefty percentage of the authors who are in the bargain bin today.

Everyone gets remaindered.

A quick rant

I don't agree with Rand Paul on much, but I'd be remiss not to thank him for doing a little battle against the never-ending war against "Al Qaeda" we are fighting with drones.  I put "Al Qaeda" in quotes because it deserves to be.  The entity that attacked us on 9/11 is pretty much out of business.  The other organizations that call themselves Al Qaeda this or that are not Al Qaeda, no more than someone else can call themselves a Bilmes or a Joshua or a Joshua Bilmes and not be me.  And even though I am not in favor of any of these organizations attacking us or for that matter attacking other people, including other Muslims, which they do as or more often as attacking us, I am in favor of the rule of law.  Targeted assassinations against targets determined behind closed doors under a program with no oversight, no accountability, no nothing, with the administration not even willing to entirely preclude carrying out attacks like this as opposed to arrest and trial even when they can do so -- those aren't the rule of law.  And as people who read this blog know, I wish that libertarians and especially gun nut libertarians would stop fixating all their attention on the 2nd amendment when we are doing far worse violence against multiple other amendments that are as or more important in the name of some undefinable never-ending impossible-to-ever-have-an-ending war on terrorism that has been going strong for almost 11.5 years.

So, yes, please, let's get on John Brennan and Eric Holder and the Obama administration just a wee bit on all of this.

Unplanned Obsolescence

There's nothing like the internet to make me feel obsolete sometimes.

As an example, I used to plan to see movies on opening weekend.  There would be an ad in the Sunday paper or in the Village Voice on Wednesday telling me that a movie was opening on Friday.  It might even have told me which theater it was opening at.  I'd have days to anticipate going to the Astor Plaza or the Ziegfeld or some other particularly nice theatre.  Now, maybe, I'll check the NY Times home page on Thursday night and there will be reviews of movies opening the next day, and I'll finally know what's opening.  Many of the movies won't even have ads in the paper on the day they open, or they'll have ads without theatre listings.  If it weren't for the movie clocks in newspapers, the only damned way I'd know where to see a movie would be to scroll through 12 pages of listings, two theatres or three theatres to a page, on the internet.  It would almost make me not want to go to the movies any more.  I feel old.

Now, Variety is migrating.

Like a lot of print media, Variety has been in trouble.  It's lost ads and readers, it's lost relevance to websites like Deadline.com, which is owned by the new owners of Variety.  25 years ago I could remember special issues like for the 25th anniversary of James Bond movies that would go on for 50 pages full of ads from anyone who had ever so much as supplied an ashtray to the plot department of a James Bond movie.  Now special sections have two pages or two columns or two column inches of ads from somebody's mother.

A few years ago Variety decided to hide its content behind a pay wall, which only hastened the migration of readers to other Hollywood sites.

So now, the pay wall is down.  Daily Variety will be gone in two weeks.  There will be one weekly issue like what the Hollywood Reporter has been doing.

And this totally sucks.

Because, first, the Variety web site sucks.

Please, click here, look at it.  Am I missing something?  Am I so old that I don't know a sucky website when it stares me in the face?  To me, this is just a random bunch of garbage strewn randomly down a web page with no grouping of any information in any discernible form or fashion.  Where is my eye supposed to go?

Clicking a link to an individual section header isn't much better.  Any better.  Let's look at the film section.  If you want to find anything in the section, you've got to go scrolling down and down and down and down because there's no "there" there.  Wherever you go, you have to just scroll down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down for 1 little headline after another with a very big picture.  My life isn't long enough to go scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.

There are no RSS feeds.  You can sign up for newsletters, and maybe the new owners will be better than the old ones who couldn't keep track of what newsletters you did or didn't want and who felt they could send you new newsletters you hadn't asked for until you begged them to stop.

As frustrating as the fact that I'm now not sure where to go to keep up with Hollywood is the absence of having somebody tell me what news was important for me to read.

The internet makes it too easy to discover only what you want to discover, to visit only the websites you want to visit and follow on Twitter of friend on Facebook only the people you want.  It closes out different views, different perspectives, puts blinders on to things that might be important but which aren't on your radar.

But getting a mass communication product, even for a small community like Hollywood with Daily Variety, means that you are forced to turn the pages and find on those pages not just what you already know you want to know, but other things beyond.  It provides a forced path to learning about the world beyond your own immediate and narrow horizons.

Even if I find some Hollywood news site that I'll visit in order to find what Variety will no longer provide, the temptation will be to focus only on those things I want to focus on, to lose depth and breadth of seeing a headline for something else and being tempted to explore.

I don't think this is an improvement.  I feel old, outdated, like yesterday's model, because I'm not seeing this as a step forward.

Idle Musings

I just feel like ranting about a thing or two today:

The Keystone Pipeline.  I'm a leftie, you read the blog and you know that, I believe in climate change, I believe in not running the AC 24/7 during the summer or leaving store doors open to hot streets while running the AC at 72 degrees in the summer, I believe in rapid transit over cars.  But I'm not a crazy leftie, I do all those wonderful things and then like to fly in business class to London Book Fair so I can have a good healthy carbon footprint just like everyone else.  The environmentalists shouldn't be fighting the Keystone Pipeline like it is the end of the planet.  Yes, the arguments in favor of the pipeline are almost certainly a lot of hooey with regard to the jobs created.  But stopping the pipeline isn't going to stop anything else.  The oil locked in the Canadian tar sands is coming out no matter what, it is getting to market one way or the other, it's happening.  Did you ever see the movie Silver Streak, and the train's roaring along at the end of the movie.  That train is the tar sands.  Now, if Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor had decided to take away the train track, the train was still going to keep coming, maybe crashed or derailed and made a mess of things.  If you wanted to stop the train, you had to get into the engine.  The opposition to Keystone isn't taking control of the engine, it isn't stopping the train, the best you can say is that it might lead to a tidier crash, but the people who are opposing Keystone can't say that for sure, their crash may be worse.

The sequester.  As some background, I've been ambivalent about the sequester.  The big reason for me is that it's so hard to get any defense cuts through normal budget processes, and the sequester doesn't spare the defense department.  We spend more money on defense than the next eight or ten countries combined.  You just can't tell me that with all that money we're spending we can't find ways to spend less and still defend the country.  As an example, why don't we keep one or two bases in Germany or someplace like that to have a nice military hospital and an airfield to help as staging for far away conflicts, and otherwise remove troops from Europe seventy years after World War II and 25 years after the end of the cold war?  I've gotten really super tired of having the SecDef going before Congress to bemoan the sequester and all the harm it's doing and wish Obama, who is after all the boss of things, had told SecDef to shut the f*ck up instead of carrying water for Lockheed.  My opposition to the sequester might be as quixotic or foolish as Bill McKibben's to the Keystone Pipeline because over time, the Lockheed lobbyists will have a lot more money to spend getting their money back from DoD than the advocates for needy people who are losing things in the sequester as well, but it is what it is.

But certainly, if you want to replace the sequester that you helped create, the way to do it isn't by having this constant parade of chicken little forecasts not just about DoD but about everything else.  Because ultimately, a lot of these cuts will take place over time in such a way that they are not discernable to the average person.  Or the departments will find some way to move fungible money around or move job titles around where the craziest cuts don't materialize.  What the average person will see is that we've had the sequester, in spite of chicken little's visit the world hasn't come to an end, and that we can cut the budget.  And they will go from there to deciding that we can in fact run the government without raising taxes or cutting tax expenditures (a.ka. eliminating tax loopholes) or doing anything on the revenue side.  In essence all of Obama's complaining isn't going to help him on the revenue front, it's going to hurt him, he should have just kept his yap shot and his SecDef's mouth shut and everyone else's mouth shut.

But as we've seen time and again, President Obama is not a good negotiator.

I did a tweet about this next subject.  In the good old days, people sent manuscripts and there were rules to follow.  Some of those rules aren't relevant any more.  It doesn't matter if your electronic manuscript is double-spaced, because so much stuff is now being done electronically.  Your editor reading on a Kindle doesn't care what font or size or line spacing you had going in.  If the copy-editor does actually need to look at the manuscript, it's a minute to change the format on a global basis for the file.  But there's one rule that needs to be followed and which many people don't.  You still need a title page with your contact details at the front of your manuscript.  For the exact same reason you needed your address in the old days, only more so.  In the old days, maybe your query got separated from the SASE or your manuscript got separated from your cover letter.  Now, it is 100% sure that they will be.  I will take your attached manuscript, I will put it on my iPad, I will often reformat it into ePub for that purpose to read in iBooks, and there it will sit on my iPad.  Your email?  It will be somewhere in the cloud.  Maybe your e-mail address will be stored as a sent-to address or maybe not or stored under your email address instead of your name.  Maybe I'll want to call you instead of e-mailing you.  Think how much nicer it is for me to go to the front of your manuscript and find all your details there and waiting, vs. having to go and seek out an email from three weeks or three months ago when the submission arrived, only to find that even then, I may want to call you to give the wonderful news that I want to represent your fine first novel, and you've sent me an email that doesn't even have a signature block on it.

We now continue with our regularly scheduled programming.  Thank you for listening to me rant.

Broken Effects

A few weeks ago I finally caught up with Broken City, this year's MLK Weekend film from Mark Wahlberg, and was a little quicker to see Side Effects, the new movie from director Steven Soderbergh.

There's a lot I can say about Broken City, not much of it good.  Wahlberg is a cop who's on trial for killing a teen in a housing project without just cause, he's found not guilty but there's some evidence we don't see that comes into the possession of the mayor played by Russell Crowe.  Several years later, Wahlberg isn't making ends meet as the head of a private detective agency, he's happy to get a call from the Mayor offering a lot of money to find out whom his wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is sleeping with.  This is happening in the midst of the Mayor's re-election campaign, and we find out that the chief aide to the Mayor's opponent seems to be Catherine Zeta-Jones's paramour.  All of this ends up tying in to some possible scandal with the sale of a public housing project to a private developer.  And all of it's a mess.  Let's start with the script, which is too convoluted to follow without the script in hand and not really worth following.  It's a script that has the candidate running against Crowe doing debate prep right in front of the windows of a storefront campaign headquarters instead of in an actual private place.  It's a script that has the mayor's wife and his opponent's chief of staff heading off to Montauk in the days immediately ahead of the election for a rendezvous, as if neither of them would have other engagements or better things to do or not be missed or have their absences questioned at this crucial point in the campaign when they disappear for what would pretty much be a full day to get out to Montauk and back.  It's a script where the climax depends on Mark Wahlberg making a decision about whether it's worth his going to jail for the murder he was acquitted of if it will mean the bad guy will go to jail as well, ignoring common sense (I don't think I'd go to jail in order to send somebody else to jail) and the legal principle known as double jeopardy under which Wahlberg's character could maybe face a civil suit but probably not be re-tried for a crime he was acquitted of.  It's a movie filled with people who are either wrong for their parts or not directed well enough to fit into them.  The mayoral candidate played by Barry Pepper just seems off, Crowe seems off as the Mayor, I don't often see a movie where so many parts seem filled by people who just aren't quite right.  It's a movie where the main revelation involves finding somebody's name on papers that aren't secret and which almost certainly would have been uncovered well before they are in the real world no matter how few newspapers are around to look at old papers like these.  It's a movie where people buy tickets in Grand Central Terminal then go to an above-ground platform to board the LIRR to Montauk when the LIRR doesn't stop at Grand Central, which doesn't have any above-ground platforms.  This will take a place next to Tony Scott's remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 as how not to do a New York movie.  The director of this mess is Allen Hughes.  

Side Effects was better, but weird.  Rooney Mara (Dragon Tattoo) is depressed even though her hubby (Channing Tatum) is just out of jail after an insider trading conviction.  She's given a drug by psychologist Jude Law to help her deal with her depression.  It doesn't help much, there are side effects, she sleepwalks.  During one such incident she stabs Channing Tatum quite nicely in the gut and ignores him as he bleeds to death in their apartment.  Jude Law is castigated for prescribing the drug, he is convinced he's the last person to blame, and he sets out to find the real story, going all kinds of Moby Dick and Captain Ahab in the process.  I was entertained by the movie, this is a good cast with people who work well, Steven Soderbergh always directs with panache and vision and style.  It's hard to talk too much about this movie without spilling things that shouldn't be spilled, at the same time I'm uncomfortable putting the movie in a spoiler free zone because I was certainly offput by some of the kinkier directions the script took.  There are all sorts of things worth seeing in the film, and yet I hesitate to give it a recommendation.

And to comment briefly on one other movie, because I want to try and blog on as many reviews as I can this year...  Molly's Theory of Relativity is an indie movie that opens in New York this week, and I walked out of a preview screening.  The script doesn't sound like real dialogue people will say, it's acted by people who are not good actors or just not able to act out the words in this script, it's not visually interesting.  Odds are it won't come to a theatre near you.  If it does, feel free to skip it.

Quartet Quartet

Two Quartets invaded the art house scene in the closing months of 2012.

The better of them is A Late Quartet.  Christopher Walken is the cellist of a string quartet -- the other members a couple played by Catherine Keener, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and the fourth by Michael Inavar -- who finds out that he has early stages of Parkinson's.  His imminent departure creates chaos.  Ivanar starts sleeping with the couple's daughter, whom he is instructing in violin, and resists a. effort by Hoffman to split the first chair violin role.  Keener's decision to side with Ivanar and/or the good of the Quartet over her husband creates tension in their (shotgun) marriage. In hindsight, and in actually describing the plot, the melodrama of it all is readily apparent, but to the credit of the cast and filmmakers it doesn't seem that way at all in the watching.  Quite the contrary, everyone plays with such conviction you would feel certain this is as much a documentary as the fictional documentary about the Quartet that we see pieces of along the way. Christopher Walken we all know for his wild-eyed manic roles, but he can act.  It is a pleasure to see him here, paired with a uniformly good cast.

Quartet is the first film to be directed by Dustin Hoffman.  It's a master class in British acting, with the likes of Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon in it.  It's in the grand traditioni of "let's put on a show" movies, here at a home for retired musicians that needs to have a successful annual gala to pay for improvements and operating expenses and secure its future.  It's got nice British countryside to look at, we should all be so lucky to retire in our dotage to a building as stately as the one this home for retired musicians is in.  It's pleasant enough, but it's not really that good.  Hoffman's direction doesn't have a lot of pep or energy to it.  More important, it's not a very good script.  The tension in the movie arises from some old conflict between the characters played by Maggie Smith and Tom Courtenay (whom I would have first seen in Dr. Zhivago and first remember seeing 30 years ago in The Dresser, for Maggie Smith it's California Suite over 35 years ago as the first film I remember her in, though I'd have also seen her before that in Murder by Death and Death on the Nile), but the movie withholds any detail about the conflict until near the very end, just so that it can then be resolved quickly and immediately and pleasantly.  A nice touch, the end credits reveal the musical backgrounds of all of the background players, the film is filled with musicians.