I’m still trying to discover (a) why no copies of my book were available in the U.S. on pub day; (b) why, if no copies of the book would be available on pub day, pub day was not delayed until they were available; (c) why nobody at OUP bothered to tell me that my book would not be available on pub day; (d) when copies of my book are likely to be available; (e) why the Kindle edition of the book is in gray e-ink, something not true of any of the hundreds of other books I have ever read on Kindle; (f) whether the Kindle edition can be fixed and, if so, when. I have no answers to any of these questions and no clear indication of when, or indeed whether, I will get answers.
Turns out that this is not really the publication date for my book at all. See the update here. I am a pretty unhappy camper.
It’s pub day for my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers! Sayers is a fascinating person and I had a wonderful time writing about her. For this one week I’m gonna emerge from my social-media Faraday cage and be prepared to answer questions, here and at my Buy Me a Coffee site. (I’m not turning up on X or BlueSky. I’m no hero.)
Related: When I was writing the book I often posted on DLS-related things that I couldn’t fit into the final version.
UPDATE: Maybe I should think of my actual pub date as the day when Amazon next has the book in stock. Sigh. Maybe there were more pre-orders than Amazon and OUP had expected? That’s a consoling thought. But I suspect that there has been a delay in the manufacturing process, because I haven’t received my author’s copies either. Basically, at this point the book exists only digitally.
I’ve been suffering from eyestrain, so for my evening reading have turned to Stephen Fry narrating the Sherlock Holmes stories, which ranks as one of the three best narrations I have ever heard, the other two being Fiona Shaw’s The Mill on the Floss and Andy Serkis’s The Lord of the Rings. Spot-on in all respects: Simon Callow’s review of Fry’s Holmes. 📚🎧
Sometime during the mid-2010s, I noticed photographers, videographers, and artists of all kinds referring to what they made as “content,” as opposed to photos, videos, or art. The case was the same with writers: Blog posts, essays, and articles were lumped together and called content. The term “content creator” also appeared, which further collapsed distinctions among writers, artists, and performers. In 2023, for the first time, I heard a representative from the entertainment industry rebrand it as the “content industry.”
As I understand it today, content is a type of expression that doesn’t rely on concepts like “quality” or “meaning” to differentiate itself. The way content stands apart — which is to say its primary appeal — is that it can be created at scale. The more of it, or of its kind, the better.
Content is tailor-made for a sense of immediacy. This means content is best — is most itself — when it’s fresh, when it belongs to the here-and-now. It also doesn’t, or shouldn’t, take much, if any, time to grasp the substance of content. In other words, content is expression explicitly for the moment, created by who or what wishes to define that moment.
When AI can mute my TV during commercials and unmute it when the show/game comes back on, I’ll be all in. Not until.
As we’re seeing more and more sophisticated robot/drone warfare, I find myself wondering whether the next step is what Adam Roberts described in his fabulous 2010 novel New Model Army — which I wrote about here.
Currently reading: Loren Eiseley : Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos by Loren Eiseley. I’ve written occasionally over the years — here for instance — about how much Eiseley has meant to me since I discovered him at age fifteen or thereabouts. But how did I discover him? I well remember: He was quoted occasionally in Intelligent Life in the Universe, a 1966 book by I. S. Shklovskiĭ and Carl Sagan, which I borrowed from the East Lake Public Library in Birmingham, Alabama. That’s the kind of person I was at age fifteen. 📚
Whenever an organization says “There is no place for XYZ in this organization” or “We have zero tolerance for XYZ” the proper translation is: “Making this statement is all we’re going to do about XYZ, and you’ll just have to deal with it.”