Royalty only

I received a royalty check last night for my essay “For Love or Money: Six Marketing Myths,” which is in the HWA collection On Writing Horror. One of the bits of advice I give in that essay is to avoid royalty-only (RO) anthologies, as they tend to have no marketing plan and rarely return anything to the author downstream. On Writing Horror was not such a project—we were all paid up front and now that the book has earned out its advance, we are seeing downstream profits. Though the check was only for $5.60, it’s considerably larger than that from any RO project I was involved with as a novice. With the exception of Jack Fisher’s Octoberland anthology, the only other proceeds I’ve seen from an RO anthology was for $1.00.

I have a tire on my car that keeps going soft. It’s a very slow leak—it takes about a month to get to the point where I need to reinflate it unless I’ve been driving on the freeway. I should have taken it in for repair or replacement months ago, but I managed to procrastinate until today. I rode my bicycle to work for the first time in ages, which is also something I should do more regularly but I always manage to find an excuse not to. It’s only 2.5 miles, which takes me about 10 minutes.

My agent is back from his honeymoon and promises that the manuscript for my detective novel is on the top of his stack of things to get to know that he’s back at it.

There’s a LOST-like quality to Life on Mars, even though the two stories seem to be totally different. There’s obviously (??) some external force manipulating Sam’s reality, but what kind of force? We’ve had cues that they may be space aliens or gods, but even those might be wrong. As with LOST, there comes a time when the character or characters have to stop questioning what’s happening and get on with living life as it exists at the moment. I think we might see Sam pursuing Annie more aggressively in future episodes. But next week, having dealt with him mother, we get to find out about his father.

It looks like Randy is going to play the obnoxious card next week on Survivor. Most obnoxious contestants annoy the crap out of me, but there’s something about Randy that I begrudgingly like. I’m not sure that getting rid of Charlie was a strategic move that helped out anyone, but it had the benefit of being a total surprise to half the team. I’m surprised they didn’t try to flush out Sugar’s idol, since Bob now has a pretty good idea she has it.