Always a pleasure to receive my annual check from the Public Lending Right Commission in Canada. Money just for having my books in libraries in Canada. How cool is that? One of the books I have listed is When the Night Comes Down (you have to be at least a 25% contributor to register a book, so I can’t add anthologies in general), and I’ve earned significantly more from it from the PLRC than I have from royalties.
I had an interesting experience yesterday. Something I tweeted was retweeted by someone with a few million followers. So all through the Academy Awards last night, I was treated to a steady stream of likes and retweets! It was interesting to see something like that propagate. On of my regular moderately popular tweets gets 100-300 engagements. This one has had over 150,000, and counting. It seems to have taken on a life of its own.
We were sort of disappointed by Steve Jobs, which we watched on Saturday. Not by the movie, per se, but by the fact that so much of it was utter fabrication. The movie’s structure was interesting. All the action took place around major product launches: The Macintosh, the NEXT and the iMac. That meant that we never got to see Jobs in his regular environment. Which meant that a lot of crises and confrontations had to be shoe-horned into the hours leading up to the product launches. From my reading afterwards, it appears that virtually none of those arguments happened, and certainly not in the stressful context of the launch prep. There’s no doubt that Jobs’ treatment of his daughter Lisa was reprehensible for a long time, but there’s no mention of the fact that she actually lived with Jobs and his wife (also not mentioned) and their children (ditto) for her last four years before college. Fassbender is good and Kate Winslet is very good, but you have to wonder what the point in making a biopic is if you’re going to make up most of the major facts to suit yourself.
Stay tuned Wednesday for my interview with Richard Chizmar and Stephen King about the collaborative novella that Entertainment Weekly will be launching.
