Baby I Got Your Money

On a night when I’ve been mostly transfixed by the conflicting reports about the capture, or not, of Serbian war-criminal Ratko Mladic,* I’ve been suddenly distracted by this headline from Yahoo! News:

“Japanese housewives amassing secret fortunes”

Now that’s news.

TOKYO (AFP) - Nearly half of Japan’s housewives keep money secret from their husbands and most of them doubt their spouses have any idea about it, a survey found, showing women hold the purse strings here.



About 46 percent of housewives said they had secret funds, with the sum averaging 2.41 million yen (20,000 dollars), according to a survey of 500 wives in salary-earning households by Sompo Japan DIY Life Insurance.



The hidden savings seem to be accumulating with time, as the average sum was four million yen for housewives in their 50s, nearly three times as much as the 1.46 million yen for those in their 20s.



On the other hand, 76 percent of the women believe their husbands keep no such secret money.

———

*An hour before BBC started announcing the Mladic reports, while we were consuming a bottle of vodka, sms’s from Serbia began vibrating John Nadler’s phone, cluing us in. Made me feel on the cutting edge of the headlines, briefly.

The 100th Post

Contemporary Nomad is 12 days shy of three months old today, and in that time our entrepid writers have dished out their level best. It’s been up & down, but we’re also full-time writers with plenty of other fish to fry. I’m pleased with what’s been going on here.



On December 6, I said:

[T]he thought is that if four interesting writers are stuck in the same room, what might come of it? Too much testosterone? (We are, after all, male.) Clever phrases? Cultural insights? Stuttering psychosis?

the contemporary state of fiction in an increasingly fictionalized worldthe role of propaganda, and why it might not work so well anymorethe Frey brouhaha and why we should or shouldn’t give a shitOsip Mandelstam

On the Web: Mystery Circus

Kevinfollowing his linkJohn RickardsMystery Circus

The mission of the Circus is to push, promote and make people aware of the best cool new stuff in the world of crime fiction - be it books, short stories, comics, online, offline, whatever. …[W]e want to make people aware of the Good Shit. And for people to make us aware of Good Shit that we would otherwise have missed.



We’re also here to try to serve as a central hub for crime online. A meeting point, a place for cross-polination of a million online conversations. There’s plenty of interesting stuff out there. Let’s bring it in.

Check it out

Ivan's War

Those who enjoy the Soviet experience from the safety of an armchair, be it through the fantasy of books like mine or the extensively researched accounts by real scholars, might be interested in this one, reviewed in the New York Times today (link also down on right, where I’ve installed a NYT Books feed). Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army 1939-1945 by Catherine Merridale deals with…



…well, you don’t have to be a genius to interpret that title.

No matter how bad American soldiers had it in World War II, Russians had it worse, from start to finish.

Revision

My present project is a novel ostensibly called Falling Sickness. It’s the fifth and final book of the crime series I’ve been working on continuously since the end of 2000, and hope to wash my hands of by the end of this year. And since it’s the one that will cap this long project, I want to go out with a bang—which is one reason, as I’ve mentioned before, that Falling Sickness will clock in at around 1000 pages.



When you’re working on something this long, it helps to pat yourself on the back now and then, and yesterday I did just that, having typed in some final edits on the first long section, “1986”, which runs 75,000 words, about 280 pages.



It all takes place in that year, over the space of a week, when Emil and various other militiapeople (one’s a woman) attempt to uncover why, during his retirement party, Brano Sev was shot by a sniper. By the end of 1986, they know why and have done all they can about it. So, in essence, it’s a self-contained novel, following its arcs to a kind of completion.



But the story won’t end there. It skips on to 1989, which I’m starting now, and deals with the revolution in my country that topples the communists, and then goes on to 1990, when an old Emil chases his enemy across the landscape of immediate post-communist Europe.



So there’s still plenty of work ahead, and I’m eager to get to it. Which brings me to my uncertainty.



See, I know—I know—that the last 60 or so pages of 1986 suck. The rest of it is good—I’ve run it through plenty of edits and it’s in fine shape—but those culminating pages where the conspiracy is uncovered and various denouements occur are just a mess. The order is crappy, the rhythm is all off (at times I’m just bored by it), the “conspiracy” is reiterated enough times to make a dog understand, and some of the events are just ludicrous.



But I’m so eager to get going on the next section that, for one, I’m not going to sit around and fix the problematic pages. I’m going to let those wait a few months until I’m well into 1989 and can review it all with clear eyes.

Whenever I Feel the Urge to Return Home....

Kzamm points to an LA Times article on the rage that’s sweepin’ the nation: creationism!

“Boys and girls,” Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, “you put your hand up and you say, ‘Excuse me, were you there?’ Can you remember that?”



The children roared their assent.



“Sometimes people will answer, ‘No, but you weren’t there either,’ ” Ham told them. “Then you say, ‘No, I wasn’t, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.’ ” He waved his Bible in the air.

Tech Note, Comments

Given that our number of visitors is significantly higher than the amount of people we see commenting here, we’ve changed the commenting form, so you don’t have to be a registered member of Blogger to make yourself heard.



But we’ve no regrets having forced some of you to register.



Only thing we ask is you fill in your real a name, and a website address if you’ve got one. We at the Nomad don’t go for that “anonymous” stuff, even though it’s a tempting mask; we’ve seen how it makes some conversations degenerate into loads of shit.

(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)

Marketing With RWN, redux

Robert Ferrigno was having a little trouble with the commenting apparatus on CN (and who hasn’t?), but he was kind enough to send me some enlightening updates & clarifications (with permission to print them) concerning his great web-based campaign for Prayers for the Assassin:

I can take little credit for the site, Level 10, a net marketing company in Dallas, Texas did most of the work. I mostly gave ideas on what the fashions would be like, what special features the cars would have, what products would be popular. Then I reviewed all the copy that their ten writers churned out, and made a few changes. It was very very odd. Definitely deepened my sense of the book —- like having people come in and rearrange the furniture in your brain and you discover they have made some nice improvements.



As to if it, the net campaign, will work —- like you, I also wondered. I also wondered after my publisher spent almost six figures on the campaign if I would be stuck with the bill if the book tanked…



… as of a few days ago, with only one review, the Philadelphia Inquirer, we were at #38 on the Barnes and Noble list and had moved to #400 on Amazon.



I think not every book lends itself to this kind of treatment, but as we all know, publishers are desperate to attract new readers, and the best publishers are willing to take risks. I was very fortunate to be at Scribners, and to present them with a book they want to make such an investment in.



Glad you liked the map —- my only contribution was to mark South Florida, where I grew up, as Independent Cuba.

Marketing With RWN

As Sarah reports, the great reviews are flowing in for Robert Ferrigno’s newest, Prayers for the Assassin, a no-doubt controversial speculative novel. Says Ferrigno:

The premise of Prayers for the Assassin is that the USA loses the war on terror and becomes an Islamic republic. I make it clear that the USA was never defeated militarily, but bled white by a conflict without end, weakened internally by dissent, economic malaise, and a consumer culture hostile to people’s thirst for meaning in their lives.

Republic World News: Breaking News for the Islamic States of America



my own lame effortsthe previous discussion about marketing techniques

Remember when cartoons were funny?

I came to the Mohammed cartoon controversy nearly two weeks late, since I was in Serbia, and didn’t understand what was being said when I saw, on TV, crowds of Muslims rioting in streets. I finally got around to asking someone what the hell was going on, and started to get informed. Now I’m playing catch-up.



It seemed straightforward enough. The Danish Jyllands-Posten printed cartoons depicting Mohammed, who’s not to be pictured in any way according to Islamic tradition. Muslims were insulted, embassies got burned, death threats were issued, and murders occurred.



Even Bill Clinton said the Danes were at fault.



Then I heard that the cartoons making the rounds weren’t all quite legit. Extra-offensive images were slipped in. Fakes. Then it seemed that simply making images of Mohammed isn’t as offensive as it’s reported to be.



Mulling over this, I found out that the same cartoons were also printed in the middle of Ramadan 2005, in Egypt. Not only that—and that’s admittedly quite a lot—but in November, Romania’s Evenimentul Zilei published the same ones.



In neither case did anyone bat an eyelid.



Now, Danes are fleeing Indonesia.



Here’s a Sunday Herald piece trying to come to grips with the sequence of events. It’s certainly worth reading.

(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)