Pensive

There's going to be a more cheerful post soon - I want to try to get a virtual holiday feast/cookie swap going - but before then, while I wait for the oil company to show up, I've been thinking about reviewing.

Yeah, it's fun to do, and the free books are a blast. But on the other hand, I have to wade through a lot of stuff I'd prefer *not* to be reading. It's getting more and more tempting to tell Reviewing the Evidence's editor that I'll clean out my queue and then quit.

On the other hand, thanks to Who Daily, I see that one of the large SF sites is looking for a Who reviewer. If I pitched for one of the audio Doctors it wouldn't interfere with the writing I do for Firefox News. It would mean a lower queue - the site wants people to pick specific Doctors to review, so if I stick with audio, we're talking about 4 reviews a year... although the wordcount per review is correspondingly 4x longer.

Or I could just pack up the whole thing. Odds are good that I'm about to be voted in as Secretary for Team Wench, and maybe I should just be devoting my time to that.

To help me figure out what I want, another in the patented "I make no guarantees to follow the results, but it helps me solidify my thoughts" poll. No silly options because that's always the winner.

[Poll #1309299]

(no subject)

Sorry for the spam, but if you're not reading Rich's fan comic The Ten Doctors, you really ought to be. Today's page is arguably a standalone if you haven't been reading - and the last few panels absolutely sum up the spirit of all 45 years of Who.

(And if you're not reading Torchwood Babiez, you should be doing that too. After all, it turns out that Paul Cornell and John Barrowman love it!)

The reader's view of the publishing crisis

Yet More Spam, sorry.

If Borders wants to know why it's going bankrupt, it might consider its lousy shelving system. Seriously. Here I am, making a running errand to the store to spend my nifty coupon. Can I find the stuff I want? No. The DVD might be in TV, or British TV, or Science Fiction *or* locked up in one of the cases, and "Hunt the Doctor" is a concept that should be limited to cracky fanporn. The craft books are shuffled together like a deck of cards, quilting next to knitting next to woodworking, three full bookshelves of this, and I don't have time to go through every single spine when I can walk right into the knitting store and get it from people who know the difference between knitting and crocheting. The computer book my brother wants "is likely" in the store, but the computer screen gives me a shelf number that isn't written on the shelves, the signs are pointing to stock that has been relocated ("Internet" was full of biology books) and there are so many subdivisions that I can't search alphabetically because the alphabet reboots every half shelf.

So I say phukit, and shop elsewhere. Again.


And a note to booksellers, publishers, and authors: Yes, I am an SF fan. Yes, I read seasonal romances. But I should never be expected to part with good money for titles like "Holiday With a Vampire" or "All I Want for Christmas is a Vampire." I can get as much of that extremely specialized genre kink as I want online for free, and from authors who are taking it as unseriously as it deserves.



Sekrit Messages: Pers, Calapine, I'm going to comment in your LJs as soon as I can get them to load - I'm getting weird SQL errors when I try to read 'em.