A Year of Reading: 2022

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Goodreads, as is their tradition, have curated a list of all the books I read across 2022. The total number runs to 72 books, give or take a couple of titles that didn’t log properly, with another 10 books that I started across the year still “in progress” at the end. That’s a big of a slow year for me, but more than I thought, especially given I worked full-time for the first time ever through the bulk of 2022. The learning curve—and figuring how to use my time judiciously—proved to be a challenge.

With that said, lets talk the highlights.

2022 was a year where the bulk of the new-to-me authors I picked up were romance-oriented, partially because Romance is my comfort reading and partially because Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and the Hot As F$ck Romance newsletter fed a continual supply of interesting reads my way. Big recommendations on this front are Penny Reid’s WINSTON BROTHERS books, Kris Ripper’s BOOK BOYFRIEND, Ruby Barrett’s THE ROMANCE RECIPE. The most oddly disappointing book of the year was Lucy Parker’s BATTLE ROYAL, but that’s mostly because it was good and her prior works I’ve encountered were outstanding, so it suffered in comparison.

My Spec Fic read of the year was definitely Gareth Powell’s ACK-ACK MACAQUE, a maximalist SF trilogy with a very odd premise that just hit all my buttons as a reader. Enjoyed Django Wexler’s HARD REBOOT a lot as well, and I’m mystified as to why Xiran Jay Zhao’s IRON WIDOW isn’t logged (it’s also great). Also missing from my Goodreads log: Travis Baldree’s LEGENDS & LATTES, which was a low-keys salve during some very stressful weeks.

Oliber Burkeman’s FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS and Giblin/Doctrow’s CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM were the best of the non-fiction reading, although the Nohelty and Leonelle series on GET YOUR BOOK SELLING… captured a lot of conversations I wish indies had more often in a really accessible way. I don’t know that they needed to be eleventy billion different books, especially given the series wasn’t finished before it was kick-started for new editions, but books on Events, Selling on your Website, and Kickstarter are all good reading if you’re in the self-publishing or small press space.

And I *did* end up backing the Kickstarter, despite my reservations about their business model where all the books feel like lead magnets.

Mark Forster’s SECRETS OF PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE is probably my productivity book of the year. I didn’t expect it–I didn’t think it was that impactful–but it’s had the greatest impact on my day-to-day habits and tactics.

Finally, special mention goes out to the Chad Dundas edited THE TERRITORIES, which is such a niche book that it’s ridiculous that it actually exists. Short version: Dundas and his cohorts have created a shared world featuring a set of fictional 80s wrestling territories and the stars who move between them. There’s a very small group of people who see that and scream “goddammit, take my money,” but I’m definitely in that group. The anthology is hit-and-miss in terms of quality, but when it’s on fire, it’s really on fire. Worth it for the two outstanding novellas, and I have no regrets about buying it.

Reboot (Hulu/DisneyPlus)

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

I’ve been a fan of Steven Levitan’s TV shows for years without really being aware of it. I devoured episodes Just Shoot Me as a kid, went out of my way to watch Stark Raving Mad during its brief tenure, and slowly wended my way around to an appreciation of Modern Family after writing the sitcom juggernaut off for the better part of a decade. The same three traits unified his creations: incredibly smart casting, an interesting concept, and a thin seam of genre subversion running through a solid understanding of the core tropes.

His most recent effort, Reboot, takes those traits and turns them up to eleven. The pitch is simple: an edgy young writer convinces Hulu to reboot an early 2000s family sitcom; as it comes together, we discover the original creator was her father, who walked out her mother and started a new family, then turned that new family into the core conceit of his hit sitcom. Rights issues mean father and daughter end up working together as co-showrunners, working out their issues as they create a new vision for the show. Meanwhile, the dysfunctional cast and crew of the original show come together to work out their issues.

It is, as they say, very meta, and in the wrong hands it would be terrible. In the right hands…well, you have Reboot. The writing isn’t immediately in-your face funny, but it’s incredibly deft and willing to spend an episode building a joke so it lands just right. It’s a show that trusts the audience to get it, rather than making the laughs obvious. It’s the closest I’ve come to the feeling the first seasons of How I Met Your Mother had, before it became a cultural juggernaut and lost all subtlety, shining a spotlight on every callback instead of just throwing them out there and trusting folks to follow along. It’s exactly the mood you want in a TV show about the making of a TV show, and it works. The show’s humor creeps up on you when you’re not looking, and by the time you’re laughing, you’re definitely in its thrall.

And then there’s the other strength of Levitan’s work: casting. Father and daughter are played by Paul Riesler and Rachel Bloom, both folks who have worked on their own incredibly smart sitcoms in the past. The core cast of the show-within-a-show are Keegan-Michael Keys, the criminally underrated Judy Greer, and Johnny Knoxville, who all know their business and deliver. The writers’ room—when it forms—is an unexpected pleasure of brilliant casting, pitching an old guard writing team comprised of veteran actors Fred Melamed, George Wyner, and Rose Abdoo against the younger, queerer, socially conscious young blood played by Dan Leahy, Korama Danquah, and Kimia Behpoornia.

We initially gave the show a try off the strength of the major cast, but the bit parts were a constant flow of “oh, I love that person”. And, in truth, there are certain shows I’ll give a chance on the strength of their IMDB list, especially when it includes secondary-character specialists like Abdoo (who played mechanic Gypsy on Gilmore Girls) and Behpoornia (who played Abby on Atypical) who I’ve rarely seen in anything awful.

If you’re in the mood for something funny and smart, Reboot is an unexpected pleasure.

Ch-Ch-Changes: Status Update, 11 Nov 2022

PETERMBALL Status

It’s a season of change, in many ways.

Two weeks ago, I lost my job, which began an immediate search for what comes next. Obviously, part of the answer is “writing” and “Brain Jar Press”, both of which got short shrift while I was dallying with full-time employment (for the first time) over the last twelve months. Neither writing nor publishing is enough to sustain us on its own, but it’s looking like I can assemble a Frankenstein’s Monster of a solution from various part-time and contract gigs that have come my way over the last few weeks.

More recently, Elon Musk took over Twitter, which seems to have triggered a mass exodus of users and much thinking about what comes next. For all Twitter has been a pretty terrible place for the last few years, far less fun than it was in its heyday, it held traction as the one place where conversation spread in a way other social platforms of its era now refuse to do. It gave you access to a larger, discursive space where folks talked about their interests in your vicinity. I’m not saddened to see Twitter go by the wayside, but I see it as a potential problem point for those of us who relied upon it for outreach. Specifically, this line of thought explored by Michael Damian Thomas about the impact this will have on speculative fiction magazines.

https://twitter.com/michaeldthomas/status/1587156089585520643?s=20&t=biFMNFUdwZZcH8ebu4WEww
https://twitter.com/michaeldthomas/status/1587178685500645376?s=20&t=biFMNFUdwZZcH8ebu4WEww

I’ve been doing the occasional consult and course on writing, publishing, and backlist over the last twelve months, and a big part of what I end up talking about is this fundamental problem. Marketing involves putting your work in front of people who don’t know you but may be interested (lead generation), then nurturing that interest until they’re ready to put money towards your project. New writers often build very detailed plans for nurturing, but give lead generation short shrift, relying on one or two tactics rather than a wide spread of ways in (hell, even experienced writers do this, as lead generation takes time and we often have very little of it).

Twitter, like Livejournal before it, worked well for this because starting a conversation actually served as lead generation. The more people who became involved, the more people who stuck around what else you had to say, and soon you were nurturing a new audience members. But the curse of lead generation is this: anything that works well, when you start out, soon works less effectively and costs more to achieve the same reach.

Once upon a time, blogging was the great lead generation system of their era, and I surely discovered a lot of great authors through the discourse that emerged as authors I already loved responded to, recommended, and linked to other writers in their field. But that medium died, by and large, when RSS fell by the wayside and social services (*cough* Facebook *cough*) made it difficult to put links to posts in front of readers and pull them off the Facebook site.

Once upon a time, putting free ebooks into various stores as a loss-leader was also a great way of generating interest, but as organic reach on certain sights (*cough* Amazon *cough*) gave way to pay-for-play placement and advertising, it’s become less effective than it was.

Five or six years ago, before the Trumpocalypse, Facebook Ads could generate leads cheaply through specific targeting of readers. Two years ago, when it was shiny and new and trying to reach a critical mass of users, TikTok offered great, free reach to writers.

Now, Facebook advertising is a more competitive, expensive field and TikTok reach (and particularly viral reach) grows harder and harder to achieve.

It doesn’t make any of these tools ineffective, just less effective than they once were and a potential threat to any writer or publisher who invested deeply in this one approach for generating leads and talking to audiences.

I’m thinking about this a lot today, courtesy of this time of transition. Making the Freelance/Writing/Publishing hustle work relies heavily on generating leads, and one of the tools that’s served me well is less useful than it has been.

CURRENT INBOX: 77

WORKING ON

  • Setting up a system for booking in mentorship/consulting for writers and small-press publishers
  • Final proofs on two Brain Jar Press projects and the first issue of Eclectic Projects
  • Writing so many cover synopsii
  • Getting set-up with Spectrum Writing as one of their new tutors.
  • Two freelance cover design gigs

RECENT READING

  • Just finished Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man (Recommended) and William Gibson’s The Peripheral (very recommended).

RECENTLY WATCHED

  • Henry Selick’s Wendell and Wild on Netflix is all the fun you’d expect from the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline, but it’s threaded with punk rock energy (and so much X-Ray Spex in the soundtrack). Go watch it.

STATUS OF THE ADMIRAL