Pixel Scroll 9/21/16 “Repent, Pixels”, Said The Box-Tick Man

(1) STATHOPOULOS WINS MAJOR ART PRIZE. Although the critics gave their prize to Louise Herman’s portrait of Barry Humphries, the people have voted the 2016 Archibald Prize People’s Choice award  to a fine artist with fannish roots.

ault-and-stathopoulos

In Nick Stathopoulos’s commanding portrait which won the 2016 Archibald Prize People’s Choice award on Wednesday, its sitter, Deng Adut, sees himself exposed and vulnerable.

A monster, thought the former Sudanese refugee and lawyer when he first saw the finished portrait….

Of the eight artists who approached him, Adut selected Stathopoulos, who grew up not far from where Adut practices as a lawyer, to paint his portrait for this year’s Archibald Prize.

It took three sittings, one of nearly six hours, and four-and-a-half months – the longest time Stathopoulos has taken for an Archibald entry – for the artist to be satisfied he had captured the essence and likeness of his subject.

The portrait, titled Deng, is Stathopoulos’ first public choice winner and his fifth entry to be selected as an Archibald finalist. A “clear winner” among the pool, it comes with a $3,500 cash prize.

The Guardian calls it “vindication”:

The win is something of a vindication for Stathopoulos. In 2014, the artist was “astonished and disappointed” when his portrait of the author Robert Hoge, titled Ugly, did not make the finals of the Archibald or the Doug Moran prizes; it went on to win the people’s choice at Salon des Refuses, which features work that did not make the Archibald’s finalists exhibition.

…The Art Gallery of New South Wales director, Michael Brand, said: “This vote of appreciation by visitors to the Archibald recognises both the meticulous skill of artist Nick Stathopoulos and the wonderful contribution Deng Adut has made – and is making – to Australian life.”

The Archibald exhibition is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until 9 October.

(2) THE TRIMBLES: The title of GQ’s article – “This Is How Star Trek Invented Fandom” – is bound to rub some who remember earlier fanhistory the wrong way, but the article itself has accurate information about the start of Star Trek fandom. Especially the part that comes from two impeccable sources:

“We’re pretty sure that the Trek community you see today would not have existed but for us,” Bjo Trimble says. “Not bragging.” Special guests at Star Trek Las Vegas (and a host of other 50th anniversary events), Bjo (pronounced “Bee-joe”) and her husband John are Star Trek’s ur-fans, the determined couple who saved the franchise.

They’re both in their eighties now: John wears red cap with a blue Vulcan salute on the front, Bjo has a streak of brilliant pink hair floating in her cloud of white. She’s the more loquacious of the two, but, she insists, “the whole Save Star Trek campaign was John’s fault.” They had heard the show was being cancelled in 1968, after its second season, during a visit to the studio lot. At John’s suggestion, the two launched a letter-writing campaign—all mimeographs and postal mail. It was the first ever to save a TV show, and the first time any fan community had flexed its collective muscle.

“NBC came on, in primetime, and made a voice-over announcement that Star Trek was not canceled, so please stop writing letters,” Bjo adds with pride.

TOS’s third and final season premiered with “Spock’s Brain,” commonly held to be one of the worst episodes of all time. (“We’re responsible for there being a third season,” John admits, “we’re not responsible for the third season.”) But by the run’s end, with a grand total of 79 episodes—barely making the minimum threshold—Star Trek could enter syndication. It had earned a second life.

(3) KINSELLA OBIT. Canadian author W. P. Kinsella (1935-2016) died September 16. Much of his fiction was devoted to depicting First Nations people of Canada, or baseball – and he is particularly well known as the author of Shoeless Joe, which was made into one of my favorite movies, Field of Dreams.

Kinsella’s first published book, Dance Me Outside (1977), was a collection of short stories narrated by a young Cree, Silas Ermineskin, who describes life on a First Nations reserve in Kinsella’s native Alberta. A later collection of similar stories, The Fencepost Chronicles, earned Kinsella the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Kinsella was criticized for engaging in “cultural appropriation” by writing from the point of view of Native people, while he rejected the criticism on the grounds that a writer has the license to create anything he chooses.

These stories use the ineptness of the white bureaucrats on reservations as background, and Kinsella defended them, saying, “It’s the oppressed and the oppressor that I write about. The way that oppressed people survive is by making fun of the people who oppress them. That is essentially what my Indian stories are all about.”

Kinsella wrote nearly 40 short stories and three novels involving baseball. Shoeless Joe (1982) was his first novel, and the second, Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1986), was written as an epic spiritual conflict in the form of a game between a minor league team and the 1908 World’s Champion Chicago Cubs which threatened to go on to the ending of the world.

(4) BESIDES THE FICTION. Abigail Nussbaum says don’t overlook another reason to respond to Strange Horizons’ fund drive:

But beyond my relationship with it as a writer, what makes Strange Horizons special and important to me is the material it’s put before me as a reader.  A lot of the testimonials you’re going to see around the internet in the next few weeks are going to talk about Strange Horizons‘s fiction department, which has and continues to give platforms to new writers, many of whom have gone on to great things.  That’s worth recognizing and celebrating, but to me Strange Horizons will always be special as one of the finest, most interesting, most fearless sources for criticism and reviews.  There is, quite simply, no other online source of genre reviews that covers the breadth of material that Strange Horizons does, with the depth of engagement and the multiplicity of perspectives that it offers.  The editorial team that took over from me in 2015, under the leadership of Maureen Kincaid Speller, has excelled at finding new voices, such as Samira Nadkarni, Vajra Chandrasekera, and Keguro Macharia, to offer their vital points of view, while maintaining the presence of reviewers like Nina Allan and Erin Horáková, whose writing is essential to anyone interested in the state of our field.

(5) ASPIRING TO GREATNESS. Kameron Hurley identifies another of her writing problems in “The Madhatter Teaparty: Rescuing Your Characters from Endless Cups of Tea”. I have wondered if she didn’t struggle, would she still have such a rich source of examples to use in teaching about the writing profession? (She probably would!)

Plot kicks my ass. It kicks my ass up one end of a story and down another, because honestly, all my characters want to do is snark at each other over tea. Or whisky. Or coffee. Or bug juice. Whatever. Any excuse for them to sit around flinging zingers at each other and discussing what they are going to do next works for me.

This over reliance on tea-and-conversation scenes is a hallmark of discovery or gardener writers like me. When we get stuck on what happens next, we just sit the characters down for a chat and let them figure it out. Needless to say, this is a time consuming bit of lazy writing, because while it may get us where we’re going eventually, we can spend literally thousands upon thousands of words over the course of a novel having the characters explain the plot to each other, and then we have to go back and remove all those scenes or make them more interesting in their final form (I spent a lot of time in Empire Ascendant in particular going back and making talking scenes more interesting. For real: in the first draft, the first 150 pages of that book was just people talking)….

(6) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • September 21, 1897 — The New York Sun’s Frank Church replied, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”
  • September 21, 1937 — J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit.

(7) COMICS MAKING. NPR tells about “A Comics Convention For The Unconventional: The Small Press Expo”.

In theory, SPX seems a lot like many of the other comic-cons that have been popping up across the country over the last few years. There’s the vast exhibit floor, there’s a packed schedule of panels and spotlights featuring interviews of, and discussions between, various comics creators. People mill about, lugging bags loaded down with stuff they’ve bought, or find an empty patch of carpeted hallway on which to plop themselves and rest while perusing their purchases.

If you close your eyes, its sounds a lot like any other con: the low, steady murmur of voices punctuated by the occasional exclamation of delight or surprise from someone who’s stumbling across an old friend — or a new passion.

But the moment you open your eyes, you’re reminded that SPX isn’t like most other cons.

It’s smaller, for one thing — the big shows in San Diego and New York attract upwards of 130,000 people, and SPX’s attendance is closer to 3,000. It fills the huge ballroom at a hotel in North Bethesda, Maryland, but unlike other comic-cons, where companies build massive booths that tower over you with video screens, loudly hawking all manner of comics-adjacent stuff like toys, games, statues and t-shirts, everything at SPX is at eye-level.

(8) CAN THOSE EDITORS. A piece on wired.com by Susanne Althoff called “Algorithims Could Save Book Publlshing – But Ruin Novels”  looks at ways publishers are using data to determine which books they buy, including a summary of The Bestseller Code.

The result of their work—detailed in The Bestseller Code, out this month—is an algorithm built to predict, with 80 percent accuracy, which novels will become mega-bestsellers. What does it like? Young, strong heroines who are also misfits (the type found in The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). No sex, just “human closeness.” Frequent use of the verb “need.” Lots of contractions. Not a lot of exclamation marks. Dogs, yes; cats, meh. In all, the “bestseller-ometer” has identified 2,799 features strongly associated with bestsellers.

Later, Althoff discusses a company called Inkitt which invites everyone to submit their novels for everyone to read, and offers to act as agent for the books that are the best-performing. Inkitt sold YA novel Bright Star by Erin Swan to Tor, which will publish it next year.

The ability to know who reads what and how fast is also driving Berlin-based startup Inkitt. Founded by Ali Albazaz, who started coding at age 10, the English-language website invites writers to post their novels for all to see. Inkitt’s algorithms examine reading patterns and engagement levels. For the best performers, Inkitt offers to act as literary agent, pitching the works to traditional publishers and keeping the standard 15 percent commission if a deal results. The site went public in January 2015 and now has 80,000 stories and more than half a million readers around the world.

(9) KAREN GILLAN IN JUMANJI REBOOT. The Hollywood Reporter has “9 Theories as to Why ‘Jumanji’ Has Actress Karen Gillan So Scantily Clad”.

The first image of the upcoming Jumanji cast was released Tuesday, and one notable cast member looked like she got lost on the way to a Lara Croft Halloween party and ended up in the jungle instead.

Karen Gillan plays Ruby Roundhouse alongside Dwayne Johnson as Smolder Bravestone, Kevin Hart as Moose Finbar, and Jack Black as Shelly Oberon. Johnson promises there’s a plot-driven reason for Ruby’s seemingly sexist and totally nonsensical costume in the reboot.

“Her jungle wardrobe will make sense when you know the plot,” Johnson said. “Trust me.”

(Some fans are guessing that Gillan’s character is a trope. The original Jumanji from 1995 featured purposefully stereotypical characters who were part of the game — so perhaps that’s the plot device Johnson is referencing.)

(10) VOTE FOR FEMINIST AND QUEER COMICS AWARD. Autostraddle is holding is third annual comic award contest, for both excellence in the art form, and excellence in representation: “It’s Time to Vote in the 3rd Annual Autostraddle Comic And Sequential  Art Awards”.

This month is the three year anniversary of this column, which seeks to highlight and celebrate comics by, for and about queer women. So, that means that it’s once again time for the Autostraddle Comic and Sequential Art Awards, the only comic award that focuses on feminist themes and queer women’s representation in comics. Starting last year, these awards are voted on by you, the fans and readers of these comics and these books, and we’re doing that again this year, but now there are even more categories for you to vote in! This way, even more comics and creators get the recognition they so rightfully deserve.

(11) LANSBURY HELPS CELEBRATE BEAUTY & THE BEAST’S 25th. She can still carry a tune at the age of 90 – click through to watch as “Angela Lansbury sings ‘Beauty and the Beast’ theme in honor of anniversary”.

Twenty five years later, Angela Lansbury is ever just the same enchanting actress for Beauty and the Beast fans.

The actress, 90, reprised her role as Mrs. Potts during a special screening for the 25th anniversary of the animated classic. Lansbury, accompanied by composer Alan Menken, sang the title song, “Beauty and the Beast,” during the celebration in New York on Sunday. At the end, she even spoke her line to her character’s son: “Run along and get in the cupboard, Chip!” much to the delight of the crowd.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Rose Embolism, Martin Morse Wooster, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bruce Baugh.]

128 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/21/16 “Repent, Pixels”, Said The Box-Tick Man

  1. Those Swedish badgers seem to be getting too big for their britches. Like some sort of weaselly gang, roaming the streets and terrorizing other species. Hope they’re not rabid, just cranky.

    (8) Saying “cats, meh” proves they’ve never been on the internet. And “no sex”? Bwuh? I think Hines’ post covers it pretty well. A comment there leads to another place where the boilerplate “answers” are given. And nobody’s been able to confirm the supposed sale book is actually coming out — plus, Tor does take open submissions, so big whoop.

    (9) “Justification” is definitely the word here. Possibly proceeded by “feeble”.

    @Nicole JLL: When Burger King started those TV ads with the “King” guy in the scary mask being a creeper/Peeping Tom, I quit eating there. I still patronize other junk food emporia.

    @Dana: I can read Dan Brown, but 50 Shades just completely made me “bwuh”. Has someone written a fun, snarky thing about that like @Arifel’s link? Or is that to terrifying to contemplate?

    Even bad bars will ask if you want, say, Bud or Bud Light, Coors or Coors Light. You’ll have to make some sort of specification. Back in the Wild West or speakeasy days, just saying “Gimme an X” would work, but I can’t think of any place that doesn’t have at least two of every category nowadays.

    Is it better or worse for Shoggoth to eat tickies instead of Perry Rhodan books?

    Title suggestion: Leonard Cohen’s “Scroll Me to the Pixel of Love”.

  2. @Michael Eochaidh: as you say — each of those beers was for a specific clientele; only one would have gone to walk-ins.

    @Chris S: we were talking about medieval times, and somewhat later times, not present-day England. (Your list omits separate ordinary-vs-special bitters, IME.) Possibly there would also have been enough choice that “a beer” wouldn’t have been sufficient in the US before Prohibition; after that crushed many breweries, it was pretty much lager (specifically, weak-flavored imitation pilsner) all the way down until the rise of craft brewing in the ~1970’s. (Consider also the kind of bar a noir character storms into; choice probably reached them last.)

  3. Nicole, I’ve noticed the same schtick in several other Koontz novels (not counting his early SF work, I’ve read maybe a half-dozen of his thrillers), of taking a sympathetic character and suddenly having them act like an asshole. It’s like, “Hmm, in this scene I need someone to be a scumbag, but my main villain is offstage. What the hell, I’ll just do it with THIS guy.”

  4. I read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. The whole thing. It was awful, but I couldn’t stop. I kept having to turn the next page. Had to. No choice.

    I’ve been very, very careful to never pick up another Dan Brown book.

  5. @Dana: I can read Dan Brown, but 50 Shades just completely made me “bwuh”. Has someone written a fun, snarky thing about that like @Arifel’s link?

    I know of one: Cliff at Pervocracy. It stopped at chapter 25, though. (Cliff has been pretty busy since then.)

  6. @Bruce Arthurs: “one of the other tells is an overuse of “was””

    I’m wary of “don’t overuse X” or “word X is bad” in general, but especially for basic components of English that can be used in more than one way, like “was” (e.g., linking verb or helping verb). Did they explain what was wrong with “was” and how it’s overused?

    @Chip Hitchcock: Hey, wait, you’re using HTML italics. I give up; what the heck do your \ / and now ~ and ] [ mean?! (IMHO the \ / and ] [ versions make your text ever-so-slightly less readable; maybe just me, and obviously not a big deal.) I need a key to your unique mark-up.

    @SciFiMike: Thanks for satisfying my curiosity – weird, I’m on a desktop, too. On the other paw, I’m still on MacOS 10.8.x, so maybe later Safaris are quirkier. Anyway, re. the movie, darnitall, yes – I’m in the USA and you’re a lucky UK person who gets to see the movie now! My Google Fu sucks; I can’t figure out when it’s coming out in the USA (no date yet???). I’ll just keep waiting, that’s fine. 😉 At least (it seems) they’ve restored the original name of the movie – the altered version (“She Who Brings Gifts”) always sounded weird to me.

    @Mike Glyer: Not that you need another confirmation of “no e-mails” but yeah, my box-checking last night has produced nothing after the confirmation. Good luck!

  7. Kendall: I’m interested that at the link PJ Evans posted, the person with the same problem also started experiencing it right after the new Jetpack update the other day. That matches up with our experience here.

  8. snowcrash: Lol, but I confess – would read the hell out of The Newton Sudoku

    I’d back that Kickstarter! 😀

  9. Kendall, the avoid-“was” rationale is that if a passage can be written without using “was” (or “that”), it’s more effective, reads more smoothly, and is more active than passive. You need to use “was” sometimes, but when I go thru a manuscript for editing and revision, I usually take out about 25-30% of “was”.

    Besides input from the local writers workshop, I use Pro Writing Aid to catch errors and copyedit stories. I don’t follow all the suggestions PWA makes (a small percentage point out “errors” that are the program misjudging context), but it catches a lot of stuff I might not have noticed without its input.

    And hey, I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but my story from 1997, “The Rest of the Story”, is being reprinted as one of the offerings at Great Jones Street, a new smartphone app that wants to be “Spotify for short fiction”. An iOS version is out and available at iTunes, and an Android version is supposed to be available soon.

    “The Rest of the Story” originally appeared in HIGHWAYMEN: ROBBERS & ROGUES, edited by Jennifer Roberson (DAW Books, 1997). It recasts the Good Samaritan Parable as a mystery/detective story set in 1st-Century Judea. (Who was the man rescued by the Samaritan? Why was he really beaten and robbed?) It’s a story I’ve always been pretty proud of, and I’m glad to see it available to new readers. My first reprint, huzzah!

  10. A brewery doesn’t necessarily brew only one type of beer, though. European monasteries in the middle ages, for instance, might brew one type of beer for the nobility, another for the monks and a third for pilgrims and the poor.

    You’ll note that I never suggested that breweries only brew one type of beer.

    The image being objected to was of fantasy heroes going into a tavern and ordering ale. If that tavern is supplied by a brewery, the guy isn’t going to go in and ask, “What do you have in a porter? Say, what does the local monastery brew for the monks? Got any of that?”

    The fact that the brewery brews different kinds of beer is not likely to filter down to a beer menu at taverns they supply.

  11. Hey guys,

    Marvin from Inkitt here. Just read the comments here and thought I’d engage in the discussion. Yes, indeed Inkitt started as another display site @Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little, but with the promise and the vision to make publishing more fair for authors in mind. A promise which I think we have kept. Just take this week for example: On Wednesday we published Charlotte Reagan, a previously unknown author. Within the first 24 hours her novel ‘Just Juliet’ became a bestseller and ranked #1 in LGBT eBook, #5 in Teen & Young Adult eBook, and #51 overall on Amazon. We even outranked books like ‘The Hunger Games Series’. The whole Inkitt team is extremely proud of Charlotte and we are excited to continue to help authors like her get discovered.

    Half a year ago all of Inkitt was made up of four people. Now we have grown to a 30+ team. Of course, we’ve made some mistakes along the way, but we strive everyday to improve and never do anything with the intention of hurting our authors or their works.

    One topic I’d like to address specifically is the EULA and first rights comment @steve davidson. It’s simply not true that posting work online equates to being published. We’re very transparent about our publishing terms and all authors retain their full rights until a publishing deal is signed.

    @bookworm1398 what distinguishes us from Wattpad is that they’re not a publishing house. Inkitt also focuses less on fanfiction and more on full-length, original fiction titles, which makes our content more streamlined. So at Inkitt we’re focussing on building a community of authors with the end goal of getting published. Plus, readers enjoy all this for free – without any ads.

    I hope I could clarify some points here, otherwise I’d be happy to provide further explanation. Feel free to contact me at [email protected] if you have private questions.

    All the best to everyone!

  12. On Wednesday we published Charlotte Reagan, a previously unknown author. Within the first 24 hours her novel ‘Just Juliet’ became a bestseller and ranked #1 in LGBT eBook, #5 in Teen & Young Adult eBook, and #51 overall on Amazon.

    Yes, a complete unknown with a story with apparently 1.2 million reads on Wattpad.

  13. C’mon, Hampus, that’d require something other than boilerplate, which is all Inkitt employees are trained to post. They certainly can’t admit “their” authors could make more money by just slapping the books up on Kindle (B&N, Kobo, etc.). And I love how they tell authors that lie about first publishing rights — who needs lawyers? They never respond to follow-ups, just see their name mentioned through egosearch alert, dispatch someone to spout the copypasta, and go on without another thought. Marv there even misspelled his own email.

    Anyone who’s thinking of Inkitt (oh, and they’re spammers too, as you see in the Hines article) needs to be immediately directed to Hines’ blog, Writer Beware, and the oeuvre of the Smith-Rusch family.

    @Darren: Yeah, 1.2 million readers is completely unknown. And she only had 2K stars, and a huge social media presence to get first-day sales.

  14. On Wednesday we published Charlotte Reagan, a previously unknown author. Within the first 24 hours her novel ‘Just Juliet’ became a bestseller and ranked #1 in LGBT eBook, #5 in Teen & Young Adult eBook, and #51 overall on Amazon. We even outranked books like ‘The Hunger Games Series’.

    Yeah… you know, most of the people here understand how Amazon ratings work, and know that this doesn’t really mean much.

    Also, you can say “It’s simply not true that posting work online equates to being published” a million times, but it’s still not going to make it true. 🙄

  15. @Kendall: \ and / are a lazy habit; I used ASCII email for almost 30 years before being forced to shift, and they’re faster than HTML (even the one-click HTML this site supports, since it requires mousing). ] and [ are relative of [ ]; “this word isn’t precise but a full explanation would be distracting”.

  16. Heh. I was wondering how long it would be before someone from Inkitt came by to copy-paste the boilerplate and spackle a thin veneer of customization over the top.

    I should also like to hear Marvin actually answer the questions posted at Hines’s blog. They are good questions. I am not putting money on the likelihood of ever seeing an answer.

  17. @Nicole: The last comment on Hines’ blog says she posted about them in May and they came back with more boilerplate in August. So along about Christmas when we’re another 90 Pixel Scrolls deep, someone might show up here with more copypasta.

    None of us will notice, of course, since a) tickybox is off this week b) Mike closes comments in a reasonable amount of time.

    But they wouldn’t actually give an answer anyway.

  18. @Bruce Arthurs: Thanks for the info & congrats on the reprint, BTW.

    @SciFiMike: Next year for US release?! Gah! I don’t understand, wah. Thanks for the info, bummer though it is.

    @Chip Hitchcock: Thanks. I used ASCII e-mail and related text-only stuff like FidoNet, Usenet, etc. for many years (not quite as long as you, but not wildly shorter), but I’d never seen either of those. Asterisks and all caps seem like the common ASCII emphasis styling (still in use today) – IME, that is. Anyway, thanks for explaining.

  19. So, Matt from Inkitt, now when you have said that you are interested in engaging with us, can you tell us:

    1) Why you have 30+ persons employed when you only have a total of two books on Amazon Kindle? What are all the people doing?

    2) Why do you compare a totally unknown newbie author the success of The Hunger Games? Do you mean to imply that the books have sold as much? Then you would have press clipping about it, I guess?

    3) Could I ask you why you have placed a new book for this year in the Fantasy Classics-category on Amazon? To get higher ranking?

  20. “There’s this hilarious review of 50 Shades of Grey, if you haven’t read it.”

    That was interesting mix of prudishness and trying to establish how exciting her own sex life is compared to the book. Getting stuck up on the very common term “playroom” for a dungeon? Come on. If you buy a book with BDSM as a theme, be prepared for that it may contain, you know, BDSM. Stuff that people who like BDSM will get excited by. With the dark fantasies about stuff that aren’t political correct. That is for fantasies or regulated consensual play, not for reality.

    Yes, it will be trigger warnings for others. But they aren’t the target group. I found this review to be very depressing.

  21. @Hampus,

    I found the review both very funny in its writing, and very informative – it pointed out how unbelievable and unsympathetic even the main characters are; the lack of quality of the writing; the thinness of the plot; and that even the ‘BDSM’ bits aren’t really. *shrugs*

  22. “…and that even the ‘BDSM’ bits aren’t really.”

    And that is another problem with the review. Because what she says isn’t BDSM is still extremely common BDSM-fantasies. It may come as a surprise to her, but there a lot of BDSM-people whose fantasies are not tied to everything being consensual. This made me really hate, hate, hate the last part of her review. Because she is belittling other people, saying that they do not understand the difference between fantasy and reality. And are not allowed to have their fantasies because it “sets feminism back decades”. And those that have these fantasies are “participating in some of the most blatant misogyny”.

    This is a fantasy. It is not her call to decide what should be a turn on for whom. To say that people are not allowed to have their fantasies, even if they know it would be horrible in reality.

  23. @Hampus Eckerman,

    the point the review makes is really just that the book is badly written, including that the author doesn’t even quite seem to understand the subject matter. Yes, it’s all fantasies that people have – from the very beginning of a clumsy character (for the reader to identify with) who is really attractive but nobody has noticed – and the person who does notice happens to be immensely rich.

    The review simply points out that the plot, the characters, and even the sex-related bits are all badly done – and it does so in a way that I found highly entertaining and informative both.

  24. That the author does not understand BDSM is true. As it is true that the reviewer does not understand it. I find it more shaming that entertaining.

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