Yeah, the old “Fixing my mate is my responsibility and what makes me virtuous” theme 
2 Likes
Well, that and stabbing vampires with a parasol.
4 Likes
We both do only written media and interviews these days.
I don’t do much of that; I’ve long since moved on from the startup world and the nonfiction tech and scifi stuff I wrote long ago. I’ll be retiring in a few months and plan to get back into that again then, so we’ll see.
When my wife was still mommy-blogging, she did a local TV interview (using her pseudonym) that was supposed to be about that. Instead, the interviewer attempted to sandbag her by bringing up something she did for a “Girls of SDSU” magazine article that she did her junior year of college. She couldn’t get them back on topic. It got really creepy so she got up and walked out, and hasn’t done one since.
These days she writes romance novels. They are quite popular, and the fan mail she gets… well let’s just say no one would want to meet some of those people. The line between fiction and nonfiction is strangely vague for a lot of folks.
10 Likes
That’s a great way it put it. I’ve also heard this referred to as The Joss Whedon Problem, in that his characters are about female empowerment, but in a very specific way that plays into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy of men. It’s big on agency, so they get that part right, but falls down on defining self-determination as “can beat people up and all her choices are things cishet men think are hot”.
I say this as a huge Buffy fan, too. She’s a very deep and interesting character that I love, but as a feminist icon she only works to a point. She’s very definitely a “woman written by a man imagining a male gaze version of feminism”. At the end of the day, it’s still All About The Menz.
19 Likes
6 Likes
“I am S̶p̶a̶r̶t̶a̶c̶u̶s̶ Elena Blanco!”
I write gay erotica and it’s tame compared to some of these bodice rippers coming out in romance these days, so if your wife’s letters look anything like mine do, I get exactly why you guys use pseudonyms ;D Same reason I do.
I love my fans , and I’m by no means popular, but I don’t know them or trust their intentions.
7 Likes
When I worked in the library, James Patterson was the bane of my existence. We had to order ten bazillion copies of every book or else deal with so many boomers complaining about the wait (we had a certain holds-copies ration we usually kept). Then we were left with ten bazillion copies of every Patterson book (we sold a lot of them).
And the number of people in the world who read these terrible mystery novels but think they are so much better and more refined or whatever than people who watch TV in their free time, is staggering. (Spoiler alert people, I, your local library employee, had hardly finished any fiction books since college).
9 Likes
Well they may be terrible, but at least they are reading, right?
3 Likes
I’m not sure what you are trying to point out. That you don’t have time to read now that you are out of college the way your library patrons do, or that you think reading fiction is déclassé? Or something else?
2 Likes
From a recent new yorker article on “Masterclass”
Rogier had secured an additional $1.5 million in funding, but it still took three years to launch. “It was a dark time,” he recalled. He finally got a commitment from Dustin Hoffman by persuading Jay Roach, who’d directed Hoffman in “Meet the Fockers,” to direct the class. Then he got James Patterson to sit for a three-day shoot. “Patterson had twelve things he wanted to teach, and we were with him on all of them, except that we had to push him to do an ‘overcoming writer’s block’ chapter.” (Patterson, who has written or co-written three hundred and twenty-five books, was unfamiliar with the concept.)
I hope you aren’t in charge of “weeding” the fiction section. At my library, I feel compelled to search for the early works of an author I’ve recently discovered, and usually don’t find them. Or I worse, I feel compelled to read a series from the beginning-- but Volume I is too “old” to have been kept.
7 Likes
@PurpleFlower (because the post-link went weird)
I get your point, to a point. I worked in bookstores for quite a few years, so I’ve shared the frustration at people demanding the new hot thing you just don’t have enough of. Then, when the publisher finally prints enough for everybody, people lose interest, and you have to figure out what to do with the tons of copies left over… I get that, I really do. It’s exasperating, and it happened a lot, due to supply chains and publishing decisions.
As for Patterson’s literary merit… I did read one of his books to see what all the fuss was about. I wasn’t impressed; I’d call it very light reading. But the same could probably be said of other fiction I read and enjoy, too. Sometimes all you need is a little fun, to help take your mind off things for a while. I don’t think that’s such a horrible thing. (But then, I don’t think I’m superior for being a book addict either, even if I’m not reading anywhere near as much fiction as I used to when I was younger.)
If somebody develops a reading habit, no matter what they start with, there’s a chance to gently steer them into other, better authors and works (which is something that librarians and booksellers have an opportunity to do.) It always made my day when I could introduce people to stories I’d known and loved, and some of my regular customers did the same for me. It didn’t work all the time, because not everyone has the same literary tastes, but when it did, it was awesome.
That’s usually a space/storage issue. Libraries have only so much room, and there’s always more books coming out than shelves to hold them (or money to buy them, in many cases.) At that point, libraries have to make the difficult choice of what stays and what goes to make room for new material. I don’t know what rationale is used; it’s often determined by the volume of checkouts books and authors had in the past, but I’m not a librarian, so I can’t speak with any authority on that.
I’m a read-series-in-order person too, so yes, it’s painful when earlier books just aren’t there. If you’re lucky, you might be able to request those volumes from another branch via interlibrary loan. I mainly check out ebooks, so that isn’t an option for me. 
13 Likes
Most of the stuff I’ve read on the practice (CREW, which is often reproduced uncritically throughout the United States, complete with Texas parochialisms) concentrates on nonfiction. I’d like to hear what approaches are used for fiction stacks, as the cyclic practice of discarding books older than five years, in order to make space for twenty five copies of the latest Patterson novel, would seem to be a very inefficient use of space. I know that a library with deep coverage of a few selected authors can seem very unbalanced, but the system I’m in has hundreds of thousands of books-- I’d like to see them at least try.
3 Likes
I’d recommend asking your librarians on that subject. While I’ve come across some in that field discussing their selection methods online, I worked in bookstores, so I’m no expert on what libraries do. 
6 Likes
I’ve been ploughing through the Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason novels (which I’d previously avoided since I didn’t especially like the TV character from 60 years ago). These are pretty light reads, but surprisingly deep in some ways: Gardner, a lawyer himself, loathed police and prosecutorial overreach, and the books are full of commentary on this (alongside classic 30s-40s wisecracking) that feels like it was written for today’s environment. Fun novels were a great delivery mechanism for the message, and since Gardner was the bestselling US fiction writer of the 20th century he had a huge audience.
5 Likes
There are booksellers on ebay, Thrift Books, Better World Books, and a couple others who charge less than $5 for lots of ex-library books which are in superb condition, usually w/free shipping, and discounts when you order a certain # of books. They have their own websites, too.
6 Likes
I can’t finish fiction because of ADHD/Autism. I can only finish non-fiction related to a current hyperfixation. Reading fiction is okay. Reading fiction and thinking you are somehow better than people who would rather enjoy TV, video games, comic books, or movies, that’s not okay. There were plenty of old ladies who came in, got their James Patterson books knowing they were schlocky and terrible and loved them anyway, those were the cool old ladies that had good life advice.
7 Likes
I don’t work there anymore but when I did, I did a ton of weeding because we had a building that was way too small for our usage. We tried to keep all the books in a series but at some point they’re only available in mass market paperback and they don’t last long. And we didn’t really know we were missing books in a series til someone wanted one and pointed it out, which is frustrating for customers.
I did so much weeding, but had no input whatsoever into buying so it was a little annoying because there was definitely room for improvement in that department.
5 Likes
