I was delighted to view recently a recording from the beginning of the year featuring Ian MacEwan interviewing Julian Barnes about the release of his new book, Departure(s). I have read Ian MacEwan’s Amsterdam, and several others he wrote are on my list. I have read Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, The Sense of an Ending, The Only Story, Elizabeth Finch, Arthur & George, The Noise of Time, and Nothing to be Frightened Of, and am currently reading The Porcupine. Yes, I’m a fan.
The release of Departure(s) is interesting because Barnes has said it is his last book, that he is done writing novels, that he has no more ideas. He just turned eighty, and has medically-controlled blood cancer. There has been much speculation on why he is ending a lifelong writing career, and why he announced it.
While this subject did come up in the interview, MacEwan’s carefully constructed questions for Barnes were, for the most part, quietly ignored. Throughout the conversation, Barnes had some difficulty hearing, and perhaps following, the topics MacEwan presented and the questions asked from the audience. Did this matter? No, because when twice Barnes rose, eager to read from Departure(s), his reading of his own work was utterly magical, his writing lyrical and perfect, his performace riveting. I could easily have listened to him read the entire book. (Having said that, I just looked and yes, the audiobook is him reading it — I don’t care for audiobooks but in this case I may make an exception.)
When the conversation focused less on Barnes’ own life and more on the broader philosophical issues of life and death, both men delighted in pulling quotations from the works of others to support their points. Several times they mention Larkin, whom I knew meant Philip Larkin, one of my favorite poets. I was able to find a poem they reference in the talk, “The Old Fools“, on my bookshelf right after I finished watching.
When asked the typical question about advice for young writers, both men emphasized that one must read. And while this sort of conversation makes me painfully aware that I have not read enough, at least I know how much I learn reading them.
Glossy bookmarks with images of my books on them. Business cards with my picture and a QR code. “Sell sheets” for Murder at Old St. Thomas’s and Bummer at Luna Beach. Envelopes for sending out information cards for H.G. Wells and Science Education to libraries who had indicated interest via a listing I paid for. All into the recycle bin.
Ending most of my marketing efforts was not an easy decision, but it was made thoughtfully. Many writers have promised themselves that if the marketing tasks of their profession overtook their writing, they wouldn’t engage in them. For awhile it was possible for me to convince myself that creating Facebook and Instagram posts, learning the vagaries of Amazon algorithms, and schmoozing popular writers was not interfering with my own writing. If you read this blog, you know it’s never been a comfortable fit.
Some of us, as we age, are less able to undertake multiple things at once. Others find some of those things less worth our time. In my case, the low sales of my books have many possible causes, including my own unwillingness to create enough memes, posts, and videos to have something “go viral”. Composing them not only pulls me away from my current work (since I must focus on things already completed) but encourages me to create for the wrong reason, the wrong people, the wrong places.
Who are we working for when we create a post or video on social media? We believe it’s for ourselves, to get our work “out there” and hopefully sell books. But when Amazon determines the value of my books by where they place them, and wants more and more money for the possibility of placement in their search, it means I’m working for Amazon. I am working for Meta when I increase traffic to Facebook and Instagram with my work. I become a “content creator” for Pinterest, a videographer for YouTube, a staff writer for Medium or Substack. When I make sure my SEO is optimal, I’m working for Google. Even as a purchaser of ads, I become a graphic artist and a copy writer for someone else.
I am a marketer lucky enough to quit before I am fired. I laud the writers with the talent and drive to create interesting content in support of their books, to attract attention without being extreme or garish, to create writer personas without violating their family’s privacy, to engage their readers and make them want more. These wonderful authors have risen above the cynicism, paid to take the courses in understanding Amazon and Facebook tactics, beaten the algorithms, and successfully brought in the money they need. Some of them, bless them, “write to market”, researching what’s selling and publishing new books with great efficiency and attention to detail.
While I knew that I could never make a living writing my own stuff, and I love the web for giving me a place to release to the public whatever I like, and I love writing the books I want to write, I admit I wasn’t prepared for the sheer amount of self-selling, meeting of market needs, and jostling for position that being an indie author demands. Instead, I will dispose of most of those trappings. Yes, I still have a website, and will still have a table at book events. But my focus will be on creating more and better work based on my own themes and desires. I will design something else.
Why shouldn’t we be mad at the Supreme Court? If you’re a Democrat or liberal or progressive, the conservative majority’s every move seems unethical. The recent decisions seem to have supported our current president’s demagogeury. The best parts of Roe v Wade and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have been overturned. Redistricting to favor certain parties has been allowed.
But that’s not the whole story. And it’s not the whole story because the story of the Supreme Court, and its importance to democracy, is a very long story.
What the Supreme Court does
Since Marbury v Madison in 1803, the Supreme Court has been considered the arbiter of the Constitition. They enforce this authority when a case comes before them, typically a case that has come up through the lower courts and seems to rely on a constitutional issue. They adjudicate that case based on whether or not the law being broken in the case was constitutional. That’s its only role.
They make these decisions based on case law and the precedent established by previous Supreme Court decisions. Doing so is part of what keeps our Constitution a living document.
Supreme Court justices are usually lawyers or judges confirmed by a set process. The president nominates, and the person is confirmed with the advice and consent of the Senate. Each nominee’s previous decisions on the bench can give a strong hint of the nominee’s bias, but one never knows what will happen when that person becomes a Supreme Court Justice. They promise to consider each case on its merits. This is why they are justices for life, so that they cannot be removed for political reasons.
We consider some justices liberal and others conservative based on their records. So the justices are not unbiased, but in most cases they are highly educated and experienced in the law. And despite what individual Americans think about their loyalties, they are sincere.
(Why is this important? It is always a mistake to think that your opponent is not sincere in their beliefs. Doing so weakens your ability to counter them with your own. If one values rationality and understanding, it is important to understand the opposition’s position, even if to you it might seem irrational, or stupid, or cynical.)
When a case is weak
Sometimes the cases that come before the Supreme Court are weak. If the majority of the Court is “activist” (their values and biases are obvious as they try to use law to bolster a cultural stand), a decision can be made that is based on a weak case. Roe v Wade is one example. The case was based on the Fourteenth Amendment, determined through case law to include “personal liberty” and the right to “privacy”.
When any justice or justices disagrees with the Court’s majority decision, they may write a dissent. Two justices did this with Roe, questioning privacy as a constitutional right, the legal standing of one pregnant woman to represent them all, and the universality of the cultural change in the view of abortion used in the majority decision. I have always been surprised, even as a vehement supporter of abortion rights, that Roe held as long as it did. An originalist (someone who emphasizes only what the founders intended at the time) would say that since abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution, it is the right of the individual states to legislate about it according to the Tenth Amendment. The Blackmun Court created the idea that there was a right of privacy ensconsed in the Ninth.
Many say that right now we have an activist conservative Court.
The current situation
Again, the Court can only decide on constitutionality, and only on cases brought before it. Some of these have been brought by lawyers of somewhat dubious expertise and limited experience.
The current president’s ongoing “emergency” decisions demanded of the Supreme Court have revolved around cases much weaker than Roe’s, because often there is no actual law being violated. This president specializes in doing whatever he wants because there’s no law against it, only tradition, or ethics, or common sense. So it should surprise no one that the cases seem to be argued or presented hastily in the rush to defend long-held understandings.
For example, there are either no laws or weak laws about building monuments, destroying parts of the White House, making millions while in office, sending relatives instead of Cabinet officials to negotiate with foreign countries, firing bunches of people in order to disembowel a federal agency, using commercial media to set policy, letting in or excluding from the country whoever he wants, purging the military, or painting the bottom of rectangular pools.
Times have changed. They tried to take away President Obama’s Blackberry because it was not secure. Now the president can rail on X at all hours of the night, and it gets reported as policy in the media. There was no law against President Obama using his Blackberry, and none against the current president posting whatever he wants.
Congress makes laws. Not the president, not the Supreme Court. The separation of powers (also a tradition rather than a law) has been undermined in many ways over the last several decades. But the power to legislate, and to fund, still relies on Congress. If after the first administration they didn’t have the sense to pass laws preventing executive overreach, insanity, stupidity, and egomania, why are we expecting the Supreme Court, even more limited in its remit, to descend like angels and fix it?
The long game
Supreme Court justices realize they play a role in the history of the country. As such, they play the long game, embedding both majority decisions and dissenting opinions with many examples of historical cases. They do this not only to support their point at the time, but to provide information and direction for future courts regarding similar cases.
Justice Kavanaugh did that clearly in Trump v Barbara, the case regarding the Executive Order about birthright, in an opinion that concurred in part and dissented in part. The case, he implied, was weak, because Congress had passed no law declaring that the children of undocumented people were not citizens. He wrote:
If Congress amends §1401(a) or otherwise enacts a statute creating new exceptions along the lines of the Executive Order for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country, such a statute, as I see it, would pass constitutional muster.
In last month’s decision regarding the rebuilding of the East Wing of the White House (National Park Service, et al., v. National Trust for Historic Preservation the United States), the court deemed that the complaint of one person (albeit a person of importance and knowledge) in being affected by the aesthetics of the ballroom construction, did not signify harm nor give standing. Again, they can only decide on constitutionality.
This Court has not found standing in circumstances like these before. To the contrary, we have repeatedly held that mere offense, disagreement, or distaste does not qualify as a concrete and particularized injury under Article III.
It was a weak case, and the majority opinion ends with a paragraph that begins: “Today, we do not pass upon the legality of the government’s East Wing project.”
But Chief Justice Roberts, in a move that surprised a lot of people, then wrote a dissent. It begins:
That construction is likely unlawful. Pursuant to its plenary constitutional authority over the District of Columbia and federal property, Congress has explicitly prohibited the construction of any “building or structure . . . on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.” 40 U. S. C. §8106. The ballroom is a building or structure being erected on federal park grounds—President’s Park—in the District of Columbia. Yet Congress has not passed any law resembling “express authority” for the Executive’s construction of it.
If there had been such a law, the ballroom would be ok. Without it, it’s illegal. But the case that came to the Supreme Court wasn’t about the legality of building the thing. Congress would have had standing in such a case, but they didn’t sue.
So why not get mad at the Court?
Consider our democracy. All of it. Historically and at present. Its current threats, including efforts to undermine fair elections. Consider the possibility that each justice, and the court itself, is doing its job, using the knowledge (yes, and biases) of its members to hash out the legal issues that impact constitutional law. If we believe that isn’t happening, or that they’re doing it all wrong, what is the alternative?
If the Supreme Court is corrupt, is deliberately handing executive power to support demagogeury and, ultimately, dictatorship, then any efforts to bring better cases are moot. It’s like “defunding” the police. You take away the resources the good actors need in order to punish the bad ones.
Instead, how about observe what the justices (and their clerks) do? You have a bias: liberal, conservative, radical, whatever. You have already adjudicated what you think is right and wrong. Now look at the decisions. They’re all there on the Supreme Court’s website. How do the justices who hold views you don’t like justify their positions? How do the decisions you do like justify theirs? Which might be easy to overturn later, or to solidify through Congressional action?
I have recently returned from my very first (!) road trip across the United States, from San Diego to New York City. Here are a few observations.
Cicadas are loud. Very loud. They seem to be everywhere at once, making sound. All the way from Colorado to Pennsylvania. Apparently, this was just the annual set, not the one that happens every 17 years, but these guys’ mating calls were constant companions along the trip. I never saw one, only heard them. I did, however, see some kind of “fly” with big beetle wings. The waitress at the restaurant by the river in western Pennslyvania was afraid of them, even when they were dead.
Baseball is a different game from place to place. I usually go to games at Dodger Stadium in L.A. In Kansas City, the cars coming in to the parking lot are polite to each other, the people happily tailgate before the game, the ticket takers help you find the bathroom. The floor of the concourse is linoleum, not cement, and the ballpark food is fresh. Fans are happy to be there, enjoying a night out. There’s a minor league enthusiasm about the game.
At Yankee Stadium, the fans are boorish and ruthlessly competitive. They don’t just want to beat the other team (in this case — yes, I know — Boston), they want to slaughter them. The stadium is big and intimidating, with cement floors, cold hot dogs, and no relish to put on them.
At Citi Field, Mets fans are loyal and happy to be there even though their team is in last place. They cheer on their players, are upset only at bad calls, and their mascots dance. Really dance. Like New York Broadway dance.
It’s not that there’s no fun at Yankee Stadium — the ground crew who smoothed the infield did a whole YMCA routine. It’s just so intense in the stands. And getting there on the subway is a grimy experience. Saw two men pissing on the stairwells as I was going up to jam into a subway car full of fans. At the park, you must cross an entire area of rowdies getting drunk, then cross two streets, only to get to the wrong entrances.
Citi Field had plenty of room, and the subway station rails were painted in blue and orange. The Mets, of course, are a more recent team, their blue from the Brooklyn Dodgers and the orange from the New York Giants, a holdover from when both teams moved to California. But the enthusiam is real, like the fans are glad it’s their team. They keep singing Lindor’s walk-up song (My Girl) even after he’s started his at bat. And there is relish for the hot dogs.
Road kill changes from state to state. It took me awhile to realize that the many dead animals along I-70 in Kansas were armadillos. It seemed a little far north for armadillos, but that’s climate change for you. Their poor bodies are dismantled with plates intact, or literally belly up, or half-flattened. Around Missouri it starts to change to dead raccoons and possums. The animals get larger as you go eastward.
[No pics. You’re welcome.]
The sky changes too. In Utah and western Colorado, the sky is almost an afterthought. The rock formations are the stars of the show, creating plateaus and tabletops, showing off their many colors of amber, red, gray, and brown. I’ve never liked western environments, never saw the appeal of the desert. I grew up in Bakersfield, California, and got pretty tired of tumble weeds and dull beige soil. But I did see the beauty of the rocks in Nevada, Utah, Arizona.
It was when we got to Kansas that I realized how much I had missed the sky from when I was a kid. The big sky, where the land is the afterthought. A sky that goes on as far as the eye can see across flat or rolling land. I got wistful and homesick a bit. In Kansas, there are flat fields of corn and soybeans that reminded me of the flat fields of veggies and cotton in Kern County. There are also rolling hills that reminded me of the Yorkshire Dales. I didn’t expect to like Kansas, but I did.
Conservative America was everywhere far from the big cities. We have a very big country, and there are many people with right-wing views. Driving through dead-end towns and huge fields of corn punctuated by grain elevators, I listened to country radio. Heard the complaints about data centers taking over farmland, about city-dominated politics, about the loss of connection to the land and to ordinary people. I listened to the crop prices and projections. The war on Iran, the cesspit of D.C. politics, seemed to have little to do with daily life. I listened to Bill O’Reilly make some sort of sense. And climate change? Yes, farmers have to deal with it every year, but weather has always been a challenge to farmers. Driving through miles and miles of green fields and seeing so many trees, I could see how climate change might be hard to understand as a pressing global issue. I saw the current president’s name on billboards and spelled out in bricks on people’s property, even while a sticker of him pointed to gas pump prices and blamed him for them.
New Jersey has a signage problem. We paid tolls twice just going round and round, trying to get from Secaucus to Manhattan. The signs use highway numbers and names sporadically, and they do not match what it says on Google Maps. It’s hard to leave New Jersey, but not because you want to stay there.
Hamburger fans can rejoice along the I-70. We had burgers at Freddy’s in Las Vegas, Vernie’s Hamburger House in Hays, Kansas, and Culver’s in Indiana. All great.
Rest stops are a different experience along I-70. In California, many rest stops are just an outbuilding with ill-tended toilets with no seats and a lack of toilet paper. Along the I-70, where you are continually reminded that this was part of Eisenhower’s highway system, they are large air-conditioned buildings with well-stocked bathrooms, vending machines, and signs about the history of the area. In Ohio they even got quite carried away with the tourist possibilities of the rest stop.
Favorite places: Kansas City, MO. So much to do and see. I bought a harmonica there because it seemed like the place to do that. I’d been singing the blues song “Kansas City” as we approached, and saw the lyrics written out on the side of a buidling.The highlight was the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Learned all about Satchel Paige from the fabulous museum president Bob Kendrick, who tells riveting stories. The exhibits teach about segregation and racism, but within the context of the players, managers, and owners who overcame the obstacles to play great baseball. The place was crowded with people who just wanted to learn, which was inspiring in itself.
Best small town was Casey, Illinois, where they have some very big things: sculptures of everyday objects in huge size just because.
Best art experience was Falling Water, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. We had a full house tour, which was wonderful. You’ve seen it in pictures, but the way it feels, with the rock worked into every wall, and the huge terraces, is priceless. Built for the Kaufmann family, who owned a department store in Pittsburgh, Falling Water was a family house, meant to last only 50 years or so. The upkeep is expensive, with water literally passing through the building, but worth it.
No, I’m not a fan of Artificial Intelligence [sic]. But it’s here to stay, and any introspection about whether we should use a technology because we could use the technology is unlikely in a plutocracy, especially when the plutocracy is partly controlled by those who make the technology. So I’m not going there.
AI is here. People are writing books with it, and Amazon is publishing those books, making it even more impossible for people to find mine. Some say that using AI is not writing a book.
Language changes in response to new inventions by adding an adjective to the old one. I remember when a telephone was a telephone, and it was something portable in your house only because it had a long cord from the kitchen. But now it’s a “landline”, because we have cellular/mobile phones as the norm. To anyone under 30, the cell phone is the (tele)phone, and a landline is attached to the wall.*
(That was also when a book was a book — a codex — and the only way you could put a book on an electronic device was to stack it on top.)
So now that we have things other than writers doing writing, identifying your work as AI should be the obvious solution: “Hey, look! I wrote a book with AI!” And everyone not using AI will have to say so, too.
Instead, people publish books using AI to write them, and don’t say so. People make art with AI, and don’t say so. This is what’s wrong. Not AI itself.
New skillz
To write a good book and create good art with AI, you have to get damned good at using AI. That’s a completely different skill than writing or designing or painting. You have to master the LLM you’ve chosen, likely after trying several. You have to create prompts that reflect your creative vision. You may have to argue, cajole, flatter, or persuade the AI bot to do your bidding. Because if the bridge collapses in Chapter 3, that will ruin Chapter 8.
People who do that work should be proud to publish “AI books” and “AI art”. They’ve mastered a skillset and produced something they want to share with the world.
Yes, we can say, but it’s not their product. It’s other people’s products, other people’s creativity, all rolled in together. Other people’s work, transformed by a computer.
That’s like sampling music (you can’t tell me that Kid Rock didn’t steal Warren Zevon’s Werewolves in London riff). That’s like rhapsody on a theme without crediting the original composer. That’s like fan fiction with no residuals to the author who created the character. Our culture thinks that’s ok, and has for centuries. Whenever I complain about crediting people, references, originality, I am told “all art is derivative”, as are all stories. They’re all the same seven themes. What’s original mean, anyway? They can’t even figure out what derivative means anymore for copyrights.
Just don’t pass off AI stuff as 100% human-made. Don’t allow authors to self-declare AI like they do at Amazon: build better AI detection programs.
And most importantly, if AI books and art are clearly and proudly marked, we can evaluate with awards and kudos what’s good, and pan what’s bad, within the AI category. We can celebrate those who did a really good job making AI realize their creative vision, making something new out of other people’s stuff, without turning them into the smokers on the fire escape.
(And while we’re at it, don’t pass off human-made stuff as AI. I’ve seen author’s human work called out by AI detectors because they’ve been trained on that very work. The Declaration of Independence is now AI.)
*AT&T is ending landline service in California, but they are calling their new VoIP system a landline because people will see it plugged in to the wall and think it is connected to the indestructible phone system, when it’s actually connected to the highly vulnerable and electricity-dependent internet.
Are we getting information from the web, or are we just being manipulated?
I’ve been playing with Substack, the new, super-popular, supposedly not-yet-enshittified blogging platform that can get authors organic readers.
So in addition to posting a newsletter there, I have been following the Substack links that turn up when I search for something.
Substack teasers
But what I’m getting is called a “teaser”, the start of a Substack post with “Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app”. To continue reading, I have to confirm my phone number (in other words, log in to Substack so that what I read can be tracked).
In the old days, a blog was by default public, and you could just read what was posted. My blog is intended to be this way. So are my newsletters — although emailed to subscribers, they also appear free on my website.
Apparently, on Substack the “Boost” feature is the default, and that feature automatically creates “Teasers”. I believe the idea is to be able to track all your readers, even of your free stuff.
My conclusion: Substack is just more click bait.
Pyramid style
Back in the day, I was editor of my high school newspaper. We learned to write in the pyramid style. Who, what, when, where, why was in the first paragraph. The further you went down the article the more in-depth you got.
Now, even the largest newspapers’ online articles (New York Times, etc) are in what I call click bait style: a teaser headline (which may or may not relate to the point of the article), followed by a vignette to grab “interest” (so often controversial). You have to keep scrolling (thus being exposed to many ads) to get to the meat of the article. If there is any meat at all.
I am a paid subscriber. I had to log in three different ways to get the whole article, and it’s meaningless.
I have recently subscribed to The Atlantic, on paper. I notice that there, although the articles are not as long as they used to be, click bait style is avoided. I can actually read a properly constructed article, with main ideas to start and more detail as you read.
Double (and triple) dipping
It’s not that I think authors shouldn’t be paid. But somehow it’s become normal for consumers to both give up our privacy and pay. This is true of media streaming services, where you can give up your privacy and pay and be subject to commercials. We all tolerate this so we can watch or listen to things we enjoy.
I’m considered old fashioned because I think it should be a choice of one of these: give up your privacy or pay or watch commercials. That was the old choice: cable tv (pay) or network (commercials). When did we agree to allow triple dipping?
The engagement trap
I’ve even noticed biased (liberal and conservative) websites running “shocker” stories, spouting the opposite of what their readers believe, just to get people outraged so they comment. Why? So that advertisers know that people aren’t just looking at the website; they’re looking long enough to see their ads.
So if you’ve engaged by commenting, you are being used as a test subject for advertising, in addition to the other ways in which you are “paying”.
Who cares?
Why does this matter, so long as we’re getting what we need from our online searches? The fact is, we’re not.
Search now favors sponsorship and scrolling through ads rather than aligning our search terms with web-based information (see Cory Doctorow’s book). How do we know this?
1) the first 3-5 links relate to your search, but the others do not
2) useful information is on the third or fourth page after scrolling, or
3) the information you’ve asked for is pretty basic but you can’t find it
This last is the most important, because it leads you to believe that there is no answer, that no one has studied that drug, or covered the flooding downtown, or knew that historical fact.
Feeling used?
“If it seems too good to be true, it usually is.” In the early days of the web, people said things like, “if you’re not seated at the table, you’re on the menu” or “we are the product”. A recent article in The Atlantic about attention spans claims that our attention is being stolen from us. Rather than humans having shorter attention spans, we’re getting increasingly frustrated with needing to click around everywhere to find what we want.
Back in 2018, I declared the open web, the electronic frontier, had closed. We were transitioning from the web-based internet to the platform-based (and app-based) internet, a closed system run by corporations.
I now declare that the Information Superhighway is closed. This is no longer about information. It’s about manipulation.
I attended a sobering talk last week sponsored by Sisters in Crime, a wonderful organization for writers. The speaker was Adam Chromy, an agent who works with authors to sell their book idea to publishers.
He told us that far more books are published now than ever before (400% increase in the last 10 years), and that publishers no longer have the same job. Where they used to be the gatekeepers, selecting authors whose books had potential, today they are only interested in boosting authors who have social media cred. In search of a guaranteed best-seller, publishers want authors who already have a significant and meaningful social following, who already fill up events with guests who love their books, and who write trendy books. They are, in his words, “at the top of the algorithm”.
The literary trends were the first shocker. As we have all seen, people read fewer books, and instead spend hours each day scrolling social media on their phones, looking for things that will make them feel something in seconds (or less). The books they like have a similar, longer-form feel: quick chapters that each have a little cliff-hanger, a protagonist who gets into worse and worse trouble with each chapter, a whiz bang ending that makes the reader feel something strongly, and a leit motif that holds it all together.
Since the talk was on the state of publishing today, I’m quite sure Mr. Chromy knows exactly what he’s talking about, and I’ve seen the signs of everything he mentioned. It was simply unnerving to hear it spoken so plainly.
The talk answered a lot of questions for me, like why my local bookshops pretend to be interested in me doing an event but don’t follow up. Why having a few hundred followers means nothing. Why writing slow-burn, immersive, historical books that demand sustained attention will never find a publisher. Why my fellow authors who are traditionally published complain that they still have to do all their own publicity. Why so many authors write posts ending with a question to desperately encourage “engagement”. And, yes, why everyone is writing on Substack as if it were an audition for Broadway.
The implications for writing are clear. The algorithms, which are a combination of popularity and viral luck, determine not only the marketing but the content of published books. When asked about cozy mysteries, we were told they are dying out because (1) the audience for cozies is aging and dying, (2) they create a feel of community that people enjoy but that for younger people exists now in social media, (3) they are now in the “feel good” category, and (4) they’ll die now that mass market paperbacks are dead.
What I heard helps explain how the binge watching of “series”, the scrolling and clicking on phones, and the quick emotional climax people want, are all connected. So is what I saw increasingly in the college classroom: just give us the gist, leave out the boring stuff, don’t make me accountable for something we talked about last week. It’s why students enjoyed my lecture and my classes but learned so little history. It explains why I tend to keep older books, but give away recent fiction because most of it is fluff.
But although the tricks Mr. Chromy stated might indeed be what’s necessary to get an agent and publisher, part of me doesn’t buy it. There are readers who want an involved, escapist tale. There are people who want to be up all night reading, not because of cliff-hanging and page-turning, but because they want to stay with those characters and that story. Not every child, to reference the old experiment on patience and impulsivity, wants one marshmallow now rather than two marshmallows later.
For authors, to prove yourself first as a social media “personality” may have very little to do with the quality of your work. As you know if you read my blog, having expressed a warm, giving, professorial persona for 34 years, I am ambivalent about creating a new one for being an author. Considering the emphasis on being “authentic”, I find it ironic that the only way to succeed as an author is to not be ones true intense, introverted self, but rather cater to the algorithm.
Is it possible to do it another way? Well, I recently read that Hemingway was a great self-promoter, showing up at everything and deliberately creating his grumpy, slovenly, drunken, holding-up-the-big-fish persona. He did this even though he balked at Scribner for making him do interviews. But he wrote his way. Perhaps that’s the model for this new age as well.
A day in the life of a historical novelist often involves research showing you made a mistake. Or in this case, two.
I wanted a scene where my character meets a girl in a place of intellectual discovery. I chose the London Library. Ooops — entrance was by membership only, and he is too poor to be a member.
So instead, I envisioned the scene, set in 1882, taking place in the newly opened Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I had a bit of trouble finding a floor plan, and I wanted my characters to walk through several galleries.
On this map, which I later discovered was made in 1905, I found a fish gallery and wrote the scene.
My character followed the girl from the Shells gallery, got lost because the Starfish gallery doesn’t go through, lost her while she went through Corals, and they both wound up in Fishes.
(Yes, this is a watermarked image from Alamy. Such companies make a lot of money copyrighting public domain images because they digitized them.)
At the display cases in the museum, my character looked at a stuffed pike, and the pike looked back. Trying to impress the girl, he inquired about dogfish, and they found one. He then expounded on how dissection of the dogfish, combined with rabbit and frog, provides all the biology student needs to know about vertebrates.
But once I discovered the map was 20th century, I needed an older map and began searching the usual places: Internet Archive, Google Books, DuckDuckGo. I found a floor plan for which the Museum wanted to charge me. Then I thought to look in my Baedekker guide book (1883). It had no floor plan, but rather a detailed description of the exhibits that ended with this:
Uh oh. So I went here, to British History Online, one of my favorite sources for London. It had a much better map. And there I found out it’s true: the zoology exhibits wouldn’t have been there in the summer of 1882, or at least not yet open to the public:
“The building was handed over to the British Museum by the Office of Works in June 1880 and opened to the public in three of its four departments in April 1881: the last (zoological) gallery was opened in 1886.”
So now I must see if there’s a fossilized pike and dogfish, otherwise my clever scene won’t work.
Having taught history for 34 years at community college, I am an expert at trying new pedagogies. I pride myself that I used many different techniques in the classroom, both online and onsite. Interactive lectures, small group discovery, or kits with primary sources, I did it all.
Or so I thought. Now, after a few years as a historical fiction writer, I’m not so sure.
The enjoyment I get from doing history has always been the research. Since I retired, instead of having only a little time to do bits of research on a specific project or class-based exercise, I can research whatever I wish. As a scholar of the Victorian era, I have naturally set most of my fiction there.
Unlike authors who do all the research first and then write their novel, I look things up as I go along. (She reached into her pocket for a pen . . . oh, gosh, does she have a pocket? what is she wearing? did they have pockets in that kind of dress? should it be a purse instead? what kind of purse? what kind of pen would she be carrying?)
Historical fiction attracts me because it allows me to fill in the gaps in the historical record. I was recently interviewed about conducting a workshop for writers, and was asked what my passion was. Research, of course! The challenge, then, is to make research the foundation of an interesting writer’s workshop. It only occurred to me later how similar this would be to teaching.
And so, in a flashback to the years where I awoke at 3 a.m. with a new teaching idea, I have one. A student, or group, or the class, could be given the timeframe and place. They could be given or decide on a genre for a story, and some kind of family of characters. In composing the story, they’d need to know the details: what class would the characters be from? what would they wear? eat? say? where would they go to work? how would they get there?
Then the students would do the research to find out. The whole thing would be discovery and creation.
I wouldn’t have thought of this unless I wrote historical fiction. I’ve always been an avid reader of the genre, and I love the details when the author is skilled enough to use them. In this case, details would be required, as the goal would be immersion for the reader.
While there wouldn’t be time to do this deeply in a two-hour workshop, it would work great in a classroom.
Now, back to my writing. I have a dead body in an office at the University of London, slumped over a desk. What kind of desk? Is the room dark? How much light would come through the window at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday in July 1883? . . .
In my efforts to let people know about my books, I have been posting on social media, Facebook and Instagram in particular.
If you use these platforms, you know that you can view them in two forms: on your desktop/laptop in a browser, or on a tablet/phone using apps.
Since these screens have different aspect ratios, it is necessary to create everything at least twice (more if you’re doing TikTok or other platforms).
Facebook posts (what you see in your feed) are horizontal, with a 4:5 ratio. Here’s an example of one I made that was a 1:1 ratio but still looks ok at 4:5:
However, very recently there has been a change: if you add a video to a Facebook post (4:5) , it automatically changes it to a reel if it’s short. A reel is vertical (9:16), and you see them in TikTok (9:16) and Instagram (3:4). Facebook is desperately trying to catch up with TikTok, thus the change.
So yeah, I want to have video. My short video ads get 100x more views than posts with still images.
Trouble is, the video in Facebook still also appears as a regular post in the feed, where Facebook adapts it so it looks really stupid:
Lovely, isn’t it? And so far I’ve found no way to just post a reel without it appearing in a post.
Now, I like having a cell phone. I do think it’s miraculous to carry a computer around in your pocket. But many of my readers, according to the stats, prefer to scroll Facebook on their desktop/laptop. Why? Because some of us find the phone frustrating for images and information. Very little content fits on the screen and you spend much time scrolling and scrolling. Information comes in little bits, but some of us are readers and we need more than little bits to make sense of things.
Lots of things on one screen? Yes, it’s old-fashioned. Like wanting a newspaper or magazine instead of massaging a cold, hard screen with your finger.
Remember when televisions got bigger back in the 1970s, and we were so excited? Then they got smaller, and we were excited again at the idea they could be portable. Then they got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and now I see homes in my neighborhood where they take up half the wall. We can PVR, scan through the ads, pay more not to see the commercials at all.
So everything heads to the phone to get your eyeballs. If only those eyeballs could have an easier time of it.
I have recently finished reading Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification, and I expect my old Edutech friends were nodding along as I was. We were there for it, man: dial-up modems, Netscape, uploading teeny tiny pictures to decorate web pages written in HTML, discussing it all in IRC chat.
The web was a wilderness, but despite its origins most of us on it were good actors. Global communication, peaceful coexistence, publication for people who could not be heard before. Web pages, blog rings, then Web 2.0 and interactivity. I was there for it, I did it, I taught with it. Then with the rise of Learning Management Systems, I saw that the frontier, the Wild West of the open web, was closing. I rang the death knell in 2018 here on this blog. (Before this, in 2010, I had not believed that it was true. That was when net neutrality was still a thing.)
From wonderful to kinda whatever
Doctorow focuses on platforms, such as Google and the Metaverse, and on providers that became platforms, like Amazon. The process he explains is simple. At first, a start-up is disruptive, innovative, trying to solve a problem that makes people unhappy. It creates something, a product or platform, and people join. Think MySpace, then Facebook. Its engineers work tirelessly, often without much sleep and crappy pay, to make the product better, make people happier. Google’s original tag line was “don’t be evil” (a corporate motto they abandoned in the same year I said the web had closed).
Once it gets really big, the company’s obligation shifts. Instead of making things better for the customer, it begins to make things better for itself. Having hired the best of the best, listened to their engineers, made the product really, really good, they now have huge market share. The competition has been eaten, absorbed, killed, or purchased. There is no reason to improve the product except to keep the good techies on board. (With AI, they won’t even need to do that.)
The consumer, originally empowered by choosing to stay or go elsewhere, now has only the illusion of choice. All your friends are in Facebook, making it difficult to leave, and you’d also be leaving all the cool posts you wrote. All your email is Gmail (sure, you can export it — got a program that reads .eml?). The drugstore down the street doesn’t have what you need anymore, so you order from Amazon.
The pandemic cemented the reliance on “walled gardens”, platforms that were easy to use and difficult to avoid. Alternatives are very expensive, and all the big guys can offer you the product for cheap or “free” (you and your data are the payment).
This is where, according to Doctorow, enshittification begins.
A deliberate decrease in quality
I had noticed it happening, but I didn’t have a name for it. Old 19th century models of monopoly were cemented in my brain.
The Standard Oil octopus cartoon from Puck, 1904.
But I felt the squeeze. (And I had seen it before, when the Learning Management System Canvas got the monopoly on California colleges and got worse and worse, less responsive to its users and more ass-kissing to its shareholders.)
These days, I search Amazon for something I know exists (tree wrap, magnesium citrate, wide-calf compression socks) and the top results are brands I’ve never heard of, with higher instead of lower prices. I try to sort by price and it won’t do it, throwing inferior and higher-priced items to the top. I search Google and, just within the last year, the search results are crap, from dubious websites I’ve never heard of, and I have to load many pages before getting to a source I can trust.
I’ve learned this is all intentional. It’s not the result of the pandemic, market forces, changes in taste, or tariffs. If Google gives you crap results and you only have Google, you go to page 2. Then 3. Then 4, searching. Each page serves you fresh ads. Google wants you to keep looking. It now really is a search engine, not a find engine. (Doctorow claims that Google engineers don’t use the consumer version at all, but rather the old, good Google available only to them. He now pays to use Kagi.)
Author beware
As a self-published author, I experience it, especially within the last year. Ingram now completely dominates the book printing market for indies in the US. Everyone else is gone or niche. I submitted my current book to get a proof on January 29. I still do not have a copy now in March, although it costs four times as much to print and ship it as it did four years ago. Yes, there are other printers for my own copies, but Ingram is the only one that supplies bookstores, shops, retail outlets with paperbacks and hardcovers. No Ingram, no books in stores. The product itelf, which used to be vastly superior to others even though they all used Ingram too, is of lower quality.
The book market has been saturated by self-published authors since the pandemic, when everyone decided they had a book in them (in many cases, it should have stayed there). We have to do our own publicity. We turn to social media to get known, but again, just within the last year, even our followers don’t see our posts. If I don’t buy expensive ads, my ordinary posts don’t get seen. If I do, they mostly don’t get seen either.
It’s not just that there are too many products. We sign up to follow people so we can see what they post, but instead we get a bunch of stuff Facebook or Instagram or TikTok thinks might encourage us to buy something. Your aunt’s post with the family pics? You’re gonna miss it. But since on another computer you were looking for shoes, or Alexa heard you say “shoes”, your feed is full of shoe ads and podiatrist influencers.
My efforts to get seen vs …
This year I decided to go back to writing a newsletter for subscribers, of which I have several hundred, which in the social media world is bupkis but every one of them is important to me. Other writer friends have gone over to Substack, the newest walled garden where few enough authors are there that it can make writers money. Eventually it will grow and grow and be enshittified, too, but for now (even according to Doctorow), it is the game.
I’m gonna be very contrary about this. I always have been, cranky about anything imposing on my use of the open web. This year I had given up my mail list to return to my blog, having people subscribe to posts. They didn’t, and RSS never became user-friendly so my readership remains a select and wonderful group. But this wonderful group told me they weren’t getting the images in the posts, the videos were blank squares, the links didn’t work. I’d been using Jetpack inside my WordPress installation, so I looked it up and sure enough, they don’t do videos in emails.
So I tried to go back to Mailerlite, where I had been forced to copy my newsletter blog posts before and spent hours cleaning it up because they didn’t like straight-up HTML. Well, in the last year, they don’t like a lot of things. My newsletters now would have to be composed using blocks, one block for each type of content (text, video, image, logo, all in a vertical line). Over 50% fewer choices for formatting than I had before. I would learn it, and then be stuck there, and they’ve already enshittified it just in the time I’ve been gone.
A current plan
My solution? All the choices are bad. If I join Substack for newsletter or blogging, I’ll have to abide by their formatting and spend most of my time in their walls. If I use Jetpack, my subscribers won’t get my images and video. If I return to Mailerlite, I’m stuck in their system and they force me to upload all my media onto their servers.
So today I took a time machine back to 2004, cleaned up my blog, created announcement emails in MailerLite with just a link and a button I’ll link to my Newsletter blog post for the month. Yes, when subscribers want to read my newletter, they’ll actually have to click in the email, once a month.
Why? Because I want to invite subscribers to my home on the web, not a fast-food joint run by someone else where the coffee costs $15. I may be the last of the “will work for pizza” generation, but that’s what I’m doing, at least for now.
All text copyright Lisa M. Lane 2026 and is not to be used without permission.
You can this week on the podcast Sunday Tea with V, hosted by Verena Rose. (This is Spotify, but it’s also on Audible and wherever you listen to podcasts.)
It was so fun! I got to talk about my first mystery, Murder at Old St. Thomas’s, as well as the upcoming Murder at the Gasworks. Plus we talked about doing historical research, children and workhouses in Victorian London, an imaginary dinner, The Annotated Alice, and much more. Enjoy!
Back in the day, most of us could recognize (and hum) the title of the Sunday Night Mystery Movie, and Masterpiece Theatre, and we all knew the Edward Gorey visual sequence. But what about today’s mysteries? Title sequence design has gotten wildly creative, but a certain style has emerged that just says Cozy Mystery.
My awards for Title Sequence Design are….
Bookish Created by Huge Designs (more info here)
Designer/animator: Tamsin Mcgee, Ben Hanbury, Hugo Moss
Music: Sarah Warne
Queens of Mystery
Title credits: Blair Conacher, I think Composer: Paul Englishby
Would you like to read Murder at the Gasworks in February, before it’s published?
(ARC means Advance Reader Copy–an ARC Team is a group of select early readers.)
Just fill out this short form, and I’ll be sending out a link next week to download the book. (I also hope to have a couple of print proofs if you really, really want print.)
ARC readers typically read the book in its Final Draft form, then post reviews. GoodReads allows reviews to be posted before publication. For Amazon, readers wait till the day of (in this case, March 6). Instagram, Facebook, social media, BookBub — all are places to post a review.
And yes, short reviews are just fine. Indie books just don’t sell without reviews.
Here’s the back cover:
London, 1860.
Ten-year-old workhouse escapee Tommy Jones is accused of murdering his only friend, a stoker at the gasworks. When the assigned City Police Inspector falls ill, shy, intellectual Sergeant Cuthbert Slaughter is put on the case.
As a second gasworks murder across the Thames is revealed, Slaughter must secretly collaborate with a rival detective to prevent a horrible injustice. Are the two deaths connected? If Tommy was not the killer, who wanted two stokers dead?
A mysterious cloaked man spying on the Bank of England, a poor clerk whose wife is under arrest for pilfering, the dumping of noxious substances into the river, all seem to be related. Hampered by his reticence, Slaughter must use all his wits to save the boy.
I was in Canva today creating some social media ads for my books. In particular, I was working on Murder at an Exhibition. In that novel, my fictional heroine Jo Harris works with the real-life historical figure Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and I was putting them together for an ad.
It got me thinking about the male/female teams in my work.
Jo Harris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti are not a romantic couple. In the first place, Jo is gay, which lady’s man Rossetti is not. But they make a great team.
In Bummer at Luna Beach, Lou has been in love with senior sleuth Rosie for a long time. It may be mutual, but their partnership is what is important. There are no romantic overtones.
Even in my mystery romance, A Heart Purloined, the collaboration of Amanda Goodwin and Jack Strawman is what keeps the plot moving. Yes, it’s a romance, and a rivals-to-lovers trope at that. But their love for each other develops slowly, and is not crucial to the action.
I’m also reading Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. She says in her chapter on characters:
You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.
I had never thought of my characters as being some facet of me. But if they are, then it may be that I’m not a fan of love for getting things done. Certainly not for solving a murder, at any rate.
Am I unromantic in general?
Naw. Maybe I just think of the word “romantic” in its 19th century form, when it implied the supremacy of emotion. The emotion of love can create a bond, but it isn’t that bond itself. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton come to mind. A couple may have strong feelings toward each other, but the relationship may not be workable, or only workable for certain things.
Readers know that I’m not a huge fan of the solo detective in my novels. Yes, Cuthbert Slaughter is my main detective for the Victorian mysteries, but even he doesn’t work alone. All my characters who solve murders work within a pair or, as in Murder on the Pneumatic Railway, as part of a team that supports each other. Even Poirot, Holmes, and Marple needed their foils.
Of course, I write alone. Yet alliance, relationship, and collaboration are of importance to my characters. If Lamott is right, these values are part of me. Just perhaps not when I’m trying to get something specific accomplished!
I published my first novel, with my own imprint, in January 2022. Since then, I have tried to be a “successful” self-published author. But along the way, a lot of my pleasure in bookish things has been, well, murdered.
The Bookshop
Take bookstores, for example. They, along with libraries, have always been my “safe space”.
Now I go in and look at book covers: which are trendy? should mine look like that? I pick up popular books. Oh, that’s how they set up the story? should I do that? I look at the best-sellers, a category I used to ignore. What made them best-sellers? Whom did the author know? Why are so many written so badly? I compare the aisles. Why is Biography so big, and Self-Help, but the History and Literature sections are shrinking? Why is the Barnes and Noble half-full of games and toys instead of books? What does that say about our society?
It is still a place of wonder, but what I’m wondering about lessens the excitement of discovery.
The Reading
I remember complaining about literary criticism in school. Sure, it was all very interesting to learn about the metaphors Flannery O’Connor was using. That spoon is a penis? Really? But it ruined the magic of reading the story. I lived in fear that we would have to analyze a tale I really loved, a story that meant something to me. It was rather like taking a beloved machine apart. Even after you put it back together, it is never the same because now you know what’s inside. Thank goodness we didn’t read The Secret Garden or Little Women in class.
“Reading like a writer” has done something similar. I now look for craft. I don’t want to look for craft. I don’t want to know how I’m being manipulated. I just want to be taken along. I read somewhere that reading to oneself is disassociative. Yes, please.
The Unread
Writers and readers talk about their TBR, their To Be Read list/stack/shelf/table. They feel guilty, or not. Many bemoan that their stack is high. Some cannot buy another book because they have too many. Others say it’s like a wine cellar, and you’ll read the right book at the right time. Now I look at my unread books and wonder which I won’t finish, which will be consigned as DNF.
This is because I read things now I don’t care to read, or wish I hadn’t read. I picked up a copy of the Paris Review to understand what’s happening in literary magazines. I found heart-wrenching, sometimes disgusting, events and actions, designed to create emotion in the reader and, in many cases, allow catharsis for the writer. I have no interest in other people’s trauma (although I did enjoy David Adjmi’s play The Stumble, about Oscar Levant).
Some things I’ve read out of perceived obligation. I have purchased copies of self-published books from writers I’ve met, because I wanted to be part of their community. Three-quarters of them were awful, poorly written and edited, or clearly written “to market”, with no literary interest. I’ve been stymied for how to write the expected review at Amazon or GoodReads.
The Blog
As a writer, I fight against invisible forces to write what I want to write. This blog is a perfect example. In changing types of blogs (I wrote of my blogging history in September), I’ve been responding to forces I neither understand nor agree with. Blogging used to be running things up the flagpole, throwing spaghetti at the wall. Now every presence one has online is “branding”. Being an “author” brings in a different kind of reader, one who may or may not care what I write on other subjects. It’s been a major struggle to not cater to fear, the fear of invisibility, of being read out of context, of being misunderstood.
And, once I write this post, do I post on Facebook or Instagram that I wrote this post? LinkedIn? Should I use hashtags? I didn’t used to question things like this when I was blogging about education. It’s only since I published my first book.
The Newsletter
For a couple of years, I convinced myself to write a Newsletter (here’s an example). Newsletters are currently a “requirement” for any author to build a readership. If you search for “publicity for authors” or “marketing for writers”, many offer advice on your Newsletter. The purpose of offering a free book or a sweepstake is to get more people to sign up for your Newsletter. You want hundreds, thousands, of people subscribed to your Newsletter (I think I topped out at 300).
What’s in the Newsletter? One is supposed to write in a way that encourages the reader to “get to know” the author. You aren’t marketing your book, they say. The reader will only buy your book if s/he is interested in you. It can’t be all “buy my book”, even though what you really want them to do (the “call to action”) is buy your book. I tried Newsletters for over a year. It was kind of fun at first, but it felt forced. Does anyone really care that I loved the possums in my garden? Did I care whether anyone cared?
The Writing
I have thus far avoided some of the external pressure in writing the books themselves. My novels contain likable characters, twisty mysteries, solid writing, a moral conundrum, historical lessons, very little violence, and a bit of humor, because that’s what I like to read. My Victorian mysteries have overlapping characters but aren’t a series, Bummer at Luna Beach is not a cozy that would make a good Hallmark movie, and I never give away a novel for free.
And because I have not written “to market”, there hasn’t been any. My surprise at this is disappointing. Somewhere in my head was the idea that if you write something good, something that pushes the envelope in a familiar genre, something that doesn’t do quite what was expected, readers will be there, awards will be awarded, agents will ask to represent you.
Naïveté is the source of misery for so many things.
The Books
Last there are the books themselves: Booktok, Bookstagram, images of books and covers. People who “love books”. One doesn’t love books, typically; one loves what is in the books. Some books contain poor writing, or topics of little interest. All books are not equal.
I am not a book fetishist. The very sight of a book, any book, makes me curious but it doesn’t make me swoon. There are such people, and more power to them; without them many wonderful books would not be preserved as artifacts. But are book fetishists readers? It’s hard to tell on Instagram.
A book, I’ve been told by marketing experts, is your product. It’s a commodity. If you want to sell it, you should think like that. I have tried, but I’ve never done well being told how to think.
Whodunnit?
It could be argued that I am the murderer of my own joy. I do not have to look at bookstores, books, authors, or publishing in this way. But it’s very difficult to unsee what one has seen, to unknow what one knows. One cannot simply go back to the fantasy of bookstores as places of magic rather than market, of writing as a sacred act, of publishing as a mark of societal approbation.
Another piece of wisdom is “Just Write”. I think I’ll go with that one.
There are some stalwart theories as to why people love a mystery. Not thrillers, mind, where the excitement or suspense is the central trick, but mysteries. Detective stories, cozies, whodunnits.
For many years, the theory has been that people like solving puzzles. They enjoy watching a character find the solution, and the challenge of trying to find it themselves. But I have never been a gamer or a puzzle fan. Sure, I do the occasional crossword, but more for the words than for solving it. (Years ago when I played Assassin’s Creed, I only did it to see the scenes of Italy and London.)
Jill Scott as Precious Ramotswe
Another theory is about justice. Humans like seeing justice done. Whether that justice is legal or divine, we like seeing the evildoer get his or her comeuppance. Certainly I want humans who do bad things removed from situations where they can continue doing them. I strongly believe in societal systems of justice, and enjoy studying them.
But it occurred to me that there’s another reason we like the whodunnits. In most mysteries, though not all, the solver of the puzzle is motivated by helping people. While the murder victim may be dead, the living have questions, pain, and a need for resolution. If you’re a suspect, and you didn’t do it, you need help even more. The detective, whether professional or amateur, uses skills not common to everyone to find the miscreant, and often those skills are appreciated, at last if not at first.
It doesn’t matter that sometimes the detective doesn’t seem to care about anyone. I’d put Lord Peter Wimsey in this category, and Sherlock Holmes. Even Miss Marple keeps herself removed from the angst of a case. Others, like Benoit Blanc or Precious Ramotswe, seem to care a lot and become involved in people’s lives.
Those who get emotionally involved are often appreciated by those they assist. The detectives who distance themselves get satisfaction from what they do, regardless of whether they are thanked or not. We, the readers, provide that appreciation even when others do not, making us complicit in their helpfulness.
While Murder at the Gasworks is being edited, I have done what everyone says you should do and begun a new novel.
This one is set in Portsmouth (for a bit) and then London in 1883. I’ve written 14k words so far and have no idea where the plot is going. Is it a mystery? Or an adventure story? Or a bromance? Again, I meant to plan, to outline it all, to get effing organized for once. But then I just didn’t. I prefer to let the horse run, hold the reins loose, and see what happens.
But things have arisen, naturally. Two of my characters want to go do interesting things in London, since they’ve never been there. From writing my Victorian mysteries, I know a lot about the city in 1860, 1862, 1863, and 1870. But 1883 is quite different.
From William Frith, Private View at the Royal Academy, 1883
There’s been the Franco-Prussian War, for one thing, in 1870-71. It was expensive, and impacted fashion trends. Gone were the Scarlett O’Hara skirts and the waist-pinching corsets. S-corsets, long line, were supposedly better for health, the dresses narrowed, and the colors were from chemicals rather than nature, causing an unacceptable amount of puce in the visual landscape. My theory holds true that when women’s fashion moves away from hourglass fertility, they have gained more public rights – the suffrage movement was gaining strength. Bustles were no longer as fashionable so women could sit comfortably at a suffrage meeting.
The sewers were already built and in operation, and most middle class homes have toilets by now. So my usual fun with sanitation and pollution is not as interesting. Most toilets, not all, were tied to the sewer system as required by law. But laws aren’t always obeyed or enforced, so there’s something suspicious in the cellar of the townhouse…
I always like goods, and knowing what’s in the shops. I can find that through paratext, the ads scattered around the sources. Almost every book published had advertisements. 1883 seems to feature Dr. Scott’s Electric Corset, Chocolate Menier, Swan & Edgar Mercers and Drapers, sheet music, watches, yarn, and ice-cooled refrigerators.
But I digress. What should my characters do to have fun on the town? If I were a tourist, I’d turn to the Baedeker’s guide. I found one for 1883 on Etsy, confirming my enthusiasm for the web as a source for things I could never have found 20 years ago. Cost me $40, but it even includes the pull-open map pages and notes written in pencil in 1867 by one of the book’s owners who obviously traveled with it.
The book is full of useful information for the visitor, and quite a bit of advice. Keep your sovereign coins and your shillings in separate pockets, because although one is gold and the other silver, they are of similar size and might be confused. To prevent being overcharged, do not pay for a cab yourself, but let the doorman at your hotel do it on your behalf. And if you’re visiting from America (as I believe P.H. Mayo, the penciled owner of the book, was if the way he wrote dates was anything to go by), you don’t need a passport.
I also have a slightly out-dated 1880 book by Herbert Fry, in its not-very-well-reprinted edition (you can peruse a version at HathiTrust here). The plates are blurry but show a bird’s eye view of major streets so my characteers can walk around looking for adventure.
(As a recovering medievalist, I confess I still find it awesome how many detailed sources about the Victorian era I can find and use to create realistic settings.)
However, these city guides rarely touch upon anything more exciting than pubs and music halls, perhaps not the only sort of adventure a pair of young men would wish to find. Looking at some seedier sources, I am finding things like poses plastiques, where nude women would pose with white powder on their bodies, completely still in their tableaux lest they break a law about nudity in public. And of course the theatre district had houses that weren’t theatres. But it is so trite to have them visit a house of ill repute. And the story is not about their sexual antics. At least I don’t think it is.
I shall take another look through Baedeker.
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In 1855, five years after the death of Sir Robert Peel, a statue of him was erected in Cheapside, near St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Peel was a Prime Minister and is known for creating the modern Metropolitan Police, which is famously why constables are called “bobbies”. What I found odd was the location of the statue.
Despite the novelty of police forces in London in the mid-19th century, there were actually two: the City of London Police, who controlled the Square Mile, and the Metropolitan, which covered everything else. The City of London Police, like the City of London itself, was fiercely independent. Even today the local government and traditions of the City, now, as then, the financial heart of London, are different from the rest of the metropolis.
The City Police and the Met were rivals in many ways, as I learned on my visit to the City Police Museum a number of years ago. For example, the City Police height requirement was taller than that at the Met. That museum had a coat rack from the Snow Hill station where the coat rack height was chalked in as a dig.
The higher hook is labeled “For City Police”, the lower “For Met Police”.
Writing my upcoming novel, Murder at the Gasworks, I made use of this rivalry. My sergeant works for the City Police but ends up having to collaborate with an inspector from the Met. It makes for some tension and gave me an opportunity to explore the intricacies of the relationship between the two forces.
So when I recently discovered images of the Peel statue, I had a suspicion that it was facing toward the City. And sure enough, when I looked on maps, that’s where Sir Robert is looking, toward the jurisdiction zone of the rival City Police.
The Met was founded with the intention of serving all of London, and I’m sure the independence of the City force would have stuck in Peel’s craw, so I found the placement amusing and delightful.
And don’t worry, the statue, although no longer facing the City, is ensconced at Hendon, where the Met police are trained.
Hi there. If you’re looking for my posts with news, history, writing, and more, you’re in the right place. If you’re looking for my author page with my books, it’s here.
Some of us like a good TV mystery. For others of us, it’s an addiction.
As one of this latter group, however, I am also an exception. I almost never figure out who the murderer is, and sometimes I don’t even try. This is despite the fact that I write mysteries myself, and have been reading and watching them for half a century, sometimes more than once.
I watched 24 seasons of Midsomer Murders and guessed the murderer only twice. I saw The Mousetrap in London three times before I remembered whodunnit.
Is this stupidity? An ignorance of plot structure? An indication of incipient memory problems? Perhaps, but I prefer to think that I get caught up in really good narratives and interesting characters.
This is also strange, since I get impatient with stories, especially dramas, especially these days. To fit with contemporary themes, what the characters feel about things is more important than what they think. Popular detectives have dark or tragic personal backgrounds (Jimmy Perez in Shetland), inappropriately intervene in the lives of others (Raphaëlle in Astrid), are considered outsiders (Oskar Reinhardt in Vienna Blood), and use their life experiences to inform their work (Candice Renoir).
However they may be portrayed in a contemporary setting, the characteristics themselves are far from new. Sherlock Holmes was addicted to cocaine. Maigret melded into the background. Columbo got lost in the pockets of his coat. Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher were incorrigible busybodies. By today’s layman’s definition, all of them were neurodivergent. But I can ignore the popular motifs, especially since solving the mystery requires a certain amount of cognitive ability, no matter how much the story tries to manipulate my feelings.
So here is my current list of recent mystery shows good enough that you don’t need to know who did the deed. And because I don’t like violence, they are all cozies or cozy-adjacent. And because I don’t have cable, they are all on PBS, Britbox, or Acorn.
Sherlock and Daughter (2025) is better than it sounds in the Wikipedia description. While the portrayal of the American daughter is marred by 21st century intonalities and language, the story, David Thewlis’s performance as Holmes, and the production design make it worth watching.
Mademoiselle Holmes (2024-now) is a French program currently on PBS, featuring a (yes) neurodivergent, intelligent policewoman who gets in an accident that changes her brain and makes her confident in her brilliance. She also happens to be the granddaughter of Sherlock Holmes. Highlights include gender role reversals and the first detective I’ve seen who’s sexually healthy. There’s an excellent review of the show at Sherlock Adjacent.
The Chelsea Detective (2022-now) is harder to pin down in terms of character. Max Arnold, played by Adrian Scarborough, is quietly intelligent and introverted. The character continually threatens to be uninteresting, and his bland personal life is of little help. Nevertheless, it is absorbing, and the exuberant presence of Frances Barber as his aunt doesn’t hurt.
Sister Boniface (2023-now) – originally a character in the Father Brown series (2013-now). Like Murdoch, and Holmes, she uses scientific methods to solve crime. There is no attempt at deeper backstory or character development, which is refreshing.
Only Murders in the Building (2021-now) is tops in the creative, uncomfortable, twisty but not gory category. You can read about the story, but I actually found the characters best described in a cool video about the production design.
Hello friends, subscribers, and readers! Here’s my Grousable Books news for fall:
Long-listed
Delighted to report that Bummer at Luna Beach has been long-listed for the Murder & Mayhem Award at Chanticleer. If you haven’t read it, you get a discount if you buy from me directly (plus I can autograph it for you!).
I’ve been selected as an author participant for Write On Oceanside, a festival of authors coming Saturday, October 11. It will take place at the Oceanside Civic Center Library Plaza, Courtyard, and Community Rooms, located at 330 North Coast Highway. While my SoCal cozy, Bummer at Luna Beach, will be featured, I’ll have all my books there for sale.
Located for the first time at the big mall in Escondido, the book fair theme this year is Around the World in Eighty Days, very appropriate for my Victorian-set novels. I’ll be there sharing a table with historical mystery novelist Jolie Tunnell on Saturday, November 15 in the afternoon. In plenty of time for the holidays, my trilogy of Victorian mysteries will be on special price.
ARC Readers Needed
Interested in reading and reviewing my upcoming Victorian mystery, Murder at the Gasworks? I’m looking for some good people to join my Advance Reader Copy team. You’d get a free e-copy of the final draft of the e-book, fully edited and formatted, in November. After you’ve read it but before the release date (looking at January 5 at the moment), you could post a review on GoodReads (or BookBub or any bookish community to which you belong). Just contact me if you’re interested.
Book trailer
I’ve never done a book trailer for any of my books, so I thought I’d give it a try. If I’ve done this right, you should be able to see a draft of one here.
Done and fun: photos
Editor and friend Pam Sheppard presenting to Publishers and Writers of San Diego group in August. An excellent explanation of Amazon keywords and how authors can use them.
With writing pal Shakurra Amatulla, nominated for her pilot teleplay “Sepia Frontier”, at Burbank International Film Festival, 28 September.
Award for the worst pic of me ever taken goes to this one from March, where I presented at the Encinitas Library.
The ever-wonderful Jim Groom (you’ll notice I’ve linked to his blog) and the folks at Reclaim Hosting are engaged in a series of deep-diving video conversations about writing and blogging called “On Writing”. You can view the sessions on YouTube. The Reclaim crew has talked with Kate Bowles, Alan Levine, Martin Weller, Bonnie Stewart, and many more people I’ve worked with either directly or tangentially over the years.
It’s all about writing and blogging. I do both, so folks may well wonder: what is my story with blogging?
The Beginning
I began by blogging about history (because I’m a historian), but I couldn’t say exactly when (because I’m not a very good historian when it comes to my own life). The first post I have a record of was dated 2006, even though I’d been teaching online and a citizen of the internet since 1998. That first blog was hosted in a Lunarpages account, using a program (they weren’t called apps then) called Nucleus.
When I got deeply involved in educational technology and educational philosophy (c. 2008), I created a new blog in WordPress instead of just posting on my Nucleus blog. That seemed like a huge decision, and in retrospect it was. It meant bifurcating my online identity into “historian” and “educator”. Two identities, two blogs.
Blogs, blogs, and more blogs
Over time, I began to focus more and more on college teaching and ed tech, so my WordPress blog got far more attention than my history blog. And other blogs were set up. Some were for courses in which I participated, like CCK08, EC&I in 2010, and DS106 in 2011. Some were for me to use with my students as I fought the Learning Management Systems trying to control my pedagogy. I created a Tumblr and joined Twitter and became part of the online community of educators. I blogged with students and helped them set up their own blogs. I ran entire classes via blogging. But I posted in my own space throughout, and finally pulled my Nucleus posts into my WordPress blog.
In 2012 I participated in the wave of Massive Open Online Classes, and created them for the Program for Online Teaching. That project, with volunteer faculty teaching other faculty how to teach online, had been active since 2005 and would be around till 2017. I blogged about the MOOCs, POT, online pedagogy, etc. The posts are still there.
Since 2017, I have gone back and forth separating and combining blogs, importing and exporting posts as I saw fit. Then when I retired from teaching a couple of years ago, I started a separate author blog as I became a fiction writer, since why would anyone who knew me as an author care about online teaching or educational technology?
As Alan Levine mentioned in his conversation with Maren Deepwell, blogging can seem old-fashioned. With Facebook and Threads and Instagram (oh, wait, that’s all the same thing) and Bluesky and Mastadon, what is the point of writing on a blog? Well, unless you choose to monetize your writing via Substack or Medium (tried that), your blog is the place for long-form thinking in public. It can be, as I’ve rebranded it here, your “webhome”.
Outside of blogging (and inside it’s too dark to see), I struggled with social media as a fiction author. Following all the usual advice, I spent 2023 and 2024 posting continually in FB, Instagram, TikTok, GoodReads. I did Canva placards and videos on YouTube. I put energy into an author newsletter rather than my blog. (Of course, I posted copies of my newsletter on my blog.) I even paid for ads on Facebook and Amazon. I had a few hundred followers as an author, and a few hundred newsletter subscribers.
But nothing I did in these spaces sold any books. That became my new metric for determining how I spend my time doing things I don’t find fun or interesting.
One Blog Alone
So this year I went back to my Lisahistory blog, the one that originally combined ed tech with history. I’ve cut down on social media. I’ve added an author page with its own URL (lisamlane.com) to my one blog, and closed out the separate author blog. I’m working on linking everything to my one blog, slimming down the categories, maybe writing my newsletters here, posting whenever.
Reunited and it feels so good. Blogging is fun and interesting, especially when I remember that I can post about anything I wish. No more “is this an author post? would readers be interested?” or “oh, that’s edtech–where do I put that again?”.
There has been a price: the followers I had elsewhere have been lost. But if they want to, they can find me here, in my webhome, turning on the porch light, letting Jetpack accept subscribers, chatting history and edtech and being a writer, and making a pot of tea for whoever comes by.
The first book I published, Before the Time Machine, was unapologetically literary fiction. It was dual timeline, completely character-focused, had no threaded plot, and featured serious themes.
But then I began to write historical mysteries, the Tommy Jones series, set in Victorian England. And immediately there was a problem.
The meta information for a book (needed for publishing, Library of Congress information, and marketing) requires the author to state a genre. Are Murder at Old St. Thomas’s, Murder at an Exhibition, Murder on the Pneumatic Railway, and my upcoming Murder at the Gasworks historical fiction? You bet. Are they in the mystery (also known as crime) camp? Also yes.
Once in the mystery category, there are subcategories. Are they cozies? A cozy doesn’t have graphic violence or sex. Check. It is usually discrete, one crime solved per book. Check. It has some light elements or humor. Check.
But historicals aren’t cozies, typically. So when I wrote a more typical light cozy mystery, Bummer at Luna Beach, I stopped referring to the historical mysteries as cozies. Instead, they are historical fiction, and traditional mysteries.
It got even more complicated when I published A Heart Purloined, a historical romance that was also a mystery. And possibly a cozy. But certainly a romance, with a rivals-to-lovers trope. The meta list was getting longer and more confusing.
Since my books have been available for a few years, I’ve had the opportunity to receive feedback from readers. I do not have a lot of readers. Historical fiction is not a popular genre at the moment, and people buy far more thrillers than traditional mysteries.
Historical romance is nowhere near as popular as it was when I was reading them avidly in the 1980s and 90s. And historical romance mystery? Not even on most readers’ radar. My best-selling book is the actual cozy with no genre waffling, Bummer at Luna Beach.
What I keep hearing is that my books, particularly the Tommy Jones Victorian mysteries, are differently written than most in the genre. They are more serious, less trauma-based, and better researched than many books that are written quickly and sell a lot. They have deeper themes and more developed characters. The typical mystery elements are there, and they are whodunnits (not why-dunnits), but they come off more like — dare I use the word? — literature.
That’s because my models were people like Anne Perry and P.D. James. At the time, they were considered mystery genre writers. But now, as I re-read their work, I believe their books would be reclassified as literary fiction, like Patricia Highsmith or Georges Simenon.
Why? I believe that in the last twenty years or so, what we call genre fiction (mysteries, thrillers, romances, etc.) has become increasingly lightweight in terms of literary expression. Perhaps because attention spans are shorter, people want a fast read. It doesn’t have to be short, just easy to read quickly. They want their emotions hit through trauma, rather than character depth. Trauma is a faster route to caring what happens to a character. When they love a book, they want more like it rather than something new. (As a reader, I got into this tangle myself reading authors like Kate Morton, who use recurrent themes in similar settings.) Also, many readers today demand a “twist”, and are unhappy if they don’t get one. My twists are more ribbon than braid.
In short (yes, I know it wasn’t), I’m considering thinking of my historical mysteries as literary fiction, at the other end of the table from cozy mysteries. If you’ve read my work, let me know whether you agree?
Generative AI isn’t new to me, but I don’t like that everything we put into ChatGTP (or any other online AI platform) will be used to train it for private corporations, who then profit from my work. So I’ve avoided it, particularly doing things like putting a whole novel in to have it write a blurb.
Now I’ve discovered a more private route, where I can use AI without the internet on my home computer (a MacBook Pro with an M2 chip).
Here’s what I did. I downloaded GPT4All, and installed it. Then I had it fetch me a couple of Large Language Models. I wanted to try the ones not associated with Meta, then I realized that DeepSeek is connected to China. So I’m trying Llama (3 8B Instruct) and Mistral (Instruct). I put the .docx versions of my Victorian mysteries, plus the “bible” I use to keep track of them, in a folder on my Mac desktop, and made those the Local Docs for it to access. Then I turned off access to the internet.
Attempt #1: a fact
Then I asked it questions, beginning with something factual: the age of my character Tommy Jones. I asked it for each book, but it couldn’t tell me. So I asked it for all books, and it couldn’t do it.
How old is Tommy Jones in these books?
Tommy Jones’ age is not explicitly stated across all contexts provided. However, based on the excerpts: 1 In “Murder on the Pneumatic Railways,” he mentions working as a bricklayer and refers to himself as possibly 25 but looking older, suggesting an age in his mid-20s or beyond. 2 He is described alongside Susie, who is seventeen at some point mentioned (though context suggests she might be younger), indicating Tommy could be either slightly older than her or of a similar age depending on the narrative progression. Considering their background from derelict houses after their parents’ deaths in the war and their friendship with Samson, it’s likely that Tommy ranges between being a teenager to someone around his mid-20s. His exact age may vary within these bounds across different parts of the story.
Susie is a character so minor I’d forgotten about her, and Tommy’s age is explicitly stated and referenced not only in each book, but detailed in the “bible” to keep track. He was never a bricklayer, and never refers to himself as 25. Not an auspicious beginning.
Attempt #2: a blurb
Then I asked it to write a blurb for my current work in progress, Murder at the Gasworks.
“Murder at the Gasworks” is a gripping mystery novel by Lisa M. Lane that follows Detective Sergeant Cuthbert Slaughter and Inspector Samuel Revel as they investigate the murder of a stoker at the City Gasworks in London. As they delve deeper into the case, they uncover a web of corruption, illegal activities, and threats from trade unions that may be connected to the murder. With the help of their colleagues and members of the community, they must race against time to solve the double set of murders that have perplexed them for months before the killer strikes again. Will they be able to bring justice to the victims and put an end to the dangerous game being played at the City Gasworks?
OK, well, that’s wrong. Inspector Revel is off the case for most of the book. Slaughter works with Inspector Martin, his mentor. There are absolutely no threats of any kind from trade unions — two of my characters just happen to belong to them, and one is an organizer. The race against time is pretty mild, and it’s only been about a month. The City Gasworks is only one of the two gasworks involved. When I tried again in the other LLM it used the same wording: gripping, web of corruption, race against time.
Attempt #3: reading group questions
Fine. Since I will be writing Reading Group questions for Murder at Old St. Thomas’s, I asked it to do that.
Write ten reading group questions for Murder at Old St. Thomas’s 1 What is the setting of Murder at Old St. Thomas’s and how does it contribute to the atmosphere and mood of the novel? 2 Who are some of the main characters in the novel and what motivations do they have? 3 How does the author use historical details about the hospital and its era to add depth and authenticity to the story? 4 What themes are explored in the novel, such as loyalty, betrayal, and medical experimentation? 5 How does the author use literary devices like foreshadowing and irony to create suspense and build tension throughout the novel? 6 What role do detective work and forensic science play in solving the murder at Old St. Thomas’s? 7 How does the character of Tommy Jones evolve throughout the novel and what lessons does he learn about taking on important responsibilities? 8 What is the significance of the use of anesthetics and hygienic practice during this era, and how does it relate to the murder at Old St. Thomas’s? 9 How does the author use dialogue and inner thoughts to reveal character and advance the plot? 10 What is the ultimate resolution of the murder at Old St. Thomas’s and what implications does it have for the characters and the world they inhabit?
These are extremely general questions, and don’t mention any of the characters other than Tommy. They could apply to any mystery. They are the sort of thing I would have never written for the classroom, and would lead to lousy discussion in even the most enthusiastic book group.
Attempt #4: craft and style
One more try, about craft and style:
What shows that Murder at the Gasworks is based on character rather than plot? Murder at the Gasworks is based on character rather than plot in several ways. First, the novel focuses heavily on the motivations and personalities of the characters, particularly Detective Sergeant Cuthbert Slaughter and his colleagues. The investigation into the murders is driven by their desire to solve the case and bring justice to the victims, but also by their individual beliefs and values. Second, the setting and atmosphere of the novel are heavily influenced by the personalities of the characters. For example, Ellie Slaughter’s neighbor Mrs Gross is portrayed as a gossipy and nosy person who is always meddling in other people’s lives. This helps to create a sense of tension and unease throughout the novel, as the reader becomes increasingly suspicious of her motives. Finally, the plot of the novel revolves around the relationships between the characters rather than any overarching mystery or crime. The investigation into the murders is largely driven by personal connections and alliances between the detectives, as well as their individual beliefs and values. This helps to create a sense of depth and complexity in the characters and their motivations, making the novel more about character development than plot twists and turns.
It’s sort of true, though “individual beliefs and values” is simply a definition for character. And the only specific example is wrong: Mrs. Gross is a good friend and not gossipy in the slightest. She is there for comfort, not to create unease. She has no ulterior motives whatsoever.
And, of course, the plot does revolve around the crime. This isn’t literary fiction.
Assessment so far
I also tried these prompts with the internet connected, just in case the models needed to fetch something from outside (like how to write good reading group questions). The results were very similar. The tool simply couldn’t process the full content of the novels.
So far, I am less than impressed. I shall keep working at it, of course. Stay tuned.
Lady Emily Peel (neé Hay) was raised in aristocractic style, raced her beloved Borzoi dogs, and was tracked by the paparazzi when she went on holiday. She’s also, in her fictional form, a character in my upcoming book. Here’s the real Lady Emily in a photograph made by Camille Silvy:
Those dogs, Yasva and Ulaloi (I have no idea which is which) are in photographs with her several times. She acquired them on a trip with her husband, Robert Peel, to visit the Tsar in Russia. No, this is not the Robert Peel who founded the Metropolitan Police and lives in legend as well as fact, but rather his son, the 3rd Baronet.
Lady Emily was from a high-ranking family, married the son of a famous man, and was expected to have children. I wanted to have her appear in the story before that particular responsibility. The novel Murder at the Gasworks takes place in 1860.
While it was natural to find her on Wikipedia, the list of her children steered me the wrong way.
It turns out some of this is correct and some isn’t. In fact, Robert, being the only son, is the only one whose birth is verifiable through multiple sources. The more I researched, the more contradictory lists appeared. This is from Geneanet:
Now instead of bearing twin daughters in 1860, she’s got a first-born child in 1860 and the twins, if they were twins, afterward. The Peerage also lists Victoria first.
Interestingly, when you follow the links for Evelyn and Agnes, it says Evelyn was born in Camden, London, and Agnes at Drayton Manor, the manor house they had near Birmingham. If they were twins, that’s a helluva carriage ride.
Geneaology sites are of questionable reliabilty, but sometimes it’s all you have. FamilySearch, it’s true, lists Victoria’s birth incorrectly as 1860. But it has Evelyn born in 1863, and Agnes not until after her brother, in 1870.
So I tried to track Victoria, who’s likely the real problem here. The citation for Lady Emily’s Wikipedia page points to ancestry.co.uk, with a dead link. For Geneanet, it points to Ancestry.com, which on my reliability scale is about equivalent to Geneanet. So I tried searching birth registrations, and found Victoria’s, for 1865, at FreeBMD.
Now, it’s true that not all births are registered right after the birth, but five years is a long time if she was born in 1860. Then I found a notice of her christening. She was named after Victoria, and the Queen was her godmother.
She was an infant. The average time to baptism after birth during this era was 14 days. She was born in 1865.
I don’t want readers worried that Lady Emily is six months pregnant while doing deeds of derring-do (which she does) in the book with social censure.
The implications for writing are clear. The algorithms, which are a combination of popularity and viral luck, determine not only the marketing but the content of published books. When asked about cozy mysteries, we were told they are dying out because (1) the audience for cozies is aging and dying, (2) they create a feel of community that people enjoy but that for younger people exists now in social media, (3) they are now in the “feel good” category, and (4) they’ll die now that mass market paperbacks are dead.
Would you like to read Murder at the Gasworks in February, before it’s published?
This is because I read things now I don’t care to read, or wish I hadn’t read. I picked up a copy of the Paris Review to understand what’s happening in literary magazines. I found heart-wrenching, sometimes disgusting, events and actions, designed to create emotion in the reader and, in many cases, allow catharsis for the writer. I have no interest in other people’s trauma (although I did enjoy David Adjmi’s play The Stumble, about Oscar Levant).
Last there are the books themselves: Booktok, Bookstagram, images of books and covers. People who “love books”. One doesn’t love books, typically; one loves what is in the books. Some books contain poor writing, or topics of little interest. All books are not equal.
As one of this latter group, however, I am also an exception. I almost never figure out who the murderer is, and sometimes I don’t even try. This is despite the fact that I write mysteries myself, and have been reading and watching them for half a century, sometimes more than once.
