NEW POSSIBILITIES

I'm trying to learn how to send material on my MS Word files
to my blog. If I can do that, I'll start publishing, in installments,
one of my academic murder mysteries.

In the course of my career as a mystery writer, I've killed more than a dozen professors...in varying ways. I hope to be able to share one of my
mysteries if I find out how to file material from word.

In the beginning was the word.

Arthur Asa Berger as Decoder Man 

Discovering LULU!

I just discovered LULU, an Internet publishing program that does books for free,
and since I had a few book-length manuscripts on hand, and no publisher were knocking down the doors to my house, I published them on LULU. When you know how to use LULU, it only takes twenty minutes or so to publish a book. Amazing. And it's free. You pay according to the number of pages and the amount of a royalty you want
for each book.

So, in just a few days, I published a memoir (of sorts) of mine, EXCULPATORY EVIDENCE and two mysteries: THE RASHOMON CASE (which deals with different ways of analyzing the film Rashomon) and TERMINAL PAPERS (which is about writing compositions).

You can get an ISBN number for $34.00 and then it will be listed on Amazon.com
and other Internet booksellers.

The problem with publishing books on LULU and competitors such as IUniverse
is that you don't have distribution and have to figure out ways to market your
books. But it costs around $500 to publish a book on IUniverse and Xlibris
and it's free to publish a book with LULU.

LULU has published something like 15,000 books...all available as
Print-on-Demand books. LULU represents a revolution in publishing...it seems
to be a completely automated system that enables you to publish a book, as
long as you have it on a file.

I made a collage to use in one of my books and believe I've posted it to my blog. I don't know how to write something in my blog and then upload an image. In essence, everything I do with this blog, except for what I write here, is a matter of chance and luck.

This is a collage I made recently 

This is what I looked like fifty years ago 

Decoder Man

For many years I was "The Secret Agent," a title given to me by George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania. In recent years, as I've become more interested in semiotics, I've switched to "Decoder Man"--but the two are quite similar for what I decode at things discovered or found interesting by my other persona, "The Secret Agent."

If I can ever figure out how to upload files from my word processor, I'll reveal some of the secrets I've found and codes I've decoded.

My Other Super-Hero Identity: Decoder Man 

Problems of the Creative Artist

I think I uploaded the cover of one of my academic mystery novels. What I'd
like to do next is figure out how to upload text that I've written in Word...
and perhaps offer a mystery one segment at a time. I'm exploring this matter
and will see what I learn.

Decoder Man

Cover of my Mystery 

Televised Football is Postmodern.

The question I'm discussing today is football postmodern. Football isn't but televised football is,
because thanks to television you see many different views of a given play and thanks to the new
cameras available, you get a number of different perspectives on the plays as they occur.

So there's a big difference between the game of football and the television version of the game.
The television version is highly mediated, with numerous reaction shots of coaches and players
and thus the game it turned into two dramas. In the first, there is the matter of the outcome of
the game. In the second, we become involved in the reactions, feelings, and emotions of the players
and the coaches.

Seeing something from a number of different perspectives is, by nature, a postmodern matter.
So many fans, who have never heard of the term, are actually caught up in a postmodern
activity...whose impact may go beyond televised football.

January 14, 2005

THE WRITER'S LIFE

For the past 35 years I've been involved with any number of editors in any number
of publishing houses. With some pubishers, the editors have come and gone, one after
another...They seem to have vanished into thin air.

There are various aggravations involved in writing...sometimes it takes years for
a book that has been accepted to be published. In other cases, editors send your
manuscripts to professors for evaluations. These professors are so busy that they
can't get around to reading your manuscript for months and months...and then
when they do, they often send very negative reviews...or indicate that you, the
author, really need them to co-author the book you have written.

One editor told me, "I've rejected better people than you!" and suggested I find
another hobby.

On the other hand, there are some wonderful people you deal with and so you
have to learn to accept rejections without getting depressed or blown away by them...
Just put the manuscript into an envelope and send it to another editor.

So the moral is--reject rejection and carry on.

I once had the idea of creating a reversal of the rejection slip--a
reject-rejection slip to send to editors who rejected my manuscripts. But someone
else actually did that.

Meanwhile, I have manuscripts that professors are dawdling over, that editors
are too busy to get to, and I carry on.

Tsuami Irony

There was an article in the Financial Times to the effect that authorities in Thailand
knew about the earthquake two hours before it hit Phukett, but didn't wish to disturb
the tourism industry, lest there wasn't a tsunami. So in this case it seems that not
wanting to disrupt tourism led to the deaths of many tourists--a tragic irony.