From Ashes …

Laurie and I watched "Cinderella Man" yesterday. I don’t particularly like boxing or movies about boxing. As Laurie put it, "when one man has to knock another man unconscious to win, I don’t like that sport". That’s exactly how I feel – it just has too much of a feel of the old bread and circuses days. And seeing all those people sitting there cheering on two people beating themselves to a bloody pulp does nothing to inspire good feelings about humanity in general – well, at least not for me:

But speaking of blood and circuses, we have General Maximus himself in "Cinderella Man". Actually, for some reason, Russell Crowe looked younger in this movie. I don’t know if anybody else thinks this but he’s got a little Mel Gibson thing going in there. See, all the Aussie actors who make it great in Hollywood have this rugged, unshaven look – think back to Mel Gibson during the Mad Max days and then there was Paul Hogan … not not the wrestler, that’s Hulk Hogan, this is the other guy – remember "Crocodile Dundee"? :p Then there’s Guy Pearce too – even he had that whole unshaven look going on. Anyway don’t know if Crowe calls himself an Aussie or a New Zelander but even when he was shaven, he’s always managed to look menacing and unshaven. Mel Gibson used to be that way and then suddenly he became everybody’s favourite baby-faced boy :p In this one, Crowe too has a completely different personna – he’s got this whole, Irish boyish charm thing going and as I said before, he actually looks younger somehow. So hence the comment about him doing a Mel Gibson.

But getting back to the movie itself, even though I hate boxing, there was the whole underlying thread of one man against all-odds that I always find irresistible. There is something about the victory of human spirit over all adversity that just appeals to me. Then there is the time period – the story is set in depression era New York and the two time periods from American history that I love the most are the pioneer "Westward Ho" days and the depression era 🙂 Add to that the fact that you have a lot of charming characters (and some good actors too – Renée Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, Bruce McGill) and then it also has kids, who can resist a movie with kids? :p I loved the scene where Braddock (Crowe’s character) teaches his daughter to spar and gets smacked in the face when he looks away and where he says that he’ll have to buy some turtles if he wins the title because he told his kids that he’d come home with a title and they thought he said "turtle" 🙂 Overall, a pretty good movie to watch!

Much Ado About Narnia

First there was J. K. Rowlings doing a hundred-eighty from loving Narnia so much that she couldn’t put it down even today if she was in a room with the book to saying that she’s never even completed the Narnia series and that there is something about C. S. Lewis’s sentiments that gets on her nerves. Now there is Philip Pullman saying that the Narnia series is everything from "propaganda in the cause of the religion [Lewis] believed in,", misogynistic, racist, sadomasochistically relishing violence and even anti-vegetarian :p (Of course, the last one might not be Pullman – I just read that bit somewhere in reading about all the brouhaha over Narnia and how somebody claimed that the stories were anti-vegetarian or something because Mr. and Mrs. Beaver had sausages for breakfast …but haven’t done the research to see if that was Pullman … yeah, I know, bad journalism :p)

Now, I’ve read Harry Potter (who hasn’t? :p) and I enjoy Rowling’s writing. I haven’t read any of Pullman’s work and I mostly knew of him as the author of the "Northern Lights" series since a friend of mine raved about it and encouraged me to read it. However, Pullman and his "His Dark Materials" is what is touted when anybody talks about Pullman and the Narnia issue. Not having read any of his stuff, I can’t really comment. Quite a few of the commentaries online say that at least in the case of Pullman, this whole Narnia thing is a case of sour grapes. I personally don’t believe so. I think that both Pullman and Rowlings are victims of not being able to perceive something from a different perspective, something written at a time when things were simpler, when everybody didn’t have to conform to what was "politically correct" or have to write within permitted boundaries. In fact, Rowlings and Pullman have done the worst possible thing from both the Narnian children’s perspective and that of Peter Pan – they have grown up :p

See, one of the things that Rowlings has objected to in Narnia is that Susan is condemned to damnation because she was interested in lipstick and being a woman. Of course, she misses the point entirely. What happened with Susan was not that she became interested in being a woman, but that she dismissed all that the wonder they’d experienced as children as "fancies" and wanted to be all adult, grown up and serious. What some people don’t realize is that you don’t have to give up the wonder of childhood to become an adult – you can still have the best of both worlds.

Of course, there is a lot more that people say about Narnia. They say it’s racist. They say that it’s anti-Islamic and that the Calormen, who were the bad guys in "The Last Battle", (well, at least most of them) were patently Muslims. Now I’m a Muslim and I’ve read the Narnia series over and over and over so many times and I’ve never, ever thought of the Calormen as Muslims till all this hullabaloo started in the first place. In fact, even the Christian symbolism passed over me when I first read the books as a child. I understood the goodness in the books and agreed with it – I still do and I wholeheartedly in the principle espoused in "The Last Battle" that it doesn’t matter who you believe in as God, that as long as you do good in the name of God, it means that you always believe in the "right" God. (Yeah, I’m phrasing it badly but hopefully you get the idea :p)

I had this friend of mine, who is the only other Sri Lankan that I’d known till then who’d read Narnia, introduce another friend of his who loved Narnia. Her first question was "How can you like Narnia when it is so heavily Christian?" Fortunately, we were talking online and she couldn’t see my look which said "Are you insane?" :p I’ve never thought of the Narnia books as Christian and I don’t think I ever will. If you want to take everything with Christian symbolism in it, you might as well call "E.T." and "The Matrix" Christian works as well :p I think of the Chronicles of Narnia as a great story with a simple (and true) philosophy behind it. Why can’t we all just leave things at that and go back to our own writing? :p

The Work of Blogging

In the old days, running a blog used to be fun. You just set the blog up and writing about whatever took your fancy. But then came the comment spam. And then the referral spam (or was it the other way around? :p). Then the trackback spam, the pingback spam, the tagboard spam … you name it, there was sapm for it. When writing your blog became secondary and combating all this spam was the primary job, that was when blogging became a not-so-fun endeavour – at least for me.

I had not worked on my sites or my blog for such a long time that I had totally given up monitoring what was going on with my sites. Just a week or so ago, I noticed that the then SM sub-domain had about 1GB of traffic in about a week and I had not posted an entry there in months! So I began doing some digging and discovered that I’d done something really stupid back in the day and had not realized it :p I had set up a top 10 referrers list for my blog a long time ago and had not realized that referrer spam had been hitting it in ever increasing numbers till the referrer spam was doing around 300MB of transfers a day! That was when I finally noticed it.

But taking the top 10 referrer list down did nothing of course. These guys probably mark sites with referrer lists, set their bots up and then forget all about it themselves. So nobody was going to notice that I’d actually taken the top 10 referrer list down. I had to do something myself. A quick Google around was all that was needed. There were a lot of people who had to deal with the same issue and they were doing so by using mod_rewrite and .htaccess to do the job. So I sat down and went through the list of spam referrers to my site, came up with a list of rules and then put them up. The next day, the transfers from the SM subdomain went down to about 10MB from a whopping 300MB! I’ve had to keep an eye out on the traffic figures since then and tweak the referrer blocking list (there’s automated scripts out there which will parse your Apache log files and add new referrer filtering rules ….) but it’s been worth it.

Now I need to find a solution for the damn tagboard spam :p (The tagboard’s been disabled for a while now since all I get on it is spam …)

Scamming Scum

I’ve been working on the redesign of the site whenever I have a spare moment – I think I’ll divide the main site up between the blog, my writing and my coding. I want to have a consistent interface which still visually breaks the site into these different sections. The design for SM will remain pretty much the same but I’m adding two new layouts for the other sections – at least, that’s the plan.

In between working on the layout, I’ve been reading up on more scams by fake agents and I must say, it just makes me wonder about humanity all the more. Anyway, before I get into that, I guess I should talk about my own brush with a fake agent. It all started with a standard query. Usually, I would e-mail an agent a query but the Robins Agency had an online form for people to submit queries. So I submitted via that. I must admit, I made one mistake before querying them – I neither checked them out via Google or checked one of the online lists such as Preditors & Editors which provides a list of scam artists who pose as agents. (But I’m wiser now :p). The very next day, I received this response:

Dear Fahim,

Yes, we’d like to take on your work; however, we limit the number of clients we accept to only those with marketable works and who are in a position to pay our annual retainer fee of $3,250 (US). Although many agents charge $4,500 to $6,500 per year for expenses on top of their commission rate of 15% – 20%, we’ve found that we can do a superb job for only $3,250 with a commission rate of 10%-15%.

As to what you can expect. The process is rather simple (as compared to rocket science 🙂 ); we bring your work in, take it through editorial to make sure it is in good shape; take it through marketing and research to find not only direct sales opportunities, but indirect as well (i.e. film, tv, foreign markets); put together a marketing package, then start the submission process. When a buyer is found, then the negotiations begin.

You are informed each step of the way as to what we are doing with your work; and are a key player in the sale negotiations as well. We normally answer e-mails within 24 hours and telephone calls the same day … that is, if you don’t reach us when you call.

What you won’t get is the typical attitude of most agents (you work for them, not the other way around); you won’t get someone cutting your work up because they can, not because it may be needed (yours doesn’t need it); you won’t get an agent selling you or your work short just for their commission check; and you won’t have to wonder what is being done with your work as you’ll know.

Many agents do not provide the scope of services that we do; and they expense back to you (monthly or quarterly) about $4,500 to $6,500 annually.

We think that we provide a solid service for the monies charged; more importantly though — our clients feel they are getting more than their money’s worth.

If this is the way you’d like your agent to work — for you, not the publisher — and if this is within your budget, then let us know and we’ll get the paperwork in order and start straight away. I look forward to seeing how far our agency can take your work.

With regards,

Syd Michaels
********************************
Robins Agency
*******************************

Now the above is, in a manner, fairly straightforward – they do tell you that they charge an annual fee of $3,250 and as an aspiring author, I half-thought, "hey, if they can deliver on what they promise, that might not be so bad" even though I knew that most reputable agents did not charge an up front fee. However, I did decide to do some checking up on them online at this point and what I found was various posts on different forums where people said that they’d paid the Robins agency and then had not heard back from them or that Cris Robins herself would call a writer who’d signed up with the agency and cry (yes, cry) on the phone asking for money.

Now, I have no idea as to the veracity of any of these claims. The Internet after all is the one place people seem to feel secure about making all sorts of bogus claims and indulging in mindless slander. However, there just seemed to be too many instances of the Robins Agency being mentioned as a scammer for it to be just slander. Besides, the Preditors & Editors list (which *is* reputable) mentioned them as well. So, while I still wanted to cling to the hope that they would actually sell my book for me, I decided that these really weren’t the people I should be going with. So I sent them off the following e-mail:

Dear Syd,

Thank you for getting back to me. However, a few things about your response did not ring true with me – such as the fact that you claim that my work would not need any cutting based on just a few pages of my manuscript. I am in search of an agent who believes in my work and wants to sell it. You asking for $3,250 yearly up front to represent me seems to indicate that you do not really believe in my work but are simply doing it by rote. So thank you but I think I will pass. Regards,

Fahim

Two days later, I got the following from Syd:

Fahim,

I did not say your work would not need any cutting based on anything; fact is, I said we’d take it through editorial to make sure it is in good shape.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, Fahim. You get what you pay for — this is a business, not a wish factory. We pick up works we BELIEVE we can sell; but belief doesn’t pay the light bills.

We know we offer the most fair, complete, and honest service on the market. We would have like to work with you to realize your dreams.

Best to you,

Syd

And that was the extent of my dealings with them. Now this might just be conjecture, but the last response to me felt as if they were trying to make me feel bad about rejecting them and perhaps go back to them begging for another chance. Well, not a chance :p

Of course, this encounter was pretty mild compared to some of the others I’ve been reading about online. The agents appear to come after the people who posted negative comments about them, threaten law-suits, stalk the people, mail bomb them, call their neighbours up to get their unlisted numbers – the whole works. Then there are those who actually defend these people – saying that those who complain about them don’t have the talent to make it and so they are simply trying to bring down good people providing a solid service.

I can’t speak for any of these people but what I can say is this – if an agent wants money from me up front to sell my book and also wants a chunk of the money that I’d get for my book, then there really is something wrong. I agree, there is no free lunch – but that works both ways. I don’t see why I should provide a free lunch for an agent to potentially do nothing after taking my money. Their incentive is the commission that they get, my incentive is the (potential) fame and fortune in selling my book. An equitable trade, wouldn’t you say? :p

Change is in the air …

It’s been a very long time since I’ve done anything with my sites (except to try to combat all the spam that is :p). I’ve been taking a break from the programming and have been working more on the writing end of things. And then work became a bit hectic and took over everything and so didn’t have time to do anything at all.

On the writing front, I finally found an agent who wanted to actually read my manuscript instead of simply saying "Not interested" after I queried them. However, the manuscript has been with them for about two months now and haven’t heard much from them 🙁 So, I’m a bit disheartened at the moment and wondering whether the whole thing is worth it.

On the other hand, I’ve also been reading about scammers on the Net who rip new writers off without any compunction. Not that the agent who has got my manuscript is one – I did check them out first :p Interestingly, I did get approached by a scammer at one point and had an interesting exchange of mails with them but don’t want to get into that in this post since that’s a whole new post by itself :p But what I did notice from my reading online was that these scammers can get pretty vindictive when they are called scammers – imagine that :p There were some pretty interesting (and horrifying) stories online but one of the most detailed (and engrossing) ones was this one. After reading that, I do have to wonder if it is even worth it going through all that hassle to get published …

You might have noticed that SM has now moved to be the main focus of my domain. This is in line with other changes that I’m contemplating. If the current agent that I’m corresponding with does not work out, I might try to simply publish my current novel (and the other six in the same cycle) online. My friend Nige has been prodding me to consider some sort of Net-based publishing mechanism like Cory Doctorow does and I might actually do that and be done with all this agent business …

So what does that mean for the software part of this site? Well, the software will still be there and I will continue to provide support as and when possible. I’m even working on a few apps which will help a writer keep track of submissions and story ideas and they will go up when I think the app is ready. However, coding will probably not be the main focus of this site any longer. The old Developer’s Corner content is still there and I will eventually add links from the main page to all that stuff but for the moment, it becomes just another historical layer to this site :p