A Tale of Three Authors

We'll call them Mary, Kate, and Ashley.  Those are not their real names- well, not all of them, and none of the three in here will be referred to by her real name.  They are all women who have had, now, several books published. Two I have met in real life- once, apiece- but I worked perhaps the most significantly with the one who I've never seen in person and who lives at the greatest distance.

The stories of my connections to them vary (and I will be obfuscating or even slightly changing some giveaway details, although each, should she read this, will likely know it is she I am talking about). I write this because there seems a common thread among the experiences, and I am trying to puzzle out whether I have said or done anything wrong in any of them.

Mary.

I met all three of these authors because of my LJ account. Mary had one back in the day, but rarely used it by the time we connected. (None of them use theirs to any meaningful extent now, although I have open, if rarely used, social media connections to each.)  Through somebody else's entry, I became aware of Mary's writing, and, long story short, I wound up being one of the editors of the first in a new series of novels she was putting out.  I was happy to do it, loved the writing, and loved that I seemed able to make meaningful contributions that made it even better.  When it came out, I received a generous credit in the acknowledgments- as I did, for lesser contributions of different kinds, to the second and third.  We also would occasionally email about writing things, and we shared some social-media posts and comments, but the last time I received any personal communication from her was 2012.

The fourth book then came out, for which my only involvement was as a reader. Around that time, Mary was signed by a publisher.  I sent her a congratulatory email about it, along with the germ of a story idea for a possible later book in the series. No response.  Didn't think much of it at the time- I figured there were probably now Channels involved- and for me, Channels started to include Netflix and Hulu and other tablet-y things that I was watching more while not having as much time to read, so I gave up trying to get back in touch or even following the rest of the series.  Now and then, though, I'd see a blog post come across- the fifth, then sixth, of the books came out without me even looking for them.  A few weeks ago, though, she posted a couple of new things. One was about the seventh in the series- inspiring me to Amazon the whole missed back end of the series. (I'm almost done with the seventh.) But the other was a post about her writing process and status, which seemed to suggest that she had gone back to self-publishing. Among other things, she talked in the post about needing to keep as many of these sets of characters going with regular new offerings.

So I made one. I sent one more email, regretting that I'd fallen off the series trail, but also that we'd fallen out of touch. I briefly described a new, rather silly, one-off to the series I'd been a part of at the beginning- and made clear that I was looking for nothing in return but perhaps an acknowledgment. 

As before, no response.

I wonder: was I too pushy?  Are these going to spam?  Or maybe Mary's just bad at emails (that last one from 2012 readily admits that she is).  I may try another way to communicate- but I do not want to turn into Stalker Dude, so if one comment or social media message goes unanswered, I will take that as the removal of the welcome mat and speak of this, and to her, no further.

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Kate.

This situation, I know, I fucked up far more than the others.  I met Kate when she was working with books, but not writing or editing them.  She's one of the two who I met, and I realized, much after the fact, that I probably was too assuming in that meeting of how close we were as friends. (The meeting was also with another friend of mine, who I'd met several times before and who I was, and still am, much closer to, if not geographically. I think I projected some of that connection onto Kate, and I realize now she likely did not appreciate it. I am sorry for that.)

Still, we share some common interests in music and media, and while I sent out a comment on one forum or another that clearly pissed her off (my smartasshattiness gets me in trouble with lots of people), it was a relatively rare occurrence and I learned from them to think a few extra seconds before hitting "send" around her. Eventually, she was signed to a multiple-book deal with a Big Six imprint, and I read and reviewed the first two and got back thanks from her for doing so.  The third came out earlier this year, and I put up an entry about having just received it on this blog (along with some other events of the day), which I then put on another social media site that linked to her page on it.  Within hours, I heard from her in a direct message for the first time in probably years, asking me, not to remove the blog post, but to remove her name from the Facebook reposting of it.  I felt awful about having done something (who knows? maybe more than some things) wrong, and I did as asked. We have not spoken since- but I also lost all interest in taking time to post a review of the book, even though I genuinely liked it.

Kate has always been a little edgy about things- and not just with me. Others we have in common have confirmed that. I think she has the potential to be really great at what she's doing, and it saddens me that I likely will not be a part of it.

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That gets us to Ashley.

She is the only one of the three who Eleanor also has been friends with.  I forget which of us connected with her first or how, but for several years she was a near-daily LJ poster and reliable commenter on our entries, and she had many and meaningful interactions with both of us.  I met her on a summer trip a few years ago in between baseball games and a downstate court appearance, and she was as kind and genuine in person as her writing made her out to be. (That's true of the other I've met, too.)  Around this time, I began doing editing work with authors she knew- contributing to the first book in one author's series, and then lead-editing the second.  I also tinkered with making a writing contribution to an anthology she was working on, and she was very helpful with a small but deadline-intensive project of mine which required a lot of knowledge of the publishing industry.

At the time, she had a dayjob which involved some amount of similar skills, but her love was clearly in the writers and books she was cultivating.  Then she told us of a significant career move- new job, new city, uncertain future.  We started hearing less and less, and the LJ completely dried up.  Our emails to her became beacons to see if she was okay. Eventually, we learned that the new job had not worked out, the new city was not for her, and she was facing a future that was more uncertain than ever.  The last either of us heard from her was a year or two ago- she sent Eleanor an online birthday card, as the three of us had been doing for each other for some time.  I sent her one of my own, with a note asking if she was okay and offering our love and emotional support.

Nothing. Ashley's gone ghost.  She had a personal-ish social media presence on one site that was last updated in 2012.  Her publishing "self" has another one which hasn't been updated since one "like" of a post that tagged "her" in March (and before that, not at all since 2013).  Her birthday, and Eleanor's, were both this month. Eleanor did not receive an e-card, and I didn't even try sending one.

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I know. People change. We've lost touch with some friends from "real life" as well as here who were, and somehow always will be, important to us if only in memory. It's odd, though, that three different friends who make their livings on words got disconnected from me when words were pretty much all we ever had to connect us.

If any of you see this and see yourself, if it's something I said or didn't say, I am truly sorry. If it can be repaired, let's try. If not, please take the first step and hit that button to let me know there's nothing there to repair.  Next time I do a pruning, if I haven't heard, I will take that step myself- but with a link, one way or another, to this entry.

You Might Think.... I'm already hooked.

Papa's got a brand new binge.

::cues James Brown guitar riff::

It's called BrainDead. And while I'm doing the binge through Amazon Prime (more about that later), it's also available on the CBS site and even over the good old air if you don't mind the commercials. It comes from the minds behind The Good Wife, which I never watched but always heard good things about.

In roughly thirds, it's political comedy, sci-fi and horror.  The premise establishes before the first commercial break:  Alien ants arrive on earth via meteor. They quickly find their way to DC, where they literally get in the heads of politicians and turn them into political extremists.  Our Heroine, sister of a young Senator semi-forced to work for him, is the first (so far) to figure it out.  The casting is fabulous: O.H. is Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who we just saw (briefly but powerfully) in Swiss Army Man; Nurse Jackie sends us Dominic Fumusa as the first of the infected zombies, and an even more awesome Tony Shalhoub as the first politician to get the buggers into his head (and I swear he homages his MIB role where he knew all about heads); and Good Wife brings over Zach Greiner in an elder statesman role.

Unlike House of Cards and Alpha House, which also riff on modern politics with occasional cameos but live in their own fictional politiverses, this one is full of current clips of the real candidates and the real controversies; only the fake Rachel Maddow was a distraction, since of course NBC wouldn't let her cameo on a CBS show.  But none of the clips and back stories is really relevant or necessary to following the main plot- although watching the RNC last week, you'd think the ants had already landed and filled every head inside the joint.

Only one episode in, there's already an established trope: "You Might Think" by the Cars is constantly playing in the background, usually while servers and bar patrons are staring at Our Heroine and her reluctant compatriots with already BRAIIIIINNNNNNS-like expressions.

The episode titles are odd- almost in an Orphan Black kind of way- but the writing in them is solid, and the characters are crossing over so many stereotypical genres at once that they don't totally fall into any one trap of looking too much like Dana Scully or Doug Stamper or Doctor Crusher.  I don't know if the show can sustain even a full 24 episodes, but as something Netflix-shorty, I'm thinking it should work.

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As I mentioned a while back, in order to get first-day ordering on Orphan Black, I had to sign up for at least a month of Prime.  You can now do this a month at a time, and for that month you get all the goodies, including two-day on everything and access to their own video material as well as commercial-free versions of things like BrainDead.  It's the first series I've watched using this service, and they've got one really nice feature compared to Netfix, Hulu and iTunes product deliveries:

At any point during playback, if you touch the screen, you get a sidebar with a headshot photo, captioned with the actor and character names, of everyone appearing in that scene at that moment.  That's a major time and battery saver for OCD viewers like me who just have to know who that is in a scene before you can pay attention to the show itself.

There may be other features in their app, but I've just begun. I am, still, a bit perturbed by how bossy Amazon is about controlling your experience- requiring not one but two full Android app downloads, one of "Underground," the other of "Amazon Video"- in order to begin watching. And Google is none too pleased about it; they do not allow them to be downloaded through the Play Store, and you have to turn off security settings- with screen after screen of warnings- before you can get them.  Plus, this tablet has been error-messaging all over the place with Google apps on it, so I'm tapping that damn screen during playback way more often than I want to see who's playing Senator Healy.

I'll likely finish the backlog before the month is up and can then CBS the rest.  If Alpha House comes back, or if any of Prime Video's other current shows are really good (anyone? anyone?), I might press on.

At least you might think so....