education

TRX
December 12, 2012
78:
@53:
how much does simple herd following affect what gets published by publishers?
---
I used to chat with a writer named G. Harry Stine. Mostly about 1960s muscle cars. Anyway, I got a message from him one evening. He had been writing for a living for forty years, mostly for the same publisher. The editor he'd dealt with for ages had retired, and he'd been assigned to some perky young English Lit new hire. She told him she couldn't possibly consider a story that advocated "polluting space" and told him she wasn't interested in the book, which was something about satellite technology, I think.

Anyway, poor Harry nearly blew out an artery. He found that there'd been a purge at the offices and the new staff were basically all identical.

Harry didn't have much luck finding another publisher, either for his science or SF books. He said that he could have made a couple of sales, but he wasn't going to write for nothing, and he was competing against a new generation of word-processor "writers" who would sell six months of their life for $500 and a box of author copies.

Somehow he hooked up with an editor at Pinnacle who wanted a bunch of SF- themed military stuff. I think he had a series about fighting robots and another about submarines; Harry said Pinnacle sold them almost exclusively in the wire racks at truck stops, and I've never seen one. But his contract called for a new book every two months, and he said he'd never made so much money in his life. Anyway, the acquisitions editors are the gatekeepers to what gets printed. If you don't write the kind of stories they like, or think their customers will like, you're not going anywhere.

TRX
December 13, 2012
85:
Westerns are baaaack! ...sort of.

They seem to be the hot new romance subgenre. There are shelves full of the stuff around here, crowding the vampire books to the bargain bin.

TRX
December 13, 2012
86:
> The reason I didn't major in genetics
> is because I failed Human Anatomy and
> Physiology at the university level--
> not just once but twice.

Many professors seem to think that their job is to make things as difficult as possible for their students. Poorly written "textbooks" that are simply question sets with no instructional material, little or no instruction in the classroom, etc. They seem to have the idea that their students should go out on their own and find the information the professor is being paid to teach.

Many of the classes I took, I would have been better served to have spent the time in the library reading a book on the subject, because the professors certainly weren't interested in teaching it.

My Calculus 201 instructor was actually bragging that he had a 90% drop-out or failure rate in his class, as if it were something to be proud of. His method of teaching was, "here are the problems, in this book. You'll have to figure out how to solve them on your own. After all, Newton and Leibnitz did it, so can you."

I don't think he actually knew any calculus; he probably had a degree in "Education", which bestows godlike polymath powers to its holder...