Nostrum is back? Is Amazon buying them too?

I really don’t know what to make of this.

There was a posting yesterday on Jules’s Nostrum Nation blog that he and the Nostrumite were bringing back Nostrum. Again. They’re calling it Nostrum Series III, A Very Special (Batch o') Episode(s), (AKA the Codswallop Chronicles), and you now know as much about it as I do. He gave no timetable, and no indication why it was back or what it will cover. For that matter, he gave no indication of what he and the Nostrumite have been up to since they were last heard from a couple of years ago. Has all this talk about my writing somehow lit a fire under them to get back to their writing? Maybe they’re just jealous. I have no idea. I’ll see if I can track one or the other of them down over the weekend and get some details.

Anyhow, speaking of writing, this morning it was announced that Amazon will be buying Goodreads. Now I can’t say that I’m much of a follower of Goodreads; I don’t exactly need advice on reading, given how little I get to do on my own dime. And as the VCA knows, I’m not that big a user of social media. I especially don’t rely on the advice of strangers to recommend how I spend my time, or how I spend my mental energy. Trusted critics are one thing; the Great Unwashed are something else altogether. The Fifty Shades books, for instance, get an average of 4 stars according to Amazon customers. The likelihood that I would enjoy an average of 4 stars worth of Fifty Shadesness, however, is extremely small. If my daughter were to recommend a book I might like, however, I’d pick it up right away, and I’d probably like it. But that’s just me. Goodreads is a big deal in what you might call the reading community, and the last I heard, Amazon is something of a big deal in the bookselling community. Any question why I’m going to use Amazon as the outlet for The House on Summer Street? Amazon may or may not be the latest edition of evil incarnate, but when it comes to books, they are increasingly the only game in town. The are integrated vertically, horizontally, elliptically and widdershins. I can’t wait to hear how the publishing community takes this news. There are going to be some unhappy campers out there.

Come Monday, I’ll get back into writing up my adventures publishing the new book. This weekend should be fun; I’m popping down to NYC tomorrow for some museumness, and then dropping in on O’C, who is screening Willow for the assembled multitudes. Now, I can’t say I care one way or the other about Willow, but I do have a fondness for the assembled multitudes, which will include my daughter and JV and God knows who-all. Then Easter is a family day, out to eat at a local joint that does a nice Easter dinner complete with rabbit stew, which strikes me as either perfect or wildly inappropriate, much like having reindeer stew on Christmas Eve. It gets the Aged P out and about, however, which is a good thing once in a while. And then Monday night, we have a tentative workshop for the Sailor Speecho-Americans heading to the State finals, which means that I keep at least a marginal hand in such things for a little while longer.