KunstlerCast - The Big Slide Episodes (3)

[RVideo]

Like a few other listeners, I really couldnt get into listening to these shows at all.
This was the only Kunstlercast episode that I actually turned off, ever.
It wasnt that the story was boring per-se.  Hearing a "reading" audio just wasnt working for me.

That makes two new things on KunstlerCast that I didnt care for. What happened to that great picture of you and Jim talking?
That "studio shot" was such a great idea, as it gave the listeners a visual reference for your podcast. Replacing that cool photo with a radially overexposed "artsy" shot of Jims face with his forehead cut off is kind of depressing.

Oh well.  I guess Ill wait till Big Slide comes out on Fictionwise.com.

[Duncan]

Oh well.  I guess Ill wait till Big Slide comes out on Fictionwise.com.

Not going to be on Fictionwise.

>>Fictionwise will sell your works if you can offer a minimum of 10 reprints that are either novels published by established print publishers (not vanity presses or similar outfits that charge the author), or short fiction works published in major professional genre magazines, "Best of" collections, or anthologies published by established, non-vanity print publishers. We require a minimum of 10 reprints because of the considerable time and expense it takes to establish an author at Fictionwise and to market his or her works effectively.<<

Although JHK does have more than 10 novels and nonfiction works, Big Slide was self-published. And Fictionwise won't allow us to submit the piece unless it's accompanied by 9 others.

Just buy the book from his site if you're considering reading it, willya?  You listen to this show all the time. Shell out the five measly bucks and take a read.

Also, I moved that photo to the page on the website that lists all the shows. OK. Sheesh.  

[carstars]

Really enjoyed the Big Slide.  Bravo!  Also the surprise ending really jolted me.   

[peter31]

I enjoyed the final acts of Big Slide too - thanks Jim and Duncan.

I can tell Jim has a soft spot for the medical profession because he created a sympathetic town physician character in World Made By Hand, and the physician was the only one of the elite to survive the massacre at the end of Big Slide.  I'm a family physician in Canada so it set me thinking - if I was the physician in the (yet to be written) Act 4 of Big Slide, what would my ethical obligations be?  Should I allow myself to be co-opted onto the general staff of a mass murdering bandit, or should I say "no thanks" and get gunned down myself?  And the conclusion I came to was that the most ethical course would be to adopt the "medecins sans frontieres" approach and insist (as far as you can insist with a person holding a gun) that all sides in the conflict should have access to medical treatment including the mass murderers, the militias, the elites and the townspeople.

OK, I know it's fiction and I'm never likely to be in that position, but it doesn't do any harm to think around the issues involved.  Good production - thanks.

[wardad]

Thanks guys.

Jim, Nice work.  As a distopia fan and an historian of collapse I have to say this story was riveting.  I loved how the isolation of your characters in an emergency as such was felt by the listener (viewer when in production.)  You just don't know what is going on beyond the walls of the cabin; just as I imagine THE coming disaster will play out.

Very enjoyable, entertaining, and that Act 3; terrifying.  Jim, I love how you made the fascists sound a little IWW-ish.  I was fully expecting to hear that dick of a leader say "No war but class war!"

I really wish you could have worked in a "violenet clown" into the script, however.

Those that complain that they couldn't "see" the action are betraying a fundamental flaw in the modern info age; screens.  Y'all see so much with your eyes you have lost your child-like imagination.  You have lost the ability to visualize with your mind's eye and apparently, the patience to sit still and just listen.

Peace dudes,
ward

[Paranoia_agent]

Wardad--   I agree 110% about wishing at least one "violent clown" could have made an appearance in the play!

[RVideo]

>>Fictionwise will sell your works if you can offer a minimum of 10 reprints that are either novels published by established print publishers (not vanity presses or similar outfits that charge the author), or short fiction works published in major professional genre magazines, "Best of" collections, or anthologies published by established, non-vanity print publishers. We require a minimum of 10 reprints because of the considerable time and expense it takes to establish an author at Fictionwise and to market his or her works effectively.<<

Just buy the book from his site if you're considering reading it, willya?  You listen to this show all the time. Shell out the five measly bucks and take a read.

Also, I moved that photo to the page on the website that lists all the shows. OK. Sheesh.  

Wow that is so sad to hear.  You should submit the ebook anyways to them despite their requirements.
Jim is missing out on some revenue here: Fictionwise is the place to be.  Millions of ebook readers with various devices (Ebookwise, Rocket, iPod, Kindle, Sony) buy their ebooks from Fictionwise because it is the best site ever for ebooks. I am personally 99.999% confident that Fictionwise would publish Jim.   After all they would be crazy not to.

If Cormac McCarthy and Stephane Meyer have books there, then Jim can too

If you had a format that was convertible to IMP format (or RB/REB format) then I would buy it. Im sure eventually it will get there, as Jim is such a great author.

[rjw8625]

I was at the reading.  I tried to treat the entire thing as entertainment first and foremost since I've been all about the message for a couple years now anyway.  Not to disparage any of the other actors, but I thought the best ones were the Daniel character, the old Aunt, and the wife of the psychiatrist.  The young slut was pretty good herself for an actress her age.

I really enjoyed Act I.  I thought it was funny and like others have commented, really drew you in.  Unfortunately I thought the whole thing came to a screeching halt during the airing of grievances scene in Act II.  Did anything really get accomplished there?  It just didn't seem believable.  It didn't seem like the children characters really got anything out of taking pot shots at the old man either since they each got about 15 seconds to do it.  And I agree with the earlier criticisms of the sheriff scene, but I can also see how the actors may have pushed character perception in that direction.

Overall I still enjoyed the experience.  Hadn't been to a reading or a straight play in a very long time.  I hope Rochester's cultural scene comes up with a way to do the full production and bring you guys back!

[Logan5]

 I tend to agree that airing of grievances is profoundly uncharacteristic of the sort of person likely to be associated with the ownership of an Adirondack great camp- it's jarringly un-waspy. I also kind of feel like the ending was a little much- in Lucifer's Hammer they got good mileage out of the idea that making someone a refugee was pretty well a death sentence. Still, an interesting listen.

[Centrifugal Bumblepuppy]

There's a certain historical resonance with a Romanov-style execution though, no?

[Duncan]

Wow that is so sad to hear.  You should submit the ebook anyways to them despite their requirements.
Jim is missing out on some revenue here: Fictionwise is the place to be.  Millions of ebook readers with various devices (Ebookwise, Rocket, iPod, Kindle, Sony) buy their ebooks from Fictionwise because it is the best site ever for ebooks. I am personally 99.999% confident that Fictionwise would publish Jim.   After all they would be crazy not to.

If Cormac McCarthy and Stephane Meyer have books there, then Jim can too

If you had a format that was convertible to IMP format (or RB/REB format) then I would buy it. Im sure eventually it will get there, as Jim is such a great author.

Uhh... I don't think it's "sad."  And submitting things despite clearly stated requirements is unprofessional and obnoxious.

I can explore Fictionwise later. However read this from their website:

Because Fictionwise contracts only the electronic publishing rights, authors retain the print rights to seek an ink-on-paper publisher. The Fictionwise author contract is exclusive--this means that electronic copies of your works must not be available for sale anywhere else on the internet for the duration of the contract.

That means we can't sell the book on Amazon or on JHK's website or anywhere else at the same time it's listed on Fictionwise.

What you should also know, as a consumer, is that Amazon and these other ebook "aggregators" take a completely unfair cut from the sales. Amazon takes 70 percent of the sale price for themselves when they sell JHK's Big Slide on Kindle, for example. Apple's new "iBook" store is going to pay 70 pecent to the author. That's forcing these other guys to become more fair in their payout. But it hasn't happened yet.

On the other hand, JHK gets almost all the sale price when you by the ebook PDF from his site.

So it will be a while before I bother with groups like Fictionwise...(we're trying to earn a living here and, honestly, "consumers" like you ain't making it easy).

If you explain what those other formats are, then I can create them for you. You're not dealing with some huge corporate publisher here. I think you have some kind of disconnect in your mind. I oversaw this project for JHK. The e-book was self published. You're just talking about JHK and me here. OK?

Purchasing the e-book is a small way for you to help support the KunstlerCast and JHK so that we can keep providing you all this free content. This isn't an NPR fund drive. When you buy the book you get something for your contribution. But at the end of the day, you're contributing some money to this project. We're not going to do this forever. If the sponsors don't support the show and if the listeners don't support the show, then the show -- and the discussion forum -- goes away.

[faraway]

>snort<

Always good fun to see the up and coming generation of businessmen and businesswomen come SPLAT up against the "something for nothing mindset" that pervades our culture.

Something I've been contending with for nearly 20 years now.

Welcome !

[Duncan]

Always good fun to see the up and coming generation of businessmen and businesswomen come SPLAT up against the "something for nothing mindset" that pervades our culture.

(This is not directed personally to the user a few posts above.)

 It's actually more like a "something for nothing right effing NOW in my particular format mindset."

The weird thing is that folks with this mindset see nothing wrong with forking over money to big corporations -- McDonalds, iTunes, Fictionwise, the supermarket chain. But they want the small guys to give it all away for free. And they don't see anything wrong with demanding that the product be delivered to them in exactly the format they want -- which is a format suited to their particular device which they shelled out a small fortune to buy from a big corporation (i.e. ipod, zune, kindle, nook, ipad, and so on) -- even if that particular format will take the creator hours to accommodate for.

There is something called the paradox of choice, and among other things, it's destroying the possibility for profit and for Americans to ever find manufacturing jobs at the wages they want.

As an author once said (I think it was Barry Schwartz) "I want the jeans that used to be the only kind of jeans." That has been my motto for a while now.

[RVideo]

Well in that case, Duncan, I decided to take things into my own hands on the whole ebook format thing, and went ahead and created a version (from the PDF that I bought) of Big Slide that is formatted correctly for all Gemstar, Rocket Ebook, Ebookwise, and all of the other ETI-1 and ETI-2 based e-readers.

I spent over two hours on this conversion.  I had to go line by line to manually format the extracted text so it would compile correctly on the Rocket Ebook e-reader.  

The Big Slide
Rocket Ebook/Ebookwise Edition.

Here's what I did over the two hours:
• Repaired improper page breaks for eti1/eti2 half vga ebook conversion.
• Stripped illegal UTF-8 characters from original document.
• Manual redefined paragraph tags for proper half-vga eti-2 compiler.
• Removed unknown attributes in converted html derivative from source pdf.
• Manually added cover art.
• Fixed some small punctuation errors from original (mainly missing periods/apostrophes).
• Will work with all Rocket Ebooks (REB1100), RCA Readers (all models) , the Ebookwise 1150, and the Gemstar devices.
• Also converted to .Lit  (MS Reader/Pocket PC format)

If you want these conversions just let me know where to send them. My email is racer4770@aim.com.  These ebook versions will almost certainly give the listeners more options at the very least.  In case you are wondering, I have used ETI-2 based e-readers since 2002 to read many public domain and out-of-print books that I couldn't read otherwise, and as well, have become somewhat handy with ebook compiling and converting across various formats. I have not sent these anywhere; just keeping these archived in case they are of any use to you or Jim.

Cover on my 1150


First page

[maineiac]

 I tend to agree that airing of grievances is profoundly uncharacteristic of the sort of person likely to be associated with the ownership of an Adirondack great camp- it's jarringly un-waspy. I also kind of feel like the ending was a little much- in Lucifer's Hammer they got good mileage out of the idea that making someone a refugee was pretty well a death sentence. Still, an interesting listen.

Well said. I was quite surprised at the ending, too. I thought the Road would be a suitable death sentence for such unprepared people just as it was in LH (greatest post-apocalypse book ever IMHO).