However my only complication is knowing if in this case, you can have active-sterile neutrino oscillations in this case.  Obviously the mass matrix looks different in the mass basis than from the weak basis.  But it is quite possible, say, for one right neutrino to have U(1) assignment +1 and the ordinary neutrino to have -1.  Then you have symmetry breaking oscillations.  Which at the first thought of it, sounds wrong to me.  So I must be missing something.

And there was article by Ewan Morrison that compared the ebook phenomenon to a bubble– a very wrong and ill-conceived comparison.  The ebook phenomenon is a  gold rush with deflationary pressures on pricing.  A bubble is a gold rush with a inflationary pressures on pricing.  All bubbles have something in coming, skyrocketing prices.  Dot-com bubble, stupid stock prices.  Housing bubble: housing prices went through the lroof.  Tulip bubble: you guessed it.  So you have skyrocketing prices fueled by cheap money.

This is emphatically not what is happening with ebooks.  The pricces are trending to zero. Supply outstrips demands. Last  I checked the Amazon stocks aren’t skyrocketing. Ok sure Amazon stands to make a lot of money even if individual authors don’t.  However, Amazon is entitled to make a profit on their investment.  They made the technology, they have a high traffic website. They deserve their money.  Now you may say, in this ebook revolution, books are being devalued.  There may come a point when  the public would refuse to read books anymore because they are afraid of stepping on self-pub bad eggs.

Not true.  If anything, it would make trad pub more valuable in the long run.  Not only that, you can’t underestimate the intelligence of the crowd.  Already, we have book clubs, book bloggers, reviewers.  A lot of the self-pub works are hidden from sight.  If your book isn’t featured on the bestselling lists of Amazon, your books is effectively hidden from the average reader.  It isn’t hard to avoid self-pub.  Just buy the 12/13 dollar ebooks, or the ebooks where it says “price set by publisher”

The market is increasingly bifurcated between the masses who muck in the dollar-three dollar ghetto and  those who buying the ten dollar ebooks. I fail to see the Armageddon argument here. The sky isn’t falling.

I personally don’t understand why criticisms against self-pub involve glamourising the gatekeeping function of the big publishers  These ebook detractors want messiahs, or saviors who will lead the masses on the good books to read and the bad books to advoid.  But they equally forget about the trad-pub well-edited but shitty books that are ignored by the public everyday.  The books that bookstores return to the publishers to be pulped and forgotten.  The books that sell for pennies in thrift stores.  They forget the sheer waste of the publishers they like so much. They forget the celebrity books, the fluff books.

They betray a snobbery of masses.  Believe me, Joe Plumber can decide for himself what he’ll read.  He knows what is a good yarn and what is bad yarn.  If he’s too afraid to decide for himself.  He asks his friends for recommendation, or consult book bloggers.  See right there, magic, wisdom of the crowds.  Joe Plumber found himself a book read.  If the book is badly edited, Joe Plumber can either return it, or tell others to stay away from the author.  See, the beauty of the market.  Cream rises to top, albeit cream that a billion Joe Plumber’s want not the cream that a few hundred literary types from New York want.

Arguments about the evils of self-pub boil down to snobbery and envy. If you don’t like self-pub  books, don’t read them.  Go buy the ten dollar ebooks.

One thing is for sure, ebooks will not be give us the next David Forster Wallace, or Thomas Pynchon.  I don’t think it will give us the likes of Fitzgerald or the Hemingway people idolize so much.

I rarely ever buy self-pub books because there are so few that tickles my literary bone. I have bought 2:  Nameless and Gollyweister.  With those two novels, I was able to ignore my boredom and read them through.  The writing isn’t especially difficult nor are they a ‘grab by the balls’ voice.

On the plus side, people prefer familiar and easy.  To the degree that you can produce familiar and easy on the fly, you will do well on the kindle. But if you want to develop a more difficult voice, with a strange style, and a brand of stories that don’t fall for tropes, then you will have to work a lot harder.  You have to find those who are looking to read something a little more difficult.  They are out there.  But most do not own a kindle, and your path to kindle riches is less than assured than say if you released another urban fantasy dreck with yet another love triangle.

One note on Darcie Chan, and her bestselling literary novel, I had sampled it.  The writing did not grab my attention. Keep in mind here, my idea of ‘grab by the balls’ writing is Hollinghurst or Ondaajte so I am a snob in that regard.  I just think  if you are going to write about ordinary people with ordinary dramas, then you must have extraordinary writing. But that is just me, and I’m in the minority.

So yeah, it’s just easier to look through books published traditionally to find the truly interesting.  Unless you want to recommend your own novel with its ‘grab by the balls’ writing style.

So here I am, looking for ideas.  I have narrowed down  on few short story/novella ideas.  A killer nun. (Thank Black Lagoon for that)  I like the contradiction in that image.  The idea is loose enough that I have great leeway to be serious or be light as possible.  Nowadays, I’m leaning towards funny.  But I don’t quite have a story for it.  I just have an image of the nun, and her name is Consuela.  I imagine, a Lolita type opening.  Yeah, I need a plot.

Killer granny.  (Yes, I know)  This would be serious tone.  I imagined some sort of the  Turn of the Screw type of writing.  You know the serious first person pov that quickly devolves into a tale of a crazy motherfucker in high pretentious writing.  Appeals to me a lot.

I had some old idea of an absentee Father who goes on some mission and runs into his son whom he had abandoned, and then discovers his son is dying.  Ok, Ok. this already is turning into a literary snooze fest. But you admit that is a emotional story, right.  Oh righty.  If I don’t add in a action plot of some kind or some kind of bells and whistles, I might not be able to save the idea.  Though I have been thinking of a sci-fi world for this.

What else?  Oh yeah, an private Eye has to find a dog.  Ok, I have conceived this on the humorous side of things.

I’m trying to branch out into horror, especially psychological horror a la Stephen King.  I think my writing gravitates to the dark side of human psyche.  As always, I need the good ideas.

So that is on my mind.  What should I write about?

I wish publishers would do this more often.  Give their ebook versions cheap.  Get yours before it resets to $8 price.

I suppose this really speaks to knowing yourself and not getting yourself enraptured that you miss reality.  Danny is so wrong for Nick.  He is young, like to takes drugs, likes to party.  Alex is in his mid thirties, a stuffy office worker, likes opera, likes fine things.  Not one for the stereotypical gay life of raves and nightclubs and orgies.  You are happy that Alex is at last living life per se but really the glamourous life isn’t all that is cracked up to be.

Anyway, yeah, if you like literary fiction, get The Spell.  I prefer this to his booker award winner. it has more characterization and more plot.

The book itself is hard to get into. The main character isn’t exciting or likable. The conflict is very understated and it is very British. I almost gave up but the writing drew me in.

Alan relies more on astute observations and intertwining character thought with surrounding and less on gymnastic, masculine prose. It is very personal, very character interior; it is almost too easy to ignore its beauty.

As always, when I read geniuses, I try in my small way to imitate. So I have been thinking a lot about integrating setting with character observation. So my boring descriptions of things need to move between memory, feeling, the future in the character’s eye, and being careful not sound like an info dump. Hopefully, you might see how non-trivial this is.

It quickly gets to be an overwhelming exercise. And readers do not readily appreciate failed literary experiments. Well Alan takes his time to write his books, apparently, it doesn’t come easy for him either.

I get excited on a prose level. On the storytelling, character level, I happily ignore. But not too much though. After reading Fitzgerald many romantic passages, I have also being thinking about emotive prose. On one level, feeling is natural if you build the character well. On other hand, I think there is something to writing that capture the essence of feeling. And this too is a magic with Alan, he writes so well and it doesn’t feel cerebral or intellectual to me.

Anyway, we’ll see how those experiments turn out. Hopefully, someone will find them readable.

Since then, I have not written much flash.  Hunting for ideas and coming up with unique twists aren’t natural for me.  Either it is a burst of inspiration or I must have been thinking about it for a long long time before putting words to paper.  Furthermore, it has been harder for me to sit down and concentrate.  So I have a lot of first paragraphs of flash pieces.

Anyway, take a look at the piece and I hope you enjoy it.

The original artist had an intent and a theme. The eroticised fanfictions cheapen the intent and theme. I think of graffit.

I do understand that fanfiction is primarily a way for fans to connect with other fans. If people want to do fanfics on over my work, I would be ecstatic. It at least shows that I am engaging an audience, and I can start charging the high prices for my precious art.