Blade Runner and other famously satisfactory endings

I’m in Bristol this weekend for the Bristol Film Festival! If you’re around, please join for:

• Moon

• The Matrix

• Tron

• Blade Runner

Four science fiction classics, on the (very) big screen at the Planetarium! I’ll be doing short introductions to all four. I know absolutely nothing about the fine craft of filmmaking! The screenings start after my bedtime! I have a small child and haven’t been to the cinema since before the pandemic! Everything about this screams ‘success’! Please come along and witness the breakdown in full and glorious Technicolor!

(Is Technicolor even still a thing? What about Dolby? I used to love going to the cinema when they’d do the ‘this cinema has DOLBY SOUND’ and then showcase all the magnificent boomers and tweeters and such. Do cinemas still have sound?! Discuss.)

Despite the cyberpunk theming of all this, I won’t have any books with me. But am obviously happy to sign (or, even better, chat about!) any stray Big Books that might be floating around.

Anne and I wrote a bit about The Kitschies in the latest issue of ParSec. We have a recurring feature there called ‘In the Weeds’, which is our opportunity to poke various industry beehives. Except it isn’t really about The Kitschies, it is about ending things. In publishing, like every other industry you get kudos, attention, promotions, press coverage and applause for starting things. Being the founder of x or the creator of y is what makes you worthy of being talked about. And the entrepreneurial spirit is amazing and innovation should be praised! This is good.

However, insufficient attention is given to those who continue things. Not just the ‘scale-ups’ or the growers, but the people who keep institutions alive, who keep the lights on and the front page up. ‘Middling’ is, in every way, undervalued. These are the people who you don’t notice until their gone, and everything they did is gone with them.

And, of course, ending things. Sometimes, we argue, the right thing really is to bring something to a close:

Anne and I have ended a few things now - several websites, a publisher, an award - never without much discusson or soul-searching. To us, it has come down to three questions:

1. Are you still achieving what you set out to achieve? 

2. Are you still getting value out of it?

3. How does it make you feel?

We go into more detail in the article, but I think they’re fairly self-explanatory. Is the thing that you are middling still doing what it needs to do for you and for others? Above all else: ending is a privilege. It is a choice that many people do not get to make. We are lucky that our side hustles were, in fact, our side hustles, and the things we thinged were options, not mandatories. But that only increases the weight of the calculus: life is full of many thousands of things that we have to do and many millions that we should do.

There are only a few things you do that allow you to not do them. It is a privilege, but also an option.

The actual physical conclusion of The Kitschies was pretty wonderful. There were fifteen years of judges and finalists and winners and publishers and friends in the room, most of whom I hadn’t seen for five years and some for even longer. The winning books and their creators - Out There Screaming, The Centre, and Julia - were well-represented and gracious. Please check out these books and those of the other finalists. There’s a nice write-up here as well.

We (and I include the awards’ directors Glen Mehn and Leila Abu El-Hawa in the mix here too) have always fostered an aggressively (aggravatingly) eclectic award, and that is reflected in the wonderfully bonkers mix of people at the ceremony itself. It is almost like shared interests create positive social mixing. Who knew?!

One of the goals over the holiday period is to package everything nicely. A dedicated friend has been tidying up the Goodreads data for the winners and finalists (thank you, David!). The Wikipedia article is a hot mess, and needs some sorting. And the other toenails of the digital footprint need to be clipped (e.g. social accounts, websites, etc). Ultimately, the legacy of the award will be one of links and references, and that torch (such as it is) carried by third party sites. Which is in terrifying in a historiographical sense. I look forward to Amazon Archive™ where Prime members get added historical significance for a small monthly fee!

Anyway, I think there’s a ‘lessons learned’ newsletter to come: we did a lot right and (gasp) even a little wrong, and I’m a big fan of making sure both triumphs and stumbles are part of the historical record for future mistake-makers and institutional-middlers.

Y’all know the Black Friday hack, right? This is the one day (or, seemingly two week period) where every single database with your email address will be firing on all cylinders. It is absolutely tempting to delete the flood of emails as they comes in, but take that extra moment to unsubscribe. Black Friday as Inbox Spring Cleaning!

Fully cognisant of the irony above, and adding yet another email to your inbox on Black Friday, but… if you’re not getting Shelfies yet, now is a great time. We’ve had some great guests so far, and some real bangers on the horizon. (Not actual sausages.)