Thursday Eclectia
Shortpacked on Wonder Woman and the Flag. Heh … I particularly like the Captain America quote at the bottom.
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I’ve seen the Bookscan numbers for Red Hood’s Revenge [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon]. Sales for the official release week? Best ever for any of my books, and about 30% higher than the first week sales for Mermaid’s Madness, the previous record holder. Thank you!!!
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We bought a half-dozen guppies a while back. As I should have expected, they soon produced bonus baby guppies. I’ve been moving the babies to a separate bowl to keep them from becoming guppy food. One of the babies got messed up before I could get him out. His spine was kinked in two places, so he looked like a little lightning bolt. He wasn’t growing, and I didn’t expect him to survive.
Shows what I know. He’s still a little guppy runt, but he’s now big enough to join the others in the tank without becoming a snack. He’s even getting some color in his tail. Watching that little zig-zag fish zipping around makes me happy for some reason, so I thought I’d share.
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RANDOM POLL: Which has better banter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the Sherlock Holmes film?
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Yesterday, the tooth fairy brought my daughter a dollar folded into a fairly intricate heart shape. She loved it, and is once again convinced the tooth fairy is real, because she doesn’t think Mama or Daddy are talented enough to do that. I am quite pleased … and also vaguely insulted 🙂
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I don’t think “eclectia” is a real word, but it should be.
EpeeBill
July 15, 2010 @ 9:58 am
I’ll give Buffy banter a slim lead over the new Holmes film.
Jim C. Hines
July 15, 2010 @ 10:07 am
Looking at the responses over on LJ, so far Buffy is kicking Holmes’ butt in this one…
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Debi Murray
July 15, 2010 @ 12:01 pm
Buffy…but it has an unfair advantage…many more hours to banter as compared to the length of a feature film. For the record, I like both fo them.
Congrats on the rise in sales…I bet Joshua is happy, too. I told him how much I love both your series at Bouchercon.
Jim C. Hines
July 15, 2010 @ 12:03 pm
Thanks, Debi! Joshua mentioned RED HOOD on Twitter yesterday. He is indeed pleased 🙂
Stephen Watkins
July 15, 2010 @ 12:28 pm
I don’t think Eclectia is a real word… but I’ll bet Eclictica is, or should be… in the same mode as “esoterica” and “exotica”.
That’ll be $0.02. Thank you.
(Also: congrats on the growing sales figures.)
Jim C. Hines
July 15, 2010 @ 12:30 pm
I looked up both versions when I was writing the blog post, and neither came back as an actual English word (though eclectica did have more one-off uses according to Google).
And thanks!
Steve Buchheit
July 15, 2010 @ 12:37 pm
Have to disagree with the Buffy and go with SHerlock Holmes. After all, banter in French as well as English.
Stephen Watkins
July 15, 2010 @ 12:37 pm
I hit Google, too, and came up with the same. But I think the pattern of “groups of things that are exotic”=excotica and “groups of things that are esoteric”=esoterica would best hold true for “groups of things that are eclectic” being equal to “eclectica”. It sounds like a fine word!
(another example: “groups of things that are american”=americana; which implies that it’s the addition of the -a, rather than a -ca that makes it work this way…)
Suzuka
July 15, 2010 @ 1:18 pm
I have to go with Buffy – but it’s helped along by the fact that there’s much more time for character development, and thus banter that makes the watcher feel “in” on the conversation 🙂
Jim C. Hines
July 15, 2010 @ 1:27 pm
Clearly we need more Sherlock Holmes movies in order to do a proper comparison!
Jim C. Hines
July 15, 2010 @ 1:29 pm
You’re right that eclectica probably would have fit the patterns better … but this is officially too much thought for me for a random blog post 🙂
Jim C. Hines
July 15, 2010 @ 1:31 pm
Tres bien!
Stephen Watkins
July 15, 2010 @ 1:38 pm
Ahh… a very worthwhile observation.
Also… a question: do you refer to the original Buffy movie or to the Buffy series in your question?
My own question is academic: I’ve seen neither the Buffy movie nor the recent Holmes movie, but the distinction might be important for the coming debate.
Jim C. Hines
July 15, 2010 @ 1:42 pm
I was thinking of the series, which — as I understand it — was much more of what Joss Whedon intended for the character and story.
zollmaniac
July 16, 2010 @ 1:57 pm
When Sherlock Holmes can use banter in musical form (ala Once More With Feeling in Season 6? of Buffy) or without talking at all… we’ll have a fair fight.
Jim C. Hines
July 16, 2010 @ 2:00 pm
Bah. Fair fights are highly overrated.
Moses Siregar III
July 17, 2010 @ 12:17 am
I was going to suggest eclectica as well. The people (all two of them) have spoken!
Elena
July 25, 2010 @ 1:06 pm
One more vote for the word “eclectica”.
And Buffy the series definitely has an edge in the banter over the Sherlock Holmes movie. Partly, I agree with Suzuka regarding the character development, maybe partly just because of the pacing of a TV show vs. a movie, and partly because the Buffy series could make a lot more pop culture references (such as “Scooby Gang”) which can act as a verbal shorthand to generate an idea in the viewers’ minds. We don’t have quite enough understanding of Victorian culture to allow a verbal shorthand for the Holmes movie, which puts it at a bit of a disadvantage.
If you compare the Buffy movie to the Sherlock Holmes movie, Sherlock Holmes wins hands down. If you like the Buffy series but haven’t seen the movie yet – just don’t. The seeds of the series are there and it has fun moments, but it’s too much like a typical cheesy high school B movie with bonus undead. Only teenagers should see it.
Jim C. Hines
July 26, 2010 @ 9:03 am
It’s funny, the Buffy movie was on this weekend, so we just caught it. I saw it when it first came out, but that was ages ago. the movie has its moments, but … yeah. The series was so much stronger in so many ways.