About Tennis

The real one

US Open 1987 has been out and available for several years now, in its CreateSpace edition. As I began preparing the first Nostalgistudio edition for publication later this summer, I remembered that several people who read the book had told me they'd been a little lost at points because they don't know anything about tennis. For a tennis fan like me to hear this is shocking and sad, of course. I don't like to think of people being deprived of such an enjoyment--watching and being able to follow a good competitive tennis match is one of the higher pleasures in life, I think. As for the novel, the first chapter concerns a single fateful tennis match described in some detail. Those kind readers felt lost right away, this was the problem.

So I wrote some more text, a few pages to insert quite near the opening. If you've read the book and didn't get the tennis part, please accept this new material with my sincere and apologetic thanks. For newcomers, maybe people with some know-how about the game, I offer it for discussion. Did I miss too much again?

(The new excerpt is here.)

What a Wimbledon

Here I am spending hours and hours this fleeting summer in the preparation of new editions for Nostalgistudio of all three FAMEPUNK novels so far, immersed once again in women's tennis as a subject while simultaneously scanning its current state for promotional opportunities, ways to ride some surge in fandom into wider view. And what I see is so very far from promising anything of the sort, it might as well be a cloud of antitheses, when all but the seventh of the top ten ladies' singles seeds goes out in the first week. It's disgraceful and won't win fans--quite the contrary. Overpraised princesses wilting under a single round of pressure: no one wants to applaud that. To my personal horror, women's tennis has become the New York Mets. One loss, then two, then two others; they achieve something lemming-like, these super athletes in mostly identical dresses swatting forehands long.

via Gfycat

LAMENT out now!

Another new clay season

A little scare just now when I sat down to write a fresh entry and found myself signed out of my Blogger account after two years away. I could see my two little old sites still reading "me" but couldn't enter to refresh them, this one and Reading Les Miserables at Work out of my control only drifted there, like junked space stations, relics. I sat bewildered. Then I thought, Would it matter? What if What is Famepunk? ended randomly, years out of date, out of carelessness? Couldn't it go on that way, an old attachment, always linked? Old and dead, yes--but would it matter? With a lynch-pin of my creative life (even if it hasn't looked like one lately) not just threatened but gone, snatched away, rationalizing like crazy, I kept calm. My mind formed ideas for going on without it, unencumbered by women's tennis blogging. But I was self-disgusted. I felt the loss I'd brought on myself through inattention. In the end I tried another sign-in, the right one. I'm grateful to be back.