Grabien's grasp of theater, folklore and history provides a feast of enjoyment

Oh, that's especially nice. Yay for a lovely PW review! And a book in hand -- it's such a wonderful feeling to be able to actually hold it for the first time.

Susan, insent on the kiss contest.

Thanks for the congrats on the PW review, all. Since a good review by these people damned near guarantees extra bookstore sales, I can relax a bit.

Also, you might want to be parsimonious about how many different results happen from this one virus.

Absolutely. This one's going to have the one major effect, but it's a corker: a form of anemia that's triggered by the onset of hormones at puberty. It's a mostly non-lethal anemia, but highly debilitating and weakening, and the result is a craving for human blood. I'm fairly comfortable with forms of anemia, because my mother had a cope-able form of thalassemia. They have no clue how she had it; it's supposed to be specific to the Mediterranean and she had nothing but Welsh, as far back as she could find. But she had the damned thing.

Also postulating that, in the spirit of Nature liking to provide a species with a survival requirement some means of locating the fix, I'm going to have this small group of anemic kids able to basically smell vampires, and also to emit something (ahhhhh, more science to be researched) that saps some of the vampires' physical strength: pheromonal?

Waking up. New topicc for drabbling today.

Heh... I'm starting to be intrigued by Portia. I think she should be the third book. With a little work (and trouble and hardship), she could be made quite likeable and readers like (imo) reading about the redemption of a villain, if it's well done.

I do have just the germ of an idea for her. It was going to be my third book, but I pushed it back after getting the idea for a story about a girl who gets pressed into the Navy while running away from home dressed as a boy. It has no obvious connection with the first two books and is set about ten years earlier, but I couldn't resist the urge to tie the worlds together by giving its hero, Will Gordon, a common great-grandfather with James and Anna, though Will is descended from that gentleman's illegitimate son. One of these days I'll make a family tree for all my imaginary people.

My explanation of how teevee works is clunky and aggravating the piss out of me. I've got to streamline it and make it less confusing. Gonna post, k?

Go for it.

Fans sometimes make the mistake that they are consumers of television shows. (This sentence bugs me. Make it stop bugging me)The viewers are actually bait for the real consumers, the advertisers. People hawking laundry soap, douches, and/or sport utility vehicles purchase time from networks to advertise their products and services to the audience watching a television program.

A teevee show is just a shiny lure to get millions of people to watch commercials. The network baits a hook with a group of viewers called a demographic. The most precious demographic is 18-40 year-old males, who supposedly have the most disposable income and are therefore the most delicious bait to hungry advertisers. So networks create shows that will appeal to a certain demographic, and then roll the dice. The network tells the advertiser that the television program will attract a few million viewers in a coveted demographic. The advertiser buys a minute or two of commercial time from the network in anticipation of chomping on a tasty bit of the audience.

The cost of making and marketing a show must break even, or be less than the amount of money advertisers pay for their commercial minutes in order for the show to be a success. If the demographic the network promised doesn’t tune into the show, the advertisers get pissed off and find another baited hook to provide nourishment. Fans aren’t the top of the food chain, we’re worms. Advertisers are the fish, networks are the fishermen, and the network’s shareholders are the giant squid who comes up from the depths of the murky sea to eat the boat, fishermen, and anything in a 50 yard radius.

Now before you get all paranoid and think that the FOX network has a spycam in your house to guage what you watch and whether you’re clicking through the commercials, let me explain the concept of Nielsen boxes. Nielsen is a company that takes a statistical measurement of television viewers in the US and abroad. There are “hundreds of thousands of Nielsen Families” according to the Nielsen website. People with Nielsen boxes and diaries decide what the rest of us watch. Every morning, the Nielsen ratings are posted, and advertisers can check to see whether the networks have delivered the demographics they promised.

When the network isn’t delivering, television shows get canceled. Critical acclaim does not matter. It doesn’t matter if four million 20-year-olds with a lust for Sega games tuned in to a show if the network promised six million of them. Your favorite television show can get axed if four Nielsen families all get together for a game of mini-golf and shut off their sets two Fridays in a row during a “sweeps” week, when Nielsen provides the most detailed data, pretty much.

What were we talking about? Oh. Firefly.

Fans sometimes make the mistake that they are consumers of television shows. (This sentence bugs me. Make it stop bugging me)

The mistake is in thinking that they are consumers, and the sentence should say so. Maybe "Fans sometimes make the mistake of thinking that they are the consumers of TV shows."

Fans sometimes make the mistake that they are consumers of television shows. (This sentence bugs me. Make it stop bugging me)

Fans sometimes mistakenly believe that they are the consumers of television shows?

Lee make head stop hurt. Lee good.

I'd leave out the "sometimes." Make it real direct: "Fans believe they are the customers of TV shows. They're wrong. The customers the networks care about are the advertisers."