Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

merkin muffley wrote:

SandRider wrote:backing it up a minute, does anybody else get the feeling that Byron really and truly just doesn't give a shit anymore ?
Chig said something about his not being privy to Keith's new mouthfarts, but I wonder if he even cares ?

He definitely doesn't care like he did a couple years ago. when Jacurutu was just starting out (I can tell when I check the historical archives). I think he cares even less than he did when he banned a bunch of people over the L.A. Times cherry-picking journeyman article. I posted that Paul of Dune prolapsed my anus and he didn't ban me, nor did he even delete that post. I don't think he gives a shit. He just wants to put food on his family, and practice his love with OBGYN's.

...and dislocated both your shoulders, too. That still makes me laugh.

it was cherry picking the la times that got me banned, those were the days my friends, those were the days !

Ah, the "journeyman" episode ... those were some good times.

Kevin was not pleased with that. Which, clearly, is the only reason that Byron briefly woke up over there. Because you guys are right: it couldn't be more clear that he stopped caring quite a while ago.

Keith seems to have that effect on people with poor cognitive capacities...

The others just stay mad.

How about a prediction that 'Sisters' doesn't get a hardback release - it's halfway there already, for the first time Simon & Schuster aren't soliciting a hardback release for a McDune novel in the U.K. This is a major indication that they're lowering their expectations for its success. Wonder how this'll get spun...

Sev wrote:How about a prediction that 'Sisters' doesn't get a hardback release - it's halfway there already, for the first time Simon & Schuster aren't soliciting a hardback release for a McDune novel in the U.K. This is a major indication that they're lowering their expectations for its success. Wonder how this'll get spun...

Haters, all of the UK. Haters.

Na, It'll be in order to streamline it's market delivery to maximise initial penetration.

There's no condom large enough to save us from more repeated tehKJAcket and Bri-Bri offerings, it seems.

Sev wrote:How about a prediction that 'Sisters' doesn't get a hardback release - it's halfway there already, for the first time Simon & Schuster aren't soliciting a hardback release for a McDune novel in the U.K. This is a major indication that they're lowering their expectations for its success. Wonder how this'll get spun...

I wasn't sure if the lack of a hardcover link or page on Amazon UK was an oversight or delay, or what.

KJA's Terribla Incontinent: Edge off the Whirled went straight to oversized paperback, and then mass-market. I added "publisher expecting flop with paperback only" to my tags over there.

Could we be seeing the beginning of the end of McDune?!

The begining of the end was in 1999.

Freakzilla wrote:The begining of the end was in 1999.

ZING!

Great news about the UK publishing plans!

I often think that publishers are barely clearing expenses when they take on a Keith book (or, in the case coming up, Keith & Bobo's exciting foray into Hellblow). Truly, his sales rankings on Amazon suck harder than a black hole, especially after the first week of release. His books just plummet right away into sales ranks in the hundreds ... then the thousands ... and often into five digits.

Part of me really believes that he works pretty cheaply. He'd rather have the ego trip of a new book out than the ego trip (and other benefits) from a big stack of cash.

The exception being McDune, of course. I think he and Bobo have a nice sweetheart deal there that nets them a wheelbarrow of cash. Of course, the publishers get just a bit peeved when they determine that the last two McDunes have been miserable failures.

TheDukester wrote: Part of me really believes that he works pretty cheaply. He'd rather have the ego trip of a new book out than the ego trip (and other benefits) from a big stack of cash.

I agree with you, and I also think this is the best he can do. He is limited by his own hack mentality and writing method, and will never understand that if he actually had any real passion, a lot more people would be interested. If there was some actual quality in McDune, it would be huge, and not just tween fiction.

Does anyone know how many books they've contracted for? I'm hoping this is the last of mcDune.




"I'm an award winning, bestselling author! I bring something new to every sandbox go in! I'm popular, I say!"
-teh Hack

D Pope wrote:Does anyone know how many books they've contracted for? I'm hoping this is the last of mcDune.




"I'm an award winning, bestselling author! I bring something new to every sandbox go in! I'm popular, I say!"
-teh Hack

I used to ask Byron that repeatedly at DN but the comment always got deleted.

This first:

"I bring something new to every sandbox I go in! I'm popular, I say!"

Exactly. Something which can proudly be said by every cat that's ever shat.

Now this:

D Pope wrote:Does anyone know how many books they've contracted for? I'm hoping this is the last of mcDune.

AFAIK/IIRC they still had two books left on the Heroes SERIES contract. I don't know how the legalities of such things work... would they draw up a new contract, applying any advances paid for those to books to the new contract, or would there have been provisions in the original allowing the publisher to cancel the two and renegotiate a completely new contract (maybe at a lower monetary level based on the FAILURE of the previous series )?

WAY outside my incompetence area.

I was thinking more in terms of Merritt losing interest in what Keith is actually doing in the McDune sandbox, plotlines, rewriting Dune history, &etc.

[tl;dr SIDEBAR begins here] (he quit caring about the Official Corporate Dune Forum along time ago;
I think he realized somewhere along the way that the critics were right; McDune sucks, McDune fans suck, he
can't legally say anything on the Corporate Forum that could be interpreted as a negative opinion of Keith - I
think he got personally bitchy with the OH calling him all the names and intentionally trying to poison the Corporate
Board against McDune ... he got the adminFever, took it personally that the OH was not going to play by his rules,
then some of us did make it personal ..... for some reason, I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a prison
guard - he said that most of the time, it's not whatever it is that the convict is doing wrong, it's how the convict
responds ... in the big buildings of the general population, there are yellow lines on either side of the hallways ...
convicts are supposed to walk on the right side off the hall, "behind the yellow line" ... this keeps the center of
the hallway clear for the turn-key officers assigned to each barracks, and keeps a line of sight open all the way
down the hall ... if two guys start to fighting at one end of the hallway, the guards at the central desk can see
all the way down there, instead of their LOS being blocked by a crowd ... so, as an example, if a group of 100 or
so convicts are coming down the hallway heading to the mess hall, and two guys are walking side-by-side having
a conversation, and the one on the outside isn't paying attention and is walking on the other side of the line a bit,
the guard will holler "Get behind the yellow line" ... and the convict who is trying to get along in the system will
acknowledge the order and get behind his buddy and keep on talking ... if the guy is just too fucking cool to be
bothered with walking where he's supposed to walk and way too cool to obey a first order, he'll get yelled at again,
maybe with some verbal abuse designed to embarrass him in front of his peers ... if he says something like "yeah,
yeah, motherfucker, I hear you" and gets behind the line and mumbles to his friends about the fucking po-lice, most
of the guards will let that go ... he got behind the line, and his attitude problem is between him and the parole board ...
but if a convict steps on out into the middle of the hallway, says something like "Fuck you, bitch-ass punk, I'm tired of
all y'alls bullshit" ... that is a different story ... now, it is not the yellow line, it is the disobedience of a direct order
and the threatening behavior ... that is now the issue, and several other guards will have seen and heard this, and
will be in the middle of the hallway in seconds ... the convict is now certainly going to receive a disciplinary action
report, but whatever else happens is now up to him ... he'll be told to get on down the hallway, and if he does, one
of the guards will follow alongside him ... depending on the convict and the guard, and their relationship, the conversation
may be confrontational or rehabilitative ... the guard may threaten the convict, "You know I wish you would come on
over that line at me, I'll gas your ass so fast" &etc or it could be "Goddamn, Junior, what the fuck with you today? You
know better than that." .... maybe the guy let some news from his family get to him, maybe he is having trouble with
other convicts ... if he demonstrates a willingness to talk to the guard and acknowledges his behavior, it might be that
the guard goes back the others and they do not file a disciplinary action ... it could be that the presence of all the
other guards appearing on the scene could set the convict off, and he just starts whipping ass ... which won't last
long, can't last long, as he'll be overpowered and gassed and beat with clubs ... so the hallway yellow lines are used
as a barometer of a convict's mentality and temperament .... and all that leads back to Merritt only in that it could
have been that when he said "Don't talk bad about Keith", and the sockpuppet posted "Keith is a doofus and he smells
like pee." that the resultant banning MAY HAVE BEEN Merritt's response to a what he saw as a personal affront to
his "position" as Almighty Freakin Meow, and not a defense of Keith, per se ... who is a doofus, and does in
fact smell like pee, but that is not the issue now .... the issue now is a power-struggle and who is the AFM and who is
just a poster .... the fact that he's allowed Freakzilla to post under a new username, and I wouldn't call it a sockpuppet,
as Merritt knows who it is, tells me that he's either let up on his OH hate, which may or may not have been caused by the
attacks on McDune and may or may not have caused by his personal inferiority complex(es), or he's just stupid and lazy ....)
[/tl;dr SIDEBAR]

I was thinking maybe he's not concerned about being "out of the McDune" loop, because he's just biding his time,
waiting for Brian to Die; I do not for a moment believe that Keith will still be in the boat after the funeral ... Merritt
may or may not realize just how bad the McDune is, objectively; either way, it doesn't matter - he surely knows it
has NOT been a commercial or critical success, and he surely knows how Frank's fans feel about it, so in the long run,
to Byron Merritt, if he is in fact concerned with the Dune future, McDune is fucking irrelevant ... everything that Keith
wrote will be disregarded and ignored in a set of "new" Dune books, by Merritt or someone else, and they may be as
bad or worse than McDune (if Merritt writes them, I'd bet on needing a new thread to redefine "suckularity") but the
point is, they will not rest on any foundations from the McDune ...

and if the McDune fans are McIdiots and the Official Corporate Dune Forum is on life-support,
why should Merritt care what the latest McDune is about ? ... maybe that's why he's so bad
at defending them - maybe he's never actually read them, just the synopses and Keith's blahg,
and he just sorta parrots whatever Arnoldo says ....(or copypastas "That is an interesting point.")

SandChigger wrote:

D Pope wrote:Does anyone know how many books they've contracted for? I'm hoping this is the last of mcDune.

AFAIK/IIRC they still had two books left on the Heroes SERIES contract. I don't know how the legalities of such things work... would they draw up a new contract, applying any advances paid for those to books to the new contract, or would there have been provisions in the original allowing the publisher to cancel the two and renegotiate a completely new contract (maybe at a lower monetary level based on the FAILURE of the previous series )?

The contract may have been vague enough to allow the delivery of two more Dune novels, regardless of actual content.

Well, it occurs to me that the true test would be whether he would let me return under a different name.

But I would literally bite off and swallow my own nasty old balls before I would put myself again under their power to edit or delete my words.

(And, sure, I have my sleeper accounts over there, ready for the day they update the boardware, because there are certain features—like looking at member profiles & finding their posts—that are only available to logged-in members, but I don't promote their board by posting there. And I continue to disinfect HToD by slowly removing links to DN as I update things.)

I hope you're right about Kevin getting the boot when Brian bites it, but remember that Byron is just one member of the HLP. If the books keep sucking with each performing worse than the one before, keeping KJA will make less and less sense.

The worst thing I can see happening would be Byron and Kevin teaming up. After all, would they be stupid enough to release a "DUNE" book with just KJA's name on the cover?

in that scenario, they'd have to get Kim ....

by Byron Merritt, grandson of Frank Herbert, and International Best-Seller Award Nominated Avid Adventurer Kevin J. Anderson

wouldn't fit on the cover, esp. with how much they'll have to increase the DUNE font size ...

I just noticed on Twitter yesterday that TheKJA has added "speaker" to his list of other things he does besides not writing.

SandChigger wrote:The worst thing I can see happening would be Byron and Kevin teaming up. After all, would they be stupid enough to release a "DUNE" book with just KJA's name on the cover?

Who knows, maybe someone in the family will one day hire a good writer.
(I've never read anything of Byrons )

I read his Monte-Ray Gunn in one of those Monterey Shorts anthologies; what I recall of the style—which started to wear by the end—reminds me now a bit of Uncle BriBri's in Sydney's Comet. It wasn't KJA-level bad, that I remember. He's got another story in the second volume, but I never got around to reading it that I can recall. I was also following that thing he was posting on DN, about the disembodied spirit coming to the realization that he has died; I don't think he ever finished it. (Or did I ask and he sent me the conclusion? Meh, can't recall.)

It's a pity that little boy BriBri wanted to be known as a best-selling writer like Daddy and the other members of the family let him bring in Kevin to achieve the goal. We probably would have seen something very different if Brian had instead chosen Byron as his partner. Ah well...

Herbert should just die already, for all the good he does.

Okay, here is another one to place bets on:

Somewhere in the Great Schools series, we will see a story thread that details how, after the Great Convention, a certain house "goes renegade" and uses atomics to destroy Salusa Secundus - that one is a no-brainer. But the real fun will be that we learn that that certain house is none other than our favourite House Wayku!!!

Unfront wrote:Okay, here is another one to place bets on:

Somewhere in the Great Schools series, we will see a story thread that details how, after the Great Convention, a certain house "goes renegade" and uses atomics to destroy Salusa Secundus - that one is a no-brainer. But the real fun will be that we learn that that certain house is none other than our favourite House Wayku!!!

Whatever happened to Rhombur? Could he turn himself into a suicide ultra-bomb?

Rhomboid bit the big cyberlingam-ding-dong in Winds, remember? (And his dying words—"Is Paul safe?"—are what drove his son-through-artificial-insemination-by-brother-donor (brojizspon, in Galach), Bronso of Icks, to sever ties with the Atreides—hence explaining why House Vernius did not come to their aid on Arrakis!—and to hate Paul forever and ever and ever how could you!!!!)

Actually, Unfront, it was revealed in Paul of Dumb that it was House Trampwhore/Moritanikei that nuked SS. The Waykewl did something like side with the wrong side and jeer at the Emperor's catamite in the Fourteenth Coalsack Snitfit.

Or some shit like that.