Comments on: Help my weak memory

By: Diane

Diane — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 23:17:25 +0000

Here are some sites that actually have reviews for you, John:

http://www.flightintofantasy.com/2009/09/02/review-tales-of-the-madman-underground-by-john-barnes/

guyslitwire.blogspot.com/2009/06/tales-of-madman-underground-by-john.html

http://www.teenreads.com/reviews/9780670060818.asp

crowdingthebooktruck.blogspot.com/2010/03/tales-of-madman-underground-by-john.html

By: Diane

Diane — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 23:12:44 +0000

John Barnes! How wonderful for you to pop in. I did locate those sporadic postings by you on Amazon and noticed that you hadn’t exactly kept them up-to-date. But I’m not throwing any stones here since my poor readers are still waiting on me to finish up about 600 books here.

I encourage ego-searching so we can have better conversations. I think that’s the part of Twitter that I like. You can search by those hashtags and “pretend” you are simply improving your tagging & search strategies.
Links can be placed on here, you just have to take off the h t t p : / /

My students feel that if you won’t start your own facebook page, that you should allow them to develop a fan page. If you had the fan page, you could control a bit more. If they develop it, who knows what they’ll commit you to. More series. A novel every season. It’s really a good idea for you to take charge of your web presence before these teens do!

By: John Barnes

John Barnes — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:10:14 +0000

I don’t maintain a Facebook page or blog or do any of the social media stuff because it looks so awful when I ignore it for months or years at a time, which would be what I’d prefer to do. If people want to find me, I’m on LinkedIn as myself, and I tweet as KarlShoemaker, but one reason I like doing that is that I can ignore it for long periods of time. If you’re looking for promotional stuff, there are two tinyurl pages that are relevant (this site doesn’t let me post links, but if you know tinyurl this is enough to get it for you), my never-maintained site TalesOfTheMadmanWebpage and my Amazon profile, cleverly tinyurl’d as JohnBarnesAmazonProfile, which is where I post occasional news and essays when I can’t help myself. If I’d been blessed with the sort of early success that Salinger, Pynchon, Harper Lee, or Henry Roth had, there wouldn’t even be that much. I respond to fan mail on the day I get it, or many months later, or never; most of my long-term friends (almost none of them have anything to do with writing or publishing) are used to my disappearing for a year or two at a time now and then, and then being around frequently for a few months. So trying to contact me is always worth a try, as long as failing at it is not too much of a disappointment.

I also sporadically ego-search, which is how I found this (yes, I know, it’s a disgraceful habit, and I have never actually given up a single disgraceful habit in my life). So I suppose you could more or less invoke me by mentioning my name and a title of one of my books, or enough keywords so that I’d know you weren’t looking for the soccer star, the Ada programming expert, or the biographer of Eva Peron; I might respond, as I just did here.