Still on Heli Koivula's novel

Antti Majander, the book critic of Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest newspaper in Finland, wrote today about Heli Koivula's forth-coming novel I wrote about earlier. Majander said that no use throwing stones, let's see first what the book is like and fair is fair and stuff like that.

This is so nonsense. If Koivula's novel had been treated normally - sent back to the author, get corrections, change that, let's talk about that, that sort of stuff, you know, the publishing stuff - and if it hadn't been accepted so eagerly and so fast and after a struggle between different publishers, then I'd say: "Okay, we'll wait when the book comes out."

But when the celebrity athlete says she wrote the book last Fall and sat on it for quite a long time [I still don't get this] and it's coming out faster than any other newcomer's first novel, it's really not okay. Antti Majander should know better. (Since he quite trashed Anna-Leena Härkönen's new book, a memoir about her sister's suicide, based merely on what were his own preconceptions of the book. Fair is fair, right?) (Maybe this was because Antti Majander's sister is a publishing director at the same house that is doing Koivula's novel.)

***

About work I'm doing:

I had to put Pulpografia Britannica on ice for a couple of weeks, since I'll do couple of entries for Toni Jerrman's and Vesa Sisättö's book on Finnish SF and fantasy authors and have to read some Finnish stuff.

I finished doing the layouts for the newest issue of Ruudinsavu/Gunsmoke. There's an article about the best movies about Indians, stuff about the Dutch comic Silver Arrow, the Finnish paperback series White Navajo etc. I have two articles, one about Indians in Western literature, from Cooper to Momaday, and other about African-Americans' own Westerns.

I'm doing some stuff on a new name book we are doing with Rea. It's about proposed names, that haven't yet been taken to use. We don't know if it's going to see the light, but here's hoping. We did one before, with a sample of 300 names, and it seems to be popular in libraries.

I'll be taking a week off from work, since we are going to train Kauto to sleep and won't probably have energy to concentrate. Most probably I'll put some stuff here.