One of the older and more respected (i.e., least dodgy) book contests for independent publishers is hosted by Indie Reader, an independent publisher promotion and advisory site. I entered my second novel, Toys in Babylon, in Indie Reader’s 2025 Indie Discovery contest back in August and promptly forgot. My book is such a short, light piece of work that entering a literary contest was an incredibly long shot -- admittedly farcical.

It turns out, someone at IR liked my book and posted a short, blurb-style review on the Indie Reader website -- six weeks ago… with my name misspelt. I only stumbled across the review because I was researching something else, whether an old haunt of mine in South Chicago (Powell’s Bookstore) had shelved the book following a written entreaty (It had). Here is what Indie Reader had to say:

Thank you, Indie Reader!

"Whip-smart satire and a cutting-edge premise make Toys in Babylon a tongue-in-cheek romp for savvy language lovers everywhere. Bursting at the seams with wordplay and whimsy, this pun-packed whodunit is a surreal and allegorical ride through our complex contemporary landscape. The multilayered, reality-blurring story is ultimately a vehicle for linguistic gymnastics and the pure pleasure of words, relentlessly poking fun at the tangles and paradoxes of language. Finegan delivers a beautifully bizarre and thought-provoking novel, one that poses crucial questions for real-world society, delivered with linguistic confidence and inimitable creativity." - Self-Publishing Review, ★★★★ - 10 October 2024

Self-Publishing Review published a very kind review of my book this week. The week has been rough, so I am immensely grateful. Thank you, Self-Publishing Review.

You can read the entire review here: Review: Toys in Babylon by Patrick Finegan

On Sale Now at Amazon

My older brother and I inherited individual retirement accounts (IRAs) from Vanguard when our younger brother passed away in 2012. Except for taking the required minimum distribution (RMD) every December, I never interact with the company. Ever. The statements arrive, I file them, and, once a year (inevitably in December), I phone in my RMD instructions.

Vanguard wrote me in June that the legacy investment platform which hosted the conduit IRA account would shutter on December 31, 2025. Vanguard advised me to move the IRA’s investments to a brokerage account on its replacement platform before then. I sought to do so yesterday.

Per Vanguard’s written instructions, I began registering online at the URL designated by Vanguard. There were several online pages of forms – personal identifying information, account numbers, the usual stuff – then a checkbox: “Sign me up for e-delivery.”  The only way to proceed was to check the box. If I left the box blank, I received a red error message, “Error: Please read the terms and select the check box”, and was denied further access.

For me, that was a deal breaker. These were the stated conditions for “going paperless”:

“By consenting to e-delivery, you'll go paperless by receiving account documents securely through our website, including statements, transaction confirmations, tax forms, proxies, fund reports and prospectuses, annual notices, amendments, and other important documents. You'll be able to download and print as needed and change your preferences at any time. Your electronic consent to the linked agreements and terms below is required to access your account online.”

In other words, I would no longer receive alerts that a RMD deadline was approaching, calculations of what my upcoming RMD would be, or even a year-end IRS Form 1099R unless I, first, remembered the username, password, and email address I used just once every 365 days, and, second, possessed the same smartphone and smartphone number I used to double-authenticate my account when (or rather if) I registered online. I have broken or lost three cell phones during the last two years. And, because my previous phone was unlocked when it was stolen from a toilet stall at Home Depot by the next “patron”, I deactivated and replaced the phone number. I am absolutely certain other such “senior moments” are possible. The point is, I depend heavily on paper documents and reminders, especially for low-traffic accounts.

I called Vanguard to assess my options. At first, the agent did not believe me. She insisted I was mistaken; the “go paperless” checkbox was optional. After I walked her through each of the forms and repeatedly generated the error message, “Error: Please read the terms and select the check box”, the flummoxed agent went off script and ad-libbed. “Oh, you’ll have the option to deselect that option later.” 39 years of legal experience taught me otherwise.

I said I would draft a notarized letter of instruction, instructing Vanguard’s account “transition team” to set up a brokerage account in my name on their new platform and transfer my investments from the old form. If they could not accommodate the request, I would visit their office in person and transfer the funds to a competitor. The agent at last exclaimed, “Oh, we have a paper form for transitioning accounts within Vanguard. Would you like me to mail you one?”

“Yes, please,” I replied, and thanked her profusely for her assistance. Just another hour of make-work in our ever-so-efficient digital age.

Meanwhile, my Reuters feed quoted the newly appointed Vanguard CEO as planning to make his company as strong a presence in fixed-income asset management as it is already is in equities. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/vanguards-new-ceo-eyes-fixed-income-offering-expansion-2024-09-25/

Please, Mr. Ramji, hold that thought for a second. The “go paperless” checkbox in registering a Vanguard account should be optional. A second is all your programmers need to ensure that. As enticing as your new-fangled fixed income products promise to be, they won’t matter if baby boomers like me move their life savings to Fidelity.

For five brief minutes, I felt on top of the world. For the first time in 18 years, I had shepherded a website from one version of its core infrastructure (content management system) to a wholly rewritten version without devastating complications. Wrong! Today’s blog entry is about what most people thankfully never experience – the trauma of “upgrading” a website. But first, some background…

The foundation of nearly every modern website is a content management system (“CMS”) rather than individually coded pages of HTML. The CMS is the infrastructure for publishing articles (content) without having to code HTML, for assigning menus and page sections without coding Javascript, and for shuttling content between an efficient storage engine (typically, a SQL server) and a spartan PHP-scripted presentation vehicle (your website) in nanoseconds. It is not exaggerating to say content management systems revolutionized the Internet.

Beginning in 2005, I began migrating a handful of websites I managed (non-profits, mostly, and only because I was a curious volunteer) to a still-nascent open-source CMS called Joomla! (the exclamation point was Joomla’s, not mine). Although I had dabbled with other open-source CMSs such as Drupal and the now-global leader, WordPress, Joomla’s great advantage in 2005 was hundreds, if not thousands, of third-party add-ons (extensions) facilitating everything from website security (e.g., a firewall) and backup utilities to event calendars, popups, slideshows, news tickers, and e-commerce – virtually any bell or whistle web designers could think of.

The scary part was when the Joomla! team decided minor security updates (e.g., Joomla! 1.0, 1.1, 1.2) were no longer practicable and that a comprehensive recoding of Joomla’s core PHP files was essential. At that point, Joomla! announced a deadline for conversion. Beyond the deadline, previous versions would no longer be supported – no more security updates, no more updates of third-party extensions, no more customer support. The older versions were “deprecated” (Windows 95 and Windows XP are apt analogies).

I built my first Joomla! website using Joomla! 1.0. Unfortunately for me, Joomla! overhauled its GUI (graphical user interface) in January 2008 (version 1.5) and set a deadline for conversion by July 2009. The transition was torture. Because the “upgrade” involved a new GUI, none of the version 1.0 templates were compatible. Templates specify the look and feel of the website – its menus, fonts, default colors, and, crucially, packets of shortcut stylesheet instructions (CSS “classes”) for formatting just about anything. Without the legacy CSS classes, all migrated content has to be reformatted by hand.

Joomla! introduced another overhaul (version 2.5) in January 2012 and deprecated version 1.5 in September – the same month it introduced version 3.0. I could not keep pace. I shuttered three websites.

Fortunately, the 3.x series survived a decade – from September 2012 through August 2023. Its stability was extraordinary. Hundreds of thousands of Joomla-driven websites emerged, and third-party extensions became more and more incredible. I developed my modest publishing website, twoskates.com, in Joomla! 3.x, and it performed seamlessly, as did an incredibly complex website I designed for a large, not-for-profit amateur athletic organization. Those halcyon days ended mid-2023.

Joomla! 4.0 introduced another wholesale overhaul. Thousands of popular third-party extensions became incompatible including, once again, the majority of website templates. So, although Joomla! crafted an automated script for upgrading its core features from version 3.x to 4.x, web administrators still had to reformat nearly all legacy content from scratch, repopulate calendars and image galleries by hand, and forego the functionality of thousands of now-incompatible third-party extensions.  Many websites gave up or, worse, retained version 3.10.x, hoping to avoid detection by hackers. That was the principal reason the large amateur athletic organization and I parted ways; it kept dragging its feet on migration, notwithstanding gaping security risks. The organization eventually developed a bare-bones informational site using WordPress and retaining a third party; I wish them well. My tiny publishing website, by contrast, survived the Joomla! 4.0 migration, but not without compromises. The redevelopment process, as from version 1.0 to 1.5, was arduous.

Imagine, then, my bewilderment, when Joomla! introduced version 5.0 just one month later… in October 2023! It set a migration deadline of October 2025, but I decided to take the plunge early. Yesterday.

Miraculously, the migration was seamless – the simple click of a button.  Outwardly, nothing changed, not even at the administrative back end. Until, that is, I tried to create a new blog entry (this one). Titling the “article” went smoothly, as did assigning a category (blog entry), but the text field was frozen – blocked against everything. I scoured the Internet for similar mishaps and learned many users recovered editing ability by modifying a single line of code in the PHP configuration file. No dice. Some facets of IT are immutable – among them, the illusion that website migration can ever go smoothly.

I decided to revert from Joomla! 5.1.4 to 4.4.8 using the third-party backup and recovery extension I installed 11 months prior (Akeeba). Per the extension’s progress alerts, the restoration went perfectly. It did not. The back-end login URL generated an error message, so I was locked out. On the front end, many pages worked fine, but the entire blog section was replaced by a single red error page. I spent hours in panic mode, trying to restore the website. Ultimately, I wiped the host server clean of everything, including my public_html file directory and my PHP database. I then uploaded a third-party utility (also by Akeeba) for unpacking JPA backups, together with previous evening’s full JPA backup of the website, to my public_html directory and tried again.

Twenty minutes later, my website was back up and running, as if the previous ten hours of panic and desperation never transpired. So much for taking the plunge early. I am not migrating to Joomla! 5.x until the curtain falls on version 4.x – 13 months from now, after I have had 390 shots of whisky just thinking about it.  

Anyone who has ever commissioned software or development resources has been there: they omit a minor spec but discover the oversight long after the design team is gone.

So, they scramble for a workaround, just as Hilton did when its programming team omitted a minor detail in their online reservation system: the ability to alert customers when they are about to book a reservation that cannot be cancelled (e.g., “This reservation is noncancellable!”). Instead, Hilton prominently displays a “free cancellation” deadline 15 days, 18 hours and 59 minutes before its customers click Book Reservation. In other words, Hilton leaves it to the customer to intuit, “Uh, I guess that means I can’t cancel.”  Hilton – the industry’s leader. Too funny.

"A very different kind of book... [Toys in Babylon] is a very clever satire as the story races at breakneck speed from the first page to the last...  The reader is kept guessing with every page." - Lucinda E. Clarke for Readers' Favorite, 8 September 2024

Readers’ Favorite published a flattering review of my book this week. Thank you, Lucinda Clarke and Readers’ Favorite. You can read the entire review here: https://readersfavorite.com/book-review/toys-in-babylon

Reminder: The price of the Kindle edition climbs back to $3.99 at midnight. It is priced today at just $0.99. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CYDNGNX2

Hi everyone,

I set up several book promotions with Goodreads and Amazon in July and promptly forgot about them (senior moment). One such promotion expires tomorrow evening (Sunday, April 15) at 11:59 pm NYC time:

The Kindle version of Toys in Babylon – A Language App Parody and Whodunnit is priced at just $0.99 globally. After midnight, the book returns to its list price of $3.99. Click https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CYDNGNX2 to purchase a discounted copy now.

Expiring Tuesday: Goodreads is GIVING AWAY 100 Kindle copies of Toys in Babylon, but it is a raffle-style drawing. Nearly 1350 Goodreads members have entered the drawing so far (that’s inside information), but you can take your free spin here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210132542-toys-in-babylon

Countdown to the MLB post-season: The playoffs begin October 1, and the Yankees are, fingers crossed, within days of clinching the division. To celebrate the occasion, Amazon is pricing Bärenmord – Eine Sprach-App-Parodie und Krimi at just zero euros globally (ja, kostenlos!) for the last five days of September. Mark your calendars: you won’t see that deal again.

Why baseball and the playoffs? Click the Read Sample button under the cover photo at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D7RN1VTK then scroll down to the first 3-4 paragraphs of Chapter One. If your German is rusty, you can read the same chapter in English at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CYDNGNX2.

Happy reading!

“Must read ... A thoroughly engrossing infotainer, blending sci-fi and cozy mystery about contemporary AI technology, leaving behind much food for thought” – Sonali Ekka for Reedsy Discovery, 9 September 2024

Read the entire review at https://reedsy.com/discovery/book/toys-in-babylon-a-language-app-parody-and-whodunnit-patrick-finegan#review and click “Upvote” if you like it. Thank you, Sonali Ekka and Reedsy Discovery!

Yup, the photo on the cover is my childhood backyard!

I vented last week that the best-selling brand of household dehumidifiers on Amazon (Gocheer) instructed someone to snail mail me a letter offering a $40 Amazon gift card if I posted a 5-star review and mailed proof to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (the purported email address of the “Amazon Customer After-sales Team” [sic]).

I attempted to post a redacted photo of the letter (no personal information) plus a one-star review of the product on Amazon, but Amazon declined publication and banned me from ever rating the product  – presumably, because (1) Amazon benefits enormously from the sale of thousands of $40 Amazon gift cards, and (2) publicizing the scam would question the credibility of all Amazon product ratings, as well as the company’s asserted commitment to “honesty”. There are, of course, other channels for publicizing product scams and corporate malfeasance, but few Amazon customers consult them.

AI to the Rescue

I do not know whether other browsers led the way or will follow suit, but the open-source browser Mozilla (aka Firefox) recently introduced AI technology from Fakespot to make product ratings more reliable. The Fakespot sidebar extension assigned Gocheer a “C” rating for reliability and downgraded its 9,388 ratings from a composite average score of 4.3 to 2.5. Based on my own experience (2 of 3 units died within a year), an adjusted 2.5 rating seems appropriate. I hope, in the future, that all web browsers – including Android and OS-based – include an AI-assisted rating-adjustment sidebar.

Out of curiosity, I examined the adjusted score of various products I presumed unlikely to receive intensive (and unorthodox) “marketing” assistance from their manufacturer. First up? Ivory soap. Amazon lists twenty bars for $13.98. Fakespot adjusted the 2,464 ratings from a composite rating of 4.6 (yes, it was my parents’ favorite) to 5.0, and awarded P&G an “A” for reliability. Next: Crayola crayons. The $8.99 64-pack had just 163 ratings on Amazon with a composite score of 4.5. Fakespot’s adjusted score: 4.5 plus “A” for reliability.

How about something more expensive… an appliance? Amazon’s best-selling dorm-style refrigerator is the Upstreman 3.2 cubic foot mini fridge with freezer, listed presently for $139.99. Amazon reports 3,347 ratings with a composite score of 4.4. Fakespot agrees and assigns Upstreman an “A” for reliability.

Okay, but what about gadgets where startup companies invest a comparative fortune in branding, gadgets where consumers fret for days before choosing? The products that qualify for me are: solar generator units; solar panels; and tabletop electric “composters” – each because I am obsessive about reducing my environmental footprint but also not busting the bank or replacing gear within 10 years. For time’s sake, I will focus only on solar generators.

Four of my solar generators are from an “inexpensive” Chinese “knock-off” brand, AllPowers. Its generators are considerably cheaper than comparably-sized units from the industry leaders, Bluetti and Jackery, but they have served me well so far (knock on wood). Amazon lists the All Powers 2000W portable power station (the model I use) for $799. Amazon displays 30 ratings with a composite score of 4.4. Fakespot agrees and accords AllPowers an “A”-rating for reliability. Interestingly, the industry favorite – the Jackery Explorer 1000 – scores 4.5 on Amazon (141 ratings), but receives only a “B” from Fakespot for reliability, yet still registers an adjusted score of 4.4.

So, similar to bond ratings from Moody’s, there isn’t much difference between and “A” and “B”, but there is a huge drop in reliability when you receive a “C”. Analogizing further, buying dehumidifiers from Fakespot’s “C”-rating poster boy Gocheer is a lot like purchasing junk bonds. The dehumidifier could default (i.e., die) any moment. God, I love this extension. Thank you, Mozilla and Fakespot AI, for trotting it out.

Postscriptum

I had a panic attack before clicking “Publish”. How does Fakespot score ratings of my novels, Cooperative Lives and Toys in Babylon? What if they are branded fake? Yikes!

Thankfully, Fakespot judged the paltry 66 ratings for Cooperative Lives (composite score: 4.1) and even sorrier 8 consumer ratings for Toys in Babylon (composite score: 4.3) as 100 percent accurate. Not many fans, I know (Boy, do I know!), but at least they are genuine – a comforting solace despite lackluster sales.

Several days ago, I completed the final unit of the Duolingo EN-FR course (section 8, unit 37), bringing me to the Daily Refresh wheel of review. Each daily wheel is comprised of six exercises – two Stories and four Personalized Practices (Q&As). Whether the Q&As are indeed personalized is debatable, as many others have noted. They are unquestionably also repetitive, especially if you click the 25 XP Start button, as opposed to the 40 XP Legendary button.

Here are four observations that have not previously been shared:

1. Some of the stories are new – stories that were, for whatever reason, omitted from the long, windy path of Duolingo’s structured lessons. Consequently, the Daily Refresh can indeed be “refreshing” – a breath of fresh air.
2. The stories sometimes differ, depending on whether you click the Review or Legendary button of each storybook pavestone. This makes the Legendary story exercises more interesting, because they do not necessarily repeat (or regurgitate) the story you just heard when you clicked Review.
3. Opting for the 25 XP Start button guarantees that you will see the identical Personalized Practices questions over and over during subsequent Daily Refresh cycles.
4. Opting for the 40 XP Legendary button instructs Duolingo that you are ready to move on. The questions become more challenging, they cover considerably more ground, and they do not repeat what they asked during the previous Daily Refresh cycle.

I made the mistake of using my 15-minute Early Bird and Night Owl bonuses to race through each Daily Refresh cycle – racking up XPs – but enduring the same Personalized Practice questions over and over. Fortunately, I did this for only three or days. I discovered that electing “Legendary” burned through much of my 15-minute bonus time, but ensured that the daily review questions didn’t repeat. I have only been doing this for a couple days, so Daily Refresh may indeed still become repetitive, but electing Legendary seems to be the way to make Daily Refresh exercises worthwhile.

I have blogged elsewhere that I have never owned a car, preferring instead to rent – believing it reduces my environmental footprint, however slightly. Consequently, I frequently use Zipcar.

One annoyance for all Zipcar members: It is not unusual for Zipcar to modify or cancel a reservation shortly before a scheduled pickup. Sometimes, that means sending you to a faraway location. As frequently, it means accepting a change in the type of vehicle – sometimes better, sometimes worse. Until this year, Zipcar honored the rate quoted in the original reservation. No longer.

Three times now, I have been “bumped” into a different class of vehicle and Zipcar has deliberately or by happenstance chosen to profit from the unilaterally imposed, last-minute change. In the first instance, I was downgraded from a Honda CRV to a Kia Soul but charged the SUV rate, as if I wouldn’t notice the loss of cargo space. After twenty minutes on hold, the customer service agent apologized and issued me a credit for the different rate – as if I had cancelled the CRV reservation and rebooked the subcompact myself.

The second time, it was the opposite. Zipcar switched me from a Chevy Malibu to a Honda CRV and charged my credit card for the amount I would have spent if I intentionally reserved the Honda CRV instead of the Malibu. Another twenty minutes on hold, another apology, another credit.

At 11:17am, my phone pinged with a text; my 5:30 am rental tomorrow morning of a Toyota Corolla was “updated” to a Toyota Prius – a vehicle with a $7 higher rate per weekday. This time, I spent 16 minutes on the phone, speaking with two different agents (It’s never easy!). When I explained to the second agent that I was being charged a higher daily rental rate than I agreed to, just because Zipcar (not me!) decided to “update” my reservation, the representative replied, “Yes, I see that. It’s a more expensive vehicle.” As in: “Zipcar can switch your reservation at its exclusive option to the most expensive vehicle in the fleet, charge you that vehicle’s quoted higher rate, and that’s just good business.” I eventually got the credit, but I detect an unsettling pattern. What at first seemed like oversight now seems like calculated profit-making subterfuge – the kind that too often arises from upper management.

“Brilliantly eccentric and packed with a colorful and unforgettable cast of characters, readers will instantly lap up Finegan's effervescent and mindboggingly enjoyable journey.” - BookLife Fiction Prize critique

Founded in 1872, Publishers Weekly is the world’s leading trade weekly for publishers, agents, booksellers and librarians. It hosts the prestigious BookLife Prizes for Fiction and Nonfiction. Winners of the fiction prize are announced in mid-December, but the reviewers at Publishers Weekly were kind enough to furnish me with a critique weeks before winnowing selections.

I have no illusion of advancing further but was pleased by my novel’s 8 of 10 rating – partly because Publisher Weekly is well-respected, and partly because Toys in Babylon was grouped among “mystery/thrillers” instead of satires or even fantasy/sci-fi. My short, gentle parody of Duolingo cannot possibly compete with the testosterone-driven works of Dean Koontz, James Patterson, David Baldacci and Tom Clancy, but I am nevertheless happy PW’s critics were entertained.

BookLife Prize critique of Toys in Babylon

I will expand on this another day, but Section 8 Unit 36 of Duolingo’s EN-FR course is brilliant. It relies too fully on members’ presumed fixation with coffee and sleeping late (a fallacy for those who have advanced this far), but the questions pull effectively from remote corners of the course and exhibit poetic wit while doing so.

« Mes rêves s’effacent tel un dessin sur le sable, et je me réveille telle une sirène perdue sur une plage. »
My dreams fade away like a drawing in the sand, and I awake like a mermaid lost on a beach.

Every sentence is memorable.

The final unit, by contrast, is a jumble of platitudes – flattery of Duolingo for presenting such a “remarkable” course and me for enduring it. It then commends Duo for being an obnoxious, unrelenting passive-aggressive nudge. Over and over. And, just in case we missed it, again!

Examples:

« Merci Duo pour cette expérience enrichissante ! Grâce à toi, j’ai tant appris ! »
Thank you, Duo, for this enriching experience! Thanks to you, I’ve learned so much!

« Les notifications envoyées par l’appli ne sont pas très subtiles, mais au moins, elles marchent. »
The notifications the app sends aren’t very subtle, but at least they work.

« Les notifications de Duo m’encouragent à continuer quand je veux baisser le bras. »
Duo’s notifications encourage me to keep going when I want to throw in the towel.

« À quoi bon avoir un portable, si je ne reçois pas les notifications de Duo ? »
What is the point of having a phone if I don’t get notifications from Duo?

« Quand je repense à ce que j’apprenais tout a début, je mesure le chemin parcouru depuis ! »
When I think back to what I learned at the very beginning, I can see how far I’ve come since!

The focus of these prompts is so misplaced. At the beginning, the unit resembles Theodor Seuss Geissel’s graduation address, Oh, The Places You Will Go, but it degenerates quickly into a crass rationalization of the green owl’s TikTok prick schtick. I am sorry, Zaria Parvez and Manu Orssaud, but this is not the place to redeem yourselves. Nor am I the appropriate audience. The 436,000 XPs and 1100 consecutive days I invested in French (approximately 400 XP per day) required no reminders from the owl. Nor do I believe I received any. No, the people you hound with daily texts will probably never reach this point. The pangs of guilt belong earlier in the course, much earlier – say, the end of Section 2, when occasional users tire of your petulance and study elsewhere. Placing holier-than-thou rationalizations at the end of the course is, quite frankly, disappointing.

If Duolingo wants to make the EN-FR course memorable, it should preserve the Dr. Seuss homage, but conclude it with new expressions and vocabulary, not self-adulation. The only worthwhile prompt in the entire unit was,

« À quoi bon apprendre une langue si tu n’oses pas l’utiliser ? Allez, lance-toi, dis quelque chose ! »
What is the point of learning a language if you don’t dare use it. Come on, go for it. Say something!

I agree. Unfortunately, section 8 unit 37 says nothing. It is such a let-down.

In Babylon bahnt sich Ärger an!

Mit Erfolg gehen Wachstumsschmerzen einher, und das weltweit erfolgreichste Unternehmen für Online-Sprachunterricht stellt da keine Ausnahme dar.

Alles läuft furchtbar schief, als eine Duolingo-ähnliche Firma die Kursentwicklung an KI-Rechner übergibt, die ihrerseits ihre unverwechselbaren Zeichentrick-Lehrer mit eigenem Verstand ausstatten. Ein fesselnder Krimi und eine zeitgemäße Satire des Autors von Cooperative Lives.

Erhältlich bei Amazon und allen Online-Buchhändlern.

Feathered Quill published an interview of me today, following its review last week of the novel, Toys in Babylon - A Language App Parody and Whodunnit. These were the questions:

You can read the entire interview here: https://featheredquill.com/author-interview-patrick-finegan-2/

Thank you, Feathered Quill!

I write fiction and am therefore no stranger to literary deception. But there are boundaries. Deception ends when I turn my attention away from the manuscript. I do not countenance fraud in real world.

The attached solicitation arrived via USPS in my mailbox yesterday, purportedly from the Amazon “Customer After-sales Team” but signed This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. – a clear tip-off to forged identity.

The sender was the Chinese consumer appliance brand Gocheer or its US distributor. The letter entreats me, a verified customer, to leave a 5-star review in exchange for a $40 Amazon Gift Card. The dehumidifier in question had 9,139 reviews as of 1:30 pm this afternoon. Approximately 6,300 (69 percent) of those reviews awarded 5 stars. It makes me wonder. Did Gocheer pay $250,000 ($40 x 6,300) to dominate the dehumidifier market on Amazon? And did Gocheer really think this could continue unchecked?

One of the great no-no’s in literature is paying for “likes”; it is strictly forbidden by Amazon’s terms of service. Despite the taboo, there are nevertheless countless “author service companies” on the Internet which aggressively stretch the envelope. But no one is as brazen in the literary world as Gocheer is in the world of consumer products. Forgery, mail fraud, consumer fraud, and a permanent, physical paper trail? Grant the company this: it has chutzpah… a new 1-star rating, and a copy of this missive in the hands of Amazon’s in-house counsel. Well played, Gocheer. Perhaps you should anoint yourself Gocry.

“[W]hat did Jacques know? He remembered Anton’s admonition, “We are all friends, here.” Sure, the way Facebook defines friends. What Anton and Mark Zuckerberg really mean are “Casual Acquaintances”. At least LinkedIn is honest. Its Networks are comprised of Contacts, nothing more. Jacques’ colleagues qualified as contacts, not that they filled his LinkedIn page. Jacques’ contact page was filled with retirees and dead people.” From Toys in Babylon – A Language App Parody and Whodunnit.

There was a time, before and during the pandemic, when social media platforms were incredibly popular. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were a cornucopia of shared information and celebration – birthdays, anniversaries, retirements, new homes, gardening triumphs, memorable vacations, newborn children, and endearing pets. I counted 300+ “friends” on Facebook in 2020 and 250+ “contacts” on LinkedIn. At least a third were genuinely active, meaning they posted regularly and “liked” or commented on the posts of others. Many even solicited for charities. Without hesitation or exception, I contributed. If a friend said their special birthday wish was to assist a charity, who was I to ignore that wish? Heck, I still donate. Always.

I published my first novel during those halcyon days of social media and received hundreds of “likes” and supportive comments on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. They meant a lot. As much as I tired of seeing what my daughter’s former skate coach ordered for dinner, Facebook felt like a genuine community. And community support was one reason, perhaps, why I continued writing, and one reason, perhaps, why those charitable contributions felt meaningful.

Facebook’s heyday has obviously passed, eclipsed by Heaven knows what. I doubt whether even 30 of my “friends” are still active. Half the posts on my feed are ads, and half are reposted memes – hastily prepared images or quips designed to trigger knee-jerk reactions and nothing more – authored anonymously by complete strangers. Rare indeed is the post containing genuine news or information about a friend.

No surprise then that announcement ten days ago of my latest novel, Toys in Babylon, received four “likes” on Facebook, including one re-post (Thank you!!!). Just four likes, plus zero on LinkedIn and X. It’s a good thing I catch up with friends in person. Otherwise, I’d need a psychoanalyst. Toys in Babylon is an entertaining read. I promise.

My latest novel, Toys in Babylon, arose from an online challenge: Draft and post the next chapter of a community authored novella – but in two languages – then hand it off to the next contributor. I penned chapter one, then, impatient for others to contribute, completed the remaining chapters myself.

The German version of the novel, Bärenmord, goes on sale September 1. I owe a debt of gratitude to my editors, Ulrike Gemein and Regina Goetz, for making it comprehensible. Whether it is as captivating as I hope (i.e., “fesselnd”) remains to be seen.

I, for one, am pleased with the result, but I ask myself, “Did I really compose a book in two languages?” The honest answer is regrettably “no”. I did, in fact, compose the original first chapter (now chapter 2) entirely in German, waited a day, then translated it into English. But the remaining 24 chapters were composed in reverse – first in English, then German. I performed the translations by hand (zero AI), often laughably, always arduously, but from English to German, not vice versa. Conceptualizing plotlines and dialog in a foreign language is just plain hard.

Writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, William Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad hold a special place in my heart – not just because they were extraordinary writers, but because they composed and published their works entirely in an adopted language (English), and not initially in Russian, French or Polish. Ah well, next time perhaps two chapters!

One of the biggest translation challenges for me was identifying and reformulating passages that contain puns and colloquialisms, knowing they were doomed in a second language. Try explaining, for example, how an idea came “out of left field” to a native Bavarian when the closest he or she will ever come to understanding baseball is watching paint dry. Alternatively, the Bavarian may indeed understand your colloquialism, but divine from its formulation that you are a foreigner. Example: everyone on the planet understands the metaphor “a bull in a China shop” but native Germans say, “an elephant in a porcelain shop”. Different animal, different shop. Thank goodness for editors!

OpenAI and other AI engines may eventually make writers obsolete, but there will always be a market for good literary translators. I am hopeful my novel, Bärenmord – Ein Sprach-App-Parodie und Krimi, illustrates why.