life is great!

Offline

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I’ve been offline all day because of malware on my office computer. Thanks for putting pron links on my work desktop, malware writers!

Black Friday Non-Shopping and Leftover Contest!

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I’m scheduling this post for early Black Friday morning, when I’m going to be sound asleep. (At least, I hope I will be.) So I’m writing this just after eating a sizable but not gluttonous Thanksgiving dinner.

So! Have a friend who likes urban fantasy? Want to have a gift sent to them at no cost to you? You’re in luck: the prize for this contest is a signed, inscribed, giftwrapped copy of Child of Fire, which I will mail to your friend/family member/loved one/mortal enemy anywhere on the planet Earth.

I’ll inscribe it any way you like (within reason), and the gift wrap will be nice but non-denominational. I’ll also include a nice but non-denominational card, too, with “Do not open before [date you choose]!” written on the envelope. And don’t worry, my wife will do the actual wrapping; that ensures the package will not only look nice, but it won’t be sloppily cocooned in scotch tape.

This lets you cross someone off your gift list without spending a cent! How do you win the prize? Well, we have the remains of a 20 lb. turkey in our fridge, and we’re looking for recipes for the leftovers. Suggest something. You can give the recipe in detail, describe it in a general way, or just drop a link to something you like. On Sunday morning, my wife, son and I will look at all of the suggestions on my main blog, LJ, and Facebook, and together we’ll choose a recipe to try. If we choose yours, you win!

Helpful tips for folks thinking of entering: soups, sandwiches and pot pies will have to be really unique or special, since we make a lot of them already. Cheese will be a tough sell (we’re open-minded, but cheese and turkey?), and any sort of hot sauce or spicy pepper will get an immediate veto by the child. And, if we find two recipes that look great, we may have two winners.

At any rate, we’ll make the winner’s recipe and I’ll blog how it turned out.

You didn’t want to go shopping on Black Friday anyway, did you?

To shift gears.

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Actually, let me pause a moment before I shift gears. My anniversary was nice. My wife loved the flowers I brought her and I loved the dinner she prepared (little steaks with sauteed mushrooms, noodles, and bleu cheese salad).

I also went to bed early (actually, I was *sent* to bed) and got a decent night sleep.

*Now* I’ll shift gears:

What are your three favorite movies about ghosts? Or just list three that you really love. Or one. Ghost movies, please.

Attention history buffs:

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FORTUNE’S FAVORITE: Sir Charles Douglas and the Breaking of the Line just came out. It was written by a friend of mine, Chris Valin, and represents the expansion of his master’s thesis about his own ancestor, a Royal Naval captain who played a major role in the Relief of Quebec, the Battle of Valcour Island, and the “breaking of the line” at the Battle of the Saints.

It’s being published by a well-regarded small press specializing in nautical history and historical fiction, Fireship Press, who also publishes Alaric Bond. I’m really excited for him.

Here’s something nice for the shelf

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Look what arrived today, courtesy of my editor:

Child of Fire PW Top 100 Scan

Yeah, that looks nice. :)

Hey, everyone who watched the pilot of V last night!

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I missed it because I was watching a movie about aliens who come to earth, pretend to be our friends, are revealed on TV to be aliens in human suits (um… duh!), come clean about their plans to eat humans like cow-kabobs, and are finally defeated by a plucky band of resistence fighters.

Really!

It was called GODZILLA: FINAL WAR and it also had super kung fu mutant soldiers in really stupid “armor”, giant rampaging monsters (‘natch), flying battle machines with huge borers on the front (!!!), an ex-MMA champion as captain of the last flying/underwater/undergroud battle machine, a 100% racist scene with a black NY pimp and his pimp-mobile, ray gun battles, a super ninja motorcycle battle, chi-powered kung fu blasts, and a hero who discovers at the end that he had Sekrit Powers!

So… HAH! You are jealous and don’t try to deny it!

Woo-hoo!

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ZOMG, Child of Fire just made the Publisher’s Weekly “Best Books of 2009” list!

Holy crap! I’m no longer wigged out about spending most of yesterday underneath the kitchen sink, fixing a leaky connection and scrubbing you don’t even want to know what. (I even dreamed about it, gah!)

Holy crap!!

::Does a little dance:: :D

Also, thank you to the folks who helped me with the cover copy of book two in my previous post. As soon as I stop floating around my living room, I’m having another go at that.

In which I have a happy moment

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I just stopped by my local Borders and saw they had new stock to sign. Eight new copies of Child of Fire. This is the third time I’ve dropped by in the month since the book came out, and they’ve had new books on the shelf every time.

Also, the Amazon.com sales ranking is now lower (higher? How about “closer to 1”) than it’s been for three weeks. In fact, it was hovering around 25K yesterday, and has been in the teen-thousands (I made a word!) all morning.

Thank you, everyone, who has given the book a read and helped spread the good word. I’m tremendously grateful.

Also, ethelmay sources the “apartmently” story from a previous post. Thank you, too!

In Which I Approach Normal

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Then back away again.

Lots of vivid, awful dreams last night which I will not relay in detail but which I interpret as health anxiety. I had a salad for lunch today. And never mind that I woke up four minutes before the last non-tardy bus was going to arrive. Yeah, I’m a real fashion rebel at work today.

But I swung by the downtown Borders to buy my son a welcome home toy, and what should I see but new, unsigned copies of Child of Fire? It seems the fourteen they ordered originally were down to three, and the five new ones were just sitting there waiting for me to scribble in them. Which I did.

On top of that, the book is now up to 49 reviews on Amazon.com, and a few of the most recent are quite-sensible 5-star reviews. Such good people, really. But who will be number 50? The suspense is so strong that I’m tempted to make a contest about it. (Okay, not really. Did I mention that I overslept and almost missed work? I’m too damn tired for a contest.)

And I no longer feel like a miserable failure. So there’s that.

And the 50th review has been posted! It’s yet another “This isn’t a Jim Butcher novel!” comment. Ah, well.

Trouble at the office

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And I mean my writing office, not my day job. And by “writing office” I mean Starbucks.

OCD Guy is having a bad day today. Worse than usual, at least. His finger drumming has been especially bad, and he’s just started foot stomping.

The music, too, has been especially intrusive. It’s not as awful as the times the barista’s sing along (which is an unbearable distraction) but for some reason the tunes keep stealing my attention away.

In good news, after reviewing the changes I need to make on Man Bites World, I’ve realized it’s not that much work. My wife and some will be out of town for about 10 days, and while I’ll be day jobbing for several of them, I hope to be able to finish all this before they return.