Randomness for 11/3

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1) Gore Vidal can go fuck himself.

“So what’s your take on Polanski, this many years later?

I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?”

via bookslut

2) Malcolm Gladwell: Football, dogfighting and brain damage. I don’t think I’m going to be able to watch football in the same way again. Actually, I’m thinking of giving it up entirely.

3) On a slightly lighter note: America pays more for its health care, in convenient chart form. The interesting thing about this is that people say Medicare spending is unsustainable, and also that they don’t pay enough for doctors et al to keep their doors open. Aside from the fact that those two are pretty much contradictory, it’s instructive to see how much more money Medicare spends than foreign payors.

4) Now for something upbeat: Writer Carrie Vaughn: The Best Advice I Ever Got. How perfect the timing of this is for me!

5) And then there’s this: Supernatural collective nouns. via tnh’s particles.

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.

Please help

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I’m trying to come up with some back cover copy for Game of Cages. This is a little rough and a little too long, but what do you think?

In the wilds of the North Cascades, near a small town called Washaway, a secret high-stakes auction is taking place. A select wealthy few have gathered to bid on a captured extradimensional entity known as a predator.

The peers of the Twenty Palace Society, powerful sorcerers all, are dedicated to protecting the Earth by destroying predators–as well as anyone who would summon or possess one. Left unchecked, a single predator could scour the earth of all life. But none of the peers are near enough to raid the auction, so it falls to Ray Lilly, an expendable “wooden man” with a few stolen scraps of magic and an investigator with no magic at all to surveil the event and identify the winning bidder for later sanction.

They arrive too late. One of the losing bidders has released the predator in an act of sabotage and it has fled to the nearby town to feed. Now all the bidders are tearing apart the town, trying to capture the creature for themselves. And unknown to Ray, one of them is a powerful magician the society has been hunting for decades, and more dangerous than any single predator. Even worse, he’s taken notice of Ray, and knows who and what he is.

Can Ray and the investigator hold out until help arrives? Or will they, and the entire town, be swept away in the conflict of these terrible powers?

Any input would be appreciated.

Update: copy sent. Thanks for your help, everyone!

Randomness for 11/1

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1) New book explains why Tina Fey hates Sarah Palin. Apparently, they play different kinds of characters on TV.

2) The Ten Funniest People on Twitter. You’re welcome.

3) In *my* day we had to roll the dice ourselves… And we were happy to do it, too!

4) Free web games, with tips for winning them.

5) Nine questionable Batman toys. I’ve linked to the water pistol before, but the bath foam is even more disturbing.

MONK writer meets his readers

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“Is Monk ever going to get any?”

“You mean have sex?”

“Yes,” she said. She’d actually asked me the same question during the question-and-answer session but I guess my answer didn’t satisfy her.

“Well, the show is over, so no, I don’t think so.”

“What about in your books?”

I shook my head. “I just don’t see it.”

“I do,” she said. “Vividly.”

Weirdly, someone asked me about NaNoWriMo

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I won’t be taking part. I’m still editing Man Bites World (finished one of the difficult parts today) and I’ll have galleys for Game of Cages soon. After that, it’s new project time, so I’ll have brainstorming and outlining to do. I may not write another word of rough draft until Christmas.

However, even if I weren’t knee-deep in edits, I’d probably skip it. I’ve never joined in and probably never will.

Happy Halloween!

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House Haunted By Tortured Souls Of Current Residents

“HARTFORD, MI—On the outside it may look like any other home, but within the walls of 6535 Maple Ave. lies a terrifying secret: Every night, when the sun goes down and the moon comes out, this suburban bungalow is haunted by the restless, tormented souls of its current residents, the Davidson family.”

Bobby McFerrin and the Pentatonic Scale

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Wonderful.

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!

E-Book Stuff

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I missed this when it first blew up last week (thanks a lot, missing LJ-feeds!), but apparently there was an online dustup about the fact that Kindle owners can have more than one Kindle (or iPhone) on a single account. There’s no requirement that the machines all belong to the same person, or that they all live at the same address, either. This lets people who download a book onto their Kindle share it with friends.

Apparently, this came up in a NYTimes article, and some authors went on a name-and-shame campaign against the reader named in the article because the article made it seem that she was bending the rules. Dear Author covers the situation pretty well, and makes some good points about e-books and book-sharing.

Me, I think it’s great that Kindle readers can share. That brings me closer (but not to) the point that I’d be willing to get one. People: Share my books with your friends and I will be happy!

Oh, and writers shouldn’t call readers “thieves.” Duh.

On that note, John Scalzi points out that Amazon.com has a new patent that would track e-book piracy by altering the text of the book in unique ways–essentially substituting synonyms for words in the book.

Scalzi, quite sensibly, calls bullshit on that. Jane at Dear Author likes the idea better, although she seems to be promoting an idea similar to but not identical to what Scalzi’s talking about.

For me, I hate it. I have zero faith in a computer’s ability to substitute synonyms sensibly. In fact, readers would probably be astute enough to spot the switches.

And it reminds me of certain horror stories, such as the English author who who discovered that the editors who published their book in the U.S. were concerned enough that American readers would be confused by British terminology (“They went back to his flat.”) that they did wholesale search-and-replace. At which point one of the characters delivered a line of dialog “apartmently.” Ungood.

I’m with Scalzi on this one (and I hope that “apartmently” story is apocryphal).