Galleys!!

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Five of these showed up in the mail (well, UPS) yesterday:



Boy... there are some pretty big moments for a writer, getting started, and this is definitely one of them. The first time you can actually pick up a copy of your book and flip through it. It's even got that ink smell that's somehow unique to the publishing industry, and hasn't changed by a molecule in probably a century or more. (I can personally only date it back to the first Dean Koontz and Stephen King paperbacks I read in the eighties.)

This feels surreal. And very cool.

Behind the Scenes at a Book Binding Company

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This is like porn for any writer dreaming of that first hardcover. I'd embed it here, but for some reason YouTube has disabled that for this video. Anyway, enjoy:

Automated Binding of C-SPAN's Abraham Lincoln Book

You can even click the little HQ button toward the bottom right of the video frame, to watch it in high-def.

Oregon Trail

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I remember it being just about the only game anyone ever played in the computer lab in my high school, in the early nineties... but for some reason I never got into it, and just now, a few hours after midnight on February 6, 2009, was the first time I ever played Oregon Trail. It's online here.

I went as a carpenter, and I made it to Oregon on my first try. Woo hoo!

Been a while

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Looks like it's been a couple months since I've updated this blog. I was finishing off the second book, using an advance test model of one of those new Apples. I can't say I recommend it if you're up against a deadline:


Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Random Thing #42 Overheard at Grocery Store

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"You don't sit down them gummy bears are goin' back on the shelf."

Just thought I'd share that.

Bob Dylan Didn't Have this to Sing About

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I've had that Jesus Jones song Right Here Right Now stuck in my head since eleven o'clock last night. And Wind of Change by Scorpions. Maybe that sounds a little cheesy. Oh well. I was just starting high school when both of those songs became hits. The Berlin Wall had just recently come down, and the Cold War was ending. It was a big deal. It was a cool time to be fourteen, when everything already feels like a big deal.

Last night was the first time I felt exactly like that again. Like the world felt in those first couple years of the 90s. No matter which candidate you were rooting for, seeing those celebrations in Grant Park, and then in New York and Washington D.C. and at Spelman College in Atlanta, it had to hit you that last night was a very big deal.

Good time to be around, whatever age.

Comments

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When I started this blog last year (and then left it sitting idle for a year) I seem to have disabled comments. I don't really remember why. Maybe I thought people would write things like, "Hey... why hasn't this been updated since October of '07?"

Anyway, all the comments on Janet Reid's blog, in response to her post linking here the other day, were extremely nice, and I felt dumb for not having comments enabled. So from now on I'll enable them. And I'm sure that as long as I avoid controversial subjects, nobody will come out of the woodwork to post anything insane, or be rude to other commenters.

Thanks to everyone for all the kind words! And thanks, Janet, for linking to the site!

Oh, by the way, soft drinks should always be called "soda," not "pop," toilet paper rolls should be positioned so that the leading edge hangs from the front of the roll, not the back, the 2004 election was rigged in Ohio, and the Voltron that was made up of fifteen vehicles was way the hell cooler than the Voltron that was made up of five lions.