So this week I’m reading The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, a horror/dark fantasy/historical/possibly semi-autobiographical novel by the violinist and pop/punk/cabaret/sort-of-unclassifiable singer Emilie Autumn.
Pippi Longstockings is NOT in the house.
So this week I’m reading Three Moments of an Explosion, a collection of short stories by one of my favorite writers, China Miéville:
This week I was reading The Vagrant, by Peter Newman, in which Ted Danson, Steve Guttenberg, Tom Selleck, and a baby wander through a post-apocalyptic wasteland that―oh, wait, sorry, that was Three Men and a Baby. No, in The Vagrant, there’s just one man, a baby, and a goat. And, eventually, a few hangers-on. They are definitely wandering through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, though.
This week, having finally finished off all those dystopian stories, I have moved on to something based on Lewis Carroll’s famous stories about Wonderland: Alice, by Christina Henry. No doubt this will be cheerful and wacky, eh?
Then again, maybe not.
This past week we watched “Spring”, a low-budget indie film that we got as a disc from Netflix.
So late last month, my novel A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder (or, as we lazy folks refer to it, Crows) picked up a review over on Amazon.com. That makes two (count ’em!) Amazon reviews for this book since it was published in 2002. At this rate I’ll be hitting the magic number of, oh, say, 50 reviews, somewhere just shy of halfway through the millennium. Of course by then everyone will be reading their books under the sea on their waterproof devices, and Crows will be classified as science fiction because it takes place on dry land, but hey. Genres shift.
It’s been quite a while since I reached into my giant pile of rejection (and some acceptance) letters, so this week I spun up random.org to have it tell me which folder I should reach into. It selected folder I-J, from which I pulled an old contract from Hard Shell Word Factory (now an imprint of Mundania Press, home of some oddly specific genre categorizations), for the eBook rights to Night Watchman. “Hard Shell Word Factory” doesn’t belong in the I-J folder, of course, but, you know, sometimes things get misfiled. But anyway, I picked it, so here it is. Rather than reproducing all umpteen pages of the eBook contract, I thought I would just pull a few selected sections from it, which may serve as an interesting illumination of how the eBook world has changed since the year 2000 (or, as we called it back in those panic-stricken days, “Y2K”).
