Possibly the most iconic house in my home province that isn't on the #1 highway is now in Google Street View:
I must say I'm amused at the idea of calling a provincial trunk highway a "street". I guess it's paved…
Oh hey look, Edge Publishing has added details about Tesseracts 14 to their website. So that's one more place my name will appear when I go ego-surfing.
Looks like it's ready for pre-ordering, too:
Brandonites: Pennywise Books
Canucks: Amazon.ca
Americans, and the rest of the world too: Amazon.com
(Hint hint. Also, aside to Keith, if you're reading this — if you've got a pre-order email address or something, I'd be abundantly happy to add it to the head of this list.)
I'm pretty excited, all over again! Also: I'll be reading from my story "Heat Death, or, Answering the Ouroborous Question" at Words Alive this year. If things work out, I'll also be able to sign books there, just like a Real Proper Author.
Woo-hoo!
I'm not going to say too much about it yet — I'm still in the opening moments — but it seems that some pretty serious liberties have been taken with the copyright on a poem I had published way back in 1997. I found out about it by accident, from a relative in China, and initially assumed that it was part of the intellectual property piracy that China is, fairly or unfairly, known for.
Nope. Turns out the copyright infringement happened in my own province. In the educational system, no less.
So now I'm looking deeper, and trying to figure out what my next set of steps should be.
#
As for tonight, I'm writing, and then I'll be running, and probably writing a bit more later. I need to find out about late 17th century embalming practices — did they use camphor, for instance? — and funeral rites. Any suggestions?
…over at dead things on sticks.
Whether you're a content creator or a "gimme", you'll want to read it.
Rembrandt is ten years old when his life is turned upside-down.
It's 1928, and the Great Depression has yet to begin. Rembrandt's entire world is his extended family, three households of farmers who live very close to each other, as farm houses go. He's the only child in three families, and his aunts both want a child very badly.
So badly, in fact, that they'll cut a deal with the Devil to get what they want.
To save his aunts' souls, Rembrandt, his pa, and his uncle Thompson have to take to the road, never staying in any one place longer than twelve days. Because on the thirteenth day, the Black Bottle Man will come for them…
* * *
This one took me by surprise; it built so steadily, and so quietly, skipping from Rembrandt's youth to his 90-year-old dotage, that I didn't realize until the end just how much I had invested in it. The climax caught me off guard with just how much emotion it wrung from me. Not many books have made me tear up. This one didn't, either, but man it was a near thing.
My only complaint would be that I found a few grammatical quibbles, here and there, but on the whole this book is highly recommended.
Written by Craig Russell, based on his radio play of the same name, Black Bottle Man is published by Great Plains Teen Fiction, an imprint of Great Plains Publications. My copy is signed because I went to the book launch at Pennywise Books here in Brandon.
Get it…
from the publisher
from Chapters/Indigo
from Amazon.com
I got a new watch from my wife for my birthday last month. It's a great watch, and I like it rather a lot.
Today on my lunch break, for no other reason than "because I'm a nerd", I punched my watch's serial number into Google, expecting to find — I don't know, maybe its incept date*. Nothing much, anyways.
Instead, I found a US Marshal forfeiture auction listing that included my watch.
That's it in the bottom middle of the lot.
The things you learn.
[update] Apparently, the auction company in question "sells all the jewelry[etc.] seized and forfeited nationally for the U.S. Marshals Service." So… do I have a drug dealer's watch? Was it seized in a tax forteiture? The rather shallow mystery deepens a very little bit.
[2nd update] As it turns out, there's no mystery here. What I took to be a unique serial number was apparently in fact a global product number. So it wasn't my watch in the property auction; just a watch just like mine.
____
* See, there's that nerd thing creeping in again.
13 words that sound like what they mean
One word that doesn't sound like what it means
…is a go. I finished the high-level outline of the novel last night. I printed the outline this morning — 18 pages — and at lunch hour today I'm going to start into writing the actual first draft. Even after two months of outlining, I'm still really excited about this project, which is a good sign.
Here are the two choices for the epigraph:
Inne ye Ocean yre is an Iland,
On ye Iland yre is a Stone,
Inne ye Stone, a Seed,
Inne ye Seed, the Death of us Alle.
— From the Rutherford Codex, largely considered to be a fake
or
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
— Matthew 16:26
Any preferences out there in Reader Land?
Most novel updates will probably happen on the ETNH site: http://patrickjohanneson.com/everything/ .
Living in the "Wheat City" in a nutshell: wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat, one-way streets, and wheat.
See Slurpees and Murder for the results of my request for a marker drawing of Brandon's love affair with wheat.
Contract
The contract for my Tesseracts story arrived in my email inbox today, as well as the layout version of my story for me to proofread. Awesome. If you need me, I'll be proofreading.
Hey, does anyone know — can you spell Ouroboros with a lowercase "o"?
Update: Yes.