Gadfly in the Ointment

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Puss in Bootstraps
IBM has developed a super computer that is smarter than a cat.
Apparently, it is able to slink outside the box.

[Edited to add:] It doesn't come with a mouse.

It's almost time for Nawanoth
Oohhh... Nawanoth is almost here. I'll explain next week. As for now, I'm down to one more week of speaking and travel. NJ schools today and tomorrow, then down to Philly for NCTE, followed by two days at a local school next Monday and Tuesday. After that, I get to stay home and write books. Or maybe I'll just blog.

Stuff
I was amused, this morning, to hear someone on the radio say, "If you Google the name 'Johnny Cash' on some sort of search engine, you'll be amazed at how many people cover his songs." I was amazed that you can Google something on Alta Vista or Lycos.

I was annoyed the other day by an email from Continental Airlines. They informed me I need to update my online profile to make sure it contains my name as it appears on my ID. So I clicked the link they sent. I don't mind adding my middle initial. I do mind that the site has no obvious way for me to change my name. I can change my email, and all that stuff, but not my name.

(SPOILER ALERT about the move UP)
I was delighted, while watching UP with my daughter, at her instant response to the site of all those balloons rising above the house. "Shouldn't they have lifted the house even before they were released?" Good point. She's right.

I was relieved when my first flight on Sunday arrived in Atlanta ten minutes early, since I had a tight connection. I was only slightly stressed when we had to wait ten minutes for a jetway driver. No more flights this year. Yay.

Flights of fancy
I'm departing soon for my last pair of flghts for the year. Loyal readers of this blog might remember my winter charity challenge. Well, there's no snow today. Just a 45-minute connection in Atlanta for the only plane all day that can take me home. What could go wrong? Have fun speculating.

Three things I'm happy about
1. I just had dinner with the Goddess of YA Literature.

2. It was Tex/Mex.

3. She drove.

An awesome state for books
I love Texas. Yeah, me, a Jersey boy. The thing is, the librarians in Texas work really hard to get kids into reading. I'm visiting five middle schools in Sugar Land (near Houston) this week. In most of the schools, I'm only speaking to one grade. Why? Because many of the middle schools bring in a different author for each grade. Imagine that -- three author visits to coordinate each year. And the libraries have great displays of the Lone Star Book lists. It's just really good in many ways. As I wander around each library, I just marvel at how much good stuff is out there for kids to read.

The kids I've spoken to have been wonderful. I had 7th graders on Monday, and they were among the best behaved I've ever met. The same for today's sixth graders. The teachers were also wonderful. So, yeah, I love Texas. On top of everything else, it's warm. Once I go back home, I won't be warm again for months. But even if it was cold, I'd be happy to be here.

The tarmac less taken
I flew about a dozen times last winter and spring. I'm down to two flights left for this year. I'm heading off to Chicago this afternoon, and I'm going to Houston on Sunday. Then I don't have to fly again until March. So there won't be another winter travel challenge. (I'm too lazy to look for a link to it.) That's a good thing. Flying is not much fun anymore. Winter flying is dreadful. Though you can get a seasonal flu shot ot O'Hare.

Speaking of which, I'm not worried about the swine flu. I know I might catch it, but I also know there's no way it can kill me. My paternal grandfather died during the influenza epidemic that hit Philly back in 1918. I'm not Lamarkian enough to think this grants me any sort of biological immunity. However, I am enough of a novelist to know that the irony of dying in the same way as my grandfather would be far too trite a device for any sort of good story. So, on the theory that the universe leans toward clever irony and is capapble of tossing out some interesting plot twists, I'm feeling pretty darn invulnerable to flu death. (Though I'm not ruling out the possibility of a freak snow storm taking out my plane this afternoon.)

DST failure
It appears that Daylight Savings Time doesn't brighten the morning if you get up too early.

Ship wrecked
My best laid plans have crashed and burned. I'd kept today free to dive into the new Jak and Daxter game. Bad move. Let me explain. The book-publishing world has a dizzying variety of dates: release date, ship date, lay-down (Sally?) date, on-sale date, etc. On top of that, winter seems to include spring, and all of the seasonal boundaries are unclear in my mind. Things in the game industry are simpler, but where there is even a remote chance to misunderstand any aspect of the real world, I have a good chance of being wrong. It turns out that today isn't the release date for new games, it's the ship date. So the games ship to the stores today. These games will be available tomorrow. I won't be available tomorrow. On the bright side, I'll have something to look forward to when my travel marathon ends.

Speaking of bright sides, The Big Stink, book 4 in the Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie series went off to copy editing yesterday. One more book to go.

Anyone who has absolutely nothing to do for an hour and has about 63 meg of available disk space can check out a podcast where I'm interviewed by the clever and astute Rick Kleffel. I'm flattered by the write-up he gave me.

We can all be number 1
My Rotten Life is the current hardcover horror best seller at Eerie Books in Wylie TX, ahead of Mr. Gamin and Mr. Hill. Doing well at an independent store is especially nice since it suggests someone was hand selling the book. But that's a topic for a different post. Right now, I want to talk about how all of us are amazing. That's the nice thing about the Internet. You can always find some place where you're in the lead. For example, Amazon has so many sub categories that one of my books can always be counted on to give me a false sense of awesomeness. Punished! is often in the top three or four books in the category Books > Entertainment > Humor > Puns and Wordplay. So I only have to dig down three levels below books to find joy. Whenever I want to feed my vampire-like thirst for validation (hmmm Valid the Impaler?), I just have to do a bit of web browsing. If you have a book on the shelves, someone out there loves it most, or has put it on a reading list, or in some other way singled it out for a kiss.

Sometimes, the attention is so unexpected and delightful that it cries out to be shared. Here's a site that pairs kidlit with knitting projects. Stuff like that is priceless, both because someone thought it up in the first place, and because someone picked my book.

Remember, somewhere out there on the web, you are number one. Of course, if you've ever been reviewed by Kirkus, you can also be treated like number two. But that's another story.

Hi, Jak
If your PS2 has been sitting idle for a while, and you haven't paid much attention to gaming sites for the last five or six months, I have great news for you. (Why do I feel that I have now sieved my readers down to one or two?) Tuesday, Jak and Daxter, the Lost Frontier comes out for PS2 and PSP. Jak II was one of my favorite PS2 games. To find out a major title is coming out for an older system this late in the system's life cycle is really wonderful. (Much more wonderful than the structure of the previous sentence.) I have organized my whole work schedule so, if I put in enough hours this weekend, I can take Tuesday off. Wednesday, I start traveling. Tuesday, Jak is all mine.

I didn't program the last Atari 2600 game ever produced, but I came close. I did a game called My Golf, which was released in Australia in 1990. (It was a contract job.) There were a couple games released after that, but I don't think anything commercial came out after 1990, except for hobbyist releases. I actually wrote 2 games that year, so I think I was responsible for about 25% of the titles released in 1990. In retrospect, I'm not sure if this is cool or sad.

I'm also eager to see the reviews for Dragon Age: Origins. It also releases on Tuesday. It looks like it carries on the tradition of great dungeon-crawler action RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Champions of Norrath. Okay, now I've lost everyone. My daughter and I played all four of those (each of the titles I mentioned had a sequel). They were great 2-player co-op games. As long as I let her have first dibs on all dropped weapons and treasure.

All of this has been posted mostly because I am trying to avoid getting back to work, even though I have to get to work.

Happy Halloween.

Award of the state
Ah, the sweet smell of success. Literally. I drove to Hershey yesterday to receive the Keystone to Reading Award from the Keystone State Reading Association for my chapter book, Punished. The young adult award went to Pam Muñoz Ryan, who is such a trooper that she flew here from San Diego just to attent the luncheon. I had a chance to chat with her for a while, which was nice.

I'm enjoying a small lull before the last travel marathon of the fall. Starting in the middle of next week, I'll be in NJ and Chicago, followed by a week in Houston, followed by day trips to various parts of PA and NJ, followed by a couple days in Philly, enjoying NCTE.

Yet another virus to fear
Apparently, the H1-N1 has already mutated, producing a second strain. This new virus, the H1-Nron causes a particulary nasty sickness characterized by the delusion that one has lots of energy.

Why I'll never Twitter
Because it just hit me that I love telling people I'm twitless.

Delta Dawn
The two Delta pilots who overshot their airport by more than an hour now claim they were distracted by their computers. That's obviously a load of bull crap. There's no way two people could both zone out for so long just because they were studying the new crew schedules, as they claimed. I think the truth will eventually come out. But I already know what it is. They will both finally admit, "We did it for the show." And then they will both throw up. Twice. And float away.

Rogue gain?
Is it just me? Every time I headlines saying, "Palin Goes Rogue" I expect the next headline to be "Palin Goes Commando."

Oops -- Teen Read Week is over and I missed it
Okay, I often claim to be the world's least observant writer. I can stand in an airport within sight of a large sign that says, "TAXIS," and have no idea where I go to get a cab. But I'm not sure how I managed to completely miss the fact that this was Teen Read Week. Not that I'd have gone through the week any differently had I known, other than perhaps making an irreverent blog post or two about the questionable ethics of encouraging teens to get tattoos just so the rest of us can read them. I did spend part of the week at a bed and breakfast with spotty wifi. (This being every traveling writer's idea of Hell.) I guess that buys me a bit of slack. But still, I feel that I missed out on something. On the other hand, teens who read do so every week, so I guess I'll get 51 more chances to do something in recognition of that.

More events of a fortunate series
Today, I'll be getting the galleys for Goop Soup, book 3 in the "Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie" series. I have to return them by the middle of next month. Today, I'll also be starting my next pass on book 4, The Big Stink. The final version is due early next month. Luckily, the first submission version didn't have any major editorial issues. In one sense, I'm pleased I'm turning the books around so quickly. In another, I miss the luxury of letting a book gestate, mutate, and mature. A series is like bread. You add the yeast, it rises, and you're ready to bake. A novel is like mead. You add the yeast, it ferments for a while, and then it needs to sit for a long time. I'm really pleased with the the books in the series so far, and I put in enough hours on each one so it doesn't feel like hack work or a rush job, but I haven't had much chance to absorb or process everything that is flashing by.

Brazil Whacks
Brazil has announced the host sport for their 2016 Olympics. It will be the traditional BuyAthlon, which combines drug running and shooting.

My 1.66666% of Weekend Edition
The zombie piece Rick Kleffel did ran on NPR's Weekend Edition this morning. Here's a link to the audio. Note that the text below the link is just a summary. To hear me in my glory, you have to click the speaker thingee at the top. I'm sure Rick Kleffel would appreciate some listener comments on the web page.

I just got the royalty statement for my one book with the worst deep-discount clause. For the current period (Jan. through June), the book sold 993 copies at the regular discount, earning 48 cents per book. (Basically, 6% of the cover price.) It also sold 9,523 copies at a 50% discotunt, earning 20 cents per book. In total, the paperback has earned an average of 17.5 cents per book. The lesson here? Two things. First, don't sign a contract with a clause that allows a publisher to make more money by selling a book for less. Second, never assume that deep discounts are the exception. For this book to have averaged 17.5 cents a copy, when regular sales bring in more than 40 cents, a huge portion of the sales had to have been made at a very steep discount. Having blogged about this for several years, I've decided to retire the subject. I'll let someone else tilt at the windmills.