A quick story (with news) about The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon to lead into this blog: One of the reasons I set up a Facebook page for the novel this early in the game was because I figured that after the announcement that I’d been shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize I figured that I needed to grab up domain names and usernames and such before anyone else grabbed them and “held them hostage” as it were. I finally got enough Likes to get a…
These past few days after the announcement that my yet-to-be-published novel, The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon, has been shortlisted for this year’s Dundee International Book Prize, have been strange to say the least. It’s hard to know just what to expect when something like this happens, but the course of events so far has been nothing like I could have predicted. To those of you who have sent me congratulations or compliments on the published excerpt, I thank you deeply. I want to take a…
Those of you on my social media feeds got the news today that I’ve been shortlisted for this year’s Dundee International Book Prize for my first yet-to-be published novel, The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon. Since not all of you who are reading this may be familiar with the story so far, please allow me to catch you up. Early in 2010 I experienced a spurt of story ideas, most of which I was able to get down into some kind of short story. At the time…
The other day I observed that, following a reformat and upgrade of Yggdrasil Mark II about a year ago, I still hadn’t transferred my old away messages onto my IM programme. For as long as I can remember being on IM software that let you set custom away messages — I want to say back when I used ICQ you could only select from one of a handful of preset messages — I kept a list of different away messages based on song lyrics or…
Calling Off Auction, Borders to Liquidate (New York Times) When Borders came to Toledo a few years ago I kind of made a point of not going there. Their arrival caused Toledo’s largest and best independent bookstore, Thackeray’s Books, a favourite haunt of my family’s, to close up shop. It didn’t help that Borders moved into Franklin Park Mall (I refuse to call it by its new name), which rapidly went downhill this past decade, gathering all sorts of undesirable characters. When Southwyck Mall closed…