Try number 2 this time around

Well...

Meisha Merlin says they have less than 10 copies of Crystal Dragon on hand... which means that what they had has been sold or is all in the distribution pipeline. The book has been doing fairly well over on amazon.com, running at around 25,000 or so in rank 6 or 7 months after initial release, and with a lot of books ordered direct in the first place... both amazon and bn.com report they can still ship in 24 hours.

Meanwhile, I went by the barn that burned a few miles from here last night, causing a ruckus. It used to be a great big barn... I have a few photos..I'll try to get one or two up later on.

Both the home mailbox and the post office were disappointments today in terms of checks, but we got some *great* ads, including one with a handy opt-out form that went right back into the mail...send us *no more* credit card applications, thanks. I've been averaging three credit card offers a day between the home address and the office address... please, I'd need a Brinks truck to carry them all if I accepted a month's worth...and then I'd need the standard rich and famous movie contract, too!

Been playing bravely with Firefox 2.0 release candidate, with no problems of note. I like the speed.

Played briefly in Second Life today -- I'm adding advertising panels to my airship, you see, they say "Read Science Fiction"... and I have hopes that a fancier version will be up soon, thanks to the resident SL/FoL art whiz. Thanks to some lucky trades I/Elan has... an airship, several different jet cars, a spaceship...and not enough room to put them all out.

If you're in SL and missed Rolanni's nice merry go round... it's running daily at Friends of Liad Park. The airship is currently parked at the park as well. I chatted in SL with... 4 members of the FoL, by the way, and got into discussion about Brunner, Ballard, and Delany all having books that seem to prefigure the SL world. Imagine... also thought it was funny that, as usual, SF geek talk was able to chase away more than half of the folks wandering by. Fans, we don't get no respect....

Quick notes

Been busy in unexpected ways...

looked at the corner of the kitchen the other day and said ...
that's got to change. So now we have a lot more storage *and* as a bonus, we have much better heating circulation, what with the 1/3 of the baseboard that had been hidden and blocked now usable. NOT, I say, not that we've had the heat on yet this year.

Today, marks our anniversary -- that is a moving anniversary -- 18 years since we arrived in Maine. About this time 18 years ago we were discovering that the newspaper job I'd gotten through correspondence and phone calls...had disappeared while we were enroute. Let's hear it for adventures.

Today is also, IIRC, Liaden fan and friend Farwing's birthday. Tell her hello if you see her.

Yes, the cats were jumpy for no apparent reason last night. Just because *we* didn't have the good sense to notice and earthquake where we were...

Meanwhile, we're alternating going to the living room window to see if the mail has arrived. We could really use that check. You know, the one that was in the mail last week, or was that the week before? ... if you see that check, tell it hello and send it our way will you?

So. on my plate, sometime in the next days or so I must rearrange my office to put the furniture that was blocking the vents in the kitchen into a corner where it will not block vents. Then I;ll get the 28 reams of paper I have sitting here on to the furniture... and I need to write up a storm. Maybe two storms...

Being a librarian is one of my conditions -- once you're a librarian you never quite recover, even if you do other work. The same is true of journalism. And so, on top of all the other plans today I'll make a side trip while going to the post office to visit the site of the barn fire that caused so much distress in the neighborhood yesterday.

Oh yeah, chess last night.

So I played three club-rated games last night and won them all. I also drew Gary a couple of games, and managed a couple of horrendously bad games that hurt the ego, but not the rating... but that's club chess for you.