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Odd Lots
- I'll get back to the "If I Had a Billion..." game shortly. I've had more mail on this than anything since I spoke of grounding, and it's made me think even harder about the issues involved.
- My sister Gretchen is going in for major surgery in a couple of weeks, so Carol and I are heading back to Chicago to stay with them for awhile and share the motherhood function while Gretchen can't. I mentioned to Gretchen that I may be changing diapers for the first time in my long life, and Carol began laughing. May? May? There is no "may..."
- We first landed on the Moon 38 years ago today. My SF writer's intuition is that we will not go back without major advances in nanotechnology. I'll expand on this insight someday. We need to master the Very Small before we will make much headway against the Very Big.
- My bookstore on Lulu.com has been serving me very well in my republication of the Carl & Jerry stories, but they have some other interesting options, like full-color calendars. To test it out, I created a QBit 2008 calendar. Still a little pricey, but it's an idea (one-at-a-time custom calendars) that I myself would not have had. I created it literally for myself (and possibly as gifts for relatives) but if you want one you can certainly order one.
- It's All Harry's Hallows Eve, and the gremlins are out in force, somehow filching copies out of the locked-down distribution channel, and photographing them on somebody's grubby carpet before knitting the photos together into a monster PDF that is now bouncing around the P2P circuit. The publishers are spitting and sputtering their slightly silly rage about it all, while (I'm sure) inwardly acknowledging that the resulting news items represent a fortune in free publicity. This blog even suggests that the photographed copy was a deliberate PR stunt. No way—there are too many Right Men and Right Women involved.
- The larger problem with Harry is that monster retailers are using him as a loss-leader to bring people in the door, sometimes with a retail price so low it's lower than the wholesale price offered to smaller booksellers. This is insane, and one reason I think that giving manufacturers some ability set minimum retail prices might be a good thing. Might. In the meantime, I may be the only person in the Western world who will reliably not read Deathly Hallows. Each time I've begun one of the other books, I soon think: Egad. Soap opera. Hey, when is Ugly Betty on again?
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