Today would have been my mother’s 113th birthday. Even at 80, when this picture was taken in her Connecticut living room, Sophie Dutton was a…
Leave a CommentPublishing dark matter since 2018
Publishing dark matter since 2018
Today would have been my mother’s 113th birthday. Even at 80, when this picture was taken in her Connecticut living room, Sophie Dutton was a…
Leave a CommentDear Readers,
Light rain has fallen all day here in 01754 as I write this. More is forecast, and the sun might not come out for the next four days. Once upon a time it would have been snow. I guess I’m thankful for that, as I don’t feel up to shoveling right now.
I hit the Holidaze with a bowel disorder, bookended by Covid—first my wife’s and then mine. When she got it a few days before Christmas, it didn’t lay her entirely low, but it did a number on her travel plans. She had to cancel her flight to Turkey, where she wanted to usher in 2023 with her family, and had to settle for Skyping.
Somehow I avoided picking up her ailment for two weeks, but on New Years Day I tested positive at home. That was weird, because I didn’t feel sick, and still don’t. Not so peppy, but that’s a small price to pay for the honor. Maybe my three boosters helped.
1 CommentI’m afraid another month blew by without saying hi to you. And rather than ranting about politics or plugging my book, I’m offering a guest…
Leave a CommentMy apologies for not writing in August. Not only was it beastly hot, I was extremely otherwise occupied packing and moving our stuff to a new house.
I knew it was bound to happen and put it off as long as I could, but buckled under rising home prices, mortgages, and peer pressure. It wasn’t the first time my spouse and I had committed to buying property but it was the first time our offer was accepted.
We dithered and negotiated over this and that for seven weeks before biting the debt bullet on a cute little mid-century cape in a modest but up-and-coming mill town 20 miles west of Boston. Sorting and packing and labeling and loading and hauling and unloading and distributing three tons of stuff took more than a month, leaving us with dozens of banana and banker boxes brimming with history to plumb and triage and keep or trash. The banana boxes at least found a good home in the barn of a coop that gleans otherwise wasted crops from local farms and donates them to food pantries and the like.
1 CommentThanks to having our offer on a house accepted, June came and went without finding time to emit a newsletter; if you’ve ever gone through…
Leave a CommentThis month’s assorted provocations include several commentaries, a story, a funding appeal, and news of recent publications. Two of the items are fiction.
5/5. Got an email saying, “Greetings everybody, I’m Oscar, your friendly spambot. I’ll be feeding you all sorts of incredibly delicious offers from exotic portals for your shopping enjoyment. You’ll want to read each and every one and clip the valuable coupons.”
How nice. I kept reading.
You would be foolish to decline my bountiful offer, but can opt out at any time by visiting my Patreon page and donating $5 to cover my monthly upkeep or just $50 for a whole year, and thank you in advance.
Welcome to my internet family!
Oscar.
At least it doesn’t want Bitcoin. Still considering what to do. Any ideas?
Leave a CommentBefore I forget, Saturday 4/30 is Indie Bookstore day. You may yawn, but it’s a big deal in their struggle for survival. Find a local bookstore and go see what’s happening. Click the poster below to visit a store locator at bookshop.org. Click here to see the full size image. If you have a website or want to send out email about it, copy this section and paste it there.
And while you’re there, why not browse at the Perfidy Press Bookstore. Thinking of adding a shelf called Friends Recommend... with books that you and others I know believe readers would enjoy. It’ll be limited to 10 titles, so don’t delay, send in your faves.
Sometimes the magic works.
It isn’t normally possible for an author to get a new book reviewed in print before it goes to galley, which means you’ve got a publisher or you’re publishing it yourself and it’s all typeset. I’m in a pre-publication limbo, and rather than just twiddling my thumbs til my publisher does their thing, I decided to review my novel myself—but not by itself.
1 CommentThis month’s topical commentary comes with a commercial.
In a perverse twist of ancient history, here comes the Ides of March and Ukrainians are falling to bombs, missiles, and shells aimed at them by a modern-day power-mad emperor. We’re in dangerous territory that could have been skirted. I can’t help but feel things would have been different had the US and EU not engineered a 2013 coup in Ukraine that threatened to make it an anti-Russian economic and military outpost. (If you object to the socialist slant of that article, see this 2019 paper by neorealist political scientist John Mearsheimer that largely agrees with its analysis.) Read and weep about what the West hoped to reap at Russia’s expense — an enlarged military perimeter, lucrative investments, austerity measures, neofascist nationalism…
1 CommentAs the year inexorably winds down to the orgies of consumption I sometimes call the holydaze, I find myself unaccountably nostalgic for the “old daze,” when my parents, grandparents, and perhaps an aunt, cousin or guest gathered around the table at my childhood home in Connecticut. Along with my parents and theirs, five of my twelve first cousins have since departed to their final destinations. Of the survivors, one of us lives close at hand and she’ll be with us on Thanksgiving, hopefully with stories. Her mom was a fabulous cook who threw large dinner parties I well remember that I’ll never upstage, even with Peking Duck as our main course. (Don’t ask why. It just happened that way.)
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