…before the book is officially on sale. To help me celebrate my brother flew in from Belleville yesterday – a total surprise! I hadn’t expected him at all so a special day will become more so.

I answered a few questions in an interview for a book chain the other day and one of them asked me to name some of my favorite books. There are so many, and for so many different reasons, but the one that kept popping into my head was the dictionary. Maybe sounds nerdy, but every time I open it I’m fascinated. I’ll look up one word and twenty minutes later I’m still reading.

1. Received my copies of the novel this morning.
2. Had a great egg, bacon, and cheese on a toasted bagel for breakfast at the diner while chatting with my adopted New York Jewish grandmother.
3. Found out the UK Science Fiction Book Club is picking up A Darkness Forged in Fire.
4. Found out my book was a ‘pick of the week’ on a Canadian television morning show yesterday.
5. Saw and signed the first copies of my book in a B&N this afternoon.
6. Ate a really, really good black&white cookie…with milk.
7. Oh, and even though it happened last night, got two tickets to see The Police at MSG this August while supporting Public Television.
8. Other than that, not much happened.

It is perhaps best not to look too deeply into the shadows of one’s soul lest you find things there better left unrevealed. I, as it turns out, enjoy pain. Well, in the context of training for running. Last night we did more hill work. Up/down, up/down, up/down with some pushups between runs just for fun…yippee. The strange thing was, I loved going uphill, and wasn’t as fond of coming back down. You can really power your way up the hill, grunting and pumping your arms and taking longer strides. Downhill though, feels like a bus about to lose its brakes in the Alps. Clearly, I need to work on my downhill technique.

Later today I’ll be talking with the narrator, Michael Kramer, for A Darkness Forged in Fire. We’re going to go over the pronunciation of some names. I can’t recall if I mentioned this before, but he’s also narrated Robert Jordan’s series. I wouldn’t mind if a little of that success rubbed off! I think the audio comes out mid August and I’m excited to hear my story read by someone else.

Big thanks to the marketing folks at Pocket for the ad in the July issue of Locus. My first reaction on seeing it was “Oooooooooooo, color.” 🙂

The movie is simply brilliant. And from the sounds of my fellow movie goers, most of whom were under the age of 10, they’d agree. I was around that age when Star Wars came out and I was instantly fascinated by R2D2, but even then I knew he and fellow robot C3P0 were there for comic relief. WALL*E is the star of this show and excels in his/its leading man, er, leading robot, role.

Go see it. If you’re a writer you’ll learn a thing or fifty, and if you’re a human being, you’ll learn even more. This is one great movie. Clearly, I’d never make it as a critic. I went, I saw and I enjoyed.

If you keep telling yourself you’re not going mad is it already too late? The logical part of me knows how Amazon works, what the rough percentage is of books sold in comparison to other accounts like B&N, Borders, Chapters-Indigo, Waterstones etc. and what that ever changing ranking really means in actual books sold. And yet, like a moth to a flame, I find myself wanting to check in, you know, just out of curiosity, to see where it’s at. Oh, I could quit anytime I want, really, but this is research, I’m trying to be an informed author. It’s important that I know because…because…because not knowing is agony! And with my new Blackberry it’s like pouring coffee in an I.V. straight into my bloodstream. But unlike that first morning cuppa, each Amazon hit is rife with uncertainty – the ranking might have gone up, in which case your heart flutters like a bright, spring morning, or it might have gone down, taking with it your will to live. You never know, and each hour when those tumblers tick and a new ranking appears you live, and die, a little more each time. If you’re really hard core, however, you can take it a step further and have aweb application monitor it for you. Yeah, 24/7 Amazon, raw and uncut.

…help me…