Salacious Details Not Forthcoming. Maybe.

Playing on the iPod: Band of the Black Watch, "Will Ye No Come Back Again" from The Sands of Time
Meters Swum Today: A mighty 1900, baby, canya gimmee Halle Berry?

Ha! And you thought you were gonna get the dirt on my premarital foolings-around! No such luck. I've already written the letter for one of the books I'm flogging around, formerly titled Annie Sipkins, Accountant to the Gods, recently retitled No Accounting For Reality so as to better fit on a book jacket. The only big question left is where to send it. I was gonna send it to Daw, only to discover much to my dismay and chagrin that it was too short. Like about 50,000 words too short.

I gotta tell you, too-shortness is a new one on me; Mindbender is like 150,000 words (500-600 printed pages). No Accounting for Reality is only like 32,000 words, which is about 120 pages. The Conventional Wisdom holds that the longer a book is, the more expensive it is to print. Steve King's The Stand, for example, is rumored to have given his chief editor at Viking a mild coronary. It was almost 1200 pages and it had to be a phenomenal bestseller to make its printing run back. Well, of course it did. Seventeen printings or something ridiculous. Howsomever there's apparently some point of shortness beyond which it's not worth printing at all. Waste of decent wood pulp or something like that. I mean, hell, 120 pages is more of a longish short story, don't you think? Or maybe a novella. To quote Stephen King again, "Welcome to Novella, senyora. Sit down and get comfortable. You gonna be here long time, yes?"

Yeah, yeah, I know, it's longer than Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, which clocked in at 107. But I'm neither Big Steve, nor am I R.L. Stevenson. I'm better lookin' than both of them combined, for one thing. But here's what I'm thinking. Unless you were a regular reader of the Del Mar Times back in, say, 1999, you probably haven't heard of me anyway. So, like, what harm could it do, to publish this thing somewhere other than a trad book press? Like, say, an ebook or audio book publisher. 120 pages would fit pretty well on a Blackberry or a Palm Pilot. It's just long enough for an airplane flight to somewhere or other, and if you don't like it, you can delete it when you're finished.

Of course, this means I must do more research. Which means I can't send the letter yet. No, I'm just kidding. I'll send it somewhere before Sunday night. There's no mail on Sunday, a'course, but e-publishers usually take e-submissions, so I'll be okay there.

One publisher, one agent. That was the deal, right? Okay, I'll start working on the other letter. Just so's you know you aren't missing anything, though, I'm still in the single digits romantic-partnerwise. Yes, even at my advanced age. And I couldn't have told you anything about Joan anyway because she threatened to hide a dead cockroach in my swim fins.

She'd do it, too.