Windows file copy dialog author visits some friends & Sunday O-Rama

Another classic xkcd: The author of the Windows file copy dialog visits some friends:

Sunday O-Rama

While I’m procrastinating, perhaps a few announcements are in order.

MARVELLOUS HAIRY is coming! That’s right, my second novel is on the way this fall, courtesy of Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink, a publisher for “The Enigmatic Polygeneration”. If you’d like to sign up for my newsletter, or facebook page, you can get the details as they’re available, though the book should have a pretty good distribution, and all the usual online stores for sure.

For now, check out the cover:

Review copies for influential readers are available. Just contact me.

Diesel, the zany mind behind Matress Police, and humor-blogs.com, is also a novelist. Go congratulate him for finishing his book, Mercury Falls, or better yet, sign up for his “interest list”. When it hits 500, he’s going to publish that puppy.

Another prolific friend, Ahmed Khan, is working putting together two anthologies right now, and one of my short stories, “Hounding Manny” has made the cut. You can check out the whole TOC for Fun Times in Strange Lands here. It’s a reprint of a story originally published by Oceans of the Mind, and it’s on the short fiction section of my site here: “Hounding Manny”.

If you are a little more ambitious in your reading habits, you may want to check out a contest being run by Corey Redekop, the author of delightfully demented Shelf Monkey. He has thrown down the gauntlet, and begun the Critical Monkey Contest. Here’s what Corey has to say about it:

I, as I assume most people who read this blog are, am somewhat of a book snob. I don’t pretend to read only the ‘classics’ of the Western canon, but there’s a lot of crap out there I go out of my way to avoid. See? Right there, snobbery. Bad monkey! Bad!

So I have decided to launch Critical Monkey, a little contest designed to make us confront our fears, and read those we otherwise actively ignore. These do not have to be authors who are typically derided in literary publications; choices can be books you simply have never wanted to read for whatever reason. Never read a Charles Dickens, but always felt bad? Now’s your chance to try him on for size. Have you avoided Margaret Laurence because a lousy teacher force-fed you The Stone Angel and squeezed everything good out of it (guilty!)? Time to make her acquaintance. Anything you like. Even Harlequin romance novels. I double-dog dare you to try.

You can read the rest of the rules, entry details and promise of prizes here. Essentially, you need to read seven books you wouldn’t normally read, and blog a review about them. The masochist has already inflicted Twilight upon himself. I’ve yet to decide what I will read first.

Alltop and humor-blogs.com are much more reliable.