Pimpin’

My contact at the publisher tells me that The Stephen King Illustrated Companion should be in the Barnes & Noble warehouse on September 25th, at which point it will be available for order on their web site. Books should land in Barnes & Noble stores within two weeks after that, though it may be up to individual stores when they put them out on display.

I’ve had a number of requests for signed copies. If you would like to get one directly from me to save on half of the shipping charges, let me know so I can figure out how many copies to order in advance.

Now that the publication date is more concrete than ever before, I’m starting to update all the various organizations I belong to with information about the book, as well as preparing press releases to send to newspapers and radio stations to generate some publicity.

The weather has been terrific here these past couple of days. It’s amazing how much difference a dozen or so degrees makes. Hopefully this will remain the trend over the holiday weekend, as we have plans to go to the beach and go off the grid for a couple of days. A much needed and long overdue vacation before we both get really busy again.

Big Brother summarizes 144 hours’ worth of activity in about 144 minutes each week. They manage to make the house look like a hotbed of activity, but apparently boredom reigns most of the time. There is a lot of solitaire playing. They can’t watch videos or TV, can’t read books (except, apparently, the Bible), and have little else to do to pass the time except shoot pool and jabber at each other.  It’s no wonder they go off on each other every now and then. Cabin fever, big time. At this point, I don’t really care whether Jeff or Jordan gets evicted, though it would be nice to see Jordan make it to the end. Wouldn’t mind seeing Michelle win, either. This is the phase where everything falls apart as a rule, and to see Jordan volunteer to campaign to keep Jeff in the house is unheard of.

Here’s today’s homework assignment. I purchased two candles shaped like numbers (between 0 and 9) for my wife’s birthday. As a joke, I switched the order of the digits and in doing so increased her age by exactly 75%. Can you figure out the relationship between the two digits?