Newfangled Death

...that's what I'm working on now! It's the tentative name of a mini-collection of new poetry -- both free verse and rhyming -- coming in a month or so to all eReaders and PC/Mac/whatever. It'll be $1 USD and have probably 20-30 poems depending on how their lengths unfold. But no illustrations this time around, because of compatibility with eReaders and because I'd like to take a more direct route to your brain now anyway, if you'll kindly creak open your skull.

And for people who like physical books, the current plan is to release three or four digital collections like this fella and then make a print anthology of them available on Amazon.com. Somewhere under $10 I'm hoping. Somewhere within the year I'm hoping. Shipping may not be great for outside the states (that includes me!) but I'll explore other options as well.

So, I'll keep you updated on that. I'd be thrilled to sell anything at all really, with no self-deprecation intended. I'm glad there are some people who already follow what I do, but this is uphill territory regardless.

In the meantime, I spent a good juicy chunk of February writing a short story for a contest in the Toronto Star, a newspaper around here. When my girlfriend and I went to drop it off (on deadline day, naturally), the box was stuffed full of envelopes. One was even inexplicably housed in a hamster cage by the reception desk. The competition was streaming in and out the door, and while they looked like nice people, let's hope hope they are all awful writers.

I have mixed feelings about the story I wrote, which ended up being a kind of fairy tale somehow, but it's done and it was fun to flail madly at a deadline again.

Oh,

and a week ago, my sister's cat vomited a rubber band.

It was kind of cute.