Day: September 14, 2007

A good night’s sleep can work wonders. I like my kids again. They’ve gone back to being generally agreeable and cute rather than screaming, kicking balls of emotion. I’m going to make them go to bed early again tonight and see if this is a repeatable miracle.

It turned out to be a very good thing that the kids were in bed early. Thursday is Howard’s gaming night. The GM for the game had a crisis which left the players at loose ends. They all came over here and tip toed into the house so as not to wake the children. It was a really fun couple of hours. Howard cooked some food. There was talking and laughing. Then we watched Back to the Future. I was really glad that my rough evening had such an enjoyable end.

Today was happy and productive for me. I got to field a bunch of emails from people who are excited about buying sketch editions of the next Schlock book, but who needed special help for one reason or another. I love answering that kind of email because only a little bit of extra effort on my part makes people effusively happy. I figure the extra effort is only due to these people since they’re paying our bills.

One week until pre-orders open. I need to run some orders through and make sure that everything works the way it should. The store had a pretty good stress test with the last book release, but we’re doing some different things. I need to test those.

A couple of years ago I met a very nice man named James Dashner. He was one of a group of people that I visited with at Conduit in 2006 who inspired me to work toward my own dreams. I think the biggest indicator for the success of a writer is that they know other people who have succeeded. A couple months later I lured James and his family over to my house for dinner so that Kiki could stare in wonder at the author of the Jimmy Fincher Saga. She had him sign books and still has them stashed away in her room where no one else can damage them.

James is a fun guy to be around and is just getting ready to leave his day job for a career as an author. I’m very excited for him. As part of this move he’s begun a blog of his very own, The Dashner Dude. As is true with most new blogs, he feels a little lonely over there and would like some company. You can click the link and meet James for yourself.

This entry was made primarily because James offered free books for blog links. I like free books. But honestly, I like James even more than free books and I’d love to see his career as a writer soar.