Christopher Moore’s Blog

Hey kids. I know I’ve been remiss on the blogs and posts here. I’m locked down, trying to get a new book finished before the tour in February. I promise I’ll start producing some web material soon.

For now, let me confirm the release date of the new book, Fool, will be February 10th. And that the next book will be — well — here’s the first paragraph:

“The city of San Francisco is being stalked by a huge, shaved vampyre cat named Chet, and only I, Abby Normal, emergency back-up mistress of the greater Bay Area night, and my manga-haired love monkey, Foo Dog, stand between the ravenous monster and a bloody massacre of the general public. Which isn’t, like, as bad as it sounds, because the general public kind of sucks ass.”

So, there you go. Now, back to work for me. As always, you can email me at BSFiends@aol.com if you actually want to get a personal response. I try to answer my MySpace messages, too. I’m not able, however, to respond to all of the general MySpace comments (I have to draw the line somewhere or I’ll never get any books written.).

Let’s face it. I’m a gadget guy. I like shiny new machines, sometimes because they are shiny and new. I have an Iphone, an Xbox360, 2 Playstations, two Macs, five PCs (4 of which I built), 3 flat-screen TVs, 2 Tivos, 4 Ipods, 3 Digital SLRs, 4 digital point and shoot cameras — well, you get the idea. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a luddite, or anti-technical. I am not averse to change, nor am I nostalgic for the “old days” that never really existed. Neither am I evangelical about technology – I don’t have any unnatural affection for my Macs, and I don’t have any built-in revulsion for my PCs, or vice-versa. I like stuff that works, and I get pissed off at stuff that doesn’t. Okay. Just so we’re clear.
So, despite my misgivings about E-books, which I’ll go into in a whole different blog, I bought a Kindle from Amazon. My history with the electronic book reader is this: I tried to demo the Sony reader three different times in various book stores and there was never one that worked long enough to actually tell what it was like. But it was obvious that electronic paper had some possibilities.
Then, about two months ago, Amazon’s Kindle PR division contacted me and asked me to do a blog for them, which I linked to here. I started looking into the Kindle machine, reading reviews, asking friends, checking out the specs. After all, you couldn’t sign on to Amazon without being hit in the face with another Kindle promotion, and I sign onto Amazon a lot. (Note ridiculously long gadget list above.) So, even through Amazon had sent Kindles to my friends Neil Gaiman and Daniel Handler for review, and not to me, and I had done a blog for them (for fucking nothing, despite the fact that I actually get paid to do this – a lot) I ordered a Kindle. And eight hours later (I’m not kidding, eight hours) they lowered the price by $50.
So, you know, good start. So, here are my observations. And yes, this does go on a bit.
First, the good:
Kindle delivers available books in about 60 seconds through a free cellular data network, anywhere in the country. It’s fast, there’s a pretty good selection, and the screen is easy to read, with scalable fonts. It’s light, and the battery supposedly lasts a pretty long time, as power is only required to turn/change a page, not show text (it’s not back lit). They ship it with a very nice leather cover, that almost completely negates the size and weight advantage, but does protect the Kindle if it’s strapped in, and you can surf the internet, search Amazon products, and subscribe to and read blogs, magazines, and newspapers that are available from Amazon. You can also mail Word or other text documents to yourself and for ten cents a piece, Amazon will convert them to Kindle format and send them to your Kindle. These are all cool things. With a cheap SD memory card, you could easily carry 200 books with you in this little machine, and it highlights, clips, makes notes and bookmarks text.
Which means that the Kindle is not a complete P.O.S. It is, however, at least in this generation, a partial P.O.S.
The Not So Good: 1. No place to hold it. Every place you grab it does something — activates some function.

2. No page numbers. They have reference numbers, but not actually page numbers. There’s no way to find something or tell someone else how to find it. If you change font size, the reference numbers change. So, for instance, you might say, “Oh my God, there’s the funniest line in that new Sedaris book!” “Really, what page is it on?” “Uh, 2023 of 4432 in the second biggest font.” “Oh, yeah, that means something to me.”

3. There’s no place to clip the light they sell you to clip on it, and without the light, it’s dark. Of course you can clip it to the cover they sell you but…

4. It falls out of the cover. There’s a tiny “ledge” that’s supposed to keep the Kindle in place, but it doesn’t work. Yes, I could put a piece of stick-on velcro on the back and solve this problem, but I just paid $400 for this thing, I shouldn’t have to add velcro to make it functional.

5. It shuts down. I took it to Los Angeles for a weekend trip. I’d charged it before I left, and it’s supposed to be good for 7000 “page turns” on a charge, but even with the wireless off, it just stuck on a page on the second day, so I had nothing to read. I’ve never had a real book, “lock up”.
6. Reading on the screen is disorienting. I read a lot on a screen, more than I read on paper, but reading a novel on a screen is disorienting. The screen is still pretty small, and a full page of text from a book isn’t displayed. You never have a feel of how far along you are in a book. You don’t know how far from the end of the chapter you are. There is a little line of “progress dots” along the bottom of the page that’s supposed to indicate how far along you are, but it doesn’t feel “real”. It think if you could make it default to page numbers that mirror the real book, and you knew you were on page 44 of 400, you’d have a better idea. The progress numbers aren’t always right, either. I loaded the manuscript of my new book into it. The reference numbers keep showing things like, 2483 out of 98. Which, you know, is confusing.

So, the Kindle, in my opinion, just isn’t quite there. And understand, I think there’s a certain inevitability to electronic books, so this is not a rant against the form. For some things, particularly college courses, I think e-books could rock hard. But until there’s a generation who has never read or worked with paper books, the “analog” aspect of the reader has to be a lot better. You’ve got to somehow simulate the good things about paper books (and I don’t mean the smell or the fact that you can tear the pages out and wipe with them if you’re stuck dropping dooky in the woods), while taking advantage of the assets of e-books.
I’ll have a whole new blog on e-books soon, in which we’ll explore how you can decorate your garage to accommodate your own homeless author guy, who just got Napstered out of a job.
Meanwhile, e-book owners, share your thoughts.
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What we do around the authorguy house on Easter morning….


And this from a happy reader:

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Chapter 7 – Prom Night and the Delicious Badonk of Death
Fujikasan totally busted me today for skipping invisibility class today. Thing is, I had been skipping all semester, but Fujikasan just thought I was really good. I was going to get an A, but Saki didn’t show up today to say my name at roll call. What a tool. He scratched himself while poisoning his shuriken stars in Kitchen Arts class and was all paralyzed and foaming at the mouth and stuff all afternoon. I may appear out of nowhere in his dorm room and give him the Praying Mantis Melvin of Suffering Wedginess if he lives. That or put his hand in warm water when he’s sleeping and make him pee the futon.
So, I’m going to ask Mariko to the prom. I know a lot of guys say she’s a skank, but it turns out that the rumor of her taking on the whole basketball team last year was totally bogus. It turns out that she did take them on, but she didn’t bone them, she killed them. Most of the varsity she used the viper sword and silent slaying method, but she took out the whole JV team with just nunchucks and a Motorala Razr. She’s so hawt! I just hope she doesn’t kill me with her corsage pin, which is what happened to the guy who took her to homecoming. When she says duck, she means it. I guess he thought she was ordering.
The dance is on the east wall of Toyota castle. There won’t be any music, as we are doing the whole thing under the noses of the guards, but Mariko has the most amazing booty when she’s hanging from a grappling hook, and there’s even a sliver of a moon we might have eye contact, or, maybe, you know, some Humping Tiger, Moaning Dragon, if you know what I mean. It’s formal, so I guess we’ll all be in black again. At midnight all the seniors are going to slip into the castle and kill the Emperor and his court, then there’s supposed to be a totally fly after party in the basement of the dojo, and Yashica is going to throw a whole handful of X into the punch.
Speaking of Yashica, it looks like he’s going to have to repeat senior year. I told him not to eat a bean burrito the night before stealth class. It’s not enough to be silent and invisible, they can’t smell you coming, either. Better than what happened to Toshiba, though. How many times did I tell him, just because they call it the “death of a thousand knives” doesn’t mean it’s going to be exactly a thousand. Keep jumping, even if you think you counted a thousand. Master Sushi transferred him to the killer robot program and they’re going to fit him with rocket feet or something so he’s not totally useless, but it’s not the same as being a real ninja.
I’m totally stoked to graduate and go out into the real world. My dad already got me a summer internship at a big law firm where I guess I’ll be in the mail room. Mostly just sorting and poisoning witnesses, but it will look good on the resume. We’re not allowed to throw our hats at graduation this year. Three or four parents got decapitated by last year’s class and ruined it for everyone. I just hate the part where you have to snatch your diploma from the dean’s open hand before he can close it. I just can’t do it. He’s too fast. I’ve decided the only way I’m actually going to be able to graduate is if I take his hand along with the diploma, and I totally rock with a short sword, so I hope Master Suzuki doesn’t mind when they transfer him to Pirate school next year because of his shiny new hook.
My biggest worry is that I have to sit next to Dave. He just doesn’t seem like one of the group. I don’t mean to sound racist, but, he’s like totally Western. He sucks at everything. In invisibility class he can’t even get translucent, and twice last week he dropped a smoke bomb in the men’s room when he was trying to get his unit out of his pants. Next thing you know, we’re all clinging to the ceiling, looking only like shadows out of the corner of your eye, just like we were trained, except that we’re weeing all over ourselves. I think he might be like a spy or something for the fucking pirates. And that’s only the beginning of the mystery, today in the hall…
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The Electric Rhino - An Unwritten Romance
Chapter 5 – The Test Drive
His forearms were like braided leather cords, as cordy and leathery as those lanyard thingies they used to make at summer camp. Penny loved to watch Bert use a screwdriver, he was the master of her heart, and her sex, just like he was the very master of that relatively uncomplicated tool. In fact, that’s how she liked to think of him, as an uncomplicated tool – with cordy, leathery sweaty man arms.
“Okay, are you on?” said Bert. “I’m going to plug it in.” His voice was pure sex, almost as if he had been gargling with male hormones – she longed to hear his hard, male, testosteroni voice.
“Wait,” she said, reticent now, not sure how she looked atop the massive, armored beast. Was she feminine enough? Did these leg irons make her butt look big? Was it wrong to serve rose’ with tater tots? “What about the garage door. Are you sure it will hold this time?”
Bert grinned at her, a coy, dazzling, sexy man-grin, like a baboon who had just ripped the arm off a baby chimp with his teeth and was gnawing it with great irony. “Does baby need some more lube, huh?”
Penny felt herself blushing at the truth, then held out her hand while Bert emptied the tube into her hand…
“Okay,” said Penny with a giggle, feeling the potential power humming between her thighs like a big sack full of epileptic squirrels that you just happen to be straddling. “Plug that bitch in!”

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