Seasons Greetings

A big thank you to all of my readers this year. I appreciate your visits and comments. Winter is a time of rest, mulling over prospective ideas for the coming seasons. It's my favorite time of the year. Hoervrt you celebrate the holidays, I hope they are warm and memorable.

Malcolm

P.S. You may also like Winter's Waiting Wonder Child about the symbols of the season.

December 16 Blog Hop

Twelve small-press authors are writing inspirational posts for the holiday season at tomorrow's Sleigh Bells and Inkwells Blog Hop.

They are Smoky Zeidel, T. K. Thorne, Patricia Damery, Debra Brenegan, Anne K. Albert, Elizabeth Clark-Stern, Collin Kelley, Sharon Heath, Melinda Clayton, Ramey Channell, Leah Shelleda, and myself. Stop by and say "hello" or ask a question.

Meanwhile, I'm happy to say that the roofers are half way done repairing the damaged caused by the strange incident of the tree falling and then bouncing up against the house. I still think dwarves or pixies did it. Of course, there are a lot of deer in the yard at times that fit our "critters of interest" list in the investigation.

--Malcolm

P. S. If you click on that sleigh bells link before the blog hop goes live, you'll see the latest Malcolm's Round Table post that explains how to tell the difference between a blog hop and the bunny hop.

Saturday Stuff

A slightly chilly but sunny Saturday here in Jackson County 60 miles northeast of Atlanta. A good day to get some work done and that included making a squash casserole for tonight's supper. Here are a few random items:

• Amazon is getting a lot of backlash from its price-check application even though many malls offer such apps. Add to that, its new program for authors that prohibits them from selling their books anywhere but Amazon. Sounds like a bad deal to me. My satire about it is here: Octopus Books Launches TDP-or-Else Publishing Program to Control Reading from Cradle to Grave
• You can find an article about the program in the Huffington Post here.
• So far, I'm getting no entries in my book give-away contest. Kind of surprised. Hint: you don't really have to be psychic to tell me what you think I left in the magic cabin in my novels. Since nobody will probaby get the answer right, a guess will get you into the random drawing for a free paperback copy of Sarabande.
• The roofers will be here next week to fix the hole in the roof caused by that tree that fell far away in the middle of the yard and somehow jumped over toward the house. Fortunately, the homeowners insurance will cover most of the costs.
• If you're an author or publisher and have the dates and times for bricks-and-mortar book signings and other events, I'll be happy to put them in Book Bits, my daily posting of links for writers. Send me the date, time, location (including city and state), and the name of the book and/or the name of the  event to malcolmrcampbell[at]yahoo[dot]com.
• If you're looking for books for holiday giving, my list of the 40+ books I reviewed in 2011 is here. Perhaps you'll find something you like.

I hope you're having a nice weekend with either plenty of rest and relaxation or a lot of exciting things to do.

--Malcolm

this post is the Word Nerd's fault

Recently, the Word Nerd, who--among other things--describes herself as "bookishly dorkalicious," stopped by my blog on the pretext of reading an announcement about a book give-away challenge for my contemporary fantasy movel Sarabande. But she had hidden motives.

"Meanwhile," she wrote coyly, "I’ve awarded you for your utter awesomeness" a TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF AWARD. Well, it's not the Pulitzer or the Pushcart, and its "goodies" force the recipient to reveal seven things about himself or herself and then stick 15 other bloggers with the award.

While Word Nerd confessed that she was "nerdariffic" in high school, she knows me well enough to understand that the odds of my revealing anything so personal about myself are slim and/or will be a pack of lies anyway. Yet, in the spirit of the award, here are the magnificent seven.

1. A girl I had a crush on in high school told me 20 years later she also had a crush on me in high school but was afraid I might think she was too popular for a guy like me from the other side of the tracks to risk asking out on a date, but that if I did ask her out, we'd have to date in another town where nobody knew us well enough to tattle, much think we were going steady.
2. The large angel fish in the aquarium next to my bed used to stare at me when I was trying to sleep.
3. My favorite movie is "The Apartment."
4. I was sent to the principal's office in grade school for saying "yes" rather than "yes ma'am" to my teacher. (Since I wasn't born in the South, and had no idea I was supposed to say "ma'am" and "sir" to my elders.) When I refused to apologize, my parents were called and they told my teacher to stuff it.
5. My first car was a 1954 Chevrolet that had a driver's side window that wouldn't close and that burned oil faster than gasoline.
6. My favorite car was a 1970 Jeep CJ5 that saw IL, GA, KY, MN, SD, MT, TN and a few other states before the repair bills became too much for a starving college teacher.
7. Yes, I really was a college teacher, but I got in trouble because I refused to say "yes ma'am" and "yes sir" to the deans, full professors and other tenured academics.

I'm not going to tell you whether (or if) I "bestow" this award on any other bloggers because some of them might work for the mob or the Feds or other groups that really don't want people to know who they are or what they're doing.

--Malcolm

Sarabande book give away challenge

Today I announced Malcolm’s Genuine Sub Rosa SARABANDE Book Give-Away Challenge on my author's web site and Round Table blog.

It's one way I can call attention to some new magic and fantasy pages on the web site for Sarabande, and it's one way you might win a free copy of the novel.

You don't have to be psychic to win. All that's required is a good imagination or a lucky chance guess. Or, if nobody discovers the secret, I'll draw a name at random from all the entries.

Stop by my announcement, and go for it. . .

--Malcolm

Apparently Dwarves are Evil: the tribulations of a book reviewer

Dwarves pushed a tree over on my house because they didn't want me to finish writing a positive review of Lisa Goldstein's "The Uncertain Places."

It happened Monday at high noon.

When I heard the noise, I just naturally assumed that either the cats had pushed over a bookshelf or that my diet had fallen on hard times.

Finally, I looked out the front door and saw that a tree had somehow leapt from the center of the front yard, turned end over end, and poked a hole in the roof before bashing in the eaves above the garage.

Unfortunately, my insurance isn't going to pay for the entire cost of fixing the roof. Heck, it cost $75 just to have a guy cut up and haul away the tree. I wonder if I can write this off as, say, hazardous duty pay or business expenses on my next income tax return. Or, perhaps I should send Lisa Goldstein a bill. After all, if she hadn't written the novel, I wouldn't have read the novel and written a review that drew the attention of dwarves and other denizens from the world of faerie to my doorstep.

It's not like I was doing spells or anything to attract folks from areas where worlds overlap or where boundaries are thin or where a phrase (accoding to Goldstein) like "Rick Rack Ruck" can cause the earth to open up.

Even though I'm currently reading and enjoying "The Night Circus," I'm thinking  twice (at least) about writing a review. Goodness knows, I don't need a circus tent in my yard, much less an illusionist knocking  at the front door.

--Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of magical realism and contemporary fantasy novels that do not cause bad things to happen to readers and reviewers.