My friend Seth wrote to congratulate on getting the book up somewhere where people see it and added:

 ”P.S. - Is there any chance you can give me, you know, like a synopsis or something? Reading is so  time-consuming….”

Excellent question, Seth. Reading time is indeed a valuable commodity. Fortunately, there is an answer. Using the autosummarize feature of MS Word I can condense a 100,000 word novel down to just 98 words, which I have pasted here for your reading pleasure. I think it very accurately sums up the book:

Couch
by Benjamin Parzybok

“Thom!” said Erik. Thom sighed, “Erik?”
“Tree! Thom! “Erik,” Thom growled.
Thom nodded. Thom nodded.
Thom nodded. “Erik!” “Thom?” Thom smiled. “Thom, Tree and Erik. Thom
nodded. Thom smiled. “Thom. Thom nodded.
“Thom and Tree.”
“Erik,” Erik said.
“Tree,” said Thom.
“Tree! “Erik! “Thom!” said Erik.
“Tree?” “Tree! “Erik!”
“Tree! Thom,
Thom smiled. Thom,
“Thom.” “Erik? “Erik! Thom,
-Thom

# (<–I assume this is to signify part two - ed.)

“Erik!” “Thom! “Erik!” “Erik, Erik. “Tree! “Tree! “Erik!” “Tree? Thom?”
Thom nodded.
Thom

“Tree!” Thom nodded.
“Thom!” Thom nodded. “Tree? “Tree! “Tree?” “Thom – Thom! “Thom? “Erik.
“Thom!” “Tree!”
“Tree. Thom. “Erik!” “Erik!” “Erik,” Thom said.
Thom nodded. Thom!

I hope I haven’t given away too much plot. 

In November of 2000 I gleefully believed I’d coined the word ‘Automagically‘ to describe how I felt about the mechanism behind The Psychic Book Project (now a horribly un-updated project) which included some of my first experiences with web programming. From the Gumball Poetry log:

November, 2000: Gumball Poetry saw several exciting new unveilings this month. Number one, the mechanism that runs The Psychic Book Project was completely overhauled due to Madame Lola’s (our in-house psychic) departure for Antarctica. As such, book divinations are now done automagically by Madame Lola’s robotic dog, Pietro. You’ll just have to head on over there to get the full scoop.

I now see that Automagical  was used as early as 1987. The definition, via Wikipedia:

Automatic, but with an apparent element of stage magic. Commonly used in computer and other technology fields, referring to complex technical processes hidden from the view of users or operators. Includes a connotation of specialness and often implies pride on the part of the process creator (especially when the person using the word is the process creator). Sometimes, also used in sarcastic way, ironically implying an impossible process.

I love this word. It still very much describes how I feel about programming. It’s magical. You create a black box and inside of it roil and boil all these spells you’ve fashioned. Feed it some input and, voila! Your water is turned into wine, your toad into a prince.

I want my web apps to impart a sense of automagicality, and my writing to revive a sense of wonder and magic in the reader. But more than that, this is what I want life to feel like all the time, which, thankfully, it mostly does. Any time I get to feeling like it’s a pile of drudgery I have to remind myself  of pretty much any bit of nature - Elephant painting, elephant intelligence  - to realize how effking automagical it all is. Who needs religion when this much magic is here already?

This article: ET Likely Doesn’t Exist, Finds Math Model made me feel sad today. And lonely, I suppose. But it also reminds me how automagical it is that I even exist.

April 18th! Happy International Eyewear day!

Here’s our contribution.

Let’s see your eyewear!

Small Beer Press launched John Kessel’s short story collection: The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories today, just in time to battle your tax angst. The cover is awesome - I love the artwork - and it’s reversible, with a faux financial self-help cover inside.

Also, as noted on  Boing Boing it’s been released as a free download.

Floor map of Book Expo America 2008. See that green dot? That’s Small Beer Press on May 30th, #2120. Corner lot, yo.

It looks like the cross section of the death star or maybe the preferred cuts of a piggy bank.

Here it is, traversing deep space, the giant small press battlestar. Going where all booksellers are going simultaneously.

At any rate, these people have been tasked with doing something there, probably involving powdered ice cream or eating tea with chopsticks in microgravity.

Today I joined my cousin Tye Parzybok on Amazon.  Tye’s book is Weather Extremes of the West and it’s awesome. (Update: Couch seems to be going in and out of search results. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes not. Here’s a direct link)

“A rare and deadly twister rips through parts of Oregon and Washington. Haboobs strip paint off cars in Arizona. A dramatic two-hour temperature gyration from 4 degrees Fahrenheit to 54 degrees Fahrenheit and then back to 4 deg breaks plate-glass windows in Spearfish, South Dakota. Most of the wildness of the western frontier may have gone the way of the buffalo, but weather, as meteorologist Tye Parzybok illustrates in Weather Extremes of the West, is still a wild beast.”

It’s really strange seeing Couch up there, or at least the placeholder for it. I do very much like the jacket art:

I think it says a lot. The drawing of the white motorcycle in the snow storm in the lower left corner was a brilliant touch. It’s fun to look at all the formalities that go along with having your book there. For example, I was surprised to see the genre classifications:

• Fantasy - Contemporary
• Literary
• Fiction

And I have an ISBN! Wait, I have two:

• ISBN-10: 1931520542
• ISBN-13: 978-1931520546

Last night’s speech changed this election season for us, and I think it did for a lot of others too.

I have been most interested in a regime change, a sea change in how business is done in the White House, and I think either democratic candidate could bring that. However, I have never been given so much credit for intelligence and understanding of subtlety by a politician in my adult life.

We threw $100 down on the table and committed ourselves to a campaign.

What I was struck by most? Words matter.

Words matter, words matter, words matter. Speeches should be pretty. I want my politicians to be brilliant orators and to bring passion and depth to ideas.  I want speeches that unite, clarify, bring momentum - there’s been such a dearth of this in the last eight years.

If you haven’t read the speech - find it and do so. I fought tears a couple of times.

Other than that I’m home w/ a sore throat finishing the last of this novel, which is headed out today!

Update: The Oregonian wrote about Coen

Among Saturday’s more poignant images was a tiny 4-year-old boy who held a sign that said, “This war’s older than me.”

Link to article: Five years of duty, dissent and war

Go Coen!

—

And thus the sign we made him, This War is Older than Me! He also thought ‘Poop on the war’ would be a good one.

I shipped my family off to the protest in downtown Portland today (still editing), and was awfully proud watching them go.

It’s very depressing to think that he has never known a time where we aren’t at war. Since we listen to a fair bit of radio, he has often inquired about such-and-such market bombing, and we’ve taken care with the language and have begun to censor the radio a little. At any rate, at just over four, he’s well aware of the war going on on the other side of the world and how we feel about it - and of course he’s also quite familiar with Adel Hamad/Project Hamad and thus Guantanamo. Not that each age doesn’t have its craziness, but these are strange times to grow up in.

At any rate, just for fun we did a search on Flickr tonight to see if he turned up anywhere, as Laura said quite a few people took his photo.

What do you know, he’s here:
http://flickr.com/photos/36254855@N00/2336481760/

and here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomlechner/2336714908/

side note: I’m sort of mixed about posting photos of Coen - I probably won’t do this a lot. There are various opinions from other blogs I respect - Tim Bray’s ongoing makes a point of not naming children’s names or posting photos, and the Granades are very open about this sort of thing. I like the idea of being open about it, but I’m naturally secretive and again I think this is a strange time to be growing up. But since this seems like an exceptional case and many others took his photo, and, I admit, I’m proud to think of him carrying a protest sign, I’m going for it.

The editing of Couch is going well - thanks. Doing a little research on lost cultures and lost knowledge, I came across the term ‘Language isolate’ - (Thanks, Wikipedia).

A language isolate is a language that does not have a genetic or genealogical relationship with any other living language. The Basque language is the most common example of these, I believe.

The impossibility of linking Basque with its Indo-European neighbors in Europe made many scholars search for its possible relatives elsewhere. Besides many pseudoscientific comparisons, the appearance of long-range linguistics gave rise to several attempts at connecting Basque with geographically very distant language families.

Many hypotheses on the origin of Basque are considered controversial, and the suggested evidence is not generally accepted by most linguists.

Cool, I love this kind of stuff. And then I saw the enormous number of languages that are considered to be language isolates. Here’s a picture of what I could fit in my screenshot window of language isolates in S. America. Click for a full view.

The proposed column is for what language they might be related to.

Did this many peoples really forge their own languages out of nothing? Have we really lost this much knowledge over the course of our history?

The black hole of our past is awesome and huge.

Click to see fullsize. Very helpful, but even more so is all these extra hours she carved out of the schedule for editing here are ones that she’ll be doing extra kid duty. Thanks Laura!

It seems to be bobbing between computers quite a bit, and so here it is encased in its flash drive. Rally!

Wouldn’t it suck if I lost the flash drive? Ha ha ha oh.