Entries from September 2008 ↓

I will be going on tour in November to celebrate the arrival of couch and the regime change. It’s up to you to decide which brought about the other.

See what we have nailed down so far (and see my real-life author photo) here at Book Tour. 

Alternately, if you look to the right you’ll see the RSS feed of my book tour right here. Subscribe! Be merry!

Regarding being on tour: I hear I’m famous for that one trick with the podium and the coat hanger in Milwaukie. Ah, Wisconsin, how you laughed, how you cried.

You know what to do, people.

David pointed out to me that on Amazon, Couch has under ‘Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought’ only a single item: the Omron HJ-112 pedometer.

A few weeks ago there were a number of books in the slipstream genre here instead, presumably because their algorithms looked up other books by my publisher and fitted Couch into this genre. Now enough people have bought Couch that they’re able to do some direct correlating.

What does it say? It says that the people at Walker Tracker are completely awesome. Thank you so much.

But I love how it looks, too. It’s as if people were buying the book and a pedometer simultaneously in order to set out upon the quest in the book for themselves. I would know it true were it accompanied by a few other tell-tale items. Say, a mustache trimmer, wire cutters, some RAM and a Spanish phrase book.

I would love to find other items on Amazon that tell a sort of story – items bought together to perform a single esoteric task. Certainly there’s some mystery that could be gleaned.

I have an old domain, datablob.com, that I’d like to find a home for.

For a long time Data Blob was The Nonsense Exchange – the world’s largest database of nonsense in the universe. You can quote me on that.

The internet archive says I had datablob as an active site between March of 2001 -> July of 2007

You can see what the site looked like sometime in 2006 . You could deposit your own nonsense here, and you could even send nonsense on to your local politician.

Datablob: The nonsense exchange

I think having a giant reservoir of nonsense is vitally important. The world financial system might just collapse without one!

If you want this domain for something cool (ie: art project, no ads & no commerce) – please contact me and describe your purpose.

If you would like to purchase this domain, let me know your price.

I’m at ben at ideacog dot net.

Fortunately I had a nightmare in the traditional sense — not ‘my reading was a nightmare’-sense. 

I dreamt that I was reading at Powell’s Books – but there was a bar there – to my left from the podium – and a band too, apparently in case I wasn’t quite entertaining enough. I stood at the center of all of that, with about a hundred people in front of me (go brain!). All of them were talking, and seemingly my book had been printed in messy, overly-corrected ballpoint pen on wet toilet paper. I held a mush of it there in my hand and tried to separate out a few consecutive sheets in order to try to piece together a story-line, any story at all. I tried a few times, starting off with gusto on some sentence that ended in a messy blurred blotch. Then I would start all over again.

This was a real enough dream that at some point my dream brain had obviously had enough and to said to hell with it, bailing me out into wakefulness, and I sat there in that departing dream state, heart palpitating, trying to figure out if maybe I could try to just improvise a little of the book? Did I know any songs I could sing? Would someone bring me a beer at least?

I was incredibly relieved to remember that I will be reading from a real book, with a binding! not printed on toilet paper!

I did a quick search on reading nightmares to see if this was, you know, some sort of common pre-book-release epidemic that all first-time authors experienced and came up with the poet Matthew Guenette’s reading nightmare. My favorite part: Instead of his book being switched out for a mush of toilet paper, he held in his hand ‘a set of visual “instructions” for how to change a muffler’.

Brains. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

From Publisher’s Weekly

“Parzybok’s delightfully lighthearted writing successfully diverts attention from the heavy-handed plot devices that threaten to overwhelm this ambitious debut. An apartment flood destroys almost everything owned by mismatched roommates Thom, Tree and Erik, leaving only the handmade orange couch, which the landlord demands they remove. Broke, jobless and now homeless, the roommates begin carrying their couch through the streets of Portland, Ore., and quickly discover two things: it might be magical, and Goodwill won’t take it. They reluctantly embark on a hapless quest to take the couch exactly where it “wants to go.” Occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, the enthusiastic prose carries readers through sporadic dark moments, though it can’t save a clunky finale that leaves too many unanswered questions, including the survival of its heroes. Parzybok’s quirky humor recalls the flaws and successes of early Douglas Adams. (Nov.)”

I wonder if this review was based off of the ending that we crashed-edited before it went to print, just 5 days ago. Since it was so recently edited, I’m guessing not. At any rate, I’m awesomely excited to get my first review. Douglas Adams!