Entries from February 2009 ↓

Also, Powell’s mentioned that they have a few signed copies of a book called Couch if that’s the kind of weird fiction you’re into. I wouldn’t know. Watch out for the fingers!

Here are a bunch of updates on the book.

1) Tour! I’m doing another wee tour in the Pacfic Northwest: Portland-Olympia-Tacoma-Seattle-Bellingham-Spokane-Missoula-Dillon. I’ll post more on those dates/places soon or you can check on the booktour site. Dillon, MT! I’m excited about this tour because it retraces some personal history: 

• Village Books in Bellingham – I was a soup maker in the connected Colophon Cafe
• Orca Books in Olympia – I went to school at Evergreen and spent a lot of time haunting Orca
• Auntie’s Books in Spokane, where I grew up. (I had a bed near the magazine rack)

2) Reviews. Here are a number of places that were kind enough to mention Couch. Thanks, all.

L-Magazine – very kind review by Nina MacLaughlin

Antsthereader’s blog casts Tree as Rhys Ifans  

Maureen McHugh talks about young people books

The Daily Evergreen reviews Couch – twice!

Once by Jessica Schubert McCarthy and again by Andrew McCarthy.

3) Interview: Geoffrey Goodwin interviewed me for Bookslut

Regarding the Bookslut interview – there was a bit of a mixup, and the rough draft where I said a few idiotic things, such as:  ”Murakami allowed me to bridge the world…” — imagine for yourself a giant human bridge between Portland and Japan with my face on it — got posted first. However Geoffrey Goodwin and Jessa Crispin were kind enough to re-post the final version.

4) Signed books – if your and my trajectories through time and space intersect at any of my tour stops above, the possibility of a signed book is high. Alternately:  I signed about sixty books at Powells recently — I’m not exactly sure how one might obtain one of these, though it’s quite possible they’ll post the signed versions to their site. I’ll mention it if these surface. Incidentally, the people at Powell’s have taken to pronouncing Couch as cooch, after the street the Couch carries pass. Powell’s is also on Couch st. (Google streetview)

5) Back to press. I heard news from the towering offices of Small Beer Press that Couch will be heading back to print soon — I’m amazed the first million have already sold! Incredible. Thanks for buying all those copies, Mom!

6) Coffee. I apologize to my writing group members for spilling the entire contents of a Vietnamese iced coffee across all of the manuscripts I was supposed to be critiquing. They are now sticky and brown, as is my phone/lap/etc.

7) Poster. If you asked me for a signed poster, those are now in the mail. I still have a few left, so if you’d like one let me know.

It’s always sad letting go of a domain. I love owning domains — each one represents a fresh slate, a new incarnation of my personality. Empty ground to build something exciting.

Dear8ball.com housed a fun little robot application I worked on for a while. I plugged it into twitter via a jabber bot so that you could simply reference it: @dear8ball ___(question)____ and it would grant you a magic 8 ball reply. It worked pretty well! It was a great project that I got 85% through, ran into a little technical difficulty, and then more or less lost interest. It happens.

And that’s a good thing — I wish it would happen more often. Every good idea does not merit implementation. Incidentally, it looks like someone else did work on a similar project (though that looks to have gone extinct now too).

In my pairing of domains, I recently gave away listmaker.org, and have let a few others expire as well. A little focus never hurt nobody.