I’m going to try to do some housecleaning here before we get over to 2011. So effking futuristic are we, no? Except for flying cars.

OK:

- My short story Hamlet was picked up by Bellevue Literary Review and should be out this Spring (here’s BLR on Facebook).

- I believe the Turkish-language rights for Couch have been sold to Domingo Publishing. So if you speak Turkish, voila!

- David Naimon and I are now officially calling our co-written short story, entitled The Voyage, a book. So presumptuous! So exciting! We’re just under 20k words in.

- Laura Moulton’s website is way over-due for an overhaul, which is my spousal responsibility. So in the meantime I’ll mention a few of her goings-on here:

• She was awarded a Regional Arts & Culture Council grant for her project StreetBooks!
• She has a great piece coming out in Street Roots soon (< That link searches for ‘Laura Moulton’ on streetroots.org – right now it just comes up with her Brazil article & Project Hamad)
• Her book is coming along – (I’m currently reading the first 100 pages).

- Speaking of novels…mine is still in progress. Laura’s editing the first 75 pages which are considered to be semi-final. There are another 325 pages lying in wait of further edits.

- Taleoh.com is still being coded…

I think that’s it, or all that I can remember presently. Enjoy the last few days of 2010.

Coen has taken to carrying a pencil and pad wherever he goes. He’s crazy about taking notes and writing. I taught him how to create a clue-based treasure hunt and so he’s been making these in the house with sticky notes. It’s really fun.  However, since he’s in a Spanish immersion program, he learned to read and write in Spanish. That doesn’t stop him from sending us notes in English though. The following note (there are 4 words, last in pencil) reads spot-on with a thick Spanish/Mexican accent.

I’ll be turning a decade birthday in the next week, and so it feels like a drawn-out space for thinking is needed. What do I want to do for the next ten years? How do I want it to happen? What happened over the last ten years? — by all means a tremendous decade, and my favorite one by far.

My best thinking happens while walking. When I got married I took a four day walk from Portland in the direction of Astoria (some of that scenery was later written into Couch). This time I’m shooting for another four days, but in the opposite direction. It’s a short walk, compared to the work the pioneers did, or this guy, but it’s what I can afford from a schedule where I find myself a part of two startups, a freelance career, raising two children and in the middle of writing a couple of books. I think four days will be ample time to slow the pace down. It also feels like the right thing to do to set off a new decade in the right direction.

Walking also helps me not-think and not-do, both of which I’m also looking forward to.

I’m shooting for walking about 20 miles a day. Is that too ambitious? I guess I’ll find out tomorrow when I start. Here’s my route:

View A walk from Portland, OR to BZ Corner, WA in a larger map

I’ve gone over the route carefully — which is a much different approach than my last big walk where I set out on some train tracks and walked until dark, then found a place to sleep. Though undoubtedly I’ll be sleeping in a few farmer’s fields off the road. I’m also doing it much later in the year than I did last time — fortunately the weather doesn’t look entirely wet. I was encouraged by reading Werner Herzog’s book, Of Walking In Ice, in which he walked from Munich to Paris through a blizzard.

Much of the route will follow the Historic Columbia River Highway – which is just incredibly beautiful, if you haven’t driven it. The rest will be on paths or train tracks. I’m going to try to avoid traffic as much as possible.

Of course, I’ll also be tracking my steps, as I’ve been known to do, and if you’re curious you can see (or join in) the competition map I setup on Walker Tracker for that here.

See you on the other side!

Steve Snell “River King” paddled the Connecticut river in a wooden, carved couch boat.

I am almost positive that this is one of the characters from my Couch, my bet is on Erik, escaped from the book. If you run into him, please ask.

Click to make it large enough to read the article.

Oh, and I just found this at steve-snell.com. Definitely worth a look-see. I’m so happy that Erik upgraded with a paddle.

Via my good friend Paul Chaney who found this story on the other side of the pond.

A special message from Steve Almond

I think this would be described as a classic win-win situation.

My Strange Horizons story Birds appears to have been translated into Chinese and published here, along with a birds graphic. Pretty much a mystery to me.

If you’d rather read Birds translated into Chinese (I assume by a human?) and then back to English again (by Google’s machinery), you can give that a go. The last line in that new hybrid version is “My mind floated the infinite regret.” Which brings to mind the Airborne Toxic Event from DeLillo’s White Noise.