Here it is. Release date is set for May 15.
All posts by Lars Walker
Swine flu over the cuckoo’s nest
Over 1,000 people are reported to have contracted the new swine flu in Mexico, and it’s been spotted in California and Texas. Here’s a report from FOXNews.
The U.S. government said it was closely following the new cases. “The White House is taking the situation seriously and monitoring for any new developments. The president has been fully briefed,” an administration official said.
White House sources report that, if the flu becomes a serious menace to the U.S., President Obama (peace be upon him) is prepared to fly immediately to meet with it, shake its hand and apologize for America’s record of antivirus imperialism.
The enemy with a thousand faces
If you follow our comments (each to his own taste) you’ll have noted an exchange following Phil’s “Questions” post, in which I talk about my personal emotional problem with shame. It’s an awkward sort of conversation, as I no doubt appear partly self-pitying and partly just perverse, responding to everything with a one-size-fits-all, “That makes me feel ashamed.” Although I can see how it might look as if I was playing a game, let me assure you that I’m dead serious. That’s what it’s like to have a shame problem. Whatever you think about anything, good or bad, helpful or worthless, shame is always there, in some different form. It’s a ubiquitous, protean enemy.
Thinking about it this evening, it occurred to me that that would make a great theme for a fantasy story. I could have a villain who was a shape-changer, who follows the hero wherever he goes, and confronts him again and again in different disguises.
And then I realized, with a shock, that I’d already written that story. My new book (which, in case you’ve forgotten, is called West Oversea) features a villain who’s a shape-changer. He follows Erling Skjalgsson wherever he goes, even in a voyage to North America, and confronts him again and again in a variety of disguises.
I wrote an allegory on my own condition, and didn’t even realize it.
I’ll figure out a way to feel ashamed of that, too….
Art is long and life is fleeting
Andrew Klavan, hereinafter to be known as The Hated Competition (THC), because he has treacherously and spitefully arranged for his new book to come out at about the same time as my new book (called, in case you’ve forgotten, West Oversea), nevertheless has some things to say worth reading in the second half of his interview with John Nolte over at Big Hollywood. In response to a question about how much easier leftists have it in the entertainment world, he replies:
Yes, it is easier for them that way. But it’s harder for them too because they’re talking absolute nonsense and we’re telling the simple truth: that liberty is a great good and worth defending, that right is right and wrong is wrong and moral relativity is merely a form of cowardice, that the individual is more important than the state, that our rights come from our Creator. See, they can attack us, try to silence us, maybe crush us-but they can’t beat us because we’re right and they’re wrong. The truth is not so coincidentally a lot like Jesus, dude. You mock it, you torture it, you kill it-and yet there it stands. I try not to worry about what they “allow,” or what they say is permissable. I try to hitch my wagon to the truth and hold on.
But enough of THC. You want to know the latest news about my book (called, in case you’ve forgotten, West Oversea).
I got a .pdf of what is apparently the final cover tonight. It looks to me as if, after all the sturm und drang, the artist pretty much got everything he wanted. Which is a lesson to us all, I guess.
The book is called, in case you’ve forgotten, West Oversea. I’ll post the art as soon as I’m cleared to do so.
Your dilemma, should you choose to accept it…
Andrew Klavan’s new Young Adult novel, The Last Thing I Remember, will be released by Thomas Nelson on April 28, according to this interview (Part 1) over at Big Hollywood.
This naturally raises an interesting dilemma for you, the discerning but budget-savvy consumer.
Because my novel, West Oversea, is scheduled for release this month, too. (Or in May anyway. June at the latest.)
So where do you spend your hard-earned book-buying dollar?
I’ll make it easy for you. Buy my book. For the following comprehensive, compelling reasons.
1) Andrew Klavan is already famous. I’m still behind Thorstein Veblen in the list of famous people who grew up in Kenyon, Minnesota. And I’m getting old.
2) Klavan is bald. I have a handsome, thick head of healthy gray hair. The implications should be obvious.
3) Klavan’s book will come out in paperback eventually. Mine will be paperback from the git-go.
I rest my case.
The service economy, unpacked
I’m bubbling with ideas today. It’s kind of scary.
I’ve figured out why service is always lousy in this country.
When the economy is good, you can’t get good service because the best people are all working in higher-paying jobs.
When the economy is bad, you can’t get service because the employer has cut to back staff.
The crime of self-defence
“Why,” you may ask, “has Pres. Obama (peace be upon him) opened the door to the prosecution of former Bush administration legal advisors, those who gave opinions that techniques like waterboarding could be legally employed on captured terrorists? Isn’t that ex post facto law? Won’t it have a chilling effect on speech, warning people that they can be called into court merely for expressing an opinion? And won’t it be dangerous for our national security?”
Ah, but you miss the genius of the strategy. I’ve got it figured out, I think.
For conservatives, the ideal condition for our country is to be free, strong and respected in the world.
But for liberals, the ideal condition is to be a victim. Liberals love victims. Victims get all the love and sympathy, as well as lots of presents.
For liberals, the greatest moment in recent history was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11/01, when the president of France said, “Today, we are all Americans.”
Liberals desperately want to recapture that glorious moment.
And of course the simplest way to accomplish that is to be attacked again. For liberals, it’s a tragedy that our interrogators learned about plans for another terrorist bombing in Los Angeles through using “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
For the Left–the hard Left, anyway–that’s an opportunity lost. If we could have just had another smoking tower and thousands dead in Los Angeles, the world would have loved us again!
A few thousand dead is a small price to pay for satisfaction like that. The hard Left figures we have way too many people around anyway.
Up from slush
I’ve made a careful survey, and I think I can say authoritatively that I’m now the only blogger in the world who’s never mentioned Susan Boyle.
Oops. Scratch that.
Over at Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, there’s this amusing article about the (vain and counterproductive) lengths some writers go to, to get a magazine editor’s attention. It’s a fun read, and there’s much wisdom there. (Tip: Loren Eaton at I Saw Lightning Fall.)
I enjoyed reading this article in particular because there are a number of quotes there from George Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer, who used to be my agents. Before they were my agents, they were my editors at Amazing Stories, which gives me a rare opportunity to feel smug, since I managed to please these discerning connoisseurs of slush, once upon a time.
I’ll tell you how I made my first sale to them, too, at no extra charge. Continue reading Up from slush
How much untruth can you squeeze into a two-letter word?
Theodore Dalrymple, the great English physician and social commentator, meditates on the question in this piece at FrontPage Magazine.
It is intrinsically unlikely that a man espouses a totalitarian doctrine of proved and indisputable viciousness and violence from a love of peace and a dislike of poverty.
Saw Iowa, lived to tell the tale
I should probably start by noting that I was wrong (again) about the price of the new book. It will be $12.95. A further saving for you, the valued consumer!
I rode down to Iowa with four other guys on Saturday. Not Viking stuff, but Sverdrup Society stuff. We had a meeting in Radcliffe, Iowa, which is where my paternal grandfather spent his childhood, and it’s a place I haven’t visited much, so I thought I’d go. (Travel report: it looks pretty much like the rest of Iowa.)
What surprised me was how much I enjoyed it. We talked all the way down and back (it’s about a three-hour trip), and I actually had a good time. Even now my subconscious is working in the background, reprocessing the memory, finding reasons to believe that I made a jerk of myself and spoiled everybody’s day, but—for the record—I had a good time.
I heard a couple memorable quotations. A pastor of Finnish ancestry told us something his father used to say—“I don’t know if I understand all these things I know.”
And someone quoted an old North Dakota farmer, what you’d call a “character,” known to a couple of the guys present, who used to say, “These modern times! When will they end?”
Tonight, more proofing.
When will it end?