Today the whole world is discussing the fall of Assad in Syria, the arrest of the Brian Thompson killer, and the verdict in the Daniel Penny trial.

It is a busy news day.

Which is rather sad from my point of view, because otherwise I’m confident everybody would be talking about the release, this weekend, of The Year of the Warrior in paperback on Amazon.

You realize what that means, don’t you?

It means that you can now own the whole series of Erling Skjalgsson books, all the same size, lined up on your favorite bookshelf, to the envy and amazement of all your most most sophisticated and insufferable friends.

Just make sure to leave a space for The Baldur Game (coming soon).

I started this business of formatting books for Amazon (if I remember correctly, though I have an idea I may be mistaken on some points) while setting up The Baldur Game. I watched how-to videos on YouTube that took me through the process of making a Microsoft Word document into something you could humbly submit to the gatekeepers of the great publishing leviathan.

I was terrified to do it, frankly. I am an old man, what they call a “digital immigrant,” someone who’ll never be quite at ease with all the ones and zeros. And yet I worked at it to the point where I’m actually relatively at ease uploading books now.

So I figured I might as well go ahead and make all my Erling books manifest. One after the other, I worked my magic, and behold, they did appear, and I held them in my hand, like the treasures of far Cathay.

And I cannot lie – there’s a thrill to holding your book that just doesn’t happen seeing it appear on a Kindle. Like holding your baby rather than looking at his picture. (But with less diaper changing and mineral oil.)

I even think I’ve developed a minor flare for design. I think the paper books I’ve created possess a sort of simple elegance. They look good to me. I am not ashamed of them.