Reading: BIO OF AN AGRE by Piers Anthony
Music: Want to pick up The Clash's 2-disk Essential collection. Maybe this weekend.
Link o' the Day: Whiz Kids

It's been another quiet day for the most part.

"I turned Betsy around and followed the city wall for a spell before striking out onto another road in the opposite direction of Pa and the apple farm. The stars ain't lied to me yet; and I think it was time to see what lay on the other side of Tecumseh."

I've done some more revisions for the Tecumseh story and have gotten a good start on the Butler voice acting book for BearManor Media. There was one goof with the return addresses on the SFWA Bulletins so the fix for that will delay their mailing for a few days. Fortunately the printer took responsibility and it's not going to cost any extra. And for the next issue I'm going to be getting Bob Eggleton for the cover. Not too shabby.

Today's link-of-the-day leads to an online reprint of a comic book Radio Shack printed in the 80s--mostly hawking their products and in particular their computers. I've got a soft spot for those old Tandy computers. My first computer was a TRS-80 upon which I taught myself BASIC and wrote game programs and the like. Later I owned a Model 4 and a TL/2 1000. I still have models of both in my spare room from my retrocomputing days (neither being my originals, but both fully operational). I also have (someplace around here) a Tandy Pocket Computer complete with a whole 4K of expanded memory. Wow, those where the days, eh? And as nice as the commercial internet and the WWW is, there was a techno-charm to the old ways--the dial-in BBSs and Fidonet--which the modern technology doesn't quite have. Alas. Back then, the computer geeks were elite and mysterious.

Wizards!

There's a little mystery lost now. A little innocence lost.

I finished THE RAZOR'S EDGE after getting home from work. I'm going to need a few days to meditate on it before discussing it. Let's just say that one reason why it's among my favorite books is that, in addition to being superbly written, it can really make a person think. I've been reading in short bits during work breaks Piers Anthony's first (of two) autobiographies, BIO OF AN AGRE. That's fairly interesting so far. He drops the names of a lot of fen I know and of course there's a whole lot of history, not all of it pleasant, twixt him and fanzine fandom and him and SFWA. He's an odd duck in a way, but a successful odd duck. He had to work for his success, of course, and I'm getting the impression that there was a lot more to it than luck. He got his fair share of rejection slips, and later had more than a few troubles with various publishers. He seems to have a history with standing up to authoritarian powers and it's gotten him into trouble, but it also seems to have served him fairly well in the end when all is counted and sorted. Good for him. I enjoyed the first few Xanth books when I was younger, but haven't been able to get through one in a long time. His Bio of a Space Tyrant series was fun for the first few books, but I think I quit reading the fifth book about halfway through and didn't feel too bad about not finishing it. Ah well.

Pretty Maggie's coming for a visit this weekend, and will hopefully be here early tomorrow evening, so I doubt I'll be writing much until Sunday. I trust that everyone reading this will have themselves a most pleasant weekend.