I need to go to the shooting range again RIGHT NOW. Either that or mainline several milligrams of Xanax.

First of all, Frankie has developed an obsession with silverware. He gets it out of the sink and carries it all over the house. Now, this in itself is pretty funny, and I can even see the humor in being awakened at 7:30 AM by having a dirty fork dropped on your head, but overall I could have used another three or four hours' sleep.

Next: over the past couple of years, due to being married to a fat man and having many fat friends, I've become interested in fat acceptance, fat-positiveness, or whatever you prefer to call it. This afternoon, while browsing such a community, I learned about Mississippi House Bill 282 by Rep. W.T. Mayhall of Southaven, MS:

AN ACT TO PROHIBIT CERTAIN FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS FROM SERVING FOOD TO ANY PERSON WHO IS OBESE, BASED ON CRITERIA PRESCRIBED BY THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH; TO DIRECT THE DEPARTMENT TO PREPARE WRITTEN MATERIALS THAT DESCRIBE AND EXPLAIN THE CRITERIA FOR DETERMINING WHETHER A PERSON IS OBESE AND TO PROVIDE THOSE MATERIALS TO THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS; TO DIRECT THE DEPARTMENT TO MONITOR THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS FOR COMPLIANCE WITH THE PROVISIONS OF THIS ACT; AND FOR RELATED PURPOSES.

Of course any stupid shitsplat who manages to get elected can propose a bill about any moron thing s/he likes, and of course this idiocy died in committee, but it twists my gut and boggles my mind that ANYONE ANYWHERE EVER TOOK THIS DISCRIMINATORY GARBAGE SERIOUSLY. Even in Mississippi. (Apologies to the smart Mississippians out there. C'mon, I'm from Louisiana; we've got to have somebody to make fun of.)

Next, while innocently reading fuckyoulist, I came upon this prize. (DO NOT click if drooling ignorance about transsexuality/transgendered people makes your head explode.)

So I decided I needed to get away from the computer, and I went out in the yard to see if the fence guys had come and put up the rest of my razor wire as promised. Of course they hadn't, and while examining my plants, I found several boards that hadn't even been screwed down at the bottom. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for a fairly skinny person (e.g. most of the crackheads in my neighborhood) to kick in one of these boards and slip through the resulting gap. If they haven't come and finished the job by tomorrow morning as promised, I swear to God I will do it myself and bill them for my labor.

At that point, Chris came home from running errands and told me I needed to calm down. He had to go back out again for some groceries, so I amused myself by continuing to read Amazon reader "reviews" of my older books, and I found a doozy. I may have to make this a regular feature. This one's about Exquisite Corpse, but you probably could have figured that out on your own.

T. Jackson (Portland, OR United States)
Though I am a big fan of many dark films and movies, I usually like for them to have some sort of moral, lesson or hope to impart. Most of them do. This book is darkness for darkness sake, extremely gross and sadistic, and beyond disturbing. Though well written, I thought it was a waste of time and offered nothing but horrific visions and bleakness. I was so upset by this book, I wanted to write the author, but naturally, she has no public email or way of contacting. I really think she should be hanging her head in shame for contributing garbage like this to the world. I am no prude, extremely liberal and my favorite movie is The Crow, which is quite dark itself. But while that film is about love and redemption, this book is about terrible things. The world doesn't need this kind of darkness.

Somehow, I have no trouble believing that T. Jackson is "extremely liberal." I share many political opinions with liberals, but I find that those who just have to brag about how liberal they are seem to enjoy being offended almost as much as white people (of course, there's a lot of overlap there). Ah, how I wish she had found my P.O. box address (which has been on my website since 2000; this "review" was posted in 2006, so I guess T. Jackson didn't look terribly hard for that contact information she accuses me of hiding) and written me that letter telling me how I should hang my head in shame. I've never sent anyone a dead animal before, but there's always a first time.

I have now tagged all my 2008 entries. Yay for me. This tagging business is compulsive, and I'd eventually like to have the whole journal tagged, but I wonder if someone on my friends list would be willing to do the entries from September/October '05. I find those almost impossible to look back at.

Speaking of looking back, when I visit my Amazon page, I usually only check out the new reviews of my more recent books, but today -- perhaps because of Kody Boye's nice comment about Drawing Blood on my most recent Amazon blog entry -- I wondered what people had been saying about my older stuff lately, so I checked out the most recent of the 228 Lost Souls reviews. Most of them were good, but I found this gem (excerpted) from "Otto" of San Antonio, Texas:

I support gay rights, gay marriage, etc, but I can do without details that paint a picture in my mind, or actually seeing it happen. If someone told me Poppy Z Brite wrote a book and the gay stuff isn't in it, I'd be interested in reading it. Otherwise, I doubt I'll pick up another book of hers.

In other words, "I'll say what I have to say to be PC, but I don't want to know what those icky fags actually do with each other." I can only hope someone told him Exquisite Corpse wasn't a bit gay.

Occasionally I become far too entertained by the Internet. After barely touching it for weeks, I'll start compulsively checking customers_suck to see what new atrocities are being perpetrated on the workers of the world and stupid_free to watch human train wrecks in general.

The granddaddy (or perhaps grandma would be a better word in this case) of human train wrecks -- author train wrecks, even -- I've seen lately is this thread about an author who stalked a fan for giving her a three-star Amazon review. You can make fun of romance writers if you like (I've never read a romance novel myself, so cannot comment fairly one way or the other), but judging by the comments here, these ladies are far tougher than I. I wouldn't actually stalk a reader, but I have violated several of the rules they seem to have little trouble following. I've commented, sometimes snarkily, on Amazon reviews here in my journal and (very occasionally, always briefly, almost always in case of factual error) on the reviews themselves. Twice, I think, I've asked readers to post good reviews if they felt so inclined: once right after Liquor hit the stores and I was nervous and wanted to see something up there; once because somebody had just posted a borderline-troll review, and while I didn't think it should be removed, I hated to see it just sitting there at the top of the page. In retrospect, both of these were probably mistakes. I don't think I've ever asked readers to go and vote that bad reviews were unhelpful (or, in the nauseating parlance of the reader-stalking author discussed above, asked for "clickies"). If I have, I shouldn't have. I've never asked for a review to be taken down simply because it was unfavorable to the book, but I've had obvious troll reviews (e.g. personal slams; one-sentence "This sux" jobs; people who admit they haven't read the book) removed. Of course all of these violate Amazon's reviewing rules and technically it is their responsibility to remove such reviews without anyone having to ask, but I don't see how they could ever get to all of them, and I'm not sure I see anything wrong with giving them a heads-up. Does the fact that I did this somehow make the good reviews less valid? Was I "gaming the system"? Twenty-three years after my first fiction sale, am I still hideously unprofessional?

In related but far less wankish news, there's an interesting discussion on greygirlbeast's journal about the possibility of authors offending readers with our opinions. I always figure that somebody is going to get offended no matter what I say (witness the recent hate letter posted by officialgaiman, whose journal is at least 95% nice, informative, and non-confrontational), or whether I say anything at all. There are a few topics I try to stay away from (veganism, fanfic) because they're just not worth the hassle, and I have trained myself off the bad habits of railing about Amazon on a weekly basis and hectoring readers to buy my books because I'm so fucking generous as to provide this wonderful free blog. I particularly regret ever having done this last, both because it's rude and presumptuous and because, after living through the past three years, it seems so utterly unimportant to me whether any one person chooses to buy my books or not. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it tremendously when they do, but it's hard to believe I once took such umbrage when they didn't.

Anyway, we're having our former neighbor over for dinner, and I'm making crawfish etouffee, so I better make like an amoeba and split.

This post on therealpzb made me happy, not just for the kind words about D*U*C*K but for the props the poster gives to novellas in general. They're a form I like very much, both to work in and to read. The poster mentions Different Seasons, which may well contain Stephen King's single finest piece of writing ever ("The Body"). I believe Peter Straub does some of his absolute best work in novella form ("Pork Pie Hat," "Mr. Aickman's Air Rifle," more). The post was particularly welcome just now because the latest, otherwise mostly favorable Amazon customer review of Antediluvian Tales complains that "Even D*U*C*K, her latest, has been downgraded to a $35 'novella.'" I suppose it's bad form to bitch about four-star reviews -- and I do appreciate the fact that the reviewer seems to read everything I publish -- but this annoyed me a little. First of all, D*U*C*K wasn't "downgraded" to anything. I contracted with Subterranean Press to write a novella and I wrote one; neither SubPress nor I ever claimed it was going to be anything else. Second, I don't know what those snarky quotation marks are for; novella is a perfectly valid literary term and D*U*C*K is a perfectly valid novella. Third, if you know you don't like novellas and find $35 (a price over which I have no control) too expensive for such a book, don't buy the fucking thing. No one is holding a gun to your head.

Novellas have a bad name even among writers, because they're hard to publish: magazines and anthologies don't want a piece that will take up that amount of space unless you're a big name. And no major publisher is likely to publish a Different Seasons-like collection of novellas unless you're a really big name. One of the things I value deeply about Subterranean Press is that this kind of corporate BS isn't an issue; as long as it's good work, they will publish story collections, novellas, short novels, chapbooks, and other interesting forms for which the larger publishing world has little time.

By the way, I linked to Subterranean's D*U*C*K page because I noticed that Amazon is temporarily out of stock, but in general, it's better to buy my Subterranean books directly from Subterranean; they'll get there so much faster that it's well worth giving up the slight Amazon discount.

I'm already sick of not blogging. Let's face it, in real life I hate to talk, but online I'm a blabbermouth.

I've fallen off the rehab wagon, too. I had to; the sciatica pain is worse than it's been since before we moved and Ultram is barely touching it anymore. This morning I dreamed I was a pelican with a polar bear gnawing my wing off. When I woke up, I couldn't get out of bed without Chris' help. There is something uniquely humiliating about having your beloved husband watch you scrabble across the bathroom floor on your hands and knees to get pills and cram them down your throat. Not that he wouldn't have gotten them for me, but there's so much crap in that drawer that he has no idea what's what. I don't have many painkillers (oh, for the ones I flushed down the toilet!), so I need to ration them carefully today; Chris' 46th birthday is tomorrow and I want to get through the nice lunch we're going to have at Commander's Palace with our friend Harry, then lie around and watch the Saints season opener tomorrow night, all without being in agony. After that I can just lie in bed and cry if I have to.

I've called my orthopedist to find out about getting another steroid shot. I remember when I was first considering getting them, someone warned me that they could cause weight gain, but do they ever cause massive weight loss? I'm not absolutely sure -- much of last year is kind of a blur -- but it seems to me that I lost my appetite and started dropping all this weight right around the time I had the first shot.

In other news, apparently Chris and I cannot be lovers because we constantly call each other "dude." We've gotten a lot of mileage out of that today -- "Dude, whatever that was we did last night, it couldn't have been sex, because lovers don't talk like us, dude." "Oh well, dude, it sure was fun, dude." "Dude!" "Dude." Gosh, it sure is crushing to be called a bad writer by someone who hasn't mastered the basics of spelling and punctuation.

William continues well. Thank you for all the good wishes.

I always appreciate Frank Berkeley's thoughtful Amazon reviews of the Liquor books, but his comments on D*U*C*K seem to be as much a political screed as a review and leave me fairly disturbed. While I agree with the screed, the absolute last thing I want as an author is to be treated like a victim. Books are not charity cases; they must stand on their own merits. I think D*U*C*K does that just fine -- in retrospect, I like it better than Soul Kitchen, perhaps because writing it saved my sanity (what there is of it) in a way that no other story ever has -- but I hope readers of it and my other post-K work will state their honest opinions and not "cut [me] some slack" as a Katrina victim. One major quibble with the review: The first chapter was written first, and I believe it serves the purpose of providing Rickey's motivation for the entire remainder of the story. (One pro reviewer even suggested that the rest of the story is a concussion-induced fantasy brought on by the events of the first chapter. While that wasn't my intention, I found it imaginative and intriguing.) The Ducks Unlimited charity auction happened many months later, as an afterthought, an attempt to give a little something back to DU for the importance they'd assumed in the course of the story. In no way except actually plugging in the winner's name was the chapter written to satisfy the requirements of the auction, and the character needed a new name anyway; I'd originally called him "Brownie," as in "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie," which was amusing but dumb. I don't know why readers bother to speculate about these things, as they are invariably wrong; they'd do far better to say "The chapter felt extraneous to me" and leave it at that.

As well, I'm utterly mystified by the review's final sentence. D*U*C*K is not an "amuse-bouche," or even an appetizer (O Lord, deliver me from the food metaphors). It is a stand-alone novella. With very rare exceptions (e.g. my downloadable early "novel" The H.O.G. Syndrome, which has been available for free on my website for more than a year now), I don't give my work away. This is what I do for a living. No one in any other profession would be expected to give away five months' worth of hard work, and it always amazes me that people think writers should. And as long as I'm bitching, may I just say that I am sick and tired of complaints about the prices of my Subterranean Press books? I'm poor too, but a review is not an appropriate place to complain about how much a publisher charged you for a book, particularly when even major publishers' hardcovers now cost $35 or close to it. Authors have absolutely no control over the pricing of their books, Subterranean allows me to publish in forms (novellas, short story collections) that don't interest major houses, and I think Subterranean always provides a fine value -- a beautifully crafted, signed book -- for the money. No one is forcing you to buy the stuff. If you want poundage for your buck, go buy a Dean Koontz novel.

Besides, if you bought it on Amazon, it didn't cost you $35. It's currently listed there at $23.10.

Over the past couple of years, I have tried hard to complain less about Amazon and the reader "review" system; it's largely fruitless and, I imagine, tiresome for many readers, and Amazon has improved the system, weeding out/removing more obvious troll reviews and allowing comments on the reviews that are posted (a much-criticized decision, but I think the only fair one). When I do allow myself to do so, with very rare exceptions -- and this isn't one -- my comments on Amazon reviews are not intended to insult the reviewers or discourage them from reviewing future books. However, the declaration, "[W]e cut Poppy some slack [because of Katrina]," from an intelligent reviewer in a four-star review, is more insulting than a plain old bad review could hope to be. To "cut me slack" due to the events of the last eighteen months is patronizing and assumes knowledge of me that you do not possess unless you know me personally and well: "Oh, well, look what happened to her; it's a wonder she can write anything at all." The reason I'm not currently writing anything is because I no longer feel capable of doing good work until I've established a permanent home base and gotten my shit together (in several senses of the expression). I was recently rereading Paul Theroux's Hotel Honolulu -- an irritating novel in many respects, but near the end I came across this quote (he's discussing the progession of his writing life from youth to middle age):

All this time I had been writing. Then my life was fractured. I fled and found myself with fragments of my life, and so swiftly had time passed that I had outstripped my ability to write any of it.

I think that is exactly where I am now. Theroux often has the ability to point out what should have been obvious to me in a succinct and clear-eyed way, particularly when it has to do with writing. I was able to write D*U*C*K, and I hope do a good job with it, because it was a fantasy, a kind of fairy tale. The next Liquor book won't be, and midway through, it became clear to me that I wasn't ready to write it yet. Until I am, I may well take on a nonfiction, non-K-related project I've been contemplating for a couple of years but wasn't sure when I would find time for with Rickey and G-man tugging at my sleeve all the time. I miss them badly, but to rush the telling of their story would do a disservice to them, myself, and my readers, and the nonfiction project would be nearly as close to my heart.

I'm not happy with all of my work in retrospect, and I don't know how D*U*C*K (or my other recent work) will hold up for me in ten years, but I will never deliberately palm off substandard work on my readers for the sake of a buck. If I didn't think D*U*C*K was good work, I wouldn't have published it, and I don't expect to be cut any goddamn slack for it. If you don't like the book or any future book of mine, I am sorry, but hold me responsible -- not the one-eyed bitch, the failure of the federal levees, or everfucking Bush. (That goes double if you do like it, natch!)

Since I started keeping an Amazon Connect page, I've accepted all but one of the "Amazon Friend" invitations I've received. I'm not sure I see the point of the whole "Amazon Friend" thing, but it seemed rude to decline the invitations and harmless enough to accept them. However, please do not (obviously, I'm talking to the one person whose invitation I declined) invite me to become your "Amazon Friend" as a thinly disguised way of plugging your book and inviting me to review it. Since I'm not a fan of the whole Amazon "reader review" system, I very rarely review books there; I generally only do so if a book I admire has received a number of particularly insipid bad "reviews" and I want to help raise its rating. I don't review books upon request. In a somewhat similar vein, I very rarely look at review copies of books sent to me by authors or editors who didn't take the time to contact me first asking if I'd be willing to take a look and maybe offer a blurb. If they do contact me first, the answer is often no; it depends on how busy I am and whether the book sounds like something that might appeal to me. If it arrives "blind," though, I almost always toss it without a response.

In order to effectively budget your time as a freelancer, you have to become something of a snot.

I don't have a goddamn thing planned for today, which is a blessing.

Bless kava kava. When you're low on your -pams, it can be a godsend. Don't worry about the liver-damage rumors you've heard, just splurge on the good shit that's made entirely from the roots. The liver-damaging toxins are in the bark, which is only used in the cheaper versions. At least that's what I choose to believe, and ain't nobody better tell Daddy different. Right now I'm more concerned about my sanity than my liver. (Make that last sentence a little less unwieldy and you could sell about a million T-shirts bearing the slogan in New Orleans.)

I wasn't in the mood to read the newspaper this morning, so I came in here, removed some of the toxic junk that's been flying around my journal and prime_liquor for the past couple of days, looked at some e-mail, and scanned my Amazon page. I look for new reviews and check the sales ranks (which aren't usually all that great, but occasionally they shoot wildly up, which is mysterious and exciting even though my agent says, and I quote, "Those damn numbers don't mean a damn thing and I wish to hell you writers would quit looking at them"). This is a daily ritual for a lot of writers. I've never known a single one who didn't take at least an occasional look at their Amazon "reviews" (though, admittedly, I've not quizzed every single writer of my acquaintance on this). The thing is, I really only pay attention to the "new" books. I might glance at the older books' sales ranks to see how they're selling, but I never check to see if they have any new reviews the way I do with Liquor et al. It's not that I don't care about the books themselves, but I guess I've gotten far enough away from them that I don't much care what people think of them anymore. The other day someone said to me -- not in a mean way, though I don't suppose there's any really kind way to tell someone you hated their book -- that he hadn't cared for Exquisite Corpse at all. Had he said the same about one of the newer books, it would have hurt my feelings and I might have said something snotty. (I hope not; I try not to, but you know me.) As it was, I just replied, "That's cool -- I don't think EC is my best book either, though I think it's probably the best of the earlier ones. If you feel like it, check out Liquor or one of the more recent ones. Here's a page I made to help people figure out which ones they might be interested in reading." He seemed surprised and grateful at my measured response, and said (possibly even truthfully) that he would pick up Liquor.

That wasn't really leading up to anything, I'm afraid. It was just another sad little peek into how writers spend their time online.

Late-breaking, heartbreaking bulletin: Chris, who's in the other room reading the paper, has just called out to me that Mr. Ernest Hansen has died. You can read his obituary here; it's a particularly well-written one and may bring a tear to your eye. Briefly, Mr. Ernest was the co-proprietor of what I consider New Orleans' best snowball stand, Hansen's Sno-Bliz. It's mentioned in Liquor. He invented the machine that shaved the ice to a soft, snowy consistency utterly unlike the hard crystals you'll find in many local snowballs. Whenever I would go into Hansen's wearing a sleeveless top or dress, Mr. Ernest would always get excited about my tattoo of the Amsterdam city crest and start reminiscing about his youthful travels (which may or may not have actually happened; I could never really tell). You may recall that his wife, Ms. Mary (who concocted the delicious syrups that completed the snowballs) died shortly after evacuating to Thibodeaux in the storm. I imagined he would follow her soon. After a 72-year marriage, they were only able to bear seven months apart.

(Since Ms. Mary died during the immediate aftermath of the storm and I never saw her obituary, I didn't know until today that she was a Gemelli before marriage, but it just further proves my contention that in New Orleans, everybody's grammaw was Italian.)

I frequently receive complaints from my overseas readers (particularly in Australia) that they've ordered books like The Value of X or The Devil You Know from Amazon and had them take forever to come. Usually they understand that this is Amazon's fault, but occasionally they blame Subterranean Press for "taking too long to send Amazon the books." That's not how it works. Subterranean provides books directly to Amazon, and also to a book distributor (Ingram) who sometimes provides them to Amazon. If Amazon fails to order the books, Subterranean and Ingram have no way of providing them. Bill Schafer of Subterranean tells me that Amazon also regularly attempts to order things that have been out of print for a while.

As you can see, Amazon isn't really on the ball with small-press stuff. If you're in Australia and can't find one of my books from a major publisher, such as Liquor or Prime, you're probably all right ordering it from Amazon; they keep plenty of these books in stock and can send them out in an expeditious manner. (Alternately, you can ask your local bookstore to order it; they can easily order books from major U.S. publishers, and if they tell you they can't, they're just being lazy and providing poor customer service.) If you want one of my small-press books, though, you're far better off ordering it directly from Subterranean or Gauntlet. They can't provide the discounts that Amazon does, so you'll pay a little more for the book, but you won't wait six months to receive it.

I could blather on, but Chris and I are going birding on the North Shore today. (Proof that we're not hardcore birders: If we were, we would have been there at least five hours ago.)

A couple of weeks ago an Australian reader posted a nice Amazon review of The Value of X in which he expressed his disappointment that the book was advertised as signed but arrived unsigned. (The first two printings of TVoX were signed; when Subterranean wanted to do a third printing, I was frantically trying to finish Soul Kitchen and didn't have time to do signature sheets, so they decided to publish the edition unsigned and Amazon apparently never got wind of the change.) I contacted the reader, sympathized with his disappointment, had Subterranean contact Amazon to see that the change was made in the description of the book, and offered to send my Australian reader a free signed copy of TVoX to make up for the problem. He declined, but thanked me for my kindness.

This morning, he found another way of thanking me for my kindness by posting a one-star "review" of The Devil You Know, which he hasn't read, because Amazon took too long to send it to him.

Look, I can't blame anyone (especially in Australia, where I've heard shocking tales of how long deliveries take to arrive) for complaining about Amazon's customer service. However, Amazon is not punished by the posting of a one-star review; the author is. Since this non-review clearly violates Amazon's TOS, I've contacted them and asked to have it removed, as well as contacting the author and asking him to do the right thing and have it removed himself. (Since I was unable to keep a certain peevish tone out of my e-mail, I don't know if he will do so.) The removal will probably go faster if some of you nice folks also go to the book's page and report the "review" as inappropriate.

Thanks, and I'm sorry I never seem to do anything here lately but bitch and moan. I'll try to tell you a happy bunny story soon.

[Addendum: Here is one happy, if extremely weird, thing: Peter Straub will guest-star on the soap opera "One Life To Live" today at 1:00 PM CST.]

[Addendum the Second: Wow, that was fast; the "review" is already gone. Thanks for your help, and please remember, folks, render unto Amazon what is Amazon's.]

I had a wonderful time at a party last night and woke up this morning in a state of black despair. I don't want to go into another decline like my beginning-of-Lent one. I mustn't allow it to happen. I have been getting work done and enjoying it, not to mention that I have a May 1 deadline for this book that I'd like to at least make a solid attempt at meeting.

This morning I finished Paul Theroux's newish novel Blinding Light. It is one of the most hateful books I've ever read. I don't necessarily mean that as a criticism -- Theroux is often very funny when he's being hateful -- but I do tend to agree with the critics (the real ones; I've not read any of the Amazon "reviews" yet) that this is not one of his more successful novels. However, I tend to prefer the metanovels that are about him, or at least about a character named "Paul Theroux." I had to take a break from this one about halfway through and read On the Banks of the Bayou, a Little House book previously unknown to me, about Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter Rose who -- what do you know? -- spent a year attending high school in Crowley, Louisiana, where she met Cajuns, black people, and other exotic types. Its innocence was a nice few hours of relief from Theroux's well-written bile.

[Addendum: Having finished Blinding Light and knowing their probable stupidity could no longer worm its way through my enjoyment of the novel, I went ahead and read some of the Amazon "reviews." Aside from its disregard for basic punctuation issues, I almost agreed with this one:

OK Paul, now you've written a dirty book. Please don't do it again. I slogged through it because even when you're bad, you're a good writer, and I've read just about everything you've published. But the weird premise, the unlikely plot, the baroque, excruciating sex scenes, the pretension of name dropping the rich and famous (and the pretension of not name dropping the most famous), the unlikeability of any of the characters--it was pretty awful. The endless scenes with Steadman rattling around in his drug-induced blind horniness got old real fast.

until I got to this part:

There was some good stuff, which others have talked about, so it wasn't a total waste. But at your age, writing so graphically about sex labels you as a dirty old man. You don't want to end up in that category, do you? You can do better than a Henry Miller ripoff.

Yes, by all means, let's declare everyone nonsexual beings once they reach the age of 55 or so. (Theroux is, I believe, 62.) Anyone who thinks about it, writes about it, or has it after that is a dirty old man or woman. Fucking pinhead.]

Today I received a small but very important royalty check: $168.12 from Simon & Schuster. Yes, ten years, no promotion whatsoever, and two ugly legal battles later, Exquisite Corpse and Untitled Novel #2 (which, obviously, I never delivered) have finally earned out (meaning, basically, that sales of Exquisite Corpse have now exceeded the advance money Simon & Schuster paid me for both books, and now I can start sharing in the income produced by further sales of the novel). No matter how tiny the advance or how long the period between publication and first royalty payment, this is always a banner day for any writer. Most novels never earn out; they go out of print long before they've had the chance to do so. If I had to name the one thing I'm proudest of about the "business" side of my career, it would be that all my major books are still in print.

Several writer friends of mine have recently been advised by their agents to take down their Amazon Connect pages due to the following clause in Amazon's TOS:

For all Author Materials that you post or submit in connection with the Program (including any trademark or similar rights in them), you hereby grant Amazon a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual and irrevocable right and license throughout the world in any media to: (1) use, reproduce, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display all of your Works.

I discussed this with my agent this afternoon and we came to the conclusion that the copyright problem isn't particularly onerous unless you're putting up content that you wouldn't want to see reproduced elsewhere, e.g. short stories or novel excerpts. For writers like me, who maintain separate blogs for our "real" online journaling and whose Amazon blogs consist primarily of new-book announcements, anthology-appearance announcements, and such, as my agent put it, "If they decide to license it to Amazon Poland without your consent, who gives a shit?" I like the feature, I've seen a small but definite increase in sales since I started using it, and, pending any further developments, I'm going to leave my page up.

In other news, a thank-you note I sent to "P. Tibbs" in gratitude for a kind gift has been returned as undeliverable. Thank you, P.Tibbs, whoever and wherever you are.

Since I could do worse in life than to make greygirlbeast my role model, I went ahead and created one of those Amazon Connect things. I don't expect to update the blog anywhere near as often as this one -- it'll mostly be an alert system for when I have something new coming out -- but you can go here to find a bibliography of everything I've written that is available on Amazon (this part won't be live until the items are "validated" to make sure I'm really me), my monthly reading lists, and suchlike.

I contemplating posting a nude picture of myself here, too, but I think I've already done enough of that sort of thing to last a couple of lifetimes.

I finished "Cocksucker Suit" last night and sent it off to scottynola, who says it made him cry. Of course we all cry at the drop of a hat -- or a pair of seersucker trousers -- lately, but it's still a gratifying response.

After two changes to my shipping address, most items ordered through my Amazon wish list are now reaching me, but at least one person reported having an item returned as "undeliverable" as recently as a week and a half ago. An e-mail exchange with Customer Service produced this ultimate response, beyond which it seems futile to go:

( Unhelpful Note from Amazon )

They seem blissfully unaware (despite being told twice) that there is no problem with the shipping address currently listed on my account, but only with their ability to deliver the items. Remember, they already sent at least one package to my old, uninhabitable house, despite that address not having been on the account for over four months. All I can say is that if you want to send me something, most of the recently ordered items have gotten here as long as the buyers selected first-class shipping. If you select the cheaper shipping option, the package really will be undeliverable, since New Orleans is still receiving only Priority and First-Class mail.

I realize this is deadly dull for the rest of you, but I hate for people who've tried to send gifts to wonder if they just disappeared into the ether.

I'd heard that BN.com, nearly five months after the storm, was still not delivering to New Orleans. I found this hard to believe, and ordered a book from them (a replacement for the tattered copy of Carrie I've had since I was 14) to find out whether it was true. I just received a confirmation e-mail saying the book would ship on Monday. We shall see.

I'll be reading tomorrow at the launch party for My New Orleans in the Mezzanine Ballroom of the Hotel Monteleone, 3-6 PM. Editor Rosemary James has asked me to read some of my bird doggerel (which is mentioned, and even briefly quoted, in my My New Orleans piece), but I'm not sure I have the intestinal fortitude for that and anyway I've never compiled it anywhere. If I could draw funny birds, maybe I'd do an illustrated chapbook, but I can't, at least not reliably. Anyway, I'll be reading something, as will John Biguenet, David Brinks, Peter Cooley, Roy F. Guste, Jr., James Nolan, and others. As well, jazz singer Leah Chase, daughter of iconic Creole restaurateur/cookbook author Leah Chase -- to whom I owe one of Soul Kitchen's epigraphs -- will be singing at the event. I believe the elder Leah, another contributor to My New Orleans, will also be in attendance. I hope so, as I'd like to meet her.