Two New Lives for Perfect Skin

Perfect Skin was the novel that broke me in America. When I say ‘broke’ I don’t mean it put me on tour for months and bought me my second Lear jet, but it got me a start there. It gave me a toehold. A crumbly toehold, as it turned out, but that was no fault of the publisher or the book.

My agent there put it out to a few publishers and I had things to do in the UK, so I decided to make a round-the-world trip of it and come home via New York. She was going to line up meetings. We both had the plural in mind when she started, though what I turned up to was singular. One meeting.

On the way in my agent was all about expectation management: ‘He just said he was interested to meet you … I don’t know if he’ll have read the book … He’s been out of town so he may not have started it yet …’

The meeting was in the Flatiron Building so I told myself that, if it was awful, at least I’d have got to see inside a New York icon.

This job has taught me to brace myself for awful, or at least underwhelming, and what happened was a rare instance of the opposite of both. As we signed in I kept telling myself ‘one guy, half-interested, lots of talk about how hard it is these days’. But no. We were lead into a triangular office at the pointy end of the building with a view right up into the haze of Broadway. Eight people came in. All of them seemed to have the word ‘publisher’ in their job titles. Following an orgy of photocopying – and going with the mistaken belief that this was hotly contested property – every one of them had read the book in the preceding three days. And each of them had personal, insightful, flattering things to say about it.

I had come to pitch to them and it turned out they seemed to be pitching to me. They wanted to talk about the book, they wanted to talk about me. They had googled me and rounded up reviews. ‘After January,’ one of the senior players said. ‘Tell us about After January. I see it’s set in Caloundra.’ He said ‘Caloundra’ perfectly and carefully, almost as though he’d been practising. ‘Tell us about Caloundra.’

So I kept my face as straight as I could and I said ‘Caloundra’s kind of Brisbane’s equivalent of the Hamptons.’ If you know Caloundra, you’ll know how much I liked saying that. And, fans of Revenge, please feel free to imagine Emily VanCamp turning up to an adjacent King’s Beach unit to defeat her nemesis Madeleine Stowe, after Madeleine framed Emily’s father years ago for leaving his bin out for too long or not cleaning the communal barbecue after use.

I left the meeting feeling dangerously optimistic. I bought a picture of the Flatiron Building from a street vendor and told myself it was about having got as far as having a meeting there, and that buying it wouldn’t jinx the deal. An offer came through a few days later.

They lined the book up for the end of summer the following year. As the time grew closer, they started making plans. It would come out in September, I would do some Canadian writers’ festivals at the start of October and then head to New York. By the start of September, my publicist was seeing some draft reviews and they were looking good.

On September 10, 2001, the book was published. No one needs reminding of what happened the following day. Almost all the reviews were spiked and, when book reviews found their way back into the media weeks later, it was the next month’s books they were talking about. In the circumstances, that really didn’t seem like much to complain about. My mother called me on September 12 to make sure I was making the trip anyway, however crazy the world looked that day, and to tell me any one of us changing our plans was a victory for the terrorists. (My mother was 6 in England during the Blitz and had subsequently faced terrorism in Northern Ireland in the early 70s – our family position re attitude to armed aggression was established long ago.)

So I did the festivals in Canada and flew on to New York, where the southern tip of Manhattan was still smouldering as we circled before landing. Needless to say, there were no bookstore events for me to do. The city was a long way from normal.

So the book didn’t have quite the life in America that we’d once hoped for. Meanwhile it had a reasonable life in Australia, it had its moments in the UK and the Italian edition went on to be made into a movie, Solo un Padre, which shifted the action from Brisbane’s inner western suburbs in summer to Turin in winter. It peaked at #4 at the Italian box office, at a time when Twilight was #1. Here’s the trailer.

The book may not have had an easy time in America, but it didn’t completely vanish. It found some readers, and one of them was Will Entrekin who had this to say about it just over a year ago. If you take a look at his review, you’ll see it finishes with the line ‘It doesn’t appear to be available for Kindle, sadly.’

A year later, he’s the person who’s changing that. His company, Exciting Press, is Perfect Skin’s new publisher in North America and Europe and, as of today, Perfect Skin is available there for Kindle and Nook.

And from the start of net month it’ll also be back in Australia, both as an ebook and print-on-demand pbook through Allen & Unwin’s House of Books. So will Monica Bloom, which Exciting Press has also recently released outside Australia.

You, Me and a Lot of Shampoo – the hairdresser porn that got dumped and scored me a contract

By the mid-90s, my writing career wasn’t exactly resembling a career. I’d had a collection of short stories published that reviewers had persuaded everyone but my mother not to buy, but my agent was working hard to get me any break she could. Mostly that meant stories for anthologies, while I worked away at two novels and a part-time medical editing job.

Random short stories would beef up my CV, perhaps catch the eyes of publishers and at least see me putting something out there while I worked out how to be a novelist. (I had already worked out several ways not to be a novelist in the 80s and early 90s.) And maybe the writing would sometimes feel good, and maybe I’d learn something.

Every commission counted, and a copy of any book I appeared in was lovingly filed away (thank you James Bradley, Drusilla Modjeska, Beth Yahp, et al). From all those commissions, I can recall only one rejection of the finished product. It was for an anthology called ‘Men Love Sex’.

I don’t think the briefing I got extended much beyond the title. Or maybe it did and I just skim read it, already thinking ‘yay, another anthology, more (somewhat) paid writing, another chance to get noticed, men, love, sex, hmmm’.

There were some big-name writers involved and I thought my only choice was to stake out my own little piece of turf and try to write a story no one else would be writing. Cue loser guy with elaborate fantasy life and hairdresser fetish. Go to town. Let no opportunity for a laugh, cheap or otherwise, go by. Make him way hairy and truck in loads of shampoo. And find a story somewhere in there and tell it. An undercurrent of tender apparently unrequited love might be nice.

I wrote it. I took no prisoners, I rarely took his mind out of his pants or off his hairdresser, and I wrote it. And sent it to my agent. Who called me while still laughing. We both though I was set.

Then, weeks later, the letter came from the editor rejecting it. He said it wasn’t right for the book. He said he’d wanted ‘blood on the page’. I looked back at the commissioning letter. No blood. My story had a man, love and sex. All three boxes ticked and it overlapped with nothing in the book. But it wasn’t to be.

I just saw this today in a recent online bio of the editor: ‘To satisfy his curiosity about how other men write about their relationships, in 1995 he also edited the acclaimed anthology Men Love Sex (Random House 1995) which remains a benchmark of male writing about the emotions.’ He probably said something along those lines in his letter, but I wasn’t in a place to read it properly. The anthology was acclaimed, my story didn’t fit and I bear no grudge.

Because, at Brisbane Writers Festival in 1995, that story got me far more than a spot in an anthology.

I was programmed onto the cool young writers night-time event, which was called Spoken Like a Savage. It sounded like blood on the page again, and again I had no blood. But it was okay. It was a live reading and no one would or could stop me once I’d got going.

My agent told me there would be a publisher in the audience looking for talent for a major new fiction list and that I should read a piece that would really stand out. And nothing was likely to stand out more than my first person lewd hairy-man hairdresser fantasy story. So I practised and practised and practised until I could work it like a monologue. I practised and practised and got a migraine and vomited and slept, and then showered and went to the club and gave it everything I had.

And the next day the publisher came up to me and said, ‘I hear you’ve got a novel manuscript. I’d like to read it.’ She published the novel a year later.

Once the novel was out, the story had a life as well, in an anthology of contemporary Australian writing published as part of the cultural program connected with the Sydney Olympics (yes, seriously). It also appeared in my collection Headgames. And now it’s back, as a stand-alone ebook. Weirdly, it seems to be being bought by people also buying other books with ‘Haircut’ in the title. I didn’t know that was a thing but, if they’re over-attached to the idea of haircuts, they should surely get my guy.

For the next few hours, it’s free for Kindle/Kindle app on Amazon. After that it’s US99c, which amounts to a tiny fraction of a hairdresser experience these days. Want one? Click right here.

My Place in the Universe – this week’s favourite contract clause

Publishing people don’t ask for it. For them the world is enough. Admittedly they often ask for strange and ambitious parts of it – see my earlier post concerning my publisher’s wish to secure rights to sell my work in the McDonald and Heard Islands, Antarctic volcanoes inhabited by nothing more bookish than seals – but in the end they keep it terrestrial.

Several times now, I’ve had film people require me to give them the rights to my work ‘throughout the universe’. Okay, look at it from any practical point of view and that’s madness, but there’s a lot about it to like. First, it says to me that lawyers are confident we are not alone. That there are other sentient beings somewhere out there, and they’re making movies. Movies so good they could undermine the struggling film industry of Earth.

Second, it says that film makers see a market for my stories not just beyond these shores but beyond our planet, solar system, galaxy and indeed species. Who wouldn’t love to be an author of genuinely, literally universal renown?

But a friend and fellow novelist, Adam Ford, got me thinking yesterday about the physics of it. And here it is in perspective.

World rights? That makes sense. You need to be the only creatures on the planet with the right to make the movie.

Solar system rights? Well, okay, but we’ve looked closely enough to be pretty sure there are no other film-makers in the vicinity. Earth looks like the only planet set to make movies for the foreseeable future. (Though I’d love it to be different – imagine a Martian Tim Burton making ‘Earth Attacks!!!’) But supposing film-makers appear out of the blue on Neptune. They could ship a rocket-load of bootleg DVDs here in a matter of years, and we all know how long film development can take on Earth. So, I can agree to ruling out the solar system.

Galaxy rights? Here’s where the physics comes in. The nearest star, the invisible red dwarf Proxima Centauri, is around 4.2 light years away, ie, about 40 trillion kilometres. So the producers/distributors here need not be concerned about the bootleg DVDs. On the other hand, if the Proxima Centauri film team went to screen their movie of my book and pointed it right at earth, the visual image – albeit very attenuated – could reach here in 4.2 years. (It’d be a silent movie though – if sound could make it, which it couldn’t, it’d take 967,000 years to get here, travelling at its earth-typical speed. Okay, maybe they’d email it and the sound would be there once we downloaded the file onto our Proxima Centauri-compatible iPads …)

Of course, that supposes not only that film development is a cruise on Proxima Centauri compared with Earth and takes no time at all, but that the Proxima Centauri film team already has the source material to work with. Since it’s not presently possible for me to send the physical book 40,000,000,000,000 km in my lifetime, perhaps I transmitted it to them digitally. The signal would take 4.2 years to reach them but, if the book is at least 4.2 years old, they could conceivably have it already, while I’m about to ink the film deal back on Earth.

So, yes, earthling producers, you can have galaxy rights.

But universe rights? You want to stop film-makers currently outside the Milky Way from adapting this material, in case the end result causes problems for you? How far to the next galaxy? In the producers’ interests, I’m prepared to work to as narrow a definition as possible, ie, Milky Way satellite galaxies are not included in Milky Way (ie, galaxy) rights. So, the nearest galaxy outside our own is Canis Major Dwarf. How near? 25,000 light years.

That’s right. If I emailed or in some other cunning way transmitted my story to the film team over at Canis Major Dwarf, it’d take 25,000 years to get to them, and the movie would take 25,000 years to get back. Allowing the Earth-average 7 years development from book publication to movie screening, that comes in around 50,007 years.

If I can manage to live another 50 years, the story would by then have been in the public domain on Earth – ie, available free to any film-maker here who wants it – for 49,907 years. By that time, it’s also possible the current producers’ interests in the project may have waned.

So, I’m going to try to limit territories to galaxy rights in future. I think physics will back me up on that.

The Titanic, in Almost Present Tense

I admit this’ll look like something I’ve made up – or borrowed from Oliver Sacks – but the only changes I’ve set out to make are to de-identify the patient involved. Yes, it goes back to my medical days, to 1988, when I was a junior doctor at a Brisbane hospital.

Some time that year, I was doing a Casualty term when an 85-year-old woman was brought in from a nursing home in a state of confusion.

Earlier that morning, she had screamed when a staff member had turned the TV on in her room. When asked why, she said that there were small men in coloured clothes in the corner playing cricket in a box. There had been a game the night before, and the highlights were being shown on the news.

She knew her first name, but couldn’t account for where she was, or much else. Until the day before, she’d been doing the cryptic crossword in the paper in under 20 minutes most mornings.

From the start, I sensed something different was up. I addressed her as Mrs Gardner and she said, ‘I’m not Mrs Gardner. Everyone’s talking about Mrs Gardner, and I don’t know who she is. I’m Margaret. I’m Peggy.’

So I called her Peggy and she gave me an odd look. I called her Margaret, and all seemed okay. I said my name was Nick Earls, and I was the doctor who would be assessing her. She said ‘Hello Doctor Nicholls’.

We talked about the men in the box playing cricket, and it was clear that she knew about cricket but not about TV. She answered my questions thoughtfully, even respectfully, as though she owed them more consideration than I was used to. I was 24 and to most of the patients I looked like a teenager. I was called a young whipper snapper often enough that year (and once, by another confused person, a young whipper snipper …). But Margaret was treating me as if I was older than her.

I checked the notes. She had come in with an MSQ score of something like 3 out of 10, which meant she was quite disorientated. I ran the questions again. I asked her who the Prime Minister was and she said ‘Mr Fisher, no, Mr Hughes’. I asked her the year and she said 1915. On the MSQ that’s a simple 0 out of 2, but the answers were consistent. I asked her how old she was. She said she thought she was 12. She was certain she was not more than 14, but said that if it was 1915 she was 12. 0 from 3 but, had it been 1915, 3 from 3.

I had stumbled, for the only time in my career, upon a Hollywood movie mental illness. My patient was stuck in 1915 and she was 12, and Peggy. Peggy to her family, but Margaret to old men like me who had never met her before. I had been too familiar in my greeting, too late-20th-century, calling her Peggy and mentioning my first name. I tried to think of all those Merchant Ivory films – A Room With a View, Maurice – and pitch myself accordingly.

Confusion wasn’t supposed to be like this. In real life it’s never this clear cut, as though the shutters have come down 73 years before and nothing since is visible.

She told me about her father, a boot-maker at Highgate Hill, and the rich man at the top of the street who owned a pony and sulky. She talked about the vegetables her family grew in their garden and the food her mother cooked. She told me about leaving England, and how scared she had been about the prospect of the sea voyage. But her father had fixed that. He’d taken her to see the start of the maiden voyage of a huge ship as it left Southampton for America.

She described a black hull with the ship above it painted white, and four funnels with black tops. The ship towered over her on the dock. It was the biggest thing she’d ever seen, and the three blasts it gave on its whistle were the loudest she’d heard from any ship.

I realised she was telling me about maiden voyage of the Titanic, 100 years ago today but, for her, only three years before that moment. I asked if she knew what happened next, and she didn’t grasp what I was fishing for. She told me she and her father had something to eat and went home. And she knew from that day that the voyage to Australia would be safe, and so it had been.

Somehow, her father had kept from her the news of the loss of the Titanic and to her, in 1915 and 1988, it was still the greatest ship afloat. I was talking to someone who had seen the Titanic, but had no idea it had sunk.

I spent far too long doing her admission. I wanted to hear everything I could. Mostly she was fixed in time, but when she looked at her hands they baffled her. They were the hands of an old woman.

She told me about men from her street going off to war. I asked who they were fighting and she said ‘the Kaiser’. Then she stopped, and checked herself before saying, ‘I almost said my son went to war and was a prisoner of the Japanese. But that’s not possible. I’m 12 years old. I can’t have a son. And we’re not fighting the Japanese.’ She shook her head, as if that might clear the idea. ‘It’s bad,’ she said. ‘I think something very bad happened. But I don’t understand.’ We talked about 1915 again, and that was better. Other than that one brief flicker of the 1940s – a memory that wouldn’t stay down – she was entirely a 12-year-old girl in Highgate Hill in World War One.

In the ward, they stopped all medication, and within two days she was her usual alert 1988 self. A new drug she’d been put on a week before had interacted with something she was already taking. In two days she had had to work through 73 missing years.

I visited her on a break, though I had no work reason to. She had the paper in front of her. She was doing the crossword.

‘Doctor Nicholls,’ she said when I walked in. She held up her arms and laughed. ‘I’ve grown into my hands again.’

Triple-A Credit Rating Now Locked In for Qld (or, On the Axing of the Premier’s Lit Awards …)

Well I’m glad that’s sorted out, and congratulations to Campbell for getting us there so quickly. Insiders tell me there’s nothing more influential on the ratings folk at Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s than reducing your debt by 0.00028% through axing awards for writing. That’s how valuable the axing of the Premier’s Literary Awards is to the state’s finances. It’s a saving of $250,000 at the same time as the LNP is telling us the state is $85b in debt (and I didn’t even factor their extra $4b of new spending into my calculation).

It’s the difference between going $20,000 into debt to buy a car and instead being really smart about your finances and only having to borrow $19,999.94.

While I’ve had little personal reason to love the Premier’s Literary Awards, I’ve been glad they’ve been there. In the 90s, when just about every other state seemed to have them and we didn’t, it was yet another contributor to the perception that we were a backwater that hadn’t shifted since the mid-20th century (a perception I’ve tried to combat any time it’s shown its face). Peter Beattie’s introduction of the awards in 1999 wasn’t some bizarre act of state largesse – it merely brought us into line with the rest of the country.

If in fact yesterday’s decision cans all of the awards this year, it actually means this government will be doing LESS than the National Party government did in 1989. The David Unaipon Award was in operation then, and I think the Steele Rudd Award was too. (It was certainly well-established by 1993, when I remember failing to win it.)

The Unaipon Award is one that will be particularly missed. There is nothing else like it in the country – a national award for an unpublished manuscript by an emerging Indigenous author – and it has launched several major writing careers and unearthed some work of great quality. To name three: Samuel Wagan Watson’s ‘Of Muse, Meandering and Midnight’ (1999), Larissa Behrendt’s ‘Home’ (2002) and Tara June Winch’s ‘Swallow the Air’ (2004) – some brilliant poetry, a strikingly impressive first novel and one of the best collections of short fiction this country has produced. To name a fourth: Doris Pilkington Garimara won the Unaipon in 1990 for her first novel, and went on to write ‘Follow the Rabbit-Proof fence’, which became the acclaimed and successful film ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’.

The Unaipon Award has been important both in discovering new Indigenous voices and also in starting several significant writing careers. Tara June Winch acknowledged that herself yesterday.

Another significant loss is the Qld Premier’s Prize for an unpublished manuscript. This award gave a prize of something like $10-15,000 to the author and, at least as importantly, guaranteed publication of the book. Winners have gone on to have their books win or be shortlisted in significant national and international awards such as the Miles Franklin, Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and Age Book of the Year. I know of at least two manuscripts recognised by this award that ended up with significant US publishing deals.

Those two awards can make careers, and all of the awards can help sustain them. They’re partly about drawing attention to our stories and continuing to see them told, and they can have an industry benefit too, and an economic benefit.

If Doris Pilkington Garimara hadn’t been picked up by the David Unaipon Award, would she have written ‘Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence? I don’t know. But that award was the start of a sequence of events that not only made her a published author and saw her next book published, but saw $6m invested in making that second book into a film which took $16m at the box office and won 23 awards in 7 countries.

To the caller to talk back radio this morning who said ‘you don’t see the government giving money to apprentice plumbers,’ please when open your eyes whenever you’re ready to. An apprentice is eligible for $5,500 in Tools for Your Trade grants, $7800 Adult Apprentice Support in year one if they’re over 25 and $5200 in year two, up to $1000 a year in travel support and up to 13 other Centrelink benefits. Plus the government pays their employers to have them. I don’t have the figures for plumbers, but for apprentice brickies the employer incentives total $19,800 per apprentice.

It’s a rare writer who is good enough to win awards that might pay them an amount comparable to the tax dollars that go towards each and every apprentice training anywhere around the country. I want us to have apprentices. I want us to have plumbers and bricklayers and sparkies – I’m not for a second suggesting we wind their money back – but I also want us to have writers. And anyone saying we don’t put taxpayers’ money towards apprentices is just plain wrong.

To the caller who said ‘You don’t see governments handing this sort of money out to other industries,’ okay, you’ve got a point. The federal government recently committed a thousand times this much to one initiative in the car industry, for whom $250,000 proabably wouldn’t fund one meeting in Detroit. The government would never bother earmarking $250,000 for the car industry.

Governments give huge amounts to industries all the time, and we don’t notice much of it. A lot of it’s probably very useful, but it’s not there to be noticed. Writers’ awards are there to be noticed – it’s partly what they’re about. But don’t go saying governments don’t give out money to other industries.

A government has a chance at a pretty good return on $250,000 invested in writers’ awards, both culturally and in terms of fostering future writing (and tax-paying careers). Meanwhile, in the world that some people seem to think is more real than the creative industries, $250,000 doesn’t even buy a bus stop. We’ve got one down the road that was recently moved 50m at a cost of $300,000.

But at least Qld now has only 99.99972% of its ugly debt left, and only $84,999,750,000 more to cut. And there’s one fewer set of awards I’ll need to get bitter and twisted about not winning this year.

OMG – temporarily the world’s 4th-highest selling (free) unicorn sharehousing fantasy story

Okay, it’s not quite like that. It’s EVEN BETTER. I’m currently the author of the world’s HIGHEST SELLING (free) ‘unicorn sharehousing comedy fantasy story featuring a protagonist called Stanley’, and don’t even try telling me that hasn’t been your dream since childhood.

All right, all right. Amazon slices and dices the genre categories a bit, but not quite that thinly. But thanks to some enthusiastic downloading, Problems With a Girl and a Unicorn is currently sitting at #13 in the US Kindle rankings for (free) contemporary fantasy.

This is the time for all Australians to don the green and gold, download like bandits and make it infiltrate the top ten while the Americans are sleeping.

Who knows what they’re expecting when they download it? As was pointed out to me earlier, most of the people downloading it in the US seem to be scooping up every unicorn story they can point their Kindles at. Yet my story is a reasonably grubby 90s sharehousing story, that happens to feature a unicorn housemate. It can’t possibly be what they’re expecting. All the more reason I want it on their Kindles.

The story came about because, after John Birmingham had come out of the blocks with the definitive Australian work on sharehousing (He Died With a Felafel in His Hand) and then followed it up with another hit or two (Tassie Babes, for instance), it seemed like loads of people were trying to get some buttock purchase on his bandwagon. We were deluged with sharehouse stories, some of which started to look, dare I say it, a little derivative.

So I decided, as my own private way of commenting on that, to suggest that a writer would have to go to extraordinary lengths to write a sharehouse story with anything new in it at all. And I decided I’d do that by setting out to write the same story everyone seemed to be trying to write, but I would people it with a guy, a girl and … a unicorn. A sharehouse that no one had seen before.

I played around with it for a while, but it didn’t go too far. Then I was suddenly struck by how it might end, and I knew I had myself a story. It was published in my collection Headgames and has twice been turned into a short film. It’s also been optioned for claymation by someone who worked on the Wallace & Gromit movie. I want to see that.

For now, though, it’s at least fully resuscitated as a story, and free for another day or so for Kindle and the Kindle app. Please download one here. I’d like to see how far and wide I can make it go.

New (Old) Stories, Free Stories

Who knows where ebooks will end up once we’re through this one-time-in-a-few-centuries shake-up of publishing, but it’s time for me to make more of some of their early apparent advantages.

Here are three of them:

1. Old stories never die. Books no longer need to go out of print. While this comes with the downside of potentially turning retailers into an endless thicket of old (and new) stories, I think and hope it’ll worth it for what we’ll no longer be losing. We also now have a chance to put out-of-print work back into print.

2. Size isn’t important (and I’ve been waiting a long time to hear that). Historically, short stories have found their homes in other, bigger things (journals, anthologies, collections) and novellas have had trouble finding homes at all. With ebooks, that’s all changed.

3. Prices are often lower. There are fewer steps in bringing a story to market in e-form and the steps that add fixed costs (paper, ink, fuel) are the ones that have gone. Publishing industries in some countries (I’m looking at you, Australia) are still sorting out how the new supply chain works and how to price accordingly, but there’s scope for prices significantly lower than paper books, with a reasonable return to the people who together make the chain that leads from idea to e-reader.

So today I’m adding 1, 2 and 3 together to make, um, 5. Five short stories of mine from the late 90s and early this century will, for  a limited time, be available worldwide (ie, now including Australia and New Zealand) through Exciting Books on Kindle. I’m assuming that includes the Kindle app for iPads etc. The US price will be 99c, and I hope the prices in other markets will be comparable.

And sometimes the price will be zero. We’ll start that today, with Problems with a Girl and a Unicorn set to go free for two days from 2pm Australian EST (ie, midnight US Eastern and 5am UK, if I’ve got my calculations right)*. If you have any capacity to read Kindle-formatted stories, please get yourself a copy by clicking here. And if you don’t, maybe download the Kindle app and then get yourself a copy.

* Note: If the timing doesn’t work out exactly like that, you have my apologies. Please check again later, since it’s booked to happen today. And if the link doesn’t work where you are, please check for the story in the Kindle Store.