I'm starting to feel faintly cursed.
Tonight I thought, well, I've signed about 4,000 of these title pages -- decorating many of them with little drawings, doodles, staring eyes, portraits of Uncle Sam, and, following a slight accident this afternoon with a bottle of ink, fingerprints -- I'll stop and do a blogger entry. I'll tell the story of my day being photographed for the back cover shot.
So I turned on the notebook computer, and listened as the charging cord made an interesting sputtering sound and an even more interesting burning-electrical-things smell, and then died.
It left a half-charged battery, which may just be enough to get the various files I'll need tomorrow off the computer and onto another. But it kind of put paid to my plans to write a leisurely sort of journal entry. So I signed another few hundred cover sheets instead.
This is the deal on the 5,000 signed books: bookstores can order dumpbins or risers or whatever they call them of American Gods. Ten copies of the book, a couple of the audio books, and a couple of signed ones. If you have a bookstore that has a stand of American Gods, and you know I'm not going to be signing in your area, then take a look and see if there are any signed books in there.
At my most cynical, I imagine a bunch of people driving from Barnes and Noble to Borders across America buying up the signed copies and immediately offering them on E-Bay (or hoarding them and then selling them on E-Bay).