One of the cool kids

So I turned 41 on Friday.

Thank you, thank you, yes I don’t look a day over 33, you’re too kind.

It was a day marked by spontaneous outpourings of love and respect from people all over the planet, which is amazing and always makes me feel humbled and incredibly fortunate.

PLUS I GOT PHAT LOOTS.

Said loots include an excellent and stylish watch, books, a Lego Batplane set (!!!), a variety of vouchers for buying graphic novels, and…

Yes, I done got me a Kindle, thanks to the efforts of my amazing wife and our most excellent friends. And it is a thing of beauty – 155 grams of processing power, with a minimal but easy-to-use interface and enough space to store a metric shit-tonne of ebooks.

I have, of course, immediately put all my own ebook titles on it, and have finally been able to examine them in their native environment and realise that I don’t like some of the formatting. So I’ll need to do some work on those – both Kindle Store and Smashwords versions – to get them up to snuff.

I also have a few other titles on there, including Chuck Wendig’s Shotgun Gravy and Greg Stolze’s Switchflipped, both of which I can now read in comfort without balancing a laptop on my knees while riding the bus. More will come, once I start working out how to filter down the impossible volume of ebooks on the market to find the ones I want.

Yes, I’m now a consumer as well as a producer, and can start developing my own impressions about ebooks and how expensive they are. It’s exciting.

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Also rather exciting is the appearance of Hotel Flamingo and Godheads in The Book Designer‘s ebook cover design awards for February. They didn’t win, but I’m assuming that the covers are listed in descending order of awesomeness, which means they placed pretty high. I’m chuffed no matter what.

Speaking of cover designs, I’m still working out what to do for The Obituarist; I’m very happy with the great work Design Junkies did on those two books, but it’d be good to try something different for the next one. So if there are any graphic designers reading who’d like to work on an ebook cover – and can work within my budgetary constraints – drop me a line and talk to me!

(As for Nine Flash Nine, I’m talking to an illustrator about that one for something different again, but it’s a while away still.)

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Work on The Obituarist continues apace. I’m actually having a lot of fun writing it, which is very out of character for me, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

The problem has been finding time to write it, as this has been a very busy couple of months, what with the day job, social life, travelling and writing horse-choking blog posts every 3-4 days. Which, as you may have noticed, I’m cutting back on a little, now that all that book pricing stuff is done and dusted.

But still, the hope is that I can finish a first draft by the end of March. I’m actually going to New Zealand in a week or so to spend 5 days travelling around the North Island and meeting with textbook authors and consultants for my day job. But by night, I plan to eschew the fleshpots of Auckland and Palmerston North to hunker down in my hotel room and bang out one 1000-word chapter after another.

Let’s see how that goes.

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In closing – it’s a short post tonight – I want to reiterate the fact that my wife is amazing. Just amazing.

She’s my sunshine, you know.

Also, LEGO BATPLANE.