Unfortunately, I won’t have any copies of Codex Nekromantia with me. My printer had some problems related to Hurricane Irene (among other things) and the copies that I was supposed to bring will arrive fashionably late on Monday. Crap! But I’ll be there with some free stories to sign!

Of course you do, you’re reading this. And as we all know, fans of mine are suave, sophisticated party animals. You have tons of friends. Anytime you want you can go stomp in military boots at a warehouse, or scrape caviar across toast at a swanky penthouse. You can even Get the Led out in somebody’s basement while you sit under halos of pot smoke illuminated by blacklight.

The world is your army ration, oyster or Dorito, respectively.

So why haven’t you come to the party that my publisher’s throwing over at 1889.ca? They’re giving away a truly heart-breaking amount of prizes. If you so much as enter the giveaway, they will have to forfeit their own expensive penthouses and luxury yachts to fulfill their promises. From riches to rags they will fall, bleeding wealth all the way, until they’re rattling around in a thrice-used appliance box, sold to them by the previous tenants as “a great little fixer-upper.”

What can I say? Kindles are expensive. But not as expensive as producing the trailer for Bears, Recycling and Confusing Time Paradoxes. That’s right, we have produced a trailer for the book, and it (and details of the giveaway) is available here: Party Like It’s 1889!

That would, however, make a badass set of samples. Thud thud slap woosh. Sounds from the wharf.

Now that I have a book with pages to turn, I feel that I should extend that page-turning metaphor to introduce the new site design! The columns are larger and less space-efficient than ever before, and I’ve created a proper homepage instead of the digital equivalent of me writing my name and phone number on your palm in ballpoint. I struggled with widening the columns because it makes the site more difficult to read on mobile devices, but I think I managed to strike a happy balance. Please do let me know if you encounter any crap with the layout on iThingies, small screens or crystal orbs.

Now I’m off to nurse my hangover.

That line, and thousands of its friends, were cut from Codex Nekromantia for good reasons, but the sentiment has always stuck with me, and the thought has been necessary on the long process of making very thorough mistakes on the novel. And now, in the month of October, when I swore that I’d always release it, I’m releasing it.

Mondays will no longer be Moral, at least for the run of the book. I’ll instead be updating A Path Fantastic with sections of the novel.

Starting right now. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it!

So it begins.

I fooled around with copying and pasting in text until I had an idea of what authors were in the system, and then wrote some text snippets in an attempt to get specific authors.

First up was this to try for Raymond Chandler:

So I walked down to the bar and slapped a fiver on the counter. It stuck there, soaking up some stale beer and the flecks of dreams that had spilled from glasses and mouths.

“What do you want me to do with that?” asked the bartender. He’d seen too many deaths in this bar to count, what was one more out back in the alley?

“I want you to insulate your wallet. The winter’s coming, it’ll be cold.”

The bartender slipped it into a creaky old register with a big, fat bullet hole right over the L in Melner Machines.

“I don’t know his name. I know his drink. A dram of gin and an olive, taken in one go, fifteen minutes later, and every fifteen minutes, another, until he staggers into the street and out of my mind.”

“A ginhound wrecked up that broad? Tell me you don’t have jazz in this joint.”

“I ain’t got a reason to lie to you.”

“Maybe not to me, but maybe to my client.”

The analyzer returned Raymond Chandler. Success!

Second, I wanted to get James Joyce. Which was difficult because I’ve never knowingly read any James Joyce.

the men fell like trees in the yawning vistas of british columbia toppling one by one as their hats fell like drifts of snow from the crowns of the boughs in cold december. the bullets kicked up little clouds of dust, the fog of chainsaws around the feet of the trees, roaring away against the life that each killed.

if a man falls in a field, and nobody cares, does he make any news?

I write like: James Joyce! Two for two! Next, I wrote some stream-of-consciousness as a random test.

Jimmy broke down the door and snarled.

“You stay away from my butter! That’s my butter! You ain’t got a right to it!”

Timmy whirled, knife halfway to his steaming toast.

“It’s my butter as much as it is yours!”

“You use your cream cheese! You bought those bagels and you’re gonna eat them!”

“Keep the fucking bagels!” Timmy said, buttering his toast. He buttered it hard, pressing to the point of no return against the bread. It collapsed as the butter soaked into the nooks and crannies and softened the bread. He almost poked holes through but kept a steady, angry hand.

Jimmy pissed in Timmy’s pillowcase while he ate butter.

Behold, Chuck Palahniuk. Not bad. Now I would attempt to get Stephen King. This took the longest. Passage after passage failed, until I tried a butchered, abridged version of Stephen King’s IT:

And then this fucking clown turned into a ghost and haunted these kids until some kind of space lobster appeared and killed that one guy in the bathtub.

Clowns and [Maine] lobsters, two mainstays of King, carried me through! I wanted to see if I could mad-libs the passage and get another author:

This goat turned into a lion and haunted these kids until some kind of electrical appliance appeared and made toast for that one guy in the bathtub.

Still King.

At that point Michael, the friend who showed me the site in the first place, copied in Mark Twain’s [James] Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses and was told that Mark Twain wrote like James Fenimore Cooper. Maybe this slight will re-animate Mark Twain’s corpse. I was surprised that it failed with a known text and also that it had James Fenimore Cooper as an option. Then Michael pasted in the first few paragraphs of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and received Twain.

In conclusion, I Write Like is a fun site to play with until Twain’s zombie tracks down the server rack and chews the cords to pieces.

Unfortunately, my processor is 100% grade-A American man, and he’s never once been too cold in a room. This is the sort of man that lives on steaks and when his girlfriend puts her cold hands on him she has to go to the hospital for that shit where you heat a frostbitten body part up too fast, and then when they get to the hospital he eats another steak, served to him by his cardiologist.

My friends, wife and I planted a garden this weekend. We put in two 6×10 plots and filled them with yellow onions, garlic, chard, sugar snap peas, and hot peppers of some description. According to a label written by a friend, we’re also growing hamburger trees.

And the fucker bought the hamburger tree seeds whose fruit has fresh onions, not grilled onions. I hate fresh onions on hamburgers. Joke’s on him, I’m not sharing the bounty of my french fry plant.

I also have a project in the works that, while it probably won’t titillate, might capture your attention for three or so seconds, and that’s enough time to implant a latent neuron-pulverizing hook for a pop song.

Like I just did.