What's wrong with this picture?

It's blurry, I know. Frau Lobster was drunk.

Not really. Finding Frau Lobster drunk, even on a holiday, is like finding a politician being honest.

If the camera wasn't the size of a bottle cap, it wouldn't be so easy to blur a picture. If you could see clearly, I'm wearing a YMCA shirt, but I'm not young or Christian, and I haven't been associated with that gym for over a year. More significantly, I'm pouring Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale into a Mickey Mouse glass.

Happy Boxing Day!

Which was Christmas Episode Three for lobsters this year. First year we have not done more than one grandparent's house in a day, and Mo (and the rest of us) are much less stressed for it.

I list books I'm reading with an icon and link in the right-hand column, but since the traffic at this site is slight, if I take less than a week to read something, one of you three might miss it. So, for a brief period, I was reading Pat Walsh's book.


It took less than a day: topical motivation, good writing and relatively abundant free time. It was the ass-kicking I needed, and it came from a source I was willing to be kicked by. I've entertained notions of self-publishing in the form of starting my own small press, but I've never discounted MacAdam/Cage. It's not that they never miss, it's that I never feel like they bought a book without thinking it had artistic merit.

For a press that comes out with 30 titles or so a year, often all debuts, they have a disproportionate number of good reads. Pick 30 random reads from a big New York house like Random House or Scribner from the same 12-month period, I'll put my $24 on MacAdam/Cage.

And Walsh is the founding editor, and still (as far as I know) the top dog of their small editorial staff. I have no illusions that 'Wealth Effects' needs anything list than a pods-in-the-attic rework (or ten) before I'd let friends read it. I've workshopped some of it in online workshops, but even that is hard to bring myself to do. If I can still see shit that's broken, I can't show it to someone as if it's all fixed up. It'd be like feeding them undercooked chicken. And as far as editors and agents go, I don't expect they have seatbelts on their toilets, so no reason to send them any undercooked chicken either.

Hard to picture the author who's guilty of all 78 sins Walsh describes, but I'll bet he can at least provide proof of somoene who's committed 77. I've approached 70 in my life as a 'writer' and 20 or so in the past year. As I get back to serious work on 'Wealth Effects,' Walsh's book was probably the right book at the right time for me, whether mine turns out to be the right book at the right time when I'm ready to try and get it published or not.