It’s not often that I cross the radar of a NYT bestselling author. But at Balticon last week, I had a chance to meet the new steampunk star, Gail Carriger, and sit on a panel about YA books with her. Later, she blogged about it, calling C4C “genius”, and embedded C4C Episode 1 on her post. How cool is that?

If you’re at Balticon this year, and would like to buy some Calls for Cthulhu Merch, get a signed copy of Tumbler, or just hang out, this is where you can find us (the ones with asterisks are guaranteed, the others are just our plan at the moment):

You guys remember a few months ago, when OkCupid posted an analysis on what the best pick-up lines were, based on statistics from it’s dating website? At the time, I thought that was pretty cool, because it showed that a dating site was actually paying attention to statistics surrounding human interaction.

It was actually more interesting to me because I used to use OkCupid back in the day, before I met Allison. I haven’t been there in about three years, but all the same, I was sent this e-mail:

BrandG:

I posted a swords and sorcery short story to Smashwords recently called “A Moments Pause.” It’s basically the story of the four greatest heroes who have finally cornered the five greatest evil-doers in the world, and what they do in the face of sudden retirement.

The story’s only a buck, and you can find it here: LINK. Hope you like it.

Okay, I don’t go “Grammar Nazi” in general, because I believe people should be able to write whatever they want, and use whatever words fit the situation. However, I’ve seen this same issue come up in three different podcast fiction stories, from three different professional authors, and I gotta find closure on this.

I hate the word “instantaneously”. Let’s put aside the general writing advice that says, “Kill all the adverbs”. If you want to say that something suddenly happened, it seems like “suddenly” isn’t good enough anymore. “Instantly” is better than “suddenly” because it means something happened even faster. But “instantaneously” is even better than “instantly” because it’s even faster-er!!

This morning, Amazon posted Brand’s novella “Tumbler” at this link. I can’t tell you how amazingly cool this is.

So, about a month ago, as we were getting on a plane to go to California, I misplaced my phone. Someone called the contact number to tell us that he left it at the “Lost and Found” at BWI. So, cool. I went to the L&F desk, and was told that there are actually six different L&F places in BWI alone. One for the terminals, one for security, one for the ticketing, one for international ticketing, one for the parking lots, one for the buses that service the parking lots . . . you get the idea.