The Strip Tease Continues…
This week we’ve got another slew of hot news.
First, super fan Jeff “The Other Jeff” Dutton has created a Jeff Carlson fan club on Facebook. Get in there and make some noise. Do you love Cam more than Ruth? Can’t believe the turn of events in Plague Zone? Let the e-debates begin!!!
2) My short story “Planet of the Sealies,” a far future adventure loaded with clones and battle armor, has been slated for the February issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine .
3) As mentioned previously, I have another new short story sale that I can finally talk about. “Damned When You Do” is a modern day fable-with-a-twist which will appear this fall in an anthology from O/R Books edited by Gordon Van Gelder. The anthology’s title is Welcome To The Greenhouse: Tales of Climate Change. I’m excited about “Damned” not only for the story itself but because O/R Books is one of them newfangled publishers who emphasize e-books in addition to their print run of real live actual books. They’re best known for their New York Times chart crusher Going Rouge, the Sarah Palin exposé, so this feels like an interesting experiment in demographics and marketing. Cutting edge, that’s me.
4) Meanwhile I’m still playing coy with the new novel because I’m evil. Just to be especially cruel, here are four questions I found myself researching yesterday:
a) Whose fingerprints are recorded in civil, state, and federal databases?
b) What is the religious history of the evolution of the spring equinox into Easter and the winter solstice into Christmas?
c) How long is the average flight time of a commercial airliner from Japan to the West Coast?
d) What is the air speed of a swallow carrying a coconut?
So… come on, people! If you can’t figure out what the book is about with this much information served on a platter, I’m completely disgusted with y’all.
I have it figured out!
Easter was moved to the spring to replace pagan rituals, thereby depriving the Beast of it’s vorpal power – it having not been killed by the Holy Hand Grenade. Arthur, having found the Grail, was granted immortality and being bored with eternity began a new life of crime in the United States makinga spaksh in the NCIC.
The flight time from Japan to the West Coast in hours, curiously, when multiplied by 3, is the airspeed in MPH of an African swallow carrying a coconut as it’s silly to consider a European swallow as there are no coconuts in Europe.
This number, by sheer concidence, is the same as Arthur’s rank on the FBI’s most wanted list.
These are only a few of the interesting facts our heroes uncover as they seek the ageless criminal Briton.
Did I get it???
>> These are only a few of the interesting facts our heroes uncover as they seek the ageless criminal Briton.
You *nailed* it, man! In fact, the name of the book is “The Ageless Briton.”
Moving Easter to the first Sunday after the full moon following the Spring equinox is so much easier to remember than remembering the Spring equinox itself!
The airspeed of a swallow carrying a coconut is approximately 170 knots, or about 200 mph. This is the terminal velocity it will reach as its coconut pulls it toward the earth. If it spreads its wings out it might slow down to about 140 knots, but a coconut has a pretty low coefficient of drag. Also, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a European or an African swallow!
I know this is true because I read it on the Internets.
Bad Earl,
Interestingly, the Swallow was the official nickname for the German ME-262, the 1st jet fighter which also tended to run into terminal situations when attempting to dive.
Tough to win a war with a plane like that! They should have called it the Elephant…