Stunningly, the CNIB and other Braille-formatted books in Canada receive no financial support from governments at the Provincial or Federal levels as I had thought they did.

No, honestly, none. All they get is money from the generous individuals who send it in on their own.

Needless to say, making books in the format of little bumps is a tad pricey.

Doing something decent today will only take about one minute. Go here: http://righttoread.cnib.ca/default.aspx

Thank you.

So… what’s the deelio with me then? What have I been up to? What, if anything, have I been accomplishing lately? What do I want to / will be accomplishing?

Good questions, all.

Well, let’s see… Over at Atomic Fez, I’ve been happily prepping four books for release at the end of March / beginning of April! Read about that here.

That’s… pretty much it, actually. Books are consuming all my daily life, really. Well, waking life, certainly.

Other things have occasionally taken place. Sleep, for instance. That seems to be a once-every-twenty-four-hours pass-time. Food, also, seems to be recurring, but with more frequency than sleep.

The bathroom has finally been completed – hooray! – thanks to the fact we “got a man in”. The final stumbling block to me doing the job was when I realized that today’s tiles are made slightly different a dimension than yesterday’s tiles were, so the new tiles wouldn’t fit perfectly in the space the old tiles were in. The result of that was that all of the tiles needed to come off the wall, with the probable need of repairing yet more wall-board, plus having to trim a big whack of tiles to weird shapes around the window in the wall [image, left], aaaaaand who knows how much else in the way of complications. Merely trimming the tiles to fit around the window was enough of a complication to make my head spin, so we called a guy for an estimate, accepted it, and he started last Monday.

By the time yesterday arrived, he’d re-built some of the wall at both ends of the tub, removed the inner sliding window in the wall and tiled the inside of that hole, replaced all the wall-board, removed the shower doors with a curved rod and shower curtain, replaced the shower head, and repaired some of the wall outside of the existing tile area as well as extending the tiles so they better cover the area which gets wet. End result: what feels like a brand new bathroom!

So that’s excellent.

One of the oddest things discovered during the process of readying the wall for the new tiles was the fact that cardboard was used as a construction material.

You see – and this is starting to sound like an episode of Holmes on Homes, isn’t it – the wall surface of the gypsum board was a bit different than the surface of the wallboard behind the tiles might have been, were the shower wall-board attached directly to the studs. So, behind the thinner shower wall board some 1/4″ cardboard was placed to fill the gap to maintain a flat wall surface.

No, really. That’s what someone did [see image, left]. Probably it was my (now late) Father-in-Law, as this was the sort of “good enough without spending any money” approach his work around the house took on from the mid-1980s or so.

Anyway, it’s all done properly now.

Preparations are nearly complete for attending World HorrorCon in Brighton at the end of March, and then onwards to the SF-based Odyssey 2010 (aka: “EasterCon) the next week-end.  How the hell we’re going to pay for it is something we’ve not solved, but it’s nearly impossible to make a go of it selling books without proving to people they actually exist by having them on a table at a convention somewhere, so there we are. There’s a few days I don’t have to stand in a Dealers’ Room selling books, so I’m planning to hit the British Museum and the National Gallery again, plus possibly a pub or two. Look to see daily summaries here again covering that in all its glory.

So… that’s about it for me, I suppose.

What’s new with you, then?

No, this isn’t a book that I’m publishing, sorry.

Hell’s Belles is another novel in the brilliant “Brenda & Effie” series of books written by Paul Magrs (pronounced ‘Mars’, because he’s English and they do that sort of thing to confuse the rest of us). It’s set in Whitby, England, and follows two ladies who have a rather infernal connection to things hell-ish.

The other three books in the series are very much enjoyable, but the new one I know little about, save for the fact I wish very much to read it.

Enter the contest on his blog and possibly be one of the five lucky people to get a copy of the book. All you have to do is explain, in fifty words or less, why you want to visit Whitby to meet Brenda and Effie (note: trip to Whitby, UK or any other locale named “Whitby”, and/or meeting ladies named ‘Brenda’ and/or ‘Effie’ not supplied).

Go here and do it now.

Way back a few months ago you may recall a post about how the old publishing company was part of the Short List for the British Fantasy Society’s annual awards.

Earlier today (a couple of hours ago, I think), it was revealed that Tim Lebbon’s The Reach of Children won for Best Novella.

Congratulations to Tim are very-well deserved. Especially well-deserved as it was some of the finest writing I read last year, probably only second to Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (which hadn’t been read before).

ADDED LATER:

For those who wish they had been in Nottingham when the award was announced, here’s the next best thing: VIDEO!

For an odd bit of fun, count the number of very un-hairy male heads involved in Horror Writing. No idea what this means, or which causes which to take place.

Only a few times is one presented with the opportunity to use a headline like that. Needless to say, there’s a reason for it probably.

You see, Lord Likely – the notoriously randy, mystery solving Member of the English Aristocracy; and not British Aristocracy, as this involves the Welsh, who don’t much take to that – has lost his pet feline and is seeking the same to be returned to him safely.

If anyone can help in that beng accomplished, please let him know.

More details can be got at the post on his blog which you can land upon merely by clicking that poster there.

Yes, it’s the one with the big pussy on it.

…and let the SPAM begin to flow!