01.09.01

January 7, 2001

Posted in General at 6:41 PM by Jack Chalker

Happy New Year and Happy (real) New Millennium! We made it. As to where your flying car is, consider how many idiots are out there driving in traffic now with ground-based cars and ask yourself if you want each of them to be over your head ready to crash a few thousand pounds into your home or office. On the other hand, I’m pissed that there’s no moonbase, no space wheel with artificial gravity and scheduled trips, and we’re still arguing about whether or not we can afford to dream.

     And I am doubly pissed that they still haven’t found the pill you take that instantly and permanently takes off weight without side effects. You’d think we could have at least gotten that by now….

     Still, consider that NOBODY, and so far in spite of many searches NOBODY means NOBODY, predicted that you’d type in a URL and wind up reading this from your home, and maybe drop me and others instant email. Remember all those old stories (including Heinlein and Asimov) where folks put in their credit or debit card and got the newspaper printed just for them? That’s about as far as we got.

     Well, all those folks who said that the ebook revolution was upon us are now pointing to King’s THE PLANT and saying “Maybe not….” Of course, King was getting his minimums until he announced that he was stopping to do more pressing things after promising he’d finish, so maybe there’s a correlation there? Hmmmm…. Still, they’re right in one way: if King can’t do it, writers like me sure can’t, and newer writers won’t even be noticed. That’s sad. And, yes, I’m having problems selling books to anybody in New York these days, too, and my bank account is being sucked dry because of it. Hey, Hollywood! Discover me! I need the bucks!

     Of course, I did predict that most folks would lose in the dot com stock market while only a few would get rich. Nice to see I haven’t lost my touch….

     My thanks, though, to the dozens of folks who showed me how to indent in html. This is an old writer’s trick, by the way. If you need to know something and you don’t pick it up instantly in the references, you use a public forum and they’ll come rushing in with the answer….

     The health front is as good as the financial front is bad. The infection in the leg seems to have been killed after 3 months of intensive warfare, and I’m still walking fine. My chronic sinus infection is back, though, but, then, again, doctors have been assuring me since I was 3 that it would vanish when I grew up (or, later in life, within a year or two of quitting smoking—now over 7 years smoke free here). Some things are beyond medical science even in the Twenty First Century.

     The web site is only partly updated, and may stay that way until I finish the next book, but go beyond the old sign-in screen (which will eventually vanish, too) and click on THE MYTH hex or, at the top, on the Site Map. Conventions have been updated, and I’m going to have almost one con a week from the last weekend in March to the last one in April. On the road from Jersey to Moscow (Idaho). Between New Jersey, western Virginia, Madison, Wisconsin, south central Missouri, or, later in the year, Idaho and Philadelphia in two consecutive weeks, a lot of you should be able to see me and say hello if you like. No California this year (I don’t bring electricity so they don’t care) but I’ve been all over there a lot and will be there (San Jose, anyway) next year. The calendar of appearances is now on the new site page, and so is Where to Buy My Books, really just reformatted from the beginning of the bibliography but I’m getting lots of email from folks who apparently don’t read there. Literally almost everything is “Click on me” so try it. And let me know if it takes too much time to load and we’ll see what we can do.

     Okay, to work now. I’ll write when I find work…. jlc

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