It’s time for my annual calendar revamp, and this time, it’s serious: now you can pick the rolling start month for a calendar, and that means that you can buy a 12 month calendar at any time of the year without wasting any of those precious pages on months you’ve already used up.

So now when you order a calendar from Retropolis or The Celtic Art Works, you just select your starting month from a dropdown list and you get exactly the 12 months you need. Sweet!

Yep, that’s right: at last you can assume mastery – or mistressy -of the space-time continuum just by buying something. It’s a wonderful world we live in.

I don’t usually try to promote my books at Amazon; that’s because I make quite a bit more from sales through my own web sites compared to what Amazon pays me for a sale. But the strength of Amazon is its great big pile of customers and the idea is that you make up the difference in volume. But you’re not likely to reach all those customers without good sales ranks and reader reviews.

So if you happen to have bought one of my books, either the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual books, or the second edition of my Celtic Knotwork Borders in Repeating Sections (and regardless of where you bought it) then I hope you’ll consider visiting their product pages at Amazon and writing a review there. It does a lot to push a book up in the rankings on the Amazon site. With enough pushing, maybe Amazon can make up in volume that difference in what I’m paid for a sale. That’s the theory, anyhow.

So here they are:

Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves

The Lair of the Clockwork Book

Celtic Knotwork Borders in Repeating Sections

See how lonely they look over there without a single review? If it was me, I’d want to reassure them somehow.

I’m trying to get caught up on several fronts in what are some pretty trying times, here in the Secret Laboratory, where the Recession is still Recessing its infernal brains out no matter what I do. So any help up there at Amazon is much appreciated!

I should be posting more regularly here in the near future. Like I said: trying times.

Matthew Hughes’ new web site went live a week or so ago, and since I built it I’m pretty happy to say that it hasn’t blown up since then. Except for a few minutes this morning, anyhow, when I dove in and tinkered with it in an almost non-destructive way.

(I can remember a day about fifteen years ago when I really did say "I wonder what this does…." just before I pushed a button that I really, really should not have pushed.)

But all that aside, I’m an admirer of Hughes’ books – particularly his Archonate stories – and so it was a genuine pleasure to work on his site. If you don’t admire him yet then the best way to change that is to visit the site yourself; there’s a large collection of excerpts from his books there, among other things.

"Other things" will eventually include an online store where you can purchase digital versions of his back list novels. We’re just waiting until the first couple of them are ready before the store goes live on the site.

Also of interest is a series of posts labeled "On Writing" which are just what you’d expect, but better.

This project gave me a chance to get to know a lot of the more recent additions to WordPress and coincidentally gave me a chance to swear like a sailor over a long period. “Coincidentally” doesn’t mean that there’s no connection there, of course.

No, I aten’t dead, even though the past few weeks at the Webomator blog have looked exactly as though I was, with the only updates being the automatic posts about new pages at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. It’s just the sort of postmortem retro-futurism you should expect from me.

But in fact I’ve been spending a lot of time on a web site redesign for somebody else and spending far too little time getting ahead on the next serial for the Thrilling Tales site. That one’s far enough behind schedule that thoughtful observers, who are probably all me, take a good long look at it and go "Hmmmmm."

But anyway there are Giant Robots, as you can see here. So we can hope that all will be well.