Mainly of interest to collectors

I've given the newsletter subscribers* 90 days with the new catalog, so now it's everyone else's turn. 

For those of you who don't know but do care**, I sell signed first editions (and foreign editions and other editions as well) from my stock of author copies, and given that I don't go out to bookstore or convention events much anymore, this is probably your surest way to get a signed copy.  I'm actually out of many older and more obscure titles, so I may not be able to help, but it's worth a try if , say, you are having trouble completing a signed set of first editions of the Giraut books.

The catalog is just a reasonably cleanly formatted list of what I've got and what I charge to sign one and ship it to you, plus a few odd bits of memorabilia and other things that a fan might like but is just gathering dust with me. (Or would be if I didn't keep them in clean, tight storage boxes in a cool, dry storage space). 

I should add that although my prices are somewhere just a bit below  that of a new book (sometimes a bit higher or lower due to scarcity or abundance), if all you really want to do is read it, once you figure in shipping, it's almost always cheaper to just get a used one from any of the many fine places that sell them.

But ... if you're a collector ... and especially if you want a signed first, possibly a personalized signed first -- then use the email link and just tell me you'd like a catalogue.  And off it shall fly to you, for your perusal and my delight, for it contains instructions both for obtaining the books, and sending me money.

Next post up will be much less commercial ... sorry for the interruption of brief low commercialism in the high falutin' intellectuable*** tone hereabouts. I shall falute upwards again soon.

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*Want to be one? I might send out another newsletter sometime, really! Just drop me a note and ask to be added to the mailing list.

**all other permutations are loved but I'm not talking to you right now.

***Why, yes, I did read Pogo obsessively when I was a child. How did you know?

A riff in time with some silly lines

So I just had an idea for a blog post and thought, I could write that one in fifteen minutes, and that's about how much time I ever have nowadays, because dealing with a group of  accurately-said-to-be-difficult gifted and talented 9th and 10th graders is turning out to be a wee bit time consuming, and I'm in the middle-to-last stages of finishing a new mainstream YA novel, which I hasten to say is only as much like Madman Underground as any two books by me are like each other.  (Longtime fans just laughed, and thanks for the support, guys!)

Riffing rather than writing a footnote, the reason I hastened to say that bit about the current YA mainstream not being a sequel to Madman Underground  is that when a sometimes-reclusive writer makes a too-brief announcement, out in the blogosphere it tends to go like this:

Fred Ferd Dref, author of Space Duck (in personal blog or fan newsletter): I'm working on a new science fiction novel, and I'm getting close to done.

Over at PerfectlyReasonableFans.com, there follows:

Perfectly Reasonable Fan: Dref is writing a new novel!  Gee, I hope it's a sequel to Space Duck, because I loved Space Duck!

Another perfectly reasonable fan: I'm not sure whether  it was just that I was in the mood for Space Duck when I read it, or if it was that great cover it had by Duncan Deceased, my favorite sf artist ever. I wish he was still around!

(Snip, now, an enormous number of people talking about the Dref and Deceased oeuvres, with a bit of politics and some silly puns and occasional harmless pretensions and even more occasional genuine insights).

Then over at ModeratelyGoofyGeeks.bloginabox.org, we get:

ModeratelyGoofyFan1: Dref is working on sequel to Space Duck! I hope he doesn't screw it up because apparently it will have a posthumous cover by Duncan Deceased, and Deceased deserves better than that!

MGF2: You're crazy! Duncan Deceased should have been shot for that cover he put on Space Duck!  He totally drove people away from the finest novel since Les Miserables!

MGF3: I loved Les Mis.

MGF4: Your a dumshit nobody was talking about les mis we were talking about how Dref shot Duncan Deceased and stole his best cover for this stupid sequel to stupid  Space Duck. And anyway you should say Les Miserables because the book is Les Miserables and when you call the book by the nickname of the musical  it sounds all pretentious and theatre-person snob arrogant --

MGFn: And you're the kind of shithead that hated Space Duck, doesn't get that Duncan Deceased totally had it coming, and pronounces it all fake French like LAY MIZZER OBBLES!

 

You can all probably construct the chain of messages across many more blogs until somewhere out there in the LoudmouthCreepBlog, there's a proclamation that Space Duck contains a confession to the brutal murder of Duncan Deceased, and the sequel will be about how Dref feels sorry for himself because he's a socialist dick that voted for Obama and sucks up to women and that the next work will be titled I'm So Miserable and the publisher will bring it out anyway because big publishers only publish books by writers they have already published and it's just not fair.  Also at IAmTooAnInsiderSoThere, there will be a pre-review of I'm So Miserable declaring it to be a major advance far, far beyond Space Duck, and in fact the best novel of all time, which will show those jerky right wing military sf fans who just want to read trash, so there.

And there went my fifteen minutes.  So, as it turned out, it was all riff.  Maybe I'll write that first idea I had sometime later. Back to the YA book. 

No, it's not a sequel to Space Duck.