Sanguinity Hematode's Blog: The Lives and Times of Darkness and Light

Brief Comment on Award Winning Novels

It's comforting to think that award winning books are less likely to be weeded by librarians who need to clear out some shelf space, as noted in this article over at the Awful Library Books blog.

Thank goodness for that Pronking Possum award handed out to The Girl Who Grew Crutches From Seeds! Right?

Now, if I could only sell or give away some copies before my birthday on Halloween [that's Samhain for some of you], I'd be in seventh heaven with fashionable sunglasses.

Oh, don't forget about the SROP Halloween Bash this Wednesday, on my birthday. Come on by and say hello. I'll be there naked in the flesh at 9:57pm, with antlers and wings!

Sanguinity on Wattpad!

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone, even those who don't live in the USA... Tomorrow the Head Rodent is going to try publishing my collection The River Rises on Fanny's Future over at Wattpad. Start here if you're interested: River Rises on Wattpad

Sanguinity's Upcoming Cover Revealed

Hello everyone, it's been so long since I've blogged or written anything that you've all probably forgotten me. But the furry faced folks at SROP have been hard at work preparing a small collection of my short stories: The River Rises on Fanny's Future, and other stories. It won't be large, but it will be new. I wish I could say more, but for now, you'll have to just look at the teaser for the tentative cover and imagine what sensual horrors may lie between the covers of this book. (You may click the thumbnail to be pointed at a slightly larger image.)

It's certain to be nothing your children should see.

Oh, yes... Happy Mother's Day...

The State of Sanguinity and Her Stuff

Forgive me Mother for I have sinned: I can't believe it's been more than a year since my last confession blog posting. Yes, darlings, I've been procrastinating. But that's me all over... While Mantissa has been pretty much half-speed ahead on a new little book and has pushed out two books in the last year (between stints of money-making to help bring home the salad), I've been procrastinating more than ever on the necessary sequel to my previous book. (You all read it, right?)

Even the cats (Darkness and Light for those who don't already know them) have started to notice I'm scribbling less, showering less (because of the drought, honestly), and staring at other girls' boobs books a lot more than I should be, and not feeding them nearly as often as they'd like to be fed, although I do provide them an ever-plumper lap to sit on.

Maybe I'll do something to jump-start a bit of writing, or at least plotting, during the Christmas vacation, when I'll have some down time and El Niño is pummeling the California coast and helping to replenish our water supply...

For now, oops sorry I missed Diwali, and happy too-late for Hanukkah, and just barely Merry Christmas in time, and Happy New Year ahead of the game.

Love-a-dove and adiós muchachos,

  —Sanguinity

Twas the Week Before Xmas and Stockings Were Stuffed

So I was like totally bored the other day cuz Mantissa's been out of town stumping for Elizabeth Warren, so I sat down to take a nap sitting up like the Elephant Man, and not because I had to, it was just more convenient than dragging my ass all the way to the bedroom and I had Darkness on one side and Light on the other because it was really fricking cold in the house even though this is Califuckingfornia where it's supposed to be hot, and as I dozed I started dreaming up shyte I could write about and all I could come up with was a litany of books that have already been written, but I couldn't think of the right titles, so while tossing and turning because of the cats on either side of my noze I kept on blurting out like the shtoner I was before I turned 30 and they took away all of my toys. And they sang:

1. The Catheter in the Rye... Some kind of hospital nursing memoirs squeezed through Salvador Dali's moustache by a fellow from Eton & Oxford yada blah blah.

2. For Him the Bell Toils?... Some kind of oy-vey-ful Yiddish novel about cigars and the Cuban women who light them with acetylene torches and smoke them to tick off their menfolk.

3. The Naked Mall Rat Litters... Not your Misty of Chincoteague because I could never pronounce that, but obviously some icky memoir by Woody Allen's evil twin about growing up in L.A. and working at a pet store with a gerbil mill in the back.

4. Finnegan's Snooze... Thought up while I was sleeping of course and it's probably about a sturdy Irish dame who dresses like a man so she can work as an usher in a theater and spend her shifts napping and dreaming of Walter Mitty in spandex coming to rescue her from Lent.

5. Madame Bovinary... A novel about a French cheese merchant's wife who can't stop chewing her cud and eventually the neighbors discover she's actually a jersey cow that has been genetically altered to serve tea, so they snub her.

6. The Scone Also Rises... About a baker in Brooklyn who sells his shop to cover the cost of cremating the dead bull left on his doorstep by a mad Italian matador, and his adventures in doing so.

7. Keep The Rover on the Right... Very serious comic novel about a British woman antelope hunter who flees to South America in a Land Rover and can't remember which side of the road to drive on.

8. Lard of the Floes... About an Inuit kid who wants to open the first Artic burrito factory but has loads of trouble importing fresh ingredients, so he resorts to using infected walrus blubber and canned corn with powdered habanero.

9. Pimply Hungstocking... Children's book about one young elf's struggle with maturation and menarche at Christmas time. (Yeah, banned in a lot of places, uh huh, so eat yer heart out Judy Blume.)

The End of Introductory Pricing

As I reported in my previous journal entry here, the pricing of my book after November 15 would depend on how many copies were sold in the first half of the month. The figure has come in, and it's a shocker even for me, and I've been prepared all my life for shocks and bumps.

The new catalog price of the paperback will be $48.73, based on two factors, one of which is the expected sales potential as predicted by Mantissa's Ouija board. It has also been re-classified as a cookbook by the publisher (those clever little rodents!) and therefore needs to be priced accordingly. The e-book version will sell for slightly less because it's not on paper, and the catalog price for that will be $37.50.

Oh, well.

The Crutches Have Landed

It's still a few days before Halloween, which marks my thirtieth birthday and the official release of The Girl Who Grew Crutches From Seeds in a Garden of Exotic Delights, but I'm very busy this week and I never could stand suspense, so in the interest of getting things off my plate at the earliest opportunity, I hereby jump the gun to roll out this announcement...

A limited edition e-book is now available for $2.50 on a first-come first-served basis and to obtain a copy, you can go through the Smashed-Rat-on-Press Red Catalog to order one if the spirit moves you to do so.

This pre-release "leak" will be plugged (i.e., go out of print) after fifteen copies are sold, so you might want to hurry if you're annoyed by encountering empty discount bins when you finally get around to shopping. To make things even more enticing and exciting, the first ten buyers to scramble for their mice and click away can use coupon code PH1YZ1UO3Z to receive 60% off the price, which brings their cost down to $1.50. What could be simpler? The coupon expires on November 15, by the way.

If all fifteen copies of the e-book are sold before the deadline, the price of the e-book will permanently drop to $1.50 or less. (Or even much less for SROP regulars who know how to follow the bread crumbs.)

If no copies of the e-book are sold, the book will go permanently out of print in electronic form, and will only be available by special arrangement with the furry-faced folks at Smashed-Rat-on-Press.

And in between 0 and 15, just to keep things amusing, I'll follow a complicated pseudo-stochastic process for determining the final price of e-books, if any, after November 15.

Note 1: If your name is Sassy or Fernij, please do not take advantage of this spectacular offer. You're destined to have a better deal coming by and by.

Note 2: Don't forget the other big SROP sale still going on until November first!