The Future! It's… full of words!

Today, I have three word-related intelligences to impart!

 

Intelligence the First: The Return of the Commie Pinko!

Several years ago, I founded and ran a writing contest.  It was a great deal of fun, but other things intervened and I stopped doing it for a while.

And then a dear friend of mine asked if maybe we couldn't do it again.  Because I am an immoderate softie, I said that of course we could.  And so we are.

It's called the Commie Pinko Writing Contest, signups will begin in December and the writing period will be in February, and if you want to know more, you just go clickie on the link.

 

Intelligence the Second:  Inappropriate Crush

I have about 25 copies left of my shade-grown fair-trade limited edition collection of prose (fiction, nonfiction, and a recipe) Inappropriate Crush.  Copies are numbered and signed, which makes them collectible, I suppose.  But mostly it means you can prove you got your hands on a copy of something of which there are only 75, and it's all stuff that isn't available under other covers, so.

I will happily bring you a copy if you will be attending one of my book events this week, if you let me know before 2 pm today (for Philadelphia) and before Wednesday at 5 pm (for New York, Boston, and Northampton).  Copies I deliver by hand are $15 each, payable in cash or by PayPal — email me at crush at hanneblank.com to reserve yours and let me know if you need PayPal information or will be paying in cash at the venue.

I will also happily mail you a copy if you can't attend one of the book events.  S/H raises the total price to $20 for US addresses, non-US addresses will be calculated when I ship the book.  Again, crush @ hanneblank dot com is the way to get your hands on one.

 

Intelligence the Third: The Invisible Library

A few of you will know immediately what a Lexicon game is, and probably even fewer of you have played in one before.  (Hi, everyone from Green!)  Others of you will need to go look at the Wikipedia entry and then at, let's say, the Macropedia Terradoma, which is a completed Lexicon game.

As a birthday present to myself, I'm going to be running a Lexicon game in 2012.  I'm aiming to begin it in March.

I'm calling it The Invisible Library.  

The Invisible Library is known only to those who are employed by it, and to those few mostly nameless, mostly faceless, instruments of government, industry, science, and other more esoteric disciplines who have reason to know that it is there.  The Invisible Library is responsible for handling, storing, and archiving all manner of documents and ephemera that the rest of the world simply doesn't need to know about but that are, for one reason or another, too valuable to simply destroy.

Most of the Invisible Library's staff have never seen one another face to face.  They wouldn't know one another if they saw one another in a crowd, or at a party, or even across the dinner table.  They are known to one another by code names and they work together via a heavily secured electronic network.  Together, they work to create a compendium — strictly for in-house use, of course — that thoroughly describes the  nature and provenance, history and access records, of the incomparable collection held by the Invisible Library.

I am recruiting 24 players to begin The Invisible Library in March.  If you would like to be one of them, please drop me a line at crush at hanneblank dot com.