Weather and Reviews
It snowed on my house all Friday night, and continued snowing in Anchorage until sometime after 7:00 pm last evening. With 134.5″ as of yesterday evening, we’re now about two inches over the highest recorded snowfall for a single winter (1954-55, with 132.6″), although it only snowed as much as 7 inches twice all winter (we did have something like 32 days in a row with an inch or two every day). It froze pretty solidly last night (Saturday, April 7th) and somebody left my son’s window open all night, so I just woke up to a very chili upstairs floor a few minutes ago. The snow may not last long as temps should reach into the 40s today. My son didn’t build a snowman yesterday, because the two of us lit out and visited Anchorage.
Zook Country has generated some outstanding reader reviews, and I hope that there are many more to come! I’ve posted snippets of a couple at my Zook Country page, and my publisher has posted a few reviews at http://twilighttimesbooks.com/ZookCountry_ch1.html#ZookCountry_rev.
The nature of the industry is that “literary reviewers” aren’t likely to review Zook Country spontaneously. Jake’s voice is very much appropriate for the story told, and literary types discuss authorial and narrative voice all the time, but many of them just can’t see a uniquely voiced book as worthy of review until the author is dead or somehow pulls the J.K. Rowling trick. It’s up to fans and reader reviews to get the book enough attention to merit attention on high visibility web-sites.
That said, I posted a couple of entirely notional awards at my website.
