• Before I lived in the country, I always wondered why so many roadside mailboxes were messed up. Everyone said the cause was mailbox baseball, you know, driving down the road in a pickup and smashing mailboxes with a bat. Our mailbox has been busted twice, first by a semi-truck that was too big for the road pulling out and knocking it off with a side mirror. The second was the right-of-way mowers who ran into it with their tractor. Now I understand why some folks build brick structures that enclose their mailboxes. This time the thing is skewed and no amount of bending will twist it back into shape so the door will close. I guess I’m going to the hardware store tomorrow.
• Another nice review from BigAl’s Books and Pals from another reviewer. Writers love this! Both reviewers liked the novel, but their approaches to the review were very different. And one of them is from the UK, and that means there are a big culture and dialect barriers she had to wade through–about like me trying to review J. J. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy which was filled with British slang that we don’t hear in the States.
• Wow, both of our cars are working at the same time. One is a GM product and one is a Ford product. My wife and I grew up on opposite sides of the great divide between GM families and Ford families. We inherited the Ford at about the same time our 1997 Saturn finally stopped working a few years ago. We’re old school: that means we don’t buy foreign cars.
• We watched an interesting Walter Winchell documentary on TV last night, wondering how many people today have a clue who that is. He was a real presence on radio, TV, and the newspapers when I was growing up. Hung out at the Stork Club (well!). Personally, I think he would fit in with today’s agenda-driven reporting.
• My publisher and I are still waiting for the printer to get the colors right for the dust jacket for the hardcover edition of Fate’s Arrows. (The paperback is currently available in bookstores via their Ingram Catalogue.)
• My wife made a quiche for supper and you can’t have any.

—Malcolm