Dr. Frank's What's-it

Revealed

So, this be the cover of my new book:

Whitney Matheson over at USA Today's Popcandy revealed it today, and there's a Q&A with me at that link as well. Cheers, Whit!

You can pre-order the book here.

Basically I Will Use Just about Any Excuse to Link to One of My Books, No Matter How Tenuous, Because I'm a Writer and that's What We Do

This person recommends Andromeda Klein's strategy for saving library books from being weeded:

People who feel strongly about retaining books in libraries have a simple way to combat the removal of treasured volumes. Since every system of elimination is based, no matter what they say, on circulation counts, the number of years that have elapsed since a book was last checked out, or the number of times it has been checked out overall, if you feel strongly about a book, you should go to every library you have access to and check out the volume you care about. Take it home awhile. Read it or don’t. Keep it beside you as you read the same book on a Kindle, Nook, or iPad. Let it breathe the air of your home, and then take it back to the library, knowing you have fought the guerrilla war for physical books. This was the spirit in which I checked out the third book in Etienne Leroux’s Welgevonden trilogy with no intention of reading it.

(From this book, via Andrew Sullivan.)

Reading Chunks

If you'd like to read a chunk of King Dork Approximately, you can find one amongst the twenty excerpts from 2014 YA novels in this free download. The Amazon link is here.

(Also, pre-order the book, if you like.)

I found the main character's views on cats to be incredibly problematic...

There is a problem with the way people read novels now, most obvious in Amazon reviews, in which readers consistently confuse whether or not a novel is good with whether or not they “like” the characters. Generally, readers imagine that if they don’t like the characters in a novel, it is a bad book.

To make matters worse, whether or not they like the characters is usually based on whether or not the characters behave nicely.

-- David Baddiel, on judging John Updike.

A False Positive is a Negative

Because I'm a shameless narcissist, I have google alerts on all my "stuff" and this yields some surreally inapt things sometimes.

One common one is that I will get alerted to young Christian women who proclaim things like "why yes, I am a DORK! Daughter of the Risen King!" Apparently that's a thing. Little do they know that their declarations are automatically directed via internet to anyone who happens to have written a book with the words "dork" and "king" in the title.

Another is that people who list my stuff in their favorites on certain dating sites get their profiles forwarded to me (and I assume all the authors and bands they list.) Of course we look at them. Who wouldn't be intrigued by that? (This doesn't appear to be comprehensive, as it only happens occasionally. As a narcissist I have to assume that many more people are listing my stuff among their favorites on dating sites than are actually being forwarded to me. Maybe it has to do with privacy settings or something.)

I am also alerted to the antics of many other doctors other than myself, including Dr. Frank-n-furter, and my favorite of all the Dr. Franks, Dr. Frank A. Wrestler. According to that link he's 73 and the name will soon be up for grabs, if I understand the way names being up for grabs works. And when that happens, I'm using it.

Finally (well, not literally finally, but finally in the sense of it's the last thing I feel like typing about), MTX is an abbreviation for quite a few things other than the Mr. T Experience. It's an audio company (so you get things like "kick ass MTX pumpin' bass..." It's also a Czech sports car, a Honda motorcycle, a lethal toxin found in exotic fish, and a drug used in various kinds of chemotherapy.

This last leads to things like "I hate the doctor for giving me MTX" which seems just about right in any context, or this one that just came in recently:

"it's probably just the MTX but like if I had the energy I'd probably throw myself out the window." Actually I'm not certain which MTX this person is talking about, but of course I hope he or is she is all right.

Sometimes narcissism takes a dark turn.

Cum on Feel the Data

So I just discovered that the Dr. Frank / Bye Bye Backbirds "Hitler" / "Population: Us" single is now available as a digital download on Amazon and on iTunes. (Also on spotify if you'd prefer to snatch the food from our mouths and negatively impact my girlfriend's boob job fund.)

You can still order the record here. And actually, I don't have one, so if you're rich order one for me too while you're at it.

No, I believe they know exactly what it means: nothing