The digital copy of my first book is now available on Kindle for just 99¢ !

(The paperback copy is still being proofed, but it'll be available sooner rather than later.)

If you've already read it (I know who you are), please consider reviewing it. And don't be honest. Lie and say it's worth 5 stars. In the book business, that's called marketing.

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Remember last year when I sent my manuscript away to get rejected? Well, sadly, I never got a rejection letter. I never got anything.

So I'm taking matters into my own hands.

www.centralkingdomschronicles.com

I'm almost ready to release the first book to Kindle. (Paperbacks will be available on Amazon.com soon!) I'll post details when it's ready. Stay tuned.

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Last month the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an obituary of a 99-year-old woman with the headline "Loved using iPad, Kindle." Should I live to be 99, I would hope that whoever wrote my obituary could come up with something more personal, more illuminating about my very long life other than the fact that I was proficient with common consumer electronics.

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For the first time in 38 years, I opened no gifts on Christmas Day. Mom and I celebrated on Christmas Eve so that I would have plenty of time to get Dad to the hospital by 6 AM this morning for his scheduled angiogram. He'll likely be in the hospital until tomorrow, which is also his birthday. That's my birthday present to him; I figure a trip home from a hospital stay is probably as good a gift as any.

Not that our Christmas Eve celebration was exactly a big deal. Mom and I had a brief gift exchange and some homemade hamburgers (we forgot to make the french fries we had in the freezer) before working on a jigsaw puzzle. Other than the case of 20-oz Cokes given to me by my new bff Randy, everything I got for the holiday fits in a single, moderately-sized cardboard box. And not a single video game! A quiet evening with mom and no video games? I must be getting old.

I should probably point out that fewer people gave me gifts than ever before. I used to get presents from my aunt, but earlier this month she declared that she is in financial straits this season and wouldn't be exchanging gifts with anyone. I was worried about her until she showed up at our house with the brand new Kindle Fire she bought herself. The worst part was that she only came over because she wanted me to teach her how to use the Kindle. Add that to the time I spent installing Dad's new Blu-Ray player last weekend, and it's been a very Tech Support Christmas.

Still no word from my brother. Presents are wrapped and waiting for him and his new bride, should they ever decide to communicate with us again. Trey's defection from the family certainly remains a bummer, but on the upside, a small holiday gathering of just Mom and me prevented a recurrence of our dysfunctional family's most cherished tradition: our annual shouting matches. I have to say, it was a kind of a nice change of pace.

For the record, this post isn't meant to describe how shitty my Christmas was. In fact, I quite enjoyed myself. It was certainly among the best holidays I've had in the many years since Santa Claus stopped visiting. I only list these things and point out that they combine to something of a high-water mark in my experience so that you, my dear reader, can establish a metric by which to compare your own Christmases to mine. It is my dream that one day we can all have better Christmases through Science. It's what Jesus would have wanted.

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My Kindle tells me that I am 44% of the way ("location 12886 of 28927") through War and Peace. I had promised myself that I would get at least to 50% before I abandoned the book, but I don't think that is going to happen anymore. It turns out in the end that both war and peace are boring.

I typically expect to know by 44% of the way through a book what the author is trying to tell me, but with War and Peace I'm still not entirely sure. So far the message seems to be that the human condition is entirely without merit: war sucks, love sucks, religion sucks, politics sucks.... Life in Imperial Russia really, really sucks. That takes 28927 virtual pages?

Perhaps my problem with the book is the fact that I am reading an English translation of the original Russian/French. There's no significant art in the language, just enough repetitious description to be confusing. Or maybe that's because of the never-ending string of newly introduced Russians and their identical "stout" figures and posturing pretentiousness.

But it's not only the minor characters that I dislike. It's also a problem that I hate most of the major characters. Some are just foolhardy children (like Nikolas, who gambles away thousands of rubles that his family can't afford to impress a friend who steals wives for sport), but others are inherently weak characters (like Pierre, who supposedly means well but couldn't stick to a plan if he were glued to it). The "evil" characters are all one-note caricatures of one or more of the seven deadly sins, and the "good" characters are all stupid. I have a hard time pulling for stupid.

There is an episode of Cheers in which Sam reads War and Peace in 5 days (without sleep) to impress Diane. It's taken me 2 months to get only 44% of the way through the same book. I'm sure that it says something terrible about me that I find a television sitcom about a bar filled with sad sack ne'er-do-wells far more engaging than a universally praised epic novel. What can I say in response to that other than, "please pass the Beer Nuts"?

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Amazon.com announced yesterday that the Kindle v3 is their best-selling product ever. I'm pretty sure that means that I now have to hate it. Damn it. I was really getting use to reading Kindle in bed.

The previous best-seller for Amazon was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. That book has sold more than 44 million copies worldwide, so maybe that gives some idea of how many Kindles have been sold. We have to guess because Amazon hasn't told us.

Of course, Amazon saying that their best selling item is their own Kindle would be like the United States government announcing that the best selling car in America was a government-subsidized Chevy Volt. There's a bit of a credibility gap when the manufacturer is the one telling everyone how much everyone loves the product.

So now I have my choice of morals for this story: either I'm allowed to like the Kindle because it isn't really selling well, or I might like a Chevy Volt because popular things aren't so bad as I'm inclined to think that they are. Next time you see me, take a look at what car I'm driving to see which lesson I eventually learned.

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'Twas the night before Christmas, and I finished my book: Murder in Coweta County. (I personally like a little light reading before my holidays with the family.) Fortunately for me, it was replaced Christmas morn with a new Amazon Kindle.

The Kindle was purchased for me by my brother's girlfriend. My gift to her this Christmas was a box of Q-Tips. Not even a full box, mind you, but one of those half-sized "vanity" boxes. So I gave the gift of clean ears and received the gift of a very disgruntled glare. That's a pretty fair trade, if you ask me.

Last year I think I gave Leslie a bag of candy, and she gave me a video game. There must be some law of inverse exchanges between Leslie and me; the cheaper the gift that I give her, the greater the gift I get in return. Next year I'll try buying her penny candy to see if I can get a new car in the exchange.

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I now have a new laptop. It has 3x the processor speed, 4x the memory, and 12x the storage space of my nearly tween-aged desktop. I'm sure that if my previous computer weren't dead, it'd be envious.

During the week that I was without a computer, I finished a video game, worked on an oil painting, baked a cake, completed most of my Christmas shopping, caught up on a bunch of tv, and read a book. I'd nearly forgotten how much I liked books. Naturally, this made me wonder if perhaps I wasn't spending too much time on the computer. But my new machine came with Amazon's Kindle for PC app, so now I can read books on my computer! Dilemma solved.

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