Well, my plan to divert the advert bot seems to have failed.  Either I need to write about Albania for several days running, which would be difficult since I’ve never been there, or else there just aren’t very many websites touting Albanian products or vacations.  As I intimated the other day, I’ll be happy to check the place out if you buy enough of my books to finance the trip.  From what I’ve heard, it would be the ideal place to hole up while I get the next novel off the ground.

But why should you buy my book?  Well, for one thing, my readers continue to report that it tastes just like chicken.

There was a good ‘B.C.’ comic recently.  One of the characters tells the other that he’s just discovered a new animal that’s especially tasty.  Oh? says the other one.  What does it taste like?  Well, says the first one, it tastes like everything.

Today I spoke with a reader who told me, much to my surprise, that The Great American Desert reminded her of her favorite novel by Eudora Welty, one of her favorite authors.  It also reminded her of a novel called The River Why, by Daniel Duncan, that I have not read but that she assures me is wonderful.

As I believe I’ve mentioned, I was also told recently that I write like Virginia Woolf as well as like Jorge Luis Borges.  If I add those authors to others that have been mentioned (Steinbeck, Faulkner, Mark Helprin, and a growing list of others), I find that I write like everyone.  This has come as something of a surprise, but fortunately each reader assures me that whoever it is I am being compared to is that person’s favorite author.  So as long as nobody decides that I write just like James Fenimore Cooper I guess I won’t complain even though some of the comparisons have left me scratching my head.  Fortunately, I learned long ago that you can never tell what people are going to read into a scrap of writing.

But keep those comparisons coming.  Maybe someday I’ll post the complete list.  As long as you tell me that it tastes like chicken I promise to be flattered, because that’s what people say when they want you to sample a tasty slice of possum or alligator or rattlesnake.  Fortunately, nobody so far has suggested that my writing reminds them of eggplant.  I’m not a fan of eggplant.  And what I notice is that when eggplant aficionados want you to sample something with eggplant in it, they don’t tell you that it tastes just like something else.  They say you won’t even notice that it tastes like eggplant.