Getting this last load to California has turned out to be a disaster more than anything else. My delivery was early yesterday and my next pickup is not until early tomorrow, so all told I will have spent almost three solid days sitting around in this relative hellhole. Then it’s off to Texas. Oh, joy.

Hasn’t, of course, been all bad. I’d never see an entire interstate shut down at 6 in the morning, and now I can say I have. I was lucky enough to find an alternative to the TA truck stop to spend these last two days, a dinky mom & pop place so new it doesn’t even smell like urine yet. I know there’ve been some other things to cheer about; just can’t think of them at the moment.

Anyway, I did find some WiFi here at this mom & pop. (Had been several signals at the TA, none of them strong enough to connect to.) And decided to zap the second novel off to my agent.

What? A second novel? Actually, I can’t recall if I’ve mentioned it before or not. An odd beast (“What? you’re saying – The Great American Desert wasn’t odd?”), I’m still not sure that it isn’t what the statisticians call an outlier. It’s call Big Rock Candy Mountain, and is about the childishness of the American Male. Set in Las Vegas, of all places. I’d love to get some copies printed so more folks could read it but I still have all these crates of the first one sitting around and tying up my non-existent capital. Christmas is coming up, you know. Makes a great gift.

Oh, shameful! An artist so-called soiling his hands in the marketplace!

I learned an interesting lesson when I self-published Desert. Lots and lots of people had told me they definitely wanted copies, and I foolishly assumed that meant they wanted to buy copies. Some of them did. Most however seemed to think I was performing a public service. Well, if I could afford to, I would. Then I thought I’d put up the sample on the website, give folks a chance to see that what I was offering wasn’t your common or garden-variety sort of tale but a stab at a literature itself. Anyone got any other bright marketing ideas?

Here’s one of the more depressing pieces of news I’ve heard lately: A friend, who would like to have her book club tackle my winsome tome, is sorry to say that her book club, yes BOOK club, has resolved not to choose any book the members would have to spend money for.

Maybe my agent will write me back to say that Candy Mountain is just crass enough that the public will forgive my literary pretensions. I sure hope so, because this next one is nothing if not literary. Yes, I know; some of you are thinking it’s no doubt pretentious as well.

Maybe I’ll post a section of Candy Mountain on the website. Maybe I’ll even find the time to do that the next time I’m home, which will be the beginning of October.