WHEW.

I got back from running errands to find both sample copies of The Longer the Fall stuffed into the newspaper box with the newspaper. At least they weren’t lying on the ground! Both the covers are perfect. Now I’m ordering the short runs of both editions so I can fill orders and start sending out review copies. I’ve finally won the war! This benighted book has been PUBLISHED!! 🙂

Now I’m just waiting for the world to come to an end or something…for years, I’ve had the weirdest feelings about this book. Maybe I’ve purged the karma now, but…!

I’ve found a new online source for ordering BLUM’s titles: Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego. All our books are in their catalog, including The Longer the Fall which Powells Books hasn’t picked up yet. Thanks to jimhines for posting a link that brought the store to my attention!

Having consummated the telephone tag game with Borders, I have now commenced pursuit of wholesalers Baker & Taylor. I know Lightning Source is looking into their failure to list BLUM titles, but Lightning Source doesn’t know about all the Publishers Weekly and Library Journal reviews. So far, I’ve been roaming B&T’s voice mail hell–I just sent them a courteous email today. I really want to get this resolved, not least because Borders is bucking all trends and opening a brand new, 24,479-square-foot store in Dedham, Massachusetts this week, in the Legacy Place lifestyle complex. (Map it!) They’ll have free wifi (my personal sine qua non for any location on earth). 🙂 Shelf Awareness says they’re having Grand Opening Celebrations the weekend of June 25-27. It would be nice if BLUM’s titles were in their shiny new system!

Amazon has installed Search Inside This Book on The Longer the Fall. Google, the Treebeard of the Internet, is still “processing” The Longer the Fall on Google Books. I haven’t heard any further updates on “Google Editions.” Apple has just announced that the iBookstore will be available for the iPhone, so people without iPads will be able to buy iBookstore titles.

Readercon Committee meeting yesterday afternoon ended up reminding me of a story I read as a kid in one of the old Warren Publications horror comics (Creepy, Eerie, one of those). The story was called “The Game” and it really was a rehash of an old “urban legend” ghost story. In it, a boy coming home from a party with the door prize, a Scrabble game, takes shelter in an abandoned house and spends the night playing the game with the house’s mysterious occupant, inside a curtained four-poster bed. In the morning, the boy’s father finds him, and the boy is stunned to see that the bed is sitting, all by itself, in the middle of a streambed–the house had been washed away by a flash flood overnight leaving nothing but the bed behind. The mysterious gaming partner has, of course, vanished.

The Committee was meeting in an office conference room, and we became aware that it had gotten dark outside–really dark. The small building seemed to have impressive soundproofing because all I could hear from outside was muffled, vague rumbling sounds from time to time. But someone went outside and reported that it was just deluging out, so we all had to look. At our exclamations (“I think I just saw Charlton Heston,” someone said), people who were teleconferencing in by speaker phone from New York cheerfully said yes, New York was under a tornado watch!

I had Pig with me and had connected to the office wireless in case I needed to refer to things online for the meeting, and I punched up the weather. Not only did the radar show a huge, very nasty storm going right over our location, but we were under a tornado watch, too!

By the time we wrapped up, the storm was well past, everything was calm and it was clearing. But when I left to drive home, there were tree limbs down all over the place, roads flooded with huge puddles–it must have been wild out there. And we’d entirely missed it, all hunkered down around a crowded conference room table and speaker phone and immersed in discussions. I went home and saw more storm reports online, including the massive tree that demolished a parked car in Brookline–holy mackerel. The poor car was not only smashed, its wheels were driven hubcap-deep into the ground!

There were three confirmed tornadoes in New England yesterday: in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. The National Weather Service is not confirming tornadoes for any of the damage in Massachusetts, however, calling that a “macroburst” or straight-down wind blast. I don’t know…some mighty big trees came down and some of them appeared to have been twisted right up out of the ground. But lacking eyewitness evidence of a funnel cloud, the NWS calls it.

Pepperell apparently missed the brunt of the storms. My garden is really growing like mad now. All the potatoes are up, they were the last to break ground, and everything else is developing so fast! No flowers on the regular tomatoes yet but they do have flower buds. Meanwhile, I haven’t taken any further steps with the greenhouse-to-be. I have a lot of publishing work that needs my attention, and the greenhouse isn’t urgent. It’s on the list of things I’d like to have done by the end of the summer. I got my sister’s birthday present today and need to mail that out. It’s nice to have a break from the hot, humid weather we were having, but it will be back!