January 6, 2002 free at last, free at last...
This was the longest, hardest book I've ever finished. I'm not happy with some parts of it; I know there's a few clues I left out, and a few that were put in that I never used, and should get rid of, but it's still more or less as I outlined it years ago.
Of course, in my original notes for Adrift, the entire second half of the book is described as, "V & J get picked up by convict transport, meet up with Dawkins, solve mystery." This was before Dawkins was Jones. Dawkins arrived first; when Jones became an ongoing character, I had to combine the two. Of course, this was also before Pierre Abélard. So he's gone through a lot since he was first thought up. He'll go through more before I'm done with him.
Herewith ends the first half of Pont-au-Change, almost ten years in the lives of the characters. More time will pass in the second half than in the first. Characters hardly glimpsed yet will finally come to the forefront. And with any luck I'll finish the next ones in timely fashion. No more murder mysteries for me! Jessica Fletcher I ain't! (Although I think it's fitting to post this on January 6, Sherlock Holmes's birthday)
I have also, at last, finished the three outstanding reviews for the Media Checklist, both versions of the 2000 made-for-tv movie starring Gerard Depardieu and John Malkovich (three hour English version and six hour French version) and the Disney version starring Scrooge McDuck as Jean Valjean. Now I have the daunting task of finding new versions to review. Oh well, sooner or later someone will get it right. I hope.
The book version of Adrift has a tentative release of this summer, probably August. I'm hoping to have it for display at San Diego Comic Con, where I'm working on getting a display table for all my books. Nothing like a little publicity to help spread the word :-)
What this means is that, although the next book does not begin for six months, I will be updating the page occasionally. I will be launching another (non-PauC) book as well as publishing some of the short stories I have lying around here—science fiction and fantasy, mostly. Oh, by the way... one of the characters in Pont-au-Change has a great deal to do with Timeless, in a roundabout sort of way. Where and how, I can't tell you right now, but you'll know it when you see it. Trust me :-)
With that, I'm signing off. I hope to hear from you all about Adrift, whether or not the denouement met with your expectations, whether you knew what was going on all along, etc. When it shows up in book form it will be different, that much I know. Now that it's all out on paper, it's a lot easier to tinker with. Let the vacation begin!
Have a very good 2002, and I'll see you in June.
December 20, 2001 one more post to go. That's all I can think about. One more post.
Someone remind me never to do a murder mystery again. It's hard keeping everyone straight!
(btw, Timeless doesn't count. Yeah, it's among other things a murder mystery, but I've already figured that one out years ago. I hope to have some of that ready to start posting on-site in January... and wow it's weird jumping from 1840 to 2296! Can't wait!)
I had toyed with not printing the last part of Adrift and having everyone just wait for the book to come out. Penny talked me out of it. Besides, it's not as if I have a ton of readers online, and none buying books, right? (insert nervous laughter here) So it'll be up, with any real amount of luck, as close to New Year's Eve as I can get so I can leave Adrift in 2001 and rev up book four this summer. Can you believe it? We're about halfway done!
Speaking of which, Sanctuary is now out and available for order! Please use the link on the front page to buy it right now. It won't be on Barnes & Noble or Amazon for a month more or so, and I make more per book if you order it directly from the publisher. Considering I didn't sell enough during the past six months to get a royalty check yet (no check since the first one! Only sold four books the past three months!) I'll take as much as I can get right now.
Nothing more updated but the book. After Adrift I can do those reviews I've been neglecting to do all year. Shame on me :-)
Have a happy one, and I'll see you here again in a few weeks for the last part of the first half. Wonder who I can get for halftime entertainment? :-)
October 30, 2001 not so much a vacation as a lack of energy...
The posting schedule has changed, obviously; I had hoped to have the book done by now. No such luck. But definitely by the end of 2001.
Meanwhile, Sanctuary has finally gone to the publisher, and should be out either right before or right after Christmas, hopefully closer than last year's was! Again I'll keep people posted as to how that's going.
Nothing new to the site besides the post, and a new picture from Lindsay that cracks me up. Hit the :-) button on the front page and you'll see it. Zig!
Till next time...
September 4, 2001 nearing the end of the book, and the approach of the halfway mark of the series...
Besides the post, there's not much to add. Finishing this book is taking up all my spare time so I'm not looking for new Gallery pictures or Oddities, and the reviews still remain unwritten. I'm trying not to get burned out, always a hazard towards the end of a book, and I can't wait till it's done so I can give myself a little vacation.
Yes, that's right, vacation. I'm giving myself a bit of a break from the book between books 3 and 4, a breather where I can recharge, revitalize, get myself ready for Act II. By "break", I'm thinking along the line of oh... six or seven months or so.
How long? You heard right. After the last post at the end of October, I'm looking at leaving off the book until right about the website's anniversary next June. Sound a little extreme? Consider:
2) I would like to be able to spend more time marketing the first three. I've done very little marketing with Resurrections and I want to give Sanctuary and Adrift a little bit of a boost (they're both coming out early next year, probably together—Sanctuary is taking longer than I thought to get polished). I want to set up book signings and get more involved in the sales end of the thing. Word of mouth is too dang slow.
3) I'd like to get some other work done. I'm planning on reviving my science fiction series, Timeless, and I'd like to set up a website for that as well. Plus there are a few other non-writing things I'd like to work on.
4) Everyone needs a vacation every now and then. I've been living with these characters and this book for so long... ever spend too long at a relative's house? It's like that. I love them, but I need time away from them. I figure six months or so ought to cover it.
5) Even Victor Hugo took 30+ years to write the original. Six more months won't kill anyone.
6) I've been spending too much time listening to how other people want the series to work, and not enough time listening to the book inside my head, and it's impacting the book to the extent that I have to keep rewriting it to get those foreign elements back out. I know how the book is going to go. I will not alter it to suit other people. By taking time off I'll be able to disconnect from those outside influences and reset my system. I don't want to lose sight of what it is I'm doing and what I want to have accomplished when it's finished.
Anyway, that's what I'm thinking. I'll still update and maintain the rest of the site, but once Adrift is completed, I'm bound for vacation-land.
With all that said, on with the show! Two more posts after this one, and Adrift is done, which means Pont-au-Change is about halfway done. Did I mention how much of a relief that's going to be? Thought so.
Till next time...
August 3, 2001 Slowly recovering from losing Jean, but getting there, thank you.
For those that don't know what I'm talking about, take a look at the Message Board. I thought about writing it all out again and I don't want to, not yet. So look there instead. Thanks for the notes and the cards and such; they really helped, and helped drive me to finish this posting. All I can say is that I'm very glad I posted a day early last time, because if I had held out till the 20th as I had meant to, there wouldn't have been a post, as I'd have been at the vet's instead. I'm trying not to find the irony in the fact that Jean died on Javert's birthday.
I had just finished the second chapter when Jean went into his seizures, and hadn't looked at it in over a week; I was planning to just set the book aside for a bit, a few weeks more, maybe, but then I realized that doing that was exactly the wrong thing to do. The last thing I needed was to waste my energy on not-writing when I could channel all my emotion into what is for me the perfect outlet vent: this book. So I made myself fire up the laptop and keep going. And I'm glad I pushed myself, because it turned out to be very cathartic.
New items this time besides the posting are eight new images for the Gallery. Obviously I was not able to get the reviews done, any of them, or the much-needed update to the Bibliography. Next time, for sure.
Meanwhile I'm also knee-deep in final proofreading of Sanctuary, in preparation for sending that on to the publisher. That may not come out by Christmas, though, as there's one other thing that needs to be done before I can sent it in. It's no secret I'm a little disappointed with the artwork for the cover of Resurrections. Yes, they did follow my design, pretty much, but the clip-art feel of it bothers me. So I went out and bought the neatest, coolest present to myself I've ever gotten or given: an animation program. Yes, I can now render art in 3D, make little CG movies, you name it. But first up is the cover for Sanctuary. Considering most of the shapes necessary are fairly simple (including the candlestick—would you believe, the first drawing tutorial in the program is how to draw one!) it's just a matter of putting them all in one frame and dithering it till it looks reasonably photogenic. I hope it won't take more than a month or two of an hour here, an hour there tooling around with it before I come up with something acceptable. I will keep you all posted as to my progress as soon as I've made any :-)
Project number two, by the way, is rendering the Guernsey photograph. Now that should be interesting!
Next update is the day after Labor Day, which is my day off work: so, as the song says, I'll see you in September...
July 19, 2001 Got bored, loaded it all early. Hope you don't mind :-)
Didn't have much of a rest, but I did get a lot done. The most obvious thing is of course the new front page. I really like the new linking buttons. The only drawback is that I can't figure out how to denote updated files the way I used to with a "new" note beside it. Possibly I can make little red buttons to swop out with the blue ones, so it's ibvious what's been updated. Or I can just leave it as is and tell you what's new here.
Good news: I've added over fifty new pictures to the Gallery and found one of the three missing pictures. And there will be more to come after some books I won on EBay come in and I get the pictures scanned. Also, the Oddities section has been cleaned out of junk (like the musical props and the cigars and so on) while keeping the cooler stuff intact, and I've added a lot of new stuff including a great article by Adam-Troy Castro featuring some familiar faces being used to make a point about writing action stories. And I've weeded out the Blotter, it's a bit smaller now and a lot of the repetitive stuff has been removed.
Bad news: still no synopsis for Sanctuary, I'm too busy working on cleaning up the book itself. And still no reviews of the Depardieu/Malkovich miniseries. I have to watch them again first, and I don't have the time for that right now either.
It looks like after this post there will be four more updates to finish out Adrift. I could do it in three but I don't want to rush myself. It's one more section, fairly large (thirty or so chapters) and almost self-contained. I've been fretting over the details for about a year now, but I think I've got a handle on it. You'll see why as it develops.
The first of those installments will be due out on August 3, so you don't have that long to wait to find out what happens after this one. After that the sections will post on September 4 (Labor Day), October 2, and the final segment of Adrift on October 30. I do not anticipate a long stretch between the end of this book and the beginning of the next book, and with any luck book four will write faster and I'll get back on my personal schedule of beginning and ending books in the summer. Yeah, right.
I know this post is a short one, but I've told you what's coming up and when it's coming out, so hopefully you'll be able to maintain yourselves for another couple of weeks. See you then...
June 7, 2001 One AM, this time PST, not Paris time. Here we are again. Happy Anniversary to me and the site, and welcome if you're new (welcome back if you're not :-) )
I'm a little disappointed that I got no mail whatsoever, neither about the Hugo family's lawsuit over some other guy's (vastly inferior*) sequel about Javert surviving his suicide attempt and going on to have further adventures, nor about the current happenings in this one. So between that and some other things, like the fact that the site needs a good revamping and I'm on final proofing for Sanctuary before that gets turned in to the publisher (again, shooting for a November/December release, just in time for that book-buying holiday season!) and the fact that the rest of Adrift is getting a bit more complicated than I'd anticipated, I'm leaving the book aside for six weeks to work on other things. I'll be posting a (short) section on July 20, Javert's birthday, and then the final third of Adrift will be following thereafter, hopefully to conclude by the end of 2001.
Not much else to add, except to wish you all the best and I'll see you in six weeks with a new look for the site, some great new articles (not by me... ha ha) and much, much more! Well, okay, some more. Meanwhile, try not to hate me too much till then...
-------
*I mean come on, the guy claims Javert would have survived the jump because "in June the water was warm enough." Yeah, if he could swim, and even then, Hugo said it was the most dangerous part of the river, where even the best swimmers drown.
May 12, 2001 Not much to share except the latest post, and this:
(NOTE this is not another April Fool's joke. It's May. Get over it.)
Friday May 4 9:30 AM ET
Literati Up in Arms Over 'Les Miserables' Sequel
By Estelle Shirbon
PARIS (Reuters) - A contemporary sequel to "Les Miserables," written 139 years after Victor Hugo's classic novel, is drawing cries of blasphemy from Paris's literati and threats of lawsuits from Hugo's descendants.
Aiming for a popular hit, publisher Plon put 60,000 copies of "Cosette or the Time of Illusions" on sale on Thursday, but the book was greeted by a barrage of criticism that author Francois Ceresa had no business stepping into Hugo's shoes.
"This is a product, not a book," commented historical biographer Pierre Assouline, who had not read "Cosette" but said the principle of a sequel was shocking.
"It's as if an old master's painting was targeted by a forger," said writer Max Gallo, who is finishing a biography of the 19th century literary great.
Meanwhile Hugo's descendants, led by his great-great-grandson Pierre, are threatening to sue Plon for 4.5 million francs ($611,800) in damages, claiming Ceresa's sequel breaches a French law protecting the integrity of works of art.
"That is absolutely preposterous," Plon's Chairman Olivier Orban told Reuters, saying Hugo's works had already inspired many sequels and adaptations, two blockbuster musicals and the Walt Disney movie "The Hunchback of Notre Dame"
"Hugo's works are not a mausoleum to be visited in respectful silence. They inspire many ideas," Orban added.
Ceresa's idea was to bring back to life the villain Javert, who committed suicide by leaping into the river Seine at the end of Hugo's epic, and turn the dogged policeman into a good guy.
"It's perfectly plausible that the temperature of the Seine that day was not fatal. Someone could have fished him out and revived him," Ceresa told Le Figaro newspaper.
Javert's resurrection as a good man is the starting point for "Cosette," a swashbuckling adventure story several critics have said was more reminiscent of another French 19th century great, Alexandre Dumas, author of "The Three Musketeers"
"It's not an imitation of Victor Hugo's style. That would be grotesque. It's written in the style of Francois Ceresa, and it so happens that Ceresa has always written action-packed adventure novels, like Dumas," Orban said.
The second installment of Ceresa's sequel, "Marius or the Fugitive," is scheduled for publication in the autumn.
********
Questions? Comments? The Blotter awaits your responses...
April 17, 2001 Time grinds to a halt when you're having absolutely no fun. I have the next section done and posted, but I'm not happy with it. However, there are two very good reasons for putting it up as is right now: 1) it's been a big stumbling block to me for a long time now and if I just put up what I got right now by the time the book comes out it'll be all smoothed over, and 2) I want to move on to the actual action. The chapters in this post, while necessary to explain certain past and future complications, is more foundation than plot. It's not vital to get it right at this time. And if I sat around trying to fix it now I'd never get this book done. So, here it is.
Needless to say, except for some more letters, that's all there is. I've had no time to put anything else together. Including the review. The only good news is that another post, probably a section, will be shortly forthcoming, in about three weeks. After that, hopefully, back to a semblance of a normal schedule.
Back to work...
April 1, 2001 Day late and a dollar short, but I have a few excuses, good ones, too. One of which was that I had to drive three cats and a Ryder truck, with my Tracker being towed behind it, and all my worldly goods some 200 miles to my new home. No more studio apartment at Chez Gorbeau for me! Now I'm sharing a four bedroom, two story house with two other people and three more cats, and it's absolutely lovely. All I need now is a job and I'm all set.
I would like to state that, in keeping with the spirit of this new posting, the Ryder truck with a car in tow drives exactly like a whale, with the car as the tail. Very interesting sensation, spending two hundred miles wondering if the car was going to jackknife the truck or if it would just unhitch itself while I was going over Donner Summit. Unfortunately (from a writer's point of view) neither of these things happened. It was quite an uneventful move. But between packing, driving and unpacking, I haven't had time to do much on the book. But my bills are paid to the end of April, so I have some writing time coming to me and I intend to use it.
This time all I got to put up is a short post. A longer one, perhaps two, will come up in two weeks. And, if I can swing it, finally the review of the Depardieu/Malkovich miniseries. And I have some more pictures for the Gallery. All this and Andy Rooney tonight on Sixty Minutes.
February 19, 2001 Happy Anniversary to You-Know and Who! (Yeah, I know Hugo said it was the 16th, but that wasn't Mardi Gras, that was the Saturday before. Big surprise, folks, he got stuff wrong a lot!)
Due to the time constraint I was not able to finish the review of the 2000 Les Misérables miniseries... I have got to get Adrift back on track before I can devote to that right now. But soon, very soon, I mean it.
Not much more to add besides that. I have two postings this time, the last few chapters of the second section (which ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, as you might recall) and the third section, self-contained. The next posting won't happen until March 31. There are good reasons for this, chief among which is that I will be moving to another state at the end of March and I need to make sure I have enough leeway for both book and real life. This means that when section four is posted, it will be coming from my new place! More on that when it happens. I know where I'm going, but I'll have more time to tell you all about it after it happens.
Note: if you're trying to order Resurrections from your local bookstore, there's still a snag. Currently unless your bookstore is Barnes & Noble, you can't get it other than going on line to either BN.com or IUniverse.com (the publisher). And even if you have a B&N near you, you'll most likely have to special order it. That's the way the book world is; not ever book gets shelf space deserving or not... ;-) but as for the snafu with ordering it through other booksellers, that's being worked on. This also means Amazon.com loses out too, not being able to order any. So, yes, you can get copies of Resurrections, it's just very limited distribution right now.
So much for that! Happy reading, and get ready for some surprises at the end of next month! Special guest characters! New reviews! And much, much more! Okay, maybe only much more... but still! Where else were you going to spend your weekend?
February 2, 2001 Well, the book is definitely out!
I've changed the link to the book site a little, since it's now on Barnes & Noble.com! Personally I can't believe how big the dang thing is. Not just physical size, six inches by nine, but the spine is about an inch thick! And I'm sitting here thinking that Sanctuary is even bigger... and then there's four more to go! Sheesh!
For anyone who wonders, I have a copy of the nameless cover, and my mother's got one with the name on it that she's sending to me, so I'll have both! It's a rough existence, being a collectoholic...
Also updated is the Blotter. I got more letters. Lots more. Pretty good batch this time around, too!
here's a link to the Birthday Card that former illustrator Ed Garcia sent to me. He's a genius :-) wish I'd thought of it first...
and here's a link to A Very Special Version, the only cliffs notes you will ever need for a Les Misérables book report. My favorite part is when Marius gets poked in the eye... and the way Javert screams when he jumps off the bridge... Do not operate heavy equipment while watching!
One thing that has not been updated, with the exception of some more goofy errors I've had to fix (Sheesh! again) is the Media Comparison page. For those who are waiting with bated breath for the review of the new miniseries, that's been put off until I get more done on the book. I have both versions, the three hour version shown in the US and the six hour one shown in Europe, but rather than review them separately I'm going to review them together and compare them against each other as well as against the other versions. And it promises to be quite, um, interesting! Yeah, that's the word! Interesting!
Also, some time ago proofer Lindsay found an old young-adult reader version of LM and there were study questions in the back. I'm going to be posting those next time too. Along with some "extra" answers she and I came up with, because, well, we couldn't resist... think you can pass the Les Misérables final exam? Oh, if only I could program a cgi test where you can fill in the dots! *sigh*
Lastly, if anyone cares (heh), I've got most of the second section of Adrift up, too. I still have a couple of chapters to go on that, but here's a good breaking point, and I will be uploading the rest of part two along with all of part three hopefully during Presidents' Day weekend, three weeks from now. Will she make her deadline? The suspense is killing you! :-D
All this and Andy Rooney, this week on 60 Minutes...
January 8, 2001 Rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated...
Here's what happened: in the first week of December my ISP went bankrupt. I've been trying to get online since then, but if you don't have internet access it's hard to get internet access, if you know what I mean. Well, after several false starts, I managed to scrounge up a nasty ol' Juno disk from two upgrades ago and used it just long enough to download a real ISP, which I now have. And I've put the Juno disk in a safe place in case this sort of stuff happens again.
Now, for all that, you might notice Sanctuary has been taken down. The reason for this is of course that I will be cleaning and spiffing it up in the next few months so I can turn it in to the publisher. I definitely want book 2 out before next Christmas.
Pont-au-Change Book One: Resurrections is now officially available! Order it from any store you want, or go to the publisher's website through the link on the front page for this site to order it via the internet. Notice that my name is now on the cover... however, apparently some did get out without my name on it. I really, really want one of those nameless ones...
Also you'll notice that the next part of Adrift is not uploaded yet. The reason for this is that while I have finished a section, I realized that another section has to come in front of it, so until that one gets done, I can't put anything up. I'm looking at another couple of weeks for that, by the end of January at the latest, at which point I'll put both sections up together. That ought to hold you off for awhile. As always, patience will be rewarded.
But, I got a lot of letters this time, so there's something to read, anyway. I'm sure you'll find a couple of them very, very interesting. I know I did when I got them!
That's it for now. Sorry it's so short. But now that I'm online again, I promise to write more often....
November 11, 2000: Actually, it happened October 31... I was at work, dressed in the Javert costume (for which I won Best Costume, btw!) and it being October 31, which as we all know is the day Hugo lost his trunk... well, I got the word: Resurrections is on the press!
Now why, I hear you asking yourselves, didn't she update the page right away? Why wait ten days? Well, a few reasons. One, I've been real busy at my "day job." Two, as of right now Resurrections is only available through the publisher's website. In about 3 weeks it should be available through ordering at your local bookstore, or Amazon.com, or B&N, or whatever. And third, there's a slight problem with the cover that I caught two days after it went to the printers... they seem to have forgotten to put my name on it! They've fixed it for the press run, but the image that's still on their website is the old one, sans nom. If you want to order the book Right Now click through the cover on the main page and it'll take you right to the shopping cart. I am very pleased with the photo-like imagry on it, they followed my layout (posted elsewhere on this site) very closely!
Meanwhile, something else came up: I found an e-commerce site that allows me to merchandise stuff from PauC with no investment on my part. I design the products, upload the images to the site, they handle the orders, the shipping, the manufacturing, everything... and I make however much over their set price I've decided I want them to go for. Right now there's only a few items up there: the mousepad, with the original Valjean/Javert yin-yang image that I did when I first started working on the book; two coffee mugs, normal and large, with the same images, only facing one another (like on the "Counterpoint" page); and of course the shirt I've been threatening to make for over a year now, the "What Would Javert Do?" t-shirt. It's kind of hard to see the image on the thumbnail pic, so here is a nice large picture of the front, and here is the answer to the question, on the back of the shirt. The shirts I put these on are gray, both t-shirt and sweatshirt styles. Notice they go all the way up to 4XL in size. That's big enough to camp in! :-) The image, for general disclosure purposes, is one of the Bayard illustrated woodcuts, probably one of the best ones of Javert. It really shows up well on the gray material. Oh, and the website address is blended in with it. Remember, the original Bayard may be in public domain, but the altered logo version here is mine, the same way the Cosette head logo belongs to someone else :-)
And now here's the answer to the question you're probably asking yourself: why don't I have a picture of my book cover on the coffee mug? Two answers. First, I don't have the corrected image with my name on it (silly) and second, because I do not have permission to market things with the book cover. That image belongs to the publisher. I am allowed to have the image on my website as a link to the purchasing site.
I've was going to add a couple of Blotter letters, since one of the people whose letter Netscape ate wrote back and resent their letter, but I'm holding off on updating that page till the regularly scheduled update, by which time I hope to have gotten some response to the opening to Adrift. Also, please note I have pushed back the date for uploading to the middle of December; I am not quite as far along as I wanted to be with the next section and I want to give myself some breathing room. But as we all know I have a tendency to set long goals and then post early :-) so we'll see.
Until next time, remember that Enjolras and his friends died for the right to sit around developing ulcers watching election returns... so enjoy it!
Till next time...
October 29, 2000: And here we are again! What a lovely two months off that was. I went to Florida, hung out with my proofers, I'm awaiting word even as we speak about when I can give out the ISBN number for Pont-au-Change Book One: Resurrections which looks like yes, it will be available for the lovely holiday season (helpful hint: books make excellent gifts!), and I'm very excited about starting Adrift, finally! Sanctuary was always meant to be the "what to do with the characters until Adrift starts up" book, so no one was more surprised than I that things actually happened in Sanctuary. However, Adrift is the non-stop Stuff Happening book, so be prepared for a bit of a roller coaster ride. Or should that be a boat ride? Hmm...
Here's a couple of pics from my trip to Florida: from left to right is Trout, Lindsay, and me on the carriage ride around St. Augustine. I was very happy to be able to spend time with the two people who volunteered to help me correct and edit Pont-au-Change way back in the dawn of prehistory (somewhere in 1998) and it's a safe bet that without their constant imput this book wouldn't be as good looking as it is. In the other pic are the same three of us and the driver (Dave) and the horse (Mick), both of whom were ultra cool! Can you spot the Trout? :-) And can you spot the blatant advertisement for Pont-au-Change?
Second, here's a little thing I came up with for a short banner ad/refrigerator magnet idea. I've printed up a few for friends and they're now gracing refrigerators coast to coast! I wish I had a clearer version of the logo but I can't find the program I used to generate the bookend thing with so I can't redo it :-/ If you'd like to copy the pic and post it to the chatroom/mailing list of your choice to spread the word that the book's almost here, I certainly wouldn't mind! :-)
Also, someone sent me a link to this page which had me laughing for hours. The guy who runs the website writes crank letters to major corporations with off-the-wall suggestions and then watches to see what reaction he gets. I think the guy who plays Father Guido Sarducci used to do that too. However, this may be the funniest one I've ever seen... for reasons which will become evident very soon! I'd like to thank the website's owner, Scott Becker, for letting me link to the letter. Read his whole site. You will be glad you did!
Finally, I am very happy and jazzed to be able to reprint, with permission, the following cartoon which has been on my bulletin board for a couple of years now. If your newspaper does not carry the extremely hilarious Over The Hedge they should be ashamed of themselves. Next to Mutts and Boondocks and Rhymes With Orange, this is my favorite currently running comic strip (that I still love Peanuts and Bloom County and Calvin & Hobbes should go without saying!). Thanks very much Mike for the permit to reprint! And this is an especially relevant comic now that I've found out that (shudder) Disney is releasing "Hunchback of Notre Dame II" next year. Dear God :-P
