…Oh.

From TV Tropes:

  • Interestingly, the surgical team who treated Terry Pratchett for a minor procedure – which after patient questioning on his part, turned out to have become somewhat more complicated and turned into a more urgent Situation – told him afterwards that he’d sat up during the operation, demonstrating the anaesthesia wasn’t quite working, and had a one-sided conversation with an unseen Other in the operating theatre. Pratchett had apparently asked that if he had to go at this point, could a packed lunch be provided? Ham sandwiches with mustard would be appreciated. Apparently he was only offered plain ham with no condiments, and had expressed dissappointment. Terry was both perplexed and oddly reassure by this, and this account of his own NDE – which he didn’t remember at all save through the doctor’s recollection – ended up in a Discworld novel as a discourse between an elderly witch and Death. This is recollected in A Blink Of The Screen, a collection of his non-fiction writings. Hopefully Death remembered the mustard, when the time did arrive.

There is apparently RAMPANT skulduggery going on with All Romance eBooks.

It’s the kind of skulduggery that, a hundred and fifty years ago, would have ended with somebody getting stabbed during a dinner party.  I’m not entirely joking.  Writers can get really intense over getting screwed over their publication rights:

On Wednesday, December 28, All Romance eBooks–a romance-specific ebook distributor and publisher that also distributes general fiction and nonfiction through its OmniLit imprint–dropped a bombshell. In mass emails to customers and authors, ARe’s owner, Lori James, revealed that her company was closing, and that in lieu of full payment, authors and publishers would be offered a fraction of what they were owed.

Continue reading There is apparently RAMPANT skulduggery going on with All Romance eBooks.

Book of the Week: The Maker of Men and His Formula.

This one is a bit of a self-indulgence: this edition of The Maker of Men and His Formula (by Jules Foche) comes across as exactly the sort of conceit where a modern writer (in this case, Brian Stableford) pretends that the book he’s written is actually a ‘translation’ or ‘adaptation’ of an obscure book from the last century.  It’s a harmless conceit, in my opinion, but in this case apparently Jules Foche was a real author of 19th Century French science fiction.  Which makes the whole thing rather meta.

And so, adieu to The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall.