I just mailed off five free signed copies of Dismantle the Sun to some lucky so-and-sos at librarything.com. Of the five winners, two are residents of rural Michigan, and one of them comes from a town close to the location I pictured for my (not real) Menominee Falls, MI. That tickles me, though I wonder if Shakespeare ever got a letter saying “Dear Bill S., I just couldn’t get into Hamlet, sorry. It’s just not real to me. To start off, it’s not Elisinore, you knob. It’s Helsingør. And look at your costumes. We Danes don’t wear stuff like that. That’s much more Dutch. And why do your women look so much like guys? Next time, do some research, you inkstained wretch! I expect my money back.”

Or maybe this will happen:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo1OnD2Rk4o&w=560&h=315]
An interview with Rob Paulsen, who voiced Yakko Warner and the indispensable Pinky.

In The New Yorker, Joan Acocella taps David Copperfield, Song of the Lark, and Huckleberry Finn as great novels with bad endings. While I wouldn’t know anything about writing a bad ending to a book personally, I’ve always thought that the ending of the novel was less important than the middle. It’s the biggest difference between the novel and the short story, where the ending really is the ball game. For me, the novel doesn’t explode at the end. The novel simply gathers momentum like a great, mile-long freight train, until it roars past us, overwhelming us with its sheer power and leaving nothing behind but the memory of its passing and a wake consisting of little curlicues of wind and dust, which we call the ending. (But that’s just me.)

Later.