Happy The Shade Of The Moon Publication Date!

I know it must be the official actual publication date for my brand new (and as far as I know totally last) moon book, The Shade Of The Moon, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (they're raffling off ten copies if you want to try for one,).

I know it's the official and actual, etc. because Amazon, which has been telling me so for months, now says it'll have copies in by Friday, which is practically Tuesday in some parts of the world. Also my editor emailed to ask if I want "the foul matter," which is such an enchanting phrase if you like to associate the word "foul" with a book you gave your heart and soul to. My editor claims "the foul matter" is really just the copyedited manuscript, but I understand that this term was created to make us writers feel just a little less human, and is quite successful in its intent.

I can also tell because the countdown clock over on the right is now going in a different direction. I guess I'll keep it there for a few days until we all get bored watching it go forwards.

I had thought about going to the nearest Barnes and Noble, which is about a half hour from here, to see if I could see actual copies of The Shade Of The Moon (other people have, but not necessarily at that particular Barnes and Noble, so there would be an element of risk), but it's raining and I woke up at 5 AM with a doozy of a migraine.

I may have to ignore the rain to scurry out and buy groceries, and the migraine is under control, but I'm so excited about why I got the migraine that I have to tell you.

At 5 AM, thanks to a dream, I came up with a hobby!

The dream itself was a primitive version of the hobby, so here's the actual hobby idea.

I'm going to take old calendars and shred them and cut them into little pieces, and then I'm going to take a picture from a calendar and paste all the shreds and little pieces on top of it to recreate it in calendar collage form.

Okay. Let me explain it again. Let's say I take a page from a calendar that's a picture of a landscape of North Dakota. I'll then take shreds of other calendar pictures, and some shapes I'll have cut out as well, and I'll paste them on top of the picture of North Dakota. So the shreds could come from cat calendars or movie star calendars or calendars of states with more liberal policies but lower reading scores than North Dakota. You know how on the back of calendars they show what each month's picture is? Well, I'll cut that out and paste it somewhere on my recreated piece so you'll be able to see what the picture is actually supposed to look like.

I went through ten pages of artwork on Etsy, and it is possible I have invented this fabulous art form.

Here's what I'm going to need to make this hobby work:

Old cheap calendars (available at Calendars.com and if I spend $25.00 I get free shipping).
Really good scissors and paste.
Tracing paper (so I can trace the picture I'm going to be recreating, to give myself a better sense of what size and shape shreds I'll need).
A compass (so I can cut really round pieces) and a cutting edge (I'm not so hot on straight lines)
A hobby for Scooter, because whom are we kidding, he's going to think this is irresistible.
Oh, and a 57th Street Gallery for my first showing. But that should be no problem.

The great thing is if I start right now, I'll have enough of these incredible pieces of art for Chanukah and Christmas presents for every single person I've ever met and a few I've only heard about through rumor and innuendo.

I understand that now that I've put this great idea out on the Internet for the entire world to see and steal, I could end up with a, in the immortal words of Gertrude Stein, "We did it first and then they did it pretty," situation. There are artistes out there who are better at cutting straight lines than me.

But what the hey. As long as they don't plagiarize The Shade Of The Moon, I'll be happy!