[video=youtube;ZyU213nhrh0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZyU213nhrh0[/video]

Why is it that those of us who do not read eBooks in Amazon's formats do not have access to The Proteus Cure in ePub without having to buy from Amazon and then convert? I feel that is unfair to a lot of your readers. Please pull The Proteus Cure from Amazon's exclusive hands so the rest of us can have at it. I don't buy exclusive eBooks from Amazon. Never have, never will.

This locking up of eBooks like this is one of the reasons I do not own a Kindle. It's not that I cannot do the conversion. I can. That's not the problem. The problem is when I feel we (those of us who read in ePub) are being tread as second class, I will not spend the money. I might not ever spend the money even if the eBook was published via B&N and/or Kobo. This is unfair. Please consider your fans who do want to read and do not want to or cannot convert.

This guy is freaking laugh out loud hilarious! NSFW! If you watch at work, wear headphones.

In this small bit he describes the need for safety words in a relationship. His safety word happens to be "Pineapples".

[video=youtube;M91LTgAWZ0k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=M91LTgAWZ0k#![/video]

I'm re-reading the Repairman Jack series currently, the Adversary cycle, and a few of the novels and short stories from the "Secret History." I'm on By the Sword right now. But I got to thinking, since the Ally, up to Harbingers was trying to prune Jack's spear, I thought that the Ally might have be somewhat behind the events in The Haunted Air. The stones in Menelaus Manor were revealed to have been taken from the Keep, which I believe have some sort of spiritual holding power, as the complete configuration held Rasalom for (going from memory, I hope it's accurate) 500 some odd years, the murdered children stayed on in the house as well as one of the Kenton brothers (I think it was Lyle but I'm not sure) from the effect of the stones, and (I haven't gotten to the point of re-reading Reprisal yet) I believe that Rasalom (as "Sara Lom") murdered the kid whose voice torments Father Ryan on the telephone using the power of the stones. It is my belief that the Ally used the murdered girl's spirit in an attempt to take Gia's baby.
Or, it was a "tainting" of the Keep stones by "Sara Lom," who is also a necromancer, which means that the Ally and the Otherness were working together (at least had complimentary goals) to a) prune Jack's spear and b) cause pain and discontent through sheer mayhem.

BTW:
I noticed a couple of discrepencies in Infernal. I marked the pages but my coworker is reading the series for the first time (he's on Infernal now) and I only remember one of them off the top of my head. Abe makes a comment about not hearing of Johnson, NJ, when, as we know from Jack: Secret Histories, he met young Jack there at the antique shop. This is probably because FPW wrote this book prior to the young adult series so I take inconsistencies like that in stride. Hey, it's a great series regardless. And, I was and still am stoked that FPW tied in Black Wind to RPJ. That was one of my favorite stand alone books.
Anyone have any speculations on my The Haunted Air theory?

Defiance is another pleasant surprise. At first it felt like just an amalgamation of elements of various other SyFy shows (the sheriff and daughter come to town like in Eureka, there's a bunch of space refugees like in Battlestar Galactica, aliens and humans have differences to work together like in Babylon5, the aliens seem mostly humanoid with weird hair and eyes like in Farscape). And it is that, but in this case they create something at least equal to the sum of their better parts. I like the actors. I like things that are cliche (the children of two rival families fall in love) and the things that aren't (the parents of "Romeo" are somewhat horrible people who encourage the wedding so they can kill Juliet's dad and brother and take over her inheritance once their son marries her). No one's hands are clean here, but one's hands are completely dirty, either. Two episodes in and I'm already looking forward to the next one.

Peter Reilly is talking about Repairman Jack over at Forbes again. He seems to have a real handle on the character http://tinyurl.com/cfubbxw

I read through Reprisal thinking of it as "Lissle" or "Lizzle" in my head, always wondering how accurate that was.

:loco: Well...I guess I'm now some sorta writer. A published author!..A HACK of distinction!!!.. And of course, LOL, it did get me, at one point, a reward: a cup of coffee at WaWa! Now being the type of film buff who drove my poor suffering wife to an almost chew-wasp frenzy of drooling rakashi murderous glee, by my obsessed research with an article I wrote, some years ago, on the television film, "Fear No Evil", for FILMS IN REVIEW; I risked further glares that would have made Gia proud. I decided to put my money where my mouth was, after getting a comment from a dvd collector, and EXPAND what I wrote into a full book on "Fear No Evil"!! What? Never heard of the film??

Ok! In a nutshell. There was a critically acclaimed film that was made by Univeral Pictures and NBC TV and released to the tube on March 3, 1969. It was the very first horror tv movie, penned by Guy ("Werewolf of Paris") Endore and vet tv producer, Richard Alan Simmons. Directed by Paul ("The Mephisto Waltz") Wendkos with a cast headed by Louis Jourdan, Lynda Day, Bradford Dillman and Carroll O'Connor (before Bunker), the movie was everything a great supernatural tale should be: intelligent, well acted, erotic (without being tasteless) and should have been headed for dvd immortality. Well, guess what? Universal not only lost or junked the negatives, but also has virtually NO RECORD of making it in the first place!!!. I did a investigation on this, contacting them, as did film historian, Philip J. Riley (who worked with me on this), who also did a doubletake that made the eartquake in "One Million Years B.C." look like a sneeze!
Well, working with collectors and shady obsessed fanboys (one, who happily told me how I should look into the symbolism of what a phaser explosion really meant in Trek's "Balance Of Terror"), I gradually was able to put the bits and pieces of information on this film togeather (and we are also talking about working to 2 A.M. after getting off work! at Midnight).
Now came the fun part!
My dear wife, who does my proof reading, had to now relive the joy of entering the world of the demon Rakashi, cursing me under (and rightfully too-LOL) her breath! The months went by and finally the publisher, BearManor Media, announced the publication (with the poster art I created) and I thought I would have a seller. Well..I just found out at this late date that the "Yugo" and "Le Car" sold more than my book. Thankfully, being a homeowner, I've had the common sense to retire in this venture(at least until I get another 'Great' idea of literary inspiration) So the moral of the story is that hard work, risking sanity in being creative, and getting bleary eyed from watching an equally blurry tv movie dub, will, at the very least, get you the rich reward of a fresh large cup of hot joe with irish cream!

I first got interested in Repairman Jack after reading an excerpt from Cold City on the website criminal element.com.

At the time I knew nothing of F. Paul Wilson. But Cold City appealed to me because it took place in NYC of the 1990s. Since I am originally from NYC, I enjoy books that take place there and Cold City definitely had the sense of place that I have come to appreciate.

I mentioned to a friend that I was reading the book and enjoying it. He told me that he had read a bunch of Repairman Jack books, and mentioned that there were some 'other' elements in them--meaning occult or supernatural. I'm not a huge occult or supernatural book fan, but after finishing Cold City I picked up The Tomb, and really enjoyed that. From then it was one Repairman Jack book after another until I finished the entire series more or less in order. I really enjoyed Nightworld. It really is well written horror in the descriptions of some of the things happening to some of the characters in it really evokes a sense of--well, horror (it's late and I can't think of a better description). I finished the entire Repairman Jack Series in about 3-4 months. I consistantly ahd trouble putting the books down.

Anyway, after finishing the Repairman Jack Series I went on to read The Keep, Reborn (which I put down with a few hundred pages left to go and will go back to), and then picked up the Secret Histories, which I am working my way through now.

I really marvel at the way FPW created a whole mythology that ties together these and some of his other books, and the whole concept of a secret history of the world and otherness.

Glad to see you're still keeping the shiney side up and hope you do for many more years to come. Happy Birthday Vaughn.