Cyberbooks

There are two things I wanna ramble about today, the first is a book published in 1989 by Ben Bova called CyberBooks.

I was just walking through the aisles of the library and the book fell off the shelves, bounced off my bald spot and shaved off a bunch of chest hairs as it slid down to thump onto my arthritic toe.

Just kidding, I picked it up because the chick on the cover looked EXACTLY LIKE MY WIFE WHEN SHE WAS TWENTY THREE ! (the pretty one, not the one with a couple thingeys popping out of her dress)

Not a little bit like her... but a dead ringer.

It was spooky, man.

In fact, a couple days later it was sitting on the counter and my daughter strolls by, skids to a stop and goes, "Whoa. What's this, Mom? This looks just like you."

My wife looks at it and 'erped' in surprise.

My other daughter goes, "Huh, I thought she looked familiar."

In other words, the cover made quite the commotion in my house.

It got even weirder as I read it. It wasn't a great, great read as in a real page-turner. But here's the thing ...the book was about a guy who invents an electronic gizmo that can download e-books. It was described down to the screen, buttons and scrollers exactly the same as the Kindle... which is 'amazering' considering Bova wrote the book twenty years before Kindle hit the Amazon River, er, streets.

The other cool thing about the book is the Bova, though he's won many awards, obviously never forgot his early roots. There's a lot about book rejections, publishers who overlook great literary works in favor of some drivel that will sell ... and frankly, just about everything that authors bitterly complain about.

All in all, a very innteerrestingg read ... if you're an author.

I'm getting kind of tired, so I'm not going to spend as much time as I thought on my second point.

Spiderwebs.... I mean websites.

I took the weekend to update my website, but then I tackled a fun project. With my first humor/vampire YA book Fang Face coming out next summer, I decided I wanted to set up a separate website for the book. So all day yesterday I played with the site.

I'm not a great Webmaster. In fact, I'm more like a Webplebe, but I think I pulled off a pretty fun site. It's still incomplete, since I don't have any reviews, excerpts or other stuff yet, but go check it out www.fangface.homestead.com .

Anyway, gotta go ..

Norm

www.normcowie.com
www.fangface.homestead.com

The Adventures of Guy ... written by a guy (probably)
The Next Adventures of Guy ... more wackiness
The Heat of the Moment
Fang Face (coming Aug 09)