Fortnightly.

I haven't really said much about this yet, but guess what?

Wednesday, Feb. 25, I host the first ever meeting of a new book-of-the-month reading club being held/sponsored by the Globe. It's called Fortnightly. Here's the promotional stuff I've made for it:

large banner

table stand

 generic square image for Facebook/etc.

The concept is that the owner of the Globe, Mike Sito, likes me and thinks I'm enthusiastic enough (about books, people, life, etc.) to actually helm this thing and make it work. So I am trying to. I've put together a big list of books I think would be good to read, and I've tried to advertised it and bring people in by posting on English-language Prague social Web sites like expats.cz and prague.tv, as well as making a Facebook group. I also made an email sign-up sheet and taped it to the counter of the bookstore, and I've had one sheet fill up already with people interested. I've made a new friend, too, a guy named Grady, because we talked so much once I invited him.

So the new group meets Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. and we'll start by discussing just what the group should be like. Then we'll talk about the first book, Bohumil Hrabal 's Too Loud a Solitude. (Members get 10% off!) It's a very slim novel (98 pages) about a guy who works destroying paper for the government, but who reads all the paper he destroys, and so educates himself while the government tries to censor everyone else...I think. I haven't read it yet. I will begin to read it tonight or tomorrow -- I told myself I would get to the halfway point (well, at least finish Part 1) of Don Quixote before I started the new book, and I just reached that point tonight. I think it's the perfect book to start the club with, because it's so short, it seems really interesting, and Bohumil Hrabal is a famous Prague resident. There's a mural of him painted near my old flat at Palmovka:

Cool, huh? That's his famous cats. There's also a typewriter and a bunch of famous books in a painted bookshelf.

p.s. if you want to get updates about the club as if you're a member, send an email to fortnightly.globe@gmail.com and I'll add you to the mailing list.

So that's what my life has been like, lately. If you're reading this, then you already probably know that I have been writing a whole lot lately. I am (hopefully) near being finished revising a long short story (the longest story I've ever finished) called The Freezing Point of Blood. It may also be called Zorion's Eyes or just simply Zorion. I don't know. It will go up on zerowhitenoises once it's done done. Also I hope to get it published somewhere (cough Katherine Latshaw will you help me get this short story published? cough).

I also came up with a cool idea for a story that weaves the four separate narratives of a young journalist, a jaded politician, the real-world band Deerhoof and a young Thai girl who gets a strange handicap after an explosion, all taking place in a fictional European city-state named Maghrey. I think it will be cool. First I have to finish the other long story I am writing. It's called The Physics of My Slow Decline, although that might just end up being the title of the first part of a longer story that would include some vaguely (or maybe extremely is the word I'm looking for) paranormal/supernatural elements. If that's the case, then the title of the entire work is most likely to be Gradual Ruin.

Hope you guys like the last blog post I made. Pictures and video take a lot longer to structure into an update than text.

Also I think I want to start a bookstore somewhere in Europe. How do you start a bookstore? Thoughts, please. Maybe Uncle Harold can lend me $100,000?