I’ve got no idea why, or for how long, but at the moment Amazon has offered a deep discount on my two Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual books.

You can get either Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves or The Lair of the Clockwork Book
for just $10.79; that’s a discount of 43% on the first, and 45% on the second, or, um, inevitably, 44% on the two of them together.

Each one’s about 130 full color pages, at some amount I am too weary to calculate per page. But, you know, a bargain. They’ve gotta be CRRRAAAAAZY to offer these deals!

Here’s another preview screenshot of my CreateSpace Shop Manager plugin for WordPress.

So far the config screen lets you add categories, rename them, change their options, change their sort order, and delete them; within the categories you can – this afternoon! – add books.

Adding the books means I have to generate thumbnail images for them. That’s because of the big surprise I found when I added CreateSpace books to the Archonate Bookstore: the thumbnails expire! It must have something to do with Amazon’s cloud hosting.

They generate a thumbnail image dynamically when you visit the page and a few hours later… that image won’t be there any more. So my plugin captures the thumbnail, does some processing on it, and saves off a permanent copy of the image.

Next up is sorting and deleting books within a category. The ‘Refresh’ buttons below the books will capture a new thumbnail image (in case the cover is changed).

I may need to stop working on this tomorrow, at least for a little while, so I’m hoping to have everything in the Admin UI working properly by then.

I’ve reached that stage in life when the people I’ve admired for as long as I’ve been admiring people have begun to disappear at what’s probably an accelerating rate. There are obvious reasons why I think that’s a shame; some selfish (it’s proof that aging is going on, somewhere near me) and some, maybe, unselfish (because I’m sorry for all of us that these folks aren’t here with us any more).

So this week, it’s Jack Vance.

I try to avoid eulogizing people I didn’t actually know. After all, who am I to weigh in? So I’ll just say that even though I try to avoid having favorites, Vance was still a favorite writer of mine because he was just way too good to yield to my policy of unfavoritism. I mean, you just couldn’t keep him down. And though he hadn’t been writing for quite some time his body of work is still every bit as wonderful as it ever was. If you don’t know that work, you ought to.

Now the world is full of people who did know, or work with, or correspond with Jack Vance. What they have to say about his passing is a lot more compelling than anything I could write. I noticed a curious symmetry in two of these: Matthew Hughes remembers his first exposure to Vance through the magazine publication of The Dragon Masters, while Frederik Pohl remembers publishing it. Taken together they’ll tell you about 10% of what you should know about Vance: the rest, you’ll get by reading him.