Being Small, here and there

So I wasn't going to do the Big Cover Reveal until you-all could go to Amazon to pre-order, if such was your desire - but Amazon.com seems to be treating Per Aspera as though they were Hachette or something, and the book continues to fail to appear on its pages. We'll keep an eye on things, and I will prompt you with big pix and everything when pre-ordering becomes possible: but meanwhile, here is Per Aspera's big cover reveal instead, to which you may click through.

And if you're so minded, you can pre-order the paperback from Barnes & Noble right now (there will also be a hardcover, and of course an e-book too).

And if you're in the UK, you can actually pre-order the paperback there too, from Amazon.co.uk as ever was. The ways of big rivers are strange to me, and one must paddle against the flow. *shrugs*

But isn't it pretty? The cover is by the awesome Mark J Ferrari, of course. Go on, have another look. This time, click through to the wraparound and read all the words.

But why is there no more beer?

There is wine; I remembered to buy wine. I may have to drink wine.

That's about as much as is happening today: an instance of wine-drinking. I did get ARCs (which I still pronounce letter by letter, while everyone around here treats it as an acronym and says "ark") for BEING SMALL - with a wholly different cover from the Great Cover Reveal, just because - and one is already off to a local newspaper for hopeful review. Otherwise it's all been intentions and unreality and nothing getting written, nothing at all.

The most I can manage, apparently, is a potful of baked beans. Locally-grown organic heirloom Yellow Eye beans, so recently dried they barely needed boiling into tenderness; they are currently simmering in the oven with onion and celery and carrot and tomato and bay, and sage and chillies from the garden - and garlic and ginger as soon as I remember to add them, whoops - and chipotle and cider vinegar and molasses sugar and smoked paprika and lots of pepper. Yay beans. And there will be leftover pork and cauli from last night, and freshly fried potatoes, and I will call that dinner and be done.

Dunno what it is about today. Neither one of us slept too well last night, but even so. I shouldn't be this hollow.

(Oh, and I'm also trying a wholly different kind of sourdough, but that's a two-day process: no results before tomorrow night.)

(Oh, and I have a stock to strain and clarify: but the most of the work in that was done yesterday, when I stripped down the carcase and put the bones in the slow cooker with lots of veg & water. Today is totally the between-day, where nothing much is ever going to occur.)

EtA: Alternatively, of course, I could always drop my jar of personally-pulverised garlic and watch it shatter on the kitchen floor. Then I could have all the fun of sweeping and scrubbing and rinsing and drying and fretting about teeny-tiny splinters of glass evading everything and piercing a boy's paw &c &c. How's about that? Yup, let's try that...

They fall like diamonds, watched all the way

And now Lauren Bacall has died. There's a sort of elegaic sadness to the news, a sense of a life completed - not like yesterday's news, no, not at all - but it is a sadness none the less. One more name to drink to.