Self-help writer signs major deal with Amazon because he’d rather be with a technology company than a publishing company. Not sure there’s much of a difference when it comes to Amazon these days.

So it’s clear why the deal is both an outlier and a harbinger. Giving up the store sale is a difficult thing for any author to do, particularly when the math works out to be so close to breakeven (and we haven’t factored in the marketing impact of books in stores, which is real.) It took an author with a particular personal bent to pursue that choice. But it is a harbinger because the math would appear to be moving in Amazon’s direction. The one way I can see for publishers to improve their chances of looking good in this calculation is to raise their ebook royalty percentage. Of course, there’s no reason that Amazon couldn’t do the same thing.

I have no idea what is happening in this video, but I watched it from start to finish.

I can’t decide if these real-life superheroes exist or are just some viral marketing scheme, and I’m too afraid to Google them to find out.

I am rushing to the emergency room to meet a real-life superhero called Phoenix Jones, who has fought one crime too many and is currently peeing a lot of blood. Five nights a week, Phoenix dresses in a superhero outfit of his own invention and chases car thieves and breaks up bar fights and changes the tires of stranded strangers. I’ve flown to Seattle to join him on patrol. I landed only a few minutes ago, at midnight on a Friday in early March, and in the arrivals lounge I phoned his friend and spokesman, Peter Tangen, who told me the news.

“Hospital?” I said. “Is he okay?”

“I don’t know,” said Peter. He sounded worried. “The thing you have to remember about Phoenix is that he’s not impervious to pain.” He paused. “You should get a taxi straight from the airport to there.”

At 1 a.m. I arrive at the ER and am led into Phoenix’s room. And there he is: a young and extremely muscular black man lying in bed in a hospital smock, strapped to an IV, tubes attached to his body. Most disconcertingly, he’s wearing a full-face black-and-gold rubber superhero mask.

“Good to meet you!” he hollers enthusiastically through the mouth hole. He gives me the thumbs-up, which makes the IV needle tear his skin slightly. “Ow,” he says.

I’ve been writing short stories lately while working on the revisions of the new novel. A few of them have already found homes with publications and will be out shortly. I’m thrilled to announce I’ll have a short story in the Aug. 25 issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, one of the top speculative fiction magazines. It’s also one of my favourite magazines, because it’s “dedicated to publishing the best in literary adventure fantasy,” with an emphasis on the literary. And let’s face it, spec fiction isn’t always known for being literary, which frustrates the hell out of me, if no one else. I grew up on writers like Roger Zelazny and Steven Brust, who care as much about the craft of writing as the plot and characters, and that’s the approach I take with my own fiction. So I’m really honoured to be published in BCS, and I’m just glad there’s a place like that for anachronisms like me.

Oh yes, the story is called “The Angel Azrael Rode into the Town of Burnt Church on a Dead Horse.” It’s a weird western featuring fallen angels, risen demons, vampires, zombies, and an assortment of other oddities. Think High Plains Drifter meets Mike Mignola and you’ll have an idea of what it’s about.

More on the other stories to come.

A random shot I took at the beach this weekend:

I don’t have a bank account or credit card with HSBC and I never will. Here’s why:

A little more than a year ago, I moved into my new house. For some reason, the previous owner didn’t set up mail forwarding, so I continued to receive her mail. I wrote “Moved” on each piece of her mail and dropped it into the mailbox, and gradually I stopped receiving her mail.

Except for her mail from HSBC.

I’ve returned a year’s worth of bank statements, credit card pre-approvals and who knows what else to HSBC, each envelope with a “Moved” message on it. I’ve even ripped open the little plastic windows to write “Moved” on the statements themselves, because maybe the staff at HSBC aren’t looking at the envelopes. But the mail from HSBC keeps coming.

I’ve never opened any of the envelopes to see what they contain, but it’s obvious that they hold this woman’s financial information. And HSBC doesn’t seem to have any system in place to stop sending their clients’ financial information out to wrong addresses, even when alerted to the fact they’re sharing sensitive data with whoever wants it.

Which makes me wonder what level of banking and credit card fraud they have. And what level of security they have on their online sites, as security clearly isn’t a priority for their physical mail.

There’s no way I’d trust HSBC with my money. If you’ve got an account with them, I’d strongly suggest taking your funds out of it, before a stranger beats you to it.

Some interesting thoughts about how agents are adapting to the ebook world by Mike Shatzkin.

First there were fake Apple stores. Now there’s a fake Ikea.

Here’s another example of how some publishers are adapting to the rise of ebooks. Recently, Gollancz announced it was supporting the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Now the publisher has announced the creation of SF Gateway, which will make available out-of-print sci-fi and fantasy classics in ebook form. So they’re providing an information service and piggybacking a retail service onto that. The reading community is happy and the publisher is happy — and the writers are happy. Everyone’s happy!

Makes you wonder what would happen if some enterprising publisher took the same approach to, say, Canadian literature. There’s gold in them thar abandoned classics.

I like to give away lottery tickets and other gifts at readings and book launches as a way of saying thanks to people who’ve come out. When I launched The Warhol Gang in Vancouver, I gave away lottery tickets for a particularly large jackpot, making my reading one of the potentially most lucrative events ever. Alas, no new members of the Warhol Gang won the big prize. However, Ethan Baron, one of my colleagues in journalism, may have been saving up all his luck for something more valuable: staying alive when attacked by a grizzly bear. Read his personal account of the terrifying encounter.