Cowboys and Novellas

Back when Michael Bible was my student, I gave him one great piece of advice: "Write novellas! The public craves novellas!" Here's your chance to prove me right! Come to Off Square Books tomorrow at 5 PM as Michael does a reading and signing of COWBOY MALONEY'S ELECTRIC CITY. And it's cheap! Like what you'd pay for one of your fancy electric books that exists in nonexistent electric form, except even though it has ELECTRIC in the title, Michael's book is FOR REAL and illustrated with illustrations and crafted as an object of art for you to hold and spill coffee on and enjoy. It's a wonderful book, full of booby traps and surprise parties in word form. (I think the only piece of advice I ever actually gave Michael was "Hey, you know that tiger at the end of that one story? Why not make it a zebra? It's more poignant!" And he did it. Sucker!) Speaking of cowboys, I was reading today in the New York Times that apoplectic radio talk show hosts are making fun of cowboy poetry...? That is a real thing for real, that they are doing that, yes, it is really something that gets under their skin for some reason, it is something worth blustering and spewing about apparently, though I would like to see them make fun of cowboy poetry to a cowboy's face. I really would like to see that, for real. For real, for real, I picked up a book of cowboy poetry on one of my raids of the free books in the library coffee shop. What's wrong with cowboy poetry? It's got two great things in it that every sane person loves: cowboys and poetry. And so does Michael Bible's new book!