The Cubs Are The Reason I Drink... In The Summer

This winter has been horrifying. I usually like winter (I never got on well with hot weather), but goddamn if the last few months haven't been unapologetically awful. Not only has it sucked, it's still going. But now we have baseball back. And baseball thaws out winter. Not literally, of course. I've been to at least one game during which the wind chill was hovering in the mid 30s. And I was sitting in the upper deck. And it started raining as I was leaving the stadium after a drizzly, lifeless 2-0 Cubs loss.

Speaking of whom...

The Cubs have a second straight first year manager. There have been some injuries. And they've fallen back to 23rd on the payroll rankings, which doesn't mean anything on its own except that we can probably expect an even longer rebuilding process as they bring guys up through the system. The most exciting thing about 2014 will be Wrigley's 100th birthday. Love the park all you want (I do), but the stadium should not be the most exciting aspect of your franchise for the better part of the last century. I'll be happy if the Cubs top 70 wins. On the other hand, I chose Pittsburgh on a lark last year and it worked pretty well for them. So it can't hurt. Anyway, there are literally zero consequences for being wrong here. I could have the Cleveland Spiders win the AL West, if I wanted. Or the Montreal Alouettes. And nobody could do a thing about it. 

• NL East: Washington
• NL Central: Chicago 
• NL West: Los Angeles
• NL Wild Cards: St. Louis, Atlanta
• AL East: Boston 
• AL Central: Kansas City
• AL West: Cleveland Spiders
• AL Wild Cards: Oakland, Texas 
• World Series: Los Angeles over Boston 

By the way, love baseball's slow embrace of 20th Century technology. In another fifty years maybe we'll finally have the robo-umpires we should've had in 2010. And they'll all look like Bud Selig.

New Stores Now Open

As promised, Nos Populus is now available at a much wider array of stores. You can find the list over there on the right. But if you're like me and the distinction between left and right eludes you (and frankly seems arbitrary, anyway), here's the master list:

Amazon (for paperback and Kindle)
aois21 (for paperback and e-book)
Barnes & Noble (for Nook)
Google Books (for e-book) and also available at Google Play
Kobo (for e-book)
Smashwords (for e-book)

The iBookstore will have it available soon, as well.

Barnes & Noble provides a really nice preview sample (all bright and shiny, with words you can read and such), and you can find more of those here and here. You can check out more about the inspiration of and influences on Nos Populus (as well as James Reso's vampiric qualities) here. You can read about my alma mater's complicated influence (and the slow deterioration of my fondness for politics) here. And the origins of President Dennis Ward here. You can also click the "Nos Populus" tag below for more.

I know I've been writing about my book a lot the last few weeks. I don't usually mean to be this self-indulgent, but the aois21 deal made a lot of things happen very quickly and I wanted to get the word out while that was still hot. Fresh material is on the way, I promise. In the meantime...

St. Paddy's 2014

I'm susceptible to cultural cringe from any number of directions, but the reinforcin' o' the stereotypes remains particularly galling.

I once said that "if you're the type to hit up an Irish pub on St. Paddy's, you're begging for an underwhelming night (you may also be a tool)." That last bit may have been harsh since, if you've attempted to engage an Irish bar on St. Patrick's Day (or in the preceding weekend, as the calendar has conspired to do this year--we can't all live in Boston), you've suffered enough without being called names.

Why do we require such a thin excuse in order to get plastered? We're adults--if we want to knock back a few at 11am on March 17th, let's go for it. But that's socially unacceptable unless we can peg it to a reason--holidays, weddings, not guilty verdicts, etc. The temperance movement may have lost, but it managed to leave behind acres of bad wiring in our cultural brain. It's a complicated relationship, but that's probably unavoidable. We're talking about a substance that tastes great and makes us feel temporarily invulnerable, before occasionally destroying us. In deference to that, let's acknowledge that hanging our binge drinking urge on a civilization that was partially devastated (and partially saved) by booze may be something like tempting fate. At the very least, and especially if you know you're a lightweight, don't pretend to be Irish while you're coughing up that half-curdled carbomb. It's embarrassing for everyone.

But I don't want to be gloomy on St. Patrick's Day. I really don't. To that end, I was happy to read that Sam Adams, Heineken, and Guinness (along with some local politicians) have pulled out of parades in New York and Boston today on the grounds that the Irish dons' long-standing stonewalling of the LBGT community is disgusting. Which it is. Check out the pious statement from the organizers of the Boston parade: "we must maintain our guidelines to insure the enjoyment and public safety of our spectators." As though anyone has ever enjoyed a parade. Anyway, this basic recognition of human decency seems a small thing, after an historic last few years for gay equality. But after such tidal waves, we may now have to measure these things in the micro-sense. And each one of those small things will be reason enough to hoist a pint. Or three.

Good News, Half-Drunken fans!

As of yesterday, Nos Populus is under the guardianship of aois21 publishing. aois21 is a marketing company, providing distribution and promotion for emerging writers and I couldn't be happier to be working with them. And not just because they made me the subject of a press release that didn't come from the police and says nothing about petty larceny (making my 8th grade French teacher's bold prognostication two-thirds wrong).

Nos Populus will soon be available at places other than Amazon (though it will remain at Amazon too). I've been looking for a way to do that for almost... two years? Really? Wow, I'm bad at this. Anyway, Nos Populus is available for pre-order through aois21. It'll be available (in e-book format) at Smashwords by Friday and at Kobo by Monday. And at some point in the near future, it'll also be available at Barnes & Noble, meaning the book will finally be Nook-ready. I will update and provide links to all of that as it happens.

I spent some time last week bemoaning the lack of progress on my first novel and how self-publishing--for all its charms--can be a draining, deflating process. That's mostly still true, but a few rays of hope can at least make the situation look nicer. I owe a huge thanks to Keith Shovlin, who provided me with this opportunity even though I only threatened him a little. He's a self-published author, too, so he knows what this means as much as--or perhaps more than--I do. That's why aois21 exists, after all.

Anyway, that's it for now. Updates to come. As you were, people.