Keypad

I wrote a short story provisionally titled Keypad. You can read the whole thing here. An excerpt follows:

The keypad outside the apartment building responded to the man’s touch by emitting a bright blue backlight. It pissed him off.

When he’d first touched the keypad seven failed door code attempts ago, he’d found the light friendly and encouraging. But seven failed attempts at something often does serious damage to your wellbeing. And this man didn’t exactly have a healthy wellbeing to begin with. After the sixth failure, he’d gone down the block to the little park and sat in the light rain on a damp bench. Great, he’d thought to himself, now my ass is going to be wet all evening. But he’d stayed there for a few minutes, looking down at the black screen of his dead phone and pretending to be someone who lived around there. Eventually he’d come back from the park and failed the door code again.

Books

I finished reading some books. I read Céline’s Journey To The End Of The Night:

There’s something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don’t give a damn whether they’re getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don’t even try to understand what we’re here for. They just don’t care.

(more quotes)

I also read Bill Callahan’s Letters To Emma Bowlcut:

One of my favorite things of all time is when an animal keeps company with a different species. It’s often a duck. Maybe you should get a duck for that library you work in. No one would complain. Ducks belong in libraries.

(more quotes)

Fountain Reviews

So far, Fountain has three non-Amazon reviews. I present some excerpts.

Tia at Nerds Of A Feather writes:

Fountain has that wonderfully bizarre but ingenious feel that leaves you on the edge of your seat grasping for more. Within the first ten pages I laughed out loud at least five times, not because Fountain is a comedy, but because it is so absurdly witty.

Taylor at the Midwest Book Review (MBR) Bookwatch writes:

Erudite, complex, deftly constructed, and a fully engaged and engaging read from beginning to end, Fountain is a compelling and highly entertaining read—a seminal work of original literature that will linger in the mind long after it is finished and set back upon the shelf.

Publisher’s Weekly writes:

This is an intelligent, perceptive novel, but it leaves the reader adrift.

Maybe that last part is a subtle pun on what happens in the last pages of the book. It probably isn’t.

An Opinion

A dear friend of my grandmother sent me some thoughts via email recently:

I do not think a Physicist should be called Tote, I think it is OK as a child, but a Physicist and especially who wrote a book, the name Tote is demeaning. So I just let you know that I do like the name Elliot a very dignified name for a future famous man.

I think I’ll start an opinions section in my bio.