SUPER-DUPER EIGHT

Almost a year ago, I offered my first novel, Super Eight Days, as an e-book on Amazon Kindle, for a mere 99 cents.

You can read about the circumstances that led to this literary landmark here if you like, but the short version is that I wanted to get the book up on Kindle before the release of the (unrelated) movie Super 8. Thus I hastily used a draft that had never been properly edited, or copy-edited, and I didn’t take the time to give it even a cursory proof.

It turned out this version was a lot rougher and more typo-riddled than I had realized, much to my embarrassment, and I heard about it from a couple of readers, who were a lot nicer and more polite about it than they needed to be. Then came an astounding offer from my cousin Natalie Nichols, an accomplished music journalist and editor on the LA scene who certainly has better things to do with her time: She would edit/copy-edit/format the book.

This she did, brilliantly and sensitively, and it’s that infinitely less slovenly version of Super Eight Days that you can now get on your Kindle, still for only 99 cents.

A thousand, thousand thanks, Cuz. You’ve saved the family honor.

RIP to actor Dick Beals, the eternal prepube falsetto who provided the original voices of Gumby and Speedy Alka-Seltzer, among countless others, passed on at 85...