In my office I have two boxes of Days of the Endless Corvette and another stack of the same. I suspect this is a problem faced by many authors. No one, not even the most avid fan of his own writing, needs more than one copy of a book, but sooner or later, the sales cycle ends and you wind up with a surplus lying around you have to store somewhere.
I pity Stephen King; It weighs in at - what - a thousand pages? Imagine having a hundred or so extra copies of that in the house.
Every time I walk into my office, I am silently reminded of Endless Corvette. Maybe I should donate them or set up a little stand in my front yard or hawk them on Ebay. Nah. I'll just keep them. Little by little, they may leave the house - in the hands of the rare acquaintance who doesn't yet have a copy, to a reviewer somewhere or something. They will evanesce, slowly diminishing the pile, like Hawking Radiation slimming down a black hole. But it will take ages and ages to accomplish. Certainly it will not occur in my lifetime.
Fortunately, I am proud of Endless Corvette, and don't object to a reminder that I wrote it. Nevertheless, there are some regrets. On page 186 is a minor error I neglected to catch in the gallies. Coach Martin is referred to as "he," but I had intended her to be "she." My idea of a joke, that Troy Badcock's first football coach should have been somebody's mother, an indication of how seriously football is taken by everybody in the South.
My next novel, Paradise Dogs, is due out in 2011 from Thomas Dunne. I am already at work on yet another, currently titled Bread of Heaven; I hope it will be published as well. Meanwhile Endless Corvette reminds me to be very, very careful and spare no pains to make these as good as I possibly can.
Whatever I publish, I'm likely to have around for a long, long time.
In great numbers.
