On This Cake-Smeared Nativity, A Gift Exchange Of Sorts

EDIT: We have our two winners! David Poole wins the signed copy of Magic Skeleton, and Tania Del Rio wins the signed and annotated copy of Magic Skeleton –! Congrats!

It is my birthday. My second Quarantimes Nativity, as it were — technically, I’m turning a FORBIDDEN NUMBER, and given that said number is also the number of a rotten piece of shit president, and because I kinda feel like a year was taken from me anyway because of this dipshit pandemic, I’m gonna go ahead and claim this birthday as:

AGE 44, PART TWO.

*thunder rumbles*

And then next year I’ll just jump right to 46 and skip that other number.

As such, given that it is the day I was shuttlecocked into the world, I figure we can do a little bit of a gift exchange. Way it works is this:

You pre-order either The Book of Accidents (July 20th) or Dust & Grim (October 5th) from either an indie bookstore or Bookshop.org. You send me the receipt for that purchase to terribleminds [at] gmail.com, with the subject header: BIRTHDAY EXCHANGE. And then I enter you into a contest where I’m giving away two copies of You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton. Both of those copies will be signed by myself and the artist, Natalie Metzger. And one of those two copies will be annotated by yours truly throughout, in handwriting so bad you’ll think you’re summoning some manner of elder god just by reading it. Maybe I’ll even doodle in it to show you why Natalie is the artist for the book and I most decidedly am not! Who knows what heresies it will contain!

You have till Sunday, May 2nd, 11:59PM EST to enter.

It is available to US residents only.

On May 3rd, I’ll do a random draw of two names.

First name will win the signed copy of Magic Skeleton.

Second name will win the signed and annotated copy of Magic Skeleton.

Questions?

Ah, yes, you over there.

Why only indie bookstores and not, say, Amazon? Well, regardless of your feelings about Amazon, one thing I do know is that our indie bookstores are the lifeblood of the bookish community, so I’m hoping to gently urge purchases in that direction to support small business and to give some love to booksellers in a fraught time. Amazon and B&N are probably doing fine. Small businesses, not so much. So, this isn’t to willfully exclude them, but it is to serve smaller businesses in local communities. Ideally, your local community.

What’s that, you say? But you don’t have an indie bookstore near you? Ah, see, here’s the good-news-gospel for you: many indie bookstores ship. In fact, you want to order from my local, Doylestown Bookshop, they will mail it right to you. In fact, if you want, I can even sign and personalize copies bought through there, too. Many other bookstores, too, will ship. Powells, for instance!

Oh, no, you’re not in the United States? Well, normally I would open such a contest to all counties, and just shunt the shipping costs off on you if you’re international. My only issue now is, I’ve found the USPS becoming unreliable thanks to Louis DeJoy’s knee-capping of said postal service, and so some stuff has just… up and gotten lost. Not that it’s amazing in the states, either, but some shit just disappears overseas, and it gets a lot harder to track, then. Plus, costs are up to ship internationally. So, apologies, but for now this will remain a US-only contest.

Final question? What’s that? What if you pre-order both books, TBOA and D&G? Well, then yes, I suppose that can count as two entries, which can give you two chances to win, as they say. But no more than that. Let’s not get silly. I mean, sure, I’d love for you to pre-order 100 copies of each book, but that’s a lot of effort on my part to put those names in a comically large top-hat.

I think that’s it.

If you have more questions, drop ’em in the comments below.

Otherwise, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME PRE-ORDER MY BOOKS OR I DIE I mean ha ha ha what.