This is just a quick note to let everyone know that I've neither died nor drifted off into space. I have been very busy reading and writing, sometimes even for money. Which means I've got a backlog of reviews for the blog, though some are already in early drafts (yeah, I'm even doing drafts now). Here's what you can expect hopefully in the next few weeks:

• Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson
• Spook Country, by William Gibson
• What Boys Like, by Amy Jones
• Before I Wake, by Robert J. Wiersema
• The World More Full of Weeping, by Robert J. Wiersema
• The Lady in the Lake, by Raymond Chandler
• The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
• Five Days Apart, by Chris Binchy

I've also written some reviews for publication in the last few months, which has been really fun. I'll let you know when those see print.

Anyway, still here, still reading, still writing. I've also been working on some fiction, and have a couple of stories out looking for a place to call home. Fingers crossed.

I've been running vestige.org for just a touch over a decade now, and one thing that I have always, always, always said, is that I didn't want the site to be about making money. No advertising, no affiliate links, no donations or sponsored posts or any of that nonsense. What you do on your site is your business, but I didn't want any of that here. Most of my current readership was not around back when I used to be vocal about this sort of thing, so it probably won't matter to you folks, but I remember it quite clearly, and it matters to me.

But.

This site isn't very expensive to maintain, if you define "not very expensive" in relation to some kind of objective measure, like the average income for a thirty-something, university-educated white male living in Toronto. The thing is, I don't make the average income for a thirty-something, university-educated white male living in Toronto, despite the fact that I am, well, blah blah blah, you get the picture. What I actually make (and I want to be clear I'm not complaining about my employer here, because my employer is pretty awesome) is considerably less than that. Enough less than that to make any purchase over $25 something that has to be budgeted for in advance. At that point running this site, yeah, isn't hugely expensive, but it's expensive enough that I feel it come budget time.

The point is, I'd like to apply for an affiliate program to help mitigate the cost of running this place, but I want to make sure that it's cool with you folks first. I say apply, because that's how it works over at McNally Robinson; you have to apply for membership in their program. That's right, not Amazon.com, but McNally Robinson. There's a few reasons why I chose their program as the one I want to apply for. I like their stores. I've visited the flagship store in Winnipeg, and their short-lived store here in Toronto, and every time the staff was courteous, knowledgeable, and not only did I find the (sometimes rare) books I was looking for, I often found books I didn't know I was looking for. Also, they are a Canadian indie retailer, and supporting our independent booksellers matters to me. In addition, they do customer service really well. I was given a McNally Robinson gift certificate for Christmas, but was unable to redeem it before their Toronto location was closed, so I placed my order online. Before shipping my book, one of their staff noticed that I was using a gift certificate that, at the time it was given to me, should have been redeemable locally. So, without my asking for it, they picked up the tab for the shipping, and I didn't have to pay a dime more than I would have if I'd walked into their store. They didn't have to do that, but it was pretty awesome of them, and I'd like to see them succeed in the future. I also feel that linking to a retailer instead of directly to the publisher is good for the publishing/bookselling ecosystem here in Canada. If you buy from someone like McNally Robinson, not only are you supporting an independent retailer who is (in my opinion, anyway) worth keeping in business, but the publisher and the author will still get their cut. And the last reason why I'm choosing their affiliate program over someone like Amazon's, is because Jeff Bezos eats kittens (not really, read the link).

If you folks give me the go-ahead, McNally Robinson accepts me, and I find the terms of their program agreeable, here's what will change: almost nothing. When I mention a book, I'll link to McNally Robinson. I'll go back through the archives and add links to the books I've already reviewed. And I might, might add a small banner advertisement to the navigation menu on the right of the page, where my AugustBourré.com banner is now, if I can find one that I like (I am insanely picky about the aesthetics of this site, which is another reason I don't like the idea of running ads). I would also add a text link to McNally Robinson in the menu bar. And that's it. It would in no way affect the content of this site, or my editorial direction, or whatever you want to call what I do here. It will just mean a handful more text links, a single banner ad (no more than one per page), and maybe it will be a little easier for you to buy the books I talk about, if you're so inclined. If it helps me out a little by dropping some silver in the coffers, then so much the better.

So is applying for an affiliate program okay with you? Let me know what you think in the comments, and thanks for reading and for contributing to the discussion.

Oh, P.S.: research and writing for The E-Books Post is going well, but it's going to take more time than I thought. While you wait, I invite you to read The Sea As Hypertext, my first attempt at addressing electronic literature and the work of art in the age of digital reproduction (well, technically my third; I'd written two previous variations of that essay, both of which have been lost to the sands of time).

My eyelids are heavy and my hands are cold for no apparent reason because I left the window open and this is a basement apartment wherein the heating is controlled by someone in an apartment the heat rises to rather than from, so what we have here is just a "hey, I'm alive" post for those of you that don't follow my ramblings on Twitter.

There will be no e-books post this weekend, because apparently there's some holiday called "Easter" coming up, and I'm going to be out of town visiting family, which is the sort of thing I do on holidays. Not having a laptop or other portable computing solution makes posting while out of town a touch difficult. On a related note, there won't be any post on the Jeff Rubin book for a while either; I'm taking extra care reading it because I think it will help when it's time to talk about the sustainability of e-readers. I'm even taking notes! Can you imagine that? I didn't even take notes in university.

I posted the other day about Sociable, a party thrown by the inimitable Julie Wilson, and lo, there are photos that will make you jealous for having missed it, and you'll only have to endure one snapshot of my crusty mug, seen sharing a frame with the always whatever-the-opposite-of-crusty-is Bronwyn Kienapple (who recently wrapped up her excellent I Am Not A Target Market series about male reading habits).

There will be a couple more books to watch out for in the near future. Through some bizarre concatenation of circumstances I've managed to acquire a copy of The Waterproof Bible, by Andrew Kaufman, The Burning Land, by Bernard Cornwell (which I'm going to have to get to soon so I can loan it to my father when he passes through town; he's the one who gave me the first four in the series, after all), and next week the fine folks over at Melville House will be sending me a paperback copy of Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone (I was quick on the draw this afternoon and won a Twitter contest). So there's that.

I managed to register on time for BookCampToronto this year. I'm very excited about that; last year I forgot about it until it was too late to register, and by all accounts I missed a powerful good time. I hear some interesting things were said and done concerning the future of books, and that makes it the place to be if you want to have your fingers in that particular pie. And lord do I.

Oh yeah, and some of you may have heard that I was recently interviewed via email by Erin Balser for Books@Torontoist. I'm kind of a long-winded bastard, so I do hope I managed to be at least marginally coherent.

Last June I followed all of the BookCampToronto posts on Twitter, and read as many of the follow-ups and round-ups and blog posts dissecting it afterward as I could. Most of them focused on e-books and social media and various technologies (though I'm sure there were other things discussed at the "uncoference"—is it okay that I don't like terms like "unconference?" 'cause I really don't), which are still the hot topics in the publishing industry. Ever since then I've wanted to collect all my thoughts and opinions about e-books into a single coherent post. The problem is that even after almost ten months of turning them over in my head, I'm still not sure I really know what all my thoughts and opinions are. Clearly it's time to start writing.

I'm going to try to have something for you by the end of next week, but there's been so much written about digital books that I'm just not going to be able to cover everything. One of the things I really don't want to cover (in part because I have no first-hand experience of it) is what goes into making a book "the old-fashioned way." Luckily, science-fiction author Charlie Stross has already done it for me, with considerably better results than even my best efforts would produce. Charlie sorts his blog by date rather than category, so here are links to all seven parts of his ongoing series, Common Misconceptions About Publishing: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, and Part Seven. Even if you don't care at all for science fiction, or any other kind of commercial genre fiction, the series is a must read for anyone interested in books or publishing. Hell, his whole blog is. I don't know why you aren't reading it. In fact, why don't you fix that now. While you're playing with Charlie, I'll get to work on The Post About E-Books.

Every year I make a plan, post it here, and every year I fail to follow through. The plan isn't really a plan, it's just a list of books that I've recently acquired or rediscovered on my shelves and hope to read some time before the end of the year. I think I made my very first "plan" post more than six years ago, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that one or more of those books still haven't been read. It'll happen eventually. So without further ado, here, in no particular order, is this year's list (not including Wild Geese, which I'm currently reading, and the remaining Robertson Davies novels that I didn't get a chance to finish writing about):

1. Fear of Fighting, by Stacey May Fowles, illustrated by Marlena Zuber
2. The Discoverer, by Jan Kjærstad
3. What Boys Like, by Amy Jones
4. Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall
5. Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, by Jeff Rubin
6. Where We Have to Go, by Lauren Kirshner
7. Whore, by Nelly Arcan
8. The Pornographer's Poem, by Michael Turner
9. The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker
10. The Uses of Enchantment, by Heidi Julavits
11. The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins
12. The Big Why, by Michael Winter
13. The Lady in the Lake, by Raymond Chandler
14. The Tamuli (trilogy), by David Eddings
15. Gently Down the Stream, by Ray Robertson

The list is woefully incomplete, of course, and is subject to change without notice, but right now those are the books that I've placed highest on my stack. So stay tuned! These and other great books will be coming up later in the year.

As I write this, Apple's supposedly wonderful Time Machine software is busy making its third attempt in twelve hours to backup my system. Those who follow me on Twitter (again with the Twitter—all the cool stuff happens there first these days) will know that I've been having issues with the hard drive in my iMac, and that I finally have the opportunity to get it fixed. What I didn't have was an external hard drive large enough to do a full system backup onto before taking it into the shop. It would be an incredible shame to have my computer repaired only to lose all my data. Like curing a disease by killing the patient.

Someone who relies on their computer as much as I do not having a backup drive is kind of like a lawyer who doesn't have a will, and since I'm not all that eager to be compared to lawyers at the best of times, I went out and bought a 2TB (that's right, TB) external drive. It took me some time to figure out how to format it for use with Time Machine, but I got that down, and started the backup. Five hours later, "Time Machine Error: Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume." Fuck a duck, as my mother would say. Being the Google super-sleuth that I am, I found a couple of fixes, but only one that really looked promising. I did that, started it up again, and went to bed. I awoke six hours later to find... "Time Machine Error: Blah blah blah." Fuck a duck. This time I was more clever. I reformatted the target drive, went back to Google, and poured through the Time Machine logs.

It turns out that Time Machine chokes on corrupt files, and deep in the rabbit-warren that is my downloads folder was a music video I downloaded more than a year ago and then completely forgot about, letting it sit there and collect dust, corrupt as you like. 30MB of bad data, all confined to a single file, made a 320GB backup fail. Fuck a duck. So I deleted that, and twenty minutes later my third Time Machine backup seems to be going smoothly. Fingers crossed.

Oh yeah, the reason for my post. I was supposed to take my machine into the shop today, but because I'll be at work by the time this nonsense finishes, it's going to have to wait until tomorrow. I still have Marina Endicott's Good to a Fault and Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese to review before next week, which might be a bit tricky without a computer. The folks at the shop tell me I should have my computer back by Saturday afternoon, barring unforeseen complications, so aside from on Twitter, which I have access to at work, you won't be seeing much activity from me online in the meantime. Just a heads up.

(Oh, and in case you're wondering, my Time Machine backup drive is named "Wells".)

I've never participated in Canada Reads before. I'd like to say that sometimes my reading schedule doesn't allow for it, or that I'm not interested in the books, but the truth is that, while I really believe in the value of my job and the project I work on (which I'd rather not discuss the specifics of), I don't make very much money, and buying all those books at once is far and away beyond my means. Not unless I can find them used or remaindered, of course, and good luck with that. Toronto's used bookstores are picked clean the day after the titles are announced. Usually. This year things are different.

Kerry Clare is running a concurrent programme, called Canada Reads: Independently, in part as a response to the criticism that this year's lineup for the CBC event only features books that have already received considerable attention here in Canada. I will be participating; I already owned three of the five books her panelists chose, and the other two were not hard to find on my budget. But! Through some miracle of fate, three of the official Canada Reads titles have fallen into my lap, so I will be participating in that as well, hunting the bookshops for the remaining two titles as I go along. (And if some kind publisher or publicist wants to help a poor boy out by supplying copies a copy of Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony or Marina Endicott's Good to a Fault, that poor boy would sure be grateful. *cough* Update: Only one book left to find.)

Wait, wait, you say. What about the five book reviews you're behind on? Good point. I'm five books behind! What's going to happen is this: sometime over the weekend, I'm going to post my review of A Mixture of Frailties, by Robertson Davies, thereby wrapping up The Salteron Trilogy. Rather than moving directly on to The Deptford Trilogy, which I've already finished reading, I'm going to start in on the Canada Reads and Canada Reads: Independently books, alternating between the two lineups until I've completed them all. (I think the world can wait for yet another assessment of The Deptford Trilogy, don't you?) That way I can participate more or less as it happens, something I've never been able to do before. I'm looking forward to it. I'll be starting with Generation X, by Douglas Coupland, and then Ray Smith's Century.

So ten hours later, I'm only half-way through the process of updating the software. I have successfully updated to from MovableType 3.34 to 4.33, but was unable to make 5.01 work, for reasons that are entirely unknown to me. According to their knowledge base, the errors I was having do not exist. After spending a couple hours bumping my head against that particular brick wall, I decided to give up on 5.01, and revert to the 4.33 upgrade I'd made earlier in the evening. The result was close to three hours of downtime as I tried to figure out why Firefox was giving me 404 errors for files that were clearly on the server. Because I'd been at it for far too long, I was too tired and burnt out to realize the obvious, that the permissions had gotten messed up. A four-second fix turned into a three-hour nightmare. This is the part where I take a bow.

Long story short, no data was lost, vestige.org was down for a few hours, and I have a better system running the back end than I had before, though not quite as good as what I was hoping for. If I can find the time tomorrow, I'm going to do some upgrades to the CSS (don't worry, that I know how to do without screwing it up), and maybe also install some plugins to make commenting less of a pain in the ass. It will also keep legitimate comments from being automatically funneled into the junk folder, which is a problem I've been having for the last six or eight months; this blog has never been one to generate lots of conversation, but I know for a fact that several comments have been lost to that problem.

It's eight in the morning, and I'm finally going to bed.

Tonight (and possibly even tomorrow, depending on how long this takes), I will be attempting to upgrade the blogging software that runs vestige.org. It's been, well, close to three years since a database failure forced me to upgrade, and in the meantime I've missed at least two major updates to the software. According to the instructions provided, I'll have to upgrade from version 3 to version 4 before moving to version 5, which is the latest release. This will be a tremendous pain in the ass, but hopefully it will allow me greater flexibility for dealing with comment spam and various other housekeeping issues.

I've been blogging at vestige.org since February 2000, and I haven't had much luck with upgrades. I've lost bits of the database at least twice, the search function was unworkable for close to four years, and I've had to rebuild the entire file structure three times, screwing up my permalinks in the process. I'm going to do my best to prevent any of that sort of nonsense this time around, but, as the Taoists say, shit happens. So if you come here tomorrow and the site is gone, or you find nothing works anymore, be patient; things will get fixed to the best of my ability.

So for a variety of reasons, I can't use my credit card this month, and decided instead to pay for my hosting with PayPal. What I didn't realize, is that transferring money from a bank account to PayPal isn't instantaneous the way it is from a credit card, or from person to person. Therefore: I won't be able to pay my hosting bill on time (a whopping $15.38 USD), and my host has informed me that they will be suspending my account until I do. Fair enough.

From what I can tell, this will happen sometime tomorrow. My money will not arrive in my PayPal account until Tuesday. This site will be down from tomorrow until probably Wednesday, and I will not be accessible via my normal email address either. If you absolutely must get in touch with me, use my "backup" email address: fishsauce@gmail.com.

I appreciate your patience.