Book giveaway … and a five-star review

The folks at Age of Autism are hosting a giveaway for 600 Hours of Edward. Just cruise over and leave your name (with e-mail address) in the comments, and you’re in.

Meanwhile, over at One Book At A Time, Page has given the novel a five-star review.

A snippet:

It was such a moving story from beginning to end.  I felt so connected to Edward, and had a wide range of emotion throughout the story.  While the story ended nicely, I wanted more of it.

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Just the facts: It’s a good book

It was nice to wake up to this today: 600 Hours of Edward picked up a nice review from Palo Alto (Calif.) Daily News columnist John Orr. The headline of this blog post is the headline in the newspaper.

Full disclosure: I’ve known John a long time but not in any particular depth. For the better part of a decade, we both worked at the San Jose Mercury News, which at the time was a large newspaper, with more than 400 editorial employees (I hear the number is closer to 100 now). The place had three disparate newsrooms, so in general, the people you knew best were the ones who worked shoulder to shoulder with you. I was in sports, which had its own room. John was in features, in another part of the building. In the entire time we worked together, we probably shared less than a dozen brief conversations.

John touches on all of this in the review, amiably highlighting the difference between sports guys and what I can only imagine he considers to be the normal humans working elsewhere at a paper. This view is highly debatable, but I’ll let it pass.

A few years ago I worked at the San Jose Mercury News, where I was casually acquainted with a guy named Craig Lancaster. He was an editor in the sports department, I worked in features, so we didn’t know each other very well, but I did watch him win a Peeps-eating contest once. That was disgusting.

But, that’s the kind of thing people in sports departments do at newspapers, which is probably one of the reasons the Merc put those people off in their own room, far away from other human beings.

(A bit of correction: I didn’t win the Peep-eating contest. I’ve never won one. It’s not for a lack of trying.)

More from the review:

Into his well-controlled life come a young boy and the boy’s mother, who move into a house across the street. She has moved away from an abusive boyfriend.

Young boys are not to be denied, and the kid becomes Edward’s friend. Edward helps out when the abusive former boyfriend shows up. There is a scene at a hospital. Trouble ensues. A lot of trouble, and threats from Edward’s father and Edward’s father’s lawyer.

All that leads to some major choices for Edward. It leads to changing his life.

Orr finishes by urging folks to pick up the book. If you’re so inclined, it can be found at bookstores all over Montana, at Amazon.com or direct from me. Choices are good, right?

Life With Aspergers review

600 Hours of Edward just received a wonderful review from Gavin Bollard’s excellent blog, Life With Aspergers.

Check it out here.

Now that Gavin has had his say, I guess I can reveal this: Of the many review outlets where Riverbend has placed the book, this one filled me with the most anxiety. Gavin is an Aspergian (Aspie for short), he knows more about the syndrome than I do, and if my book had struck a wrong note, he certainly would have held it up to the light (as well he should). I’m gratified that the book passed muster with him.

Here’s a taste of the review:

600 hours of Edward is an absolutely fascinating book. If you’re an aspie, you’ll see yourself in it. If you’re married to an aspie or if you’re caring for one, you’ll get a fascinating glimpse of their thought processes.

Consider this a bookmark

Novelist Allison Winn Scotch, author of Time of My Life, has a great post on her blog about dealing with negative reviews. (And when I say “dealing with,” I’m not talking about wishing ill toward the reviewer or taking out a mob hit — no matter how tempting those options may be. I’m talking about attending to one’s own emotional health.)

Here’s the money graf:

There is nothing you can do about this. You can’t convince them otherwise, you can’t tell them not to say this publicly. You can’t, even, get them to delete their Amazon review. You HAVE to realize that just as you’ve read books in the past and thought, “eh,” someone, somewhere out there is going to think the same of yours. This is part of the game of putting yourself out there. I think this gets easier with every book you publish. With your first one, you think, “I AM A GOLDEN GOD,” and with your second one (and so on), you realize that you’re a good writer who some people love…and who some people do not. That’s just life, that’s just the nature of our business.

Well said. I hope for such grace. Perhaps I’ll have to return here and read this to remind me to exercise it.