From the Chair

The wait is over. The book is here. You may buy one--heck, more than one; they make great gifts. With each purchase of my short story collection, you are telling the world that you support the values of Re:Maines, values of social justice, tolerance, the quest to understand the things that each of us accepts on faith, the beliefs that form the foundation for who we are.

Laying it on a little thick? Ah well, still getting used to this business of promoting my own work. Bottom line: Check out the book. On the sidebar are links to a couple of free samples, stories that appear in the book. If you click the image of the book, you can see what nice things award-winning authors including Cory Doctorow, James Patrick Kelly, and Elizabeth Massie have said about it. And then you can buy one. Tell all your friends. Acquaintances. People sitting next to you on the bus. People waiting for some other bus. People looking at the bus as it passes. Heck, any form of transport! (Except possibly Hummers. I can't see myself having a huge market among Hummer drivers, except maybe the guy who converted his to run on ethanol.) Let's get something started!

See, I'm starting to get the hang of it.

By the way, ex cathedra means, literally, from the bishop's chair (a cathedral is a church that houses the bishop's seat); more specifically, when the Roman Catholic pope makes a statement that is (he so deems it) infallible, he speaks ex cathedra--from the chair of St. Peter. He's supposed to be divinely inspired, serving as the hotline from God, as it were, when he does so.

Am I suggesting by the title that I speak infallibly? Nu-uh. But just as the pope believes he is speaking for God when he speaks ex cathedra, each of us has beliefs that we take as infallible, unquestionable--the things we have faith in, the things we believe without question, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, the things we bend the light of our universe around and still see it as a straight line. What those are for us--as individuals as well as for cultures, religions, nationalities, any other group--that's what defines us. And that's what I am looking to get at in my stories.

That's what the book is about. Buy it and decide how close I've gotten to the truth.