I live in the land of graveyards now. The dead are everywhere. They don’t even stay behind their wrought-iron fences; anyplace there’s a patch of grass and trees crammed between railroad tracks and the street, they might be there. The other day I found a revolutionary war captain buried under the oaks at the south end of the Arboretum.

This one’s from Forest Hills Cemetery.

Live Free or Undead, an anthology of New-Hampshire themed horror edited by Rick Broussard and featuring fiction by James Patrick Kelly, Jeffrey DeRego, Elaine Isaak, and many other great writers either from New Hampshire or in love with it (including, yes, me) ought to be in bookstores now-ish. I haven’t seen a copy yet, but from the cover I think I can guarantee ghosties, ghoulies, zombies, creepy-crawlies, and at least one very attractive lady with an ax.

My story, “Misty Rain”, reprinted from the British zine Murky Depths, is an atmospheric, creepy thing about a brother and sister lost in the mountains. And yes, it has a monster.

New Hampshire has been my favorite state since I was a kid, and despite all the cool stuff I’ve discovered since in all those other states, it still wins. It has Mt. Washington, Indian Head, Pawtuckaway Lake, Farnum Hill Cider, Woodstock Inn Brewery, the Flume Gorge, the Odyssey Writing Workshop, the Tufts Mountain Club Loj, the Pemigewasset River, the Kancamangus Highway, the mouldering bones of the Old Man of the Mountain, and the best state motto anywhere.

So I’m excited enough to get to be in this anthology that I’m breaking from my usual modus operandi and announcing a reading more than two days in advance! Woo!

On Wednesday, October 27th at 7:00 PM, I’ll be reading at Rye Public Library in Rye, NH along with Brendan DuBois, Andy Richmond and the fabulous Elaine Isaak. You’ll get the chance to see my sporting my super-silly Halloween moustache and what I hope will be a legitimately scary costume. And if that isn’t enough to convince you, I’ll have candy. Please come!

And if you can’t make it, there’s a whole bunch of other readings scheduled, including one this coming Friday at the Barley House in Concord, where I’d go for the beer even if there weren’t going to be a bunch of great writers.

I am really excited about them. Yes, they’ve existed for a long time and they still only account for a tiny portion of the books we buy. But their numbers are growing exponentially while the rest of the industry struggles along or declines. Ereaders get more and more abundant, flashier, cheaper, and their battery life gets longer. I think they’re where the world is going.

It’s hard to shout down those who feel nostalgia for the book. Books can be beautiful. The experience of reading a physical book will never be replaced by any ereader. But it’s not like books are going away. There are books from 1450 that still exist. There are more books printed every year, using up ink, paper, cloth. Forty percent of them get pulped every year. I love books. But you know what I’d rather have? Trees.

So I have thrown in with the ebook revolution. Weightless Books, if I haven’t hyped it up to you already, is an ebook website I built and am operating together with Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press. It offers ebooks, delivered to you instantly by email, from a small but growing set of independent publishers including Small Beer Press, Featherproof Press, Blind Eye Books, Fairy Tale Review Press, and, as of today, The Homeless Moon. Yes! All three of the Homeless Moon chapbooks are now available from Weightless in a variety of formats to suit most any ereader, at the low, low price of $0.99 (and yes, they’re still available for free as well, but we’re trying to be supportive and we hope you will too).

So. Read ebooks. Consume less paper, waste less energy shipping it back and forth and then paying somebody to set it on fire when you cast it aside, read more, read better, save the world.

Thank you!