This news just in from Publishers Weekly...

"After falling for the last six months of 2006, bookstore sales declined again in January. According to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, bookstore sales dipped 1.0% in January, to $2.12 billion. Sales for the entire retail segment rose 4.0% in the month....."

You know what's going to turn it around? When the Anna Nicole books start to hit the shelves.

It's enough to make a grown author cry.

A question for you: We can refer back to the previous decade as the nineties, and the one before that as the eighties, and so on. But, in the future, how are we going to refer to the current decade? The aughts? The zeroes? This keeps me awake at night.

ABC is talking about using Geico’s cavemen in a sitcom. In fact, I think they’re even developing a pilot. You don’t have to be a programming genius to realize this is a huge mistake. Thirty seconds’ worth of caveman is fine, but thirty minutes? Ain’t gonna work. It’ll get old real quick. At least they’re not using the gecko. Why do TV execs always seem to think they need a gimmick? What they need is good writing.

I’ve never been much for video games, but when I was in college, my best friend lived with me and he owned a full-sized arcade game called SuperCobra. Countless times, we stayed up till the wee hours, drinking beer and playing that game. We became masters at it. Recently, that game came to mind, and I began to wonder if I could track one down. Maybe EBay? What could an outdated arcade game possibly cost? A couple hundred dollars? (Never mind that my wife would disown me if I tried to squeeze a game the size of a refrigerator into our living room.) Long story short, I discovered that there was also a small handheld version of SuperCobra that was (supposedly) much like the bigger version. I found one on EBay, cheap. So I bought it. What a letdown. The game works exactly as it is supposed to, but it’s not even close to the game I played in college. You can’t go home again, my friends. Especially if you have a restraining order against you.

I’m very close to finishing my sixth novel. It’s due to my editor on April 15. It seems like just the other day I was working on the first one, and now I’m nearly done with six. Time’s flying.

I think “Lost” is probably the best television program I’ve never seen.

Name that presidential candidate: He’s been divorced twice. He famously dressed up in drag. His father was a convict. He’s a Republican, but he’s for gun control and he’s pro-choice. Who is he?

That Kelly Pickler sure got her money’s worth, eh?

Texas game wardens used to be issued Dodge Diplomats. Remember those cars? Not only were they pretty crappy, but they were completely inappropriate for a game warden. My friend Jim, the game warden, told me he hit a big wild pig once in his Diplomat. The thing got stuck under the car and high-centered it. Jim got out and the pig was still alive under there. He had to shoot it. I’m not sure why I’m telling you this. A cautionary tale, perhaps. Don’t buy an old Diplomat unless you want to get stuck on a wild pig.

Very few people know this, but Alexander Graham Bell was an outstanding limbo dancer.

I was happy to learn this weekend that Publishers Weekly gave Gun Shy a starred review in its March 5 issue. (Starred reviews “indicate books of outstanding quality.”)

I’d probably be committing a copyright infraction if I listed the entire review here, so I’ll just provide a few tidbits:

“Straight-shooter Rehder sends up players on both sides of the gun control debate in his fifth Blanco County mystery, a humorous, intelligent take on a serious issue...This satire packs firepower and poignant surprises.”

You can probably access the entire review at this address:

http://reviews.publishersweekly.com/bd.aspx?isbn=0312357524&pub=pw

They’ll be running a Q&A article about the book in a separate issue in the near future.

Thank you, PW!

I’ve always thought it would be pretty cool to write a regular humor column for a newspaper, a la Dave Barry or, here in Austin, John Kelso. Unlike other columnists it appears that humor columnists don’t have to focus on any particular subject matter or topic; all they have to do is be funny. Probably harder than it appears, three times a week.

So, my tactic has been to write columns that have some meat to them (i.e. they address a topic) while still being funny.

Unfortunately, my contacts in the book world do me very little good in the newspaper world (where I have no name at all), and I haven’t made a lot of progress. I did get one column published in the San Antonio Express-News (see earlier blog entry), thanks to an editor there who’d come to one of my signings. She referred me to a second editor, and the piece appeared as a guest column.

But I’ve been pitching another piece (about growth in the Austin area) to various print outlets lately, and I’ve had no luck so far. Feels like the days when I was pitching my first manuscript.

I’m posting that column below, because, damn it, it doesn’t look like it will be appearing anywhere else anytime soon.

Here goes...

A note to longtime Austinites who have considered fleeing to the suburbs to escape the bustling metropolis our quaint little city has become: You can’t outrun it, my friends, not unless you run far and fast. If you make a half-hearted attempt—if you don’t move quite far enough—“progress” will follow you out to the countryside, and there it will taunt you in the form of a huge grand-opening balloon on top of a new gas station.

Perhaps, if you’re like me, you will begin to conspire against that balloon. You will daydream about devious ways—illegal ways, mind you—to bring that symbol of unchecked growth tumbling down. You will speak ill of that balloon so often that your spouse will begin to question your stability.

I’m getting ahead of myself. First, some background is in order: I was born at Seton Hospital and I’ve been moving further west ever since. Winsted Lane. Rollingwood. The corner of Bee Caves and Loop 360. Cuernavaca. And the latest, as of two years ago, Hamilton Pool Road, due north of Dripping Springs.

My wife (another native) and I moved out here because Austin just wasn’t Austin anymore. Not the one we grew up with, anyway. Think of all the things we’ve lost. The pony rides on Barton Springs Road. Aquafest. Charlie the Alligator at Holiday House. The Armadillo and Soap Creek Saloon. Las Manitas and the Shady Grove trailer park are next on the chopping block. The list goes on.

What do we have instead? Traffic, of course, and new toll roads to accommodate it. Ozone action days. Wal-Marts, Taco Bells, Starbucks. New subdivisions seem to pop up overnight, like mushrooms, and not the kind people used to search for in the seventies.

Imagine my pleasure, then, when we moved out here and found a little peace and quiet. The lots are bigger, traffic is lighter, and I see the whitetails more often than I see my neighbors. But this will only be a respite, and we both know it. Rooftops will soon replace the cedar breaks.

That truth was brought home in a recent American-Statesman article about future population estimates. Hamilton Pool Road—this can’t possibly be right—will be handling nearly forty thousand vehicle trips per day by the year 2030. You can assume that a good portion of that traffic will consist of soccer moms talking on cell phones, so we are all in grave danger.

Fitzhugh Road, too, will become a major artery, with 23 thousand vehicle trips per day. Back in 1997, that number was 760, and I bet a truck pulling a horse trailer counted twice.

But by now—if you’re still reading this rather than calling a realtor about investing in Hill Country acreage—you’re probably wondering about the balloon. So I will tell the story, as painful as it is.

Mere months after we moved into our new home, a well-drilling rig turned up in a picturesque field at a major intersection.

“They’re going to build something at the corner of 12 and Hamilton Pool,” I told my wife.

“Yeah, I know. I’m afraid to tell you what it is.”

“I can handle it. I’m a big boy.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

“Okay, then. It’s going to be a gas station with a convenience store. Actually, it’ll be more like a strip center, with other—”

My screams drowned out the rest of her words.

And soon it was being built. A jumbo-sized Texaco that would look more at home at Ben White and I-35. I glared at the construction workers every time I drove past, but that didn’t seem to slow them down any.

Then it was finished, and, surprisingly, there was no fanfare. I was surprised. I figured they’d try to lure the locals in with free hotdogs or a kiddie carnival or something. I grudgingly gave them points for being discrete.

I jumped the gun. A few weeks later—maybe because business was slower than expected—it appeared. I was on my morning walk and I saw it. An immense red-and-black balloon looming on the horizon.

My initial thoughts: Good job, Texaco. See, none of us were even aware that you’d built a new store, but now you’ve got our attention. And those stringers of pennants are a nice touch.

That balloon stayed up much longer than was appropriate. Our friends at Texaco were clearly pushing the bounds of good taste and sensible commerce. It was obvious they did not understand the basic tenets of good community relations. I began to see that balloon as an affront to my beloved Hill Country, and I’m not ashamed to say I plotted its demise. Not to reveal too much, but a bow and arrow were key components in the scheme.

To my wife’s relief, they took it down before I could get arrested.

Jim Zumbo is a well-known hunter and outdoors writer, with the top-rated program on the Outdoors Channel, sponsored by Remington. He was, until recently, a 40-year member of the NRA.

Ten days ago, Zumbo said something about assault rifles on his blog that brought his world crashing down. He said: “Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. As hunters, we do not need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them...I’ll go so far as to call them ‘terrorist’ rifles.”

Profesionally, that was a big mistake. Remington dropped him. The NRA severed all ties with him. His career is pretty much dead.

I don’t mean to sound wishy-washy, but I can see both sides of this.

Considering Zumbo’s position, you have to admit his remarks were pretty stupid. I’m guessing Remington, one of his sponsors, makes ammo for assault rifles. Even if they don’t, it wasn’t smart for him to speak out against any facet of the industry.

Plus, he was making a very broad generalization. I know people who own assault rifles, and they are not terrorists. Would you say, “Well, the terrorists used a Toyota for their car bomb, so it’s obvious that Toyotas are terrorist weapons?”

On the other hand, doesn’t Zumbo have the right to speak his mind? Can’t members of the NRA have differing opinions, or do you get booted if you don’t think exactly as every other member?

One of Zumbo’s fellow outdoors writer, Pat Wray, said, “This shows the zealousness of gun owners to the point of actual foolishness. For so many years, Zumbo has been a voice for these people—for hunting and for guns—and they just turned on him in an instant. He apologized all over himself and it didn’t do any good.”

Wray is generalizing too, lumping all gun owners together. I imagine there are as many different opinions about this incident as there are calibers of weapons.