It has come to my attention that Old Man’s War is now available on the Amazon Kindle eBook reader. And doing pretty well: at the moment it’s #10 on the Kindle SF bestseller list (The Ghost Brigades is #19). Now, what that translates to in actual sales, I have no idea. But it must be okay. So, thank you, Kindle readers.

Oh, and look — Old Man’s War is also available on Mobipocket.com as well. So you don’t have to give in to the Amazon eBook hegemony, unless of course you really want to.

Today has certainly been a day for alternate literary delivery systems here at the Whatever, hasn’t it.

Earlier today:

Athena: [Tells me some trivial and obvious lie]

Me: Really? You expect me to believe that? Listen, sweetie, if you’re going to lie to me, make it big lie.

[Beat]

Athena: I love you, daddy.

The audiobook version of Old Man’s War apparently sold well — which makes me happy — so now The Ghost Brigades is out in an audio version as well. As with Old Man’s War, this one is narrated by William Dufris. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I thought Dufris did a bang-up job with OMW, so I can’t imagine he’ll do any less well here. And it appears TGB is being priced pretty well, too — under twenty bucks, on both Audible.com and iTunes. It doesn’t appear to be on Amazon yet, but given that Amazon just snapped up Audible, I don’t imagine that will take long.

So if you’ve been waiting for the audio version to find out what happens next after OMW, now’s your chance to catch up. And to anticipate the question, no, there’s been no contract signed yet for an audio version of The Last Colony, but for various reasons I would be mildly surprised if one doesn’t eventually show up. Personally, I’m itchin’ for an audio version of The Android’s Dream — I want to hear a professional reader get all the way through that first chapter.

I should say I really am enjoying the concept of audiobooks more as I go along — I think they add another dimension to the writing, and I really enjoy hearing an audio performance of my words that isn’t me, and which doesn’t necessarily sound like the voice (or voices) in my head. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to play there. We’ll see where that goes over time.

First, here’s Zeus trying very very hard to get his way into the drawer in which I have my stash of catnip. There are two things going against him here. First, the contents of the drawer are heavy enough that he has no chance of pulling it open with his teeth, and second, he lacks opposable thumbs. The catnip is safe. However, I do occasionally open the drawer, just do he knows it’s in there, and then close it as he bounds up. Because I’m a mean human, that’s why.

Second, I’m come to the conclusion that Zeus may have been weaned too early, because he exhibits the following truly annoying characteristic: In the middle of the night he will attempt to burrow under the covers, grab onto a limb (or an ass), and start biting on it. It’s really kind of freaky.

My first thought was that we had him chopped too late and he was trying to get out some latent randiness, which is disturbing on its own. I would suspect that humping your owner’s leg would be beneath a cat’s dignity and something better left to those degenerate dogs. But, without getting too much into it, nothing else about the activity presents as a mating exercise. I continued to be flummoxed until it hit me that his activity was very much like what a kitten would do when it was trying to get fed from its mother.

This is, of course, also disturbing, for various reasons. I understand that some animal behaviorists believe that cats see humans as some sort of weirdly-shaped mother figures, but this is really going too far with the metaphor. Also, you know. I don’t know what Zeus thinks he’s going to get attempting to nurse from my ass while I’m sleeping, but whatever it is, I suspect he’s going to end up rather unpleasantly surprised.

This wouldn’t be the first cat I had with mother issues. When I was ten years old, we had a cat named Doheny, so named because we found him as a stray kitten at Doheny Beach. Doheny was adorable but he was also not quite over nursing when he found him, because what he liked to do was latch on to people’s necks or arms and nibble while making those little pawing motions nursing kitten make. We thought it was too cute for words. And you would end up with these itty bitty little hickeys that were very amusing to explain to other people.

Well, it was amusing when I was ten; now that I’m 38 I’m less enthused. Doheny eventually outgrew the behavior; and Zeus is still a kitten, so hopefully he will too. And if he doesn’t, he’ll be sleeping outside a lot. Because I have better than to do with the hours between 11pm and 6am than to have them be prime feline ass-biting time.