Vollendet das ewige Werk!

When Valhalla was completed, Wotan said "The eternal work is finished." I doubt my works will be eternal--but then neither were Wotan's, as things turned out. At any rate, the revised edition of The Free Lands is now published on Amazon KDP, both in paperback and ebook form. For just$18, or $4 on Kindle, you can acquire a 2.5 pound, 655-page tome that completes the saga of the Pelicans Mercenary Regiment (unless I keep writing them, which will happen only if some people start reading them.)

Of course, before reading The Free Lands, you should read the first three volumes, also now available in final revised form. 

I'm well aware that this announcement will not cause cries of joy throughout the world of fanrasy-adventure aficionados, but I hope now to begin some sort of publicity campaign to revive interest in my Mercenaries series. (I have sold a few hundred copies in the past several years, but it has lain fallow for a while.) Any suggestions?

The new book's ISBN is 979-8848976-816. The old edition is still listed on Amazon; I hope to find a way to eliminate it (and the other old editions) so readers will not be confused.

SIZE MATTERS

 

Europeans say that everything is bigger in the United States. (French and Saunders had a very funny skit about this.) But nowhere, I think, is this truer than in the cereal aisle of the local supermarket, as I noticed while shopping the other day.

Would you like some Fruity Pebbles? You may choose among three sizes: the Large Size box is 15 ounces. The Family Size box is 20 ounces. The Mega Size box is 27.5 ounces. If you want only a small size box, you will have to buy the Large Size, which is the smallest available.

Other cereal manufacturers use the term Giant Size (apparently instead of Mega Size). 

I do not know if even more enormous sizes exist. Perhaps there is, in the storeroom, a Colossal Size box that must be winched into your trunk. 

Whatever happened to Small, Medium, Large? These words are directly related. But there is no way intuitively to know the relative dimensions of things labelled Mega, Giant, or Family. (How big is a family?)