Today is the official launch date for No Call Too Small, my collection of short stories.  I wouldn’t be much of a media whore if I didn’t get out on that virtual street corner, whip out my bullhorn, and blast notice of this book’s arrival to anyone in hearing range.  With an early review in Publishers Weekly, we were hoping to sell a few books.  Then the bug hit, closing stores, causing widespread panic, and slamming wallets shut.  Booksellers, publishers, and authors with recently launched books are all scrambling to figure out what to do now that the world has done a face plant into a pandemic.

What’s the solution?  Go digital?  Hard yes!  In keeping with the theme of upping my online game, over the course of launch week, I’ll be including a few short clips of me reading from the book.

This week only, you can order the ebook on Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Apple, or GooglePlay for around $2.99 USD. That’s less than a latte, one N95 mask, or a barrel of Canadian crude. If you simply must have the physical, Indigo offers free shipping, and your local bookstore may also be open to delivery or pickup. For the economically challenged, there may still be a few free copies available for review at NetGalley.

If you’d like to help introduce this book to the world, Goodreads, Amazon, and Indigo will gladly take your comments.  If all your free time is spent tracking down toilet paper, rating the book only takes a second.  In addition, you can subscribe to my blog by clicking the button to the right of this post. I’ll be posting all week to celebrate the launch in the absence of an actual release party.  Finally, a shout-out from your favourite social media portal, linking to the E-book deal, would be bigly appreciated.

My first clip is from a story called “New.”  It’s set in Saskatchewan, but I’m drawing from my childhood farm visits in Manitoba.  Whether it was watching a pig being butchered—literally seeing how the sausage was made—or blasting down a gravel road on a dirt bike, memories of farm life are as clear as the day they were made.  Nothing was fake on the farm.  Everything was tactile, physical, primal. The sky was uninterrupted, and the plains had full run to the horizon.

The story was inspired by a video hoax of strange creatures someone had discovered. This is my best guess for how it would go down if we were visited by wee alien creatures.  A farmer finds them in his field, someone takes a video that grabs a couple thousand views, but ultimately it’s dismissed as fake, and life goes on.