Warren Lane is finally out there, available for purchase as both a paperback and an electronic book. You can get it at Amazon , or you can order a copy through your local bookstore.

You can also read a sample chapter right here.

So I wrote this book called Warren Lane, and it should be available for sale in the next week or two. I made the final revisions to the paperback proof copy, and the electronic versions are ready to go. I’m just waiting to review the updated paperback.

The other day, I came across a blog post that said all writers should answer these three questions:

1. Why did you write the book?
2. What do you want readers to get out of it?
3. Why should anyone buy it?

I just re-read this this week. What a book! I think this might be Thompson’s best. I forgot how funny it is in places, especially the first few chapters and the chapter near the end with Rose’s tirade about Lennie, which has to be one of the raunchiest things ever printed. How did Thompson get away with that in 1964?

This book also happens to be one of the most scathing indictments of Southern small-town life ever written. It’s a little over the top in places, which comes off as bawdy, farcical and harrowing all at the same time.

I’ve been a software developer since 1998. I didn’t actually like computers until I started working at Amazon.com back in the days when they sold only books. I got a job in their customer service department after a brief stint of teaching in the Seattle public schools. At the time, Amazon’s customer support was delivered primarily through email. If you had a question, you’d write to orders@amazon.com, and one of the customer reps in Seattle would write back.

Everyone in customer service worked at a Unix terminal, using Emacs as a mail client, and a set of command line tools with names like orderstat and customerstat to track down problems.