Happy New Year 2008

Here’s a little something we picked up today off the wire: Public Domain Day, the day when a whole year’s worth of copyrights enter the public domain. In countries using the “life plus 70 years” term, works by authors who died in 1937 enter the public domain, including another familiar face, H. P. Lovecraft. 

A few celebrations of note this year:

• It would have been John Bellairs’s seventieth birthday this month (January 17, 1938)
• This April The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn marks its thirtieth year in print and the debut of Anthony Monday
• Later this year the third (and final-?) book in Brad Strickland’s Grimoire series, and a new Lewis Barnavelt adventure, The Sign of the Sinister Sorcerer.

We had the pleasure of meeting our new friend (and John's old friend) Charles Bowen again late last week.  The restaurant of choice was out of business but we settled for a nice Korean place next door to discuss family, food, and life in general.

We started in on some early spring cleaning and ran across my day-by-day trivia calendar and the fistful of sheets that I never tore off last year. I added them to my stack for scrap paper but thought, for grins, I’d at least look at a few and see if I missed anything good. Besides discovering the seven fruits making up Hawaiian Punch and the most-used regnal names in the British monarchy, there was this:

• Question:
• What best-selling children's author considers himself "a literary training bra for Stephen King?"
• Answer:
• R. L. Stine