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Author: BumblePuppy
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The Sad Bastard Cookbook
The BumblePuppy Press’ own Rachel A. Rosen and Zilla Novikov (ably assisted by Marten Norr) struck out on their own between last summer’s publication of Rachel’s Cascade, and Zilla’s forthcoming debut, Reprise, by writing a cookbook that is both useful and funny.
It’s a cookbook, and one I’ve had on (virtual) hand for only a couple of days, so I would be lying if I told you I have read it from cover to cover. But I have spot-read it and can tell you three things.
First, it is a pragmatic cookbook, one that makes no pretence it will turn you into a master chef, but rather, that it will help you feed yourself on your worst, most stressed-out, days.
Second, it is a funny book. Aimed specifically at dealing with depression or other mental or physical illnesses, as well as people who are simply over-stressed by the demands of living in a brutal, late-capitalist world where “leisure time” is more often an aspiration than a reality, it is at once snarky, kind-hearted, and justifiably angry at the state of the world. (It is also rich with in-jokes to the authors’ own books, as well as some by their friends. You don’t have to have read Cascade or be looking forward to Reprise, but you’ll get more chuckles out of the SBCB if you have done.)
This cookbook is an old friend who keeps crashing on your couch, promising they’ve got something lined up and are gonna get their shit together. This cookbook is all the recipes you already make, when you’ve worked a 16-hour day, when you can’t stop crying and you don’t know why, when the eldritch abomination you woke at the bottom of the ocean won’t go back to sleep. And hopefully, this cookbook gives you some new meal ideas. Even Sad Bastards have to eat.
The recipes are chatty but concise, with vague but clear directions allowing the reader/cook the option of following the directions as written or working on variations, confident we won’t ruin a dinner we’re very nearly too tired to make in the first place.
And third, The Sad Bastard Cookbook includes enough of a variety of recipes not only to keep you alive in trying times, but to keep you and your taste-buds from getting bored.
You can buy the book in paper from what some call The Big A, but the authors have chosen to also publish the book under a Creative Commons License and are offering it as a free download from the Night Beats Extended Universe website – and you can also get it right here from The BumblePuppy Press’s store (preferably, but not necessarily, when you also buy one of our other excellent books, currently all 20% off!).
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Summer sale (before summer’s over)
Edit: September 18, 2021: We’ve decided to continue this sale for a little while longer – there’s still time to save!
It seems hard to believe that this summer is almost over. As I type this on the afternoon of August 26th, 2021, in Ottawa (Canada), the thermometer in my home office reads 31.5° C, and the weather app on my phone tells me it feels like 38. (As I prepare to post, on Friday, the heat wave has mercifully broken at last — 23C!)
It seems even harder to believe that we are now pushing two years since rumours of a new infectious disease began to come out of China. That makes it nearly a year-and-a-half since I was laid off from my day job and since I started wearing a mask when I ventured out of doors.
I am vaccinated now, so I don’t always mask up outside, but I am not yet ready to venture into a bar or restaurant, and I am unhappily prepared for yet another lock-down before all this is over.
But all that said, I do believe (as the old saw has it), where there’s life, there’s hope. And what better way to remind ourselves of that adage, then to remember that life has never been easy and has never been simple.
Take Carl Dow’s fantastic historical novel, Black Grass (which is on sale for the low, low, low price of only $1.99 for the ebook edition, or $12.95 for the paperback (signed by the author at no extra charge if you wish!), only at the BumblePuppy Press. Why pay Amazon when you can be sure it all goes straight to the author!)
Set in 1866, on the border of what would be become the western territories of the United States and Canada, we find that life is no simpler, nor any safer, than it is in 2021. There is still conflict and threats of war; men and women still love, and still hate; the future is (literally, in this case) an on-coming train, inevitable in the broader sense, but not yet set on an inevitable track.
Gabriel Dumont and his fellow prairie Métis face threats to their lives, and their way of life, and face them with courage and imagination, just as we must do in the face of our challenges today.
I don’t recommend books because of their message — most of the best novels and stories cannot be broken down to a singular point. Yet we can sometimes take hints from good fiction, about what makes life worth living, and when it is worth risking all to preserve it.
Anyway, with a week and a half to go before Labour Day weekend comes to a close, I offer some small comfort to those of you in search of a good story.
Black Grass for $1.99 if you want it now, or $12.95 is you want it signed (delivery is extra, though if you live in Ottawa, I might be able to get it to you for considerably less than Canada Post will charge — and faster, too). Please visit our online store and make your choice!
Let’s hope next summer is a far sight better than the past two have been!
Geoffrey Dow, Publisher
P.S. And don’t forget to leave a review if you like it (or even if you don’t), here, at an online retailer, or at Goodreads. Small presses especially appreciate every kind word that comes our way!
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Father’s Day Special!
Don’t just give something to your dad, kill three birds with one stone and give something to me and mine!
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Black Grass on the pod(cast)
Carl interviewed by Peter Anthony Holder
We at the BumblePuppy Press were delighted when Carl‘s friend and colleague, Randy Ray, told us he wanted to put his skills at as a publicist to work for us.
Last week, Randy got down to it while on vacation in Florida (what a world!) and we are seeing the fruits of his labours already! Carl was interviewed on Peter Anthony Holder’s Montreal-based podcast, The Stuph File Program.
You can read Carl’s thoughts about the interview here, or you can just listen to interview by clicking below.
The full program can be found at The Stuph File. Look for program #0551.
And of course, Black Grass is available in print and e-book editions from your favourite online retailer. And autographed copies can be ordered directly from us.
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Black Grass is now available
Now available in paper and ebook editions!
In 1866, about 200 kilometres south of what is now Winnipeg, Manitoba, Susannah Ross was running for her life, and running out of time.
Black Grass is the extraordinary first novel by Carl Dow (author of The Old Man’s Last Sauna). Leavened with a wry sense of humour, Black Grass is a riveting adventure, a grand romance in the classic style (with a twist!), and a gripping war story set on the borders of what would become the Canadian prairies and the American plains.
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Black Grass is coming
Things move slow when one has to juggle a day-job and a relationship with the responsibility of running a small press.
But things do move, and it is with great pleasure that I can now say (for real!), that our next book — Carl Dow’s Black Grass, a novel that smoothly combines adventure, historical, romance and western genres — is in production and will (yes, for real!) be published next year.
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Another reason to vote NDP!
Joel Harden, NDP Ottawa Centre candidate, rescues
senior trapped in Beaver Barracks bathtub for 22 hours
Carl Dow, photographed at Ottawa’s Indy Author Book Fair, December 9, 2017. On Monday 19 March, 2018, Carl Dow of Ottawa’s Centretown apartment complex known as Beaver Barracks, and author of The Old Man’s Last Sauna and the forthcoming novel, Black Grass and Wildflowers: The Women Who Made McCord Chronicle, on which he is currently hard at work, was taking a shower at about 2 PM. He tripped, fell back into the half-filled tub, and couldn’t get out.
Mr. Dow, who will celebrate his 85th birthday July 15, has had five operations on his right hip. His left hip got jealous so they cut a deal, wherein the latter would have the pleasure of an operation – but only one. So far the bargain has been kept.
Here following is the story of the bathroom adventure in Mr. Dow’s own words.
I had an appointment with my family doctor, Mary Comerton, after having had bronchitis in December and then over the New Year was hospitalized for four days with pneumonia. I was thoroughly x-rayed and passed with flying colours. (For example, all my internal organs have been cleared. When I had my bone density checked it was declared as good as a male in his 20s.) But it had been more than three months since I was discharged and I wanted a sit-down with Mary to be officially brought up-to-date.
So I shaved and got under the shower. I turned and tripped and fell. (My right leg, as a result of all the operations, is an inch-and-a-half shorter than my left, and to make matters worse, as they say, the bungling surgeon put my right leg back together at a slight angle to the right. So I have to be careful. Because of the bungled operations my lower body strength is less than it should be (my upper body strength is much better than average).
Anyway, when I tripped I reached for the suction-cup grab bar, which I had tested before I turned on the water. It had been firm but when I needed it it came away from the wall like a piece of wet paper. So down I went. And there I lay for the next 22 hours.
I have always been super pleased at the sound proofing here. Twice, in the spirit of good neighbourliness, I’ve checked with new neighbours with volume louder than usual and we don’t hear a thing.
In the bathtub I couldn’t get my legs under me and there was no bar to grab. So using the heel of my left leg I hit the plug and got rid of the water. Then I lay back and waited for sounds in the hall.
“209 needs help!” I yelled and so I did through the rest of the day and all through the night whenever I heard sounds. But people make their own noise. So I went unheard. I thought that with morning and people stirring for work that my luck would change. No dice.
In the morning, (I knew it was morning because daylight had reached in) I heard the cleaner come with his floor machine. I yelled even while knowing that he couldn’t hear the faint call for help over the sound of his machine.
Meanwhile, I had written plot outlines for two movies and scenes for them. I was happy with the results after watching them being played out. About four in the morning (I’m guessing because I had no timepiece available), I was able to use the one crutch I had with me to secure a bath towel. I was starting to get a chill.
Throughout the morning I did my yelling. Finally, about eleven. I heard someone knocking on the only other door in the hallway.
My insatiable curiosity was in charge.
“Who’s there?”
“Joel Harden.”
The name was unfamiliar to me. “What are you doing?”
“Canvassing for the elections.”
“Which party?”
“NDP.”
“Well I’m stuck in my bathtub. Been here since two yesterday afternoon. Get me out of here and you’ve got my vote! I’ve been a New Democrat for more than 50 years.”
A few minutes later my Hero came back to report that para medics were on their way.
My daughter-in-law bought me what I call a “walk around phone”. My son Geoffrey, and Frances, light of my life, now require me to email them when I go to bed and when I wake up. I feel like a criminal out on parole. But that beats the alternative.
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Publisher’s notebook 002
Write what you know? Bollocks!
By Geoffrey Dow
Some 35 years ago, Harlan Ellison wrote that “writers take tours in other people’s lives.” He meant that it is a mistake for a reader to presume any story is autobiographical, or that a writer’s “real” self or opinions can be gleaned from a work of fiction.
In recent decades it has become a conviction in some “serious” literary and critical circles that the adage, write what you know be treated as a Commandment rather than just quite sensible advice that a writer pay close attention to the world and people around them. This advice turned ideology has led to a great outpouring of well-written but mostly pretty tedious stories about writers and their suffering.
Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with such an approach to fiction or drama, but there is everything wrong with the insistence that all fiction and drama should take that confessional road to story-telling.
Truth is, most writers prefer to look out, rather than in, and so do most readers. And, looking out, writers must be forever “taking tours in other people’s lives”. To put it in more contemporary terms, they imagine the other.
Or you could just say, they make stuff up. Readers are blessed by the works of Jane Austen and Alistair MacLeod, but we need our Tolstoys and Tolkiens too.
Carl Dow is a writer of the second school, smelting character and story from the mines of his own lived life, but just as much from the lives and experiences of others. In his new post, Thinking Like a Woman, Carl explains one way that the act of creative empathy can come about.
The Old Man’s Last Sauna
E-book edition only $1.99 for a limited time only!
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Publisher’s notebook 001
Introducing the author: Carl Dow blogs
By Geoffrey Dow
Carl Dow, the man behind the BumblePuppy Press’ first book, and the editor and publisher of the online news magazine True North Perspective, has adding blogging to his repertoir. To celebrate, we are offering the e-book version of the Old Man’s Last Sauna for the special low price of only US$1.99!
Click below to visit Smashwords, where you can buy the book in whichever format you prefer. (Or click here to order an autographed copy of the paperback.)
Carl’s first blog is an account of a singular dinner party, at which Socrates was certainly not in attendance. Clicking here to read The Silence of Sounds. And please check back next week for another!