A Freebie and a Cure

To celebrate the end of 2012, Ploughshares is giving away one of their solos  Escape and Reverse . Solos are longer individual stories. You have until tomorrow, December 31st, to download it. If you don't own a Kindle, you can read the story on your computer or through a Kindle app on your smartphone.

There is also a new anthology out from Elephant's Bookshelf Press titled The Fall.

These are the same people who brought us Spring Fevers, which you can also now download for free. The Fall is a collection of tales from the apocalypse, but so much more than zombies. The cover alone draws you in, zombies or not. Review forthcoming from this blogger in 2013.

Do you have a favorite read from 2012? In the running for me is Sixteen Pleasures. A fascinating novel by Robert Hellenga.

I wanted to draw attention to all these and more as 2012 draws to a close, but time is short and we bloggers have short attention spans because we're doing other things, like feeling guilty because we haven't done enough.  So, just one final note and I'll let you go. I promised you three cures in 2012. One involved beets which I told you about three posts ago but still I've fallen short. Here is a second:

My grandpa used to smoke a pipe. He smoked it so much, he got cancer in his lower lip where the pipe would always rest. An aunt who lived in Detroit knew a doctor in Canada who made house calls, and Grandpa went to stay with her for three weeks. The doctor came to the house every few days and applied a poultice to his lip. Mother says it was extremely painful at the time. After three weeks, the cancerous tumor was drawn out, and they placed it in a jar. She remembers seeing that jar on the kitchen windowsill. After that, Grandpa took to smoking cigars. He never gave up the smoking habit, but he never had a reoccurrence of the cancer.

Happy New Year! May 2013 be prosperous and may we each find a poultice for what ails us.