I haven’t posted anything for a couple of weeks.  Opening the new store has been a ton of work, and any online time I’ve had has been mostly devoted to responding to CZ quotes.  But starting this week, I’m actually going to start having a day off every week.

Now this may not sound like much to a lot of you, but small businessmen will all be nodding their heads.  I’m actually going to have a day off.  Every week.  Crazy?  Yes, I know. 

The new shop is doing really well, and we’re really excited.  We’ve been super busy and have been moving through a lot of guns.  Opening a new shop is honestly very similar to starting in the first place, luckily this time around I’ve got a great crew of Minions, and a loyal customer base.  So this opening has been a lot nicer than the first one. 

MHI continues to do well, as far as I can tell from Amazon’s totally indecipherable best seller stats.  My book is starting to make the rounds, and word of mouth is no longer confining it to just gun nuts in my little corner of the internet.  I’m starting to get lots of e-mails from spouses and friends of the people who initially ordered Monster Hunter, and so far, nobody has really hurt my self-esteem.

It really is cool to get feedback from people who weren’t even in my target audience.  One review starts out, with something like, “as a senior-citizen, female, who doesn’t like horror, science-fiction, or fantasy, I just have to say that Monster Hunter International is the best book ever.”

Seriously, I’ve been shocked at the feedback I’ve been getting.  The worst public review I’ve gotten so far has been 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon, and that was from a friend of mine, who still enjoyed it, but saves 5 stars for things like Moby Dick and the Bible.  So apparently I can coherently string words together into some sort of story.  Sweet. 

I took last Saturday off, and my wife and I had SUPER DATE 2008.  I surprised her with a day full of fun activities, reservations for a nice dinner, a professional massage (from an actual Scandinavian even!), and other assorted things that remind the women in our lives why they bothered to marry us workaholic types in the first place, capped off by a nights stay in a 4 star hotel suite.  (Special props to Echo Tango for the hook up on that one).  It had been so long since I had taken the time to actually plan a date, it was remarkably nice.