I have been asked to explain the picture of me that currently accompanies this blog, shown in its full glory to the right - unless you're reading this post many months from now, when I've wisely substituted a picture of my cat - and in stunning close-up to the left.

This is me, dressed as Emoticonman, the character I went out trick-or-treating as this past Halloween. "Emoticonman" is a portmanteau word combining the words "emoticon" and "conman." Emoticonman is one of the lesser-known Batman villains. He is a swindler who always tells his victims to "Have a nice day!" making him slightly more odious than the Joker, who at least has a sense of irony. I like dressing as Emoticonman because his jowls never sag, his brow never wrinkles, and he seems happy despite the jaundice.

When I do get around to using a picture of a cat as my avatar, as I notice so many bloggers do, I will probably use the picture at right. This is Declawed Debussy. Dee, as we refer to him around the house, is an Indorsian Accessorizing Cat. Indorsian Accessorizing Cats have been genetically engineered to change the color of their eyes to match whatever they're wearing. Dee is usually proficient at this, although in the present instance he has fallen somewhat short of the requisite polka-dots. If he demonstrates any further failures along this line, he will be deemed broken, and we will have to have him fixed.

I sent the galleys of What We Found in the Sofa back to Little, Brown today. The envelope was prepaid, UPS Next Day Air, meaning, since I live forty minutes from Manhattan, the manuscript had to be flung across the East River with a catapult  to fulfill the "Air" part. I picture it hitting one of the editorial office windows with a splat, sticking there briefly in a starburst of its own vital juices, and then slowly sliding down the glass, leaving a persimmon-colored trail on its way to Park Avenue, eleven floors below, an LB editorial assistant racing down in an elevator with a catcher's mitt to field it.

Then again, it may have arrived in a plastic tub with a bunch of other manuscripts.

Well, no.

By galleys I mean something a little less exciting than ancient Roman warships powered by slaves chained to giant oars. The galleys I'm referring to - galley proofs - constitute the the first ever print-on-paper version of What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World, which I have to check for typos and send back to Little Brown by August 24th. This type of galley makes for a somewhat less engaging picture...

There is, for one thing, considerably less action. (Hopefully, the reviewers won't notice.)

Up until this point, the book has existed only in electronic versions. How long before books go directly from an author's e-manscript to a published e-book, and this type of galley becomes as obsolete as the Roman ones?

Heavy, right?

A blog? Really? Just to promote a fun kids' book called What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World? Which isn't due out for another ten months?

Can I do this?

"Blog" is what Lewis Carroll would have called a portmanteau word. Portmanteau comes from the word port, meaning left, as when a ship turns to port, and manitou, meaning a forest spirit. So a portmanteau word is a word left by a forest spirit. Lewis Carroll was weird. If you've ever read him, you already know this.

The portmanteau words left by the forest spirits - I see them sort of like eggs left by the Easter bunny - are words formed by jamming two other words together. The words smoke and fog,  jammed together, make smog. (Cars and trucks, jammed together, also make smog, so there are exceptions to the rule.) If you jam google and blintzes together, you get googleblintzes, meaning many, many blintzes. (Why would you need this word?)