Daniel Pinkwater serializing new fiction online

Daniel Pinkwater, the greatest sf writer in the universe, is serializing a story on the Internet. Many writers had an influence on me when I was growing up, but no single writer did so much to inspire me to write as Pinkwater: a gifted humorist and storyteller whose savage wit and nerd-positive message comes across in stories from picture-books to young adult novels (including the blisteringly, savagely funny Young Adult Novel). Two Pinkwater omnibuses (5 Novels and 4 Novels) collect nine of his finest.

I'm so excited to see him doing this great story on the net -- I'm going to devour it as soon as I post this.

I didn't always live here. And by here, I do not mean the La Brea Tar Pits, where I am writing this down in a notebook--I mean Los Angeles. When I was a little kid I lived in Chicago.

On Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles, there is a restaurant shaped like a hat. It is called The Brown Derby, and that's what it looks like--one of those derby hats, with the round top, and the little brim all around. There is a sign outside that says, "Eat in the Hat." And people do. I knew about this because I saw pictures in Look Magazine. The pictures showed the restaurant, the "Eat in the Hat" sign, and two movie stars--I think it was Bette Davis and Laird Cregar--inside the hat, eating cheeseburgers. They were eating cheeseburgers with knives and forks! This was interesting too. I had only found out about cheeseburgers a short time before--and had only actually eaten two of them. I did not know that some people eat them with knives and forks, but I thought of them as grown-up and sophisticated food, even before learning that movie stars ate them.

Anyway, when I read about the Brown Derby and saw the pictures, it became one of my life's ambitions to eat there.

Link (via MeFi)