Exhibit 12.24

I recently began writing in a new font, if not permanently then at least for this current thing I'm doing. As this current thing I'm doing is going to take a while, it looks like I'm stuck with...wait for it...

Bolded Courier New

Sigh. I know. If it helps, I'm thinking about losing the bold. Embarrassingly, I actually hadn't planned on bolding the font, but I forgot to turn it off after I typed the title. As the title was all I could manage that first day--well, I guess I also hit enter a few times and possibly typed my name before watching Project Runway or whatever it is you think I do with my time--by the time I came back the next day I'd forgotten and just started typing away. It's not quite as bad as it sounds since, as Wikipedia tells me, Courier is a monospaced font and the bolding darkens the words without making them take up more space on the page.

Still, I feel a little bit like one of those old writers who bregudingly switched to computers in the 1980s and ever since has tried whatever they could to replicate the typewriter experience. Are there writers like that? I imagine Delillo is like that. So, yeah, I feel like Delillo if Delillo wrote crap and didn't know how to properly capitilize his own name.

So why the switch? I have no idea. I used to write in Garamond which is what 99% of you are probably seeing when you read this blog.

(Hold on, let me do the math here:

4 readers + 1 spambot + me X .99 = # > # of Boxcar Children)

I still like Garamond--though I'm a bit jealous of Mac users who have Hoeffler Text--and all of my final drafts will probably end up in it one way or the other, but I guess I was tired of writing something and having it look finished so early in the process. The great thing about Courier is that it looks so horrible it's like evil is chasing your words down the page as you type and if you stop it's going to get you. So there's that.