Ups & Downs

“The Code,” the first of the 5 short plays in Don’s Senior Moments, will be performed live on Boulder’s Channel 54 Community Television, Wednesday, January 27th, at 7 pm.  After the play, they’ll be interviewing him.  You can watch the program live at http://www.cctv54.org, or view it later from the archives.

The October issue of the Left Hand Valley Courier newspaper, serving Longmont and Niwot, Colorado, has a review of Ups & Downs.

Reviewer Donna Currie says, “The reader laughs with them, at them, and then laughs some more … How such a mismatched father-and-son team could make it through several countries on foot without one of them tumbling down a mountainside is a wonder.  But make it they did, with some good stories to tell.”

We’ve made some updates to our website. Okay, we made one update to our website, but it’s a major one.

Drumroll please: You can now buy Ups & Downs through our website!  We’re still using Amazon.com to fill the orders (and you still need an Amazon.com login in order to buy it), but we’ve made things a little easier for anyone who wants to purchase the book.

We’ve put two new excerpts up on the Excerpts page of the Ups & Downs website.

Here, we have our first experience with a “Massenlager” (which translates literally as “group camp” but more loosely as “Lay-em-down so their hips are touching”), Don gets infested with some kind of parasite that resembles the monster from the movie Alien, and David decides to spend the rest of his life as an Alpine monk.

Also, don’t forget to check out the Inner Views interview, now online.

Ups & Downs co-author David Kassin Fried appeared yesterday on Inner Views, the show that talks to ordinary people who’ve done extraordinary things.

Listen to the interview with David Kassin Fried.

If you didn’t get an e-mail from us yesterday, that means you’re not on our mailing list!  Oh, unhappy days!  To join and get regular (once-a-month-ish) updates in the world of Ups & Downs, send an e-mail to upsanddowns@fried.cc.  We’ll have a more sophisticated way to do that in the near future, but for now, that’ll work.

For those of you who have spent the last 4 months staring at the Coming Soon section of our Excerpts page, wait no longer!  The 10th and 11th chapters of Ups & Downs have been posted.

In Chapter 10, Is that an Apple on Your Head? we enter Altdorf, the crossroads of Switzerland, and by some measure its birthplace.  It was up the hill in Burglen where William Tell refused to bow to the bailiff’s hat, thus launching the chain of events that would ultimately lead to Frankenstein’s downfall.  (That doesn’t sound right … I think I’m mixing up my stories here.)

Chapter 11, Rover, Wanderer, Nomad, Vagabond, provides the first of two daydream sequences offered by David, as he imagines himself in a life of mountaineering.  Whimsical albeit ridiculous, this one is not to be missed!

Melissa Koltes of Rebecca’s Reads posted a review of Ups & Downs.  She had the following to say:

I do not typically laugh out loud as I am reading.  But this book made me LOL more times than I can count. … The authors do a fantastic job of giving a visual account of the uniqueness of the towns-people, the villages, the countries and the cultures.  The beauty of the landscape, the difficulty of the journey and the individual experiences that each narrate is awe inspiring, incredibly amusing, and greatly entertaining.

Read the entire Rebecca’s Reads review of Ups & Downs here.