Um...Also, Testing...

I'm trying out my first Teespring shirt design. It's pretty simple, just a phrase they used on last night's Daily Show that deeply resonated with me and I thought people would like on a t-shirt. I'll try to come up with something cleverer and more original next time. Here's the URL:

https://teespring.com/i-voted-for-dumbledore

I tried to keep prices low, since the graphic is pretty simple. I hope people enjoy it!

Some Horn-Tooting!

For those of you who enjoyed the original 'Outside In', which contained an essay on every story in the classic Doctor Who series by a different author for every story, the sequel is coming soon from ATB Publishing! This one will have, as you can see from the proof cover, 125 essays by 125 authors on 125 different episodes of 'Doctor Who'. I'm in there, writing about "The Christmas Invasion" and making what I think is a pretty credible case that it is not only meant to bookend "Rose", but also that it's meant to foreshadow the Tenth Doctor's descent into the Time Lord Victorious and eventual regeneration. I look forward to the book's arrival (once the madness of sorting out 125 author copies is past) and to talking about it at cons!

Storytelling Engines Announcement!

For those of you who missed the CONsole Room convention this weekend in Minneapolis (which I'll excuse this time, but 2015 is just around the corner!) we had a very wonderful convention. ATB Publishing was there, talking about their forthcoming projects now that they've sorted out their reorganization and are ready to follow up their debut project, the really wonderful 'Outside In'. (Which I participated in!) And the publisher himself, Arnold T. Blumberg, announced one particular project that I've been waiting to say something about for a while now--they will be bringing out a compilation of my Storytelling Engines columns!

This will include every single one of the comic-related Storytelling Engines, revised and expanded to include the feedback I got from my readers. In addition, there will be about a dozen brand-new columns exclusive to the book, including such topics as the "Hard-Traveling Heroes" era of Green Lantern, the Adams/O'Neal era of Batman, Solomon Kane, Amethyst, the Marvel Cineverse, and more! And while I'm certainly proud of my original columns, I think that they benefited greatly from a chance to revisit them, polish them, and in at least a few cases incorporate material that simply wasn't available to me when I posted them those many years ago. (Spider-Woman, for example, got an examination of the Claremont and Nocenti runs in the back half of her series, which wasn't collected when I first wrote the piece.)

So if you've liked my Storytelling Engines, I hope you'll be interested in picking up this volume when it's released. There's no official date yet, and I hope everyone understands that small press publishing doesn't exist in the same linear relationship to time that the rest of us do (which reminds me, 'Rip Hunter, Time Master' is going to be in there) but I also hope you'll watch this space for further announcements as we get closer to finalizing the release. I'm really very proud of this book, and I hope that you'll all enjoy it.

I May Very Well Have Snapped

I'm going to try doing a thousand words a day on a long-form story, until it's done. Since I don't want this blog to turn into "seven posts a week on one topic and then one or two a week on everything else," I've created a separate blog for it here:

http://iamundeadforlife.blogspot.com/

I will try to make it look prettier later. The quick and dirty description, for those of you who won't click on a link without a little enticement, is that it's a novel about zombies...but they're not mindless, they don't hunger for human flesh, and they don't eat brains. That doesn't mean that the dead rising from the grave isn't causing the end of civilization as we know it; it just means that it's happening in ways that Romero fans never imagined.

Bonus Blog!

I just wanted to take a moment to introduce everyone to my new Doctor Who-focused blog, 'A Madman With a Box (Without a Box)'. It's going to be a mix of new Doctor Who posts, and old posts from a variety of sources (I've written about Doctor Who a lot, in a lot of places over the years) that you probably haven't seen. It will remain separate from 'The Doctor Who Book Project', which I'm writing with my lovely wife as an overview of the Doctor Who novels (we're just finished up with 'Blood Heat'.) Also, anything I published in print will not be reprinted there (so you'll need to actually buy 'Outside In' to read my essay on "The Web of Fear".)

So in short, if you're a Doctor Who fan who comes here for the Who stuff, you'll get a concentrated dose there (the new stuff updates once a week, the old stuff every other day.) If you're a fan of my writing, you'll also get a concentrated dose there. If you're not a fan of my writing or Doctor Who, you probably didn't read this far so I can say whatever I want about you. Puppy-killer.

Side Project Announcement!

I wanted to let everyone know that in addition to this blog and my posts at MightyGodKing, I will also be posting irregularly to a blog I'm co-writing with my wonderful wife. This will be a sequential tour of my personal favorite era of Doctor Who, the novels published during the so-called "Wilderness Years" between the end of the old series and the beginning of the new. (One of the surprises that may come up is that the end of the old series and the beginning of the new doesn't come quite when you'd think it would...)

The blog is available here, and I invite you all to wander by when you have a moment. It'll encourage us to keep going with what is, ultimately, a Herculean labor...albeit a labor of love. Whether you loved the New Adventures, or whether you just kind of heard that there was a series of books out there and want to know more, stop on by!

Utterly Shameless Plug, 2011 Edition

Naturally, it goes almost without saying that in addition to my general pop-culture savviness, I also happen to be an erudite scholar of the first order. As such, it should surprise virtually nobody that I am featured in an academic publication of the highest order, from the textbook publishers at University of Ottawa Press.

Called "Braaaiiinnnsss! From Academics to Zombies", and edited by Robert Smith? (the mathematician who made a media splash a while back by modeling the spread of a zombie virus mathematically), this textbook features a variety of academic essays on the truest and most vital topic of the age: the zombie apocalypse. Mine is but one of a veritable cornucopia of scholarly discussions on the zombie problem that faces the world today, a humble contribution on the epidemiology of the zombie plague.

The book is available at a variety of outlets, such as:

http://www.press.uottawa.ca/book/braaaiiinnnsss

(or, for those of you who would prefer to read the essays in French, at: http://www.presses.uottawa.ca/livre/braaaiiinnnsss)

and of course, Amazon has it at:

http://www.amazon.com/Braaaiiinnnsss-Academics-Zombies-Robert-Smith/dp/0776607707

So remember, it's three a's, three i's, three n's, and three s's. "Braaaiiinnnsss"! Be very careful about asking for it by name.

A Brief Recommendation

I am given to understand that Tom Tomorrow has released another collection of cartoons, "Too Much Crazy", available on Amazon. I strongly suspect that Tom Tomorrow needs my help promoting books like Arnold Schwarzenegger needs Woody Allen's help moving a couch, but for what it's worth, "This Modern World" is the best political comic going today, by a country mile, and it's always filled with humor and brilliantly incisive wit that perfectly skewers everything wrong with politics today. Tom Tomorrow has the ability to cut through the bullshit like no other, and I include "The Daily Show" in that.

So yes, "Too Much Crazy". I recommend it sight unseen, and I look forward to getting it myself.

Shameless T-Shirt Plug!

After looking around a bit, I decided to go with CafePress after all. So for those of you who want to go ahead and buy yourself some geeky T-shirts, here's my brand spanking new T-shirt sales site! I'll be adding designs as inspiration strikes, but here's the initial line-up. I hope everyone enjoys them enough to buy one.

And I mean EVERYONE. In the world. Six billion sales should set me for a while, right?