Strange, strange week.
But before I get into that, some of you may be wondering exactly what’s going on with my post yesterday, below this one. What that is, is the promotional poster for Futurius Tales From the Plex Volume 2, due for sale in 4-8 weeks time. It’s an anthology which has one of my stories, Bad Luck Inc., along with a large number of other tales in a HUGE package. Lots of talented people have worked on it, and should be a great book when it hits. There’ll be more information in the coming weeks, along with links to vendors, more page previews and lots of promotional pieces to help spread the word, which I hope you can help with. Independent comic books are a tough sell in a medium which doesn’t see the sort of numbers it used to – and as an indie book we’re not going to see any money from sales as that goes straight back into promotion and printing. So expect plenty of pushing as we try to get the book on the radar.
As for the week… whew. It started off quiet enough, with pretty much a slow burn for the first few days as things sped up into ‘crazy’ come Friday. The snow made things difficult for a start, as funnily enough, the gritters were ready for it on Thursday, but not Friday. The result was a gridlock that pretty much crippled the whole city. Most people I know took 3-4 hours to get home for what would have normally taken 30 mins tops. My journey home from town was equally amusing. After spending the better part of an hour getting barely two miles out of town, the bus driver eventually declared “it’s too dangerous” and told everyone to get off the bus. Of course, no one would have if it weren’t for the fact the traffic wasn’t moving anyway. So I walked it most of the way home, in the driving snow/sleet for the remaining couple miles.
This was not fun.
I think this ‘being’ was behind the snow chaos last week. It is evil incarnate. I call him:
SNOW-BLOR the DESTRUCTOR
Then work offered some soothing discomfort as well. With last week’s WiiChat feature up- an analysis of future Wii games that haven’t gathered much press , this week was an in-depth feature on how Western developers feel about Nintendo DS and Wii given their general output is generally less well received than their Japanese counterparts(http://www.wiichat.com/nintendo-wii-articles/17067-wii-east-vs-west-developers-speak-out.html#post228679).
The story broke larger than I expected, although comically, I took a small amount of flak from some who didn’t actually read the article all the way through/properly or in some cases, at all. All part and parcel, although it raised some stuff I’m actually writing about in my most recent novel project. Should that ever see light of day (and currently it’s going full tilt, with over 21,000 words through 14 chapters, first Act finished) I imagine there’s going to be an interesting look back over times like this, given the novel’s subject matter. As cruel as the internet can be -or rather we as people make it- it always makes things interesting, that’s for sure.
My other article this week, a review of Spider-Man: Reign #3 went up yesterday over at ComiX-Fan – http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/forums/showthread.php?t=41367 – which I’m watching with extra intrigue given the attack I got for my review on Issue 2. One to keep an eye out for, although I suspect things will be quite quiet this time around, simply through The Invisible Rule of Review Thumb. Simply put, the rule is this:
Whatever you expect for your article, chances are you’ll get the opposite in varying extremes.
So since I’m expecting an extreme response, I’ll probably get apathy this time around. Hell, I don’t think there’s a writer out there at the moment who doesn’t fear the dread of apathy; getting people to actually do stuff like, you know, read is as much a goal as it is writing a good piece.
I don’t know. Sometimes I just feel… old. And drained. Only so many times you can shout into a vacuum before you lose your voice.
Hmm. Think I’ll use that for the novel.
It’s good that even tired laments have their uses…
Meeeery Christmas, suckers!
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