Selling an Englishman by the Pound

Yeah, yet another break which lasted too long. Again, not due to me being lazy or a wish to abandon this forum for my thoughts. Rather, the time has been really flying by as I completed work on a total of four [4!] books which--if all goes according to my and other good people's plans--will be released later this year.

However, there is another reason why I haven't updated this blog for such a long time. Simply put, the deal itself [read "contract"], while all but a certaintainty, is not set in stone. Meaning that nothing's signed yet, and there's what would appear to one final round of negotiations to endure before everything's finalized before I can finally, with good and clear conscience, announce it here and elsewhere. And with that in mind I've been waiting for this happy event to occur before I wrote what I planned to be my next entry. A bit foolish in hindsight, of course. Especially since I have been not only doing a lot of thinking about Ur-plots and other lit-crit business, but also have been reading up a storm. Bottom line: I'm waaaaaay behind on not only blogging, but also on reviewing what I've read.

So, I've decided to just jump back into these waters and write about what I've read in the past month and a half, so that I won't be facing a small mountain of books to talk about here. Because, as past experience in this area has shown, it simply becomes nigh impossible to do it all, and even more difficult to do those books I do manage to discuss real justice. All of which means that I'll be trying to do several posts a week for the foreseeable future, playing catch up and trying to perhaps even get a bit ahead of myself, so that I can spend some time talking about why "old ideas" aren't necessarily a bad thing if used imaginatively in a new context, among many other topics.

But first, a bit of self promotion and marketing business.

I've recently finalized my plans to attend the Book Expo America 2007, which will be taking over the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City the first weekend of next month, from Friday the 1st through Sunday, the 3rd of June. This will be only the second convention I've attended this year, which is a phenomenally small number for yours truly, and I am more than a little excited about attending it for a number of reasons.

Chief among those reasons is the fact that this show, unlike most comic-centric conventions, is mainly geared towards the professionals who work in the various fields and genres in the larger publishing world, and I'll be there trying to get some new projects placed with the proper publishers. And, no, I can't really talk about those new projects for a variety of reasons, but rest assured that I will happily and prominently announce them asap here. Add in the fact that I'll be hanging out with good people like Joel "Tripwire" Meadows, John "Last Kiss" Lustig, and the "God of Art" himself, David Michael Beck, among many others, and you've got a pretty good picture of why I'm looking forward to this event.

So if you're planning on being at the Book Expo, or in the NYC area during that period, don't hesitate to let me know that fact. It'd be great to see a bunch of people I've missed over the past two or three years, ever since I decided to refocus my energies and attention, and stopped attending twelve to fifteen shows a year. [And, no, that's not a typo; I really did attend a minimum of 12, and often 15 or more cons a year--every year--for the better part of a decade.]

Also, and perhaps just as important, a small cache of the long sold out Airwave edition of Alan Moore Spells It Out has recently resurfaced, leading to my decision to offer fifty of them as part of a special package with my latest book, Alan Moore's Exit Interview. I've signed fifty [50] copies of each volume, and they're being sold on a first come, first served basis via http://www.pmkane.com/moore/moore.htm. That set will set you back $25.00 American, plus shipping and handling. Unsigned copies of Exit Interview are also available, separately and at the cover price of $10.00 plus s/h, via that same link.

And that's enough shilling for one day. Now it's time for a quick look at...


What's Bill been reading over the past month-plus...

[Between 3-19-07 to 4-30-07]

Farewell Summer
Ray Bradbury.

Dandelion Wine, Bradbury's fictionalized autobiography of his boyhood, has always had a special place in my heart. Aside from being a compendium of wonderful tales, vignettes and remembrances which culminate in a truly magical manner, it's always been, for me, the quintessential Bradbury novel. Now, after fifty years of plying his craft in a variety of genres, mediums and media, the Master of Midwestern Magical Realism returns to Green Town to chart the final course of Douglas Spaulding's coming of age. The resulting book is, by turns, funny, frightening, touching, and always pure and true. And just like summers of yore, too quickly lived and gone. At least in this case, as with its predecessor and the rest of Ray's backlist, we can always relive it by taking down off the shelf and rereading it.

Not only does Farewell Summer serve as a worthy successor to an acknowledged masterpiece, it could easily serve as a fitting capstone to this beloved National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning author's distinguished and justly-acclaimed career. This is required reading, particularly for those who fail to see the wonder which imbues the world around us...as well as any/everyone who harbors their own dream of becoming a good writer of any form of literature, including comics.

Farewell Summer
Ray Bradbury
William Morrow
www.harpercollins.com


And that's it for today. Expect to see more very, very soon.

Now go play in the sun. That's what I plan to do right now, myself.