From my upcoming comic book...

My good friend Mav and I are starting up a comic book serial sometime this year called RAILS - the Royal Alberta Illustrated Literature Society. Our first issue probably won't be until later in the year, but we'll be launching issue 0.5 in April and presenting it at the Kazoo Zine & Comics expo on Sat April 16th. Should be about 24 pages and will include some of my work (comics and poetry) and a good chunk of Mav's as well. Come check it out!

Here is a preview from my comic short, The Owl, that I'll have in it:

And check out some of Mav's great work here: http://royalails.tumblr.com/

Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea Contest Winners!

Recently there was a Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea giveaway over on goodreads.com. Congratulations to Lisa, Rachel and Ina! I have sent forth three copies to the three corners of the globe (USA, Australia and India) with your names on it. Hopefully they will find you there to inform you of your mission: enjoy the book!

(Bonus mission - review the book! Extra points!)

Fuck a Poet

The fuck-a-poet club

Forget

those clubs

mile high or higher.

Any fool

can pay

to ride on an aeroplane

and get bounced around

in a plastic shell.

Forget those

swinging swingers parties

where swingers swing

their swinging bats at any ball

that slings its way

into the park.

How many people

will you ever fuck

that will write a poem

about it afterward?

Schluff off

those other suitors

in their tailored bravado

boring people

fuck boring people

over martinis

between business hours and television shows

Who the fuck orders

a grilled cheese sandwich

in a restaurant?

Who the fuck orders

a grilled cheese sandwich

in a restaurant

when they could

fuck a poet?

Water in the Desert

I stumbled across this review for Game Quest the other day. It's always kind of delightful to come across reviews for my self-published work. Partly because I had no distribution model other than Amazon and my own site, so the chance of Game Quest being read, let alone reviewed, is very very small. Game Quest has kind of had a life of it's own. One of my first orders was to Abu Ghraib (yes, that Abu Ghraib - insert your jokes about my book being a good implement for torture due to its size, weight or content here) and though I've stopped promoting the book years ago, still sell ~3 copies a year on Amazon and the ebook version sells quite well - about 1 a month. Despite being the most daunting (for most people) of my books in both theme and size, it seems to have found some tenuous foothold in the underculture. Anyway, so it's extra great when you find out that someone read it and actually took the time to review the book. In this case it was particularly nice because I could tell that the reviewer engaged with the book, understood it on a deeper level and had some interesting things to say about the work.

I'm not sure what most author's motivations are for writing. Mine is a desire to communicate. I don't particularly enjoy the editing, the printing and, especially, the promotion that goes into translating a story from something cool in your head to something real on the page. All that effort is a LOT of work and the end goal is to present it to the world and hope to hear back from them on what they thought. I don't really care if it's good or bad (of course, good is preferable), I just like to hear what people thought to see how and if it engaged them. Reviews are my favourite part after coming up with the idea in the first place. It's like getting the chance to reread your book from the POV of a reader...and loving it, or excoriateingly tearing it to shreds. Which, in turn, makes the hardest part about being a small-beans author is you don't get a lot of that. But boy does that water in the desert taste good!

Incidentally, Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea also just got reviewed (huzzah!) by the University of Lethbridge Student newspaper, which you can read here.