Comicon Ho!

Blog No. 168

I have no idea what images you conjure in your head when you read the word Comicon. For some of you, I’m sure, you picture the type of John Hughes 80s geeks wearing suspenders, pocket protectors, and playing with huge, complicated computers. Others just read the suspenders comment and pictured hipsters. You may imagine thousands of people dressed in overly tight costumes hugging strangers and hocking weird crap. Having gone to a couple of them, the former is closest to my experience, but it’s hundreds of people, only some of them are dressed up (some in really impressive, though unrecognizable, costumes) and some of that weird crap are books.

Big Announcements!

Blog No. 162

I hope you’ve already seen these things, but I’m going for total coverage, so get ready to see it all over again. I suspect that I’ll get back to my regularly scheduled drivel in no time, but this is all so important to me, I’ve got to go against all my instincts and spread the word. I have at least three things to share (I may drift into more because it’s my style, but I’m going to try to stick to it).

To preface it all, I hope whatever time off and celebrations you may have had were/are spectacular. I had a nice family Christmas as usual and other than the few times I had to go in for rentals, I don’t go back to work until the 5^th. So that pretty great. I just wish I were using the time more productively (as usual) but I’ve actually gotten a bunch done (not as usual). Over last weekend, the poster for the No Light Tomorrow book launch were finished and printed. At the same time, we (meaning Christian and myself) finished the December Zine (number six if we’re counting and there are numbers on them so we are). Though, more could always be done. And I’ve already mentioned two of the things, but let’s break them down.

Zine 005

Blog No. 150

I know some people (out of the few who read this) are probably tired of hearing about the Zines all the time. They are a flimsy little booklet akin to what high school students create to prove they aren’t part of the system (or whatever). While they may not be anything spectacular, they are a really cool thing to have and make, so for the time being, we are staying the course and Zine 005 is here. We still have to distribute it, but they will be printed and ready to go as of Friday. Out of all the ones we have done so far, this one is my favourite.

This one is starting to garner a bit of a history. As stated before, this year our plan was to print four Zines on a quarterly basis. The first one came out in March and the second in June. That meant that this one was scheduled for September.

“But wait.” You may be saying to yourself. “It’s October. What happened?”

Another Collection Update

Blog No. 141

Hello fine folks. I’ve been talking about this darn collection with Christian for over a year now and all I’ve had for you were promises and Gorilla Dust. It’s been a long, bumpy, lazy road, with big changes and lots of letdowns, but we are finally in sight of the finish line. I decided to use this week’s post to write a short update.

When we started the collection (back in February of 2014) we had wondrous visions of a collection of short stories to go along with the quickly growing blog. We were racking up stories faster than we could post them and decided to collect the best of them and put out a book. Christian had his own collection coming out (which has done marvellously well: http://christianlaforet.com/the-space-between-houses/) but we had lots of stories in the bag and wanted to do something more with them. As it turned out, the dynamics of Adventure Worlds changed and the number of stories we each needed grew, and so did the amount of time spent working on it.

Zines and Other Things

Blog No. 136

Zine number four is officially out in the wild. It, like the others before it, took longer than expected. Part of that is on my shoulders (as the guy who puts the layout together) but the major reason is that this time around we have ads. Anchor Coffee House, a favorite café of mine, and Paper Heroes, one of Christian’s regular haunts, graciously agreed to throw us a little cash to help fund the printing of the Zine. We still had to pay some out of pocket, but their contributions helped us find a local printer and spread the latest issue. The snag came with creating the ads and getting their approval. Both locations were easy to work with and very amicable, but I don’t have much experience making ads and finding the extra time to jet over to those stores and bother the owners to get their OK took time.  

Collection Update

Blog No 125

I’ve done a novel update this year, but I have to admit, I haven’t done any work on it since then. I really want to, but I have so much other work that has to be done now (or a few weeks ago) that I’ve had to put it on hold and focus. The one project that is sucking up the most time is currently The Collection. The fabled collection is a set of short stories that Christian and I have been working on since before this time last year. I know that seems like a long time, but since they are short stories, there seemed to be lots of little things that would get in the way (like the first Zine, Finders, updating the website, Christian putting out his book and many others). They were just short stories, we had tons of time. Now it’s a year later and we are still working on edits.

The Third Zine and Feeling under the Weather

Blog No. 122

Issue number three of the Zine is done, printed, and will be distributed into the wild over the next few days. In that time, it’ll be up on Adventure Worlds too. For this, the first quarter of the year, we have a cover by local artist Alex Morneau, and Finders was drawn by Nikita Why (the man who drew the cover last time. I have to apologize again, last time I misspelled his last lame. How could someone possibly do that? In my infinite ability to mess up, I managed it somehow. So Nikita, I’m very sorry, thanks for sticking around and doing a bang-up job on Finders. He did that son-of-a-gun by hand. When you take a look you’ll see why that’s amazing. I don’t think I misspelled anything this time, but e had a little trouble with the printing. When we first started to look into making the first Zine, we looked around for a local printer in our price range without much luck. Unfortunately we went with one of the big box stores (we do pay for it out of pocket) and the first couple of times that was fine. This time around we started to see the determent of cheeping out (or at least not going to people who are passionate about the stuff.