150: I won’t be Donald-ducking
Hullo.
Easter week, and I’m still thinking Jesus has to be a little bit miffed it’s called Good Friday. “Yeah, I’ve had better, to be honest”
Our go
Future Present
The Baron
Links
Byyyyeeee!!!
****
The 2020 Hugo shortlists were announced, and I got my first Hugo nomination. Also, my second. Which is obviously an enormously touching thing. I understand WicDiv has been inching closer to a Hugo nomination for a few years now. In fact, if we had one more nomination we’d have been in the shortlist for last year. It’s an enormously strong field to be included in.
I mean that across the board. The announcement video is here, and a run down of all the categories is here. It’s also telling the impact of the Eastercons and World con I’ve attended in the last few years, in that I own the better part of the best novel nominations. I’m looking forward to exploring as many others as I can.
The con is running at the end of July to the start of August, and will be running in a solely virtual capacity, so making it significantly easier to attend. I will be wearing one of my fancy skull jackets in my house, and I promise I won’t be Donald-ducking.
Who am I kidding? I in no way promise that.
*
In terms of supporting shops, Once & Future’s trade is out there, in comic shops and book shops. There’s also a special edition which is available from Big Bang and Forbidden Planet. It’s got the above lovely David Lafuente cover and the tale of Arthurian horror and adventure. It’s a volume we’re hugely proud of.
At some point I’m going to have to ask Dan permission to show his roughs in one of these, as I just spent today going through his ones for issue 10, and they basically give me a whole bunch of life.
Juan Giménez’s passing was a huge one. He was an enormous talent – his particular opulent brand of science-fiction was hugely influential on me as I came into the medium, and it was a huge honour when he did a cover for Salva and my last issue of Star Wars. Let’s show it here.
<IMAGE>
Just look at that. I still can’t believe it exists on one of my things.
*
C’s latest volume of her online poetry anthology Perverse is going out. You can sign up to receive them weekly, or see the poems go up on twitter.
Sarah Jaffe’s newsletter is always good, and this one was particularly so. Always an expert eye on both life and labour disputes.
Publisher’s Weekly reviewed Once & Future, and liked it, which is always an excellent deal.
These are going to be an excellent series of interviews to watch when they’re broadcast. I had a lot of fun doing mine.
#NCBD is a regular hashtag as folks tweet about their new books. In time of no new comics, Matt Rosenberg wrote trying to encourage folks to tweet with the hashtag #NTYCBD. As in, New To You Comic Book Day. As in, highlighting books that already are out there you want to draw attention to, and ideally have folks be able to order. That sounds like a good idea, and I’m going to embarrass Matt by recommending FOUR KIDS WALK INTO THE BANK which remains a definitive 10s cult crime book, one of the few post-Hawkeye books worthy of active inclusion in the lineage.
As said a couple of weeks back, I’m trying to use my forward-facing presence to basically be a source of comfort where I can. Trying to lighten when I can, and keep the knives in the sheaves. So I retweeted the immaculate pop-music-through-the-decades thread when it crossed my timeline, as it may be my fave twitter thread of all time.
I wasn’t going to send this out today, thinking that I’d leave it to tomorrow, but I just wrote that bullet entry for #NTYCBD and I figure I should get it out on the actual day, right? It was going to be a light one anyway, even if I gave it another day. Motivation is low, and remaining motivation should be spent on what I need to be doing.
This week that is PROJECT COWBOY, which has had more art arrive, and it’s painfully good. It’s an artist whose work I know well, so the insert-short-story I wrote today is explicitly inspired by having an image I know they will nail, and then building the rest of the story to provide that moment of beauty. The thing about writing: you start wherever you start.
PROJECT BRIGHTER SHADE OF BLUE is also deep into the work, meaning I’d likely slide to the next issue after I finish the second issue of Cowboy. Stephanie is just wrapping up 12, so issue 13 was edited by C (“There’s only one bit where it reads as “Oh, I’ve read all these books” but bar that, great!”) and passed to Stephanie, who I’m sure will be excited to see there’s a chance to design another of the gods. As said, Dan is in the roughs for 10. Meanwhile, I’ve been doing lettering drafts of 9. Oh – I wrote up the first of the interviews for the back of the new series of DIE and am wrestling with Jeff and Jim about what to do with the final cover for Ludocrats.
I am also now signed up for 3 RPG groups a week, one of which I’m actually playing in.
It’s also Easter, and C tells me she hid some chocolate to prevent me eating it so we could celebrate the only way I know how.
Right, back to it. Be careful. Speak soon. And, as Sarah Gordon has just mentioned Billy Ocean on twitter, let’s go out on Red Light Spells Danger.
Kieron Gillen
London.
8.4.2020