[From the Eye of the Storm] Jon Skovron's Newsletter #17
From the Eye of the Storm #17
I'm writing this from the cafeteria of my son's middle school. Both my sons are in the "Summer Instrumental Music Experience", which is a public school program that's supposed to be a way for kids to keep playing music during the summer, except it actually starts a week before the end of school. I assume that's so those poor music teachers can still have a proper summer break. It's a large program, comprised of two full bands and orchestras, grades 4-6, and at the end of the two weeks, they have a big concert. We've done it every year since Logan was in 4th grade.
Right now, Zane's band is rehearsing only twenty yards away from me. The quavering, sometimes disjointed notes are pulling at my focus, but this will be a short newsletter anyway, so I'll try to muddle through.
Hope and Red News
Blog reviews are starting to come out. I haven't been reading most of them, honestly. Reviews aren't really for authors, they're for other readers, and even the most obviously shallow ones can sometimes send me into a spiral of doubt and paranoia. But there's nothing worse than your book being completely ignored, so I'm grateful they're being written, regardless of what they say.
The exciting bit of news that I couldn't quite share with you last week is that I've been accepted on a panel at Comic Con International in San Diego. This is the biggest, most prestigious convention of its kind, and I'm absolutely thrilled to be going. Granted, there will also be massive blockbuster movies and cult favorite tv shows promoting there, not to mention just about every comics publisher in existence. On the popularity scale, I'm afraid prose falls near the bottom, right around table top games. But hey, even 1% of 100,000 people is still way more than an average book panel! I'll also be giving away free signed copies of Hope and Red at the Orbit booth, so if you're one of the lucky ones who actually gets to go, come find me!
Currently Listening
Late last week, we were gifted with a surprise new album from one of my favorite bands, Wye Oak. It’s called Tween and it’s a collection of some of the material they worked on between their break-out album, Civilian, and Shriek, their most recent album. Shriek was a huge departure for them–rejection of the classic raw guitar sound that made them known in the first place. In fact, they dropped guitars completely and instead went full synth and bass. I was a little worried about that, but it turned out to be a great album after all. Not my favorite, but still pretty amazing (my favorite Wye Oak album, incidentally, is the EP My Neighbor/My Creator).
Anyway, as the name suggests, Tween isn’t really the “next” Wye Oak album, but more a fascinating glimpse at their transition, and possibly at where they’re going next. In particular the last song on the album, “Watching the Waiting”, feels like a sign of things to come. If that’s true, I’m very excited for the next album. Check it out below:
Watching the Waiting - Wye Oak
And that’s it for this week. I’ve got a bunch of launch stuff to do, including preparing for my AMA on Reddit and writing a bunch of guest posts for other people’s blogs (I’m so glad I don’t actually have one of my own anymore, otherwise I’d probably have run out of topics!).
Hope and Red comes out TWO WEEKS FROM TODAY! Ack!
Even more importantly, Zane’s promotion ceremony is tomorrow. Yes, my youngest will officially be a middle schooler. I suppose I can expect the gray hairs to start any time now.