Hi all! As per last week, when I posted up my entry about Bento Comics, I promised I would post a new short story every weekend for 2 months. So here’s my next short story, Message To You, which is a cute 4-page silent romance perfect for Valentine’s Day (or it would be, if it weren’t already April).
Rundown:Bento Comics is a new website that permits users to read and compile their own short story anthologies. It then prints the book at a printing company called Lulu, and delivers the personalised book to your door. A new publishing model, if you will.
Short Story of the Week: A cute, 4-page Valentine story about a boy taking a walk in the countryside, and encountering a… balloon. Will You Be My Valentine?
E-book: Available on the right-hand side of this page, where it says “Ebook Available in .epub!”. It’s DRM-free, and Epub can be read on all platforms EXCEPT the Kindle. I’d like to charge USD$0.99 for this story (like iTunes), but the system isn’t yet in place so you can download it for free.
If you don’t have an e-reader like the iPad or Nook, you an download e-readers for your PC – here’s 2 programs you can download: The Adobe Acrobat eReader, and the Barnes and Noble eReader.
Click to Read on BentoComics.com!
This story was drawn on a whim in 2006, not anywhere near Valentine’s Day. Still, I like these two characters a lot (they don’t have names… “Boy” and “Girl”?), and it would be interesting to revisit them in their “every day” life for another short story. I’ve already posted this story on this blog when it first came out 4 years ago, but if you’re new to my blog since then, you may not have read it yet. Years later and it’s still one of my favourites. Ofcourse, feedback welcome.
Hi all! This book is available on the shelves now and on Amazon.com, and it’s a fantastic gift item for the upcoming Christmas season – the “Boy’s Book of Positive Quotations”, written by Steve Deger and illustrated by Yours Truly. As the title suggests, it’s a book of uplifting quotations, perfect for young boys (but just about anybody), with 33 short self-contained comics interspersed throughout.
It’s a 4″ x 6″ bound hardcover book and a super cute gift item, and available from typical bookstores and also Wal-mart. I worked on this from January till May this year, and now that it’s finally on the market with a trailer of awesomeness *points down* that I get to urge you all to get a copy of this book. It’s part of a best-selling inspirational book series, and the first one to have comic inserts – certainly this can only be a good thing for everyone. Watch the trailer down below for all the relevant info, and visit Jazma Online’s interview with Steve Deger and me.
Some random quotes from the book (and this is a thick book):
A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle
– Benjamin Franklin, Inventor, statesman and US founding father
Any life truly lived is a risky business, and if one puts up too many fences against the risks one ends by shutting out life itself
– Kenneth S. Davis, Historian
Just because a man lacks the use of his eyes doesn’t mean he lacks vision
– Stevie Wonder, Award-winning blind singer and song-writer
Below are some bios of the people involved in making the video trailer. Considering how awesome the trailer is, by all means check out their websites and their other works! Oh, as for me, I’m finishing the last 1/3 of “Odd Is On Our Side”. Definitely better than the first book, it is!
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Steve Deger is a bestselling inspirational author. He is the co-creator of the Positive Quotation series, which has sold more than half a million copies and spent more than two years on the U.S. bestseller charts for reference, self-help, and young adult nonfiction. He is the book publisher at Fairview Press, whose authors have been featured on Oprah, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the Today show, and in hundreds of other media outlets. Steve lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Information on the Boy’s Book of Positive Quotations can be found at http://www.fairviewpress.org/
Lindsey Testolin is a New York filmmaker whose work has been screened or featured in venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the Vienna Independent Short Films Festival, the Melbourne International Animation Festival and the New Zealand Film Festival. She won two Telly Awards for her direction of Dan Pink’s book trailer “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko”, which featured manga artwork by Rob Ten Pas, who won the Grand Prize Award in TokyoPop’s Rising Stars of Manga competition. Visit Lindsey’s website at http://www.lindseytestolin.com/ .
The Blind Shake is a punk/fuzz rock band from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Brothers Jim and Mike Blaha—along with Dave Roper—started The Blind Shake and released their first recording in 2004. They have gone on to release two full length albums and a handful of 7″ records with Indie label Learning Curve Records. In 2009, they released a split album called “Cold Town/Soft Zodiac” with noise rock icon Michael Yonkers, whose 1968 album “Microminiature Love” was re-released in 2003 by Seattle’s legendary SubPop records . Visit their website at www.theblindshake.com or hear an archived public radio interview and studio session at: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/08/03/the_blind_shake/ .
First Review for In Odd We Trust: Coming out on the 24th of June (at least on Amazon.com), this book just got its first review. It’s in the Icv2 glossy magazine (so not online), and it’s a great 4-star review.
I quote: “The pairing of Dean Koontz with Australian manga-style artist Queenie Chan was a match made in graphic novel heaven. Together, they tell a great story in a genre halfway between Psyche and Nancy Drew, with marvelous dialogue.” I’ll be posting my long-awaited post on “In Odd We Trust” once I run it by Del Ray’s publicity agent David, so please keep an eye out for that. Here’s also an interview with me about the book on Jazma Online, done by Allen Klingelhoets.
Comics for Telepaths: And onto what else I’ve been doing for the past year. I’ve just recently wrapped up a long-running comic work, a fantastical techno-space opera which ran bi-weekly for the past year in Telepathy Tales telezine. For those unaware of this story on the telestream, I posted the first page of it up here.
The uninitiated may be wondering why this story involves both thoughts and images, when it’s generally believed that telepathy involves only thought-transference. Well, that was Telepathy 1.0 – this story was broadcast on Telepathy 2.0. If you’re a telepath and you’re still on Telepathy 1.0, you probably already know where to get the upgrade.
Many thanks to editor Henrietta Max, and for The Daily Telepath for giving it a 4-star review. Thanks also to Melandril Moose and Telepathy Tales for giving this story a permanent home in the Vorpal Tex. For those interested in the adventures of Mr. Alabaster Curly and Luci Dworkin, I just told you where you can read all the back issues of the story.
In terms of influences, this story was inspired by Michael E. Blake’s “Science Fiction for Telepaths” (1977), a story whose entire text consisted of: Well, you know what I mean. An extremely long and complex piece of science-ficton this was, yet ironically, it’s often referred to as one of the shortest science-fiction stories in existence (according to everything2.com anyway). Hey, it took me a whole day to get through it, you know.
TOKYOPOP and “The Dreaming” Writing Competition: Everything that can be said about TOKYOPOP’s situation has already been said, and my heart goes out to those who lost their jobs in the corporate reshuffle. I wish you all the best of luck for the future. As for “The Dreaming” writing competition, I apologise for the delays – the winners were suppose to be announced at the BEA, but since TOKYOPOP’s restructuring got announced instead, there is obviously some confusion. I emailed TOKYOPOP and Marco Pavia of marketing replied, saying that they’re planning to announce the winners soon, so thanks for all your patience. Hey, if all else fails, I’ll just post up the 6 finalists and the winners on this blog. Once again, I apologise to everyone who entered the competition for this. Your entries were wonderful and a joy to read, and I hope this can be sorted out ASAP.
I like to imagine chickens breaking out of their eggs not because they have to, but because they find it so quiet and lonely in there. This flies in the face of common sense (as does this whole strip), but unlike us human observers, newly-woken baby chicks don’t quite know they’re inside an egg. It’s a silly thought, but apparently worth doodling something on.
The Dreaming: “The Dreaming” writing contest is over, the winners have been chosen, and thankyou to everyone who entered it! I will write a longer post about it later – picking the winners were an extremely difficult job and it deserves an LJ post all on its own. I believe the winners will be announced at the Book Expo America.
In Odd We Trust: The release date is in June, not July, so I shall post my penultimate “In Odd We Trust” post soon.
Move to Melbourne: The reason why I haven’t posted for so long is because I’ve been moving house to Melbourne (from Sydney) for the past 2 months. I’m still not done, would you believe. There is alot of catch-up posting to do.
Hi all! As per last week, when I posted up my entry about Bento Comics, I promised I would post a new short story every weekend for 2 months. So here’s my next short story, Message To You, which is a cute 4-page silent romance perfect for Valentine’s Day (or it would be, if it weren’t already April).
