You’re Going to Hear Me on Your (Internet) Radio
I returned to my old mediabistro.com stomping grounds yesterday, through a telephone call to Jason Boog, my successor at GalleyCat, to talk about a new book project: the publication of a print version of my “translation” of the Tao Te Ching, a work I’d been distributing for free online for the last six years. Getting Right with Tao includes a mild revision to that text, plus a new foreword and afterword and a special gift for the folks who buy it—because if you’re going to pay $9.95 for a book you could just download for free, you deserve something special, right?
Anyway, during my conversation with Jason (and AgencySpy editor Matt van Hoven), I talked about how that online version became so popular, to the point where it’s one of the first ten results you get when you search for “Tao Te Ching” in Google. We also chatted about how I ended up working with Channel V Books to do a print book after so many years of publishing this as an online exclusive, and about the impulse to do a rendition of the Tao Te Ching when I don’t, in fact, know a word of Chinese…
11 March 2010 | uncategorized |
Read This: The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity
One of the neatest twists during Neil Gaiman’s run on Sandman was Lucifer’s decision, at the end of one storyline, to abandon Hell and take an extended vacation on Earth; author Mike Carey and artist Peter Gross eventually picked up that narrative thread for another DC comic, Lucifer, which ran for six years—I didn’t read the entire series, but the story arcs that I did read were quite well-done. The pair have reunited for a new series, The Unwritten, which starts off with a mundane premise—a young man whose father based the lead character in a Harry Potter-like series of fantasy novels copes with the ramifications of his fame, and not always admirably—and immediately spins it off in fantastic directions. The first five issues have now been collected as a graphic novel, Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity.
I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for a certain type of comic book, almost always published by DC’s Vertigo line, that sprinkles literary or intellectual elements into its fantasy narrative—which tend to be largely the domain of UK authors like Gaiman and Carey (see also Grant Morrison) for some reason—and The Unwritten falls squarely into this camp. Of course, you have to accept that this first volume is as concerned with establishing the foundations for a much larger narrative as it is with the individual story arc; the stand-alone story that closes out the book, which recasts the life of Rudyard Kipling in light of the magical/literary conspiracy lurking behind the Unwritten curtain, offers a glimpse at the scope of what Carey has planned. It will almost certainly be worth keeping tabs on.
10 March 2010 | uncategorized |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
