Posters

My old bedroom was jam-packed with posters. Seriously. There were absolutely fucking millions of the things. Never mind that, for the most part, they were quite shit posters, they covered most of the free space on my walls.

… Well, okay. The above paragraph is hyperbole. But I did have quite a few posters, but now I’ve changed bedrooms, I don’t have any: the only thing anywhere near similar to a poster is an oil pastel drawing a girl from work gave me to cheer me up when I was still working there, and then let me take home when I left.

As such, I am on a poster hunt. An Evangeline Lilly poster would be quite nice – this one specifically. However, it’s from one of those sites that just generally manufactures posters based on images submitted to them, by the look of it, so I’m not sure it’ll be high quality when it’s blown-up to poster scale.

That said, there are no official Evangeline posters from what I can tell. Which is a shame, really.

Speaking of Lilly, she’s on the adverts for something or other in the UK now! I saw it first on Monday then promptly forgot about it, before seeing it again yesterday while I was playing with my phone at mum’s – I believe my exact response was a gasp, and “Yay, it’s Evangeline Lilly from Lost!”

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Anyone suffering from some mental deficiency will have been looking forward to the X-Con paperback release, and will know that it wasn’t actually released yesterday. The problem was actually on Lulu’s end of things, so sadly, none of the blame can be placed on Stuart. Though, given that I completely forgot that I needed to rejig the cover art to the new proportions until midway through yesterday, it was very nearly my fault.

(Yes, I did do the fucking amazing cover art to X-Con, which you should know by the ‘Cover designed by Nicholas Ambrose www.boringinternet.co.uk’ message on the back of the novel. I also wrote the blurb – perhaps the best piece of writing from cover-to-cover.)

Listen to me complain

Anyone reading X-Con will notice that chapter 4, though massively long (stupidly long, methinks), was split only into 4 parts – though these were longer than normal. That’s to conserve bandwidth and so I don’t have to spend forever doing formatting for what’s not actually my own content. When I hunt for something else to put on the site that’s not my own content, basic HTML formatting ability may well be necessary before I accept it. Perhaps cruel, but adding tags won’t take long, and I’ll still take the arduous task of formatting the pages, breaking chapters into pieces and sorting out all the links to different parts.

Next week I’ll post a list of final features for the September update – which should hopefully be going live in about 2 weeks. Hopefully. As usual, don’t hold me to anything.

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Sadly, I am still job-hunting after 3 full weeks of it. I’ve only heard back from 2 places – one to let me know the position was filled (ignoring the fact that I applied to two jobs within their company) and the other to arrange a job interview, only to shoot me down after the interview because I’m not pushy enough for a sales position. Well then! I guess I may be a bastard online but I’m still too nice in real life.

I finally surpassed 4000 gamerpoints on Xbox Live, so I’m pretty happy about that. I’m slowly whittling away at the slew of Halo 3 achievements (perhaps the only game, other than Guitar Hero 2, that has successfully pleased me enough to continue to pick it up after almost a year of owning it). Apart from some campaign scoring achievements, there are now exclusively online ones left. Which is a bit shit, really, but I’ll do what I can to get the fuckers.

On Monday I’ll post this month’s stats. They’re looking good. Exceptionally good. Like, so good I now consider the site a moderate success and have added information on it to my CV. Without including the web address, obviously – no one is going to want to employ me, seeing the crap that comes out of my head.

A slightly epic fuck-up

So yesterday Stuart told me that he was considering selling X-Con, on release, for £6.99. The idea sounded cool, but I didn’t think it was physically possible to sell such a large hardback book (it’s typical hardback size, 8.25×10.75″) for so little on Lulu. So I went to have a look at the base price.

Turns out the basic price is over £12. Stuart had not checked this before announcing pricing details. Thus, the prices I had announced on his behalf are no longer valid, and instead the novel will be available for £12.99 on release. I think he’s also considering a paperback release, to reduce costs. If you want the novel, but are now put off by the increased price, time to start praying.

Due to its delay, however, I am told five chapters will now be released on the site, so instead of the three planned not long back, you will be blessed (or perhaps cursed) with two extra chapters.

I’ve updated the blog, at last, to contain categories for posts, so browsing is made easier. Most posts have a tonne of categories, so if you’re going category surfing, be prepared to find the same thing on multiple occasions. In adding categories, I’ve also removed a few tags which either saw limited use or were too specific and could be replaced by a better tag.

In the meantime, Tsubasa Chronicle volume 4 arrived yesterday and took slightly under an hour to read. Now I want volume 5, as the bastard ends on a cliffhanger. As mentioned yesterday, check out my Amazon wishlist to snag me a copy. If you do, I will forever be your friend.

Irony!

Despite the somewhat negative comment about the Monday edition of Boring Comics, there was ironically almost 900 hits that day, which makes the comic the most viewed in a single day this month. It’s an odd relationship, but apparently if I write comics people think are crap, I’ll get shitloads of viewers. And also, apparently, fucking loads of spam comments posted to this blog by trawler bots.

I will, however, side with Louis Wu in that the joke is poor even at a stretch, and was merely meant to make light of Dave’s inherent crapness. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very obvious and so I promise to try to make punchlines easier to understand for the uninitiated from now on.

Today’s comic, in response to the comments, is my way of laughing things off, and is in fact one of my favourite Dave and Frank jokes thus far, excluding perhaps #9 – The Facilities, which is disgusting really, but oh well.

Not much stuff to talk about, to be honest! I’m working on yet another new novel, I’m awaiting Tsubasa Chronicle volume 4 and a new Sea Monkey playset (this is perhaps the 7th or 8th in my life), which I hope will come tomorrow. My exercise bike has broken, probably due to overuse, as it has seen an hour and a half of use a day, or more, since I got it, so that needs to be sent back to Argos. I’m applying to jobs whenever I can, so if you’ve got a job available that pays £20k a year or more, needs fuck all in the way of qualifications aside from average A level results, you don’t mind having a long-haired guy do the job without tying his hair back and the job involves talking about how much I hate various things (ie. Laurell K. Hamilton) or taking the piss out of people and/or companies, then drop me a comment.

Oh yes, and I nearly forgot: Stuart is too shit to get things done by the deadlines he sets, so X-Con will not be released until September 3rd. I’m also told that the chapters I have posted are outdated due to edits, so if you buy the book, re-read chapters 1 – 4, if you read them on the site, for whatever changes have been made. I don’t expect they’re anything particularly drastic, other than word and grammar changes, but let’s be on the safe side, shall we?

Novels

As I mentioned the other day, now we’ve got a release date and price for X-Con’s release, I ought to think about the print-on-demand version of Twist. Here’s some info!

The book will likely be around 350 pages. Don’t hold me to that, because the final final draft isn’t completely finished – hence why the PoD book isn’t available yet. It’ll come to you in that wonderful format of trade paperback and, as such, will cost roughly £7.99. Again, don’t hold me to that, but that’s a maximum; if I can, I may shrink the font size down to fit more on each page and bring the price down as much as possible.

Why no hardback release? Well, I am vaguely considering it, or making a hardback version and buying a couple myself to give away in competitions; as such, they’ll be limited edition. We’ll see when release rolls around.

Hopefully the PoD version will be here in late September.

At some point, when I finally complete the final season of Pixelated Anne (more news on that comic’s demise at some point), I’m hoping to release a PoD comic, in full-colour, with lots of commentary and stuff, plus a slew of extras. Expect that sometime in 2009. Maybe.

Real life things

Here is the promised update about things in real life you don’t care about much.

Last Tuesday I ordered Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock for the 360. It took a week, but this Tuesday it arrived. I played two songs of Easy mode but because I’ve been playing GH2 for a year, it was too boring and I amped it up to Medium – and that was still too boring for the most part. I completed it in about 6 hours or so, unlocking a few achievements, and I’m now progressing through Hard and Expert mode simultaneously and working on getting 5 stars on the last 3 or 4 songs in the Medium tour.

Yesterday I picked up a copy of Tomb Raider: Legends, also for the 360. Only £7.99, too. I’ve played about 45 minutes so far, and I do quite like the game – I haven’t played a Tomb Raider game since the very first one on the original Playstation.

That said, I’ve been getting stuck on the puzzles. I also got scared to death when I rounded a corner and a jaguar bounded out of a temple thing at me. I hate this, and when it happened I thought, “Shit, this isn’t meant to be a scary game!” Anyone who saw my reading list on the old version of the site will know that I read a tonne of horror books; that said, though, I hate being scared by something visually, whether it’s something horrifyingly gruesome or something that jumps out and surprises you – the first jaguar in Bolivia on Tomb Raider: Legend being the latter case.

Today I’m off to get my exam results. I’ll add them to the bottom of this post when I get home and then update the site to show this blogpost is live in its final(ish, in case I notice spelling errors later) format.

Oh, and I’m getting a kitten soon.

Update: Exam results:

Computing: C

Physics: C

Chemistry: D

Drama: D

Anyone wishing to congratulate me; my Amazon wishlist can be found here.

Update 2: Stuart has been kind enough to allow a 4th chapter of X-Con to be released on the site; thus, this has become a kind of X-Con Month, every available Wednesday taken up with a chapter of X-Con. He’s also told me the release date of the novel is August 27th. It will be available in hardback, will be 287 pages long and for the first two weeks after release, it will be available for £9.99. After that, it’ll cost you £11.99.

Morris the Misfit Monster

Apparently I have a real inability to live without writing some kind of story. And so, despite the fact I am already working on a book called The Colony, and looking to turn the A-Z of Why the Internet is Shit into a full book, I’ve started up on yet another one. This one is – yup, you guessed it – titled Morris the Misfit Monster.

Here’s a brief blurb right now, though it’s early days (and by that I mean, the first day) and so the project could easily be dropped like so many others, or could change drastically before completion and seeing the light of day.

“Morris is a monster. Separated by his parents in the Great Monster Migration one October, the hairy thing is picked up by a couple both succumbing to blindness. Fearing that this extraordinarily hairy ‘baby’ will be left for dead, the two take the monster in and name it Morris.

Everything seems fine for a while, but soon Morris starts school and discovers that he’s not exactly like the other children. Degraded but not defeated, Morris decides he’s going to fit in, no matter what it takes. And Morris is about to discover just what lengths he’s going to have to go to in order to fit in.”

As with the majority of my projects these days, I’m looking to keeping it reasonably short – 60k or below, given the enormous 126k that the first draft of Twist weighed in at. Unlike my other usual projects, though, this is a black comedy aimed more at teenage audiences that adults but should hopefully entertain anyone who dares to read it.

Assuming it’s finished, redrafted and refined and then not accepted by an agent or publisher if I send it off to various people in hopes of it getting actually published, chapters will crop up on the website eventually.

Sibling Rivalry

“Sibling Rivalry”, the latest horrible poem to grace the pages of the website, is one that never ceases to make me giggle due simply to the oddness of it. The poem itself, along with previously released “Harry the Fish” and a slew of others that will eventually crop up on the site, was written on my mum’s typewriter at a certain boot sale that gets a mention in an article.

The X-Con cover art is finally complete, and so for the next few weeks, the first few chapters of X-Con will be released on the site, then a link to buy the book from Lulu will be added. I would joke that the cover art is better than the book, since I made it, but he would get annoyed at me and take it seriously.

For anyone interested, though X-Con is only having a few sample chapters released, the entirety of Twist will be released on the site over the next 6 months or so (coming to a conclusion roughly in February next year), as well as being released via Lulu in a print-on-demand paperback format. I’m not in charge of what gets released of X-Con, only how and when, though eventually I hope to crush Stuart’s fallible spirit and get him to allow me to release more chapters for you.

The store will have a new addition this week or next, with any luck, though I’m screwed on what I want to do. I’ve got the art, but the question is whether I want to make a 2009 calendar print with it, a mini poster or a framed print. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I’m debating getting Guitar Hero 3, though I’ve just been told it’s the worst in the franchise apart from the recently released Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. Help on this matter would also be appreciated, because I cannot choose something to fucking save my life. If I was given the death sentence and asked to choose the method of death, it would be hours before I finally settled on something.

If anyone knows of any online sources of information about mental illness and its causes, or any books I can read, let me know. In order to release a long-winded article on the site, I need to prove my thoughts correct on something.