… and lots of other interesting news besides. Dig in, it’s a big yummy bowl of random:

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I’m pleased to announce I’ve got a new short story in Christopher Golden’s upcoming zombie anthology, THE NEW DEAD, which will be out in February of next year. My story is called “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead.” The rest of the Table of Contents is riiiight… here.

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I’ve also got an introduction in the latest Book of Goon, THE GOON: A PLACE OF HEARTACHE AND GRIEF by Eric Powell. If you aren’t familiar with Powell’s work, you’re missing out on one of the most entertaining (and certainly the most deranged) writer-artists working in comics. Here’s the first paragraph of my intro:

There’s a club-footed gorilla fighting a rabid zombie baby in a basement. There’s a hulking undead transvestite tearing up backyards and the local landlords’ association hasn’t even got around to repairing the damage done in the last city-wrecking giant monster rampage. The watering holes are crowded with cornpone, toothless rednecks, the sort of country gentlemen who think of Deliverance as highbrow romance. This is no place to raise kids. What are they going to do for fun, fight each other over fish guts? Yeah. Pretty much. I’d say the place is going to hell, but I hear property values are higher there.

See? Doesn’t that sound like a comic you need to be reading? As in, right now? (And don’t worry, with The Goon you can jump in anywhere. I think it’s wise to begin with the very first book, because you’re going to read them all eventually anyway, but the stories of The Goon also read just fine taken completely out of order).

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Finally, did you know that Amanda Boyle’s short adaptation of “Pop Art” just won a special jury award for direction at the Atlanta Film Festival? Now you do. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, and you’re sick and tired of waiting for it to screen at a festival near you… well stop waiting already. This week only, “Pop Art” is the featured short on the BBC film network, and through the magic of the intraweeb, you can watch it right there, with the aid of RealPlayer or Windows Media. Go give yourself a fifteen minute break and check it out, lemmie know what you think.

Pretty busy today, so just a few quick notes:

1) We’ve started the process of getting in touch with those who won prizes in the Love-Your-Indie contest. I never asked for permission to post the names of the winners, so I may just highlight one or two in an upcoming blog post. If you won something, you’ll hear about it in the next couple days. May 6 Update: Emails have gone out to everyone who won a prize, and I’ve heard back from 15 of the 24 winners. At least one prizewinner’s email address appears to have gone sour, but I still think we can get the prize to him.

2) There will be 25 prizes in all going out – the 24 prizes I mentioned, and a 25th which I didn’t, a signed hardcover edition of Welcome to Lovecraft.

3) Every entry I received was considered valid, with one exception, and that person was contacted before the deadline and offered a chance to reenter.

And on a completely different subject…

4) Big congrats to Amanda Boyle; her film adaptation of “Pop Art” won Best Narrative Short at North Carolina’s prestigious River Run festival.

UPDATED: Feb. 24th, ’09. AND AGAIN: Feb. 28th, ’09.

Two things I’ve been meaning to post on: 

1) Vincent Chong has a newly designed website, showcasing years of his trippy and remarkable work. Vinny did the original cover for 20th Century Ghosts, and I’ve been lucky enough to work with him a whole bunch of times since; he’s among the very best in the digital game. Check it out.

2) Good news! You can stop desperately browsing the internet, trying to find out when and where Amanda Boyle will next be showing “Pop Art.” Arthur Roth will be floating onto screens at the following festivals:

The Bird’s Eye View Festival – London, England. March 5th – 13th.

The Ann Arbor Film Festival – Ann Arbor, Michigan. March 24 – 29th.

The Dresden Film Festival – Dresden, Germany. April 14th – 19th.

The Atlanta Film Festival – Atlanta, Georgia, April 16th – 25th.

The River Run Film Festival – Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA. April 22nd – 29th.

It will also be playing the Queen’s Film Theater in Belfast, when they show the TRICK OF THE LIGHT short film program, at some point in the near future (I can’t say exactly when because I don’t know).

I don’t think I can do it, but it sure would be fun to take the bike down to Winston-Salem and see “Pop Art” in front of an audience.

I expect early November to be a low activity time here on the blog; the next two weeks are shaping up busy. This also means – with my apologies – that we’re going to have to hold off until late November on the first meeting of the Words + Pictures book club, to discuss AMERICAN WIFE & AMERICAN WIDOW. I still have a lot of WIFE to read and no time at all to work up my mini-essay on it. Of course, this is good news if you wanted in on the action, but hadn’t started the books, and was feeling like maybe it was too late. Nope.

I did have one bit of news this morning I wanted to pass on. Apparently “Pop Art” earned the audience award for best narrative short film at the Austin Film Festival. Naturally I’m just tied in a big happy knot over the news. And look – so is Arthur Roth:

“Pop Art” has landed in a few more festivals: the Brief Encounters show in Bristol, and the Leeds International Film Festival, both, obviously, in the UK. Down below the jump I’ll put up a list of all of Art’s upcoming appearances, including dates and places already mentioned.

Amanda Boyle now has a reel of her work up on her website, which includes several highlights from “Pop Art” and one complete scene. WARNING – if you haven’t read the short story, or even if you have, but you want to see the movie in its entirety someday, without spoilers, you’ll probably want to skip her video. But for the curious… here it is.

I have a couple other things I’ve been meaning to mention, but I prefer to keep entries focused on one topic, so I’ll tie this one off, and maybe post again later on.

And here’s the current list of “Pop Art’s” festival engagements:

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Amanda Boyle was good enough to pass along some info about where the short film of “Pop Art” will be making it’s first appearances. English audiences will be able to catch it at the 52nd London Film Festival and American viewers will find it at the Austin film festival. Both festivals take place in mid-October. I don’t believe you’ll find it on the program for either just yet, but I’m sure as they update their websites, it’ll, uh, pop in there.

More dates to come.

UPDATE 9/11/08: Here are the times and dates on “Pop Art” in London.

‘Cause it just felt like time for another “Pop Art” poster. Dig. As before, picture credits Empire Design.

… and the talented Bill Milner (Son of Rambow).

Image courtesy of Empire Design, which created several beautiful, striking posters for Amanda Boyle’s forthcoming short adaptation of “Pop Art.” I’ll probably be posting some of the others over the next couple weeks.

Here are three sentences about “Pop Art” for the message board book group:

1. Years ago I wrote a story called “Indie Film” and in it, two scruffy Spielberg wannabees make a short movie about a man with a magic pin, which he sticks into people to make them explode like balloons; and that was the kernel that led to me writing “Pop Art.”

2. “Pop Art” itself is on the way to becoming an indie film, made by UK director Amanda Boyle; her version hews very close to the short story, except the characters are all English and presumably like cricket and say “wo’t” instead of “what” and so on.

3. The narrator of the story doesn’t have a name; other nameless narrators appear in “Dead-Wood,” and “Scheherazade’s Typewriter.”

BTW, Ghosts caught a nice bit of ink yesterday morning in USA TODAY – link is here.

I had a chance to read at Borders Books in Bangor a few days ago (where the message board was well represented… thanks for coming out guys), and while I was there I came across a surprising artifact. They had a display of the new Sony eBook Reader, with one of them switched on to allow customers to play around with it. So I read about two paragraphs of the story on the screen… before realizing I was looking at my story, “Pop Art.”

So maybe now is a good time to mention that the new Sony Reader comes preloaded with “Pop Art” already on it – something I knew had been set up, but had kind of forgotten about. It was quite a charge to come across one in the wild with that story already cued up on it. Anyone ever played around with one of these? Any thoughts about eBook readers, pro or con? On the plus side, it looks like a pretty sweet piece of gear. On the down side, I imagine myself in an airport reading the last 30 pages of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows… and then the screen begins to blink LOW BATTERY, before blanking out and going dead. Something which will never happen with a hardcover.

There have been a few questions lately about the awards for the chalkoff, such as: where the hell are they, writer boy? Most of the prizes will ship today if I can get to the Post Office. The only thing that won’t go out are copies of “The Saved” for the simple reason that PS Publishing doesn’t have them ready yet. But everything else will be in the mail and on its way to the winners shortly.

Over on the message board, the unstoppable Dana Jean has started a kind of virtual book club, to talk about the stories in 20th Century Ghosts. I’m going to stay out of it – if someone wants to say they hated a story, they should be able to do so without being afraid the author is going to leap in to furiously defend his bruised ego. But I did think that I could say a few things about each story here on the blog, as it comes up in discussion over there. I’m thinking, like, three sentences. This week they’re talking about “Best New Horror,” the story that opens the book, so here are three sentences about that:

1. I stuck “Best New Horror” up at the front of the book because I thought it could serves as a kind of thesis statement for the rest of the collection – I saw it as a chance to spout off about horror’s unique power as a genre, and its place in the larger literary landscape.

2. Also when I wrote it, I was finishing up the collection, and I felt strongly that 20th Century Ghosts needed a story with some inbred chainsaw murderers in it.

3. As Val points out, the story features the word “twat.”

See, wasn’t that enlightening?