There’s a lot happening with LOCKE & KEY over the next month. Maybe a visual will help. This, from editor Chris Ryall:

You’re looking at the small avalanche of LOCKE & KEY stuff that will be arriving in comic shops and bookstores on August 11th. They are: the hardcover edition of LOCKE & KEY (Vol. 3): CROWN OF SHADOWS; the beginning of the new story arc, KEYS TO THE KINGDOM #1; and WELCOME TO LOVECRAFT #1: LEGACY EDITION, a $1 reprint of the very first LOCKE & KEY story.

For those who haven’t been following the comic, KEYS TO THE KINGDOM #1, and the $1 LEGACY EDITION are great places to jump in and give it a try. KEYS will be a series of standalone LOCKE & KEY stories (except for the final two issues, which work as a two-parter). You don’t need to be a devotee or a longtime follower to drop in and enjoy them. And LEGACY is more than just another edition of a story which has already been reprinted a few times. It also includes an 8-page “Story So Far” feature in the back – hosted by a damn fine looking hunk of manmeat – which covers everything else that’s happened since LOCKE & KEY began. It isn’t the same as reading the stories themselves, but it does catch you up on the highlights.

And for those of you looking to lay hands on signed copies, there are a few ways to get them:

Signing: July 29th (Thurs), 7PM — NYC. BARNES & NOBLE (82nd and Broadway). IDW has hooked the 82nd St Barnes & Noble up with advance copies of CROWN OF SHADOWS; I’ll be there this Thursday to sign CoS, other volumes of LOCKE & KEY, HORNS, HEART-SHAPED BOX, and 20th CENTURY GHOSTS. Don’t let me be lonely, guys… come see me!

Pre-Sign: August 12th — SALEM, MA. CORNERSTONE BOOKS. Between now and August 11th, you can preorder a signed, personalized copy of CROWN OF SHADOWS, and up to two other books, through Cornerstone Books in Salem, MA. They’re happy to ship wherever you live (although the shipping costs are on you). Note that this is not an in-store appearance. The only way to get your books is by contacting Cornerstone to preorder.

There are a few ground rules: I’ll only sign up to three books per household. One of them has to be CROWN OF SHADOWS, but the other two can be anything else I’ve written. All three books will be autographed, although I’ll only personalize and/or doodle one of them. Cornerstone Books will make every effort to deliver your books to you in mint, but they won’t accept returns. No one can promise there won’t be a scuff mark somewhere on one of your books. Here’s the info on Cornerstone Books:

CORNERSTONE BOOKS

45 Lafayette Street

Salem, MA 01970

978 744-1831

Email/Contact Page

Signing: August 14th, 4-6 PM — PORTLAND, ME. CASABLANCA COMICS. I’ll be in Casablanca Comics on the afternoon of the 14th to sign KEYS TO THE KINGDOM #1, WTL: LEGACY, CROWN OF SHADOWS, and all the other volumes in the LOCKE & KEY series. This is a great comic store in the Old Port. If you’re in the area, come on down and say hello.

Stay tuned… if there are other signings to announce, I’ll post them as soon as they’re scheduled.

I wrote the first draft of this story – it’s a standalone titled “Beyond Repair” – as part of HEAD GAMES, but when I hit the last page, I realized I was going to have to put it aside for a while. Because when you get to the last page, it’s pretty clear that we’ve reached the halfway point of the overarching story, and I didn’t think it had been properly prepared for way back in HEAD GAMES. So this one has been waiting for about a year and a half. Oh, and also, it’s the first and only time I’ve ever had to make a chart to write a story.

I just wanted to thank Chris Ryall, Robbie Robbins, Jay Fotos, Ted Adams and all the IDW crew for their hard work on CROWN OF SHADOWS… and I want to especially thank Gabriel Rodriguez, who turned in some of his best work ever, while battling through a series of personal setbacks that would’ve kicked the legs out from under most people (including his whole fucking country falling down around his ears). I can’t imagine a more fun collaboration.

Thanks as well to everyone who’s been reading these stories. At the time of this writing, I’m about midway through the fourth storyline, KEYS TO THE KINGDOM, and for the first time I have more of LOCKE & KEY behind me than I have ahead of me. I hope you stick around for the end. I’m gonna try real hard not to screw it up.

(UPDATED 6/14)

Next Tuesday, Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio are out with STORIES: All-New Tales, a collection of genre-fuzzing fictions from an eclectic mix of great writers. I consider myself fortunate to have a story of my own in there, “The Devil on the Staircase” (my current favorite thing to do at readings).

On the same day STORIES is released, Tuesday the 15th, Neil Gaiman and Al will be in New York City, at Columbia University, to talk about the imagination and the increasingly scuffed line between genre and mainstream fiction. Several contributors will be on stage with him, including Kurt Andersen, Jeffrey Ford, Walter Mosley, Lawrence Block, Kat Howard, and yours truly; ace editor Ellen Datlow will also be a part of the panel.* Here are the gory details:

Horace Mann Auditorium

Teachers College

Columbia University

7:00 PM

Hope to see you there.

In other news, as of this morning, Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2, edited by William Schafer, is up for preorder here. I’ve got a story in that one, too, “Wolverton Station,” which is about a corporate hatchet-man who climbs onto a train in London and finds himself carried away into the sort of country that lies at the heart of the darkest sort of fairy tales. Dark Fantasy 2 is set to feature cover art by Dave McKean, and will be out in January 2011.

* ace editor Ellen Datlow will be in attendance, but not actually on the panel; my bad.

I was thinkin’ about scrapping this fiction bullshit and writing a cookbook, but then when the publishing world pissed themselves laughing and told me to get a real job, I remembered the blog and figured it would just be easier to post my recipes here.

So here’s the recipe for The Roswell Invader, so named ’cause it looks like a UFO, and if you cook it right it squirts alien death juice down your face when you bite into it. Also every Invader carries a crew of two alien meat-slivers, hell bent on ruling the world, or at least your lower intestinal tract. Put a grease-slicked smile on a child’s face, and cook this one for your kids next time you’re in charge of breakfast. Check it out – after the jump:

Ingredients:

Fresh eggs

Colby cheese

Mini-bagels

Pepperoni

Cream Cheese

Tabasco Sauce (if desired, i.e., your children aren’t bawling wimps)

Butter

Implements:

A stovetop, or a pit filled with licking fire.

A weird frying pan like the one in the pictures. Or a normal frying pan and a round cookie cutter.

A toaster.

Steps:

• Dish a little butter in the pan, then drop an egg in there. You want to drop the egg in purty, too, so the yolk doesn’t bust. Pretend it’s one of your own testicles. If you had to lower your testicle into a heated pan, you wouldn’t just drop it there, would you? In a normal pan, you can break the egg into the cookie cutter to keep it perfectly round. And that’s the plan. You want a round egg, not one shaped like Texas or like the grody birthmark on your Aunt Sally’s face. Cook the thing over medium-low heat.

• Toast a mini-bagel. Don’t make me tell you how to run your own toaster.

• Use a spoon and flip the egg, then slap a piece of Colby Cheese on it. Look at how beautiful my fuckin’ hand is. I should’ve been a hand model. The way my veins crawl through the back of it – it’s like a Michaelangelo hand, just like Adam reaching out to touch God, if God was a piece of Colby Jack cheese hovering over an egg saturated in cholesterol.

• Then the pepperoni. Don’t make me tell you what to do with the pepperoni. You should be able to figure it out. Cook ‘em till they’re shining in their own oil. By the time you take them out of the pan, they should have a greasy sheen on them. You want them about as iridescent as the ocean off the Louisiana coast.

• Here’s what they look like when they go together. God that’s beautiful. At this juncture you can splash a little Tabasco sauce on it. Set aside a bottle of Tagamet for later. If anyone is eating more than one, check the bathrooms and make sure you’re not running low on toilet paper.

• Oh fucking yes. To do it right, you want to butter the bagel, then slather on roughly six inches of cream cheese. Pretend you’re BP playing “Top Kill.”

When you serve the finished result to children, make weird scifi sounds as you settle the plate in front of them — eeeeee-yoooo-eeeee-whaaaaa — and insist it looks exactly like the crashed UFO that the government has parked in an abandoned missile silo in Denver. A steady diet of these is all but guaranteed to kill you before you’re forty of heart disease, and when it’s time for the funeral, they’ll have to slather you in butter and cream cheese, just to fit your gargantuan fat ass into the coffin.

And there. Breakfast, baby. Oh, and hey, if any of you food channel bitches want to sign me up for my own cooking show, I’ve got afternoons free; contact my agent for my asking price.

Got a classic recipe of your own? Drop it in the deep fat fryer of the comments thread. Tssssshhh!

I’ll get into my reasons (some of my reasons), but before I do, let me say that this isn’t a reflection on the folks who visit the board. Quite the opposite – if not for the fun, pleasant, sweet, and supportive community that frequents the MB, I probably would’ve shut it down last fall. It’s been a digital hangout for some great people (Betsyboo, Mark and Mary, Patrick, Barry Wood, this_girl, New England Gothic, just to name a small few). You guys are the best. I’m flattered as all get out that you had some fun with the board; it’s been a pleasure dropping in to eavesdrop on your conversations over the last couple years.

So what is my thinking? More after the jump.

One challenge of the modern writing game is trying to figure out how to use the tools of the internet, both to support your fiction, and also (if you’re lucky) to have some fun and maybe do something creative. And there’s only so much time. If I rarely update the blog, that’s largely a matter of brute arithmetic. I spend 6 hours a day writing new fiction, and 6 more with my family. That’s a schedule that doesn’t leave me with a lot of time to look after the online real estate. Although it was only officially deleted a month ago, I actually shitcanned the MySpace page back in 2009 and I’ve never been much interested in joining FaceBook. I was thinking about jumping in on GoodReads, then remembered I haven’t logged into LibraryThing in almost a year. The switchboard of my brain can, apparently, only have so many things plugged into it at once. Maybe you know the feeling. The social networking stuff is great right up until the moment it begins to vampire away the juice from the rest of your life.

It doesn’t, at a glance, look like I contribute much to the message board. That’s partly by design; I decided a long time ago to keep my overbearing ass out of that space, so as to avoid becoming the bore at the dinner party barging into everyone’s conversations. Shane and I, however, both spend a fair amount of time observing, pruning, managing, and sorting out tech problems. Unfortunately, neither of us much have the time for it anymore, and I’d rather not have the board continue unsupervised. I feel responsible for it, in a sense, and I’m unwilling to just orphan it. I’m either going to manage it myself and be involved (even if my involvement is invisible), or I’ve got to close it down. (Now here’s the part where someone kindly volunteers to manage the MB for me. Thank you, and I appreciate your offer, but I have to pass.)

Also: Twitter. I love me Twitter. It’s fun – that simple. It also offers a lot of the best aspects of a message board – community, conversation, connection, and many other ‘c’ words – while eliminating some of the less fun elements. Someone acting like a troll? Just block ‘em. Want more variety then you can get on a board egotistically fixated on the work of one minor horror writer? Follow other people: your family, your friends, other writers and entertainers. Message boards can be fun places, but by their nature are tilted towards a small number of subjects. Twitter, by contrast, is a loud, energetic party, full of great talk, on a variety of topics; drop in and drop out as you please. Joe Bob says come on in, the water is great.

But hey, you don’t have to agree with me! And you also don’t have to say goodbye to the crew who formed up around the joehillfiction message board. There are several other fine forums where you can continue the conversations you started there. Locke & Key lovers will find lots of space to chat on the IDW message board; readers of the books will find welcoming homes at goodreads and LibraryThing. Remember, too, that almost every post on this blog has a comments thread, where wide-roaming conversations are the norm (koffkoff – yes, I am looking at you, Vicki). And for now, anyway, the blog and website are continuing concerns, along with the twitterfeed.

Thanks for your understanding, guys. Hope there’s no hard feelings on this one.

And here’s what Miz B had to say about the penultimate issue of CoS:

(Yeah, yeah, I know. You don’t hear from me round these parts for a month, then I go and blog twice in one day. Go figure.)

And that is all.

This is out today:

Yes, it was also out last Wednesday. But owing to a kink in the distribution chain, Locke & Key #4 didn’t arrive in a broad swath of the US last week; didn’t turn up in the UK either. It finally made it into most stores today, however, and Newsarama says you should run out and pick it up (scroll down to find the review).

I blasted through Toronto on Monday, to do about a week of events in 24 hours. There were a lot of highlights, but I especially enjoyed two. The first was an appearance on The Hour, a late night show hosted by George Stroumboulopoulos. Link is here – it was an unusually long interview for a TV thing, and we had some fun. Although I apparently need to say “Y’know” a whole lot less. The interview starts at about the 26:00 mark.

And the last reading of the tour, at the Merril Collection, a part of the Toronto Public Library, was great fun, and the ideal way to wind things up. Did you know the Merril Collection has the biggest collection of scifi and fantasy novels in the world? A collection so valuable, the entrance to the library is protected by a Griffin and a Hippogriff? Well, I mean, obviously. You don’t guard books this important with just a couple rent-a-cops:

I had a good time on the tour, and was glad to spend time with some old friends, and some new. Big thanks to all the editors and author escorts who showed me around the west coast, the east coast, England and Toronto. Hopefully it won’t be three years between tours this time.

That’s also a wrap on the website for the next couple weeks. I’ll probably burp up occasional, completely inessential comments on Twitter, but other than that I’m laying low, and getting some work done. Be well everyone, and a whole lot of thanks for being so good to me while I was out on the road.

I’ll be reading tonight at a place with a very long name: The Toronto Public Library/Lillian Smith Library in the Merril Collection (239 College Street). Hope you can make it. The reading gets going at 7 PM.

Had myself a good time in England – and here was a particularly nice moment. St. Paul’s Cathedral, out in the sun by myself, listening to the bells. Only now it’s like you were there too. (Quicktime video at the link – cool, huh?).

Bells