A brief Love-Your-Indie update: all but a single winner has been successfully contacted, and prizes will be going out shortly (I’m mailing a bunch today, and others will come from Subterranean and PS in due course). However: a certain Scott C. from Maine should send an email to indie@joehillfiction.com… the email address he used to post his entry is no longer valid, and so I haven’t been able to confirm his shipping address. I hesitate to send him his prize without hearing from him, just ’cause the book he won is rare and kinda costly, and I want to be sure he gets it.

Gabriel Rodriguez is selling some of his hallucinatory Locke & Key cover work over at ComicArtFans. I could talk it up, but this is one case where a picture is worth quite a bit more than a thousand words. Get an eyeful:

That one and more over at ComicArtFans. Check ‘em out.

Wolfram Alpha is a bust. It hasn’t been able to answer a single question I’ve asked it; I’m at the point now where I want it to answer something, anything, just to put me out of my misery. Because questions are itches – you only feel relief when they get scratched with an answer.

In that spirit, I have decided to make June 1st answer day here on joehillfiction.com. Ask a question in the comments thread of this post, any question, on any subject; come June first, I’ll answer as many as I feel like can reasonably get to. All queries must be in by May 29th. Note: it’s not first come, first served. The better/more interesting/more inventive the question, the more likely I’ll have some kind of reply.

Now I don’t promise my answers will contain any useful information. I don’t even promise they’ll be correct (put another way, you can give me a question off your Trig final, but if you’re actually so dull-witted you turn it in, that’s on you; I won’t be held responsible for your F). In fact, it’s likely I’ll answer most of them with one of my famous facts-from-Joe’s-ass. But at least you won’t go away completely and utterly unsatisfied. Only somewhat unsatisfied.

Remember too, that it is my policy to reveal as little as possible about upcoming work, or work in progress. Actually sort of a superstition with me. So by all means, ask away about what I’m writing now, and remember that a little frustration never killed anyone.

Hat tip to Brian K. Vaughan, who used to do this exact same thing on his blog/message board (actually, now that I think about it, Scalzi also has a riff along these lines).

Fire away guys. Happiness is coming. Soon all will be answered.

Update: Oh, hey, and don’t worry! If your question is a little unclear, Wolfram Joey’s Advanced Artificial Intelligence™ (emphasis on artificial) will transcribe your question from what you actually asked, to what you meant to ask. For example, say you asked “What was the GDP of the U.K. in 2007?” I’ll understand that you really meant, “Who is your favorite English author?” and will be glad to tell you.  See how great this is?

… on Wednesday. Oh, let’s just see if this works. Here’s a new way of previewing the issue:

… 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.

I’ve been bad about keeping this blog the last couple weeks, I know; in my defense, I’ve been busy with offline writing. In fact, the website as a whole has begun to collect a vaguely disused feeling to it. Just a few weeks ago, a friend wrote to complain that the Recent & Recommended hasn’t changed in over a year (which sort of strains the definition of “Recent” when you think about it). And I thought, oh, yeah, I’ll get right to fixing that, and then promptly forgot all about it.

The best part of the Recent & Recommended was the Anticipated Pleasure. For me, anyway, the anticipation of a thing is often more exciting than actually getting it. To put another way, what I liked best about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was waiting in line to buy it, eleven-thirty in the evening, out on the street in front of my local indie bookstore in my small town. There were all these teenagers ahead of me, and I remember watching them as they got their books and filed out of the store, with a look of calm, happy expectation on their faces. They’d hold up their books and people still waiting in line would cheer for them. I was sort of moved. These were kids who grew up on those stories; Harry was their companion as they advanced steadily towards adulthood; they were there that evening, not to celebrate the release of a book, but their own passing childhoods.

Since it’s Friday, and I haven’t done a Friday Five for a while, and because it’s also been a long time since I stuck up a new Anticipated Pleasure on the Recent & Recommended Page, I thought I’d make a list of the five things I’m looking forward to most this summer. They appear after the jump.

And what about you? Got something good you’re waiting on? Stick ‘er in the comments thread, I’m curious.

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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.