Arrowette's Diary

I’m not sure how the universe has withstood Rich Stevens (DIESEL SWEETIES) and Ariana Osborne (SHIVERING SANDS, this site, designing various things of mine at Avatar) teaming up to produce a t-shirt, of all things… but this is the result.

Available to order now, ships in 1 - 2 weeks.

Simon Reynolds is one of my favourite writers. It’s funny, really: I agree with what he writes maybe half the time, at best, but he says it so fucking well, and in such a way that I always have to think about the subject again.

He’s now doing notes on the decade at the Guardian, beginning with a piece on "beard rock." I was, I admit, hoping for a clue as to why I find Will Oldham so inexplicably creepy, but, you know, it’s a fun piece anyway:

…beardedness is tantamount to a visual rhetoric, almost a form of authentication, as though the band are wearing their music on their faces…

So, one week later. Copies of SHIVERING SANDS are now starting to arrive with people — I found this on Kat Foisy’s blog this morning:

(If you want to send me a photo of you posing with SHIVERING SANDS? Email it to my dump address at warrenellis [at] gmail dot com, along with your website address or twitter ID or whatever, and I’ll run it and your link here)

A week since launch of the book. We’ve sold, I believe, a little over four hundred copies. Given that the production of the book involved 1) me culling from seven years of jabbering and sticking it all into a couple of RTF files 2) Ariana flowing all that into a single file and spending a couple months’ worth of spare moments fiddling with it 3) Ariana uploading the thing, ordering a proof and spending an hour checking it over… we were well into any definition of profit by the end of day one.

It is, of course, the long game that pays off. It’s interesting to look at the first week, but it’s not defining.

A persistent criticism of my interest in POD has been that only writers at my level of cultural awareness can make any kind of success out of it. And some of them will now be saying, well, even Warren Ellis can only move 400 copies in the first week of a POD project. But, for one thing, it is about the long game. For everybody. The book doesn’t go away. And, for another, if I’m not aware enough of you to order that POD project — whose fault is that, really? Because, I’ve got to tell you, I wasn’t born with a book deal in one hand and an exclusive comics contract wrapped around my other flipper. Hell, when I was starting out, there wasn’t even an internet.

SHIVERING SANDS is published through Lulu.

• 14:36 FYI: The Netflix instant streaming for PS3 works like a champ. Now have more movies and TV than I could ever possibly watch. A good thing? #

• 13:08 I'm hungry and I need to change the oil in my car. Those two are not related, but I intend to solve both problems today. #
• 13:10 @WildStorm this is a mystery you've created for us Scott, don't leave us hanging! Was it Joel? perhaps Ben! we must know who eats chinese! #
• 13:22 Bleeding Cool shows stats saying 1 in 10 read comics: bit.ly/2nSnnC #
• 16:23 My car loves me today and I'm now going to work on a new script. #
• 16:24 @emersonryan kick ass lookin! #
• 20:36 @jteamjason WRONG! The meaning is to be legendary! #

Thanks for advice etc peeps!

The more time I spend away from him, the more I am convinced I am doing the right thing...i think I have been swept up in it all a bit (it HAS been ten years), but looking at the situation, I just don't really want a boyfriend right now. I wish I didn't have to have put lee through all this before I figured that out, but I guess life isn't always easy or painless, eh...at least I have been honest about it, sometimes that's all you can hope for I suppose..

In other less soap opera news, I have been working on my Power Corps comic more...I have 4 pages fully finished now! Yay!! I have come to the conclusion that I need a lightbox though...I can't imagine it would be too expensive to make one, I just need a wooden frame, a piece of perspex/glass and a light, I'm sure even my limited handiman skills could manage that much. I can't remember if my ex has one or not, I might ask him about it..

The other sad news du jour is that my friend wes broke my iPhone on Halloween night *sniff* it has a rank web of cracks across half the screen and keeps getting worse...apple want $249 to fix it, and cheerily advised me that I could then get my insurance to cover it...but I have to pay $125 to get it on insurance anyway, so I might as well just let them handle it. Wes said he would make it up to me and everyone seems to think I should make him pay for it, but it's not like he did it deliberately and it kind of feels a bit scummy making a friend fork out that much just for my phone.

Finally, I had the day off work yesterday with some weird gastro thing...I am still feeling a bit blehh but the joy of being a temp is no sick pay. Blahh.

That was a bit Herculean, good on y'all if you got this far...have a cookie! :D

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