1. message from another place

"Hey cool, I'm dead!"

Or at least, elsewhere in time. Sitting down to write a missive longer than a tweet feels like I'm reaching forward from some distant past, a time when I wrote something like...blog posts?

(Oh, is this insufferable? Is this why we stopped doing this? Guess we'll find out together.) Welcome to:

THE SCORPIO ROOM

• Agenda

• Greetings

• Statement of intent

• New business

• Call to action

• Oh, right, I write books

• POTPOURRI

• Closing 

GREETINGS

And thanks for coming. 

STATEMENT OF INTENT 

I, like many of us, am Tired of Twitter. Frankly, I sought a less noisy way to keep up with writers I liked, and found myself looking forward to the newsletters I liked. Hopefully you can look forward to this one like I look forward to those.

NEW BUSINESS

So, the website is up! That's neat! I'm no Tony Hawk when it comes to surfin’ the web, but I listen to a lot of podcasts with Squarespace discount codes. It isn’t as easy as those ads make it sound, but I’m pretty bad at software, so it’s probably quite intuitive. Take a look if you like - the site isn’t terribly active yet and is largely my attempt to give people a nice Google result when they’re looking for me, but it does have a STORE. 

ABOUT THE STORE: we're trying it. It's just Blake (my sometimes cowriter and alltimes husband) and I tackling it, but I'm going to lose it if I can't get some of these comps out of my house. In a world without cons and signings, they pile up. I'll let you newsletter folks know when I restock it, and you'll know before I tell Twitter or anyone else, so it’s like a reward for you for being here and reading. Sound good? Yeah.

Anyway, let's hope the store is a good thing, and a way for y'all to get signed stuff from me while cons are still unsafe, but be kind: its a small operation. 

CALL TO ACTION

Go ahead and leave me comments, questions, things you want me to see. If you're taking the time to read this, you seem cool. You want me to see your webcomic or your fanart, you can post it and I’ll take a look. Please be cool. I don't want to have to block you like I blocked other popular newsletter writer Chip Zdarsky.

OH RIGHT, I WRITE BOOKS

This week I have two books in stores: EXCALIBUR #19 with my always-incredible art team of Marcus To and Erick Arciniega, and a story with art god Ken Lashley on CARNAGE: BLACK WHITE & BLOOD. Been putting some of that terrible Dark Ages energy from my recent reading (see below) into that Carnage story. 

EXCALIBUR 19 finally coming out this week was a huge weight off of my shoulders. I left a chunk of my soul in that issue, for real, and not knowing how people were going to feel about it was definitely daunting. But now it’s out in the world. People have been immeasurably kind. I’m grateful to have moved this story forward.

Now they’ve got [SPOILER] to deal with next issue, so that’ll be fun.

POTPOURRI

• Hickman showed the X-Slack the PBS EONS YouTube channel and I can’t stop watching it. Fantastic stuff about dinosaurs, geologic time, and how Neanderthals were actually quite sweet, and that’s why they died. 💔

• Just finished The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell. I really enjoyed it but I don’t know if I can recommend it to everyone - it is, after all, a tale of war in post-Roman Britain, and thus terribly full of the horrors of war. Now I’m reading Final Crisis. Kind of a 180.

• Can’t stop eating pears. I'll do a Bartlett or an Anjou but there is nothing like an Asian pear, purchased from the grocery store with a cold aloe juice on the way home from rollerskating.

• Si Spurrier is such a good writer, you guys. He’s just so good. His new book WAY OF X hits Final Order Cutoff on Monday, so if you want to read about Nightcrawler’s groovy new mutant way of life (you DO) tell your local shop.

  

• I'm gonna wake up and meditate tomorrow morning, you guys. Hold me to this.

• Let’s continue to get involved in racial justice and support Asian communities and Asian people now and moving forward.

CLOSING

Man, that was really fun. I might send out another little note when I update the store on Sunday, but otherwise, see y’all next week?

TH

17:25 3.25.21 - The Valley.