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Over on Tor.com: Soon I Will Be Invincible

And on The New Sleekness: More hand-waving.

My inbox overfloweth with WIN today. Christopher Beaumont, one of the recipients of the Little Brother print I made (inspired by the eponymous book by one Cory Doctorow) created this kickass papercraft model of Camerahead, one of the characters in the print. He will be posting has posted a downloadable printout on his site, Cubeecraft.com, later on today, so that you can make your own.

Go check out Cubeecraft, they’ve got a busload of cool papercraft figures for your crafting pleasure. My favourite (aside from this one, of course)? Why, Rusty Venture, hands down.

This is NOT for the squeamish (but do check it out if you can stomach it). The book trailer for The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson:

Is live (and has been for most of the day, I’ve just been…busy. You know, with the day job and all). Check out my review of the cover for Halting State by Charles Stross here, along with a whole bunch of really insightful comments from the Tor.com community. It’s been fantastic to have a place where people can sound off, and react to my particular views on cover design.

Comic Con is now over. It was fun, and hectic, and full of work, and some booze, and lots of cool, cool people. One of the highlights for me, as with Comic Con New York, was to meet so many awesome people who I either know only through IM or Twitter, or who I don’t know at all, but am familiar with their work. Among the former group, Tobias S. Buckell (one of our writers at Tor. Go check out his work now, you won’t be disappointed) and I found that we have even more in common than we thought before we met face to face and had a few drinks. Among the latter, I got to meet Charles Stross and Vernor Vinge, two of my favorite authors. Additionally, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders from io9 turned out to be some of the coolest, most gracious, fun, and genuinely kind people I’ve met here. I’m honored to have them as colleagues.

And then there are the illustrators. I’ve met and gotten to know many people whose work I’ve admired from afar for a very long time, such as Gregory Manchess (whose demo was fascinating. Watching him work is awe-inspiring), Jon Foster, Terry Moore, Donato Giancola, Dave Palumbo, Rebecca Guay, Dan Dos Santos, Todd Lockwood, and Stephan Martiniere; and have found them to be wonderfully witty, gracious, intelligent, and incredibly interesting, to a person. As I sat at a hotel lobby bar last night, having a beer with all these cats (and trying not to nod off due to lack of sleep), I couldn’t imagine that I could be luckier. Who would have thought, five years ago, when I was grinding through and drowning in the advertising world, that I would be sharing good times with the very same people I’ve admired from afar since I first went to college, waaay back in 1998?

Speaking of luck, my flight back to NYC last night was canceled due to weather, so I’m ‘stuck’ in San Diego until tonight. This means that I get to go to the San Diego Zoo later on in the day, as I’d originally planned to do before the Con started, but didn’t have the time. Even better: I get to go with a bunch of the aforementioned illustrators. Life works out, sometimes.

Cory Doctorow alerted me to some pics he snapped at the University of Washington Bookstore of this badass cosplay costume based on the print I made, which was inspired by Cory’s latest Tor book, Little Brother. To paraphrase Irene Gallo, I’m digging the creativity that’s coming off of this book. This is so, so awesome. Click through for Cory’s photoset, wherein he plays the role of Marcus, complete with slinghshot!

Abi Sutherland, Making Light contributor and bookbinder extraordinaire, asked me for some of the off-register misprints from the first Little Brother edition, in order to put them to some good use. Well, she’s designed and made a kickass binding out of them, and showed me the pictures today. I then proceeded to run around the office like a thirteen-year-old showing everyone I could find her beautiful work.

The dynamic between Camera Head on the front cover and Marcus on the back works beautifully (check out Abi’s Flickr photoset for images of the spine, the back, and the open spread), and the layout of the type is bold and in-your-face, true to the spirit of the book.

This is a perfect example of why sharing your work and letting others remix it rawks.

Matt Mason has finally been cleared by his publishers to make The Pirate’s Dilemma available as a pay-what-you-wish download. The PDF e-book is available here.
I’ve already snagged my copy; I’ve been meaning to read this book for a while now, but my to-read stack of physical books has been pleading with me to not add to its bulk. However, a PDF which I can read on my laptop? Full of win.
I can’t wait to get started. From what I’ve been able to read so far, via various excerpts online, the book should be chock-full of good, forward-thinking insight. I’m sure a close reading will engender one or two posts here, so this won’t be the last time I mention it.

  

Little Brother

Originally uploaded by pablodefendini

The Little Brother print is finished, after a weekend in the printshop, featuring various mishaps and frustrations, and many, many learning experiences (may those never end!). In all, I have ten copies that need a good home, so if you want one, and are willing to PayPal me some shipping money, leave me a comment. First come, first served.
And for the latecomers: don’t worry. I’ve now perfected the process for this print—I’ll print more at some point in the near future, and make a large (50-100) edition.

This is the final iteration of my Little Brother piece. I’ve re-worked the Camera-Head, and added some more detail to its blazer. In the end, as soon as I realized that I was designing a poster (for myself) as opposed to a mass market book cover (for the particular needs of the mass market), I decided to leave the idea of a textural background aside. For similar reasons, I’ve also replaced the Neil Gaiman blurb with the book’s tag-line, and integrated the arphid graphic from the spine of the cover design.

I’m diggin’ it.

Tomorrow, I’ll go get myself some ink and figure out the separations. I’ll get the seps printed on Friday morning, and hopefully will be in the print shop at Pratt by mid-afternoon. I’m itching to get back in there—it’s been way too long. . . .