Quickie… And some shameless plugs.

I’m wiped out, friends. The last couple of weeks at school have been rough. I’ve got NaNoWriMo going on right now. I’m pretty sure this thing growing on my shoulder is alive and plotting the overthrow of Cambodia. I’m spent. So I’m giving today to hanging out with the gang and just trying to relax for a change. I’ve heard good things about relaxation. I thought I’d try it for once.

If you’re really desperate to read some stuff I’m writing, may I suggest you check out my other two blogs, which are quickly on their way to becoming world famous and would be highly appreciative if you started adding them to sites like StumbleUpon? Tales of the Curtain has begun its regular twice-a-week schedule, and this week the first two ongoing storylines have begin. And The Back Issue Bin continues to present older reviews daily, with the occasional newer one mixed in. Do, please, check them out.

Welcome to the 2010 Evertime Realms Halloween Party!

Hey, everybody! It’s October first, and that means that we’ve entered my favorite time of year. The October-November-December trifecta of holiday awesome simply cannot be matched by anything in the previous nine months, and even though I’m going to be really busy for the next two weekends with the play (it’s also our opening night!) that doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore my duties here, giving out a wealth of Halloween, horror, creepy and ghoulish content over the next 31 days.

While I can’t promise that every day we’ll have a Halloween article (I do intend to keep giving you chapters of Other People’s Heroes, plus my other regular features), I’ve got a lot of stuff planned, including…

• The usual movie and book reviews
• Classic Halloween “Think About It” and “Everything But Imaginary” columns
• Daily reviews of Halloween and horror comics at the Back Issue Bin website
• The annual 2 in 1 Showcase Halloween movie marathon — this year featuring Universal Pictures’ Wolfman franchise
• And on the week before Halloween, the premiere of my new writing experiment, The Curtain.

Plus anything else that occurs to me during the month as being fun.

I’ve got a play tonight (I may have mentioned that), but I’ll be back tomorrow with my first horror movie review of the year. Enjoy October, friends, and I’ll do my best to help you do the same. Happy Halloween!

Getting back to work…

Erin is back home again, and to get my mind off it, I’m going to get some work done. This means, in large part, catching up on reviews of recent comics, mainly for Comixtreme.com, but also for my own site, The Back Issue Bin. I’ve taken to posting more and more comic book reviews here at Evertime Realms in the last few months, and it’s occurred to me that’s kind of silly. I established a whole new blog specifically for the purpose of posting comic book reviews, so why am I duplicating my efforts here? So in addition to the old reviews brought back from internet purge obscurity, in addition to the “Somebody’s First Comic Book” pieces I’ve been posting at the BIB since the beginning of June, I’m going to now start a queue of recent comic reviews in my files, where I’ll post one each day – reviews of comics that other reviewers at CX already covered, or books that I didn’t get to read until they were no longer timely, concerns that of course won’t matter at my own site. This will include future Brightest Day reviews – except for those that are posted at Comixtreme, of course. I maintain my vow that every Brightest Day tie-in I read will be reviewed either at CX or at the BIB. And you’ll be able to follow all of them as I constantly update the Archive.

The other thing I’m going to be working on are the edits to Opening Night of the Dead. I printed out the manuscript, put it in a binder, and spent my downtime during Annie rehearsals to work on editing the document. (I’ve discovered that I do much better work editing my own stuff in hard copy. For some reason, I just gloss over a lot of the errors on the screen.) As soon as I finish the editing, I’m going to ask a few trusted readers to look it over for their comments, and then it’s going to be time to look for a publisher for this bad boy. Wish me luck.

Join me at the Back Issue Bin!

I’ve been a reviewer over at Comixtreme.com for many, many years. I’ve written thousands and thousands of reviews. Right now, though, Comixtreme is undergoing a major overhaul. Once it’s done, it’s going to be great — a new look, a new format, and new departments that are going to greatly expand our coverage beyond just comic books to pretty much all forms of entertainment. It’s going to be great.

It will, however, require a shedding of many of the old pages, including some of the thousands of thousands of reviews and columns I’ve written over the years.

The horror.

Fortunately, I’ve made it a point to meticulously save everything I write before I post it, so the content will still exist. But an awful lot of it isn’t going to be online anymore. So I decided to reach into the past and resurrect something I used to do back in my pre-Wordpress days, when I was still using LiveJournal. (Anybody remember LiveJournal? Yeah, quaint isn’t it?)

I’m bringing back The Back Issue Bin.

At this quasi-new blog, I’m going to slowly rebuild my old review archive by re-presenting my old reviews a few at a time. I’ve been doing it for a week already, and it’s going well. I’ve posted the review, the original date the review was posted, and on a few occasions some present-day commentary to go along with the old review, not unlike I do here on Time Travel Tuesdays. For the first week I’ve published several reviews a day, but now that I’ve started to build a bit of a back log, I’m going to slow down a bit — one or two a day instead of five. I’ve also been pretty random about which reviews I’ve posted, since the goal is just to eventually get them all there, but I wouldn’t be surprised to wind up doing “theme weeks” at some point — putting up Jonah Hex reviews to accompany the movie, putting up old reviews of Halloween comics in October, and so forth.

But that’s not all! Not content to just retread old content, I’ve been trying to decide on something new I could add to the site as well. I went to an idea I had a few months ago, something that at one point I was considering doing as its own blog, but upon retrospect I’ve decided will be less likely to melt my brain if I make it part of the Back Issue Bin. On Mondays, you can come by for an installment of Somebody’s First Comic Book! Once upon the time, there was an adage that every comic book is the first comic book that somebody has read. I don’t know if that’s still true, but what if it is? So using grab bags and bargain bins, I’ve established a pretty random assortment of comics from different eras and publishers. Each Monday, I’ll take one of those comics and write a review of it, trying to imagine what my feelings on the book would be if it was, in fact, the first comic book I had ever read. It’s not always easy, but it’s fun. The first SFCB review, of 1995’s Stormwatch #22, is already there.

And finally, with CX changing I’m also going to be changing up my comic book archive. The archive, as it exists here at Evertime Realms, includes links to those thousands of CX reviews that may be invalid in a few weeks. So over at the BIB, I’ve started a new review archive, where I’ve posted links to all the reviews on that site, all the comic book and graphic novel reviews I’ve posted here at Evertime Realms, and a few reviews that I’ve posted elsewhere on the Interweb. Once the CX revamp is over and I know exactly which reviews over there are still valid, I’ll add those links to that archive, and then I’ll mirror the archive here at Evertime Realms to match it.

So anyway, guys, there’s my new project. Fortunately, I’ll only have to write new content there once a week, so it shoudln’t be too mind-numbing an endeavor. I hope you enjoy it!

Summertime and the livin’ is… busy

Well here we are, the official beginning of summer vacation. (I can’t really count the weekend, since I would have those days off anyway. And yes, I know today is Memorial Day, but my school district rarely gets that day off when it falls before the end of the semester. Regardless.)

So now I’ve got just a hair over two months of freedom. What will I do with that freedom, you ask? Work, of course. I know, I’m a fool. But aside from spending time with Erin, pretty much everything I’ve got planned through August involves work of some fashion. I’m rehearsing for the Thibodaux Playhouse summer musical. I’ve got two short stories that I’m trying to complete for submission to a couple of anthologies, I’ve got the usual podcast, column, and review duties over at Comixtreme, and I plan to really work hard on recording the next big project for the Evercast, which I hope to hell I’ll be able to start this month.

Plus, Comixtreme itself is about to undergo a major overhaul, which has got me thinking about a more permanent home for my older features. Time Travel Tuesdays here will give me a way to re-present old columns, but I needed some place for the old reviews. Back when I was a LiveJournaler, I started up a community there where people were free to post reviews of old comic books. I’ve decided to bring back concept as well, and yesterday I spent a few hours putting together a new blog, The Back Issue Bin. I’ll post a few old reviews there every day (or at least most days), and on Mondays I’ll be doing a feature called Somebody’s First Comic Book. Just to give that site some new content.

So I’ll be busy, guys. I’m on a vacation from school, but not a vacation from work. And I’d better get to it.