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Friday, 22 June 2007
DANNY-IS-GOD.COM
Here, at last, as promised, is your news blog.
Are you all sitting on the edge of your seat?
Course you are.
Well, I was going to leave this till last but you'll all cheat anyway and skim down the blog to find it so I might as well give it to you now.
The launch date for DANNY Volume 2 is 31st October 2009. Only kidding. Calm down.
The launch date for DANNY Volume 2 is 31st October this year, 2007. So you only have four more months to wait till nirvana, and I, at last, get to launch a book on Danny's birthday.
In fact I'm going to set a precedent and launch every book from now on on the 31st of October. So look forward to Volume 3, part one, Skull Island (sounds like an episode of Pirates of the Caribbean – curse those Disney imitators) on 31st October 2008. If I work very hard I might be able to give you both parts simultaneously. But don't quote me – no telling what unexpected horrors I might trip over in the course of editing.
No price is fixed for Volume 2 yet as we are still getting quotes and sourcing print in places as diverse as Poland, Korea and China – my personal favourite as the firm there is called Royal Printing of Beijing. That just looks classy on a fly leaf.
It's going to be considerably dearer to buy from Amazon (probably in the region of £24.99) as we are pricing it correctly this time to cover their 'margin'. It will be substantially cheaper to buy from us (only around £16.99 - £18.99). We are competing very favourably in the market place and charging exactly the same price as similar, slightly smaller book/s from Penguin, a much bigger firm than us, so please, no complaints about the price.
To mark this auspicious occasion the new Poison Pixie Publishing web site goes on-line today (with the existing name unchanged). This is the first of four new websites, each of which has a domain name of its own.
The new site features the prototype DANNY Volume 2 so that The Great Object of Desire can be printed out and stuck up on your pin board/wall/fridge – all helps to make it real, folks. You can even mark the date on your calendar. We will probably be featuring a countdown of our own, ticking the days off, so look out for that.
The new site also features the Volume 1 free extract to read on-line, so no more waiting for boring PDF downloads, and, of course, it lets you read exactly as much as you want. There are synopses for the new book, and an inaccurate page count (it will, most probably be longer than 998 pages), but we are still not sure how much, if any, of Volume 3 we are including, so that will be revised as we have more concrete data.
There is also full details of Max's new book, Theatres of Dreams, which is a limited edition (hand-numbered, a hundred copies, I think) collection of the artworks taken from an exhibition he recently had at the Belmont Cinema here in Aberdeen. He has a video wall playing tonight at a rock gig at the Peacock Visual Arts Centre and then another one-man show (static art) at The Aberdeen Arts Centre in January 2008.
He seems to have a constant stream of new things going on - I can't bloody keep up.
Illustration 101 is still selling outrageously well. So well it makes me nervous. I keep waiting for the bubble to burst. But it shows no signs of halting, so no complaints.
While at the Belmont he managed to accrue yet another daring art thief. I'm not sure quite how he does this. For some reason whenever he exhibits his work someone always tries to steal it.
The Belmont exhibition was in the café bar, a large space with plenty of wall to spread yourself out on. Apparently a woman came up to the bar and asked if she could buy one of a triptych called See Thru Walls (Yes, inspired by my blog of the same title).
This featured Vincent Price in X-ray specs in two end pictures with an 'invisible' middle picture only featuring clear glass in a frame. The woman wanted to buy only one Vincent. The barman told her the piece was only up for sale as a triptych. She went away. A little while later he saw her try to take it off the wall and leave with it. He 'apprehended' her, as the euphemism goes, and she apologised and gave it back, saying she'd taken it 'by mistake'.
Some while later (not quite clear on this as we got it third hand) the barman noticed it was missing from the wall. Fortunately they have CCTV cameras and they checked the tape. Sure enough, there was our daring art thief making off with her booty.
Now, the real fun in this story is that the woman was a stall holder at the large weekend Arts & Crafts fair that's in the street outside the cinema. The barman not only recognised her but knew her stall. Staff were dispatched to 'politely' tell her she had been caught on film and that if she returned The Missing Vincent no more would be said. She denied involvement, but next day The Missing Vincent was found posted through the cinema's letterbox along with a note (and now it gets like Fawlty Towers) saying that it had been taken in "an error of judgement" and it was being returned. She finished it with the word, "Sorry." Classic stuff.
So, Vincent was returned to his place of glory and Mr Scratchmann has another art-loving madman anecdote to add to his collection.
At his very first exhibition, some years ago in London, he had every single piece of (three dimensional) art damaged in a supposedly trendy, up-market gay bar in Soho by 'souvenir' hunters. And this was stuff glued down. Quite what, exactly, all these gay men were going to do with doll's shoes and little gem stones and cut out fairy figures (yep, it was about fairies – the flying variety, not cruising) I really do not know. Gay men appreciate art. Another myth up the spout.
Other news.
DANNY has been put onto Google book search, as has 101, but at the moment they look like dogs' dinners. Google is even slower than Amazon (I wouldn't have believed that possible) and they've managed to botch two lots of submissions. We finally gave in and sent them the submissions on disk, so some day, around 2015 maybe, it should appear on there in a format that looks half-professional. DANNY Volume 2 will also appear in due course.
Three more new web sites are also in the pipeline. The first up will be the comprehensive DANNY-IS-GOD.com. This is currently live, but there is no content except for the landing page. This will be exactly what it says on the tin – a site devoted solely to The DANNY Quadrilogy. And a quick little note on that.
The correct word for a four volume book is a quartet. The more academic terminology is a tetralogy. The first makes DANNY sound like a sleazy four piece cruise ship band (and now… roll of drums… The Danny Quartet – I don't think so). The second, correct or no, is meaningless to 99.8 per cent of the population.
The one I have chosen to go with is, believe it or not, not my invention, but the invention of Twentieth Century Fox who 'incorrectly' used it to describe the Alien Tetralogy. And can you blame them?
So, what is good enough for Fox is good enough for me. Anyone who doesn't like my use of a 'not real' word may write to Fox and let their displeasure be known, because you'd be wasting your time telling me. You know how I feel about pedants, don't you?
Moving on… DANNY-IS-GOD.com will feature exhaustive details of all the DANNY books, including the original photographs that inspired the characters and photo albums of the real-life places and locations featured in the book. We hope, eventually, to go back down to Cumbria and photograph the real-life Hope House and the village of Crosby, Brixby's real-life equivalent.
DANNY-IS-GOD.com will also feature the secret web sites. These will be sites intended solely for owners of each volume to find out more about the upcoming volume/s. They will be password locked to prevent spoilers being released on the web, or elsewhere, and to help keep the excitement for those readers coming new to The DANNY Quadrilogy.
For example, if you own Volume 1 you will be able to access the Volume 2 web site and read an extract from Volume 2 along with features on the plot of both 1 and 2. Presently I can't offer this kind of material because people, being people, will read what they are not supposed to read, and do what they are not supposed to do, and the more malicious among them do... you know, malicious spoilery kind of things. For shame.
DANNY-IS-GOD.com will be followed by Chancery-Stone.com which, like DANNY-IS-GOD.com, will be dedicated to everything you ever wanted to know about me, plus, probably, things you didn't. Obviously there will be some cross-over information between the two.
Lastly, we will have THIS-IS-HARDCORE.com. This is still very much in the story board stages, but will be a site dedicated to the 'deeper' issues (eek) of DANNY i.e. it will discuss everything from child abuse to pornography and all the other 'nasties' in between. It will be strictly 18 and over with a highly offensive visual content – so, paradoxically, you should give this one a wide berth if you're only here for the man-on-man action and the subtext of DANNY is of no concern to you. The complexities of morality will only baffle you - walk away, walk away…
What else?
Oh, the Minor Works.
I contacted my old typist on Orkney (Gillian – to whom all you fans owe a great debt) and she has agreed to type up all my remaining hand-written and otherwise not PC draft copies. God bless her, she's a wondrous little gem and my Personal Jesus.
The first piece I'm giving her is The Boy With the Red Hair – the prototype period DANNY - so I'll finally be able to see if it can be shaped up into something worth publishing.
Likewise she will be doing Death in Venice, the Danny in Italy fragment novella (about 150 pages, maybe), and Delaney, another incomplete novel (about 200 pages). She will also be typing up The Chocolate Woman, The Snow Queen, plus a handful of old magic realist stories that I do not have on my computer.
It very much remains to be seen whether any of it will be worth publishing, but I am certainly considering putting the DANNY pieces together and printing them as a (yippee!) conventionally lengthed 'novel'. I think Death in Venice was written during Volume 4, or just before it, so I would have to take that into consideration when publishing it so that it didn't unwittingly spoil other books.
Anyway, it's next on my agenda now that the Poison Pixie web site is up and running. Then, after that, the other web sites. And somewhere in between I have to actually finish editing Volume 2 and get it printed and publicised – a small point, I know.
Well, I think that'll do for one day, otherwise you'll all be suffering from informational overload. Think how I feel – I actually have to do it, not just read about it.
I'll just say, in closing, that Volume 2 will be available to pre-order from Poison Pixie as soon as we have a price for it. There is a good chance that it will be printed in advance of the 31st so any advance orders will be dispatched as soon as copies are available. So you better sign up soon as you can - you might just get a couple of weeks head start on the rest of the world…
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet read DANNY? You can check it out now at Poison Pixie where you can read a BIG extract for Free! Or grab a copy on Amazon here.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads)here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts. 
Lastly, there is an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
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Comments
Oh My God, it's the second coming
Woo Hoo
Pre-order! Pre-order! Pre-order! Cried the crowds
Posted by: Jodie | Saturday, 23 June 2007
This may seem random but I've been doing some reading tonight and... Oh for fuck's sake. You have, hands down, the worst sense of humor in the history of the internet and perhaps even the world. Lol_meme just for fun. There's no jealousy, no secret feelings of bitterness. Lol_meme exists for LOLS (fancy that), for having fun and maybe for having a good laugh at people who take themselves too seriously. I wasn't around for the whole Danny wank but I've been backreading and just laughing so hard. I haven't even read a single sentence of Danny, but that's beside the point. Maybe it's shit, maybe it's amazing. I hope it's fucking magnificent because otherwise you should probably fix that condescending attitude you've got going. Actually, there really is no point to this comment because I know exactly how you're going to react. I guess I just want to thank you for being such a humorless, self-centered twat. You've given me at least a half an hour of unadulterated mirth. So again I say thank you. Never change, bb. And good luck with the rest of your writing. I'm not going to actively seek it out, but if I see Danny in a bookstore I'll probably buy it to, you know, commemorate the lolz.
Posted by: Amy | Tuesday, 26 June 2007
Amy is hopping mad, Amy has no sense of humour, Amy takes lol-meme very seriously indeed and is deeply offended by Chancery's criticism of lol-meme. Amy must go and vent spleen on Chancery's blog, but Amy must 'disguise' it so Chancery does not spot this.
Unfortunatley Amy not bright. Amy drastically overdo lol-meme really funny, cheery place where we humourous, laughing, joyful girls go for laughs. Amy use words humour, laugh, mirth etc so often she should get a royalty. Amy succeed in 'projecting' her bad feelings so obviously she has effectively put a big neon sign above post saying, "I am absolutely furious, you bitch. How dare you accuse me of being a nasty, vindictive little cow, ful of spleen and envy. You're not supposed to see through me. I use the word lol all the time. You are not supposed to question my covert attacks when I put "LOLS". You are supposed to be too frightened in case I accuse you of being lol-sensitive."
Amy still cross. Not enough spleen worked off yet. Amy throw lots of other cheap Psychology for Dummies tricks into bag. Amy might read Chancery's book... if she stumbles across it. (Amy trying to appear reasonable... but disinterested.) Amy knows "how Chancery is going to react". (Amy trying hard to intimidate Chancery, forgetting Chancery knows Amy doesn't have a clue, because Chancery much smarter than Amy.)
Poor Amy. Amy know SHE actually the angry, condescending "humorless, self-centered twat" who take everything "too seriously", no matter how hard she try to project it onto Chancery. Amy dead in the water.
Goodbye Amy.
R.I.P.
Posted by: Chancery Stone | Tuesday, 26 June 2007
Thank the lord Danny and praise be to you, Chancery. It's not instant gratification but not too unhealthy for my impatient heart, either. Definitely bumping vol. 1 up for a reread no matter how crowded my commute and how harlot-red the SEXUALLY EXPLICIT tag on the cover!
Also glad to hear about the new website. Dare we hope for a few demystifications?
Posted by: Jen | Wednesday, 27 June 2007
"Dare we hope for a few demystifications?"
Now, Jen, you know me better than that. Demystification is the reader's job. Expect more intrigue, more moral quandaries, more responsibility.
I am here to challenge, confuse, misdirect and, ultimately, abandon you to the maelstrom.
Ah, the insane heady power of it all...! (evil laughter to fade.)
Posted by: Chancery Stone | Wednesday, 27 June 2007