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Sunday, 14 October 2007
You Dirty Dog, Jesus
Just a quick news update to let you all know that DANNY Volume 2 is now available to pre-order from the Poison Pixie website.
As you can see, it is available in two different editions, entitled Personal Jesus (the gothic/romantic edition), and I'll Be Your Dog (the psychotic/mythic edition).
The two editions offer a better representation of the 'epic' content of DANNY, with Personal Jesus representing the religious zeal that Danny inspires in others – the flip side being Danny as sacrificial victim, an icon and, ultimately, a false god – while the dog cover represents the addictive, animalistic, psychotic and divided nature of Danny and the servile victim qualities both of those he is preying on and those who prey on him.
So praying to and preying on, if you will: passive and aggressive. The fact that, of course, religious worship can be seen as passive-aggressive, and the lycanthropic myths are also passive-aggressive, shows you nicely how these two themes meet and merge and get lost up their own arseholes. (Maybe not that last bit, but hey, I get pissed-off explaining creative ideas. If you don't get it, fuck off to the New Age section. See? Now, I'm being passive aggressive.)
The two editions are the same book, but the interior decorations are also different – with Jesus being religious and the dog being feral. No surprises there then.
So now you can do a quick, fun analysis of what your cover choice says about you – and about anyone else you know who's bought it.
I imagine a lot of you have already seen the comment on Blogspirit saying that the book's publication date has been pushed back to December 3rd. I'm very sorry about this, but the work has taken me longer to do than I expected. I've crammed too many edits, one on top of the other, without allowing time for them to ferment and the sediment to settle. Paradoxically, this has made the work harder, since I have to keep returning to it with an eye that's overly familiar with the text, and it makes it harder to discern if an improvement is really an improvement, thus slowing everything down to a treacle-like pace.
Rest assured this will not happen again with any of the future editions. The horror of doing this one has shown me that it needs to be finished before the publication date is announced. Another astounding 'discovery' that anyone with a mental age of four could probably have figured out. My self-esteem isn't doing too well here.
I still have the 31st of October as my personal finishing date to go to the printers. This allows two weeks for the inevitable things to go wrong, and the toing and froing that goes with it. If nothing does go wrong, there is the (slim) possibility that it may be available some time in November – but I'm promising no promises.
The two editions have had their ISBN's registered so they will show on Amazon shortly to pre-order. The recommended retail of both editions will be £24.99. This means you will get it post free from Amazon. It is substantially cheaper to buy from us, at £16.99, and even including the postage (£2.95), it will still be only £19.94 – a fiver cheaper than it is from Amazon. And, of course, we make a better margin from direct sales – so, if you can, please buy it direct from us and help us to get the other books published.
We are simultaneously launching an American edition of the book, so anyone living in the States might want to wait for it to appear on Amazon.com. It will be approximately the same price, in dollars. Although it would be technically cheaper to buy it from us, the overseas postage is £9, so you will end up paying the same, plus you will have a longer wait for it to reach you. If you buy it from Amazon.com you will get free postage, plus it will reach you a whole hell of a lot faster.
Volume 1 is also being re-launched in a U.S. edition. This will have a different cover from the U.K. edition as we are taking the opportunity to re-design it. It will be based on the current U.K. cover but it will be cleaner and more graphic. The U.S. edition is also being re-edited to bring the punctuation into line with the current Volume 2 – i.e. more conventional. So, if the present punctuation annoys you, you've always got the option to buy the new U.S. edition. Not sure when that will be released (I have to re-edit it first), but hopefully in the first three months of 2008.
Other news. There are now four little galleries of photos of me (be still your beating heart) on ChanceryStone.com. If you click on any of the four thumbnails you can see all of the photos in each session. These are around fifteen years old. I now have long hair and more generous curves, but I am still the same beautiful creature I always was. I should warn you I am semi-nekkid in some of them, so don't go looking if nekkid bothers you.
(The 'new' photo on this blog is from one of these sessions. My hair was bleached blonde at this time, hence it's odd 'red' colour. I have strong hair that doesn't like bleaching, it asserts its right to be a natural black by coming out a strident David Bowie orange. The dress I'm wearing in this photo is a 1920's original. All the clothes in the photo galleries are period originals. The photographer had a huge collection of them.)
Lastly, Vintage books is doing a competition I'm going to encourage you all to enter, called the Twins Promotion, where you team a contemporary novel up with its classic counterpart. I know this is a fun game you all like to play, so why not do it and win something, plus get your favourite book – i.e. mine – some much-needed exposure. You will have my eternal gratitude, earn brownie points in the world's karmic pie-chart by helping something that deserves more recognition, plus have the chance of winning twenty Vintage books. Can't be bad, please go have a bash. You can get an entry card at any library (unfortunately it doesn't seem to be on their web site), plus hand in completed cards there. Hell, do five, do ten, do twenty. Go, go, go…
This also got me thinking about what I'd team DANNY (Volume 1) up with. It was a toss-up between Othello and Wuthering Heights, and Othello won, but it got me thinking about Volume 2 and the others and wondering what the hell they paralleled in the World of Dead Writers.
I couldn't think of anything for V3 and V4 at all, and the only comparison I could come up with for 2 was Wuthering Heights again or, decidedly more weirdly, Walter's My Secret Life and the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom.
I don't know how familiar you are with either work, but Walter's My Secret Life is a first-person diary of Victorian 'Erotica', being an account of his sex life. It's rare to get a copy of this as the complete works (well, it was), but I had an edition in the eighties, a huge thing, and I read it all.
Very disturbing, frequently sordid and, eventually, terminally unpleasant, it tells you more about Walter (buying impoverished 14 year old whores for pennies) and the appalling state of Victorian England than it does about 'erotica'. Likewise, 120 days is just a catalogue of ever-more-monstrous pornographic goings-on, more pain and degradation, until there is barely anything you'd recognise as sex.
See? Now, you're worried. Don't worry – I am too. Still, there is a lot more heart in DANNY 2 than either of these two (I think), so hopefully that'll be its saving grace.
Still, interesting that as DANNY goes on I can find less and less similarity to any other book.
Right, I'm done. I doubt if you'll see much of me before the 31st of this month, but if there's any news I'll drop by to fill you in.
Remember me in your prayers to whatever gods you have.
'Night.
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Not yet read DANNY? You can check it out now at Poison Pixie where you can read an 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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