Enter the Sinner: sneak preview. Plus: the Sony Reader Initiative.
I'm a happy man now. After months of emailing backwards and forwards and me rejecting pic after pic and concept after concept, Charlie and I finally agreed upon the look and feel of my character Sinner:619.
Early briefs went from different pictures of me with horns - little ones like a freaking goat, right across to huge stag killers like Tim Curry in Legend. Then Pan and various other satyrs got involved but that just wasn't dark enough. Thus, my final brief of "I want him to look like Rob Zombie but homeless and with a lion-esque face" seems to have hit all the right buttons on both sides of Watford. If it's good enough for Gaiman with Death and Tori Amos, it's good enough for me.
It had it's downside of course. Now that I know what he looks like and he's also a major player in the Too Hot For Dogs sequence, the plot spiralled from "that's very clever" and me looking quite smug to being devilishly complicated, far too intelligent than I have the right to be writing and all in all, bloody excellent. Just hope everybody else will think so too.
We'll find out soon enough. I have one more proof to pull back from the print shop and then we'll unleash the hounds - promo, PR and marketing first and then it will be off to BICS with a lot of boxes.
Anyway, what you see here is a trial cover for Sinner:619 | Seven Days of the Gargoyle. This has a fantastic story, but judging by my experience with the rewrites of 2H4D, I would be foolish to think it will just drip off the tongue. Next job? Finding an illustrator. I'd love Charlotte to do it but she's kind of got her hands full with 2H4D and some other things we have on the boil. If I suggest it, odds are that I'll get a punch in the mouth - and rightfully so.
On my tour of the online excellentness that is book buying, at the Waterstones site today (and presumably other days) they are hosting a banner for the Sony Reader. Available in the States for quite some time, I believe this is the first big pitch at the UK audience.. I guess it must be if Waterstones are pimping it. The price tag on it is £200. I don't think that's too outragous at all. People keep telling me that people love books and it will never take off. I say, people used to love vinyl as well - in fact it was positively sacred - and look where that ended up.
My belief with the Sony Reader (and maybe also the amazon Kindle, although it will never sell because it looks like a heap of junk from the late sixties), is that it will revolutionise books and the book selling market. It will be hard and it there will be much written about it, but once it starts, just like music, it will be unstoppable.
Let me tell you why - I read a lot. I love books that look great. I have many hundreds. I also love - or at least like very much - books that I just want to read for the sake of the story. The books I love, I will continue to buy and they will live on 'the shelf'. However, some things like Koontz, Patterson, King, Deaver... (it's a long list), I just want to read and this is where the Reader strikes hard. On they go, dive in, dive out. Aeroplane, train, holiday, business, pleasure. I'm a man that loves to travel light. With an ipod nano and a Sony Reader with a backpack for a laptop, I'll soon be kissing those luggage collection points goodbye!
Can I position Dark Hollow comic books and Burn Magazine to be available on the reader? It handles pdf, so I don't see why not. The future is very exciting. First job: get hold of one and see what it can do. I'll host various posts about it here, but if it gets out of control, it might end up requiring a blog of its own!
Watch this: Henry Rollins interviews Marilyn Manson
and also this
