Blogging spawns some books

Doctor Xaos is on WINTER BREAK until January 3, 2016. This is a little bitty announcement, and more of them will be arriving along the way.

Anyone could have told me that I’d be building a book from the blog eventually, although I seem to have been the last to figure it out. Wow – I’m writing a pretty good, fairly unusual thing in front of your eyes. People who came for the comics get interested in the autobiography, people who came for the autobiography find the comics stuff interesting after all. A lot of the political and cultural perspective is surprising just as itself.

I decided it’d be best as a series of softcover, 6″ x 9″ volumes. If I assign 20 posts per volume, that makes about 150 pages, not a bad chunk actually, and I don’t feel bad to sell them for $10 each. Yeah, that’s $50 for the full set. I’ll do PDFs too for $5 each, free for book purchasers.

For Patreon patrons, I’ll set each volume at the nearest dollar above cost to print. Patrons get the PDFs for free automatically, no book purchase necessary.

The big bummer is that I almost certainly won’t be allowed to use images from Marvel. Or rather, they’d let me but would exert 100% editorial control over what I may say about the material, which I believe is best replied to with go fuck yourself. I have to look into whether stuff from other publishers, particularly absurdly long-gone and out-of-print stuff from publishers who now are unto dust in the wind, is OK to print.

I’ve come up with some cool cover designs using the art taken from my role-playing history, some of which is posted at the blog and some isn’t. I can use that material for interior art as well. I’ll ask some folks from the Clobberin’ Times if I can use their art when it fits.

For the text, I’ll do a little editing and tightening up, correct a few errors, pull together some material that was worked out through a series of blog posts when it makes sense to do so. You can expect an orienting introduction and a bit of original discussion here & there too, and some historical context like a timeline reference for publisher and editorial history, and a similar reference for role-playing games.

If I find that I really want to quote you from the comments or to explicitly paraphrase something you wrote, I’ll get in touch. I’m also thinking of getting some of the people I mention, whether comics creators or fellow role-players, to interject a bit if they’re willing.

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