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I was there at the beginning.

Yes, soon after Dr. Schaller (my favorite mad scientist) captured the bird, I blindly selected one of my favorite tommy guns and slaughtered the creature with panache.  I gutted it with my teeth.  I deconstructed it with a gulletful of Derrida.  I chugged a shot of ennui and belched sentences of purple bile into the airspace of downed jetliners.  I wouldn't call it a beautiful sight, but it was what I had.

Jeff VanderMeer called me a "smart ass", but I was used to that.  He'd called me worse ("cretinous wombat", "illiterate dirigible", "barbaric yawp", "Dick Cheney").

It all led to a chain reaction of words, words, words.

And now those words have been packaged and frozen with flash, waiting for you to take them out of the freezer and stick them in the microwave of your soul.

All for charity.

Go now, my minions.  Pre your order.  Feed the Wyrm and its whimsical Ministry.  Bring back souvenirs and relics and tchotchkes of the damned.  You're doing something good for the world.  Tell your friends.  They'll never believe you, but you're used to that, ever since the UFO and the sasquatch and the death panels.

The Bird Head took his last drink and I no longer have any tommy guns.  But why should that stop you?  There are mad scientists and realpolitiking consiglieri who claim sovereignty over the rest of us, but you -- you're free.  Suck in your gut.  Join the abjection.  Flay your dreams.

Remember: it's all for charity.  All the children who don't learn to read, I'm sending them to you.  It's time to ask yourself: Do you really want that weight to rend the fabric of the last vestiges of your conscience, punk?

Do it for the Bird Head.  One day, you, too, will take your last drink.  But that day is not today.  Go now, so you can say you did one good deed in your life.

This is the craziest sale I've ever seen. Small Beer Press needs to make some room in their warehouse, and so they're selling a selected group of backlist titles for $1 each, plus shipping. I got the two Small Beer books I didn't already have (Endless Things and Water Logic, which I didn't have simply because they're parts of series I haven't read, but for $1...) and a couple I plan to give to people as random gifts. It's great stuff -- brilliant collections of short fiction by Alan DeNiro and Kelly Link and Maureen McHugh, Angelica Gorodsicher's extraordinary Kalpa Imperial, etc. Stock up!

Uh-oh. Guess what I committed to and kind of forgot because of the WBBT? 

I've just updated my website with lots of illustrations from my bible and my latest book for Mantra Lingua, The Elves and the Shoemaker.

www.jagoillustration.com

MANTRA WINS TWO AWARDS AT THE EDUCATION SHOW
21-04-2006

The 2006 "Education Show" was held at the NEC in Birmingham,UK. Mantra Lingua's "Little Red Hen and the Grains of Wheat" won the WOW award given by the National Literacy Association (NLA).The book "caught the panel's attention because of its sumptuous illustrations with their determined and joyful appeal which give the familiar text a resonance. Witty, with a juggling cat and a duck on stilts, this will be a favourite in primary classrooms.There is a helpful list of keywords in translation in every edition, so you get a literacy resource for two languages, great for multilingual classroom.

Here's a couple of illustrations from my latest bok, The Elves and the Shoemaker, published by Mantra Lingua, should be out anytime now....