Media Roundup and "Valuable" Prizes!
I'm sending out free sketches like they were eggmcmuffin candy!
Hi! If you’re reading this, perhaps you wish I would scatter my metaphorical seed profligately to the four winds. You are in luck!
Most spectacularly, and releasing today, I am a guest on the wonderful monster-themed podcast Uncle Monster’s Spooky Time Fright Hour.
It features an original short story (by me) and a lot of gabbing about the featured monster, the woodwose by me and the Spooky Time “zoo crew”. NSFW, unless you work somewhere weird, but if you work somewhere weird (or aspire to) you will enjoy this podcast.
To celebrate, I am running two deals:
•Starting today and for the next week, my paranoid retro-thriller of a novel, Sudden Glory, is only $0.99 on Kindle. I am perhaps a little prejudiced when I say that this is by far the greatest novel of the 21st-century, and one that pulls off a twist that has never been tried before (true). But I would literally never exaggerate! 99¢ for one week only!
•ALSO—if you write a review of any of my books online and tell me about it, I will mail you an original sketch, more or less of your choosing, that you can pretend is a bookplate and paste into your beloved hard copies, presumably increasing their value. All I need is a link to the review, a mailing address, and whatever you want a sketch of (hopefully a monster, a mammal, or an ugly face screaming, my métiers). Terms and conditions apply, and they’re way down at the bottom, to force you to scroll through other great stuff.
Because look at this map!
Over on the reddits, u/fokkinfumin drew this marvelous item based on Chapter 4 of Impossible Histories. You can find the original reddit post here. I love maps and hate reality, so I am over the moon.
Furthermore: Only thing better than a map is a list, and only thing better than a list is a list of books, soooo…over on the book-browsing site Shepherd, I have two just-such lists up, one on the “best books of irresponsible history” and one on the “best books on magic you should not let your parents catch you reading,” which you should delve into for recommendations. Just, like, don’t let your parents catch you.
I realize I should say, anent Sudden Glory (did I mention the sale?), that strangers online have given it positive reviews. “This novel has perhaps the highest joke-to-paragraph ratio of anything I’ve ever read,” says one stranger. “Johnson has captured the reality in which we live perfectly,” says—excuse me, enthuses—another. This book, another crows, is “utterly unique in the annals of fiction.” Cory Doctorow once wrote that in me he “had found a writer who was going to pierce [him] like a very funny, very weird arrow,” and I’ll be dining out on that forever, or at least until or if he reads the review copy of SG I sent him.
Oh! And this one’s a little old, but a while ago I did an interview with This Day in Alternate History I probably forgot to tell anyone about.
If you have a blog about alternate history, “real” history, mythology, magic, books, comic books, or if you work for Sixty Minutes, I’d love to do an interview with you. Please hit me up! No, or at least very few, MLMs, please. Hopefully no one reads this far down so they don’t see me looking desperate.
Terms and conditions (for the review drive): Reviews on Goodreads, Amazon, similar sites, your local newspaper, a blog, all sorts of places at my sole discretion, are eligible. If you live farther away than a 1st-class stamp, or if your address is really confusing and hard to write, I’ll email you a scan instead. The sketch will almost certainly be on an index card, like all high-class drawings.
If you can’t find a way to communicate your mailing address to me, you can email me at the gmails, under my monicker immortallycanthropes. I won’t share your address with anyone, and will in fact almost certainly lose it quickly, but I may share your sketch online unless you ask me not to.
I guess technically, negative reviews “count” for this deal, although why you’d want a bookplate for a book you don’t like is beyond me; anyway, if all you have are bad things to say, PM me and we’ll work something out.
The more challenging the sketch subject you select, the more likely the sketch will suck. I reserve the right to cancel this offer at any time, for example if my hand gets tired.
Please don’t lawyer me here!