Several months ago, my friend Lydia gave me one of these Staedtler Non-Photo blue pencils.

Usually, these blue pencils suck; they’re waxy and useless (especially considering that every copier and scanner made in the last decade can pick them up so they’re not really non-repro). But these Staedtler pencils have a beautiful line. I’ve drawn all of my comics with them since I got my first (my mechanical pencil has been collecting dust). Whenever I’m near Pearl, the only store in NYC that regularly has them (I’ve found them at Apple Art and Utrecht too), I buy out whatever they have. And there’s something about blue pencil that is nice to ink over (makes you feel like you’re in some way like Chris Ware).

It took me longer to find a sharpener that works (I like to keep a very sharp point), until I found this amazing egg-shaped sharpener from Prismacolor. It costs like three bucks and it’s the best sharpener ever – I put all the rest in the waaaay back of the drawer.

And get one of these too, if you’re going to draw with blue pencils, because they get very short, very quickly. A pencil extender is a must:

Last week, I spent three days burning screens, biking around Brooklyn and Manhattan to various art supply shops and paper stores, cutting board (way bigger chore than I was banking on), and pulling 101 prints for those who have been kind enough to pre-order my novel, The Complete Collection of people, places & things. If you pre-order the book over the next couple of weeks, you can still get it for a discount, and I still have a few prints and bookplates left to give away to the next few people who order. More info here.

Printing the leaf-bare winter forest was fun, but the big chunk of green that that are those hills nearly look my arms off.

And I did all of this while trying to keep the drying prints out of the hands of my restless and ever-inquisitive one year-old daughter Nina – in our one-bedroom apartment. She did help dry this one by fanning it and blowing on it. When she later chewed on it, that was a bit of a setback.

Here’s the result:

John Madera just posted his second issue of The Chapbook Review, which is already a great resource and definitely worth checking out. John and I discussed  that TCR would be a great place to review mini-comics. First of all, they are very similar to poetry chapbooks: small runs, usually hand-made, ephemeral, short, and so on. Also,  it’s usually only comics artists who read minis, and that’s only because they are rarely marketed and circulated outside of that group. For instance, John didn’t even know they existed when I suggested including them in TCR. But a huge swath of readers will benefit from the medium if they just knew that these little books are out there. And TCR is a great way to reach an audience that is more likely to read fiction and poetry than comics (it’s a similar bridge I’m trying to cross with Action,Yes, particularly the Abstract Comics section in the new issue). So John thought a good place for me to start my mini-comics reviews is with a mini by a poet. Go here to read my review of Mary Ruefle’s first comic, Go Home and Go to Bed!. I plan on reviewing more minis in the future. (Let me know if you see something interesting.)

If you live in NYC, go to back of the comic shop Forbidden Planet (ignore the Captain America and Kiss statuettes that guide you on your way), and look at their amazing mini-comics section. Ten minutes browsing those shelves and looking at what people are doing with folded paper and ink will scramble your brains.

I wrote this story a few years ago inspired by the Jawbreaker song with the same title. (I still listen to Jawbreaker on my headphones – a lot – and have never really stopped listening to them for the past 15 years.) The guy in the song goes to this party, older and back in his hometown, and watches the night fall apart for everyone else. But I feel like the character in it has something else going on. Like he’s experiencing a certain schadenfreude at this party, happily witnessing (and sympathizing with) everyone else’s little tragedies, because he has left something much worse back home. In this story, I take a shot at that something worse.

BJ Hollars was good enough to publish it on his You Must Be This Tall to Ride, a site where he’s collecting coming-of-age stories to complement the recent anthology (with the same name) that he edited. Lots of good stuff there, including stories by J.A. Tyler and Matt Bell.

And speaking of Jawbreaker’s legacy, for those of you who don’t know, Blake Schwarzenbach has a new band – Thorns of Life – and they’re good. Here’s a video:

This weekend Tim Wood and I will be presenting the first books from our Nine Frayed Leaves Press (more on that soon). If you are on the east end of Long Island, or feel like visiting Long Island’s green and bucolic and wine-drenched North Fork, here’s where we’ll be debuting our project as part of an exhibition of book arts:

Click the flyer to see it full size.