Joe Young, Adam Robinson, and I have finally arranged the stops for our “Bad Freaking Idea Book Tour” through the northern Midwest the first week of January. Right now, the snow drifts in Brooklyn suggest that I may actually be escaping to more navigable climes.

Monday, January 3: Chicago at The Whistler, 6:30pm Facebook
Wednesday, January 5: Milwaukee at Sugar Maple, 8pm
Thursday, January 6: Minneapolis, Pocket Lab Series at Rogue Buddha, 7pm Facebook
Friday, January 7: Madison at Avol’s 7pm
Late show:Fred and Bethany’s house, 9pm

Adam put a page here with all the details and links. Come out. We’ll buy you beers if you ask.

Many, many months (years?) ago, Adam Robinson, Joe Young, and I thought it’d be fun to do some readings together. MC Hyland was kind enough to invite us to her Pocket Lab series in Minneapolis. We tacked on a couple more in Madison and Milwaukee (two cities I’ve yet to visit). So now we’ve got a hat trick of readings in the dead-center of America’s snow belt, scheduled for the first week of January. Smart.

Here’s the flyer for Pocket Lab on January 6th:

“The Swimmers,” one of the Baltimore atrocities, just appeared in Devil’s Lake, a new-ish journal out of Madison, WI. The fall issue has appeared just in time for winter. It appears along with Janice Shapiro’s comic about Harry Walker. Devil’s Lake is interested in featuring new comics, so if you have some, submit them.

I’ll be doing two readings this weekend in two of my favorite places (homes): Brooklyn on Friday and Baltimore on Sunday. The Brooklyn event is a reading with John Haskell and Anelise Chen, sponsored by Gigantic. There will be beer and tacos. Here’s the info.

In Baltimore, I’ll be a guest of Publishing genius, for the MONUMENTAL GENIUS HOLIDAY BOOKSHOP. The event will be going all day on Sunday and lots of books will be for sale, as well as a slew of great readers. Click here for a list of them. I just finished the last of over 100 drawings for new book The Baltimore Atrocities, and I’m excited to read from it in the city that inspired it.

Both of these are part of the Indie Lit Roadshow happening throughout the country this weekend.

My friend Max Kelly and his compatriot Laura Decker have launched Birdbrain Press from their studio deep in the bowels of Salt Lake City. Among other projects, they’re printing an excellent art/comics/lit mag called Birdbrain Collective. The first three issues are basically launching all at once, and they’re already working on number 4. They’re looking for good work so, if you have something they might like, send it to them. Here’s a recent feature about Max and Laura from the Salt Lake City Weekly that will tell you a bit more about Birdbrain.

I have work in issues 1 and 3 of Birdbrain Collective. Here are the opening pages from my story in issue 1.

My next book is collaboration with J.A. Tyler (if somehow you are not familiar with him and his Mud Luscious empire, go check it out here). We’ve written an image-text novel called No One Told Me I Would Disappear. I’m excited for this book for many reasons. The first of which is that Debra DiBlasi’s Jaded Ibis Press will be publishing it. J.A. and I had some very specific needs for this book, and Jaded Ibis is one of the few presses I could imagine that could fulfill those needs as its normal way of doing business. The book will be available in it’s standard form (including fourteen full color drawings), a very limited art edition (this will be a completely separate work, not simply a fancy version of the standard), and an electronic edition. My friend Justin Stile’s band Stethoscope will be recording the soundtrack for the book as well. The whole thing excites me – it necessitates the functions of several layers or art and community.

And I can also confidently say that this book is very different from anything either J.A. or I have done before. Basically, I think I pulled J.A. toward narrative, and he yanked me back toward abstraction. When we began the project, we both agreed that it should be a book that we should expect not publish (or, more accurately, to have to publish ourselves). Not because we planned to fail, but because we wanted to do things that might not be easy for publishers, or marketers. (Luckily, we found Jaded Ibis, who got what we wanted to do almost without explanation.)

The Stranger did an excellent feature on Debra and Jaded Ibis. Go read this to learn more.