"I don't like Mondays..."

I doubt you could find many people who LIKE Mondays. Certainly, I am not one of them. Mondays are always difficult as you try to reorient yourself after a weekend. Particularly an enjoyable one like we had!

Saturday found us up in Bellingham, Massachusetts, at Rubber Chicken Comics for one of their excellent sales. This time they had "buy 1 tpb/HC/graphic novel, get 1 free" and I picked up several good volumes there. I was especially happy to grab the recent three volume tpb set from MAD magazine featuring collected stories by Wally Wood, Will Elder and Jack Davis. (Each had their own volume.) I love the old MAD magazines and these didn't disappoint. I also picked up a couple more things for the collection including a plastic bank of the Creature from the Black Lagoon in marvelous black and white! Lovely thing. We're quickly building a collection of plastic banks with the Cthulhu and Infinity Gauntlet that my lovely wife, Carol, gave me last year!

Then, Sunday, we spent some time at the first New Bedford Book Festival where we met up with artist extraordinaire, Jason Eckhardt. Always good to support local authors and publishers. They had a very good turnout over the weekend so it looks good that they will have more festivals in the future. If I can get over my crippling social anxiety, I might even get a table at one.

Late last week, I was informed that my modern ghost story, "Inkspots", has been accepted by Travis Neisler for his upcoming Ravenwood Quarterly. Very happy about this and the fact that Travis himself enjoyed the story so much.

My current projects include a return to the Arthur Machen/Jack the Ripper novel I'd started over ten years ago and a new graphic novel about life working in comics during the great censorship scare of the 1950s. Much to do, much to do.