First up: Free stuff! My book Lonely Satellite is free today (and for the next few days) at
Amazon. I like this one a lot. It takes place in an alternate timeline in which
the world was nearly destroyed in a nuclear war in 1984; thirty years later, American
society is in the process of rebuilding, but everything’s still plenty crappy
and dangerous. One of last year’s ABNA quarter-finalists (review from an ABNA
judge: “Great voice for Laurie, very
likeable and believable. Terrific language usage, word choice and sentence
structure variety. Great dialogue. Really, this is fantastic”), Lonely Satellite is essentially a Bizarro-world
retelling of my book Bias Cut, which
was an ABNA semi-finalist and winner of an IPPY silver medal in the Mystery
category. Lonely Satellite is chock
full of all of my favorite things in life: champagne, unconventional gender
roles, post-apocalyptic mayhem, hot gay boys zipping around on motorcycles, and
gratuitous eighties references.
I’ve got a few spare copies of the paperback edition on
hand. Want one? For, like, free? Leave me a comment here, or hit me up on Twitter, and
we’ll work something out.
So now that I’ve outed myself as Evan Allen, the author of
the supernatural gay romance Four Emperors… here’s some cute Four Emperors love from a discerning Tumblr user. The sequel, Three
Warlords, will be released by Luft Books by the end of the summer.
My sister and I were planning to see Jurassic World last week, because dinosaurs are awesome, but the
trailer left us feeling a little meh about the whole endeavor. Instead, we went
to see Rick Famuyiwa’s Sundance-lauded charmer Dope, which turned out to be exactly the right move. A teen romp
with a dark edge, Dope centers around
a brainy teen in Inglewood
who, while preparing for his Harvard interview, gets unwittingly ensnared in a
drug deal that goes horribly wrong. When we saw it opening weekend, there was
only one other person apart from us at our screening, so I don’t imagine it’ll stick
in theaters long. It’s worth catching while you can.
Duran Duran just released their first single, “Pressure Off”,
off of their upcoming Paper Gods album. The single, which was produced by Nile Rodgers and features vocals from
special guest Janelle Monáe, is catchy as all hell, though it doesn’t resonate
with me in the way that, say, "Wild Boys"
does. It looks like Paper Gods is
intended as something of an updated counterpart to the Notorious album, in the way that All You Need Is Now was an updated counterpart to Rio . I’ve always been far more
of a Rio
girl than a Notorious girl, so my
expectations for the album are somewhat muted. Plus, I keep hearing things like
“in collaboration with Lindsay Lohan,” and I start to get very, very concerned.
Anyway, the album art is the work of artist Alex Israel, as curated by actress/model
China Chow (former host of Bravo’s flawed but fascinating art-world-reality-competition
Work of Art). I’m a huge fan of
eighties-inspired pop art, obviously, and I dig the Nagel-esque color palette.
I also like the idea of the stickers representing early-Duran iconic
touchstones—the “Rio ” phone and champagne
glass, the “Chauffeur” cap, the “Girls on Film” sumo wrestler, the cherry ice
cream smile, the tiger, all of it. Overall, though… well, you can see Nick
Rhodes’s sticky-yet-elegant fingers all over this one. Nick’s pop-art tastes
are vastly more sophisticated and informed than mine, and thus I often find his
aesthetic sense hard to comprehend. I kind of hate the album art, I guess that’s
what I’m saying here.
While we're on the subject of eighties-inspired Nagel-esque pop art: I’m
going great blazes on laying the groundwork for my graphic novel, Glitter Princes, about a quintet of
glamorous and vaguely Duranish spies running amuck and getting into surreal mischief
in the 1980s.
The focus right now is still on getting my artwork up to
speed, which means the living room table is covered with old teen magazines and
sketchbooks filled with loving drawings of Duran Duran, like I’m a
nine-year-old girl, and it’s 1983. Which I was at one time, and I seem to be
regressing these days (I’ve been feeling more of a deep spiritual kinship with Sailor Moon than any fortysomething probably should), so that only makes sense.
I’m going to wrap this up with a video from FFS, the new
supergroup formed by Franz Ferdinand and Sparks .
I’ve arrived at the Sparks
party very, very late; these guys have over forty years worth of damn good
music to their name. Not surprisingly, I’m especially fond of their eighties
New Wave stuff (a sterling example: “All You Ever Think About Is Sex”). Here’s FFS with “Johnny Delusional”.
Until next week.
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