From BERG, of course.

(#SVK sadly includes football results, damnit)

Here’s the cover for the paperback edition of the final book in the series.  You can see the covers for the HC and signed limited edition at this link. Out sometime this autumn, I think?

Timo Arnall for BERG documents the printing of SVK.

Ganked from the Instagram of Matt Jones for BERG:

It’s real.  It lives.  And, as you might be able to work out, it comes with a marvellous foreword by William Gibson, among other goodies.  And now it waits to be packaged with the SVK UV torch, at which point it will be offered for sale by mail order only.  Not long now.

Bugger me, the insane thing lives.

Get signed up for the email alert when it happens.>

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Sort of.

This is the June 2011 issue, out now, and, as you can see, it features a lengthy interview with my old mate and SVK artist, D’Israeli, aka the sainted Matt Brooker and one of my most trusted collaborators.

FREAKANGELS concludes in ten or eleven weeks or so.  People have asked what will happen to the FREAKANGELS online community, Whitechapel, at that time.

Si Spurrier, writer of Avatar Press’ next webcomic CROSSED: WISH YOU WERE HERE, arrived today at Whitechapel to begin the handover to the new regime.

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SVK is at the printers.

Thwipster appears to be selling the FELL: FERAL CITY book on the cheap for the next 13 hours or so (it’s 4pm UK time as  I write this.  There’s also a very brief interview with me there.

Because it’s Friday, because it’s just past noon here in God’s own country, because this is what we do:

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And this is how they arrived at the BERG offices.

BERG also had to go through some weird security checks to be able to use the UV ink that SVK is surprinted with.

SVK is an experimental publication with a limited print run, being sold mail order only.  More information, and access to the mailing list, is at getSVK.com.

And here we have Emma Vieceli, Anna Petterson and Matt Jones from BERG playing with the SVK test article:

(photo by Anne Holiday)

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SVK Update at BERG, with art and treatment clips and stuff. If you look at the top of warrenellis.com, you should see a link to getsvk.com, where you can find out more and get on the mailing list for imminent release details.

After this one?  Twelve episodes left to go.  Good morning.  It is Friday, it is past noon, it is the new episode of FREAKANGELS:

Just hit my word count for the day.  Regular readers may recall that, beginning today, I need to hit 5000 words a week for 20 weeks to complete GUN MACHINE in a timely-ish fashion.  And I introduced The Death Bar.  I will be posting The Death Bar every Monday. 

I recommenced work today, starting from already having 5000 words.  This time next week, it needs to show 10K words.  This is the Death Bar today:

I just hit 1000 words for the day.  And they were a bit of a fight, so I’m calling it a day.

Exchanged some email with Joss and constructed the laughable semblance of a Plan.  Fraction just sent me the new CASANOVA script, which I’m going to delight in reading after I’ve finished doing an email interview for Steve Fritz at Yahoo! News (I think the last time Steve interviewed me, I was in Vancouver on the GLOBAL FREQUENCY shoot).

Last night I sent out the interstitial text pieces for issue 4 of CAPTAIN SWING, so that serial is all done on my end now.

Also I have been on the twitter:

Fraction just tipped me to this interview with Joss Whedon, so I thought I’d put it up here to forestall another two hundred people telling me about it:

I talked at great length and planned at great length the idea of a portal and putting shows together, having an Internet identity and starting my own little micro-studio. Nobody in town was interested, and then by the time they were, “Avengers” came around. I was and will continue to work on a very, very different Internet mini-thing that I was writing with Warren Ellis, and I have a lot of ideas for things I want to put up there. I still believe it’s a viable financial model, and a creative playground and I miss it. But in the year that I was supposed to do that, I instead decided to make this little Sundance movie that I’m making.

What he’s talking about is WASTELANDERS.  The deal is that, basically, whenever he’s ready, I’m ready.  We have a shitload of notes, and chunks of script.  Although I need to rewrite all of my bits because they’re terrible and I never showed them to him (not least because the poor bastard was busy enough at that point).

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The first interview request to pop through the Mullholland PR process about GUN MACHINE is with Kat Curtis, over here.

Email interview requests can come to me at warrenellis@gmail.com, and will be forwarded on to Mulholland.

Daily Blam has Mulholland’s actual press release.

It was John Schoenfelder, the editor of Mulholland Books, who brought me in.  It was Michael Pietsch, the publisher of Little, Brown (but perhaps still best known as David Foster Wallace’s editor on INFINITE JEST) who made it clear, in the middle of it all, that there was a seat for me there.  Which was hugely affirming for a hack like me and came at just the right time.  But it was John who was tireless, inventive, collaborative and determined.  And so I am now a Mulholland Books author, along with Charlie Huston, Greg Rucka, Michael Marshall Smith, Duane Swierczynski, and… christ, it’s an amazing list, go and look for yourself.

John Schoenfelder is scarily clever and erudite and I are not.  But he has an absolute passion for all the things we like.  Which is why there are crazy people like Charlie and rock stars like Greg on his list – people who like the weird stuff and the pop stuff as well as the literary barricades and the deep waters.

GUN MACHINE came out of a shedload of latenight email volleys between myself and John. We were just trying to establish the parameters of where we could go with a book.  An inciting event that encapsulated the tone as well as opening up a story of many levels.  A weapons cache became a room filled with guns.  A room full of guns became a room with guns arranged in waves and swirls.  Light falling into the room in narrow golden shafts.  A gunmetal church.

Somewhere along the way, it became a two-novel deal.  So I live at Mulholland Books now.  Which suits me.  The imprint, and the book itself, will give me the space to explore a bunch of ideas in any way I want, in any depth I want.  So long as someone gets shot every now and then.  But that’s my bias, not theirs.  I just like killing people.  The chances of finding an imprint editor who likes and can quote from FELL and DOKTOR SLEEPLESS at will were pretty fucking slim, but here I am.  And the space between those two books, undiluted, is pretty much where I am with GUN MACHINE.

A few of you had probably already noticed that I’m not producing as much comics work as I was.  I have two novels to write now, so I won’t be increasing the amount of comics I’m doing.  I have a couple of things still in the pipeline at Avatar and Image, one or two other possibilities float around, and I’m still producing one comic a month for Marvel for now, but I won’t be adding much to those, if anything at all.  It’s time to do something else for a while.

I may even set up one of those word count things Cherie Priest uses, just so I can go completely fucking mad within days.

So… yeah.  That’s all I can think of to say, right now.  Except to thank my long-suffering literary agent, Lydia Wills, who is a star and an angel.  (I must show you her business-card art soon.  You’ll love it.)

I’m a novelist again.  That’ll piss off the guy who ensured that only the bad review of CROOKED LITTLE VEIN made it to its Wikipedia page, I bet.

There’s the news from Reuters.

And here is the news, with a short essay written for Mulholland, at the imprint’s website.

More in a bit.

On its way.

I am taking the piss at various levels in each of them.

Right now, I’ve signed on for six issues.  What I said to Tom was, I’ll do six, and if I’ve irretrievably fucked up the deadlines at that point, I’ll bail out and he can get someone more professional to take over.  If nothing else, I’ve got a lot of stuff to do this summer – I have another announcement on the 11th (moved from the 8th) – and this book shouldn’t suffer from that.  If I screw up, I leave of my own accord after six.

Other details are, of course, scattered through those interviews. I hope you don’t find them too dull.

As of right now, we have two issues in the can, and I started work on the third a couple of days ago. I can tell you that this bit of script I posted the other week:

Is from my second issue of SECRET AVENGERS.  And that every issue is a self-contained story.

Anyway.  Yes.  Small comics news.