Matt Youngmark's Blog, page 16
February 21, 2012
Price change
After very long and extremely careful consideration, I've decided to raise the price on Chooseomatic ebooks from $2.99 to $3.99. Compared to the trade paperback price ($14.95), and just about any of your other price/entertainment value options, I think it remains a screaming deal (it's something like 3 and a half cents for each of Zombocalypse Now's 112 endings, and I gotta eat, you know?)
I just wanted to toss up a quick post to say that if you've been thinking of getting ZN for Kindle, Nook or iBooks, jump all over it befoe the change takes effect and save a buck. But the new price went live at Apple & Barnes & Noble as I was typing this (those sumbitches are ALL OVER IT.) Amazon can't be far behind! Just fair warning!
Price change?
After very long and extremely careful consideration, I've decided to raise the price on Chooseomatic ebooks from $2.99 to $3.99. Compared to the trade paperback price ($14.95), and just about any of your other price/entertainment value options, I think it remains a screaming deal (it's something like 3 and a half cents for each of Zombocalypse Now's 112 endings, and I gotta eat, you know?)
I just wanted to toss up a quick post to say that if you've been thinking of getting ZN for Kindle, Nook or iBooks, jump all over it befoe the change takes effect and save a buck. But the new price went live at Apple & Barnes & Noble as I was typing this (those sumbitches are ALL OVER IT.) Amazon can't be far behind! Just fair warning!
February 19, 2012
Practice Sketching!
I'm just finishing up Thrusts of Justice — it should be ready to go into editing next week! Then it's full time work on the illustrations, and with that in mind I've been messing around with some sketches, trying to find a style that's somewhere between traditional comic book art and my usual goofy-cartoony comfort zone.
This is an experiment I did working from reference — I suspect the final art for the book won't turn out looking too much like this, but I thought the sketch came out kinda cool. Also, Punchy is not a character in the book! Do not be sad when you find all 89 possible endings, and none of them lead you to punchy!
February 8, 2012
Fatman Go!
In the upcoming Chooseomatic Book Thrusts of Justice, one of the story paths has you assuming the identity of Nightwatchman, an obvious Batman stand-in. So I had to laugh when I stumbled on a flash game called Fatman Go! — apparently, there are those who don't pussyfoot around outright copyright theft the way I do.
It's actually a fun little physics platformer where you swing around steel girders with your grappling hook Fatarang trying to carry a bomb into a raincloud (if you haven't read many Batman comics, let me assure you that this is all canon). And it turns out you can embed it, so feel free to try it out right here.
I'm not saying that I've been playing this a lot instead of working on the new book. But I will say that I'm stuck on level 18, and screw that game, anyway.
February 6, 2012
Charles & Erik: MORTAL FRENEMIES
I've started posting over at Favorite Thing Ever again! And since working on Thrusts of Justice has resulted in a bad case of superhero brain, here's my big fanboy gush about last Summer's X-MEN: FIRST CLASS.
February 5, 2012
Yes, I am a giant nerd
Yee hee heeeeeee.
January 27, 2012
Just FYI
I've been having some crazy, crazy times getting the website transferred to the new url, so if anything looks funky here, please bear with me. Honestly, if you're even reading this post, COUNT YOUR LUCKY STARS.
I'm pretty sure this is my penance for hideous WordPress crimes committed in a previous life.
January 26, 2012
Good news, everyone!
And YOU'RE WELCOME for making you hear Hubert Farnsworth's voice in your head just then.
I finally managed to nab chooseomatic.com from some squatter who had been sitting on it for the past few years. So now you can type chooseomatic.com into a web browser and it'll forward here to chooseomaticBOOKS.com — I'll eventually be switching everything around so it works the other way, but don't worry: I'll always have both urls and forward one to the other, so there's no need to panic bout your bookmarks or anything.
This might not sound like a terribly huge deal, but I will tell you that dropping those five characters from my website url has made me so excited I could just pee.
Good news, everyone!
And YOU'RE WELCOME for making you hear Hubert Farnsworth's voice in your head just then.
I managed to nab the chooseomatic.com url from some guy who had been squatting on it for the past few years. The five-character difference between that and the current chooseomaticBOOKS.com url may not seem like such a big deal, but it makes me so happy I could just pee.
I'll eventually be transferring this site to the new one, but have no worries — I'll maintain the old url and have it redirect, so any bookmarks you have goin' on should still work just fine.
January 23, 2012
Look! Space Wizards!
So my good friend Muffy recently unveiled the cover art for her upcoming book, The Sail Weaver. It's pretty great. I'm really looking forward to reading it, but above all, seeing the cover sent me down this long, weird rumination about the nature of inspiration, the creative process, and how much outright stealing might be just the right amount.
See, sometime early last year Muffy sent me an email with a very brief description of a new book idea she had, which essentially boiled down to three words: wizards in space. It sounded awesome to me. In fact, for the next four or five hours until I got home from my day job, it was all I could think about, and I came up with a whole bunch of fun ideas for the premise. I called her that evening, and it turned out that she already had this huge, sprawling universe pretty well worked out. We talked for a while about a couple of plot points, overall structure and stuff, and that was that. I was happy to be of service as a sounding board, and went merrily on my way.
The thing is, MY wizards in space story wouldn't let go of me. It was completely different in tone from what Muffy was working on, so I couldn't even pitch her my ideas to see if she wanted to use any of them. But in the shower, on the stairmaster, staring at the ceiling at night while trying to drift off to sleep… all I could think about was wizards in space. For a while I was obsessed with the idea of doing it as a webcomic (working title: WIZARDS IN SPACE), then I thought it would be a perfect Chooseomatic. Lately, I'm starting to see it as a standalone novel. Basically, I'm still utterly in love with the project. But I can't get myself over one little thing.
I totally and completely ripped off the idea.
It's not that I think Muffy has the market completely cornered on space wizards (um, Obi Wan Kenobi? Hello?). And it's not that I think my story would take anything at all away from hers — seriously, my entire springboard was really just three words, and one of those was "in." If I saw that idea on a movie poster or somewhere I'd have no qualms at all about coming up with a riff on it. But the fact is, my friend came to me and said "What do you think of this idea?", and every ounce of my psyche responded with "IT IS THE BEST IDEA EVER, I WILL DEVOUR IT AND SUBSIST UPON ITS FLESH OM NOM NOM."
So now Muffy's The Sail Weaver is almost upon us. Will my own wizards in space project ever see the light of day? Who knows. I still really like my ideas for it, but they're all intertwined with this inner nugget of thievery and betrayal. I'm sure Muffy would be happy to see me do it — if I called her, she'd probably even help me work out the plot.
They say that creativity is the art of disguising your influences. Looking back over this post, maybe that's something I need to work on?
