Announcements, Announcements, Announcements!

That's the beginning of a camp song we used to sing at the church camp I went to for two years back when I was in elementary school. The rest of it went, "What a terrible death to die" (repeated again), "What a terrible death to be talked to death, what a terrible death to die." And then back to the beginning. I often think that singing songs like this before announcements are made at staff or business meetings would make everyone feel better about going.

I've actually been thinking quite a bit about the songs I learned as a kid lately--not just because I have an announcement I'll make today (which will come in the next paragraph or so), but because it occurs to me that I actually know some *history* through my church song education. I just wrote up a "microcorder" entry for Cowboys and Aliens II about the circuit riding preachers that used to travel the West, going from church to church (or community to community in places that didn't have a building yet) to spread the word of God. I did a little research on it, and apparently, this is primarily a Methodist thing, so it's a little piece of frontier history that I might never have learned if I hadn't grown up in a Methodist church west of the Mississippi. The image of the horseback preacher who carries a Bible and a rifle always stirred my imagination, and I'm glad I finally got to use it somewhere. It'll probably come up again one of these days.

But the aforementioned announcements! I got confirmation the other day that my short story, "The Valley," is going to be published on The Edge of Propinquity (t_e_o_p) this February! If you're not familiar with tEoP, it's a zine for serial fiction that features a guest short story every month. I had the opportunity to meet editor Jennifer Brozek at Origins 2006, and we had a great time chatting about the format and the opportunities that exist for fiction writers in Web publishing. She knows her stuff, and I am honored that I'm going to be included as a guest writer to the site.

"The Valley" is a story about true love (albeit in a sort of horrific way), and is the closest piece to a horror short story I've written, directed that way by editor extraordinaire Abigail Greshik, who worked on the tale with me as part of her (masters?) thesis. I'm pleased with how the piece turned out, and am absolutely tickled that it's going to be over at tEoP next month. So please, be sure to stop by and give it a look!

In other news, Cowboys and Aliens II is available to be voted for at Top Web Comics and Buzz Comics. We've only been on for a short period of time, so breaking the three hundred mark for most popular comics over at Buzz yesterday just tickles me. It goes without saying that we'd like to get higher on the list, so if you feel like visiting the comic and voting for us over in the right hand margin, we'd muchly appreciate it! The C&A team is also taking part in the Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards. Despite being the writer and not the cartoonist, I filled out our nomination forms yesterday, featuring such other comics as The Dreamer by Lora Innes, who's going to do a guest blog entry for me one of these days, Shades, and Hero by Night, among others. Those are three that I feel comfortable recommending to everyone: the two latter are super hero tales and The Dreamer is a fantastic historical fiction/romance with supernatural elements.

That's it for the announcements segment today. At church camp, this meant we all could eat. Here, I suppose it means you can go about your business as usual.

Guest Blogging

Speaking of the guest blogs, I expect to start posting them in February. I have three to start with, but if you've been thinking about writing one (or we've talked about it in comments or via e-mail), I'd love to start seeing more come in this February, so that I'll continue to have content to post in March!

If we haven't talked about it, and you're interested, shoot me a note. You can reach me at alanajoli at virgilandbeatrice dot com.