I thought I'd share with you this little piece on a website called Bookfayre.cz...

Wow! I honestly don't remember doing any of that! Amazing!

Of course, now I'm wondering why I never hear from my old work colleagues at any of those companies, or any of my students. I must have done some terrible things...

Oops... Another age goes by without updates to the weblog. Sorry!

The big news this time is that The New Heroes: Superhuman has just been published... And I did it all myself. Yep, all my own work. I wrote it, edited it, type-set it, proof-read it, designed the cover, contacted the printer and paid for it all by myself. So please buy lots of copies, otherwise I'll be seriously out-of-pocket!

Actually, the truth is that I didn't exactly do all the work on my own. I had help with the proof-reading from my lovely wife Leonia and my friends Michael Scott (who also kindly supplied the book's foreword) and Danielle Lavigne, all of whom deserve great thanks.

I've always wanted to self-publish a book, and the The New Heroes: Superhuman collection is an idea I've had knocking around for some time. Y'see, when developing the New Heroes series I came up with a lot of ideas that didn't quite fit into the novels. I turned a couple of these ideas into short stories (you can find them on the Features page), but I always knew that some of the stories were just too long for that. So earlier this year I began to consider the possibility of a self-published collection.

It was, as you might expect, quite a lot of work. One of the first things I did was check out some of the printers here in Dublin. I figured that the book would be about 160 pages, B-format (the same size as the HarperCollins paperbacks), and I wanted 1,000 copies.

Oddly, a couple of the printers took a very long time to get back to me with a quote - it's hard to imagine businesses ignoring potential work, but it happened. The quotes I received varied greatly: one of the printers wanted to charge me more than all the others combined! Naturally, I said "thanks, but no thanks" to that one.

Once I'd chosen a printer, there was the matter of figuring out how to get the text into the right format... Not as simple as it might sound. All sort of fun things happen when you're type-setting, the most annoying of which is when you make a simple change to the text and it pushes everything down a line... And then you end up with the last line of a chapter all on its own on an otherwise blank page. Since I wanted to give as much value for money as possible, I spent quite some time tweaking the text to ensure that this didn't happen!

Originally I was using Microsoft Word to format the text, but it wasn't what the printers needed, so I switched to my creaky old edition of Quark Express, one of the world's greatest user-hostile programs. As luck would have it, Quark formats things differently to Word and squeezed my 160 pages down to 144 - which meant that I was able to include another two short stories! Yay!

Anyway, yesterday afternoon a delivery guy arrived from the printer with a great big pile of copies of the book.... And all my fears were immediately assuaged: it looks great. The printers (Colourbooks) did an absolutely excellent job.

Of course, I won't know for a long time whether it's all been worth the trouble: I have to sell a hung number of copies to break even. Each book costs €10.00, and from that comes the cost of the printing, the postage, the envelopes, the address labels...

So if you don't like to think of me spending Christmas sitting in the dark eating cold beans straight out of the tin, please buy a copy of The New Heroes: Superhuman. In fact, buy lots: every copy is signed and numbered and they make ideal Christmas presents.

Crikey! I haven't updated the weblog in a while, have I?

That's mostly because much of the stuff that I might put up here ends up on the news page instead, but it's also partly because I keep forgetting. I am old, after all...

Well here we are in 2007, the year that will see the publication of the third book in the New Heroes series, Absolute Power. But will it also be the final book? That's a good question! I'm glad you asked that!

[Ahem]. Moving swiftly on...

Anyway, Christmas and the New Year went off without a hitch, with the exception of my trusty PC deciding to throw a wobbly in the middle of December. You'd think that with all the technology that's going around these days that someone would be able to invent a PC that lasts longer than eighteen months without suddenly deciding that it didn't want to boot up for no reason.

Fortunately I keep regular back-ups on an external hard disk.

Unfortunately two days after the PC died the external hard disk went out in sympathy with it.

Fortunately I'd transferred all the important data to my laptop before it did.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to recover all my old e-mails.

Fortunately I managed to revive the PC after a lot of hard work - and all the old data was still on it!

Unfortunately Windows decided to reinstall itself and in the process it cleaned off all my old e-mails before I got the chance to properly save them.

Grr...

So my advice is this: if you're using Microsoft Outlook Express, then stop using it right now and find something else instead. Eudora, for example, is a free e-mail program that saves its data in ordinary text files. This means that even if something goes wrong and you can't access your e-mails through the program, you can still open the files in Notepad. Unlike Outlook Express, which stores its data in what appear to be "write-only" files that are strongly resistant to being backed-up.

External hard disks are pretty cheap (€139 for my 320Gb Seagate drive), and if you use a back-up program like Second Copy then you can set it up to automatically make backups of all your important files at regular intervals. This is what I now do, plus I've set up a network with the laptop. At any given time I now have backups on the PC, the laptop, the external disk and on CD-Roms. Just in case.

Rant over!

So what else is lined up for 2007? Well, there's the US publication of the first NH book. That's happening in April. As mentioned elsewhere, the book will be called The Awakening with the series title of Quantum Prophecy. Before it arrives I'm planning to split this website. Well, sort of. At the moment, www.quantumprophecy.com and www.TheNewHeroes.co.uk both point to the same place, but to avoid confusing the American readers I'm going to set www.quantumprophecy.com to point to a new opening page.

There'll also be some more NH short stories coming, plus a larger on-line project that - if it works - should be a lot of fun.

Aside from that... I do have quite a few irons in the fire but I can't talk about any of them right now (mostly because they're not connected with the New Heroes books).

Right. That's me done for now! Hope you all had an excellent Christmas and New Year!

Cheers,
Mike

We're back from Italy - and what a fantastic holiday it was! Sorrento has lizards! Leonia and I had never seen wild lizards before (there are no indigenous reptiles in Ireland). Here's a photo of one:

Sorrento is an astonishingly beautiful part of the world. The people are very friendly and the food... My God! The food! I don't think I've ever eaten so well in my life. The company was perfect: our great friend Paul Tomlinson, the legendary SF writer Harry Harrison, Harry's daughter Moira and her husband Mark.

The weather was so good I even took to the seas:

Just in case you were wondering: that's actually me in the above photo, and not Brad Pitt as you may have thought on first glance.

After Italy, Leonia and I spent a few days in London, doing some book-related things. Here's a shot of the signing session in the Harrod's branch of Waterstones:

The handsome gentleman in the suit is Waterstones' Lee Pheasant, a thoroughly decent bloke whom it was my profound pleasure to meet. And the even more handsome gentleman next to him is me.

We had dinner with my baby sister and her husband, before the four of us went to see Spamalot in the West End (which was absolutely hilarious - well worth seeing). Plus, I managed to fulfill one of my life's ambitions by visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum, where they had a display of some of Leonardo da Vinci's actual drawings.

Our hotel was right next to Hyde Park, so we also got to see lots of pigeons, geese, swans, ducks, squirrels, bunnies and even a couple of rats.

Oh, and on Charing Cross Road we spotted Steve-O from MTV's Jackass and Wild Boys, but we didn't have time to stop and chat because we were going to a comics shop.

Only a few days to go now before Sakkara is published! Unfortunately, I won't be around to see it happening: We're off to Italy for a few days so we'll miss the countdown clock ticking over to "00 00:00:00" (shame! After all the work I put into programming it!).

Anyway, hope you all enjoy the book...! Remember: not everything is quite what it seems...

What does that mean?

What indeed...

A random assortment of astoundingly useful discoveries I have made over the past forty years!

  • If you can't remember whether you should use "its" or "it's", simply take a moment to think about the sentence: If you can replace the "its" (or "it's") with "it is" or "it has", and the sentence still makes sense, then you need the one with the apostrophe.

  • Addendum for those who need it: the apostrophe is the little thingy that looks like this: '

  • A few years back I was overweight and was having a tough time dieting... And then one day I just realised: If you don't want to have to get fat out of your body, don't put fat into your body. Realising that made a real difference to the way I was eating: I lost fifty pounds (about 24kg) in about six months!

  • I've known this since I was three years old, but the Internet shows me that there are people out there who are my age (or older) and still don't know it: there is no such word as "alot".

  • Cats are smart, but they're not people and they don't think like people do, so don't freak out every time your cat coughs up a hairball on the carpet: if you do, the cat will quickly learn that you don't like hairballs on the carpet. So he or she will start coughing them out on your bed, in your shoes, on the cooker...

  • And speaking of cats: if you're one of those people who hates them, but finds that in a crowded room the cat will always seek out your lap on which to sit, this is not because cats are evil: it's because cats tend to feel more comfortable with people who are sitting calmly and not going "Here kitty! Here kitty!" at the tops of their voices. So if you want to keep the cat away, make noise and move around a lot!

  • Ever embarrass yourself by pushing on a "pull" door? Then remember this: if you can see the door's hinges, you need to pull. Otherwise, push!

  • Graphic novels are still just comics, only with better paper.

  • When driving, always slow down to let people pull out of side-roads. It'll make them happy. They might then do the same for someone else. And that person might do the same for yet another person. And so on, creating a long chain of better, happier drivers. One day, when you're stuck trying to pull out of a side-road, you might just find that one of those better drivers lets you pull out.

  • Never, ever, ever steal plutonium from a three-legged badger.

    Hmm... It's been yet another a while since I last updated the weblog! Sorry about that... I've been working hard (perhaps too hard) on the third book in the New Heroes series. All is going well, though! Of course, I'm not going to say anything at all about the book right now - not even its title. I mean, Sakkara has yet to be published, so anything I tell you about Book 3 might spoil that.

    Oh, all right then! You've twisted my arm! Here's a few hints about Book 3!

  • Book 3 be printed on paper.
  • It will contain a large number of words.
  • It will round out the first phase of the overall story.
  • There will be no bungee-jumping giraffes anywhere in the book.
  • Book 3 will not be set in ancient Greece.
  • The word "zarjaz" might - or might not - appear in the book.

    I haven't updated this in quite some time, but there's a good reason: I've been working like crazy on the third book in the series, which is currently going by the rather clever title of Book 3 (we'll probably change it to something more exciting!).

    Some writers just start with a blank page and make it up as they go along, but that doesn't work for me. I have to plan in advance exactly where the book is going! I've just about finished my outline document, which describes everything that happens in detail. And when I say detail... The outline is 45,000 words; not that much shorter than the final book will be!

    So if you don't hear much from me for the next month or so, now you know why!

    Today is Leonia's birthday! She is definitely the best wife in the whole world, and I love her lots!

    Much fun was had at The Dublin Comic and Toy Convention on Saturday, and many comics were bought! My fellow guest Glenn Fabry was - as always - a thorough gentleman. He brought along some of the original pages from his Neverwhere comic, one of which caught Leonia's eye and will soon be adorning our sitting-room wall. We met lots of great people, including at least one future best-selling writer (if there's any justice), and I managed to tick another three Judge Dredd Megazines off my "missing" list! Many thanks to Emmett of Comet Comics for organising the event, and to Leonia and Sparky for being willing and able assistants throughout the day!

    Happy birthday to me
    Happy birthday to me
    Happy birthday dear me
    Happy birthday to me!

    (Good lord! I'm 40!)

    Thanks to my dad's handy DVD recorder, I've finally been able to grab some images of my appearance on Dustin's Daily News on January 18th!
    Note: Dustin is the one on the right.

    We arrived back home from Manhattan on Wednesday morning, following a thoroughly exhausting flight (which itself followed a thoroughly exhausting week). The New York Comic Con was tremendous fun, and we met a lot of great people. Unfortunately, the event was so packed that we never managed to connect with our old pal PJ Holden (artist on 2000 AD strips Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper, among many other things).

    We did, however, meet up with quite a few other legendary comics creators...


    Writer/Director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Spider-Man, Daredevil) and Mike make funny faces for the camera.


    Leonia meets one of her favourite comics people, the incredibly talented David Mack (Daredevil, Kabuki).


    Brian Michael Bendis (Ultimate Spider-Man, New Avengers, Powers) is utterly delighted to meet fellow genius Mike Carroll.

    We were also lucky enough to meet (but sadly didn't take photos of ourselves with) Tom Raney, Mark Bagley, Joe Quesada, Neal Adams, Jim Steranko, Todd McFarlane, Michael Avon Oeming, John Romita Jr., and a whole bunch of other comics writers and artists.

    We managed to track down (or, rather, be tracked down by) young JT Metzer and the rest of the gang, who quizzed me mercilessly on the upcoming sequel to The Quantum Prophecy. Naturally, I refused to answer any of their questions, so they thought that it would be a good idea to see if they could get any info out of Leonia... Ah, guys, you seriously underestimated my good lady's superhuman ability to dodge questions!

    The New York Comic Con was great fun, but it wasn't without problems... On the Saturday (the second day of the con) tens of thousands of people turned up, way more than the organisers expected, which led to the enormous dealers' room becoming so packed that the fire marshalls had to call in the state troopers to clear the room!

    We spent a rather large amount of money on comics, DVDs, CDs and books, and probably the same amount of money again on food (Manhattan is not the cheapest place in the world to eat), but it was worth it: the last time Leonia and I had a proper holiday (by which I mean a holiday that was more than a couple of days) was seven years ago!

    P.S.: Just to prove that I don't always look so weird in photographs, here's one that JT took on Saturday morning...

    Yay! Off to Manhattan this afternoon! As I mentioned below, we're going to the New York Comic Con where we're hoping to meet up with JT Metzer and a few of his wild and crazy pals for what JT likes to call "the world's first official New Heroes fan gathering". I keep telling you, JT: it's not "official" unless I say it's official! You can't just decide that it's official all by yourself!
    Apologies to those of you whose e-mails are awaiting a reply - I promise I'll get to them as soon as we get back!

    Wow! The Quantum Prophecy is now officially in the top 100% of the all-time best-seller lists! Thanks to everyone who has helped make this possible!

    Leonia and I will be in Manhattan at the end of February to attend the New York Comic Con! If you're there, look us up! Even though there will be thousands of people attending, you'll be able to recognise us easily: look for an extremely pretty girl accompanied by a gangly, dazed-looking bald guy carrying armfuls of comics.

    As promised on the News page, here are some details of my recent UK trip!

    Thursday morning: First stop was Ottakar's bookshop in Guildford, where I had the pleasure to speak to about a million (well, fifty or so) very bright young people who bravely struggled through my Irish accent and bombarded me with some rather brilliant questions!

    That afternoon I visited Fullbrook School in New Haw, where I was faced with a slightly smaller crowd of older teenagers... Though I've spoken at schools many times in the past, this was my first such encounter with second-level students! I have to admit that it was a little scary at first, but it wasn't long before everything started to flow and and all too soon it was time to go.

    Then on to Thursday evening, to Ottakar's in Putney, for the presentation of the Ottakar's Children's Book Prize 2006. Unfortunately, I didn't win... But against such strong competition I was just delighted to have been shortlisted! Julia Golding's novel The Diamond of Drury Lane was the winner... I haven't read it yet, but from what I've been told it's a worthy choice! Congratulations to Ms Golding, and to the authors of the other shortlisted books...

  • The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne
  • Shakespeare's Secret by Elise Broach
  • Gregor and the Rats of Underland by Suzanne Collins
  • Jack Slater, Monster Investigator by John Dougherty
  • Ralph the Magic Rabbit by Adam Frost
  • The Lottery by Beth Goobie
  • North Child by Edith Pattou
  • Spy Mice: The Black Paw by Heather Vogel Frederick

    This afternoon - Friday - I had the privilege to be the very first ever guest speaker at the Kent Book Company in Aylesford! Billions and billions of students from trillions of schools came to see me, so I had to work extra hard not to disappoint them. It was a tremendous amount of fun, and I loved every minute of it (even when I was asked some rather difficult questions).

    The whole trip was extremely exhilerating - though exhausting - and I'd like to thank all the good people at HarperCollins for making it possible, particularly the lovely Emma who put up with me for two whole days. Thanks also to my scary editor Matt for not beating me too much this time.

    Thanks also to all the teachers for selecting only the very best pupils, to Helen and Joanne at the Kent Book Company, and to everyone at Ottakar's, particularly the wonderful Sheena (and Sheena's husband Michael, a fantastic bloke indeed!).

    But the main thanks have to go to all the kids (or Young Adults, if you prefer). Unfortunately, I can't remember all their names, so it wouldn't be fair to mention only those whose names I do remember! But there are one or two - and they know who they are! - who I will never forget! (Special note to a Certain Person: Remember... Keep writing, and never give up! I expect to see your books on the best-seller lists before too long!).

    Hooray! It's time for... Mike's Guide to Better Living!

    1. Do not ever try to eat a sofa.
    2. Helicopters work best right-side-up.
    3. If someone dares you to juggle buckets of acid, politely decline.
    4. Food is an excellent source of nutrition.
    5. Never put on a scary mask and attempt to frighten your pet tiger just to see the look on his face.

    Quote of the Day: "Instead of banning drink-drivers from driving, wouldn't it be better to ban them from drinking?" - Leonia Carroll

    Dear Mike,
      Why do people write "Dear" when they're starting off a letter? Also, why do they write "Yours" at the end of it?
      Yours, Barnaby Elephant

    Mike replies: Barnaby, that's a good question! Let me look it up in my Big Book of Made-Up Answers to Good Questions... Okay! See, people write "Dear" because it's an acronym of "De Envelope's Addressed Right" - which basically means that if you're reading the letter, and it was addressed to you, then it reached the right person. "Yours" is an acronym of "Ye OUghta Reply Soonly", which was intended to tell the reader that the sender expects a quick response.

    Today - January 3rd 2006 - is the official publication date for The Quantum Prophecy! Yay! You wouldn't believe how long I've been waiting for this...! A series of superhero novels has been my dream project for over ten years (though it was only about four years ago that I started really thinking about the story and how it might work).
        My initial idea was to tell the story of the world's first genuine superhero, a teenage boy who discovers an alien device that gives him superhuman powers. I spent a lot of time writing, rewriting and then abandoning various ideas, including one in which the Department of Superheroes was a branch of the civil service (I later used that one for my "By the Book" comic strip, published in issue #4 of Futurequake and drawn by the exceptionally talented Bolt-01).
        In October 2002 I hit upon the basic premise of what would become the final tale. Well, I've just read over my notes from that time: quite a lot has changed since then!
        So... Thanks are in order! To my friends and family who have put up with me being extremely absent and uncommunicative for the past couple of years, to my agent for believing in the book and finding it a home, and to the good people at HarperCollins for giving it a home! I'd particularly like to thank my editor Matthew Morgan, a thoroughly brilliant bloke who wisely always put the book ahead of the author's rapidly diminishing mental health! Without Matt, The Quantum Prophecy wouldn't be half the book that it is.
        I also want to extend eternal thanks and infinite hugs to my beautiful wife Leonia, who has put up with a lot more than anyone else.
        And lastly, I want to thank me, without whom this book would never have appeared.

    The New Year has arrived, bringing with it my usual batch of New Year's Resolutions!

    1. I resolve to not start World War III.
    2. I resolve to really knuckle down this year and work thirteen hours a day instead of the usual twelve.
    3. I resolve to actually read some of the books in my "must read" pile.
    4. I resolve to be more tolerant of neighbours who don't seem to understand the meaning of the phrase "turn off that bloody karaoke machine - it's three o'clock in the bloody morning!"
    5. I resolve to find a way to go back in time and persuade Jon Bon Jovi not to record "Bed of Roses", a song I used to really like before my annoying neighbour started "singing" it over and over on his ultra-loud karaoke machine.

    Mike's Weblog Archive