This isn’t even my metaphor, it’s Isaac Asimov’s – he swiped it from Lewis Carroll and put it into a time travel story of the same name.

In Through the Looking Glass, Alice meets up with the Red Queen and they go for a very brisk run – at the end of which they find that they haven’t moved an inch. They’re still standing under a tree, right where they started. Alice is a bit indignant, because she’s hot and sweaty and tired and she hasn’t got anywhere. The conversation goes like this:-

`Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, `you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’

`A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. `Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’

I’ve been running a Red Queen’s race for the past week or so, trying to get a lot of deadlines met and a lot of different things (creative and otherwise) sorted before I go to the States for the Castor signing tour in mid-July (see my own blog at www.mikecarey.net, for details – you can follow the ON TOUR tab or look in UPCOMING). But every time I finish something, something else pops up to take its place. My inbox is a magical horn of plenty that replenishes itself faster than I can empty it, and I’m sitting here gleefully mixing my metaphors like I’m trying to make a bomb or a new religion or something.

Maybe the feeling of uncontrolled acceleration comes from how many books I’ve got out this month – more projects hitting the stands from more different sources and angles than I’ve ever had before, by a factor of several. Last week saw my OGN Re-Gifters arrive in store: the first martial arts rom-com I’ve ever written, and the first book I wrote for DC’s new Minx line – although far from the first thing I’ve written with editor plenipotentiary Shelly Bond, whose brainchild Minx is. It’s a fun book and you should check it out, if only for Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel’s heartbreakingly beautiful art.

This week is Endangered Species, the X-Men one-shot that acts as part of a concerted and carefully planned overture to the Messiah Complex crossover later this year. This one-shot is a book with virtually no action – unless Madrox snapping his fingers and Cyclops shooting clouds counts as action. It’s all character beats, and it’s kind of dark – a sombre chord at the start of an amazing story.

Next week the first Crossing Midnight trade is out, along with X-Men#200. I’ll say more about Crossing Midnight in a post later on today, and a copy of the trade is going to be the prize in this week’s competition. But first, stay tuned for the winner of last week’s caption contest.

I know, I know – it’s just bread and circuses. But reading the entries livened up my weekend a lot, and gave me the excuse I needed to stop running and down tools for an hour or two. Anarchic inspiration, people. Thanks for all your efforts.

And buy my books. Or at least lie about it to make me feel good…

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 8:11 am and is filed under Comic Books, Creators, DC Comics, Graphic Novels, Marvel, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.