I am glad to report that students at the University of Connecticut are possessed of excellent taste.
The Government Manual for New Superheroes has apparently also been reviewed in Men’s Edge‘s November issue, and issue 1612 of Comic Buyer’s Guide, but I haven’t seen either of those reviews yet.

The Government Manual for New Wizards is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

Matthew and I have been informed by our editor that they’re printing another 4000 copies of The Government Manual for New Superheroes, on top of our original print run of 9000. Obviously, this is good news.
One of the things I never realized is how hard it is for an author to get a sense of how well his book is selling. I’ve been somewhat obsessively checking our Amazon sales rank, which has generally been hovering between 20,000 and 70,000, but I really haven’t had any way to calculate what that means. I’m glad to know we’re doing well.
And I’m also glad to see that, as of this writing, The Government Manual for New Superheroes is at 10,581 on the Amazon sales chart. At this rate, we’ll be in the top 10,000 in no time.

I would just like to announce that I hate, hate, hate Internet Explorer.
As I understand it, at one point, all the major forces involved in programming for the Web got together and agreed on something called CSS, which is short for “cascading style sheets.” To oversimplify a bit, it’s a way of controlling the look of webpages.
After agreeing on how CSS would work, everybody went home and started coding browsers that would deal with CSS properly. Except for Microsoft. They went off and coded a $(*&% browser that implements a bunch of features completely wrongly.
So, right now, I’m I’m working on a new feature for the PR site for my book. It’s ready to go, except for one problem–it looks like crap in Internet Explorer. So my options are:
1. Release it with proper CSS coding, thereby making it look like crap in one of the most commonly used browsers on the planet;
2. Rewrite it with crappy CSS coding, so that it looks good in Internet Explorer but crappy everywhere else;
3. Come up with a clever hack that will make the various bugs in Explorer cancel each other out, so that the page looks equally good in all browsers.
A real programmer would have no trouble doing #3. Indeed, google for “Explorer CSS hack” and you’ll get tens of thousands of resuls. But the problem is, I’m not a programmer. I’m a writer, just trying to cobble together a funny website for a funny book. I really don’t want to spend day after %(*&ing day muddling around just to get the (*&$£ing text to line up properly in $(*&ing Internet Explorer.

Since The Government Manual for New Superheroes was my co-author Matthew’s idea in the first place, we agreed his name would go first on the cover (as well as on the title page and everywhere else in the book).
Over at Amazon, though, I’m listed first. I tried to persuade Matthew that this is because Amazon lists its authors in order of how staggeringly handsome they are, but he insists it has something to do with the fact that “J” comes before “M,” alphabetically speaking.
But Barnes & Noble and Buy.com list only Matthew as the author, and not me. Don’t they know how staggeringly handsome I am? What’s the matter with them?
Fortunately, Powell’s books has the right idea.

The Government Manual for New Superheroes is now available for pre-order.

No doubt you have often considered donning spandex tights and leaping across the rooftops of your city, defeating the evil and rescuing the innocent. Equally doubtlessly, the only thing holding you back has been certain practical questions. How will you keep your secret identity secret? Where can you recruit a sidekick and, more importantly, an arch enemy? And when you build your gleaming high tech headquarters, what zoning regulations must you follow?
Fear not, citizen crimefighters. Help is at hand, and it will be published by Andrews McMeel in September or October of this year.
Oh, and also, I wrote it, with my friend Matthew.
Here’s a look at the preliminary design for the front cover (which may change slightly between now and publication):

UPDATE: The Government Manual for New Superheroes is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com.

There’s an article up at the BBC about The Whitechapel Whirlwind, the opera that I’m writing the libretto for. My only quibble with the article is that it gives the impression that the whole opera will be performed next Tuesday; in fact, it will just be excerpts. Still, I think the article gives a good sense of who Jack “Kid” Berg was, and why he’s a worthy subject for the world’s first opera about boxing.

A piece I wrote is now up at The New Republic’s website. It’s called OutFlanked, and it takes a look at what we can expect now that there’s pro-life Democrat running for the Senate. (Free registration is required before you can read the article.)