Help Me Win

Thanks to you, my comic series Testament has been nominated for a prestigious Eagle Award. Now the *real* voting begins.

If you could spare the time to vote for Testament here, you’d give this book a chance to live on. Please please do.

Just go down to number 14: “Award for Favourite New Comicbook” and click on the radio button for Testament. You can vote in as many categories as you like, but you don’t have to do any of that for the one vote to be counted.

If you haven’t had a chance to see the comic, there’s a free download of the first issue here, as well as a download of copious notes and references for the first 11 issues. If you want more and really can’t afford it – as always, let me know and I’ll get it to you.

The object of the game is not to make money off this stuff – just to be allowed to keep doing it. An award like this might be enough to convince the higher ups at DC to keep Testament going for years to come.

(They will ask for an email address, but it’s only for validation. They’ve been doing this for thirty years and they really are NOT a marketing company, nor will they use it for anything else but to count your vote.)

Broken Frontier

Here’s a great new interview about Testament on Broken Frontier, conducted by a comics fan and religion scholar, Beth Davies. She’s also doing a presentation about the comic to the American Academy of Religion this Friday. That should be interesting.

Here’s a snip from the interview:

BF: What does it mean to “hack” reality? I’ve done some coding in my time, and I can imagine hacking into a system. But into reality? Help me imagine doing that.

DR: Just do one thing that’s not expected of you.

What’s hacking, anyway? Repurposing something—using something in a way it may not have been “intended.” I think the ultimate hack of reality is to realize it hasn’t been “intended” to be anything. There’s no creator. Just creation myths. If you want the world to be created differently, then go write a new myth. If you want the world to work differently, then change the laws, or whatever is in the way. Nothing is sacred. Only the stuff that people are afraid of need the protection of sanctity.

Reality hacking can be as simple as changing a one-way highway into a two-way street, so that less kids get run over and more stores can be developed on either side. Create a neighborhood out of a former highway. That’s good enough for me.

Or create your own local currency. Get people to use it instead of dollars in your community, and watch Wal-Mart go out of business. Easy as that, if you realize it’s possible. But most of us don’t, and so we suffer and maybe pray a little for things to be changed for us.

The Secret

I’m interested in critiquing a phenomenon known as “The Secret” in my next book. For me, it is a natural extension of the faulty logic and intention going into the self-help movement from the beginning. I wrote about this when I came back from speaking (barely) at a Deepak Chopra conference in Puerto Rico a couple of years ago – but I think there’s a larger argument to be made about the marriage of spirituality, the free market, and strident individualism.

Has anyone come into contact with The Secret (dvd torrent available at Mininova, ‘teachers’ interviewed Larry King last week), and have anything to say about it – good or bad? Does anyone else see the “self help” movement as an amplification of a certain kind of selfishness? Is anyone else bothered by this juxtaposition of capitalism, quantum physics, and human transformation?

Or is this all simply the power of positive thinking? Is resistance not only futile, but cancer-producing?

If the conversation gets too involved for this forum, I’ll use it as an excuse to get a bbs up.

The Next Book

Finally settled in with a new publisher on a new book. Everyone’s been asking about it, and for once I’m trying my darnedest to take advantage of that rather than shying away from it.

Often, it’s only after I’ve completed and even done a year of touring and speaking about a book that I feel ready to really write it. Of course then it’s too late to include responses to all those great questions that come up from readers, or requests for examples, or even suggestions of examples to include.

So this time I’m going to try to share what I’m working on as I work on it, and even create a few forums through which I can engage with people on the main ideas of the book. Not a Wiki, but some robust conversations – perhaps even some real world forums. (Remember what it was like to get a room with people and actually interact?)

For now, the working title of the book is “Corporatism: How we surrendered values for value, meaning for markets, and citizenship for customer service.” But that’s really a placeholder for a more precise and, hopefully, provocative/evocative title. I’m hoping to develop something more useful than a leftist/Marxist response to a market-driven culture, and instead look at the co-evolution of the notions of the “self” and the corporation – how these two constructions feed off one another.

More soon. I have some reading to do.