Good morning. Thank you for coming to visit the monsters on what --- on the evidence of the first 129 minutes of it --- I can only presume will be a very fine Saturday. Yesterday was a pretty fun day, too:
In the morning, I got to talk to Debbie Millman on her design matters program, and who would call in, but our very own Sam B.? Sam posted a story for every one of the first 100 monsters and for just about every other monster since. We've e-mailed a lot, but I had never spoken to him before. It took Debbie's radio program.
Sam read us one of his stories, I read another, and Debbie gave us one of Victoria Koldewyn's tales. We also talked about a whole lot of other things related to the monsters and to my non-monster work. I know that a few of you tuned in to the live broadcast. Thank you so much! If you missed it and are curious, you can listen to the archived show right here.
So that was all of that. Then, over the course of the day, I got to see a great new spate of stories pour in! It's especially nice to see so many new names pop up, and do so in high style. There's some funny stuff going on with yesterday's monster. You really have to check it out:
And then there's Monster 163, of course:
In contrast to the past few beasts, Monster 163 seems entirely serene. (It's aspirational art! :^) But just because everything appears to be calm doesn't mean there isn't a story here. How did 163 achieve this state of calm, for example? Is it transitory? Or permanent? Was it hard won? Or is it in 163's nature? If you can spare the time, slow your breathing, get into a monstrous state of Zen, and please...
It's March 1st (my 34.4th birthday, incidentally) and I know that some of you are getting a little frustrated waiting for the book. Please forgive the delay. I share your frustration. Amazon moved the release date from February 25th to March 5th, but I have confirmed that the books left the HOW Books warehouse earlier this week and are on their way. In fact, Joerg M. posted a comment a few hours ago saying that he received a notification that Amazon had shipped his copy. So... it's coming.
I do apologize for the delay. As you can tell from the throbbing vein on my forehead I am trying to speed things along by sheer force of will and concentration. So far, I've not seen any useful results, but when I had some soup just now all my spoons were bent.
I do hope that you'll have a wonderful, mellow Saturday,
and that you'll check back in tomorrow for Monster 164.
Please don't let any of all this shipping delay business
make you doubt that 344 LOVES YOU
