Molecules in My Hands!
The first copies of my new book, Molecules, have arrived! It won't be out officially until October 7th, but I got a few copies FedEx'd to me just in time for a trip to California. Here I am on the plane holding one. And not only that, this very blog entry is being posted from the plane! (Sorry, I'm still getting used to in-flight internet. Oh my, the world we live in.)
It's coming out simultaneously in English and French (with several other languages following closely, and more planned for later). Here's a picture my publisher Black Dog & Leventhal just posted with both of the currently existing editions:
This is all very exciting, but here we must come to the sad part of this blog post. A few days before the book arrived, I had a nightmare that it came, and all the pictures in it were on a WHITE BACKGROUND. My whole identity is built around the fact that, come hell or high water, everything I do is on a black background. That's just the kind of guy I am. It's hard to imagine a worse nightmare than finding such a devastating rip in the fabric of my identity, but of course reality found a way of outdoing even this nightmare to end all nightmares.
Yes, I forgot to credit my just-barely-girlfriend, the amazing, delightful, incredible Nina Paley, goddess of animation and forgiveness, for the beautiful pain diagram she drew for the book, under duress. Not in the photo credits, not in the acknowledgements, not anywhere. Oh, the humanity! The only thing she gets credit for in print is breaking up with me only twice during the writing of the book. Hard to believe, but this incident did not, in fact, result in another breakup, though I feel it was close, and would have been totally justified. I can't fix it in this printing, but you can be damn sure she's going to get a very nice credit in the next printing!
So without further ado, here is Nina's diagram of painkillers from Molecules, which, like all her work, is free, public domain, and owned only by the wind and the waves as they disperse it through the creative world.
(Any complaints about the fact that it's totally over-simplified should be directed to me, and reserved until you read the chapter it's embedded in.)