So here’s the deal. I love me some indie bookstores. I really do. I mean when I shop in bookstore it might be a chain or something but really I prefer to make a home at an indie bookstore where I get to know the folks who run it and really become part of a community. A bookstore community. I adore it.

So I talked to my publisher and we discussed our mutual love for these bookstores, because the guy is also rockin’ cool and we came up with a plan! A plan I say!

If you work for, frequent or love an independent bookstore near you and you think they might enjoy selling Stays Crunchy in Milk here’s the scoop.

The first ten bookstores I hear from (adampknave @ gmail.com) will get a free copy of the book, signed, to sell for full retail and keep all the profit. Hopefully, the idea is, they will want to order more. Perhaps they won’t. Maybe they get the book, sell it, and don’t give a damn. All right. I can live with that, because it puts a bit of money into the bookstore’s pocket.

If the bookstore is interested and close enough to make it feasible I also enjoy readings and such and can make all sorts of kooky events happen. I’m easy. So there’s that too. But the main idea here is simple.

What they get: A free signed copy of Stays Crunchy in Milk

What I want in return: A picture of the front of the store so I can post it. An address so I can post it and a picture of the book on shelves. This is so I can start a section of “Suggested retailers” on my site to promote each of these stores.

All I need is the name of someone at the bookstore to mail, who knows I will be mailing them about this, or for someone from the bookstore to mail me. Either way. Like I said, there are ten copies set aside for this so let me know!

Awesome review of Stays Crunchy in Milk is up at Mamapop.com:

“Every generation gets the novel it deserves, and Stays Crunchy In Milk may well be ours.”

“Knave hits his stride in the video game sections, where the characters navigate a claustrophobic and bewildering mash-up of Mario Bros and Kings Quest, with enemies leaping out from nothingness and an ever-advancing wall of blackness swallowing the world behind them. It’s like a Scott Pilgrim comic taken to its existential extreme.”

“It may seem strange to have breakfast cereals teach you some basic truths about life, but for a generation that grew up on Saturday morning cartoons and cereals with little dried-up marshmallows, it’s only fitting.”

Go read the review and then consider buying a copy of the book.

So there’s this bookstore in Red Lodge, Montana. It’s name is, aptly enough, Red Lodge Books. Lemme tell ya about them. See this guy I met, he liked Things Wrong With Me, worked there. And we talked. He’s a pretty cool guy, so that’s good. Always nice to find new cool people to talk to. Well this guy mentioned he worked for a bookstore.

Well I’m a whore so I pointed him at my books. You know how it is. He offered to show them to his boss and maybe they could carry them or something. So I, quite happily, mailed them a book or two all nice and signed and hoped that even if they didn’t carry them they would like them. Running a bookstore is not easy. There’re less and less people buying books all the time. Thin margins and the like. So not wanting to carry more books makes an amount of sense to me. I certainly wouldn’t have taken it personally.

Turns out they liked the books. Further turned out they wanted to stock them. So yes, if you go to Red Lodge, stop by the bookstore and buy a book. Mine, someone else’s, I don’t care. But supporting local, non-chain bookstores is an awesome thing to do. And the place looks pretty spiffy.

Anyway, Halloween is coming in a few weeks and like most stores Red Lodge Books has a Halloween display. Lemme show it to you:

See that? Front and center? Yah, that’s my horror short story collection. I only ever wrote horror in short story form and don’t do it now but I did and I’m proud of the stores in that volume. And these cats dig it. They dig what I did enough to put some unknown fucker front and center, surrounded by things like World War Z. And I can’t appreciate that enough. So thanks, guys.

And the rest of you, quite seriously, support a non-chain bookstore if you can. And if you’re anywhere near Red Lodge go in, buy a book and tell them that they’re awesome.

Here’s one I’d like you all to share. If you’ve been considering buying Stays Crunchy in Milk but have been on the fence so far now you can download the first 67 pages. That’s right a PDF with all of Part One. Download it, read it, share it with a friend. Then, if you enjoy it, buy the book. Tell your friends.

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Which brings to mind a debate. How do you feel about books released for free online alongside a print version for sale? I mean if there was a PDF of a book you thought sounded interesting would you download it? If you did download it and enjoyed it would you buy a copy? Tell your friends?

It isn’t a big leap of logic to see why I’m poking about this. So please, let’s talk about it. This could change the way I do things. I’m insanely curious what you all think about this topic. Chime in!

There’s a great review of Crunchy up at the new book blog, Smart Shoppers Secrets.

And the obligatory excerpt: “I’ve just this weekend finished reading Adam Knave’s Stay Crunchy in Milk. Adam had described it to me as a pop-culture fairy tale, which at first worried me, since I’m not well-versed in pop culture — but if you’re similarly situated, fear not, this is a tale that transcends the trappings. The thing about reading Knave is that nothing ever is as it appears. Yes, you can read his work on one level and be all happy, because he follows the ‘Entertain first’ rule. Stays Crunchy in Milk is indeed entertaining: you get a buddy film, an adventure romp, a often laugh-out-loud off kilter view of the world that surrounds us; it’s all good.”

First up, Tim O’Shea interviewed me about Stays Crunchy in Milk for Talking With Tim. Great, fun interview. Somehow over the course of this thing I manage to reference Frank Miller, Zelda, the A-Team and say “That’s how I roll.”

If you don’t know O’Shea, he’s a great writer and nice guy and Talking With Tim is a great site worth reading. Tons of interviews with nifty people. The one before me? Bateman! How cool is that?

Anyway, go read and comment on it and stuff!

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I got a possible offer yesterday that has me bouncing around but I can’t talk about it yet. Which sucks. But! Excited by the chance this could happen.

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So I spent a week with a bum foot, hobbling everywhere, on pain meds, just being miserable. Got almost nothing done, because I just hurt. And now my foot is better. So, of course, I am starting to get sick. Not hardly right, I tell you.

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Things Wrong With Me, episode 60 is up – http://tinyurl.com/mbr5tt

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William Marvin died today. Of Marvin Windows and Doors. You know what they say: As one door closes… OH CRAP IT KILLED MISTER MARVIN!

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Congratulations to those people reading this who have done something that I should congratulate them on, but can’t remember because I am a self-absorbed kinda guy. You rock, and [that thing] was totally radical, dude! I can’t believe you actually [did that thing] the way you [did that thing]! Woo!

Lauren Vogelbaum is one of my faveorite people. I know that sounds trite, but it’s also true. She’s simply a joy to talk to and to work with. She’s also a great editor. We worked together on Stays Crunchy in Milk and for the release I wanted to do a quick interview with her for the fun of it. So here we go, mostly discussing editor-y things!

Adam P. Knave: so we met on this project, right?  What was your impression of it, or me, before you started to read the book?

Lauren Vogelbaum: I think the only contact I’d had with you before I signed on for Stays Crunchy was on Livejournal, which is a sort of social cornstarch — it allows friendships to thicken pretty quickly.  So I had a (fairly accurate) concept of you as this walking bowl of pop culture soup.  The book I hadn’t heard anything about, really — our friend Laszlo, who possibly felt bad that the book I’d just finished working on for him had made me scared of assorted things that are difficult to avoid (like y’know trees), promised that the characters were completely non-threatening cartoon cereal mascots and that there was no toad-eating.  But you and I agreed that the best way to edit a book is to actually read it, and that the best way to read a book is to not hear all about it beforehand, so that’s all I knew about it going in.

APK: Non-threatening? HA! Well, no, ok, point.  And that’s right, you went in fairly cold.  Less than readers have, really, because the blurb wasn’t even done.  It was just “Pop culture-y madness – GO!” … how’d that treat you?

LV: You really don’t give your readers a wading pool to dip their feet in before they plunge into all that madness… I knew by the end of the first paragraph what I’d gotten myself into.  But I watched too many Saturday morning cartoons in the 80s and studied a lot about pop & mass media in school, so the Stays Crunchy brand of surrealism is a brand that I was instantly comfortable with.

APK: What’s your process when you approach a book to edit?

LV: When I was a kid and I had more of that “time” stuff that’s so elusive these days, I always read new books twice, straight through. (This is relevant I promise.)  The first read would go super-quick ’cause I just wanted to find out what happened, but the second go was always sloooow ’cause I wanted to study the language, dissect how the author had put their words and ideas together to construct the whole. That’s sorta how I edit — I’ll do a first pass where I’m just familiarizing myself with the story and characters, and fixing silly little typos and clear-cut grammatical mistakes, and then have a second go at it where I’m in up to my elbows, working with characterization, pacing, concept structure, and all that fun meaty stuff.
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that day! Stays Crunchy in Milk is out on Amazon (or bn.com, etc) and I am as happy as a clam. I don’t even know how happy clams are, in general, but I hear it is fairly significant on the “how happy are you” scale.

Anyway! Stays Crunchy in Milk is out! You can buy it, if you didn’t pre-order it! And for the record, yes we planned to get the pre-orders in hands before the book hit sale everywhere but fate (i.e. – printers) stood in our way. The paper back pre-orders are out and should get there this week, hard covers I still don’t have so I can’t sign so they can’t be sent. I know, and I’m sorry.

But! Stays Crunchy in Milk is out! Click the book’s title or cover anywhere in this post to go and buy it!
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They were four: Wereberry the strawberry werewolf, Choco-Ra the chocolate mummy, The Creature From the Fruit Lagoon (his friends call him “T.C.”), and Cherrygeist the… well she was a ghost. At least, until she wasn’t. One day, she wasn’t there at all. And then they were three.

Three friends who have sworn to search for her to the ends of the world and beyond – to find and save her.

Through familiar lands to places startling and unknown – across looming castles, endless battlefields and simple brick roads – these three friends will hunt and search and scour every inch. Along the way they’ll have to rely on a whole lot of luck and a little bit of charm, but mostly each other.

A fairy tale for the super-sugar generation, Stays Crunchy in Milk is a road novel packed with 100% of your recommended daily allowance of essential action and adventure. And it’s a delicious part of a nutritious breakfast.
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This is my kind of book! Stays Crunchy In Milk is that rare story with both heart and substance. Adam Knave deftly reexamines the pop cultural elements of his childhood then reshapes them into wondrous things both familiar and new. Knave’s engrossing story transforms his love for his early memories into an exciting adventure novel. Its narrative swept me right along. I really cared about what happened next. Two thumbs up from me. Four paws up from Roger Rabbit. — Gary K. Wolf, Creator of Roger Rabbit

An imaginative work that uses pop culture icons in a highly entertaining way. A fine example that fun stories need not fit into one specific genre. — Alan Kistler, Comic Book Historian, MTV.COM

In Crunchy, Adam Knave hits a unique yet wholly familiar vein that is both hilarious and nostalgic. An outstanding work of pure imagination, the story will make you laugh until your sides hurt. The characters are simply brilliant – truly original yet sprinkled with just enough retro charm to make them seem like people (or creatures) you’ve know all your life. This is one book you don’t want to miss. — Byron Starr, author of Ace Hawkins and the Wrath of Santa Claus and Doppelganger

There exists a world that we all know and love, yet have never truly seen before. Adam gives a first glimpse of this fantastic land full of familiar characters and opens the door wide for everyone to join along for fun and adventure! — Chris Giarrusso, author/illustrator of G-MAN and MINI MARVEL
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You can also read the first four chapters: Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four
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If you have a review of the book, please, put it up and let me know where it is (and out it on Amazon)! If you know anyone who might want to read the book, steer them to it. It’s pop culture. It’s me being very strange, and often about as straight faced as I am here when I discuss the 80s.

So please, spread the word as much as you can. Stays Crunchy in Milk is out!

Firefox 3.5 removed a feature I used a lot from working. See you used to be able to set it so that links from an external source would open in the current tab but links from within tabs would, if they tried to, open in new tabs. Somehow in 3.5 it is one or the other for everything. Which is messing me up, since I have a program that feeds data to the browser and I don’t want it opening a new tab each time I have to remember to ignore reflex and always right click a link to open it in a new tab. All of which is to say that in gmail, where I used to click a link and it would open in new tab, now I click links like a fool and they open where my gmail was and … argh!

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It is with a sad, sad face I have to tell you I read the new James Morrow book and was … disappointed. I love Morrow, though I don’t read him all the time because he can literally depress me for weeks. But when I give in and read a book by him I am always charmed, entertained and enlightened. And depressed but hey. So I read his new one, Shambling Towards Hiroshima and … it felt like half a book. I loved it, right up until it just ended and I felt like he had forgotten to go anywhere with it. I dunno. I mean it worked, it was going somewhere and then it was over and I really felt abandoned. There’s something missing, some point, some ending, that either I missed or he did. I am willing to believe it was me, but that doesn’t help. Though, seriously, check out his other books.

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This video is awesome:

It may not be on Amazon yet (soon my pretties, soon) but I just got two large boxes of Stays Crunchy in Milk. The trade soft cover edition. The hard covers haven’t arrived yet. So those of you who ordered a trade copy, your pre-order should go out this weekend.

And that’s great. I am excited to be able to get these out. But right this second I am more excited just to have the book in my greedy little hands.

They look so pretty. So very pretty. Woo! So yeah, expect another post when the hard covers come in and a big push of “now we can all glee” when it goes live on Amazon. For right now I am gonna post this and go pet the book a while.