The Secret Vespers website has undergone an overhaul. This new format is based on WordPress. It allows comments, RSS, a calendar archive, and other useful features.
As always, thanks for reading!
I am doing a series of posts based on a question I asked my friends, “what object represents you?” I hope they will still want to be my friends after I have shared the results with you, Internet! The first one goes live March 10.
There are new stickers for sale at the Secret Vespers shop. They feature the “Not my problem!” boy, a dancing cartoon character who is just so happy that this is not his problem. I would not be surprised to wake up and find him stuck to the garbage chute of my building.
There’s a Facebook Page for Secret Vespers. So if you use Facebook, you can voice your support and make Secret Vespers a huge sensation—with tens, even dozens, of fans. If you have ever wondered what the faces of the other readers look like, now you will know!
You will find the same images you find here, plus there is a discussion section. Right now we are deciding which installments to use in a small print run this autumn. It looks like there is a video section, too. Someday we will have to put something there.
There is a new section at Secret Vespers, called Lovesick. It is devoted to the passionate moments and affairs you are doomed to lose forever, to the desires you can barely name. It is devoted to the crushing realization that there is nothing you can fix, that there is no way to get that feeling back, that there is a world of dreams never to come true. And that they are all beautiful.
Lovesick is a series of confessions to the Internet. Each one is posted live. Each one attempts to capture the loss or impossible fantasy of a lovesick, sleep-deprived character.
The first ever book of Secret Vespers prints is out. Angel House Press was crazy enough to publish them, saying the twenty-eight vignettes are “witty and wistful.” Amanda Earl, who runs Angel House, describes herself as “a renaissance libertine writer publisher bohemian bon-vivant anarchist malcontent troublemaker” and I think that explains why she agreed to print my work.
You can buy a copy for your own, or, for the greatly rewarding experience of giving, you can hand them out to all your friends. Witty and wistful, folks; we’ve got it all right here. Order them from the Secret Vespers Shop, where they wait beside many other delightful items, or at Angel House Press, or by clicking the button below. Thanks so much for reading; you really are the best readers and commentators anywhere on the Internet.
Let’s talk about scale! My friend, Tim Maly, writes a blog called Quiet Babylon, and in this post he discusses scale:
These Secret Vespers installments are tagged with scale, though many others could be. That crushing sense is one of the hardest sensations for me to put to words. Like love, hope, and so many other pre-verbal feelings, I find I can set it up with words or art, but that’s all I can do. The rest happens in the viewer or reader.
I get sort of dizzy, sort of light-heading, and I feel sort of outside myself when the scale of something big hits me. The traffic seen from above a major highway does this to me. The ocean, especially when stormy, does this to me. That documentary, Baraka, does this to me.
But enough about me. What has given you a crushing sense of scale?
I hope 2010 is off to a good start for you. Secret Vespers has changed the site layout, and has added hovertext to every episode of the comic. Now you can go back through the old posts and see what shows up when you mouse over them.
There is a new section, Stories, where I post material that has been published elsewhere:
And, there are t-shirts for sale at the Shop:
