Tip of the Quill: A Journal

Category Archives: Publishing

On the Future of Comics.

On October 23rd, I had the great pleasure of co-hosting Geek Speaks: The Future of Comics with Henry Jenkins. I was thrilled to not only reunite Henry with the one and only Scott McCloud for a one-on-one discussion on McCloud’s Reinventing Comics almost 15 years later, but to then get to chair a panel of […]

leaf

The Future of Publishing.

A few months ago, I had the honor of organizing and moderating a keynote panel for the sixth Media in Transition conference here at MIT. Our title (and topic) was “The Future of Publishing”, and MIT World has just published the video recording of it online. I’ve embedded a copy of it here (all 94 […]

leaf

The Wrong Essay: From Horrorism to Terrorism.

This weekend is Readercon, one of my favorite conferences in the world and, although this is only my second, one I’ve all but sworn never to miss. I love the people, the panels, the bookshop (especially the bookshop) and the level of conversation that happens here, wide-ranging debates that cover everything that has to do […]

leaf

On Literature and Comparative Media Studies.

(Note: I should preface this bit of writing with a warning: what follows is a first attempt to set down some things I’ve been struggling to articulate for the past couple of years. As such, it may be slightly less than ideally coherent, but hopefully out of it some clarity will emerge.) What is literature? […]

leaf

OLPC cutting way back to birth the XO2.

Courtesy of my friend and coworker Andrew comes the news that Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) group is laying off half its staff, slashing salaries and ceasing its support of Sugar, the XO’s open-source OS to focus on finishing development of its second-generation XO laptop, the (presumably-titled) XO2. While I’m definitely troubled to […]

leaf

If I were doing Inkblots again…

If I were doing Inkblots again, the community aspects of Movable Type 4.2 and the publishing aspects of MagCloud would make it an entirely different animal. The industry has caught up with a bunch of the stuff I was struggling to do, what? Five years ago now? I’m just sayin’. I don’t know if I’ll […]

leaf

Way to go Matt!

Congratulations to Aurelia’s brother Matt, who just sold his first novel! Amy Einhorn preempted world rights to Matthew Flaming’s first novel, The Kingdom of Ohio, for her imprint at Putnam; Stephanie Cabot at the Gernert Company made the sale. Set in New York City in 1901, the book revolves around a young workman on the […]

leaf

Thoughts on zines.

For multiple reasons lately, I’ve been thinking about online magazines. As many of you have noticed, Inkblots went down a while ago. It hadn’t been updated since 2002-2003, aside from the blogs of Ken and I, but a perfect storm of catastrophes first brought the site down and then prevented me from bringing it back […]

leaf

Shilling for JPG.

So my friend Derek just started offering subscriptions to his new JPG Magazine, and I’m helping to shill for it. Keep reloading the page, and you’ll get me eventually. I mean what I say in my soundbite – as a magazine editor/publisher myself, I can honestly say that what Derek’s doing with 8020 Publishing is […]

leaf

Making Lightning.

I came across this while dong my morning webcomics tour – a sharp interview with Scott “Understanding Comics” McCloud. I can’t wait to read his new book, Making Comics, which is due to hit in September. I’m still trying to figure out a way to wrangle a visit from McCloud to MIT this fall, but, […]

leaf