Books
Q: How long will WASTELAND run for? Will there be a proper ending?
A: WASTELAND is planned to run for 60 issues. Yes, it will finish properly; by the end of the book the mysteries will be solved and your questions answered. The last story arc is already plotted.
Q: Will there be any more WASTELAND after that? Any spinoff series?
A: There are currently no plans to do so, but it's certainly possible.
Q: How come the WASTELAND collections are missing some issues?
A: The “interlude” issues are a way to give the series artist a break (We don't use separate pencillers/inkers/toners on WASTELAND; the artist does all of that themselves, every issue). Each interlude issue features a guest artist, and tells a standalone story from elsewhere (and often elsewhen) in the world of WASTELAND. We therefore decided to collect these issues separately, in their own anthology-style trade paperbacks. If you're reading WASTELAND in hardcovers, you'll find the interlude stories at the back of those volumes, after the main story.
Writing
Q: Can you send me one of your scripts?
A: I can do better than that — download one for yourself from the For Writers page.
Q: Can you send me one of your pitches?
A: No, sorry. And honestly, it probably wouldn't be much use to you. I tend to write overly long and detailed pitches, and different editors will have different preferences for types and styles of pitch anyway. If you want to see what a pitch looks like because you're submitting to an editor, the best thing you can do is ask that editor for a sample of one they consider to be ideal.
Q: What's your writing process?
A: There's a very detailed overview of my process in the Articles section.
Q: Can I send you my script/idea/pitch/concept/unpublished comic to read?
A: Again, sorry, but no. This is very important: I am not legally permitted to look at such things, and if you email them to me I will delete them unread. There are big, complicated legal issues around reading unpublished material, and in our increasingly litigious world it's a risk I can't afford to take.
Q: What writing software do you use?
A: Scrivener, Final Draft and Aeon Timeline, all on a Mac. For links to these programs and template downloads, visit the For Writers page. If you want to see exactly how I use Scrivener to write comics, go here.
This website
Q: Where can I read that 'Writing with GTD' blog post you wrote? Search isn't finding it!
A: That's because it's not a blog post. To read Getting Things Written, the article Merlin Mann called “A thoughtful, complete, and coherent GTD-based workflow [and] an excellent read”, visit the Articles section.
Q: I just saw a site, mostlyblack.com, with your name and picture on it and a bunch of blog posts I'm fairly sure are yours, but they're really old. Do you own it? Is it an old site that you don't update any more?
A: The short answer: No, but it's complicated.
The longer answer: mostlyblack.com was my domain for a number of years, until I switched to antonyjohnston.com. When the old domain expired, it was bought by a Thai linkspammer via a Russian administrator. You'll notice that site is plastered with ads from Google and elsewhere (whereas I do not and have never run ads on this site).
ADDENDUM: As of January 2009, the site in question appears to have been gutted, replaced with nothing but an empty directory tree structure. I'm leaving this answer here on the fair assumption that it could change back at any time.
I expected something like that to happen. What I didn't expect was this same linkspammer to steal some very old graphics and journal archives from me — or rather I suspect from archive.org — to fake up the site, in what I can only assume is the most inept attempt at cashing in (on the, oooh, literally tens of people who regularly visited mostlyblack.com) I have ever seen.
Are this company's actions illegal? Most certainly. Is there anything I can do about it? Almost certainly not, and it would cost me an arm and a leg in legal fees just to find out.
I'm not linking to the site here, because I don't want to give them any hits or increase their Google rank. Feel free, however, to forward all your spam to alex@alexinvest.com and postmaster@jokesnquotes.com. I'm sure they'll appreciate it.
Misc
Q: That's not really how you spell your name, is it? That's a typo at the top of the page, right?
A: “Antony”, with no 'h', is my birth name. I am constantly bemused by people who think I misspell my own name. I am even more bewildered by people who link to this site with the correct URL, but spell my name wrong in the text of the very same link.
Q: How about that band Antony & the Johnsons? Have you heard of them? How funny is that?!
A: Le sigh.
Last updated March 2011.
