Firstly, a bit of news: I'm no longer doing my monthly column for Mongoose's magazine Signs & Portents. They've been really nice about it, and have left the door open for me to return at some point, but I've been feeling a bit burned out lately by having to produce something every month, and given that the magazine is currently going through a transformation, it seemed like a good time to step of the treadmill.

But this also means that I can devote more time to the other projects that I'd like to do. Some of these, such as the comics and the novels, I was already working on. But there's one particular project that I'd have liked to do, but couldn't, for the very good reason that it was in direct competition - not only for time, but for ideas also - with my Signs & Portents column.

Yeah, that's right. Critical Miss. I'm thinking that once I've had a rest I might start working on a new issue. I'm not promising any time-scales here, but as and when I have ideas I'll type them up, and when I've got enough, I'll put something out. Critical Miss is kind of like my first love, and it's a nice feeling to be talking about it in the present tense, instead of the past.

Of course, if I knew that there were loads of people actively wanting to read a new issue, then I'd have more motivation for doing it, both for positive reasons (because I write stuff for the buzz of having other people read it), and for negative reasons (the thought that there would be a whole mob of people waiting to lynch me if I said I'd changed my mind). In a sense, I never did Critical Miss for free, I did it for the boost it gave to my fragile ego; now I'm thinking it would be nice to have some payment in advance.

So I'm going to do something in this post which is part guerilla marketting experiment, part meme, and part shameless ego-whoring. Basically, I want everyone who wants me to do another issue of Critical Miss to hit the "Leave a Thought" link at the bottom of this post and leave a comment saying something along the lines of, "I'd like you to do another Critical Miss."

I'm looking for shedloads of comments, so many comments that it makes me impossible to think that it isn't worth doing another issue, or that I just can't be arsed. There literally can't be too many comments.

And I've even - and yes, my ego really is this shallow - done a banner ad to advertise this whole meme / ego-whoring.



What I'd like everyone to do is to post this banner ad on their blog, web page, roleplaying web forum, or whatever, with a link to this post, and to make it really easy I've put the code below. Just cut and paste it into a page.

<a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/jonnynexus/197841.html"><img src="http://www.criticalmiss.com/blogpics/WantMoreCriticalMiss.jpg" width="468" height="60"></a>

I'm curious to see how many places I could get this banner ad to without actually having to pay for advertising. (It's not like I'm a miser, just that paying for publicity is like paying for sex - it doesn't count if you're looking to boost your ego).

That's it.