Robert Stikmanz has done it. Given decades of work, the not inconsiderable assistance of myself, and the patient perseverance of editor Ric Williams and publisher Deltina Hay, he managed to put together something Dalton Publishing could make into a book. And they have. See what I’m saying?

Yes, dear ones, Dalton Publishing announces the release of Prelude to a Change of Mind, The First Book in the Lands of Nod, at BookPeople, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday February 3rd…or 2/3@3p as they say on my, ah, whachacallit? Raspberry?

A genuine three-for opportunity, this is a chance to support a great independent bookstore AND a great independent publisher AND get your hands on the first novel in which I, Jackanapes Plenty, play a role very nearly that of the main character. Really. If Meg Christmas hadn’t been in the midst of, like, stupendefying transmigradations and brilliant and occasionally naked and heroic, well, I would be this story. Right in there from start to finish, battling evil and giving balm to the weak, just who do you think you’ll find? That’s right, the Bard of the Rigidstick and World Champion Poet of the Dvarsh, yours truly, doing the heavy lifting and contributing every scrap of the necessary verse. Bread won’t rise without leaven, and fantasy—even alternative fantasy—won’t rise without poetry. Of course, for a class act you’ve got to use the best, so it’s a good thing I was available.

Did I mention alternate realities, magic, sex and philosophysical transdimensional visitations? This book has those, too. Truly, something for everybody.

To recap: BookPeople, 3:00 p.m., this Saturday, February 3rd. The new release from Dalton Publishing, Prelude to a Change of Mind. I’m bending my knee as I ask you.

In the meanwhile, here follows Canto 6 of my extensive poetical work, Twitter:

6.
Toilets flush dire choral airs,
dark, whiskered voices in vortex gartered;
opening strains at stool, earthly cares,
marimabas hose down the closet
where for brioche and nooky, or holy rood,
indulgences are hastily bartered,
incidental among the deliverables.
Compañero! Hermano! Esteemed paisan!
Cease these trinitarian homilies
in mumbling, harsh, inchoate text,
for in the beginning, or anyway,
just after hominy, there was pie, of which
we ate plenteously, and pronounced it good,
fruit bubbling up between the lattices.
Mount now the buses we have chartered,
without let to motor Talavera shards
and crawl up the hatch again into Mama Yoni.
Permit me to enlarge upon these sentiments
within your somnolescent bliss
recumbent upon a bed of factored tasks
and formulaic automata.
Prior to the reeds, audience hiss
drowns the nickering clicker of intimate wisps,
balletic in the wind, aspirant
when the swains of the hills—
figurative, all but metaphorical hills—
descend for the trade in gages.
Cosmologists dine with cyclotrons,
thoughtfully, leftovers, ever practicing
a clinging ruse with truculent sheep:
in a fit, most dreadfully shed
from the tennis courts spread
the genes of fossil ruminants
on which Cain cast a lustful eye
as the door in the clock was closing.

If I weren’t such a kindly soul and generous I’d change the name of this site to Jack Plenty’s blog, because I’m still here and the worthy Mr. Stikmanz is pattering around trying to remember if he’s illustrating, elucidating or swallowing roughage. Plus, he still hasn’t guessed the password.

To get right down without wasting gas, I want to share some words on The Lands of Nod, which is the supertitle of the whole shebang of projects the Stik and I have undertaken. It is the story of every world you can possibly imagine, sort of paraphrastically speaking.

Of course, R. Stikmanz is a genuine visionary or we wouldn’t work with him, but he’s not a cosmic-quality, boldly-gone, broadly drawn kind of visionary. More an under-$20.00/end-of-year kind of visionary. Given his umerous-nay imitations-lay he had to cut down from infinite possibilities a bit and focus on just a few. Alas, my dears, it’s an unfortunate case of signifiers and metafliers and inferential infratrends, which is a technical way of saying you’re probably safer than not generalizing beyond the particulars of Stikmantic expression.

But what particulars they are! Pictures, stories, oracles, piercing ululations, you name it, Stikmanz and my ownself Mr. Plenty have been venting particles of all that stuff and working them into precombinations, decombinations and recombinations to see how they piece together for, oh, years now.

The products of all this action collectively form what Stik has started calling an “alternative fantasy.” That’s something like alternate realities AND alternative lifestyle AND fantasy all squazzled together into one, ah, whachacallit?, genre? category? I’m not sure, but Stik thought of it himself and it doesn’t do any harm so just smile and waggle your head a little. Mainly what you need to keep in mind is that the name of this particular body of alternatively fantastic matter is The Lands of Nod.

And of what, you may well ask, does The Lands of Nod consist? Well, first and as we sit and breathe it consists of Prelude to a Change of Mind, the alternative fantasy novel Dalton Publishing will release on February 3rd at BookPeople in Austin, Texas. More than anything I’ll tell you what, Prelude (as I’ve been known to shorthand it) is a love story. A love story shot through with adventure, lurking danger, dire straits, a dastardly villain, a resourceful heroine, dozens of birdy-singing elves, a really talkative wise woman with incredible powers, non-human societies, parallel worlds, a gorgeous remote mountain setting and one absolutely grade A spectacular part-human poet of action, courage and genius. That’s right, me, Jack Plenty. If this book was opera I’d be singing the baritone. And handsome, too.

Prelude to a Change of Mind is not, however, the totality of The Lands of Nod. As soon as Stik can finish the graphic work for the project we’ll bring out his rendering of my translation of Nod’s Way, or Hidden Dragon, the ancient oracle book of the Dvarsh in its very firstmost publication in a human language. Jampacked with more than seventeen millennia worth of insight from the Dvarsh tradition, Nod’s Way originated in the misty early days of recorded Dvarsh history. As the story goes, almost eighteen thousand years ago, Nod, a mysterious gynandrous clown entity came to dwell among the associated clans of the true Advarsha. After a few centuries hanging out with our mages, sages and poets and such, Nod departed for parts and thoughts unknown, leaving behind the core of this book. Stay tuned for more on Nod’s Way in coming months.

Under the guidance of Dalton publisher Deltina Hay and the iron editorial hand of Ric Williams, Stik and I are also chopping out the outline for a follow-on to Prelude. Tentative plans are for this tale to appear first in installments on this site. Later we’ll bind it up as another short volume in The Lands of Nod.

Farthest out on the horizon but looming eventually large is the book I first started goading Stikmanz to write: Sleeper Awakes. Set just a couple days after tomorrow, Sleeper Awakes is the biggest piece in the entire project, the shoulders it stands on and the full toast of its palette. I laid out a cast for this book almost as soon as I recruited Stik way back when, and we’ve worked on it steadily. It ain’t done yet. It is still cooking. The aroma intoxicates like garlic and cinnamon. Yum.

Beyond Sleeper Awakes, or around it or beside, over or down, we’re working sketching and scribbling for other novels, grammars, posters, stories, video, soundscapes and on and on and on. Between my brains and the Stikmantian skillset there’s no limit to what we might fast talk ourselves into. Maybe I can even leave El Stikko to his own devices long enough to put a shine on the finishing touches of my groundbreaking poetical opus, Twitter.

Here’s Canto the Fifth, sweet babies:

5.
Ticker tape and addled pates,
a baited market reveals its lining;
blood to rush ‘round blackened bush
it will never drink your whining
or withstand the svelte delgados.
Pull up, pull up the succulent frieze,
leaves and cleavage, dimpled knees,
sixteen indifferently sampled tones
rampant and loud from Joey Ramone,
(Panama hat and pressed watercress)
for our lady of gluten-free tacos.
A flash of the idiot and we’re back again…
Not prisoners, Aloysius, or nerve;
some advice, look sharp,
up the entree queues are lining.
Hands on the table handling steel,
baize bellysuits span a Gettysburg reel,
picking up pawpaws to protect and serve,
their speed of decay an untimely warp,
a failure to mind peas and clues.
Wild onions rise ‘mongst blushed bergamot,
insurgency, a white crowning count
on stems filamentous green, and teal,
heads low in the heights monarda mount
flagging a roadside goodspeed mot
‘neath thinning migratorial twitters.

From foetal cauls to necropolis halls
the swishing hips, remembered lips
and bone maid’s osseous titters,
for Kore, hell, harrowing belle,
a trick of the shades, B grade bumbles,
recollected lisp confiding sotto voce,
“We are back again…
and again and again and again.”

Stikmanz is still all tied up optimizing and socializing, categorizing and conceptualizing, and other significant kinds of active processes. Fortunately, I am on hand and up to the tucker for holding down the fort. While the Stik gets on with his responsible act I thought I’d keep things here at the homepage focused on a subject of interest to us all. Namely, me.

1. Jackanapes Plenty, Bard of the Rigidstick and World Champion Poet of the Dvarsh—which is to say, “I”—likes to go by Jack. This Jack Plenty, as opposed to a plethora of theoretically other Jack Plentys, is (if I say so myself) famously resourceful, courageous, heroic, wise, dashing, handsome, virtuous, a terrific dancer, and modest to boot. Helpful and modest. Call me Jack.

2. Of the excellent alternative fantasy novel, Prelude to a Change of Mind, in which Jack—by whom I mean ich, moi, yo and yours truly—figures as ALMOST the main character, he has graciously allowed the poseur Robert Stikmanz to claim sole authorship. Seriously, a supporting character of MAJOR prominence. Ask anyone.

2a. Okay, el Stikko is not exactly a poseur, but when I say that it probably tells you more about me than it does about him.

III. Poet of genius and all around heroic type Jack Plenty is three-eighths human but demonstrably as attested by every authoritative standard exactly half dvarsh. Dvarsh are a species closely related to humans who, because of concerns about the neighborhood, relocated their friends and ownselves to a different reality. Some people still don’t take the hint.

17th. Jackanapes Plenty is, which is to say I am, a great lover of women. Of many species.

LCIX. Dalton Publishing will release a completely revised, thoroughly updated, meticulously edited and professionally designed edition of Prelude to a Change of Mind on February 3rd of this very year, 2007. Stay tuned for details.

99998. The first three cantos of Jack Plenty’s remarkable poetic creation, Twitter, may be found in the previous three blog entries in the archives of this very site.

iv. Canto numero cuatro, the big 4, goes like this:

4.
Tiny birds like feather nits
pipe eensy pips and weensy twitch,
a nervous splatter of morning sun
apostrophizing among the ramii.
Buttered warblers, checkered heads,
darting plump, deckle edge
attractive on the mat that backs ‘em,
“Ip,” they whisper, “Ip,” to say,
“Lordy, Mitch and Mam, aflush,
in toffeed wave a buffet gush
of spidermites. Like this we feed.”
Lacquered box, caroming gilt,
imperfect but absorbent black,
the dogfish pool e’er overhung,
well blown stack and jug unbunged,
a chrysalis recedent, moderate blush
‘neath almond-full diffusing moon.
Split needle gleams of algal bloom
choke on aggregated rafting dams,
the moms I mean, with creamy hams
cased in pedantic armillaries.
Like strolling through the Tuilleries,
the dames by cess obsessed proceed,
“Is it warm in here? Is’t? Is’t warm?”
Count one, count two, a three, a four,
God’s understudy, a daughter, bore
to the glittering angels weeping song
graven spruce on stone cold pong
of a hemisphere’s picket pilaster.
Or is it just me?