Arvidnelson.com The online home of Arvid Nelson, writer of Rex Mundi & Zero Killer

Canada to Mars

Turns out there's a difference between diesel and biodiesel fuel. I had to learn the hard way. The wife and I just got back from the French Canadian wilderness – half an hour from home, after a grueling day of driving and helping my mom with her new cable internet, I had the brilliant idea of filling up the car on biodiesel.

Thank God I didn't start the engine, thank God my wife is so patient with me. That's all I can say. We finally got the car back today, followed by a minor orgy of pent-up errands.

Lots more exciting stuff going on, too. First of all, we finally, finally found vegetarian marshmallows (no gelatin). Until today, it had been ten long, long years since I'd tasted the forbidden, fluffy fruit that is marshmallow.

As if that weren't enough, The Sword, the bestest doom metal band in the whole world, released their third studio album, Warp Riders. Haven't given it a full listen yet, but my first impression is it's a lot more studio-ified than the first two. Not necessarily a bad thing.

If you haven't heard The Sword before, I cannot recommend their first album, Age of Winters, highly enough. Their second, Gods of the Earth, is magnificent, but Age of Winters is utterly perfect. Warp Riders is a concept album – normally "concept album" makes me cringe, but in the case of The Sword, it's exactly what I wanted.

And a new series I'm writing, an adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter of Mars series, is coming out in October. The comics Internet has been all ablaze over this for the past few weeks; here are some articles and interviews with moi:

comicbookresources.com
newsarama.com
more comicbookresources

I'm ashamed to say I'd never read these novels before Dynamite tapped me to write this – but I was really blown away by how fun and readable and epic the stories are. We're really gonna do this adaptation the right way, we're going to mess with the original stories as little as possible. The first two issues will be an original prelude concocted by moi, that's it.

Really looking forward to October.