Valentine's Day Candy-grams and Singing Telegrams

Our around-the-wood-stove think tank has come up with something fun, and we're pretty excited to announce it!

This Valentine's Day, the Cyberpunk Apocalypse writers' collective will be delivering candy-grams and singing telegrams all across the city, powered by bicycle! (place order here)

We'll be bagging up assortments of handmade and store-bought candies into little ribbon-tied bundles with fancy letterpress printed tags on which we will write the recipient's name. We're also practicing song development and performance in the hopes that we'll each be singing lots of songs all day long.

Here's how it works: $5 for a candy-gram delivered by a resident via bicycle, or $10 for candy plus a singing telegram by one of our residents. We will deliver in Pittsburgh, Wilkinsburg, or Braddock. We have a PayPal button for you to place your order. We will be delivering during the day of Monday, February 14th, so please be prepared to give us the recipient's daytime address and phone number. In the event that the recipient is not there, we will sing the song to them over the phone and leave the candy taped to the address in question.

If you have any information that might be pertinent to our delivery (recipient is allergic to nuts, leaves at 3 pm, works in an office building where we'll need to get buzzed in, or is heretofore a secret crush) put it in the address box in your PayPal order. We'll do our darnedest to accommodate special requests, but no matter how many comic books we read we're still not superheroes.

All proceeds will go toward sustaining the Cyberpunk Apocalypse writing project, which hosts many free and low-cost literary events throughout the year. Please link this page to your own blogs and social networking pages so that we can make this a Valentine's Day to remember!
Place order here.

Cooling off this December!

We are so busy around the house these days. Some nights we even invite some friends over and all sit around the wood stove working on projects at the same time. Certainly there's a lot of writing going on, but also comics. There's a local compilation comic zine called Andromeda, and it's really spurring a few of us to draw comics more frequently.

What are you working on that's cool? We'd love to know. This Saturday, December 11th is our second monthly Cool-Off, where we invite you to present your cool project to a warm room of your peers. Popular vote will decide who wins half the door money. 7 pm. Be timely, friends.

Traded in storage for a printshop

Over the course of three grueling winter days, die-hard Cyberpunk Apocalypse residents and friends successfully moved an entire letterpress printshop into the basement. And that's no small endeavor. Thousands of pounds of metal and wood went up and over Stanton Heights, across a brick yard, and down three steps into the basement. In the snow. Not kidding.

We're happy to announce that the long-running letterpress zine Ker-bloom! will now be printed and assembled on site as well as much whimsy and mayhem. We've been told that 2010 is the year of the Cyberpunk Apocalypse, that it's the year of the dream shop, and we believe it.

Snow comes to the apocalypse!

During the grand finale of our Lord of the Rings series last night, it began snowing and continued throughout the night and morning. We awoke to our little world covered in a cold and white blanket.

Recently a good friend of the house moved away and left us with a bonanza of food for our pantry and zines for our zine library. Both are very much welcome, even if we miss our dear friend.

See that blue tarp in the picture? Underneath that is a letterpress and a giant paper cutter, both of which need to get into the basement or else risk freezing to death. We invite each and every one of you to help with this group endeavor Sunday Dec. 20th at noon. Many hands make light work.

Visiting Writers' Program now accepting applications

The guest room has a new paint job, a modern look entirely in blue and white. We already have our first visiting writer lined up for November: Margaret Killjoy, whose book Mythmakers & Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction has just been released by AK Press.

We are still accepting applications for the visiting writers' program. Specifically, we encourage folks from northern climes to consider a month-long residency with us during the winter. Pittsburgh is hilly enough to make sledding fantastic, and while it's no Florida, we can pretty much promise that your eyeballs won't freeze. Wisconsin? Minnesota? Nunavut? Trust us: it's warmer here.

So again, here's the 411 on the visiting writer program:

Visiting Writer Program:

The Cyberpunk Apocalypse Visiting Writer Program is a one-month residency at the Cyberpunk Apocalypse writers house. The writers will be given a small bedroom at no cost and access to the same communal kitchen, bathroom, living space, etc. that is used by the long-term residents (again at no cost). Visiting writers will, however, be expected to take responsibility for acquiring and preparing their own meals. Applicants should also realize that they will be living communally with the long-term residents of the house and in an urban environment (i.e. not a cabin retreat).

Who should apply: Anybody with a writing project that they are excited about and that they could complete if they had a month to devote themselves to it. We do ask for projects that will be finished by the end of your stay so that you can do a small presentation of your work just before you leave. This could mean working on a smaller project (such as a zine) or a larger project that just needs to be polished.

How to apply:
Send an e-mail to cyberpunkapocalypse[at]gmail.com with "Visiting Writer" in the subject line. Tell us (briefly) what you plan to work on, the month that you're applying to work, who you are/what you're like (since we'd be living with you if you were accepted), and attach or send links of previous works. It's that simple. Again, keep it succinct--if we have questions, we'll contact you.