This post is long overdue, but now that I actually have some regular readers to share it with (cheers), it can actually do some good.

I actually know some of these people, too.

Thomas A. Knight

I "met" Thomas on the forums at Amazon.com. He was offering advice for a competition called the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (I'm not going to link it because I don't support Amazon's business practices anymore), and man his advice was good. The pitches were basically query letters, which I didn't have much trouble with seeing as I'd landed several manuscript requests by that time, but with his advice I was able to hone mine into a lean, agent-getting machine. And he did this for hundreds of other strangers.

Also, he wrote a novel called The Time Weaver and sells it on the cheap as an ebook, the profits for which go to a charity that buys children in developing countries laptops and computers. And at the time of this writing, he's still helping people with their pitches for the ABNA competition.

Holy shit, now I feel bad. I mean, the bulk of my charity work is going to be done once I lead all of humanity into a new Golden Age of Enlightenment (after my novel becomes a megaseller of course), but this guy's already got a head start.

Kent Mudle

Kent's been an internet pal for years. We were both doing comics at the time. I was doing a comic about me and my high school friend called AHS (Which I later changed to Divisible By Zero), he was doing the sci fi epic Eggbert. We were both on Geocities at the time, but we moved to Drunk Duck, and there built an empire of other comic-minded friends. While I got depressed and started making comics less and less often, Kent went to art school, completed (almost) the epic Eggbert, and now works at Telltale Games as an animator. (I moved on to get depressed and write a novel).  The guy's incredibly funny, can draw like the devil, and really, really likes onomatopoeias.

I almost forgot: He drew two of those book covers you see on the sidebar. Now THAT'S talent.

Kate Beaton

Kate Beaton doesn't need my traffic, but she just happens to be one of my favorite human beings. Just read her comic if you want to know the only important parts of history and Shetland ponies.

Jess Conditt

I did actually meet this internet persona, long before she was that thing. We worked together at a certain bookstore, pushing coffee on people that probably didn't do anything to deserve such caffeinated punishment. We tried to compare writing once (I even narrated the entire plot of Mister Mercury to her), but she went and moved away to Phoenix instead, and now she reviews video games. I did not see that coming; she used to write cyberpunk spy fiction that read like William Gibson trying to talk over the radio with a sock in his mouth.

Her reviews are pretty good, too. You can almost tell that they were written by someone who wanted to major in neuroscience just so she could write a cyberpunk novel.

Stephen Root (not that one)

Stephen's an incredibly talented guy. He made a movie in which I nonchalantly hang around in backgrounds, and it's really good, guys. And I'm not just saying that because I'm in it. Some of those shots in the movie are tricky to pull off and are ingenious in execution. The guy took a 17" television screen and made it look as large as a movie theatre, for christssake.

There's a DVD coming out too, so even you can enjoy my really, really terrible hair, for all time, forever.

Basically, the movie's quality is inversely proportional to that of my hair.

Alex Pelayre

I only came across him recently, when I used one of his drawings (with permission) for a post, but holy shit this guy can draw! Seriously! Just look!

Anyway, that's it. Did I miss anyone?