For right now, we’re done as of #5 (on sale this Wednesday). Reader reaction has been great, and the reviews have been more than kind, but our sales (like so many new books lately) have never materialized.
We have a lot of stories left to tell with THE CIRCLE, and hopefully a trade will come together and sell well enough to justify us being able to tell these stories sooner rather than later, but as of now, Ulee and Ilona’s adventures are on hiatus as of the end of THE GOLIATH TRAP.
From the Associated Press comes a story just ripe for THE CIRCLE…
DOHA (AFP) - Damage to several undersea telecom cables that caused outages across the Middle East and Asia could have been an act of sabotage, the International Telecommunication Union said on Monday.
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“We do not want to preempt the results of ongoing investigations, but we do not rule out that a deliberate act of sabotage caused the damage to the undersea cables over two weeks ago,” the UN agency’s head of development, Sami al-Murshed, told AFP.
Five undersea cables were damaged in late January and early February leading to disruption to Internet and telephone services in parts of the Middle East and south Asia.
There has been speculation that the sheer number of cables being cut over such a short period was too much of a coincidence and that sabotage must have been involved.
India’s Flag telecom revealed on February 7 that the cut to the Falcon cable between the United Arab Emirates and Oman was caused by a ship’s anchor. But mystery shrouds what caused another four reported cuts.
“Some experts doubt the prevailing view that the cables were cut by accident, especially as the cables lie at great depths under the sea and are not passed over by ships,” Murshed said on the sidelines of a conference on cyber-crime held in Gulf state of Qatar.
The Falcon cable has since been repaired, along with the Flag Europe Asia (FEA) cable which was damaged off Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. The status of the remaining cable is still unclear.
Thank you, Ian, for leaving teaching me about General Butt Naked and his merry band of cross-dressing Satan-worshiping rebel commandos.
The civil war, which killed an estimated 250,000 people in this nation of 3 million, was characterized by the eating of human hearts and soccer matches played with human skulls. Drugged fighters waltzed into battle wearing women’s wigs, flowing gowns and carrying dainty purses stolen from civilians.
Before he led his fighters into battle, wearing only a pair of lace-up boots, Blahyi said he made a human sacrifice to the devil.
The sacrifice was typically “the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart which was divided into pieces for us to eat,” he told The Associated Press on Saturday. He appeared before the commission Jan. 15.
Ian’s right. If we put this in THE CIRCLE, we’d be run out of town on a rail.
Turns out there was some miscommunication and we got left off a run to the printer. Issue 3 will be out in a couple weeks, with 4 & 5 following shortly thereafter. It’s really irksome to have this book ship late when we’ve made a big deal out of the fact that we’re pretty much done with the first 5 issues (I’m doing the lettering on issue 5 today, as a matter of fact).
My apologies for the delay. We’ve ironed out the cock up that made this occur and it won’t be happening again.
