Awesome News: Adam Newton Publishes If This Parking Lot Could Speak (in Book Form)

Damn — I’m starting to feel like an even bigger slacker than I normally do, folks. Over the past year or so, I’ve watched as my H-town music-critic brethren not only write brilliantly and humorously about things musical but also step out into the wider world of, y’know, Actually Being Real-Live Writers.

First former SCR contributor Jef With One F self-published his pseudo-band memoir, The Bible Spelled Backwards Does Not Change the Fact That You Cannot Kill David Argquette, And Other Things I Learned in The Black Math Experiment — which is really freaking funny, not to mention astonishingly insightful when it comes to the way bands work in real life — and then former {Houston Press} Music Editor John Nova Lomax wrote the excellent-sounding Houston’s Best Dive Bars: Drinking and Diving in the Bayou City.

And now, {Dryvetyme Onlyne} (and sometime {Houston Press} writer) Adam Newton has gotten into the act, too — he’s just announced that his online “photo-comic” (I’m sure he’s got a better term for it, but that’s how it strikes me, at least), If This Parking Lot Could Speak, is now available in paperback form, as well as online. Holy freaking yes, y’all.

I’ve read ITPLCS off-and-on for a while now, and it’s pretty neat; it’s the story of, um, a parking lot and all the elements within it (think: cement blocks, lines, sidewalks, plants, etc.) as they struggle through trying to work together and get along, told in a series of first-person posts on Adam’s ITPLCS site. He does a great job of taking inanimate objects and using ’em to play out the internal dynamics of a retail business that employs actual humans — kind of like Office Space with a green plant in place of Peter (and minus the hypnosis-induced breakdown).

Definitely check it out, and buy a copy of the actual book from publishers Substance Vs Style if you can spare the $$$, too — go right over here for that. It’s only $10, and it goes to an indie publishing house and a darn good writer, so it’s a double (heck, triple, since the story’s so neat) win, right?

sigh. And now I’m back to feeling like a spinning-his-wheels shmuck for not already somehow writing & publishing a book; who’s next? I can’t wait for Craig Hlavaty‘s in-depth biography of Lady Gaga…