Breaking Bad Book Deal!!

Well, Readers Mine, we've been keeping it under wraps until we had actually signed the contract, but as of 3 January. K. Dale Koontz and I are officially writing Wanna Cook? The Unofficial Guide to Breaking Bad for ECW Press!

I've been a fan of the show since I first saw a pair of khaki's floating down out of a pure blue New Mexico desert sky in the cold open of the pilot episode. To be fair, I was watching said episode on DVD at the urging of the one and only David Lavery, but from then on I was hooked, and the show has -- incredibly -- just gotten better and better. The list of awards Breaking Bad has garnered would take up more space than you'd want to read here, but as an example consider that Bryan Cranston, who plays one of the central characters, Walter White, will be up for his fourth consecutive Emmy for his work on Breaking Bad, and if he wins, it will be the first four-peat in TV history.

The show is truly amazing. Cinematic, brutal, compelling, beautifully written, filmed, and acted, I have absolutely no hesitation in saying that it is, beyond a doubt, the finest show on TV. So you can see why I wanted to write about it. As part of this diabolical scheme, I hooked K. Dale Koontz on the Breaking Bad pipe with Season Four last year, and when the opportunity came to put in a book proposal, we got together and started cooking. Not-so-long-as-you-might-think-story-short, the book will be on the shelves in either early or mid-2013, depending on how AMC decides to air the final 16 episodes of the series.

Therefore, you can expect to be seeing a lot of material on Breaking Bad here in future. As a means of helping us keep our deadlines (as well as an exercise in "New Media Marketing"), Dale and I will be posting regular updates on the book's progress. You can find and follow me on Twitter as @EnsleyFGuffey, as well as on Facebook, and Google+ as Ensley F. Guffey. In addition, of course, I'll be posting updates here at Solomon Mao's, both in main posts and in a new sidebar section to the right called "Wanna Cook? Updates" (I am nothing if not original.) You can also follow along over on Dale's blog and you can follow her on Twitter @KDaleKoontz. We'll be posting under the hashtags #wannacook and #breakingbad.

The first major deadline for the book is June 15, when we have to turn in a draft covering the first 4 seasons, and then we'll be rewriting that section as Season Five is airing, after which we bust our butts to get the final section covering S5 in. We'll be breaking things down into smaller chunks with self-imposed deadlines as we go, and I'l be sure to keep Solomon Mao's updated, one way or another. So wish us luck and go ahead and stash $20 somewhere, because you know you'll want to buy the book!