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CJ Lyons is our guest blogger during the week of October 26th. If you have any questions for CJ Lyons, add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is more information on Urgent Care:

CJ Lyons returns to the front lines of the ER and the lives and loves of four very special women. Angels of Mercy Hospital charge nurse Nora Halloran has been living with a painful secret for two long years. When a coworker is assaulted and killed, Nora must face her deepest fears and reveal all her secrets to the man she loves to stop the killer from striking again.

Read a short story by CJ Lyons.

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Ah, Candide, can it be? 250 years old already? Happy Birthday!

To celebrate the anniversary, an exhibition called "Candide at 250: Scandal and Success" is on display at The New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

The exhibit, continuing through April 2010, touts Voltaire's original manuscript of Candide (on loan from the Bibliothèque nationale de France), plus other Voltaire relics and memorabilia from the 1956 Broadway production.

Are you a Candide fan? Check out Alan Walker's review of the work in Penguin Classics on Air.

Also, here are a few questions taken from our Candide Reading Group Guide - share your answers by adding a comment to this post with your responses!

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Many of you have wondered how accurate is our depiction of Vlad the Impaler.  The quick answer is that our graphic novel is filled with factual happenings, but it is also a work of fiction. Ernie Colon and myself imagined the kind of private life such a man would have lived and shaped that into our story.

To begin with, Vlad and his brother Radu were truly left in the hands of Sultan Murad of the Ottoman Empire by their father, the elder Vlad This was part of the price for the Sultan's help in gaining the throne of Wallachia. Young Vlad and Radu did indeed become  janissaries of the sultan's.  And Vlad later did have the sultan's aid in his attempt to gain the throne of Wallachia.

These kind of historical details are accurately portrayed here, from Vlad's and Radu's beginnings to the crucial battle between the two brothers and to the astounding final outcome of Vlad's epic adventure. The man's life was thoroughly researched, and as gory as the book seems to be, that is how it happened---and, yes, as gory as it still is happening today.

Some weeks ago, a publication asked me what was the most amazing thing I learned from researching the life of Vlad.  The following is what I told them...

I had recently met two native Romanian women and shyly told them that I was working on a graphic novel concerning the life of Vlad the Impaler. The eyes of both of them lit up. "Oh, yes," one of them cried. "He is one of our greatest heroes.  We learn about him in school."

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I previously blogged about the Glimmerati, the list of talented and driven design thinkers who helped guide me through the thickets of design to write Glimmer. Well, there was a whole other group I encountered along my Glimmer journey, which was in many ways as inspiring and fascinating as the Glimmerati. These were the people I ended up calling "Basement Buckys," after that glorious futurist and designer R. Buckminster Fuller.

As the name suggests, these are people toiling away in their basements or garages designing solutions to problems that are plaguing them or someone they know. Most of the ones I profile in Glimmer may not be famous by name, but they created some wonderful products or solutions, often starting with a "glimmer moment." For instance, the Java Jacket, that now ubiquitous recycled-paper sleeve that goes around paper coffee cups? That came about because Jay Sorensen burned his fingers and dropped a cup of hot coffee in his lap one day while driving his daughter to school. It took a lot of iterations and experiments but he eventually came up with that paper holder, and now, a billion sleeves later, the rest is history. And if you see plastic pill bottles in different colors and sizes, thank Deborah Adler who caught her grandparents mistakenly taking each others' medication. She realized that all those identical brown pill bottles in the medicine cabinet made for dangerous mix-ups, and went to work redesigning them.