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Randomness for 7/28

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1) Mom creates tableaus to illustrate what she imagines her sleeping baby is dreaming.

2) Via Sherwood Smith: Jane Austen’s Fight Club. (added later: Yeah, this has been going around for the past couple of days, but I’m not going to yank it just in case someone here still hasn’t had a chance to check it out.)

3) Introverts unite! (quietly).

4) Poppy Z. Brite, Tim Wildmon, and The Home Depot. I’m so tempted to send (anonymously) a copy of CoF to the AFA so they can boycott me, too. I could use the publicity.

5) Random House and Andrew Wylie clash over ebook publication.

6) How self-absorbed people behave: political columnist writes open letter to his ex on her wedding day and reacts badly when he’s criticized for it.

7) And we mourn the end of an era: No more blowing up Michael Jackson zombies with your cornapult.

Randomness for 7/21

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1) The Creative Process, in graphic/maze form.

2) This is pretty exciting: BLU has a new stop motion video out!

3) I’m sure many of you know that there’s a new storyline in the Superman comics where he walks across America to reacquaint himself with regular people. Well, now The Mighty Thor is doing it too!

4) Baby eats his way out of a watermelon. This one isn’t very interesting, but it is awfully cute.

5) Parkour from 1930.

6) Serial book thief gets three and a half years.

7) When Josh Friedman posts to his blog, we read. It’s long, but it’s amazing. He combines development notes, TV trends, and true crime, coming out the other end with belly laughs.

I didn’t bother with that “I Write Like” meme, but…

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not because I knew ahead of time that it was a promotional gambit by a vanity press to boost their Google ranking and rope in unsuspecting writers. I just figured it was a waste of time.

If you’ve posted an “I Write Like” banner in your blog or LiveJournal, you might want to go back and strip out any links to vanity publishers (or redirect them to Making Light post above).

Randomness for 7/16

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1) Letters written to fictional characters by actual people. I like this one, this one, this one and this one. And now I can’t help but wonder what letter I would write.

2) Proving there’s a niche blog for everything (until someone creates a niche blog you never even thought of before): Handsome Men Who Are Now Dead.

3) Prank rollercoaster photos. Maybe not entirely safe for work, but not too bad.

4) via Steve Barr: Ferris Beuller is Tyler Durdin!. And now in video form (which I can’t watch at work.)

5) If movie titles were honest. The funny ones make up for the dumb ones.

6) The 100 Best places to appreciate art online.

7) How to ask Thomas Pynchon for an author blurb.

“That’s so funny it makes me sad.”

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I had another good day working on The Buried King. I’ve pretty much stopped fretting about word count and daily goals–at this point I make note of the page I’m on when I start a session and the page I’m on when I stop. What the hell, right? Keeping careful records wasn’t getting the book done, so I’m not going to bother.

And with the release date for GAME OF CAGES coming up, I have a crazy load of writing to do. That means it’s time for a list! Here are all of the projects I have to complete by at least the middle of August (in no particular order).

  • A Big Idea piece for John Scalzi’s blog to promote Game of Cages.
  • Another chapter of The Buried King so my agent can send it to publishers.
  • A thorough, careful revision of the opening chapters of The Buried King.
  • A “shot list” or “shooting script” for the trailer for book 3, which is still called Man Bites World.
  • A selling synopsis for The Buried King.
  • Clean up chapters 2 and 3 of Game of Cages to post on the blog.
  • A write up of the next Kolchak episode.
  • A quick polish of an old project I can’t talk about.

And so on. I know there are a lot of writers who could do that in a couple of afternoons, but I’m slow slow slow. This will take me quite a little while to do, but I’m hoping to steal some time this weekend to cross some of these items off my list (and the Kolchak is pretty far down the list of priorities–Sorry to anyone who has been enjoying those).

On top of that, I’m expecting the copyedit for MBW at any time.

Back to the day job.

Randomness for 6/29

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1) A half-hearted defense of the Star Wars prequels. I agree with his assessment of the attitudes of the Jedi in the prequels, but I’m not convinced that Lucas himself recognized that it was problematic.

2) British stores told they can no longer sell eggs by the dozen.

3) The NY Post reacts to U.S. World Cup elimination.

4) I’m not one to link to music videos, but here’s The Go-Go’s circa 1984 (love the lighting) cross-dressing onstage and looking good doing it. And Belinda Carlisle sings the hell out of this song.

5) AT-AT afternoon.

6) An American woman in a German supermarket discovers an American ethnic food section. What foods do you think they consider American?

7) More evidence on the brilliance of Facebook users. The fan page for this author’s book has 700,000 fans, and he is sure none of them care one bit about reading his book. But damn, if even three percent could be convinced to buy a copy…

Five things for a Friday

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1- You know what’s annoying? Being unable to find a link to an article that you wrote about in your own blog. [added later: found it!]

2- I have a brilliant idea for a multi-million dollar invention: the ultimate alarm clock. Here’s how it works. At the time you want to wake up, it uses orgone energy electromagnetic waves to stimulate the dream centers of your brain. You have a dream where you wake up after the time you were supposed to be at work, and the blind dream-panic wakes you up for real, even in the dismal hours of the morning. Multi-million dollar invention, I tell you.

3- In keeping with my usual computer game protocol, I captured Hill 400 in Call of Duty 2 earlier this week. Soon I can try out Prince of Persia. Maybe tonight. Or maybe I’ll watch movies. Or do both. It all sounds good, as long as my entertainments are all several years old and cheaply acquired.

4- Remember my previous post about stress and my recent inability to write? Well, on Wednesday night I heard Bill Clinton talking about the US World Cup victory over Algeria. He did sound seriously ill (I blame the vuvuzelas) but he praised the team’s “mental toughness.” To paraphrase from memory: Every high level competition, from a championship game to a big election eventually comes down to mental toughness.

I like that! I like “mental toughness” better than “discipline” because the latter sounds like a lot of hard work, but the former sounds like something you just have. I went to bed thinking about it, and woke up on Thursday morning trying to imagine myself as a writer who was also a tough guy–stress doesn’t get to me! I can sit down and do the work whenever I have to, just like a professional athlete! Professional!

Then I opened a book and started reading.

5- That book I mentioned in number four above? It’s The Ivory Grin by Ross MacDonald, and although I’m only halfway through it. Still, it’s FANTASTIC! Maybe what The Buried King needs is not some new mental attitude but a new mental model. Thank you, dead author!

6- Bonus sixth thing! I’m deeply annoyed that day job is too busy for me to read this article of social influence and obesity. Reading it at home is going to seriously cut into my time-wasting time.

Bookslut

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Bookslut is looking for a feminist columnist and an SF columnist.

Randomness for 6/23

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1) Carnage on Hoth, the cake.

2) The rule, usually, is “Don’t read the comments,” yes? But look at this post about a delicious salad sandwich and then scroll down to the fourth comment by “Brownhornet”. WTF? I don’t understand that at all.

3) A trailer for all Academy Award Winning Movies. This is funny.

4) So is this: The angry police captain. Seen via the-isb.

5) White guys for rent.

6) Want to have a good-looking kid? Talk to the sperm (and egg, supposedly) donors at beautifulpeople.com. Money quote: “Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.”

7) “Do you think the author wanted you to learn something?”
“No screaming.”

Blow the vuvuzelas!!

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We celebrate the restoration of my home internet connection. We shall not discuss the amount of time spent convincing Qwest that the problem was, in fact, on their end.