Meanwhile…

I think items 12 and 13 are my favorite.

(From my friend over at Forgotten Bookmarks.)

(but not the wasting kind…wait, they’re both sort of the wasting kind aren’t they?)

Watched Inception over the weekend. Amazing!

Also watched the first couple episodes of “Louie.” Greatness. And thus Louis CK gets added to the pile of people to whom my wife compares me (a distinguished list that also includes Ricky Gervais and Larry David). I just have more hair.

I’m like Serpentor, if his DNA had been culled from and hilariously awkward comedians.

Reading-wise, I just finished up Michael Moorcock’s A Nomad of the Time Streams trilogy. It was a quick read, and a lot of fun. The stories get increasingly darker as you progress through the three books, which are essentially Moorcock’s deconstruction of Imperialism. I highly recommend them.

I’m chugging through China Miéville’s The Scar now, and it is as usual incredible. I picked up another fantasy book, a new book by a new writer (I think) at the same time, purely on impulse, but didn’t make it far. I will itemize the following rules for prospective fantasy writers:

• I should be able to tell the difference between the name of a person and the name of a city, artifact, or creature.
• There should not be a made-up word in every single paragraph.
• I no longer care about royalty (did I ever, I wonder?) or who/whatever else rules the kingdom.

I finished a story over the weekend, worked at it to get it to an easily sell-able flash length, then realized it is only the end of a story, and probably needs a good thousand words prior to where I start. Such is the life of a fiction writer.

I wrote the first paragraph of this not too long ago, then wrote a bunch of paragraphs after it that weren’t really going anywhere and seemed destined for a way longer story than I wanted to mess with. So I went back to the first paragraph and took it in a slightly different direction that may be more focused. I don’t know. We’ll see if anything comes of this. I think it is a crackerjack of an opening, if nothing else. Here’s the first 300 words or so, let me know if this is actually an interesting beginning. Continue reading

Erin has a new story up over at Every Day Fiction. It went up on the 4th, and is about the failings of democracy! Check it out.

And in honor of yesterday, happy birthday you poor, deluded, doomed nation.

For those unfamiliar with some of the goings on of the early comic book industry back in the first half of, er , last century, there was a period where a young DC comics, in its fervent attempts to protect a budding Superman, sued pretty much everyone else producing a superhero comic at the time. To their credit, most of the time they were likely right. (If you’ve never read Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, it covers a lot of this stuff, and is a great read.)

At any rate, I found this article over at The Comics Detective about one particular trial involving Will Eisner, one of the greats in the biz. The complete transcripts of Eisner’s testimony are available there. I’ve only had a chance to read the first few pages, but it’s fascinating stuff. My favorite line so far comes from the judge (who just seems really impatient and annoyed with the whole lawsuit): “I don’t know that a man in tights can be copyrighted.”