Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in jamesgilmer's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
1:12 am	The creaking of the story box... Fiddling around with a couple of old shorts out of boredom and because they're the only two stories I've written with intent to sell and not sold (this excludes two that were sold only to have markets sold and I've never bothered to resell them because they're a bit shit...okay, VERY shit). The first started out as a Clarion story with the rather clunky title of "Julia, Leave the Dark Alone" which became "Julia" which morphed into "Leave the Dark Alone" with became something else before settling on "Feed Me With Your Kiss" (why yes, I do love My Bloody Valentine) with a radically changed plotline. The other was the post-Clarion "In the Suicide Grove", which I always have to double check and make sure I haven't written "Groove", which would suggest an altogether different story. The only thing holding me back is the realization that the theme of suicide (and in my head "She is Fine" [EDIT- dammit! "Sue is Fine", not "She is Fine"] by MBV crashes through my skull with that ever more slurring "sue is fine" into "suicide") runs heavy through most all of my shorts to the point where it's giving me a bit of a complex. "Loneliness of the Middle Distance Runner", a story I still want to expand to a YA novel or do as a graphic novel one day, is the only hold out, I think, of my fiction output, as Samantha (story protag) never considers suicide as a way out of the hand life dealt her. I've always thought that "All Her Suicides" was the natural dark mirror to "Bleed", but essentially both are about death of self, although "Bleed" suggests transformation (and me struggling with when to use commas and when to use "and" for effect). "In The Suicide Grove" is almost an answer to both of them, and in some ways "Julia" (although NOT "Feed Me With Your Kiss", the theme of which changed with the writing when I excised a bit of a revenge subplot that was blocking the emotional core), because basically "Grove" tells everyone to stop waffling over suicides and move the frak on. Well, it tells the protag of the story that...in a way. "Feed Me With Your Kiss", which is NOT a vampire story despite the title (several people who know the title have assumed it is for some odd reason), although there is an element of emotional vampirism in the theme, I suppose. It's interesting to think about the themes to one's own works. When I did "Bleed" I got a few very nice emails, and one of them was very well thought out and brilliant and has Sweet F.A. to do with the reason I had created "Bleed", but it was a nice thought, and the person who wrote the email (which was longer than the story), was a nice bloke who put a lot of thought into the very short piece and took a lot out of it. "Think Like a Gun" has that suicide element in it...in the sense of a possibly unwilling suicide in terms of blowing up a young soldier's soul. I still liked that story, and like the fact that Karen Traviss liked it when I showed it to her AGES ago. It was an honour to have Travis Johnson grab it for his Variance Press relaunch. Karen and Travis are the two people who've gotten exactly what I was trying to say, and why I said it in so few words, where other editors all loved the setting and wanted more. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
3:10 am	When to show your cards I should be sleeping...as per usual, but I'm stuck mulling over a rather important plot point for CHANGERS. Sometimes, the hardest decision to make is what NOT to give the audience. I'm banking on this being more than a one-off, so part of me wants to save the massive reveal for a second novel, but there's another part that says that the massive reveal IS such a big hook I'd be bloody stupid not to include it. Yes, I know, horrifically vague, but that's how it's going to stay at the moment. I really thought I'd be done and dusted with CHANGERS some times ago, but the structure of the novel, while traditional, is proving difficult because of the premise, and the fact that I keep really disliking plot points and scrubbing them. The result is that the current version is light-years ahead of the first (IMHO), but that it's still not at a place I consider done. Hrrrmmm.... (Comment on this)
12:46 am	On Tokyopop http://www.newsarama.com/comics/080624-Tokyopop1.html Long overview of recent events at the Manga publisher. Fairly even-handed, but they do have pointers to some of larger scale discussions certain problems that some have experienced. A well-rounded article and worth the read for anyone interested in getting a solid overview of what's going on and why that wall of Manga you see at the bookstore might be a tad deceptive, especially if you're looking for OEL stuff in said wall. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
3:47 am	On Writing:Interlude It's always the first ones. I know I'll talk about...well, talking, but that's later. Every once in a while I pick up a comic and it reminds me why I love reading. I didn't specifically learn to read on comics, although they didn't hurt. I started on some disney books and went right to the WHOLE series of Baum OZ books, of which the Patchwork Girl of Oz was a favourite, and is why Patchworkz is often a screen nickname of mine. I'm currently reread Warren Ellis' GLOBAL FREQUENCY: There are 1001 people on the Global Frequency, a world-wide rescue operation designed to clean up all the unexploded bombs and nasty surprises that the 20th century birthed. They had a never shown pilot that lost all momentum when pirates got a hold of it in the middle of talks and spammed the net with it, and despite LIKING the pilot, the network said "Screw Them" instead of work with the pirates as a bit of asymentrical marketing. Each issue is a 22 page nugget of goodness, and reminds me why I want to do my stories in comic form, but I swear, one day, now that my short story "Loneliness of the Middle Distance Runner" is past three years out there's rights revert back to me so I own it, I swear that in addition to getting CHANGERS in a final form I will get that comic published. I need an artist naturally, as I sure as hell am not one, but that bridge is a bit away, but if anyone known someone who wants a crack at comic publisher, and god knows I'd pay pag rates. The deal would be to pay the artist page rate as well as royalties (ha! pie in the sky a bit there) and any further media development. I've love to place it at Image or D&Q or any of the idea posters open to more slice of life piece. Well, the ambien has well and truely kicked in, and I am starting to fall asleep at the computer here at 4am, so I'm off to bed. The point being, GLOBAL FREQUENCY is something great, and you should watch it, and for myself...well, I need to lay down before I fall out of the chair. Here's a little clip from the sadly never produced show. It had the smell of WIN on it unil the Pirates ruined it...and dear god, I've lost 20 minutes falling asleept three to four minutes at a time, so I should wrap this up: (apologies for any Ambien induced typos. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
11:46 pm	On Writing: An Introduction Normally, I don't talk about writing, because I don't really feel like a writer yet, but then again, one of the people I went to Clarion with did a long-running writer's advice column despite having zero published articles (besides said column) and no published stories, although I think they since published one or two since my time at Clarion. Talking about writing, or how to write, strikes me as a bit like dancing to explain how to have sex. Yes, there are vague ways to communicate ideas, sometimes important ideas, but if one doesn't already have an idea of what to do you're in trouble from the start. Stephen King's book was probably one of the better ones on the subject of explaining to others how to write. He's given stunningly good interviews too, and I'll see later if youtube has any of these up, as I know the BBC conducted an interview with him on the topic not long ago. So...writing. Here's the most important thing ever said to me about writing, and I thank my Clarion instructor Suzy McKay Charnas for this: "No one's going to do it for you" Which is another way of saying you have to sit down and write, because that novel ain't getting down on the page any other way. "Learn the rules first, and then learn how to break them" is paraphrased by something Neil Gaiman wrote, and he's right. At Clarion I was stunned to hear people who wanted to be writers talk about how they didn't believe in plot. Yes...plot, or as it is better known, what happens in a story. They had nebulous ideas about writing, and wanted to write in a very narrow...hold on a moment: Karen, mum, I love you, and I know you have this bookmarked now, so I feel it fair to warn you I'm going to talk about Clarion a bit. I'll let you go get your meds. Right... *whistles* For everyone else in the audience, Karen Traviss and I went through Clarion together and have been friends ever since. Both of us still bear the scars from those six weeks, and I apologize in advance for all the people who will suffer through us randomly saying a word or phrase like "squirrel girl" or "maaaafia" or "Needs more ass play" and then dropping to the floor together in shared laughter and trauma. Right, on we go. One of the other Clarion attendees and I (well, he started it and roped me in), once tried to explain plot to this person, as well as why telling the reader what gender your character is DOES matter and some other important things, and for the life of us we couldn't explain it. We got right down as basic as possible and they still 1) didn't get it, 2) insisted that their stories didn't need and wouldn't have plot, and 3) couldn't understand that if words were strung together in a narrative order they already HAD a plot, even if nothing HAPPENED between the characters. So...I'll try to do these when the mood strikes, mostly as five finger excercises (because believe it or not it IS important to get your fingers moving across keys, just like any excercise), and along the way I'll talk a bit about publishing, advice I've recieved, the things the DIDN'T tell me at Clarion and I've since learned on my own or from Karen and others, and whatever else I decide to say. If there was a core belief in my writing, it's that I want to write for a similar reason that Harlan Ellison gave, because as he said; "I see my stories as assaults on the world. These are progress reports that say; this is where I am today, and this is how I see the world", and once again I paraphrase. One thing which I think I'll talk about next time is the rather tired cliche of "writers WRITE!", which is like saying plumbers plumb. It's sort of in the name, and it goes back to what Suzy Charnas said, but it's one of those things that people DO seem to miss (which is why people who have no sold stories tell others how to write and how to plot), and then there's "writer's READ!", which isn't always the case either, as I know more writers than just Karen Traviss who aren't all that into reading, or to be specific, reading fiction. No, next time I want to talk about the idea that "writers TALK!", which is the fact that while writing may seem, and in fact really is, a bit of a lonely crusade since it's you and that black page at some point, and some writers can be recluses or firmly believe that they are but observers of humanity...I don't buy it. While I'm not about to say; "write what you know", I'm also not going to tell you that besides stale research, there is no substitute for being out and part of the world. There are things I would never know how to describe if I hadn't seen them or done them, and while I don't need to fly to outer space to write SF, I do think that should I want characters and places that feel real, there's no substitute for experience. Warren Ellis once remarked that if all the writers who wrote about sex but hadn't gotten any or hardly ever got any, from the simplest of oblique references to full on erotica, simply vanished from the face of the earth then we'd lose about 90% of our writers. While that sounds a bit extreme and falls into the old stereotype of writers as nerdish loners who can't get a girl and are Billy No-Mates, it must be remembered that Ellis is British, and thus prone to hyperbole and being grim. I'll go into what I mean by the talking thing next time, but it's an interesting thing that so many of the people who want to write about their fellow human beings seem to want little to do with them. In some cases I think it might be because they understand the world and humanity too well, but in most cases it probably is showing the truth in the cliche of how the world sees writers combined with the fact that writing is a solitary job. -Jim Current Mood: thoughtful (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 21st, 2008
10:10 pm	The Relationship Test Forget online psych evals. Forget couples counselling. Forget living together before you're married. If you want to know if the person you intend to spend the rest of your life with is The One you only need to do one thing. Buy several items of furniture from IKEA and then assemble them together. If you manage to navigate a three story IKEA store, and here's a little known fact; after winning his freedom from Crete for the creation of the Labyrinth, Daedalus got a job designing IKEA stores and mastered flat-packing, sadly, Daedalus never got around to writing down detailed instructions for the construction of the furniture he built for King IKEA of Sweden, which is part of the reason that said instructions you will get with purchase of these flat-packed marvels are so sparse and are actually made by pre-school children in Sweden as part of their graduation requirement to first-grade. Also, Daedalus was only given a fishbone, which he fashioned into a crude allen-wrench, with which to build his creations in a bid by King IKEA to hold him in thrall forever, which is why you only have that small tool to build your creations with today. Also, having tired of Minotaurs, Daedalus actually secreted a hidden food court in his IKEA designs where cooks dish out strangely delicious meatballs and desert products that offers an oasis from the madness, but I digress... If your romance should survive the picking out of furniture and learning the complex code system of stocking (devised by Swedish mathematicians based on Goedel's incompleteness theorems), and have navigated the self-checkout lane with the scanning gun that doesn't work, as well as squeezing everything you bought (and somehow a king-sized bedroom set becomes a five foot by seven box through tesseract technology) into your vehicle and then get it home...you're halfway there. Now comes the hard part. You will unpack it. There will be parts. You will work together. You are allowed one "I need to walk away before I say something" break an hour. If you manage to put together your furniture and are still speaking to each other at the end of the day; congradulations, you have found your Soul Mate. The number of pieces of furniture that you put together is proportional to how long of a life you will have together. Should you somehow manage to get a couch, desk, computer stand, entertainment center, bookshelf, and bed set put together without breaking up or commiting domestic violence upon one another...you will be in love until your dying days and have found the person you were born to. Also, the final lesson is one I will reveal here, although I implore you not to share it with your single friends, for they must find out themselves. If you have survived this test of love, you learn the most important words in the English language, to be uttered the next time your SO mentions buying something from IKEA; "Honey, just let me put this together while you're at work" And those words are the secret to keeping your Soul Mate. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
1:47 am	Who I Am I won't "tag" anyone, but if anyone cares to play along, go ahead and answer these. The bus story is something that means a great deal to me, and those that know me (I know you're reading Karen), will sense that it had a profound impact on me. Karen says I'm a Samaritan, in the respect of the British institution and charity, not in a religious manner, and perhaps she's right. I'm reminded of Grant Morrison (this happens a lot) and THE INVISIBLES, where Audrey Murry, a bit character who was a battered wife whose husband was killed by King Mob, an anarchist character with little morals, finds the dying King Mob in a phone box as he's spending his last moments calling his old girlfriend to tell her that the Karma Bullet has found him, all the bad shit he's done has caught up and he's dead, and Audrey Murrey does not walk by. She stops, gets him to a hospital, and saves his left and brings him carrot sticks and crisps from a Tescos, and King Mob kisses her forehead and and says that he hopes she inherits the earth and walks out to explain to another character that Audrey's act has freed him, he's the butterfly that grew out of the catapillar of the dying King Mob in the phone box. If I had a larger point...I'm not sure what it was, only that I've stopped so many times in my life, for right reasons and wrong reasons, and I can't just walk on by, and the story below may shed some light on why that is. I'm cutting and pasting this from Dan Evan's old Sk8 Jesus forum, because I wanted to tell the bus story, and I am lazy about writing tonight and feel like playing some CoH at the moment. Name: Jim Gilmer Birth Decade: The 70's, just in time to come of age during the golden years of violent boy cartoons such as Transformers and GIJOE. Song: "Heroin" - Velvet Underground First heartbreak: I don't even know her name, but I was something like ten and it was the middle of winter and the school bus was way overcrowded and I think she was in high school and I was in middle school. The bus was so crowded there was no where to sit but the driver was a bitch who would write you up if you weren't in a seat and so I was trying to sit on the very edge of a seat that already had four people crammed into it (usually they sat two or three at a push). I had already fallen into the slush on the floor twice and this gorgeous (in hindsight she was probably pretty plain and a tad overweight, and I think she had a band uniform, I don't remember what she looked like but I'll love her all the same) girl put her bookbag on the floor and helped me up and sat me on her lap and smiled at me like Jesus. I don't even know if I saw her that many times after that, but she broke my heart and gave me faith in humanity and those 15 minutes sitting on her lap were a taste of heaven. I'll love that girl until the day I die. Cake, without a doubt. These were Dan's original questions in the introduce yourself thread: "Name? Decade of your birth. Song that you love Person that broke your heart the first time Cake or Pie? Please feel free to expand on one of these answers so that the rest of us can ask all sorts of probing questions. Be prepared to defend your answer on the last question no matter what" (Comment on this)
1:23 am	Okkervil River -The Next Four Months I feel the need to share my current favourite band with you all, and so... Despite a lot of searching, no one has a version of this up on youtube or anywhere, but for those who have music services, give this, or any of their songs, a listen. THE NEXT FOUR MONTHS - lyrics "Maybe we could break your ankle, clean and unsuspiciously. An ER trip, a doctor's slip, and you could share your pills with me. Won't it feel so good, though, when we're lying side by side, when you can't move, when I'm not trying? 2000 milligrams each. A hotel by the pharmacy with drinking straws in toothpaste tubes. Stash them with your toiletries and I will share my pills with you. Little Michael sleeping in the child safety seat, lying with the windows rolled up, in the August heat. 3000 milligrams each, 4000 milligrams. We're driving down the interstate, you're feeling great, you scratch your wrist, and we pretend your kids, your husband, all you left does not exist. When in some motel that night we're lying, I can barely whisper �it's like dying. Baby, do you know what I mean? Baby, did you hear me? Baby, you fell asleep.� I know I�m weak, I don't deny we'll see our trial sometime soon. But when we know we're fucked, I'll half the pile and share my pills with you. Cause we've felt fully in our bodies, and we've felt totally alive, so we're prepared to float above this dirty bed where we both lie. Where we lie, lie, lie. Will we be fine? Not this time." A sample of live stuff: Plus Ones: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7mT618-D0o Unless it kicks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uexxTjCXg7k And my favourite next to "The Next Four Months", which is "John Allyn Smith Sails": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB6CQgB0WC0 Current Music: Do you have to ask? (Comment on this)
12:30 am	On the subject of tpyos Most of my posts are written in the wee hours after work. I'm almost ashamed of how many typos I spot after the fact, and if I could be arsed I'd go back and fix them. So, just consider this as a general apology for all the typos and outright misspellings in my posts. (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
3:21 am	Days of Fun Past The name is Bond, Shaman Bond. Except it isn't. It's Edwin Drood, and Green continues to craft the frolicksome grandchildren of what pulp might have grown into if academics and boring old buzzards hadn't gotten to it and taken all the fun out of it. Now you can't do "pulp" with ironic mocking of the concepts of some Strange New Space Brain Wave Operas involved, but not Simon Green, this is the good stuff, this is the absinthe with the Wormwood left in. The Department of Missing the Point would most likely moan about style or literary wankery, and to them I point then in the direction of the wonder sketch...the Critics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHtjl8V483A God bless Fry and Laurie. Of course, the series that drew me to Simon Green was the fantastic Night Side series, which isn't quite as polished as the Drood books, but is all the more fun...yes, do you remember that word? Fun. What books used to be until we started unpacking sentences and deconstructing things and back when we just read the damn things. Green is doing the only thing I find myself rushing to the bookstore to get anymore, and god bless him for it, and I shall by him several rounds if we ever meet for all the joy and humour and downright FUN that he's brought back into a medium that I used to love with all my heart until it started getting old and sagging and liver spots started showing up in unsightly places until some cosmetic surgery and an invite to some of the nicer places around town for a bit of speaking on the dreary nature of dreary people writing dreary books. Simon Green is not dreary. Part of me hopes I don't meet him, because in my head he strides across the earth like Indianna Jones, only his whip snaps around the typewritters of old and favourite about to launch in on bids for literary worth and instead shoves copies of their old, FUN books in their hands to remember how they once had people who flew to the stars and dreamed of forever instead of living out dreary lives of fucking thinly disguised aliens with extra cocks. Read him, for your own sake, if nothing else, and remember that once upon a time that FUN move upon the page. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 15th, 2008
4:17 am	BAHA: How I Became a Cyborg ...and will most likely spend most of SDCC being probed by DHS officials for setting off the metal detectors. I was born without a stapes bone in the middle ear, it's one of the bones that conducts sound from the eardrum to the inner ear and to the auditory nerve. A few years ago I found out about the Bone Anchored Hearing Aid, and then spent several years trying to force my insurance to pay for one. Long story short, it took several appeals and finally switching insurance companies to get the thing, which is in essence a titanium screw in my temporal bone that sets above the auditory nerve. There is an abutment that screws into the screw and them a reciever with an air pocket that serves as a faux-eardrum in the connection piece. Sounds is transformed to vibrations and sent down the post, into the screw, and the vibrations are picked up by the nerve and made back into sound. Think of how a dentist's drill sounds so loud because it's IN YOUR SKULL. This is a post-op picture of me the day after surgery (note the sly product placement in the corner there): This is how the BAHA works: 1. Sound waves are received by Baha sound processor 2. Sound waves bypass middle ear function and are delivered directly to the working cochlea in both ears I has literally changed my life. It has been one year since the surgery to implant the screw, and in August it'll be one year of having lived with it. It's still weird. The best part is plugging in my iPod or guitar into the input jack on the reciever and listening to music directly in my skull bones. I'm like, post-human, or something Warren Ellis-y. As soon as I can be bothered, I'll get a non-bloody and unwashed picture of myself with the BAHA on so you can see the "after" look of it. When I let my hair grow out recently, you couldn't even see it, as the reciever is about as wide as a quarter and doesn't come that far off the skull. Oh, and the first song I listened to via my iPod/brain interface was Hardfloor's Acid/House classic choon "Acceptance" followed by the Pixies doing "Where is my Mind?" (3 Comments |Comment on this)
4:12 am	Serve the Curve Offered without comment: (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
11:55 pm	A Locked Room Mystery I have now shut the computer room door. Inside...myself, several pieces of paper rolled into a tube shape... And a FLY. Only one of us will leave this room alive. (and I have vicodin and soda to last for some time, so I'm good) The Hunt is AWWWN. Current Music: Dual of the Fates - John Williams (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 8th, 2008
1:14 am	I had almost forgot... ...just how much TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD taught me as a kid, both the film and the movie. Christ, was there ever a main character like Atticus Finch? Or Scout? It should replace the goddamn bible, and we'd all be finer for it: Atticus: "They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience. " Atticus: "When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em. " And never has anything described exactly how I felt in my school years: Scout: "As I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me. " Scout: "I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks" Fuck, I think this is the rule I SURVIVED by in BFE, Michigan: Scout: "Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowin’ more than they do. It aggravates ‘em. You’re not gonna change any of them by talkin’ right, they’ve got to want to learn themselves, and when they don’t want to learn there’s nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language. " Atticus: "I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what. " ""I think I'll be a clown when I get grown," said Dill. "Yes, sir, a clown.... There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off." "You got it backwards, Dill," said Jem. "Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them." "Well, I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks." " There's a scene in the movie that tightens my throat every time. It's after the case is lost, and the Reverand bids the children to stand with the words; "Stand up children, your father is passing", and there's something wonderfully broken, sad, and at the same time strong about that scene. It's hardly controversial to say that it's a wonderful book and movie, but there are times when I rediscover it and remember that it still has a hold on me, and that it's every bit as powerful as I remember, and I take it down and reread it or rewatch the movie. Jim (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 7th, 2008
11:53 pm	Doctors and parents God...I don't know which will drive me mad first. I'd talked to my dad about this earlier in the week, but finally heard the results of my mom's cardiac stress test from her today. Basically, when she met with the cardiologist, he was just laid back and said that "two parts of your heart aren't working right", and when pressed for more info just said; "Well, eat more fruits and veggies". I kid you not. So, my dad was obviously not happy with that, and since my mom has been having worsening health issues, got her in post haste to see her GP, a doctor I don't like because of his passivity, but anything is better than not even being told WHAT PARTS of the heart aren't working. It turns out there may be a problem with two of the coronary arteries, which is what I expected, and thank goodness dad managed to talk the doctor into doing a cardiac catherization of my mother's heart. Also, thankfully, my mom (who usually fights against ANY sort of medical procedure) realized that this was something that she should address and agreed to it. To say that I'm mildly upset is an understatement. When you take a 62 year old diabetic with a history of blocked arteries into the doctor's because she's losing her balance, getting the shakes, falling down, sleeping for hours a day, and then find out that "two parts of the heart" aren't working...well, the last thing you expect to hear is to eat more veggies. Yeah, that'll solve that problem. And it's not like dad's a spring chicken. Somehow he has kept going as a firefighter for over 30 years despite having roofs fall on him, being thrown from the firetruck during an accident, getting caught in razorwire someone strung along a fence while responding to a fire, crashing through a floor, being in the same fire that killed three other firefighters back in the 1980's, working for years on a ruined hip joint until he found a doctor who'd do the replacement and send him back to work, having the replacement and going through the police/fire acadamy again alongside 20 year olds while he was in his 50's, and then surviving a triple coronary bypass to go back as a captain and finish his retirement last year. My biggest fear is something happens to her, he tries to help, and falls down from a heart attack too. He's a rock, and a tank, but even he knows he can't do all the things he used to, and thankfully he's pushing my mule of a mother into getting help and checking this heart thing out. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 5th, 2008
2:04 pm	Tokyopop splits in two, reduces production http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/12677.html "Manga giant Tokyopop announced this morning that it is spinning off its comics-to-film and digital units into a new company, Tokyopop Media LLC; publishing operations will remain in Tokyopop Inc. Publishing production will be reduced by roughly 50% through the rest of the year, reducing output to roughly 200-225 titles per year from a planned total of over 500 titles. Tokyopop CEO and Chief Creative Officer of the Tokyopop Group, Stuart Levy, explained the reasons for the reduction in output. “The time is now for us to focus our publishing business to overcome current market challenges. Few releases will allow for less cannibalization at retail.” " More in Link. Offered for information to those interested. Is "digital units" a term for webcomics, or is there something I'm missing? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
1:10 am	San Diego Comic Con- the search for flights and floors I've just learned that Karen Traviss is going to be making it out to SDCC, which means now I've got an excuse to try to make it out. The bad thing is that I'll have to look for cheap flights if I want to go, as well as trying to find someone's floor to crash on (since I assume the hotel rooms would be booked, unless someone has an extra bed or floor space). SDCC is always a blast, and I hope the PA lads along with other friends I've been missing make it out there. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 25th, 2008
4:15 am	An old look I just finished dying my hair plum. I haven't done it in some time, and I'd forgotten how much I like it. On first blush, my hair just looks darker, but when the light hits it you see that it's now a deep plum. I always used to get compliments from the most random people on it, because it's a subtle thing. It's not shockingly purple or anything, you have to look at it for a moment to see it. In other news, one of the few trunk pieces I've always been proud of but hadn't sold came back from a mag I had high hopes for placing in, and while the editor didn't want that piece, he did ask for more from me, which is always a nice sign. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
2:31 am	House, md:Okay, I'll admit it... I went into the latest House, MD expecting a manipulative tearjerker and got a beautiful piece of drama that actually, and I NEVER do this, made me tear up. I'm not ashamed to say it. I won't post spoilers, but there's some parts that were just brutal, and Hugh Laurie and the entire cast sold it on the strength of their performances. (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
2:35 am	House's Head I think this week's episode of House was one of the show's best. I've liked how they've shaken up the show quite a bit and have moved away from the pretense of some of the cases being plausible, although I thought there were a few moments that almost came TOO close to laughing at itself. As it was, this was a brilliant first part of the season finale, and it has confirmed what I've been wondering all season about a meta-plot and why House hasn't seemed as "with it" as usual. There are quibbles (as always) to be had about some of the medicine and some of the absurdities of the show, but House is a television program and while they may strive for making sure the big words sound right and the equipment looks right, I don't expect it to be even close to the real world. Instead, it gives me quality characters in a medical setting and boatloads of drama and comedy every week and for that I am grateful, and I can't wait for next week to see what shakes out of all this. (Comment on this)