not falling down

Man, I think I’d want to see Brick even if its protagonist wasn’t named Brendan. It’s cheap smart indie high school noir with weird slang! At last, people are making movies specifically for me! Next I want Michelle Kwan buy me a pony.

Brick has a tentative release date of April 28 at the Baxter. Anybody else up for it?

It occurred to me this morning that while they’re hardly the only clip-art comics out there, Red Meat is specifically trying to be what Wondermark already is, from a writing standpoint. I’ve been reading Red Meat since like 1997, when I first discovered the wonders of alternative newsweeklies, but the fact is that Malki! brings a better game. Props. Nephew.

Wondermark is insanely great. Why aren’t you reading Wondermark?

One of the hilariously demented* developers who works on this floor has recently posted a sign in his cube, which reads “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” I, being much cleverer and more handsome,** immediately thought “ah ha! This human has printed a corrupted version with the incorrect word order! The correct phrasing is ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here.’”

I was so certain of this because my version fits nicely into an iambic pentameter, while his doesn’t (you can make it fit, but that involves stretching a short vowel to a long syllable and vice versa). But it turns out neither of us was right: the Divine Comedy translation which spawned the phrase, by H.F. Cary, actually goes “All hope abandon ye who enter here,” which is much better and still in perfect iambs. Bah! Iambs are fickle! That’s why I support dactyls. Want to hear more about the Pro-Dactyl Initiative? Contact your local poet laureate today.

* Developer may be neither hilarious nor demented.

** I am very handsome and clever.

Because I am a sucker, I read the WENN bullet points on IMDB about every day. I don’t think they have permalinks, so I’m reprinting this one in full (copyright World Entertainment News Network but I don’t care):

Jackson’s Snake Film Creates Huge Buzz

Samuel L. Jackson’s new mile-high thriller Snakes On A Plane has created such a buzz among internet film fans, movie bosses have called for re-shoots - to give the film a tougher rating. The film, which stars Jackson as an FBI agent trying to keep a federal witness alive onboard a plane full of snakes, wrapped last September - but went back before the cameras earlier this month for five days of additional shooting. Film bosses at distributor New Line Cinema opted to add new scenes to the film to take the movie from PG-13 into R-rated territory, according to industry magazine The Hollywood Reporter. They claim the second round of filming became necessary after intense and growing fan interest in the film, which is scheduled to be released this summer. Among the reported additions to the film is a foul-mouthed rant from Jackson in which his agent character bellows, “I want these motherf**king snakes off the motherf**king plane!” The line is expected to take on cult status. The film-makers have reportedly added more gore, more deaths, more nudity and more snakes to the finished product.

Let’s emphasize the part that makes me wince.

The line is expected to take on cult status.

Aww, guys. Guys, you can’t… you can’t do that.

I don’t like talking about money, but here goes!

I am considering self-publishing an Anacrusis book: 101 of the best standalone stories from the last two and a half years, plus one (completed!) bad penny story arc. I would purchase one copy for myself, one for Maria, one for my grandmother and one for my mom. That’s all the demand I anticipate, which is why I’d be going with a print-on-demand company (likely Lulu) rather than an offset press with some kind of hideous minimum print run. I am not going to sell a thousand copies.

It would come in two versions: a fancy dust-jacketed hardcover, which I’d limit to 101 copies at $24.95, and a “viral edition” cheap paperback at $9.95. That doesn’t include shipping cost. I’d make a couple bucks off either, which I would put back into web ads, review copies, etc. I probably would not break even in the end, but it would be a relatively cheap way to raise my profile as a writer. Anybody who took the trouble to ship me his or her copy would get it signed and shipped back for free.

The chief goal of this project, though, would be to give people who like reading Anacrusis something tangible to show their friends. You might be one of those people. Do you want something tangible? Which edition would you prefer? Would it interest you more if the book came with exclusive content (eg ten new stories) or would it make you feel jerked around? (Everything would be released under BY-SA, as usual, so anybody who wanted could just repost them somewhere.)

I’ll be reading the LJ comment feed on this entry, of course, or you can spam me any time.

John Joseph Adams asked what are your top ten SF-F books not written by white men? Actually, he asked it in two parts: a top-ten list of nonmen, followed by a top ten list of nonwhites. Like everyone else who’s responded so far, I can do a list of women easily; embarrassingly (and typically), of the SF-F authors whose race I actually know, almost all of them are white (the late Octavia Butler seems to be a common exception). I might be able to do a nonwhite list, but it’d be almost all comics creators.

Anyway, my top-ten-women list demonstrates a pretty strong pattern.

1. The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
2. Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
3. Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
4. Tehanu, Ursula Le Guin
5. The Homeward Bounders, Diana Wynne Jones
6. A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L’Engle
7. The Hero and the Crown, Robin McKinley
8. Lioness Rampant, Tamora Pierce
9. The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
10. Tie: Deep Wizardry, Diane Duane, and The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

Is it usually this obvious that my literary development halted in middle school?

Two days in and still not through the backlog, I’m beginning to know a certain fear of my RSS aggregator.

We came back with all our teeth!

Bee was incredibly gracious in putting us up (and putting up with us) all week, and we owe her a lot, but to repay it in rent she’d have to stay with us for four months. Not that Maria or I would mind, because Bee is awesome. I also finally got to see Graham perform live with the Bathtub Marys–I’d only seen seen him in rehearsal and heard him on mp3. We spent seven hours trying to absorb the Met (art, not opera) with Leonard, then had dinner and games and a subsequent Saturday Day Basketball with him and Sumana.

Louisville seems a lot shorter after nine days in Manhattan, but then it seems a lot sunnier too.

Brendan: So which is better–dragon princesses, or dinosaur princesses?

Maria: Oh, definitely dragon princesses.

Brendan: You think so? I don’t know…

Maria: Oh, come on. Dinosaurs only happened because the dragon bloodline got watered down.

Maria and I (and Michael and Danielle) are going to New York! On a trip! Ballers: You can come over on Tuesday, but we won’t be here, so you may have to play games in the hall. I am pretty sure that is illegal!

I am not making this up: MSN and careerbuilder deliver an article about “What Kind of Procrastinator Are You?”

Sometimes I think MSN is a gigantic joke on the same order as Modern Humor Authority, but ten times subtler and more sinister.