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January 11, 2004 /

I took a couple chunks of my last vacation days to continue work on the Wall of Glory project, now significantly bigger than that picture shows–it covers a lot of the east side of my room, and has extended onto the door. The numbers so far are twenty-five Penny Arcades, eighteen Checkerboard Nightmares, thirteen AZWPs, three of my own comics, one each from Random Frog Children and Skinny Pandas, and four Grimbleses (you may remember the Grimbles as the only comic that updates as slowly as I do). Oh, and of course the Ninja Assassin Algorithm, which I can’t reprint for fear of its falling into Russian hands.

It’s a pretty great freaking wall. I’d like to make a project of papering my entire room with my favorite comic strips, but it’s going to be hard enough as it is to take these down if I don’t live here in seven months. Plus, eh, I’m kinda tired now.

January 11, 2004 /

So last night, me and Alison and Evan and some other people went to this hot new club? And I GOT US KICKED OUT.

I’d like to say it was because I put a bouncer through the mirror in the hallway, but actually it was because I was wearing tennis shoes. “Good catch,” they said to each other as they hustled me out. I laughed and went home.

January 9, 2004 /

Whoa! Moon shot!

If this ever comes to anything, it could actually make things really convenient for a certain movie franchise that has yet to be written.

January 9, 2004 /

I say “you gotta believe” a lot, because… well, I believe it, philosophically and biologically. It’s a motto and a mantra. I don’t think I’ll ever know if I picked it up subconsciously somewhere, or whether it’s just one of those examples of convergent phrase evolution.

Turns out there is a specific person to whom it’s ascribed, though, and his name was Tug McGraw, and he died yesterday. His obituary is sad, but it’s also good reading. He lived what he said.

January 7, 2004 /

I’d read on Neil Gaiman’s blog some time ago that, in a press conference, Margaret Atwood had declared that Oryx and Crake was not speculative fiction, as everything in it was extrapolated from some current trend. Both Mr. Gaiman and myself thought that was a fairly strange statement to make, and I was a little disturbed to hear it from a writer I like so much, but it turns out that she does say it’s speculative fiction after all. So much for gossip.

This is pretty much a post just to reassure myself, actually. Sorry.

Last spring, I read Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead, a series of transcribed lectures about writing. The themes of that book formed a large part of my senior statement, and had probably as much influence on the way I write structurally as her style has had on my actual prose. Which is to say a lot.

I often have difficulty liking things–books, music, visual art–without somebody else’s trusted opinion to back me up and give it cred. I don’t particularly like this about myself, but it has saved me from some embarrassing devotions (let’s remember that I was big into the Gin Blossoms). There are a few things, though, that I feel I came by honestly. Semisonic is one, Checkerboard Nightmare another, and Atwood is a third: the three of them form a rough but fairly clear portrait of my taste in nearly everything written.

More on writing, in probably a couple of days. (Oh, and thanks to Sumana for the O&C link.)