I’ll be wandering around Cape! this Saturday handing out flyers for A Thousand Faces. If anyone else in the Dallas area is going, let me know. I should be wearing one of these. And if you’re not going, why not? It’s a great event, especially for kids. Hope took her nephew a couple years ago and he loved it. Plus you get lots of free stuff. Seriously, lots. I have a stack of free comics from three years ago I still haven’t gotten around to reading. And they have half-a-block’s worth of long boxes full of quarter comics. It’s win-win.
Yesterday I submitted the cake story. It seems like a prestigious sort of joint, so who knows if they’ll let my sort in there. 
And I’m hoping in the next day or so to have news on when my next story will be appearing over at Every Day Fiction. Exhilarating!
Issue 4 of A Thousand Faces has gone live! My epic superhero story “Shades of Red” is included. Check it out!
Just finished watching the last of Extras. I’m a big fan of Ricky Gervais from The Office, and Extras does not disappoint. I think the scene of Ian McKellan explaining how to act might be one of the funniest moments in television history.
Writing exercise: Write a story about a superhero with an embarrassingly mundane power.
This one ended up a little long, so I’m just going to post the first half of it. It’s a pretty stupid last half anyway, so you’re not missing much. I actually really like the concept of the Liberty Gang; obviously, a patriotic-themed supergroup is nothing new, but I dig the concept that, if something were to befall the core team, or any single member of that team, there are sleeper agents, if you will, among the citizenry who can step up to take their place. It seems very appropriate, power to the people and all that. With some tweaking, I might work them into the Scarlet Ranger’s story, as they have a very Silver Age feel to them, which is about when Kelly would have spent her formative years. They’ll probably have disbanded by the time we reach the “Shades of Red” era.
About 560 words.
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I just found out “Crush” is in the Top Stories section over at Every Day Fiction. It snuck in there at some point, I guess. It’s at 19 at the moment.
Virginia has like 7 prompts done already! A monumental task stands before me!
This one isn’t finished, but I rather like it. There’s more than a little of me in Jennifer’s thoughts about high school. My graduating class had about 80 people. I’d probably remember about five or so of them on sight. Maybe about half if they had some story to remind of who they were. This is being optimistic. I’m not sure if that makes me an asshole or not. This uncertainty isn’t so much because I’ve forgotten them, it’s because there’s a good chance I never bothered to catalog their existence in the first place. That’s what probably makes me an asshole.
Don’t get me wrong: high school wasn’t particularly terrible for me. It was neither great nor awful. Some people come out with angst, and for others it was (sadly) the best time of their lives. Most of what I remember fondly from that period of my life happened outside of school, and with only a handful of my scholastic colleagues. I would say the general sense of apathy I feel for the world has its roots there. Anyway…
Exercise: Story starter: Sure, Jennifer liked _______, but this was ridiculous. [fill in the blank with a noun of your choice!]
Actually, I’m liking this enough that I may submit it somewhere. I’m just going to post the first couple paragraphs for now. And of course, this means the stuff that I’m referencing above isn’t included. Oh well.
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Okay, I got a lot of non-writing writing stuff done last week. Among them was proofing Shades of Red for the next issue of A Thousand Faces. I felt like an idiot, as there were some stupid little mistakes here and there that I hadn’t noticed before I submitted. I had to submit a big list of corrections. I work in publishing, so I know what a pain it can be to have to change things at that stage. It makes me feel amateurish. It also makes Frank Byrns (the editor) a way nice guy for putting up with it all. This is, though, my first big published story, and it is a little on the long side. So I guess technically I am an amateur. Either way, it looks like a great issue.
The plus to it all, though, is re-reading the story a couple times has gotten me in the mood to write some more with those characters. I’ve already started fleshing out the Scarlet Ranger’s origin story. I need to work on that some more.
This week should see a return to writing. Virginia in the writing group has been pounding out prompts like there’s no tomorrow. I’ve gotta start catching up.
I’m way behind on my crits for the writing group, so I’m trying to catch up on some of those. I’m also trying to come up with a decent bio for Thousand Faces.
The Dallas Comic Con was a lot of fun. Wasn’t too crowded this time, so I was able to get in and get everything I wanted done in pretty short order. I found an amazingly cheap copy of DC: The New Frontier Absolute Edition, which is just gorgeous. It’s nice to have a copy of the full series, especially in this format. Christina Hendricks was very cool and easy to chat with, and I got to meet artist Bob McLeod, who co-created some of my favorite comic characters (The New Mutants). I even managed to sell a bunch of old toys I had laying around.
Sunday we saw Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. (Fort Worth doesn’t have any awesome Indy movie theaters like Dallas does, but we do have the Modern Art Museum, which has a small screen on which they can show things like this.) I reviewed it for the department newsletter, so I thought I’d post that here. The fact that this film wasn’t included among the Best Foreign Film nominees just goes to highlight how irrelevant the Oscars are.
Something I’ve come to realize is that my reviews are almost always completely positive. Fact is, I’m generally pretty picky about what movies I see, and have a pretty good eye for what I’ll like. So the chances of me walking into a movie and coming out sorely disappointed are pretty slim (though it does happen–Star Wars prequels, I’m looking at you). If I were a pro, I’d go see everything, and probably have a lot of negative reviews. But really, is there a point to reviewing something like Meet the Spartans or Transformers?
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I’ve just received confirmation that my story “Shades of Red” will be appearing in the next issue of A Thousand Faces, due out at the end of this month! In addition, friends Jens and Erin are also included! So I can promise at least three awesome stories in this one issue! I will, of course, post again when the issue goes live. Exciting! I may even be doing some promoting of the book at Cape! this year. More info on that later.
I’ll be heading out to the Dallas Comic Con this weekend. I’ll be there primarily to meet Christina Hendricks to add to my wall of “Firefly” alum, but they always run a good ship out there, so there will be plenty else to do.
I wrote a little on a writing prompt last night, so that’ll be my Day 10. I’d say this little exercise was a big success–I wrote every day but one (because I was sick). I’ve got the seeds of at least two stories that I can develop.
Prompt: Story starter: Sometimes you don’t know who your real friends are until you survive a nuclear holocaust. This is unfinished, and really doesn’t have the pacing necessary for a flash piece, but here it is. (more…)
