· writing

#156 ~ Rabid Lamb Comics

June 6, 2008 in boyfriends, cartoons, comic of the day, comics, sex, writing | 8 comments

BAM! Did any of you think I’d really go there? I bet not. But I did. I really did.

Happy Friday.

Adam and I have both basically begged each other to have a good weekend, so I’m hopeful we’ll be able to pull it off (too many crappy weekends in a row just makes it brutal to get through the work week). However, it’s supposed to be super hot (high 80’s and even 90’s) and super humid – the worst combo on earth, so I for one will be doing my damndest to not even leave the house. What about you guys? Any excellent plans?

Update: Yet another reason to not leave the house this weekend – ANOTHER parade. Jeezus. I am apparently in the wrong city for someone who hates parades. I think this is a Puerto Rican Day parade. Yuck (not “yuck” to Puerto Ricans or Puerto Rican Day you understand, just yuck to parades…and sunshine…and people…and love…and happiness…)

Update 2: Adam has submitted an awesome drawing of a dude with a deer’s head for everyone’s enjoyment. He shows me up as a cartoonist again. Yay. Joke, it’s awesome.

#138 ~ Rabid Lamb Comics

May 12, 2008 in anna paquin, cartoons, comic of the day, comics, craptastic, winona ryder, writing, x-men | 5 comments

Yes Anna Paquin, I know, I know. I’m just making the world a more horrible place, and sending more and more people that are just looking for gratuitous celebrity nudity to my blog (where they will ultimately be disappointed)…but what can a girl do? I’m desperate for a good strip these days…no pun intended.

My weekend was pretty much a bust. I got two important errands done on Saturday, and I managed to write about 2,500 words on Sunday (yes, took me ALL day to get my ass in the chair at 5pm and write 2,500 words) but I got nothing else done. I didn’t accomplish even a third of my to do list…which leaves me with a deadline to meet by Wednesday…that is going to be nigh impossible. But wish my lazy ass luck anyway. How about you guys? Good weekend? Bad? C’mon, make me feel better…

Six Creepiest Comic Characters of All Time

May 8, 2008 in comics, entertainment, lists, writing | 2 comments

Cracked.com has a great little piece on the “Six Creepiest Comics Characters of All Time”. I’m familiar with some of them and some of them were fun and horrible new discoveries.

All their picks are solid, but I have to SUPER agree with them on #5 Ultimate Pietro and Wanda Maximoff (Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch)*, who are twins that are apparently now ‘in love’ with each other. I haven’t been reading X-Men for years, and when I did they were always exceedingly close, almost slightly uncomfortably close, but now they’ve just gone and admitted that they’re in love with each other (of course they “killed” her in order to deal with the problematic and controversial storyline they got themselves into) but it was really creepy. More creepy than that though, was The Wasp’s explanation to Captain America about it. She explains their incestuous love as if it’s something common and even enouraged in the Twenty First Century…as if Captain America is an old fuddy duddy because he’s shocked by it. I wonder where the writing team’s head was at when they wrote this particular page. Check out the excerpt below…

Yikes.

*It should be noted that this version of Pietro & Wanda exists in the “Ultimate Universe”, which if you’re not familiar with the insanity (and joke) that is comics continuity, is too difficult to explain here. Suffice to say, multiple versions of multiple characters exist in different books and worlds etc. It’s one of the original reasons I stopped reading comics and have never really truly gone back. Although the Ultimate Universe is generally pretty awesome, with well thought out stories and great writers and artists, taking the characters places they probably should have gone originally, I would say this storyline for Pietro & Wanda are an exception to that “awesomeness”…

#134 ~ Rabid Lamb Comics

May 5, 2008 in art, artists, books, cartoons, comic of the day, comics, jeffrey brown, writing | 7 comments

Whew. Hope you all had a great weekend. Mine was fairly uneventful as I’m still recovering. If I do too much I get little residual sinus headaches and I’ve got a nasty hacking cough no matter what I do. I had high hopes for some writing and drawing, but instead it was rest and movies (none of them very good), which isn’t SO bad. Onto the week…!

Movies I Saw:

The Ten. Not so impressive. A couple awesome skits, but mostly jammed in among totally mediocre ones. 2.5 Stars.

Henry The VIII. Not so good. Just like all the other pieces about this. I’m giving it only 2 Stars, despite the presence of Ray Winstone and Helena Bonham Carter.

Demon Seed. Not good. Based on a Dean Koontz novel, who I used to love. It’s an idea that I can see being awesome and horrifying in a novel, but on screen it did not work at all. I’d say they should do a remake, now that we have extra fancy technology, but a remake would likely be terrible too. 2 Stars.

Night Watch. Again, I bet the novel is pretty good, but this film was ALL over the place. There were some interesting ideas and some cool things going on, but all in all it was a mess. Sadly I have the second part, Day Watch at home from Netflix as well, so I guess I’ll be watching it. Also, as a sidenote, I HATE dubbing. I would much rather have watched this film (and maybe would have liked it more…at least half a star more) if it could have been subtitled. It look ridiculous dubbed from Russian into English. Who is into this?! Horrible. 2.5 Stars.

#133 ~ Rabid Lamb Comics

May 2, 2008 in acceptance, cartoons, comic of the day, comics, writing | 4 comments

That’s right. I’m BAAAAACK. And thank the gods. I was sick people. SICK. The sickest and most miserable I have ever been in my life. If I’d been cognizant enough to find razor blades we honestly might not be having this conversation. Which has answered one question for me quite well…my pain tolerance? Must be really really low. I never thought of myself as having a super high pain tolerance or anything, but I assumed I was y’know…average. Apparently not, because there are people that live with chronic pain that I’m sure is worse than what I experienced for a mere seven days…and I just…I don’t know how they live. I was absolutely in hell. It’s not quite over yet, I’m still suffering from headaches and a bad cough, and that kind of baby deer just outside of the womb feeling when I walk around in the world, but I’m not spending my hours imagining ways in which I can kill myself or drill holes in my face to release the pain, so it’s a glass half full kind of thing. Anyway, I hope you didn’t all forget about me, and that you’ll come running back now that I’m back…

Things that happened while I was dead almost dead.

I submitted a letter/question to The Rejecter a few weeks ago, and she published my letter this week and nicely answered my question. Which is awesome, and makes me four for four in my letters submitted/ published ratio, which pretty much solidifies my theory that submitting letters for publication is my only true gift in life and that I should look for a job doing just that. If anyone hears of such a ridiculous job, please let me know as I’m obviously a shoe in.

Adam got his first awesome paycheck at his new job working on a soon to be awesome film. I don’t think I’m allowed to say more than that, but more to come later.

My parents were in Vegas for a late celebration of my dad’s 60th birthday and did NOT win millions of dollars, but DID come away with the shirts on their backs.

My landlord tried to raise my rent by $200 a month for my new one year lease starting in June, which is not totally ridiculous for New York except that they usually only raise it $100, so it was double what Adam and I were expecting. And it acutally IS a bit ridiculous in our case since the Second Avenue subway line construction is barely a block away from us and is insanely loud, AND they’ve never fixed my ceiling from rain damage from last year, AND our hot water kinda blows. So I sent off a desperate pleading email last week before I got sick, and was rewarded with the landlord agreeing to reduce the raise to a mere $100. Yay!

I’m sure there were other things that happened…but either they are just as boring as the facts above, or I haven’t figured out what they are yet…it’s amazing how quickly your life can unravel when you can’t pay attention to it for seven days.

Short Fiction Rejection #7…

April 8, 2008 in rejection, short fiction, short fiction rejections, writing | 1 comment

And so it ends. I got my last short fiction rejection for the group of eight that had been sent out. This rejection was from Zoetrope All-Story, and was fully expected, as Zoetrope is a literary magazine of the highest order – recently Wes Anderson had a piece published…WES ANDERSON!…I cannot compete with Wes Anderson!

Ahem. Anyway, so suffice to say I wasn’t surprised. What did totally surprise me was the shockingly encouraging handwritten note on the back. If you’re gonna get a rejection, that is the kind to get, so thank you Zoetrope, for um, rejecting me.

So I don’t feel so bad, and already have another piece in mind to revise and submit to them (even though it seems like aiming for the sun). I’m actually in the process of editing/revising/rewriting a whole new batch and sending them out again.

Wish me luck…and for the record, here’s the new count:

1 for 8

Jhumpa Lahiri Article

March 31, 2008 in artists, writing | Permalink

There’s a great article over on the vulture blog about the amazing writer Jhumpa Lahiri. If you’re a fan, or interested in becoming one, check it out.

Query Update…

March 31, 2008 in query letters, rejection, writing | Permalink

Ah, rejection. There’s nothing like the smell of rejection first thing in the morning on your way to your writing group. Sunday I got a little form rejection card on the query for my novel to a huge agency. Since it was for a HUGE and seriously major house, and my work is not necessarily mainstream, I’m not really surprised, but it’s still a bummer.

Here’s the latest summary:

#1: Partial Requested and Rejected. Door left nicely open to submit my graphic novel when further along (it is sadly not further along).

#2: Never heard from them, which is frustrating as they show a 3 -4 week turnaround and I think I got lost in the shuffle (or am up on previously mentioned “laughing board”). I have also submitted this “no reponse to a query, though they say they will get back to the sender regardless” question to an “advice” blog, called The Rejecter…one week out.

#3: Dead. No response to email query. I’m considering it a rejection.

#4. Requested Partial. Sent Partial (first five chapters) via mail about ten weeks ago – no word yet.

#5. Full Requested. Sent Full via mail about seven weeks ago – no word yet.

#6. No response to email query as yet, about ten weeks out.

#7. Rejection to regular mail query from HUGE agency, about a ten week turnaround.

#8. Rejected Query.

So, 3 Rejected Queries; 1 Rejected Partial; 1 Requested Partial; 1 Requested full; 2 Queries still living in limbo…not so bad, although worse than the last time I posted an update. Please continue crossing your fingers and holding your breath for a couple more months okay? Thanks.

#109 ~ Rabid Lamb Comics

March 25, 2008 in cartoons, comic of the day, comics, relationships, writing | 4 comments

Sorry for the late posting…I’ve been ill, probably due to overwork and have taken a much needed day off/sick day and I was sleeping in. I’ve been working my regular work schedule plus going home early on Thursdays and working late from home and then working all day at home on Fridays trying to meet Monday draft deadlines for a web design thing for my office. There is ALWAYS way more work than I think there will be however, and so for the last three or four weekends that has meant working Saturday and Sunday as well…usually a minimum of eight hours each day. It it is totally killing me. And Adam is none to happy either. The side effects, in order of importance are:

1. I am an incredible exhausted grouchy-pants most (all) of the time.

2. I spend almost no pure/good/fun downtime with Adam unless it is scheduled (The Bad Plus show for example).

3. My body is so sick of sitting at my desk and staring at a computer screen that I wouldn’t sit at my desk/computer to do my own writing and comics if you threatened me with my greatest fears. Thus, no writing and the bare minimum of comics have been done over the last month.

The good news is, the project is looking good, and thankfully drawing to a close. I optimistically predict there will be less than eight hours of work this coming weekend and I hope to maybe take next Monday off as well, to offset the horror.

This must be the tiniest taste of what tax accountants experience every winter/spring. Suffice to say I will not be switching over to that field…

Beautiful Interpretation

March 9, 2008 in book reviews, books, entertainment, short fiction, writing | Permalink

I finished a couple weeks ago, Interpreter Of Maladies by Jhump Lahiri, the author of The Namesake (now also a motion picture – which looks quite good).

This is an unbelievably beautiful collection of short fiction. I had not read anything of Lahiri’s, except for her piece in a December 2007 issue of The New Yorker, Year’s End, which was equally as stunning.

Interpreter of Maladies seduced me immediately as Lahiri has an eloquent and sparse way with perfect words. Her stories are haunting and complex. I was left with sorrow in almost all of them, yet the book was strangely uplifting. Lahiri does something interesting in Interpreter in that she is not beholden to just one voice, which is somewhat strange for collections like this, usually the author seems to be looking for things to hold the collection together, and point of view is often an easy way to do that, Lahiri switches point of view between stories masterfully, moving from first to third person with ease, and yet her stories link together beautifully, because they are all filled with the same kind of happy melancholy, a private and perfect loneliness, a desperate sadness that still holds mysterious pockets of hope. They also all involve Indian characters in some way or another, which kept things together nicely.

As for best stories, they were all so evenly perfect that it is difficult for me to pick favorites. Because I tend to relate heavily to romantic relationship stories I would have to say that A Temporary Matter, Sexy, This Blessed House, and Interpreter of Maladies were some of my favorites. But that is not to say that When Mr. Pirzada Came To Dine, A Real Durwan, Mrs. Sen’s, The Treatment of Bibi Haldar, and The Third And Final Continent were any less powerful or stunning.

It is really quite an amazing feat in any collection, to make each story not only lovely and strong, but also so haunting. I give Interpreter of Maladies 4.5 stars and cannot wait to read more of Jhumpa Lahiri’s work.

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