I wish that I could hire myself as an editor, but I am much better at telling other people what to do. It’s hard to detach myself from my own writing. That being said, I have a lot of editing experience, and I’d love to help you get your book published.
Gay superheroes
This is what happens when you dare to be gay in comic books.
PS I didn’t know Batwoman was a lesbian. Corey – want to weigh in on this?
Weekly news roundup, stolen from Harper’s via Boing Boing
James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for his role in the discovery of DNA, said that while he wishes everyone were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.” Lynn Cheney announced that her husband and Barack Obama are eighth cousins. “Every family,” said the Obama campaign, “has a black sheep.” A New York man was arrested after wearing a stolen Rolex watch to his parole meeting,an Ohio woman stood accused of digging up her ex-boyfriend’s grave and stealing his ashes, and a Virginia woman was fined for attacking a Comcast store with a hammer after the company cut off her phone and Internet connections. ”I smashed a keyboard, knocked over a monitor and I went to hit the telephone,” she said. ”I figured, ‘Hey, my telephone is screwed up, so is yours.”’ A New Jersey woman sent 80,000 cans of Silly String, which can locate trip wires, to U.S. troops in Iraq; a military spokesperson thanked her but admitted that soldiers don’t use as much Silly String today as they did at the beginning of the war. Forty-nine percent of New Jersey residents admitted they’d rather live somewhere else. Taku the killer whale died unexpectedly at the San Antonio SeaWorld, 5 of the world’s 350 remaining Asiatic Lions were found dead next to an electric fence in India, and the curator of the Rotterdam Natural History Museum asked the public to donate pubic crabs, claiming that their population was dwindling as a result of Brazilian waxes. ”When the bamboo forests that the Giant Panda lives in were cut down, the bear became threatened with extinction. Pubic lice,“ he explained, ”can’t live without pubic hair.”
How dare the world make me write about government spending?
Isn’t the whole point of a bureaucracy to keep this stuff from happening? I never thought I was very good at math, but perhaps I could have had a career as a government accountant. It’s just play money anyway. I feel like government officials and heads of state must have some real currency that they don’t tell us about. We’re all chumps for trading goods and services for paper dollars, while they know that only glass beads or cinnamon or something has true value. Why else would they offer a trillion bucks for Baltic Avenue?
The U.S. State Department is unable to account for most of $1.2 billion in funding that it gave to DynCorp International to train Iraqi police, a government report said Tuesday.
“The bottom line is that State can’t account for where it went,” said Glenn D. Furbish.
Of course it can’t. This reminds me why I like to take my car when Darren and I go to appointments together. Loose change always falls from his right pocket into the space between the passenger seat and the car door. On Saturday Big Wis and I were excited to find three quarters there before we went to the park.
Something beautiful I read today
From Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson:
Leon Sanchez asked, “Are the women in with you madre, Fish-man?”
“My name Fiskadoro.” He was aware that mucus flowed from his nostrils, but he felt he would demean himself by wiping it away. “My father is dead.”
The others nodded. Harvard gouged a depression in the sand with his toes and placed his heel in it.
“My father is dead!” As soon as he’d said it, Fiskadoro saw he’d made it true again – again for the first time. Did it just go around and around? He began to see that his sorrow wasn’t simple. It wasn’t one thing, but a thousand things carrying him away to the Ocean: the work of a person’s life was to drink it.
Why grown men shouldn’t be afraid of babies
Gentlemen, I know that sometimes babies can be scary. They like women better than they like you and they can make you feel like a total zero by crying in your arms in front of other people. You don’t have boobs to feed them with and it’s hard to remember age-appropriate songs to sing to them. It’s all very unnerving. However next time you are in a nursery, here are some thoughts to fortify and encourage you:
1. You are much bigger than a baby. You could probably smash one under the heel of your shoe.
2. Babies are more scared of you than you are of them.
3. Bird babies eat throw-up. Human babies know that’s disgusting. Wouldn’t you prefer to wipe baby vomit off a onesie than to watch some little person swallow its own mother’s chunks?
4. You get laid more than a baby and you can hold your alcohol better. If you were in a fraternity together, these facts would make you a superior frat brother to the baby.
5. Babies that don’t talk yet are especially intimidating, because they could be thinking hateful thoughts about you. But you can use this to your advantage. You can imagine things a loser would say and then say them aloud in a baby voice. Everyone will get that you’re imitating the baby and they will laugh because everything a baby might say is stupid funny. “Sometimes I think I only have to fart and then I accidentally poop myself in public.” Secretly, you will know that the baby was just shamed. One day you can remind the baby that you won this early power struggle.
6. You really won’t drop the baby. Everyone thinks this is going to happen but it rarely does. And men tend to have bigger hands and more practical shoes than women so they are even less likely to spill the goods. If you are still worried, just sit with the baby in your lap in a comfortable chair, or if you are throwing the baby up and down, avoid doorways and concrete floors.
7. It doesn’t emasculate you to be majorly into babies. Most women find it really cool when a guy’s best friends are babies, especially if they all wear matching outfits and drink from the same bottle.
8. Here is a tip that I saw once on a television show. It’s for real and it works every time. If you have a crying baby in your arms, just keep saying “Shhhhhh” in a loud and sustained way right in the baby’s ear. This seriously works. The baby shuts up immediately and listens to you like you are God. I guess the sound reminds the baby of being in the womb. Anybody who witnesses this trick will think you’re a genius or a real life Baby Whisperer.
In conclusion, it’s always good to be fearless about babies because your girlfriend may or may not be lying to you about her birth control.
So busy today!
Should I focus on…
a) finishing my novel and then trying to get it published, or
b) figuring out how I will coax my face to look this good on the book jacket? Book jacket pics are the new MySpace photos.
We’re all looking at you, Marisha Pessl, with your glamorous black and white publicity shot and your flashy website and your Bookslut interview. This is my favorite review of your overrated debut novel:
Over media hyped writer who has sandwiched a 200 page clever yet not very well concluded mystery in 500 pages of pretentious literary references. So great, Marisha — you’ve read a plethora of literature. Big deal – most good writers have but to thrown it into your writing to make yourself sound impressive — how sophomoric and shame on your editor for not cutting most of it out — a marketing ploy for sure. It is not so much a means of developing Blue’s bookish persona as a clever book selling idea to pack it with references to great works in literature — so that when these names get dropped in book reviews the work sounds more intellectual than it really is. Same with having the main character be a student at Harvard — ah, the mere mention of this great institution gives the character more merit than she deserves. (Why not have her go to your alma mater instead? — Barnard not good enough, huh?!!) Using great names and works of literature to beef up a so-so juvenile mystery.
People can be so mean! 🙂
Tanya Tucker might lose her spandex jumpsuits
Poor Tanya Tucker. She has to sing to the Republican Party for her supper, and now she has to battle the fire that is menacing her stage costumes:
About 1,400 firefighters battled the Malibu fire that started Sunday morning and had spread more than 2,200 acres, destroying 25 structures — including five homes, a glass company and Malibu Presbyterian Church. Officials ordered the evacuation of several hundred homes — including those of James Cameron, director of the movie “Titanic,” and singers Olivia Newton-John and Tanya Tucker.
“All my stage clothing, boots, belts and wardrobe is in that house,” Tucker said. “I have so much memorabilia since I just moved from Nashville to Malibu.”
Why do I get the feeling that famous peoples’ homes are like museums to themselves? The only thing that relates in my life is my fridge, which is like a Wistar’s Half-Eaten Sandwich Hall of Fame.
I told you your kids were contaminated
You already know that the biological legacy of our chemical supply is my pet cause. Here’s more from a CNN article today:
Michelle Hammond and Jeremiah Holland were intrigued when a friend at the Oakland Tribune asked them and their two young children to take part in a cutting-edge study to measure the industrial chemicals in their bodies.
[The] tests revealed that their children — Rowan, then 18 months, and Mikaela, then 5 — had chemical exposure levels up to seven times those of their parents.
“[Rowan’s] been on this planet for 18 months, and he’s loaded with a chemical I’ve never heard of,” Holland, 37, said. “He had two to three times the level of flame retardants in his body that’s been known to cause thyroid dysfunction in lab rats.”
The technology to test for these flame retardants — known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) — and other industrial chemicals is less than 10 years old. Environmentalists call it “body burden” testing, an allusion to the chemical “burden,” or legacy of toxins, running through our bloodstream. Scientists refer to this testing as “biomonitoring.”
As usual, some defenders of the chemical legacy say that presence does not equal proof. But wouldn’t we rather err on the side of caution, especially considering how sensitive our bodies are (especially our hormones) and how these same chemicals have been proven to cause cancers and reproductive problems in lab animals?
I hate it when the news makes me preachy. I wish there were more excuses to write about funny stuff, like gay wizards. Quit screwing things up, world!
Tad, you wanna tumble?
Thanks for everything Susannah, mi comadre!
You would not look nearly so lumpy in that green sequined leotard.