Howard Andrew Jones

Sort of like twittering. only hopefully without the twit.


7am. stupid workmen and their stupid beeping truck.

10am. Minimum daily wordage accomplished. I can haz nap nao?

11am. still waiting on e-mails. *taps foot and glares at screen*

12pm. 2,000 words and I can sense I'm about to write myself into another corner. need to stop and think it through, first.

2pm. corner escaped. Some e-mails answered. others still waiting. political reading roundup is depressing me yet again, and it's too hot to think. going to take that nap now.

4pm. instead of napping, I lay on the sofa (Boomer sprawled on my back) and read more of Daniel Abraham's A SHADOW IN SUMMER. yes, I really am that far behind in my reading.

6pm. 3000 words for the day. discovered weird twitch in Word that's making the bottom few lines of my pages disappear. They're still there -- when I hit backspace they show up -- but the rest of the time they seem to be caught in a temporal warp. Very odd. Also damned annoying.

6:30pm. stare at the fridge and figure out what's for dinner. pour a glass of wine. chill.

...but what does it look like Dick is doing here?




Good thing that's a dark suit.

Where the best-selling writers work. Special appearance by young nude.

A gorgeous-looking issue #12 of Black Gate arrived today. It contains stories by flist pals such as jamesenge and Howard Andrew Jones. If that wasn't enough, there's also a "highly recommended" review of The Inferior and a preview of my cthuluesque story "The Evil-Eater", which is promised for issue #13. I can't wait.

You fool, Warren is DEAD!

-The Gneech from beyond space and time

We are listening to Elvis, as we always do on his birthday (among other musics, of course).

 

This is the first album he ever bought.  He mowed Louisiana lawns for weeks in order to get  the money.  He was very small.  The lawns were very large.  The push mower was also very large.  Already it was clear the hardships he was willing to endure in order to get access to the music that mattered.
 

rachelmanija explains more about auctioning off a copy of our Avatar spec script here.

 Email Fritz

I finally have my email up and running again. If you sent me an email at my montecook.com address on Sunday or Monday, I probably didn't get it. 

Correction: I'm still having problems. Email isn't a good way to reach me right now.

We're one week into release for Fall With Honor. So far the only two reviews on Amazon are very negative. I don't count Harriet, since getting a review from her is like getting an ISBN.

Anyway, contrary to opinion, I did work hard on this story and try and do some interesting new stuff with this volume, which isn't working for these readers. Is it a bad book? There were a couple of chapters I thought problematic, but a few others that I thought really worked. I believe it ends with a lot of exciting possibilities for the future.

I try and take the bad reviews as a sign of success. The better you do and the more well-known you are, the more potshots you take. It's just the way pop culture works. So all the "shark jumping" and "phoning it in" is inevitable.

Still hurts, though. But I chose the game, so I'll play by the rules.

Due to a full day and evening in LA I am behind on things here, including catching up with my enormous flist--shades of Rumpelstiltskin! I did scroll through at lightspeed last night, and caught sight of a magnificent photo by heleninwales that I hope I can find again, but I think that was at least four hundred postings back, probably more. Yow!

A couple of things. I do hope those who are inclined are still checking livelongnmarry which has some extraordinary offers, like care packages from all over the world. As for my own offer, which is doing far better than I'd thought it would, if any of those bids go to a hundred bucks, I'm getting gold ink for the lettering, and adding in margin drawings and the like. Prints won't get those--what machine can repro gold ink? I'm thinking of vellum for the paper, but will experiment with some of the luscious papers over at the art store.

I'm also busy with Coyote Wild--wow, some very fine stories indeed have showed up for the final round of selection. I and a panel of teens are busy reading.

Last, I note that Readercon is coming up soon, filling me with envy and bitterness....so what could be more appropriate than a Bittercon? If anyone has any topics they think would be awesome to discuss, either mention them here, or link up to bittercon when the con starts, I think next weekend or maybe the one after. I will be mining their wonderful program for stuff we can discuss out here.

Okay, back to work.

A few things:


Black Gate #12 should be shipping now. My story in it is "Houses of the Dead." It's another prequel story to the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, about Giliead and Ilias.

naominovik's Victory of Eagles is out today, which I'm going out to buy later.

Stargate: Atlantis season 4 DVDs are out today, which I can't go buy because I preordered them, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I have to wait for them to get here in the mail. Season 5 starts airing this Friday, so that's something else to look forward to.

Last week or so I rearranged the bibliography page on my web site, adding a list of publications by date as well as by category.

The livelongnmarry auction is still going on. Someone added up the high bids so far on July 4 and they came to over $18,000. That's a serious donation already, and the auction goes to July 15. My offer post for my autographed books is here. It's at $100.00 now, and I figure that if it goes over $125, I'll add a sixth book.

I'm compiling a list of things I would gladly own from books/movies, provided they were real of course.

1) a lightsaber from Star Wars
2) the Glaive from Krull
3) a Golden Compass
4) an invisibility cloak from Lord of The Rings
5) a light cycle from TRON
6) the repeating crossbow from Van Helsing
7) a chunk of kryptonite
8) ...

IT seems a lot of those things are weapons. Of course these two might come with their own list of enemies:
A Death Star, and Sauron's one ring.

What would you want?

This is the best post on writing I've read in a while. Go read.
http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/1141019.html
edited to fix link

In the past couple day's I've talked to and read the blogs of more clients at once than I normally manage. The odd thing I noticed is that in differing ways I and my clients are quite similar. One just posted on how little he thinks of Angelina Jolie's acting skills, and i was not aware she had any. Another client and I were discussing movies that we loved and directors we hated. Both of us loved Batman Begins and hope Dark Knight will not be a let down, and we're also of the opinion that M. Knight Shamalan and Quentin Terentino have each produced their one good movie in their career and can retire with our thanks anytime. A fourth client and i have a similar love for the behavior of politicians across the globe and skew heavily towards the same political range. A fifth is also a fan of snarking and small groups or being alone, we're planning to go hide over a lunch or two at WorldCon.

I wonder how much of this is simply coincidence, and how much of it is that they simply have to have a few similar traits in order for them to write something I will want to represent. It's certainly not that we are all the same age, as my clients range from their early 20's to the 50's (of those i know the age of, and I don't actually care how old any of them are). Location is also not factor since at the moment there are clients in five countries and the closest two to me are in Ohio and North Carolina.

woke up
wrote some
made coffee
went to the gym.
did some e-mail stuff
had lamb chop and roasted corn on the cob.
fed the cats (they insisted) (not lamb chop, although Boomer made a case for it)
did some more e-mail stuff
made some phone calls
waited for people to get back to me re: the e-mail stuff.
wrote some more stuff (about 1800 words total for the day)
ate some salad
did research trip planning
did some research on my newly-acquired silver box (I've established it's pre-1912, but not much beyond that. nothing else from the maker [Victor Silver] has the same design, although some are similar)
refilled my fountain pens (I use bottled ink, so this usually involves scrubbing my fingers afterward)
fed the cats again

Wasn't that exciting?
and now I am off to bed, still waiting on e-mails (you-all know who you are)


meanwhile, consider this from Locus, via clarkesworld...

"Results were tabulated using the system put together by webmaster Mark Kelly, with Locus staffers entering votes from mail-in ballots. Results were available almost as soon as the voting closed, much sooner than back in the days of hand-counting. Non-subscribers outnumbered subscribers by so much that, in an attempt to better reflect the Locus magazine readership, we decided to change the counting system, so now subscriber votes count double. (Non-subscribers still managed to out-vote subscribers in most cases where there was disagreement.)"

AFTER the voting, they changed the way votes were tabulated? Um...... right. Another reason why I don't really bother with Locus any more. If they don't want to count all readers equally, why open it to non-subscribers at all?

Saw this on tv tonight...

https://www.rollngrowtv.ca/?cid=513132

Okay, so I'm not one to garden, but I don't think I'd even use this... Mind you, I suppose if you're wanting an easy grow garden, it should do the trick...
 

Possibly the greatest movie of the late 80s is hitting the Music Box next month.

Yes. Road House. The Swayze as a philosophic, throat-tearing bar bouncer.

They're also doing a 70mm film festival with Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, and Tron. Yeah, David Lean, brilliant cinematography with a score by Maurice Jarre and all that, but DOES ANYONE GET THEIR THROAT RIPPED OUT TO A JEFF HEALEY TUNE?

I thought not.

Hope to see you there. Unless you're too stupid to have a good time.

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