Three Year Anniversary!

Today marks the third anniversary of my marriage to the most wonderful woman in the world. To celebrate, I wanted to share with you a dramatization of a typical morning at our apartment, with a corgi playing me and a cat playing MLW:

Light Up the Night

Last year, I wrote about attending a Protomen concert on my birthday. Well, they came back to my area this year, this time the day after my birthday. Once again, my excellent friends got MLW and I tickets to the show, and this time, everything was better than last time.

RIP Joe Kubert

Joe Kubert died today. He was a comic book artist who is, according to his Wikipedia entry, best known for his work on Hawkman and Sgt. Rock. While I'm as big a fan of the Sarge as the next guy, to me Joe Kubert is first and foremost the co-creator and artist of Enemy Ace, a lesser-known comic about a German fighter pilot during the First World War. In the course of the series, Kubert would write a lot of exciting, melodramatic stories about Hans von Hammer, including what I consider to be the best classic comic book cover of all time, above.

Tony DiTerlizzi is super nice, and also rad

This photo does not show it, but Tony DiTerlizzi has great teeth, too

Tony DiTerlizzi is currently on a tour to promote the release of his latest book, A Hero for WondLa. As part of that tour, he did a presentation and signing at the Barnes & Noble just a few minutes from my apartment. How could I not go?

Amendment to that last post: I was a month early...

I guess that's why it pays to double-check dates! I had thought that Tony DiTerlizzi would be visiting tomorrow; turns out, it's a month from now: Saturday, May 12.

http://diterlizzi.com/home/the-spring-2012-hero-tour-2/

It's a good thing I double-checked before schlepping my stack of books to the book store tomorrow!

Tony DiTerlizzi is coming to my town!

EDIT: The date is actually Saturday, May 12. See the "oops, I got the date wrong" post.

Tony DiTerlizzi, one of my favorite fantasy artists, will be doing a signing on Saturday, April 14 at a bookstore about ten minutes from my apartment. If you need me, I'm going to be hyperventilating.

Among the things he has illustrated that I love are:
Changeling: the Dreaming
Magic: the Gathering
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, especially the Planescape setting
Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You

If you need more convincing, I'm pretty sure that the second page of his site's art gallery for games has a cuttlefish in a top hat.

I'm going to approach his table, carrying a teetering pile of his books, and I'm going to be one of those people who holds up the line because I want him to sign everything, and he's going to be embarrassed, and I'm going to be embarrassed, and it's going to be AWESOME.

People on the internet are dumb

It makes me sad that the new kind of bullying is accusing the person of being prejudiced.

I'm lucky to have escaped internet drama so far, but it makes me sad nonetheless.

"Novel" is done!

My National Novel Writing Month "novel" reached 70,000 words on November 30. I barely wrote anything on the last day because I had reached the end of my plot a few days before, went back and added a scene, but couldn't think of anything else to add. Attempts to find a place to shoehorn more description or dialog only revealed tons of places where things should be deleted, so I ended up rounding out my novel to 70,000 words and leaving that as good enough.

Otherversary #3

It's been three years since my wife and I started going out. The best three years of my life...

NaNoWriMo Fan Art

One of my novel's main characters is Aleksander Kolyarov, a Russian Werewolf who looks more like a husky than a wolf. Yesterday, my wife sent me this picture:

 So I decided to use my awesome Photoshop skills to make a picture of a baby Kolyarov:

I figure, if I don't make fanart of my own work, how can I ever expect anyone else to? If you're not lucky enough to have a character who is easy to photoshop (like Kolyarov) and you don't have much in the way of artistic talent (I know I sure don't), then the next best thing is to find a picture of someone else's character who kind of looks like your character and pretend that it's fanart of your character.

But in all seriousness, I actually have received fan art for things I've written, and it is the greatest feeling in the world!

Halfway there!

It's November 15, so I'm halfway through National Novel Writing Month. I currently have 37161 words, though I haven't written today's entry yet. That means that, at this rate, I will be able to reach over 70,000 words by the end of the month! Yikes!

Well, I don't expect to actually make it to 70,000. I expect I'll be getting pretty burned out before then. The first signs of burnout have already started, and I'm sure it'll get worse from here.

That said, I'm still having fun with my writing (usually). My characters have just reached Cyberdome, so now I'm extra excited about describing what happens next! I picture Cyberdome as Thunderdome reinvented as a cyberpunk Dickens Fair. And who wouldn't want to write about that?

Fair Warning: November is Coming...

Image from austinevan's Flickr

November is coming, and once again I plan on embarking on National Novel Writing Month. The purpose of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is to try to write 50,000 words of prose fiction. You have to start the novel on November 1st, and try to have 50,000 words by the end of the month.

I've tried three times before, and even though I made it to 50,000 words each time, I felt like my first "novel" was the best and they got steadily worse from there. I hope to turn this trend around this year, but I guess we'll see how that turns out.

I plan on setting my novel in Berk. If you see me during November, please remind me that the story needs to be more zany! Wacky hijinks are also encouraged. If I'm not having fun writing it, nobody will ever have fun reading it.

This post is called "Fair warning" because I'm going to be trying to do a little bit of writing each day, so my evenings are going to be booked for the whole month. I may also have to use weekends to catch up on writing, but hopefully I won't be a total recluse all month.

But I suppose we'll see...

Write Fifteen Minutes a Day (WFMAD) Challenge So Far

So far this month, I have been participating in the Write Fifteen Minutes a Day Challenge. This is supposed to be done in August, but a friend of mine organized a September version online and invited me to join in.

I have been planning on running a Gamma World RPG campaign, or maybe a Dark Sun campaign, or some kind of campaign, for ages now, but I had never really bothered to think it through. I took this opportunity to start fleshing out some details for my setting, starting with the name.

I have also been asking people for feedback (thanks for the feedback I've gotten so far!), but when I ask people about what else I should write about, but people don't know enough about the setting and what's percolating in my brain to ask for it. So here are the posts I've written so far, and some others I'm thinking about writing. Let me know which of these you'd like to see!

Is there no one who values courage over life?

When some friends came over for a party on the weekend before my birthday, they brought along some awesome gifts. One of the things I got was this:

Tickets for me and my lady to go see one of my favorite bands of all time, The Protomen. I have written about the Protomen on this blog before, so you can guess how excited I was to see them live. I spent the next couple of workdays listening to the Protomen albums back to back nonstop. When it was time to go to the concert, one of our friends gave us a ride. As we crossed the bridge into San Francisco, the sun was setting behind the city, making the buildings look like black silhouettes with shining windows. It felt very much like we were entering the Protomen world.

Happy Birthday!

Every year it feels like my birthday is an overwhelming experience, but this year felt like it was overwhelmingly overwhelming! Thanks to all my incredibly kind, generous, cool, and rockin' friends and family for your gifts, your kindness, and your friendship. Also, happy birthday to my brothers, who share a birthday with me! There's plenty of birthday to go around!

And if I haven't told you already, some of my friends got my lady and I tickets to go see The Protomen tonight. I'm so stoked, you guys. So stoked.

Hope rides A-LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE!

Size Medium T-Shirts

When I was a little kid, I would wear enormous shirts that reached my knees. For some reason, I thought this was cool. It probably had to do with my perception of the hip-hop culture of the day. My favorite shirt for a while was an eye-gouging, neon shade of lime green. Go figure.

By the time I got to college, I was used to wearing size Large t-shirts that fit me a little better. I figured that, even though I was skinny, I was tall enough to justify wearing a Large shirt. Maybe part of the reason I wore large shirts was to cover up my physique. Nevermind that many of them draped over my figure like sheets, especially as they started to wear out.

Lately I have started wearing Medium sized shirts, and I am amazed by how much better they seem to fit. When I think about it, it feels like it's part of growing up. I've started trying to pay more attention to my appearance, and that includes trying to make an effort to at least wear shirts that fit.

Thinking Way Too Hard About: Crossovers

Image by AbyssWolf

I'm a sucker for crossover stories. I'm fascinated by the thought of creating a new story by combining characters from multiple other stories. Sometimes the settings are mashed together with very little explanation, just some hand-waving about dimensional rifts or a magical summons. Other times, there is an elaborate backstory that combines threads of multiple stories to create an amalgam universe. The author can either lift the characters from their original settings as they originally appeared, or re-interpret the characters to match the new setting.

A Warning About Maxell Stereo Neckband Head Buds

I was on the lookout for some cheap headphones so that I could listen to music while at work. I ended up buying a pair of these for next to nothing:
http://www.maxell-usa.com/index.aspx?id=63;66;522;0&a=info&pid=193

See those bits at the bottom? If you think that part is where the music comes out, you are half right. That is the part where music comes out as it drills through your ears into your brain.

Seriously, I have never worn a more uncomfortable set of headphones. When I saw the picture on the cover, I thought the guy was enjoying some awesome tunes. It turns out he's screaming in blinding agony as his ears are brutalized by these torture-machines.

I've already ordered a different kind of headphones from Amazon, but I thought I would let you know to avoid these, just in case.

I think I saw a tumbleweed go by...

It's been a while since I've received a comment on this blog.

My other blog, Supervillainous, has the dubious honor of having a grand total of zero comments on it. (There was a comment or two on a placeholder post I originally put up, but that post has since been deleted.)

I'm not writing this post to be bitter (well, maybe a little) or to remind you that I always try to leave comments when I read a blog post (hint hint), but to introduce a change I have implemented: I have turned on "Reactions."

I know that some people read this blog. I also know that it's only around five people, but hey, an audience is an audience. So I figure that the reason that people don't leave comments is that there isn't much to say. People I know tend to be pretty sharp, and not the kind to leave comments like "Yep, I read it," or "Me, too," or "lol." So, to make it easier to give a reaction to my posts, I have added the ability to note whether you thought that a particular entry was "interesting," "weird," and/or "amusing."

Let's see if it works!

PS: Feel free to leave comments, too, if you want.
PPS: If your comment is "First!" I will cry a little, on the inside.

These words have steel

I stand alone.

I am with you.

We stand together.

Let them come.

Hold the line.

I will not yield.