Blog Job

The gig I mentioned in the previous entry is this: MovieFile. I blog about movie news once a week. I cover a wide range of topics such as Regency England, music videos, and inner-city high schools. And that was just in one post.

Blog jam!

I started a new writing gig yesterday. I am now a professional blogger--one of only nine hundred million on the entire planet! The site's not up yet, but I'll post a link when it goes live.

True nature.

Once at a convention where I was a guest, a young woman came up to me with a copy of one of my stories, and announced: "You look so... normal."

I felt like I should apologize. I was probably wearing a festively bright Eddie Bauer polo shirt and kicky capri pants with sandals and pink toenails when I should have been wearing something black and leather, or purple and velvety. With silver chains and blood-red lipstick. Or something.

It's just that I prefer keep my darker thoughts well hidden under a layer of chipper cotton tees and preppy ponytails. That way, no one suspects my true nature. Plus I have a white dog, and the hairs would be pure hell to get out of velvet.

But look at this:

Most people look at that ad and probably think, "Oh, no! I'd better get insurance so my children are taken care of!" or possibly, "Shithead advertisers transparently preying on my fear of mortality!" But I look at it and think, "That little girl is going to kill her daddy in his sleep and they're going to find him with a Raggedy Anne doll head stuffed in his esophagus."

And then I giggle a little. And go shopping for a new polo shirt.

Is that a Penix in your pants?

When I first started writing, I would turn every idea I had into a story. Over time, I've learned not every idea should become a story. I've learned to be more discriminating.

Every once in a while, though, I get caught up in the rush of a new idea. (Often, this is around the time I have just taken a lot of allergy medication, or gone without sleep for a couple of days.) For example, yesterday morning there was some Spam in my in-box, the first line of which read: "Turn that little pecker into a GIANT Phoenix!"

And I thought to myself, "Hey, yeah! Imagine a story where a guy finds out his penis is the Phoenix! And he has to wear special fire-retardant underwear! I'll call it... Rise of the Penix!"

Then I further thought, "Wait, no! Maybe he has the capital of Arizona in his pants. Imagine waking up with 1.5 million people living in your crotch. Old people will retire there and talk about how it's hot, but it's a dry heat!"

Luckily I had my coffee and some breakfast and came to my senses. Although, now that I'm typing all this out, it doesn't seem as bad as I'd thought...

Resolutions

I resolve to suck at updating my blog more often.

Since I keep trying and failing to update this blog on a regular basis, I figured I'd try doing the exact opposite for a while. See if I can't trick my brain into doing what I want it to! Show it who's boss. (Technically, I think my brain is the one in charge, but shh! Don't tell it that!)

When I first started sending out my stories, I'd make resolutions like, "I'm going to sell ten stories this year." And I'd usually meet my goal, but it'd drive me crazy. There's just too much you can't control once a story leaves your desk. For example, I once submitted a story titled "The Scattered Man," and it was rejected for being too much like Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man. My story is about a nomadic tribe in a desolate world, and Bester's is about telepathy and crime in the 24th century. Except for the word "man" in the title, there's really no similarity.

You can't control why an editor rejects your story. Sure, you can control how well you format your story according to guidelines--you can control whether you're rejected for sending in a manuscripted printed in pink ink on yellow paper. But you can't make sure an editor hasn't just bought a story like yours ten minutes earlier, or that they won't make assumptions about your story based on the title or whatever, or that you haven't just caught them on a bad day. So making resolutions that depend so much on someone else, I realized, was folly.

But I do resolve to actually start sending out more stories this year. I've gotten behind on that, for various reasons. That's purely something I can control. Unless telepathic cops read my mind and stop me.