I Love Those Cupcakes Like McAdams Loves Goslin

Interesting painting meme going around. Not sure if it's really a "who would paint you" thing so much as a "who would you like to paint you" thing. My first thought was my old fave René, but if it were him doing the job there'd be an apple covering up my face or something. I thought about Salvador or Pablo, but "Hello, obvious man!" Not to mention that my vanity couldn't take the grotesqueries of my portrait in those hands. And then Christopher pointed out that there are painters in other mediums as well. So my choice is Bill Sienkiewicz, who luckily has already done some work that bears a great resemblance to yours truly:



Uncanny resemblance, don't you think?

Bananas

Note to self: If you walk through the office corridors singing "Hollaback Girl" to yourself, expect funny looks.

Coming Soon To a Browser Near You . . .

I've just heard from Darby Larson at Pindeldyboz, who tells me they'd like to publish my short "Screen." Considering that in the past they've had the good taste to publish folks like Elad, Chris, Matt and Dogtown Review contributor Gayle Brandeis, I'm very pleased.

She Sings the Sexy Dance, We Are the Audience; She's Got Spaghetti Straps, Our Hands Are In Our Laps

After a marathon session yesterday--about 200 pages in 9+ hours, which comes to something like 20 pages an hour, which is slooooow--the last of the marking up of the newest manuscript is done. And it's still good, I think, although there's nothing like intense scrutiny to make you aware of your writing idiosyncracies.

My characters like to say more or less the same thing two or three times, in different ways. They're redundant. They repeat themselves. A lot. They also--far too often for my taste--interrupt themselves, and . . . hesitate. And they--they stutter. A lot. When they get ranty they bring up a lot of things that are irrelevant to the matter at hand, and indeed to the story at large. They don't matter. They're beside the point. Did I mention that much of what the characters say is redundant? They make lists, of things that they want to tell you, things they think you should know, things to remember. The narrator does this, too. Repeats himself. A lot. He also does this thing--I'm not sure I can explain it--where he modifies a verb with a verb, without really meaning to. I don't have it in front of me so I cannot present evidence of this. But he--they--OK, I--are properly ashamed. I'm not even mentioning all the nasty helping verbs I had to hunt down and destroy, which for Cthulhu's sake I ought to know better by now.

Considering that I was hoping to trim about 6K words out of the manuscript, the fact of the excess is probably sort of a good thing. But man, what a sobering mirror to look into . . .