Errant Thoughts, Nov. 15-21, 2020
Design is simply fitting too much copy and client images in too small of a space.
Corollary: copywriters don’t read job specs.
Double Corollary: show me a copywriter that doesn’t need to edit in layout and I’ll show you a master copywriter.
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The person above… *sigh* the great thing about the Internet is that everyone has a platform. The terrible thing about the Internet is that everyone has a platform. There’s no vetting process for opinions. I guess this is the exact same as the village square or the local pub. But at least in those spaces, people have faces.
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I over complicate things. I like dense prose, I like stylish prose, I strive for lush prose but often end up with overly verbose crap. This novel, I’m going to print it out fully after the first pass and read it aloud and find all the sharp bits and hard edges with my tongue.
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SEIS MANOS on Netflix. A grindhouse, kung-fu, Mexican folklore with curanderas and brujas and black magic, Blacksploitation anime series that I watched in a single day. Good stuff.
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DoroHeDoro on Netflix. A bizarre ultra-violent epicurian alternate reality urban-fantasy with sorcerers, a man with a mysterious lizard head and a mighty appetite for Gyoza. Bloody fun and weird.
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Listening to the audiobook of Tower of Fools, by Andrzej Sapkowski, the author who wrote the novels that The Witcher video game series is based off of. So far, it’s like The Decameron meets a picaresque novel, meets Don Quixote meets, well… The Witcher. Apparently it was written in 2002 and is just now being released in English, eighteen years later.
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I’m at the point where I’m wondering if this novel idea I’ve been working on for far too long in pandemic is a mistake.
That’s all for this week.
Social Media Hiatus
On the night of the election, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t rage quit Twitter in the way I might after getting my ass handed to me on a team deathmatch of CoD, it was more of a sort of sensory overload. A blown fuse. Too many amps through too small a wire. So many hot takes, predictions of victory, of defeat, of gloom. It was just too much. All too much.
So I logged off and haven’t really been back. It’s only been a couple of weeks, but it seems like eons.
First few days were somewhat hard. After twelve years on that blasted hellsite, I’ve grown addicted to the outrage, the news, and some of the people. I’ve made friends through Twitter, true friends. But for the most part, it’s a source of general anxiety, rage, distemper. And as much as I like being plugged into the news, it’s not really good for my well being. Or my heart.
After the first week, I peeked my head back in and found it was exactly the same. Like a party you leave, head out to the street to smoke a cigarette and while you’re there you happen to meet a girl and fall in love or, on the other end of the spectrum, get mugged and when you re-enter the party it’s exactly the same, same people, same music, same vibe, but you have changed in the moments you’ve been gone. I found that I didn’t want to engage with any of the nonsense.
I’ll might pop in once in a while and say hello. But not right now. I don’t have much going on bookwise right now - just working on a novel - nothing to promote. So… that’s about the shape of it. I might use this website as a sort of journal. It could scratch the exhibitionist streak that Twitter satisfies - performative proclamations! - but I can be more personal because no one really looks at this website.
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What I have noticed since I’ve been gone is that I used Twitter to voice random, bullshit, errant thoughts. Little jokes I found funny, little personal victories and defeats. All those dumb jokes are lost now.
New York Times: 50 States, 50 Scares
Art by Ross McDonald
My first novel was mentioned in last Sunday’s New York Times, which is a first for me. It was featured in an article called “50 states, 50 Scares” listing the most frightening books from each state. Mine was chosen for Arkansas and I am grateful to be listed among so many amazing writers and books. This is the very first time that my state has really been a boon to my writing career, rather than a detriment. So I got that going for me. Which is nice.
“Hair-raising, shiver-inducing . . . a phantom radio station broadcasts blues tunes that drive people to do terrible things.”