On this day in 2009 I lost my last corporate, cubicle-based job. When the economic times got rough, the company blogger had to get going. As far as layoffs go it wasn’t too shabby. Shabby was when I got laid off from Hell, Inc. (a mere eighteen months before) and I had to introduce myself to the Canadian in charge of firing me. Let it be known that having to introduce yourself to your boss before being fired is one…
Helen Oyeyeyemi’s Snow White retelling/fairy tale mishmash Boy, Snow, Bird starts out deliciously sinister, but never quite lives up to its potential. We begin with Boy Novak a horribly abused, stunningly beautiful young woman living with her father The Rat Catcher in New York. After years of abuse Boy escapes to a small, enchanted town in 1950s Massachusetts where she lands at a boarding house and begins a love/hate relationship with jewelry-designer Arturo Whitman, the father of a beautiful young…
I went off the deep end pretty early this morning. Maybe even before 9 a.m. The cause? A Twitter-friend pointing out a novel with an intro blurb that could have been written about my work-in-progress aka The Beast. If you changed three words — the main character’s name and the color of her hair — I could use that paragraph on the back of my book. My stomach dropped and my brain fell right out of my head. It took…
So today Weezer’s “Blue Album” is twenty years old. I cannot let any of the anniversaries of my personal cultural touchstones go unremarked. This is one of the advantages of making it to fortysomething. You get to do this shit and not give a good god damn if anyone cares or not. Hooray for age-related apathy! I wish I could remember how the Blue Album came into my life. It wasn’t there one minute and the next it was everywhere…
I am typing this one-handed at 9:01 p.m. on this thunderstormy Thursday. I’m using the other hand to shove a peanut butter & jelly sandwich into my gaping maw. It is the first of a PB&J double header. I’m fucking hungry. It is, after all, 9 p.m. and I worked through dinner. Whenever I go an entire week without updating I Will Dare I get a little itchy inside my brain. Really, the itchiness starts around day three or four….
The awkward construction of that headline. Writing fiction two days in a row like some kind of fiction writer. Today I crested 21,000 words on The Beast v2. Emptying the dishwasher when the only dirty dish in the whole joint was a single bowl and fork from today’s lunch. Not stopping writing fiction today even though I kind of wanted to go soak my always cold feet in a warm bath while listening to the latest (and not as good…
