Woot! Look what I got in the mail. My story “Suspension and Disbelief” is in Destination Prague and one of the only two stories I’ve written with a puppeteer as a character. It normally seems like such a dull job, but it made sense here. Hey! Until recently, almost everyone I knew was a puppeteer. […]
Dr. Who contributor copies! Read More »
So that’s the question du jour. Should I get a New York number for my cellphone or keep my Oregon number? I can keep the Oregon number active, so that’s not an issue. The question is about getting work. I feel like the area code on the phone is becoming a sort of non-issue these
Should I get a NYC phone number? Read More »
When I was in elementary school, someone told me that if you twist the stem off your apple, saying a letter of the alphabet with each turn, that it would break off with the initial of the man you were fated to marry. Naturally, this favored the people at the beginning and middle of the
Michael Livingston, in addition to being one of my favorite people, also happens to be a scholar of Middle English. I have just finished listening, twice, to his Chaucer’d excerpt of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. In a fit of rage against working on my syllabi for the coming term, I took a snippet from
Scalzi Chaucer’d (Listen!) : Michael Livingston Read More »
I finally hit on the final pattern for Coraline’s face, today. Just for kicks, I took a picture of all the drafts that made it to pattern stage. There were, I don’t know, maybe five other iterations of her face that weren’t good enough to pattern. Making the lips happen was a pain in the
The many faces of Coraline Read More »
Finally, we got our futon. Whew. We also picked up a gorgeous bookcase from the early 1900s. The folks that sold us the futon said, “Need anything else?” And we said, “Bookcases?” Behold, for reasons that are unclear to me, they wanted to get rid of this glassfront bookcase which had belonged to the husband’s
The living room comes together Read More »
My business and creative partner, Jodi Eichelberger, has been doing some podcasts. Here’s the description of his latest: From August of 1994 through the spring of 1997 Mary and I toured a production of “Pied Piper†with Tears of Joy Theatre. We were particularly close to this show because Mary designed it and I wrote
Who stole the show? Read More »
“All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.” Charlie Chaplin Look at that. A setting, a conflict and a goal. Why does Charlie Chaplin make things look so simple?
Coraline has lips now, thank heavens. I filmed myself making a draft of her head today. It’s not the final draft, but it will show you how the assembly happens. The first thirty seconds are a montage of the dull pattern tracing, cutting and such. The last six minutes of the video are in real-time
Drafting Coraline’s face Read More »
It will only last today, but the weather cooled off. Oh, heavenly day. I actually put a sweater on. I baked! I cooked dinner! I even took a long hot shower. Clearly, the year spent in Iceland has skewed my idea of what the weather is supposed to be like. I can’t shake the feeling
Cool weather, nice. Read More »
Douglas Cohen has posted about having a subscription drive for short fiction genre magazines. Now, working on a small press magazine, Shimmer, I certainly support the idea of wanting more people to buy our magazine, but I think that the subscription drive is a matter of looking at the symptoms rather than the cause. The
Marketing short fiction Read More »
I’ve returned from a preview screening of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust–tickets provided by the fabulous Livia Llewellyn. Since I got out of the theater, I’ve been wanting to go back. When was the last time that happened to me? Princess Bride? Goya in Bordeaux? But since then… I can’t remember one. I don’t want to gush
Here I am, in the middle of laying out the Art Issue of Shimmer and stumble across this lovely, lovely review of our Winter issue. Do you like fables? Fairy tales? Mythic Realism? Writers like Patricia McKillip, Charles DeLint, and Neil Gaiman at his most fantastical? Then you’ll like Shimmer, I believe. It is a
Shimmer, Vol. 2, Iss. 2: A Review Read More »
I had to head down to meet Keith De Candido so I could finally sign the bookplates for the new Doctor Who anthology, and the restaurant was in the neighborhood of several paper stores that I needed to visit. It’s a good thing too, because with the flooding from the storms here last night, I’m
Paper and testing Coraline’s hair Read More »
I mentioned that I am using a German paper-folding technique, created by Albrecht Roser, to create the Coraline face. As it happens, I have a pattern and instructions for a face up at my puppet company’s website. If you want to play along at home. It’s for Gerta from the Snow Queen. I start off