WEEK IN & WEEK OUT

This week my first goal is to get the script for Honey Mustard vol. 2 done for Tokyopop. I really like this book. The art can be inconsistent, but the story is fun. It's a goofy Korean soap opera about a high school girl who gets caught in what looks like a compromising situation and is pushed into a marriage with the boy that was involved rather than suffer the public shame. His all-male family ends up being a handful: the grandfather is a headstrong curmudgeon, and his father is a pretty-boy, heartbreaker dentist. The first volume is available for preorder HERE.

I have a couple of days, at least, before Keith starts laying out I Was Someone Dead, which should work out because I have been going round and round on this preface I wrote for it and am trying some different options. One dark girl called me "pedantic," which is always a somewhat ironic insult, since nothing is more pedantic than calling someone pedantic. It calls to mind my friend Christopher's 21st birthday party when, like all newly minted alchoholics on their 21st birthday, we hassled him endlessly (to be fair, I have rarely seen him drink since, so he's not really an alcoholic like some of us), and at one point, when I am sure he was making a pithy argument backed up by healthy quotes from Susan Sontag or somesuch, our friend Alex called him pedantic. He responded with an angry sputter. "Pedantic?! Pendantic!!!" I now understand his rage. That word really gets under the skin.

I finished "No Brakes, I Don't Mind," moving beyond the provisional ending to another provisional ending. I am letting it rest. I like to put space between readings of my own work, as I forget details rather fast and so it will be fresher for me. "Walk Like a Panther" received its first rejection, so I am going to go over it again, too, and hopefully have them both ready to be submitted somewhere by the end of the month. I have had one other short story, "Chevelu," out for four months, but that was sent to a magazine with a long lag time.

Currently Reading: Le Morte D'Arthur: "The Book of Sir Tristram" and the Devil's Footprints colllection by Scott Allie, Brian Horton, and Paul Lee (I never finished it in serial form)

Current Sountrack: 1965 recording of Harold Seletsky's experiment musical monodrama Christ in Concrete, featuring Eli Wallach

golightly@confessions123.com * The Website

[to leave comments, click on the time-stamp below, then scroll down on the new page] – All text (c) 2004 Jamie S. Rich