Kyle Garret's Blog, page 17

Beyond This Blog (Lie Great Things!)

According to the fine folks at Google Analytics, this blog has seen a steady increase in traffic over the last couple of months.  This is no doubt due to the fact that I've start adhering to the number one rule of blogging: always update.

These days, I have a new blog up three times a week.  On Monday, you get my lovely "Abusing Nostalgia" series, which is often more embarrassing for me than anything else.  On Tuesday, I try to post general interest and writing content.  I am, after all a writer.  And I save up my nerdy posts for Thursday, so expect to see things about comic books, television, and baseball.

At this point, I've got roughly a three week cushion on content, so that's nice.

Anyway, the increased traffic hasn't really translated into increased sales, but to be honest that's not as important to me as you might think.  But I'm going to to just a tiny bit of pimping.

First, though, here's a link to a blog entry from about a month ago that gives a nice break down of all the free stories by me that you can find online.

Joss Whedon, the Complete Companion
Honestly, this is probably the book that gets the most attention.  I have an essay in this collection of works about Joss Whedon and his various productions.  My essay is called "Failure of the Every Man," and it's about Xander from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  I don't know that anyone actually discovers me or my writing because of this book, but I would hazard a guess that more people have read my essay than anything else I've ever written.  It's available from Titan Books.  The picture above will take you to Amazon.

I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot AtWhile the Whedon book has probably gotten the most views, "Pray" is the book I'm perhaps best known for, if I 'm actually known for anything.  It's my first published book, available from Hellgate Press, which is, surprisingly enough, not a made up publisher, but a real one that was kind enough to put out my book.  You can find out more about "Pray" on its page over there on the right.  The picture above will take you to Amazon so you can read some reviews and maybe buy a copy.

Falling Into PlaceThis is a strange little compilation from the people at Scars Publications.  It features a short story by me and work by a bunch of other fine folk, most of whom are unknowns like myself.  Yet again, you can click the link to go to the Amazon page for the book.

So there you go -- work by me that doesn't live on this blog!  If you like this blog, please consider purchasing one of these fine publications.  I think you can get them digitally, too.

Thanks for reading!

Abusing Nostalgia: Feline

I never understood the appeal of cats.  Well, more specifically, I never understood how anyone could not love dogs.  I grew up with a dog.  Having a dog was wonderful.  In my view, every kid should grow up with a dog.

So it's not that I really had anything against cats per se, they just weren't dogs.  But I never really gave cats a fair shake.  And then I met Nicole.

A few years ago I wrote these infrequent "essays" for a small 'zine in the UK called Swings and Roundabouts.  It's not really my best stuff, and most of it was written with an attitude that I'm not particularly a fan of anymore.  In fact, I cut a lot out of here because it gave an impression of me that I'm not comfortable with.

It's worth pointing out that I am now, 7 years after having written this, a cat person.  There can be no doubts about that.  I still love dogs, mind you, but if forced to choose, I'd go with cats.  They're far less work, far less demanding, and generally more entertaining.

This does not make anything below less true, though.

If there were a non-creepy way of writing about our cats, I'd do it, but I think I already post enough pictures of them on Facebook.




Chair Through A Window
By Kyle Garret
            Volume One Number Three: Feline
The first night is always the hardest.
Mine was a disaster.
My girlfriend and I were sound asleep in her bed when I felt something on my foot. Hindsight being 20/20, I now realize that it was the cat’s tongue, but there’s no way I could have known that then. And, like any reasonable human being, I reacted the way one does when they’re woken up by something on their foot: I kicked.
I kicked her cat.
I kicked it so hard, in fact, that it went tumbling off the bed. My girlfriend moaned and rolled over on to her side, but beyond that she made no indication that she’d actually seen or heard me do my best David Beckham to her only child. But I knew. I knew full well what I’d done.
“So your cat licked my foot last night,” I said to her the next morning. At this point I wasn’t sure that I was actually going to tell her, but if it ever came up (you know, just in case the cat told her), I wanted to make sure I had my bases covered.
“Did you kick him?” she said nonchalantly. Did I kick him? Did I kick him??
Why would she ask such a thing? Was I that obvious?
“A little bit,” I said, as if there are really levels of such things: Did you decapitate that prostitute?  Just a little bit.
“Yeah, I heard you,” she said. I suppose the pain and suffering of her only child would not go unnoticed.  I’m sure there’s a psychic bond.
“I didn’t mean to,” I said.
At this point she laughed.
“It’s okay,” she said, “he seems okay.”
How would you even be able to tell? It’s a cat. They’re always a bit off.
It’s at this point that acceptance takes a different turn.
Up until now, you’ve accepted that the cat exists and that it might even be important to her. You’ve accepted that there are times when you’ll have to let it lick your nose (side note: when she tells you the cat will do it once and never do it again, she’s lying). You’ve accepted that you may, on occasion, be required to carry bags of kitty litter and kitty excrement to the trash. But at some point you realize that you can’t just accept the cat; you have to embrace it. If you ever hope to gain her confidence, you have to become friends with it.
Just remember that the cat has to come to you. You have to be civil towards it, but the cat will decide if and when it will allow you to touch it. When it does, you have to be calm about it. This isn’t a dog; you can’t just rough it up. Cats are fragile, feeble creatures whose only real defense in the wild is the ability to climb trees. 

They will never trust you, but at some point they might like you. 

The Good (and Bad) of Marvel NOW

With DC more or less screwing up everything they touch lately, I've turned my attention towards the other corporately owned, superhero company, and their recent promotional campaign, Marvel NOW.

Americans love their dichotomies -- Coke or Pepsi, Democrat or Republican, Mac or PC -- so if forced to choose between the comic book industries' opposites, I'd come down on the DC side.  For a long time this was simply a matter of enjoying DC's characters more.  Batman is my favorite character and I have an incredible soft spot for the Legion of Superheroes.  I'm also a big Grant Morrison fan, and over the last few years he's only been doing work for DC (up until "Happy").

Part of my preference for DC over Marvel also came from their public personas.  As incompetent as DC has become (and it's gotten a lot worse lately), Marvel's public face has driven me nuts on more than one occasion.  I think they take advantage of their loyal customers by gouging them both in price and in frequency of publication.  I think they act self-righteous when they're still the company that screwed over Jack Kirby.  I think they rely on hype over substance and abuse the illusion of change.

That's not to say that DC isn't guilty of all of those things, too.  But since DC has been part of a conglomerate for so long, they seem to tone things down.  They're not as overt about what they do as Marvel is, which makes sense, as Marvel has always played that underdog, carnival barker card.  Sure, Dan Didio can be a supreme ass when confronted, but it doesn't seem like he goes out there with that intent.

The constant relaunching of books doesn't help Marvel's standing in my eyes, either.

Still, DC is going nowhere fast and Marvel's creative team round robin is interesting, so I decided to take a look at some of the Marvel NOW books.

The Good

1. Half as many books as the New 52.  Sure, Marvel is still publishing a bunch of books, but the total books included in Marvel NOW is right around half of the New 52.  It's much easier to get people excited about 26 creative teams than 52, because it's much easier to put together 26 good creative teams than 52.

2. The creative shuffle.  Marvel has writers and artists that are associated with certain families of books and with Marvel NOW they moved them all to new families.  DC didn't do anything like this.  Morrison relaunched Action Comics, but we've already seen the best Superman he can write.  Johns relaunched the Justice League and Aquaman, but he's written so many big event comics for DC, it's like he's already written those characters.  A big part of this is the fact that DC doesn't have established creators on families of books beyond Morrison on Batman and Johns on Green Lantern, and they couldn't really take the chance of mixing those up given they were the only books that actually sold.

3. New takes on superheroes.  Now, you could argue that DC did a lot of this by incorporating Vertigo style elements into their mainstream superhero comics.  But they didn't do anything as drastic as turning Captain America into a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi thriller or coming up with a viable reason to have an all female team aside from just having an all female team.  Sure, Avengers Arena wears its influences on its sleeve, but it's definitely a different way to go with teenage superheroes.

The Bad

1. Price.  There's already been comments made by retailers that Marvel NOW is not doing the business that the New 52 did and I will point to the price of most of Marvel's comics as one of the causes.  If the goal was to bring in new readers, why price so many of the comics at $3.99?  There are a hand full of Marvel NOW books that I would read every month if I didn't have to pay 4 bucks for them.  It's even more outrageous for someone like myself who buys his comics digitally.

2. Publishing schedule.  This one is two fold.  First, by spreading out the new #1's over a few months, Marvel has lost momentum.  DC's new 52 launch was crazy and probably the most excitement I've seen from fans in a long time.  The same can't be said for Marvel NOW.  Not only did the scattered release schedule hurt them, the erratic publishing schedule after the first issue has hurt, too.  Uncanny Avengers is already running late and All New X-Men seems to publish an issue every week.  Marvel's publishing plans for Marvel NOW have made it so that not only are they not bringing in new readers, but they're making it hard for casual readers to jump on board (and stay there).

3. Lack of diversity.  I'm not talking about the cast of characters, I'm talking about genres.  At least DC pretended to try other genres of comics when they relaunched.  Marvel has not only stuck with just superheroes, they've managed to limit their books even more by attaching everything to a brand.  If you're not an Avenger or an X-Man, you're probably not going to find yourself on Marvel's publishing schedule.

If I can point to a big deciding factor on why Marvel Now has been better than the DC relaunch is that Marvel has seemingly given their creators freedom to do what they do best.  Sure, there have been some continuity errors because of their hands off approach, but contrast that with the apparent micromanaging at DC and it's easy to pick a winner.

An easier way to break it down: I currently buy 1 DC book every month (Batman, Inc.).  With Marvel Now, the number of Marvel books I buy each month has doubled to 4: Daredevil, Hawkeye, Young Avengers, and Fearless Defenders.  The main thread with those books, aside from being great, is that they're not substantially connected to Marvel events and they're all $2.99.

Then again, the second issue of Fearless Defenders isn't even out yet, and by the second month of the New 52 I was still getting roughly half of them.  I'm willing to bet fat sacks of cash, though, that I stick with Young Avengers beyond the 4 issues that I stuck with every other New 52 title but Batman, Inc.

That actually might be the key, here: DC's relaunch brought me on board a ton of titles, but I quit reading them after less than a year (most I didn't stick with beyond 4 months).  Marvel's getting much less of my money, but actually might keep me around.

Grain of Salt

I would guess that most people, in general, surround themselves with a bubble.  It's probably a bigger bubble for those who are self-conscious or who engage in any kind of activity in which they're offering up a piece of themselves to complete strangers.  But, let's face facts, we're all looking for validation in some form or another, so at some point we have to let the bubble go.

I'm not great about sharing my writing.

Part of that might come from my time in grad school.  A big chunk of what you do as a graduate student in creative writing is share your work with your class.  The vast majority of the feedback you got in those two years came in workshops.

Run and go watch the beginning of Wonder Boys real quick.  Go on, it will take two minutes.  Back?  What you just watched (assuming you own Wonder Boys, as it's not available streaming anywhere online, even for money) is a pretty accurate depiction of what a creative writing workshop is like.  Generally speaking, none of the people in the workshop are very good writers, thus being in the workshop, which makes the feedback they give suspect right off the bat.

Everyone in a workshop wants to seem smart, so everyone in a workshop tries to do that by making really amazing, incredibly critical points about your work.  Half the time, the points aren't even particularly valid, but they just keep digging, trying to find something that will make them look good in front of the professor.

Even worse, we're all writers, so we all suffer from the same fragile egos.  If you had us something that's genuinely good, it destroys us, because what we've turned in is shit.  So we hate you.  And we're not good at hiding our hate.

It kind of surprising that anyone who goes through workshops ever shows their work to anyone ever again.

The workshop is a good example of the difficulties with getting good feedback.  Getting feedback in general has never been easier.  The internet is awash in writing communities that you can join and share your work with.  It's awash with these communities because it's awash with people who want to write books, and they are very eager to get their work read, so they're very eager to read yours.

The problem, then, is figuring out how valuable that feedback is.

It's a lot like trying to find something to read among self-published books.  These days, anyone can self-publish.  Even money is no longer an obstacle -- talent certainly isn't.  I don't say that to be mean, but absolutely anyone can publish a book if they want to, but we all know that everyone can't write.  Most people can't even fashion an e-mail correctly.

When it comes to my work, my wife, Nicole, is the only one who reads all of it.  She's a fantastic editor, who, beyond all other things, possess a sense of story.  That may sound obvious, I know, but you'd be surprised at how difficult it can be to just tell a story.  Writers want to write.  They want to pull out every took in that writing box and go to town, but that often gets in the way of telling the story.  My wife sees right through that shit and she calls me on it.

I've yet to really delve into the online world of peer editing.  It's entirely for the reasons above, not to mention the fact that I can't imagine having time to read some one's book, which is something I'd have to do to be fair.

I did, however, fork over ducats to have a publisher author read a few chapters of Master of the House*.  I realize that things like this are generally frowned upon by the writing community, but at least this way I knew what I was getting and who was giving it to me.

Even then, though, I have to take his feedback with a grain of salt.  As the aforementioned writer said, "So please follow your own muse, though I do hope that you will find these comments helpful."  In the end, the most important feedback is the kind I give myself.  Because in the end, that might be all I'm left with.

* It was excellent feedback, I should add.  It's also done wonders for my confidence, which might be the most important thing I could get out of it. 

Abusing Nostalgia: Elf's Head Mug

This is a funny one.  For a long time, I wrote more on my livejournal (you heard me) than I did in my own, personal journal, so I ended up incorporating the former into the latter.  So when it seems like I'm talking to a theoretical reader, it wasn't really theoretical, as people actually read this.

I particularly like the list of the best comics of 2002.  They all still rank pretty high for me.

Also: the secret origin of the elf's head mug.


Monday, December 30, 2002
December 30th, 200211:13PM - More lists.


I can understand Spanish, to a certain extent. I can speak very little of it, though. But I've been able to communicate with this nice couple who lives at the Villas (the place I work). They appreciated it so much that they got me a Christmas present -- a mug in the shape of a an elf's head.

I'm currently drinking whiskey and water out of an elf's head.

Top Four Events of 2002:

1) My nephews were born. And they rule.

2) I moved to California. And now I'm cool.

3) I met Joss Whedon. He's much cooler.

4) Roger sent me the first sketches for the comic. And they're nearly as cool as Joss Whedon.

The Top Four Comics of 2002:

1) Automatic Kafka. The fact that two people are fucking with the form so much and that it's going totally unnoticed is a great indication of what's wrong with comic book fans.

2) Stray Bullets. Returning like a motherfucker, proving that David Lapham is still a genius.

3) Teenagers From Mars. So cool it hurts.

4) Paradigm. I haven't the slightest fucking idea what's going on, but it still rules.

Next time: The top CDs of 2002!

The 2013 Cleveland Indians

Who saw THAT coming?

At the end of last season, I figured that the Indians should just focus on building for 2014/2015, when star shortstop prospect Franicso Lindor would be ready for the big leagues.  Trade Choo, I said, trade Perez, trade Cabrera.  Get young arms and outfielders in return.  As far as I was concerned, there were just too many holes in this team to fill with a traditional Cleveland off-season.

We didn't so much get a traditional Cleveland off-season, did we?

Now, we shouldn't go too crazy about the extra spending we saw this winter.  Keep in mind that the Tribe had a bunch of money come off the books from Travis Hafner alone.  Add in Grady Sizemore and Casey Kotchman and we're right around $20M in savings, an amount that more or less covers what Swisher and Bourn will make this season (as their deals are all back loaded).  But those salaries are going to go up over the next few years, so the payroll is going to get even bigger, which means these deals were still out of left field for the Indians.

What's particularly interesting to me is how fans are excited while simultaneously admitting that the Indians probably can't catch the Tigers!  That's pretty impressive, to get a fan base hot and bothered for a team everyone assumes will come in second.  But at least we have hope to compete, and there are two wild cards now.

That's going to be a fight in and of itself.  There are a lot of vastly improved teams in the American League this year.  My projected AL Central standings (if I'm going with my head and not my heart) is pretty much the same as everyone else's:

1. Tigers
2. Indians
3. Royals
4. White Sox
5. Twins

The Twins are something of a disaster, but it's clear by their off-season moves that they know they're a disaster and they're taking the appropriate steps.  It could be a couple of years before they're back to where they used to be.

I don't think the White Sox have the pitching, offense, or defense to match what they did last year.  It's really just a matter of the fact that they had so many guys with career years last season.  It's just not going to happen again.

The Royals are going to be a pretty volatile team.  Their offense looked so promising two years ago, but the young players that seemed to be the future of this team took huge steps back last season.  The rotation is obviously much better, but it's still not overwhelming.  Both Guthrie and Santana can be as awful as they are great and losing Soria is a big blow for that bullpen.

So if I work under the assumption that the Tribe has to go through the Tigers to win the division, how do they match up?  Let's take a look.

Offense

For all the moves that the Tribe made in the off-season, it was always going to be impossible for them to match Detroit's offense.  They were 6th in the AL in runs scored last season and that was without Victor Martinez.  Cabrera and Fielder could be the best 3-4 combo in baseball and now they're going to add Martinez in.  Imagine Fielder batting between Cabrera and Martinez.  That's just crazy.  Add Tori Hunter and Austin Jackson to that line-up, and you've got a pretty potent offense.

That's not to say the Tribe don't look great on paper.  They actually might have a more consistent offense through the line-up than the Tigers, and they certainly have more speed.  But getting through that 3-4-5 is just too intimidating to give this category to anyone but the Tigers.

Defense

How's this for an easy breakdown of this position: the Indians traded away Peralta so Cabrera could move to short, because Cabrera is a better shortstop.

But if we really want to dig into it, how about the fact that the Tribe has what could be one of the top 5 outfields in all of baseball?  Add in potential all star Kipnis at second, and it's clear that the Indians take this category.

Starting Rotation

Here's where it falls apart.

You would think that the problem is Justin Verlander, but it's not.  No, no one should expect the Tribe to have a pitcher who can match up with the Tigers' ace.  That's just not going to happen.  The problem is that the Tribe doesn't even match up very well after that.  Doug Fister, in particular, is a problem for the Tribe, because at this point we don't even have a starter as good as Detroit's #2.

That isn't to say that we couldn't.  I think Ubaldo is a lost cause, but I think there's hope for Masterson.  He's only been a starter for two years, so his sample size is small.  He also spent last season forced to be perfect, because he had the second worst offense in the American League backing him up.  He'll have more leeway this year, and I think that will make him better.

Beyond Masterson and Jimenez, there's the unlikable Bret Myers, probably Zach MacAllister, and then I would say either Dice-K or Scott Kazmir.  This gives Bauer and Carasco more time in AAA.  I would imagine we'll see both of them in the second half, though.

Regardless, we'd have to have a lot go right to match the Tigers' 2-5, adding in Verlander makes it pretty much impossible.  Tigers take this category.

Bullpen

We might actually have a better bullpen than we did last year, and we had a pretty good one.  We bring back one of the best 7-8-9 combos in baseball in Smith, Pestano, and Perez.  Our two lefties will go from Sipp/Perez to, I would guess, Hagadone/Hill, which should be an upgrade.  That leaves two spots.  If I had to guess, I'd go with Matt Capps for one, assuming he's recovered from his injuries.  He could be a nice addition, if that's the case.  He's saved more games than anyone else on the team.  The last spot will go to either Matt Albers, Bryan Shaw, or Cody Allen.  My guess at this point would be Shaw; he's got better numbers than the other two.  Shaw might still have options, though, and I'm pretty sure Allen does, so it's entirely possible that good spring gives Albers the edge based on experience.

I honestly have no idea who's in the Tigers' bullpen anymore, aside from, I think, Daniel Schlereth, who we generally shell, and Al Alburquerque.  Oh, there's that Benoit guy, who we also generally shell.  I'm glad Valverde is gone, because he was an ass.

The bottom line, however, is that the Tribe takes this category.

Total

It would seem that we're split 2-2 in the breakdown above, but starting pitching will always be the deciding factor, and offense is generally more important than bullpen.  While defense may win championships, it only wins divisions if they other teams are just god awful, and the Tigers are at least average.

But here's the silver lining: of the categories listed above, pitching is always going to be the most mercurial.  The Indians have enough depth in the bullpen that they should be able to withstand any flukes in performance.  They also have a lot of depth in the starting rotation, even if that depth is fairly average across the board.  It still means consistency.  If the Tribe can get a spike up and the Tigers a spike down, the Indians definitely have a chance of taking the division.

The Future

Something else to consider: the Tribe is in good shape for years to come.  They have a potentially great rotation of Bauer, Carasco, Masterson, and MacAllister all signed for years to come.  They have a superstar replacement in waiting when Cabrera's contract is up after 2014 to go with Kipnis and Chisenhall in the infield.  Swisher and Bourn are all around through 2016 with options through 2017.  Brantley and Santana are also under club control for a few more years.

The moves the Indians made this off-season weren't just for this year, they were for the future, too.

The only thing that really matters at this point, though, is that the Indians are better than they were last year and that they're an intriguing team.  Hopes have never been higher for Indians' fans, and right now that's enough.

Begin Again

As torturous as writing short stories can be for me, there is one aspect that surpasses all other forms of the written word: beginnings.  Writing an opening to a short story is always the easiest thing for me.

Sadly, this skill does not translate to longer works.

The first time I ran into this problem was with "Pray," but it was, thankfully, brought to my attention at a writers' conference.  I think I did a pretty good job with the beginning of that book.  I know it's much better than it was originally.

With short stories, you can leave some mystery.  You're not asking the reader to invest a big chunk of their time, so it's okay if you don't tell them everything up front.  Each sentence carries more weight than in a book, so exposition in any form becomes problematic.  It's okay if your readers don't know what the story is about right away.

Books are different.  Books require some kind of set-up.  You are asking someone to invest days of their life to your written word, so you need to give them some reason to part with their precious free time.  You have to put the majority of your cards out on the table.

The tricky part is finding the balance between an interesting opening that hooks the reader while still establishing what the book is going to be about.

I have found that the beginnings of books never reveal themselves until I've written a few drafts...and have been rejected by a few agents.

In the case of my first YA book, "Master of the House," I had an agent request the first 25 pages.  She passed on the book based upon what she read.  I know the book itself is good, just as I know it has a great hook.  The problem, then, had to be with those first 25 pages.

My wife had always maintained that the book started too quickly and didn't give enough set-up, but my short story writing-self had a hard time wrapping my brain around that, even if I had run into the same problem with "Pray."

Stories don't start from the beginning.  There's always back story, and much of that back story is important to the story at hand.  The problem, then, is in figuring out how much set up to, well, set up.  So I did what any smart writer would do: I looked at similar books for ideas.

I ended up adding two new chapters to the beginning of the book, then giving the first 25 pages to my wife to look over.  She liked my new chapters, but she had lots of issues with them, issues that were more or less solved with one move: I switched them around.

I now had what was probably the 4th or 5th different beginning to "Master of the House."  But I think this new one works.

My initial impulse will always be to open a story with a moment, not necessarily a chapter.  But I think I'm becoming better at finding the happy medium between the two.

Now I just have to worry about my endings.

Abusing Nostalgia: Joss Whedon

Here's an interesting one, written just a few months after I moved to Los Angeles (you can tell because I'm still pretty wide eyed and bushy tailed).

If you don't know much about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, most of this will be Greek to you.

It really was a cool experience.  Aside from driving by Fountain and Fairfax (the Afghan Whigs fans among you understand), it was my first real "Los Angeles" moment.

This would actually not be the last time I'd see Joss Whedon or members of the cast of one of his shows in person, believe it or not.  More on that in the future.



Saturday, September 28, 20029:24:45 PMI wrote this to, well, to pretty much everyone I know:
Okay, everyone, I'm going to try to make some sense out of the events of the day -- it all seems a bit surreal, to be honest -- both now and when it happened.
The signing/appearance was set for one and I got there at about 11:45. There was already a line, probably of about fifty people. They made it clear that we HAD to have the CD to get in, so I promptly ran inside and bought one (it rules...get it for the liner notes at least). I then got back in line, CD in one hand, Emmy copy of The Body in the other.
At about 12:30 (at this point the line was pretty big -- maybe a hundred and fifty people) a car pulled into the driveway. It was a greenish blue BMW. The first person to see inside yelled "It's Joss!" And it was. He parked and got out and there was much cheering and clapping. He waved as he headed inside. I think I almost passed out.
There was a film crew in the parking lot and they interviewed a girl standing near me. They told us they were from A&E and they were shooting a documentary on Buffy that should air in late October or early November.
Soon, a really nice looking car showed up and parked by the door. A driver got out and opened the back doors. A bunch of young girls got out, including Michelle Trachtenburg. This was a surprise since the fliers had said "Joss Whedon, Amber Benson, and other cast members," so we weren't sure who would show. No one ever actually saw Amber enter the building, so she could have walked to the store for all I know.
They actually took groups of twenty people into the Tower Records store and made everyone else wait, which was actually really good because it gave you a bit more time. You were going in as a group, not a long line.
As we moved forward another girl who had been standing by me returned with food from Subway. By this point we were standing by Joss' car (which, as nice as it may sound, wasn't really a rich guy car). She looked around for someplace to set her food and realized the only place to go was Joss' car. So we watched as she ate lunch on Joss' car. People took pictures and videotaped her, in fact.
Eventually we made it to the front of the line and I was about to piss myself. I'm extremely apathetic by nature, but when I really care about something I care about it A LOT. My hands were starting to shake.
They let us in and they were playing the musical in the store. Again, there was a line, but only a small one. I could see them -- Michelle, then Joss, then Amber. They were sitting at a table that was raised a bit off the ground. A few minutes after I entered, Joss got up. Two large men escorted him to the back of the story -- to the bathroom. I think my heart skipped a beat.
They decided it was a good time for a bathroom break, so Michelle got up as well. Michelle seems to have a following because some girl carrying a small DOG went with her to the bathroom. Kinda odd.
Anyway, Amber was alone at the table and she seemed so nice and so relaxed and so funny. It was kind of ridiculous. But I'll get to that in minute.
Everyone returned and the line moved forward. I should point out that I was wearing a tie -- I took a REALLY long lunch break from work to go to this. So I still had my fancy clothes on.
Anyway, I get up to Michelle and I hand her the CD as she says hi to me. I say hi back. I hand her the videotape and she asks me where she wants her to sign. I say anywhere is fine. She signs, but notices that the glossy cover makes the marker seem like it will rub off. I say that's okay as Joss notices what's going on.
I feel bad about meeting MT because it was kind of a blur at that point. Joss Whedon had suddenly entered my direct vision and everything else fell away. I handed him the CD book and asked him to sign on his picture, which he did. Then he looked at the tape of The Body.
"My girlfriend bought that on eBay for me," I said.
He looked it over, then signed it.
"It's my favorite thing," I said.
He stared at it again. "It means a lot to me, too."
"I feel bad, though," I said, "because my girlfriend bought it for me but I can't watch it -- I breakdown when I do."
MT intervened (thankfully) and recommend Joss put a heart by his name. He asked where and she kindly put one on for him.
At one Joss made a joke to the person in front of me in line and Amber laughed and said "I miss hanging out with you!" And later I thought to myself: I really wish I could make that statement.
Then it was on to Amber. I slid her my CD book. I was in a bit of a trance -- she had to open it to the page of Tara.
"I have to ask you a question," I said.
"What's that?" she asked.
I started mumbling incoherently. "Chance!" I finally blurted out. "When will we be able to see it?"
"We're working on getting distribution right now," she said as she signed my tape.
Just then, the Tower Records guy moved me along. I stood off to the side, waiting for my friend to get done. As he joined me to the side, Amber looked up at us and waved.
"Thanks for coming!" she said. "And you're all dressed up!"
"I came from work," I said back. "I'm on a really long lunch break."
And she winked at me.
Yep. She winked at me. Or maybe us (my friend and I). But he's gay, so I'm going with me on this one.
And I walked out the door.
And I remembered the little business cards I'd made up that said www.buffysdomain.com and how they were still in my pocket. *sigh*
I've been high as a kite ever since.

Abusing Nostalgia: The First Date

Today is Nicole's birthday.

I've written a lot of things about Nicole.  Heck, I wrote an entire book about her, really.  I've written so much about her (and us), that I thought I'd share some of it.  Pretty much all of it was written just for us.  I've never considered the possibility of trying to get it published anywhere.

This is how we "met."



“Hello”
            “Hey,” said Brandon in his usually upbeat, somewhat innocent manner.            “Brandon,” I said.  This is the relationship we had: I was mean to him.  I mean, I wasn’t literally mean to him, but I joked around in a very mean fashion.  I knew he could take it though, or else I wouldn’t have done it.            “I just got a message from some guy telling me I’m cute and funny.”  See, he said things like this and it was impossible for me to not be mean to him.  It was impossible.            “I take it he’s never met you,” I said.            “On Friendster,” he said, which is funny because the assumption here is that I not only knew what Friendster was, but I knew how it worked.  But it was a safe assumption to make.            “You’re on Friendster?” I said as I typed the address into my web browser.  I wasn’t doing anything work related, anyway, and this gave me yet another source of distraction.  It was hard work finding ways to spend so much free time when I couldn’t leave the office.            I pulled up the Friendster page and logged-in – as I said, I not only knew what Friendster was, I was well aware of how it worked.  Hell, the last girl I really dated I met on this thing, but that didn’t last too long.  Still, it was an interesting system, particularly for those of us who had a hard time braving the Los Angeles social scene.            “Add me to your friends’ list,” said Brandon, so I looked him up and added him to my friends list.  “Isn’t that a great picture of me?”            By this point, though, I’d quit listening to him.  I was now scanning the people in hisfriends list in hopes that they weren’t all gay men.  They weren’t.            In particular, one photo caught my eye.  The name above it was Nicole.  So I clicked on her.            “Hello,” I said as the page loaded, “who’s Nicole?”            “You should send her a message,” said Brandon, “she’s totally chill.  You’d get along with her.”            So I did.  And this is what I sent:
Date: Sunday, October 24, 2004 11:42:00 AM Subject: Hello Message: Brandon said I should send you a message. It
happened much like this:

Brandon: Some guy I don't even know sent me a
message on Friendster telling me I'm cute and
funny.

Me: You're on Friendster?

Brandon: Yeah.

Me: Let me add you to my friends' list.

**I look up Brandon.**

Brandon: Isn't that a good picture of me?

Me: Yeah, it's fan-freaking-tastic, Brandon.

Brandon: Isn't that a good description?

**I ignore Brandon and scroll down the page to his
list of friends.**

Me: Hello. Who's Nicole?

Brandon: Nicole! She's a girl I used to work with.
You should send her a message.

Me: Okay.

It dawns on me, however, that this could be the
worst conversation starter ever. But I hold out
hope.
            And they say romance is dead.

Below is what I wrote in my journal three days after our eventual first date (on December 1st, 2004).  I think it says it all.

Saturday, December 04, 2004


            I really am bad at this.
            So, Wednesday night.  I met Nicole at Molly Malone’s for drinks.  She was waiting for me when I got there.  It took me about three seconds to see her as she looks a lot like she does in her pictures.  But not exactly.  In fact, she actually looks better than she does in her pictures.
            I got there and she’d already ordered drinks.  I was extremely calm, which was just weird.  I mean, I wasn’t nervous in the slightest.  She was.  But the more we talked the more she relaxed and, of course, the more we drank the more comfortable we felt.
            I don’t know.  I could go into a lot of details about it but it’s getting late.  Basically, we spent a few hours at the bar and then a few hours here at my apartment and I really like Nicole.  I’m trying to be good about this.  I am.
            She’s coming over tomorrow night.
Eight plus years later and she's still the most amazing person I have ever known.
For what it's worth, I proposed in the parking lot of that bar, but that's a story for another time. 

The Best Avengers Team

Funny enough, the first Avengers comic I read/bought wasn't an Avengers comic, but a West Coast Avengers comic.

It was, in fact, volume 2, #17, of West Coast Avengers, and it featured a group of characters that were more or less foreign to me.  I had some idea of who Iron Man was because I'd read enough of the "on sale this week" sections of Marvel comics.  I was also an avid Marvel Age reader, so I'm sure I read a lot about Tony Stark there.  Oh, and I also loved the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe.

I realize that Hawkeye is super popular now, but back then I had no freaking idea who he was.  He was a Green Arrow knock off and I didn't even read DC Comics.  Wonder Man?  Really?  Tigra?  Mockingbird?  Not really an A-list cast.

But Steve Englehart's ambitious stories kept me interested and I'd enjoyed Moon Knight's solo tales enough that his edition to the team sealed the deal: I read the West Coast Avengers for probably a good five to six years.

I wasn't so dedicated to their east coast counterparts.  It took me a long time to appreciate Tom Palmer's heavy inks over John Buscema's pencils, and by the time I did, Buscema had left the book.  There was never really an east coast line-up that I felt strongly about.  The closest was probably when Busiek and Perez relaunched the title.

The Avengers titles have been written by Bendis for the last decade plus, but those teams never really interested me, either.  There was one point, during Civil War, when the New Avengers line-up made sense.  They were all anti-registration, so they were in hiding.  A team like Cage, Ironfist, Wolverine, Spider-man (in black!), Spider-woman, and Dr. Strange made sense, and it was a nice mix of characters, to boot.  But beyond that, it was mind numbingly heavy handed.  I actually had high hopes for the post-Heroic Age teams, and I think the New Avengers lived up to that to a certain extent, but why characters had to be on both teams, and why Wolverine would be on the big, public face of the Avengers team was kind of insulting to those of us who cared about the stories.  And, honestly, if you have to use the same characters over and over again to tell your stories, I'm thinking you've reached a creative rut.

I'm getting off topic...

It was during the Bendis era that I discovered what is, in my mind, the perfect team of Avengers.  Part of the appeal of this team might be that they were untouched by outside forces.  Part of it might have been that they appeared in some of the best stories Marvel has published in the last twenty years.  And part of it was the fact that these characters were new versions of existing characters, so they were unencumbered by history; these characters could be whoever they needed to be.

You think I'm going to say the Ultimates, don't you?  No, not them.

This is the greatest Avengers line-up ever:

Captain America, Iron Man, Wolverine, Spider-man, Storm, Giant Girl, and the Hulk.  That's the Marvel Adventures: Avengers team.

This Wolverine works on this team because this Wolverine hasn't killed hundreds if not thousands of people.  This is Wolverine without all that baggage.  This Spider-man has always been a member.  This Bruce Banner has some semblance of control over the Hulk.

Janet Van Dyne as Giant-Girl was a brilliant move, but than any modified version of any character to be found in certain other alternate reality Avengers teams.  Keep an original character, but update her so that she's considerably more modern and considerably more powerful.  There may only be two women on the team, but between Giant-Girl and Storm, they're the heavy hitters.

I'll be honest: I'm not sure that this team would have worked as well as it did if it hadn't been written (more or less) by Jeff Parker.  Parker knows these characters and he knows how to make fun comics.  Each relationship gets screen time over the course of this series and seeing what each of these characters has (or doesn't) have in common is fantastic.

I know this team will probably never see the light of day again.  But when I want to read some Avengers comics, I'll always turn to my Marvel Adventures digests.  Avengers comics just don't get better than that.