Harry Connolly's Blog, page 197

Randomness for 4/2

1) Quentin Tarantino is playing a smurf? Um, okay, I gues.

2) Protecting IP the stand-up comic way. One of my friends was (unfairly) accused of joke-stealing. It was painful to see him (voluntarily) ditch a ten-minute routine about sitting at the big table over Thanksgiving because someone else had a single joke about it. This probably deserves its own post, but I'm not the one to write it.

3) I liked Speed Racer, too. However, I don't have to call it an "art film" to justify that. It...

April Rules

FYI: As a general rule, April Fools Day pranks suck. The truth is, too many people are nasty when they think they're being funny. So this isn't a "holiday" I like much.

If I can find good examples of AFD jokes, I'll post them tomorrow. But there really ought to be a set of guidelines for people to follow when thinking up pranks.

Randomness for 3/31

1) Non-Adventures of Wonderella is awesome.

2) This one is NSFW: Forehead Tittaes. via SmartBitches

3) A horror film that calls YOU!

4) Somehow I think this is not an official traffic law.

5) This made me laugh myself sick. via barbarienne

6) "He thought if he could save one chubby girl, he's done his job," Lutz said. Pft. That's what every guy going crazy with a hunting knife thinks.

7) You know what? This shouldn't have been a TV show in the first place, let alone a damn movie. Did you...

Yesterday was supposed to be a day off.

I was supposed to take all of your advice and spend the day hanging out with my son, playing the new used Wii games I bought (verdict: De Blob=awesome. The Incredible Hulk=WTF were they thinking?) and general relaxing fun.

Instead I received my second round of notes from my agent on Man Bites World and spent about an hour and 15 reviewing the galleys for the last corrections to Game of Cages.

As I mentioned in my picture post yesterday, All the notes (there are only eight) are tweaks to...

Dammit

I've lost my focus.

I've lost my discipline, drive and willpower. And I don't know how to get it back.

Two things for today

First, if you run an independent book store, please, take five minutes every week to look over the new movie releases coming in, say, a month from now, and find out if it was adapted from a book. A new movie release is fantastic publicity for the book version, and you wouldn't have to do more than stock a few by the counter to make a few impulse buys.

Second, I'm about to log off and work on Key/Egg/Remark. This being spring break for schoolkids, I find myself in the strange position of...

How about that

There's no DVD release of CAST A DEADLY SPELL, the Lovecraftian private eye movie with Fred Ward and Julianne Moore, but it is on YouTube.

It's better than I remember, but still disappointing in some of the choices.

Randomness for 3/27

1) The fully compiled results of Jim Hines's First Novel Survey.

2) Marriage vs. PhD. via @ccfinlay.

3) I'm sure this guy can get a divorce at the same court appearance when his wife gets her conviction.

4) President Obama's Facebook page, HCR edition. "I smell Democrat."

5) Literary troll is trollish.

6) What can surprise Werner Herzog? "It's not a serious wound."

7) The future of text?. They'd like you to think so.

In my ongoing effort to make sure no one ever thinks I'm cool…

I'm going to post a couple sentences I just corrected in my latest draft of Man Bites World. See, I always give a copy to my wife to read. She's severely dyslexic, and if I screw up a sentence she can't just glide over it. She also catches plot dumbosity. For now though, a sentence or two:

"Take of this, would you, Ray?"

which of course is missing the word "care", making it sound as though Rays reluctantly taking communion.

Remind sometime me to tell you the story of how I got into this...

5 Things Make A Friday Post

1) I finished up chapter one of Key/Egg/Remark this morning. Actually, I was slightly late to day job because of it. But doesn't it feel good to start a new project? Hell yes. I've been writing Ray Lilly stories for years (and I hope to write more of them–buy my book) but it's such a relief to go into another voice, another setting, another tone.

2) And yeah, as the previous point demonstrates, I have a working title for the next project. The plan is for it to be lighter in tone, much...