Editor problems

There is a bus bench I pass every time I take my kid to school. It has an ad on it, for some sort of escrow/property management business.

This ad is so wordy and full of Random Capitalizations and multiple exclamation points!!!! that I'm getting perilously close to bringing a red Sharpie with me next time and marking it up.

I'd get busted for vandalism, but the sign would be grammatically correct.

Today's mood

Today's mood - UPDATED WITH 100% MORE AWESOME

Never give up, never surrender! I will be going to Comic-Con this year, albeit for one day only (Sunday).

Am very excited because one of my best friends, E. Gerry Hoard, will be on the panel "The Cross-Generational Appeal of Doctor Who" at 11 a.m. in room 29A. Won't you join us?

Kelly's Really Big Score: Take It Out In Trade edition

Road-tripped up to Ojai and to Bart's Books. I must say that it was the perfect day for such a trip. Sunny day, mid-seventies, and the hills of Ojai were still spring-green and the wild mustard was in bloom.

I took a bunch of books in to trade, and with the store credit I was able to get:

• Louis Bayard - The Black Tower
• Kate Atkinson - Case Histories
• Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
• Bruce Felton and Mark Fowler - The Best, Worst, and Most Unusual
• Colleen McCullough - The First Man in Rome
• T. C. Boyle - The Road to Wellville
• Marilyn French - The Women's Room
• Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried
• Alexandra LaPierre - Artemisia
• Christina Stead - The Man Who Loved Children
• Joe R. Lansdale - Lost Echoes
• Jose Saramago - Blindness
• Thomas Tryon - The Other
• Clive Barker - Cabal
• Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers
• Donald Hamilton - Murderers' Row
• William Howard - "Gore Vidal's Caligula"

I am particularly happy with the Best, Worst, and Most Unusual and the Murderers' Row finds. The former is a trivia book that's from the late 1970s, and I still remember checking it out of the local library when I was a kid and learning about everything from how awful a durian is to some examples of really off-the-wall architecture. The latter is from Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm series, which are long out of print but which are great reading, and a heavy influence on my Ashes series.

I make no apologies for the last book on the list - it's a novelization of the terrible movie made from Gore Vidal's screenplay for Caligula. I'm sure it's no good but I must have it on my shelf and it was only $2. So there.

Today's mood

Today's mood

"You'll be safe here."

Just click this link. You won't regret it.

It's funny because it's true

From The Onion: "Find the thing you're most passionate about, then do it on nights and weekends for the rest of your life."

Seems accurate.

Oh, you sweet summer child

Don't know where this comment came from - it looks like a YouTube comment - but it's people like this who will cause Twitter to implode towards the end of Season 3 of Game of Thrones.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

DON'T watch this now: Trailer for The Lorax

It was great to see The Adventures of Tintin over Christmas break - twice! It was everything an adaptation should be - a translation of the work into a different medium, with storytelling and character introductions to suit the medium; with lots of in-jokes for the fans but easy for those unfamiliar with the work to understand; and most of all, true to the spirit of the original work.

The downside of all this was having to see the trailer for the abominable-looking adaptation for The Lorax. I shouldn't be surprised, really. Shitty adaptations of Dr. Seuss' work have been the status quo since Ron Howard's bungling of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. But the trailer alone for The Lorax sent me into a hissy fit, because it is wrong on so many levels.

The Lorax isn't high on most people's list of favorite Dr. Seuss books. But I've always loved it, and I have the feeling it instilled in me my love for fiction that's depressing yet somehow just uplifting enough to not be nihilistic. So it distresses me to see one of my favorite childhood books adapted into something so wrong-headed.

What's wrong, you ask? I'll tell you. First of all, the look. Yes, the Truffula Trees are beautiful, but everything in the trailer has the same candy-colored, plastic-coated look. It's hard to feel the loss of the Truffula Trees and Humming-Fish and Swomee-Swans when the world without them is indistinguishable from the world with them.

What's also wrong is the motivation for the lead character. It's not enough for him to wonder how the world got into its drab, dirty state. No, he wants to find a tree so he can impress a girl. Please.

The voice casting is also completely off, particularly for the Lorax himself. I mean no disrespect to Danny DeVito, but he's not the Lorax.

Maybe the trailer is misleading, but I suspect it isn't. I suspect the moviemakers have taken a very simple (some would say simplistic) cautionary tale and turned into into an overstuffed CGI-fest full of slapstick and vulgarity.

I'm not providing a link to the trailer. Seek it out if you must, but it won't get any clicks through me.

I am not at all sure how I feel about this

Stephen King has almost completed a sequel to The Shining. Full story at Ain't It Cool News.

I'm going to just say "Hmmmm" for now. I love King, and The Shining is one of my favorites. But a sequel? I'm just not sure...

It's funny because it's true: "Novelist Has Whole Shitty World Plotted Out"

God bless The Onion. Oh, this made me laugh: Novelist Has Whole Shitty World Plotted Out.

I'll let the picture do the talking

Hiatus

The best laid plans of mice and men, and all that.

My plans were waylaid by these babies.

But when I took them for their first spin, I fell and broke my right elbow. So toodles to writing, cooking, and blogging for a while.

This just in: Plagiarism is bad

Yes, I know, stating the obvious. But apparently it wasn't obvious to the editor of Cooks Source magazine.

It started when a blogger found out that Cooks Source had used one of her articles in its magazine, in violation of copyright and with no permission or compensation. In her defense, after a feeble "my bad" the editor claimed:

"...the web is considered 'public domain' and you should be happy we didn't 'lift' your whole article and put someone else's name on it!"

I'm not making this up. Excuse me while my head explodes like that dude in Scanners.

With this cavalier attitude toward copyright and lack of respect for others' hard work, it should come as no surprise that Cooks Source seems to have stolen work from a variety of sources, including the The Food Network.

I'm not sure if the Cooks Source editor's behavior can be chalked up to chutzpah or just plain stupidity, but whatever it is, she's got plenty of it.

For all the grisly details, read Edward Champion's fine article, and the forums at Absolute Write. And many thanks go to the ever-awesome Lauren at BiblioBuffet for sharing this story.

Writing is hard work. That doesn't give you an excuse to steal others' work and pass it off as your own.

How much does a writer make?

Now playing on the iPod - "Jerry Was a Race Car Driver" - Primus

So how much DOES a writer make, anyway? I wouldn't know, as I've never been paid for my fiction or my reviews. The answer can be found courtesy of The Rejecter, and let's just say that it's a good thing I love what I do and don't need to be paid for it.

Signs of the apocalypse, number 3,587

Did you know that the reason books are made into movies is so that people don't have to read them? No, really!

That didn't work out the way I thought it would

Now playing on the iPod: "Going Out West" - Tom Waits

I was reading the "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" story from The Jungle Book to Young Master. I was having a great time - the whole book's a favorite of mine and the copy I was reading is the one I had when I was a kid.

Much as I did when I was young, Young Master likes snakes. Maybe he likes them a bit too much. He was inconsolable when the mongoose killed the evil cobras and now he hates all mongooses and wants a story in which snakes are the heroes. (If you know of any, please send the titles my way!) I'll have to check Just So Stories and see if there are any heroic snakes in that.

Sigh

I understand that movies take liberties when adapting books and using well-established characters.

But some people don't.

Fangirl, Interrupted Part Two: The Quickening

Through total happenstance (i.e., loafing around on the SomethingAwful forums) I learned that four-day passes for Comic-Con 2010 are already sold out - as of NOVEMBER! And one-day passes for Saturday are sold out and Friday is at 99%.

What fresh hell is this? Contrary to popular opinion, many of those who attend Comic-Con are respectable citizens with lives and jobs and families, who do not live in our parents' basements. In November I was thinking about repairing my roof before the rains came and feeding people at Thanksgiving. NOT about an event which, while it is tremendously fabulous, was eight flippin' months in the future.

I am annoyed. I'm a newbie at Comic-Con (have only attended 2008 and 2009) but it was loads of fun. The folks down in San Diego have got to find a better way to run a railroad.

Oh well. At least I've got the L.A. Times Festival of Books in April, Weekend of Horror in May, and a Whedon Con in November. That ought to satisfy my nerditry.