Happy Independence Day weekend, fellow Americanos and anyone
looking for an excuse to celebrate. To commemorate the occasion, I’ve fixed
vanilla custard tarts topped with blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries.
Patriotic and festive! And we’re planning on making a Pimm’s Cup, and maybe
seeing Magic Mike XXL. Summer is my
least favorite season—I like hiding in cold and dark places, Gollum-style—but honestly,
I’ve heard of worse plans for a long holiday weekend.
I’m experimenting with a new posting schedule here for the
summer: Mondays will be Miami Vice
recaps, Wednesdays will be reserved for a post on whatever strikes my fancy
(check out this week’s epic 3,500-word Sailor Moon: Top Ten Episodes post), and Fridays will be a smorgasbord of anything
that doesn’t require a separate post. We’ll see how this goes. On the slate for
next Wednesday: the much-delayed return of Duranalysis.
Free book: The ebook of R. Diskin Black’s middle-grade
adventure novel Ethan Weiss and the City Between Two Rivers will be offered for free on Kindle today through
Tuesday. I first met R. Diskin Black—Ray—last year when both of our books were
competing in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. He was looking for someone
to provide some feedback on Ethan Weiss,
I volunteered to take a loot at it, then promptly fell in love with his writing
and offered to publish it through my company, Luft Books. Ethan Weiss is set in a similar-yet-different parallel version of
New York City; it’s got the spirit of an old-fashioned boys’ adventure novel
(think Hardy Boys, or Tom Swift) combined with some sophisticated themes of dealing
with loss and finding strength in times of great adversity. Also, it’s a thumping
good read. Click here to download your free copy.
Ground work on my graphic novel Glitter Princes continues more or less on schedule. I’ve been
boning up on drawing foreshortened figures and dynamic motion, which are my weak areas. Here’s some concept art for Marcel.
By day, he’s a runway model/racecar driver, by night he’s a secret agent. He’s
very fine-boned and sensitive. I don’t know all that much about Marcel yet, but
I suspect his shirts are always going to be just a liiiiittle too small for
him.
We lost our sweet girl Tashiro back in early February. I
didn’t post much about Tashiro here, because I didn’t want to be the crazy cat
lady with a blog, but she was a big part of our lives. She lived to be a grumpy old lady of nineteen, weathering earthquakes and hurricanes and the traumatic move with me from Los
Angeles to New York ,
and she was awesome. I miss her every day.
Finally, there’s a brand-new trailer for Heroes Reborn. I’m still not planning on
watching the series, unless it gets extraordinarily
good word-of-mouth, but I have to admit, this trailer is hitting the right
nostalgia buttons, making me remember everything I used to love about the original
show before it all went egg-shaped. That shot at the end, the return of a
once-beloved and iconic character? Perfect. The only real misstep thus far is
the music; that mournful children’s choir cover of Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters makes me burst into
giggles every time I hear it.
That’s all I’ve got. Until next week.
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