Twist of Something or Other January 8, 2009

I find it strange how things in my life interconnect.  I pick up a book randomly in a school library, which leads to an obsession, which leads me to learn to knit so I can make a costume replica from the movie of that book I picked up, which leads to another obsession, which leads to me discovering podcasts, which leads to Lime & Violet, which leads to me pitching a column for the brand new Daily Chum, which probably puts me over the top for my Marvel internship.

Now I’m sitting here, older, wiser (though not wise enough to replace the study skills I lost in the 8 months since I last was in school) and these two halves of my life continue to interact in strange ways. Take today for instance: I’m all jazzed because the article I wrote about Kniittiing (A knitting video game for the Wii, seriously) got picked up by CRAFT and Knitty.  Which I was pretty sure it would, because all the Chum girls were chatting about it (that’s often how you know a story will be big, GO CHUM TEAM!), which is why I’m using the last skills I’d ever think to transfer from Marvel to L&V to interview the design team for Kniittiing (I interviewed a couple of video game people while I was at Marvel).

I am of course accepting questions, you can ask them here in the comments, or you can email me, or you can ask me on Twitter, or on Plurk.  Ask away people!

I’ve got my spies on you! May 27, 2008

So picking up about my life (from yesterday) I was going to say what I thought would be the most ideal thing in the world, but the truth is that I really don’t know anymore.  I guess it slipped my mind, but my life is kind of unsettled like that right now.

I do feel pretty accomplished, though, because my Twitter bot for the Daily Chum has been a huge success, and the flickr group I also started for the chum is looking like it might take off.  So that’s all well and good, but it will be pretty sad when the bot has more followers than I do, which it’s looking like it will happen pretty soon.  Also! I’ve been twittering haikus I wrote for Wendy’s Haiku contest over the past couple of days and I want people to vote on them here tomorrow, so be sure that you come back then!

On to the business of the day, my first book of the summer!  The book was Spies: The Secret Agents Who Changed the Course of History by Ernest Volkman; I really enjoyed it.  It was kinda panned in both the professional and amateur reviews on Amazon, but I suppose I’m just burnt out and easy to please because it was really fun to read.  The book is made up of very short concise biographies of significant figures in 20th Century espionage and they’re grouped according to what kind of agent they were.  In my experience (and I have some, I tried to create a fantasy-medieval era intelligence ring for a story) it is really hard to get any concise details on anything espionage-related (for good reason I think) but I feel like this book is a good way to become a bit more familiar with the language and terminology.  I generally prefer biography to straight up history because it tends to be more linear and I care more about it because there is a story.  I think this book is good for people with a general interest but no previous knowledge, it’s a little like reading the wikipedia entries on all of these guys, but I have derived hours of entertainment from reading wikipedia entries so I’m ok with that.  Also, because I bought the book at half price books, I think it’s a good way to do a little reading and discover what else I would like to read about in this field, I know now that I should look for stuff more specifically about historical espionage (there’s stuff on American Civil and Revolutionary War espionage) and if I were more interested in anyone in the book, I would then be able to track down longer biographies of them.  As it is I wouldn’t go seeking anything, but if I run across a biography of H.A.R. Philby or someone else at the library or HPB I would probably pick it up.

Summer… at last? May 26, 2008

School’s over, finally.  Second semester really kicked my butt this year, everything was pretty brutal but Creative Writing was the worst because I did so much writing for it that it took away all my drive to write elsewhere (like here or the chum) and no matter how badly I wanted to write my chum column or a blog post I just didn’t have it in me.  It was also pretty defeatist because I really am not meant to write fiction that literature snobs will like.  I’ll stick to popular fiction, where my desire to blow things up is seen as indulging my audience’s desire for excitement rather than a precursor to a murderous rampage across campus (imaginary violence is the next tobacco, mark my words).  On the bright side, my other classes were pretty good, my business law class actually has me re-thinking the path of my entire life (I did unexpectedly well).  Between doing well in law, hating creative, and my failure to actually do anything for the Chum being a lawyer seems easy, and more up my alley than publishing.

Speaking of the Chum, man, ch-ch-ch-changes going on over there.  I’m the new Online/Technical editor, which is nice, but I’ve always been wary of being labeled the tech-head and it’s not great for that.  I am the most webbish of the lot of us, so it makes sense, but I’d hate to get pigeonholed into something that isn’t really my strong suit.  Of course, I did build a pretty wicked sweet twitter bot today, entirely from the ground up, so I’m not too bad at the job, it’s just not the most ideal thing in the whole wide world.

I would say “speaking of the most ideal thing in the whole wide world” here, but I think it’s time to cut to the chase.  As you might know from the title of this blog and everything, I kinda like reading, and as it is summer the really god thing is that I have a lot of time to read, nothing else that I have to read (a problem during school) and I usually end up with a pretty good stock of books to read in summer.  So anyway, in order to try and make myself write on this blog/read more in general this summer I’m gonna gush about every book I read here on the blog. Not review outright, because I don’t want it to be a review thing, but more chronicle my feelings about what I’m reading.  I’m going to try and avoid rereading anything I read this summer (which means I read what I want, including stuff I’ve already read, but not gush about anything twice, except for one exception I’ll get to when/if it happens), and I am not going to gush over single issues of the comics that I read, but I will count trades and/or reading whole arcs together (like 5+ issues) but I will try and at least list the comics I buy each week.   Along with knitting and talking comics I think I should be able to have enough gushing to do to update 5 days a week or so, I’ve got a 4 book backlog to get through already and there are so many books that I want to read that content shouldn’t be a problem (and if it is I’ll do a series on every podcast that I listen to). The fun starts tomorrow, see ya then!