13″ Dog shown for scale and flair.

There are a lot more prose books than comic books this year and they offer a lot more inch per dollar. And that big Art of Warcraft book was only $15.

The Highlights

• Learned about trauma from the docs at BroadcastThought
• Grant Morrison panels are always awesome
• The Goon trailer is very promising, they promise that if someone gives them some money they’ll make the rest of the movie
• China Mieville is far funnier in person than I thought he’d be

Tomorrow, back to the grind.

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I gave it all of Picking Up the Ghost to process. I’m not sure this will make me finally read The Blind Assassin or avoid it forever.

I am blown away by Comic Con’s new scheduling website. You can select whatever events you want, see full descriptions, arrange your plan, see where your friends are going to be and then print the whole thing out.

Here’s where I’ll be during Con, come visit or attempt to assassinate me at your whim.

But I did walk away with two marked up manuscripts and I’m sure they spotted plenty of typos for me to fix and feedback for me to consider. One point that really surprised me, all three judges felt that for a young adult manuscript Picking Up the Ghost was long with too many characters.

Really? Because when I was in 5th grade I read all 700+ pages of The Chronicles of Narnia, with at least twice as many characters, eight times as many protagonists and whole mythical nations for settings and I know I’m not the only one raced though it in less than two weeks and loved every moment.

I send my congratulations to Nancy Klann whose manuscript Fate Carries Its Own Clock won for Best Unpublished Young Adult Novel a the San Diego Book Awards.

And, yes, that means that I did not. (grumble grumble grumble)

They just posted the names of the finalists:
I’m up against Nancy Klann’s Fate Carries Its Own Clock and Randy Morrison’s Seven Moon Circus.

My comics pull list is down to the two Green Lantern titles and three of the Avengers titles and I’m pretty sure I’ll stop collecting Avengers after they all start from 1 again. That’s the fewest comics I’ve read regularly since I started collecting comics. I’ve been trying to figure out why and I think it comes down to three things:

1. I’m waiting for the trade on more titles than ever. Only one title made the transition off the pull list, Fables. But when I pick up a new title I’ve been skipping the monthly all together, like with The Sword, Secret Six or Air.
2. I’ve gotten more discriminatory. I was reading some title far longer than I was interested in them, Supergirl, Teen Titans, JSA and JLA come to mind.
3. I’m not all that excited with what Marvel and DC are doing. Event fatigue is defiantly a part of this but both crossover events aren’t doing much for me. I can’t tell why Asgard is under Siege (see what I did there?) and in hindsight Blackest Night was written to bring twelve of DC’s pet characters back to life and I hate resurrections.

If Green Lantern is seeped in Brightest Day for another year I might lose interest in that title too. What’ll I do on Wednesdays at noon? Eat lunch or something?

by Rachel Bellinsky

Picking Up the Ghost is a finalist in the San Diego Book Awards for Unpublished Young Adult Novel and I didn’t have to sleep with anyone this time. I just finished printing and proofing three copies of the 441 page manuscript. Counting 1323 pages was easier than I thought. And I learned something about MS Word; if you’re going to print a large document wait until the entire file is loaded into memory before giving the order to print. Trust me on this.

My lovely and talented wife has been posting her flash fiction and lists on WordPress. Enjoy!

melissamilazzo.wordpress.com