It’s hard to believe that I’ve been hating on The Phantom Menace for almost 10 years now. Though that’s not really true, I don’t feel strongly enough about Star Wars to really hate anything about it. I don’t even hate Ewoks, never did. I need a new emotion for how I feel, whatever is at the midpoint between hate and ambivalence. Because it’s not Star Wars that I’m rejecting, it’s the hype surrounding it and the industry that drives it.

Red Letter Media over at Youtube has awakened a sleeping anger in me. He points out how sloppy The Phantom Menace is as a story. Driven not by plot or character but by hubris. There are so many of us who’re out here carefully working on our art, trying to make it the best it can be but this hamfisted dinosaur is sucking up all the market share.

And he’s pretty damned funny too. I hope that hooker’s okay.

In seven parts: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven

King of the Vampyres goes to pound a stake in your ass prison.

The windows will have to be very thin to restrain his Form of a Bat.

After I spend 15 minutes cleaning shit out of my dog’s butt hair it’s hard for me to work up the will to make a sandwich. No matter how hungry I am. He’s hairier than a Greek sailor back there and we’re getting it trimmed tomorrow. He couldn’t wait 24 hours, could he?

Tu Publishing is hoping to kickstart within the next couple of days and I want them to. Because they’d be a good match for Picking Up the Ghost.
My endorsements are purely motivated by self-interest.

In my queries a lot of agents want to know about me. “What is it about you that makes you uniquely qualified to write this book?”

Nothing. Picking Up the Ghost is about a poor, African-American kid dealing with ghosts and voodoo in a run down Midwest town. I’m a white, software engineer from San Diego who reads too many comics. But I wrote the book anyway, I used research and imagination.

But they want to be able to market fiction like they market celebrity biographies. Someone they can sell on the talk show circuit. Like James Frey, the Million Little Pieces guy.

Are good writers really that interesting when you put them on paper? Or even better, are financially successful writers interesting on paper? Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Stephanie Meyer, Dan Brown. You know what else these people have in common? They’re not story material.

The only thing interesting about King was his cocaine addiction and that was after he’d hit the best seller list. J.K. Rowling’s life was a struggle but she kept that to herself even as the first Harry Potter book took off. She even kept her gender a secret at first. Meyer was a housewife with fantasies about 17 year old boys.

I’m not saying that these people aren’t interesting in conversation. In fact I’d love to talk to any one of them. I’m just saying their stories, the stories of their lives, like most of us, are pretty dull.

If my success as a writer is determined by how interesting my life has been then I’m doomed because I’ve been working as a software engineer on accounting software for the last five years. I have to believe that the agents are wrong. I’ve been rejected by over twenty of them so of course they’re wrong.

Or maybe I could fictionalize myself. It worked for Hunter S. Thompson, Baron Munchausen and Grant Morrison.

The pictures speak for themselves. We kept the ceremony short and sweet and everyone seemed to have a good time.

For the honeymoon we used the book Weird California as our travel guide, hitting The Queen Mary, Madonna Inn, Sutro Baths, The San Francisco Ghost Hunt, Hearst Castle and the Olivus Adobe.

It was my first grown-up vacation, I didn’t sleep on a couch once.

If anyone needs me I’ll be in wedded bliss.

Neil Gaiman’s in China which is weird to me. Because just about everything he’s written has had a ghost or spirit in it and as I understand it ghosts aren’t allowed in books or movies by the Communist government (which gave up on actual communism years ago) .

Why? Because they’ve been trying to suppress the Chinese superstition of ancestor worship and it’s easier to say “no ghosts across the board” than get into the ghost’s family tree.

This is been one of my success/power fantasies for the last couple of years; that Picking Up the Ghost is successful enough for my to afford to have it translated into a Mandarin ebook which I would distribute freely inside China.

I have politically charged fantasies.

Imperial Japanese Navy. US Marine Corps. Fight!

There’s a elegance to a simple idea well executed. Two sides, three character types, three islands all carnage.

• The guns sound like actual guns, that includes impacts, what I really liked was that gun fire from far away has that some muffled sound they do in real life.
• Someone should have told the voice actor that the ‘Fi’ in ‘Semper Fi’ rhymes with ‘pie’ not ‘pea’.
• This game is very lethal, guns actually kill rather than inconvenience, it also has a nasty tendency to respawning you right in the middle of the action. So you die alot. So you get frustrated. And you start to hate the other team. And the racism begins, it doesn’t matter what side they are. I find myself raging against the “Round-eyed foreign devils” half the time.
• I’m a horrible pilot. With machine guns and bombs the only way I can score a kill is by running into something.
• Everything breaks. Buildings, vehicles and plants. By the time the game is over the island is a burn wreck.

Well worth $15. The problem is since it’s a download I’ll never be free I can’t hide the disk from myself like I did with Team Fortress 2.

Not much.
Still looking for an agent and a publisher for Picking Up the Ghost.
Still getting married next month and we’ve been busy getting the last of the planning done.

Oh, I lost my job, that’s new.
And while I’m looking for work I’ve been studying Java ME for the Blackberry. Ultimately I’d like to develop a few apps for the three major smartphones; Blackberry, iPhone and Android. Then parlay that experience into a Masters program for interface design. I know a few people who are doing just fine in that field.

Yep, that’s what’s new.