Wednesday, July 13, 2005 Taking care of business Three hours until I leave for Comic-Con and parts beyond. Plenty to do. Too much, in fact. AUUUUGH. But here. For those who will miss me while I'm gone for the next week and a half: The new HEARTtaker site is up, complete with the artistic stylings of Pete Mitchell, the artist I've been working with. Good times. The site design needs some work, I know. But given the two hours I had to complete it, I'm okay. Like everything in this world, it's tentative. Also, behold: My Internet acting debut! I and my team made this entry for the MAYDAY 24 Hour Film Fest last (wait for it) May, and while I won't say it's genius, I'd like to see you do better in 24 hours (if you have done better in 24 hours, well, shut up). And hey, if you live in LA and you don't participate in the next MAYDAY contest, well, Jeb, I don't even want to know you. This entry brought to you by panic, fear, and tardiness. Be back soon, dudes. | permalink Monday, July 11, 2005 SMRT-TV: Vol 1, Issue 8 is online! | permalink Friday, July 08, 2005 One of those entries where Liz just bitches and moans about her life, rather than appreciating the many good things that she has going for her My Comic-Con press pass apparently didn't go through, and thus my ability to go to Preview night, among other things, hangs in the balance. I am Not Happy. Sick iPod has been sent off to Apple Mothership for repair. It will hopefully return lively and sprightly and before Wednesday, when I leave for Comic-Con and a week with the family. Knowing my luck, this will not happen. I have three days to finish this script rewrite which is officially Kicking My Ass, and may not even be good enough to send into the fellowship competition it needs to go into. This fellowship could be Very Good for me, and no I am NOT putting myself under too much pressure, but if I don't get the fellowship then ALL IS FOR NAUGHT. I've been getting argumentative on the phone when talking to customer service representatives, and this makes me not like myself. I mean, harrassing people who are being paid minimum wage to talk to annoying people like me? Poor form. Bad karma. But I now understand why people do act that way towards customer service representatives. Sometimes, the world is dumb. Sometimes, somebody else ends up taking the brunt of it. For example, take this week. G8 concluded "with strides towards maybe making change someday," Bush probably gets to appoint two Supreme Court justices, and my favorite public transportation system in the world was bombed. And I was on the phone with AppleCare for thirty minutes before they caved in and agreed to give me free shipping on my iPod repair. It's not a just universe. But soon, I'll be able to tune it out again. | permalink Saturday, July 02, 2005 Where no one genre boldly goes I really don't care about genre distinction. This is a fact that I've come to terms with, yet still find awkward to articulate; it's hard, to put labels on things and make them stick, but it seems to be something that other people do very easily, and often. The stuff I write personally very rarely falls into one box or another; I tend to just call it "genre" because that encapsulates sci-fi and fantasy and horror and romance and all the other delightful bits that make up all fiction. I set out to write a thriller and ended up writing a family drama with knives and guts and guns; I went for romantic comedy and found myself in a fictional city, where luck is a tangible element. Right now, I'm writing sci-fi, straight up Adventure In Space with rocket ships and dead alien civilizations. But it's also a coming-of-age teen drama. It's also a love story. It's not just one thing. This is all a long-winded way of saying that I don't get the outrage over Margaret Atwood defining her work as separate from sci-fi. I certainly understand that comments like those collected here come off as dismissive and broadly general; if I really cared about loving sci-fi as a genre, I'd be offended. But she's not wrong about those cheesy 50s sci-fi movies and novels. Star Trek is more speculative than she's giving it credit for, but its use of technobabble is not only distracting but crippling on occasion. So maybe it's unfair to lump it all together, the pulp and the literature, the cheap thrills and the deep thoughts. Maybe it's unfair to put any labels on this stuff at all. When I look at Atwood's opinions about sci-fi, I don't see a haughty literary figure dismissing the entire genre. I see a writer talking about her intentions, about the goals she's setting for her work, and the things that have come before. I see a writer who does not like boxes. I get that. And man, I wish I had time to better reason this out. Don't think I'm as clear as I should be. But it's sunny outside. And that's where I want to be right now. | permalink blog • archives • photos • about • contact This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. All content © 2004.