Somyr Perry, whom we know from the following clause has fantastic taste in writing, discovered Ommatidia and made a meme out of it on her blogging community, Open Salon, which as far as I can tell is Livejournal for real journalists. Most of the posts are getting tagged or collected (except the ones that aren’t), and some of them are really excellent, that last in particular. You are awesome, Open Saloners! Now buy my book.
Category: Fame
Mars needs pull quotes
What are some of the brightest lights in webcomics saying about Brendan Adkins and Ommatidia?
–Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade
“Asshole.”
–Scott Kurtz of PvP, at the Emerald City Comicon
“Pretty slick, but my shout-out is not without motive.”
–Kristofer Straub of Starslip Crisis*
* Kristofer Straub was paid $50 during book creation for unrelated reasons
Day Whatever: Portland
I keep the Moleskine and the Micron next to my bed so I can write down story ideas I have while falling asleep, and on mornings after they usually turn out about half useful and half dumb. But even in their hastiness and abbreviation, I can almost always follow the signifying notes back to the image or twist that precipitated them.
I had two last night. One was a Chosen Ones story that I’ll probably do up for next week. The other?
“Six big diapers.”
I offer this to the world.
I live in Portland now. I had some exceedingly mild adventures in San Francisco, and took a lot of pictures that you will see sometime around 2018. Maria came to visit and that was really nice. Hugner is fine.
I’ve been in a self-imposed sweatshop lockbox all this week, trying to prepare for the big show: Stumptown Comics Fest, where I will be exhibiting with free microcomics and a six-word story completion marathon and, yes, Ommatidia, the first Anacrusis book. No, you can’t buy it online yet, not until I finish setting up the storefront. I am planning to have that up by my birthday (a week from tomorrow).
I realize that I have announced this far too late for anyone who wasn’t already planning to come to Stumptown to show up; trust me, that is all part of a strategy. Eventually I may even figure out what the strategy is. But on the off chance that there are any Anacrusis fans in the PDX, show up! There are a lot more reasons to do so than just me and my tablemates (“Cinema Sewer”).
Because obviously I’ve never ripped them off
I did that gag THREE YEARS AGO, THE ONION.
Sometimes I suddenly remember I have a nonfiction blog
I tend to cite Occam’s Razor in arguments at the slightest excuse, but it wasn’t until this weekend that I encountered Crabtree’s Bludgeon. It fits in nicely with my current working hypothesis that what we call “sentience” reduces to the intersection of apophenia and confabulation. I know that doesn’t actually explain anything, but it’s fun to say.
I have a lot of ideas about how that all fits together, and how the Bludgeon and the Razor aren’t really in opposition (look at me conceiving coherence!), and what they mean when set against the Theravada-Buddhist concept of the nature of suffering. Lucky for you I haven’t managed to jam them into 101 words yet.
Speaking of arguments, yes, I was, go back to the beginning, I updated my personal slang dictionary for the first time in like a year–this time with a phrase I actually use sometimes. I would use the other ones if anyone would understand them, which they wouldn’t, because they haven’t read my damn personal slang dictionary.
Follow-up
Mr. Munson wrote me a great email about The Implicit, and noted echoes of Naomi Shihab Nye’s Valentine for Ernest Mann–which I think we read in his class, and which I had completely forgotten until I read the “poem like a taco” bit, but had clearly absorbed and recycled. Just illustrates the point, really.
And Holly made two cakes (they were supposed to be a four-layer cake, but they got nervous and decided to be two cakes instead), one of which had this written on the dish around it:
Eventually he finds himself writing another pubic hair story, and realises he’s bored. He’s done three zombies, twenty-six otherworldly small girls, ninety-three ninjas; fifty states, every tube stop, all two thousand UN constituent nations, cutting everything he’s ever seen into 101-word pieces. He’s sent the small girls to Ganymede to fight the ninjas (the small girls won), and then set up a rematch deep within the sun (they united against their common enemy, the masked superwhale).
“Next time,” he says, eyes narrow beneath the unruly crest of his white eyebrows, “a hundred and two.”
People read my stuff and write about it. There is no better feeling in the world.