"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
More pearls of wisdom from recent spam:
“Japan refuses to accept a single export from the United States in meat & dairy produce! Now, what does that tell you? That Japan is snobby? Nope! That Japan citizens hate milk and meat? Come on, you know better than that!”
“Tip: Make sure you keep batteries in sets. One bad battery will upset all the others!”
I’m sort of half joking when I say it, but the frustrating thing about movies is that they’re not collaborative, all you do is sit there on your ass and watch them. Books are very collaborative, they invite the reader to do half the work, but the problem with books is, they’re so full of words. What I like about comics is that they invite the reader in to collaborate just like a book, but they move with the acceleration of a film, and that makes them extremely fun to play in.
So apparently Jane Fonda dropped the dreaded C-word* on the Today show last week. They bleeped it when the show was re-run on the west coast a few hours later, and co-host Meredith Viera went on to apologize to the viewers at home.
“We would do nothing to offend the audience,” she said.
Well yeah, but that’s sort of the problem with the show, now isn’t it, Meredith?
* It’s “cunt,” okay? I’m sorry if you’re offended, and I’m not arguing that it’s the sort of thing that does belong on daytime television, but it’s just a word. Maybe Meredith Viera should try reading this on the air.
Remember the house in my neighborhood that I said had Valentine’s Day decorations up for a whole month (after more than a month of Christmas decorations)? Well now they have shamrocks up in all the windows for St. Patrick’s Day…which, of course, is still several weeks away from now.
I guess on March 18th they’ll hang Eastern decorations, but what they’re going to do after March 23 — Easter is fairly early this year — is anybody’s guess.
I put off mentioning this here until now — I guess so as not to jinx it before it was made official — but I kind of got promoted at work.
A few weeks ago, my boss surprised me by announcing at a team meeting that we were looking to hire a developmental editor. We have a lot of new projects coming in, thanks to some recent acquisitions and new directions the company is moving in, but our group has never had a developmental editor working for it. We’ve had assistants leave the company to become editors at other publishers (including one a little unexpectedly right before the new year), but I wasn’t expecting this for our own little group.
Still, it was too good an opportunity to pass up, and I applied for the position. So now you’re looking at the new Developmental Editor for Routledge Mental Health. I’m both excited and terrified by the prospect.
A lot of the work will be similar to what I’ve done as an Editorial Assistant over the past couple of years. The job is in a lot of ways the same position, only ramped up, as another DE at the company put it. I’ll be responsible for working one-on-one with authors to establish clear development plans for their books, actively reading and offering comments on manuscripts, actually getting in there with my trusty blue pencil while also sussing out the competition to help improve our books where needed.
When exactly I start, and when I stop being an assistant, is…well, still a little up in the air. My boss is still interviewing applicants to replace me in my old position, and that person is going to need training, and there’s going to be a transitional period as we work out exactly what the parameters of the new position are. I think, technically, I start on Tuesday, but we’ll see.
Like I said, it’s both exciting and terrifying.