Day: June 8, 2010

June 8th

All I know is, today was Tuesday.

I didn’t sleep so great last night, waking up sometime after 3 am and finding that I was, amazingly, wide awake and unable to get back to sleep for at least another half an hour. That I didn’t oversleep this morning is, in itself, a minor miracle.

Beyond that, it was a pretty boring day. This evening, after a longer short story stalled out on me, I brushed off a shorter piece that had been rejected back in late March and sent it out again. We’ll see what comes of that.

Onward, now, to Wednesday.

Tuesday various

  • I don’t imagine this is going to end well — FlashForward fans plan to fall over and act unconscious:

    According to Variety, fans of the show will assemble in front of ABC network and affilate offices in New York, L.A., Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta on June 10 and for 2 minutes and 17 seconds are going to pretend to be passed out—just like the 2-minute-17-second blackouts on FlashForward.

  • Am I the only one who thinks “celebrate originality” is maybe a weird tagline to an ad that basically just repurposes the Star Wars cantina scene?

  • I’m not sure I agree with everything Christopher Miller suggests on how to write a rejection slip, but I am amused by his contention that “rejection slips are the most widely and attentively read short literary genre.” [via]

  • Warren Ellis suggests asking these important questions when writing:

    1) What does that character WANT?

    2) What does that character need to do to GET what they want?

    3) What are they prepared to DO to get what they want?

  • And finally, a fascinating profile of Haim Saban, still perhaps best known as the man who (curse him) brought us Mighty Morphin Power Rangers [via]:

    At twenty, while he was serving in the Israeli Defense Forces, Saban made his entry into show business. He told the owner of a swimming pool where a band played that he was a member of a far better band. Saban didn’t really play an instrument, and he didn’t know a band. But he found one, and took the businessman to a club to hear it, claiming that he wasn’t playing because he had hurt his arm. He named a price that was double what he had learned the band was making, and then approached the band members with his offer and his condition: let him join. “They said, ‘For double the money, we’ll figure the whole thing out.’ ” He eventually learned to play the bass guitar a little, but occasionally during the first few months he performed with both his speaker and his microphone turned off.