Wrote the first book by the light from this little lamp in my grandparents' basement when I first moved back to Ohio, 12 years ago now. Suppose it's poetic (for want of a better word) that it's now lighting part of The Paintshop. It'd be nice if some of the energy that pushed me to write that first book in five months lived inside its little gated community but yeah no probably not. Glad it’s here, regardless.
Spent much of the morning answering interview questions about animation and transmedia and I remain shocked – and grateful – that, 11 years after it came out, I'm still answering questions (and capable of answering questions) about a 300-page book I wrote in five months (distilling a lifetime of experience, of course) in my grandparents' basement with much of my research material (comics and big sheets of paper) spread across a pool table while dealing with the foreclosure of my first house, quitting smoking, and the general upending of my life and identity up to that point. Back to it.
MacroParentheticals 0089, a 2200-word tome on the tenth anniversary of COMICSTORYWORLD, is now in the inboxes of subscribers, so non-fic/zuihitsu morning brain is at low ebb but I can't let this bit of local-ish flavor go unmentioned:
An unnamed business on Canterbury Road contacted Westlake Police on Thursday, Oct. 13, at around 10:45 p.m. after receiving suspicious voicemails.
The individual contacted police after hearing a man leaving a message about "putting a five grand hit on another person."
"It's a five grand hit on him," the unnamed suspect said in the voicemail. "I don't care where he's at or what he's doing or who he's with."
According to Westlake Police Department, investigators discovered that the caller misdialed a person's phone number when he left the messages at the Westlake business.
"We weren't sure what we were getting into," Capt. Jerry Vogel told 3News, "if it was real or a prank or what."
A prank it was not.
And now I feel old - I'll be looking back on what I got right and what I got wrong ten years ago in this Sunday's 89th MacroParentheticals dispatch. You can sign up here, if so inclined.
Very little to write about here – newsletter weekend so I've spent the last two hours writing about writing (and COMICSTORYWORLD's tenth birthday) – but the daily discipline demands (alliteratively) that I write something here so: I remain utterly fascinated by the Superlocal and how it transforms my sense of time: though I'll have more to say, current fascination is how the things that give me most consternation are put into the context of 24 hours and truly, visually, amount to zilch when put up against the length of a single day. What a beautiful work of art. More later, probably – or maybe not, IDK.
MacroParentheticals0088 is in the wild... Macro0089 is in the planning stages (what I got right and wrong ten years ago in COMICSTORYWORLD)... I am out of words at present: the week ends / the week begins.