Let’s have a show of hands: How many of you tend to be paranoid and pessimistic? Be honest now.

I listened to the latest Webcomics Weekly and found a great deal of comfort in Kris Straub and Dave Kellett bouncing worst-case scenarios off each other. Turns out if I’m crazy, it’s at least a manageable kind of crazy.

For example, I’ll paraphrase a brief exchange I had with my wife:

Wife: Hey, you know that doll I set out on the shelf yesterday?
Me: Yeah?
Wife: I looked it up online, and it turns out its actually worth something.
Me: OH MAN I thought you were going to say the cat broke it.

And that’s pretty standard fare. In fact, today I had to call the management company that owns our former apartment complex to find out why our security deposit hasn’t been returned yet. I’ve been dreading the call for weeks, each day imagining one more way in which they would get angry and want more money and yell at me and send me to jail and send collections after me and not want to be friends… when, in actuality, I spent a grand total of about ten minutes on the phone with a very nice woman who wanted to make absolutely sure I was taken care of. Weird.

Speaking of Dave Kellett, the man is brilliant.

So…what flavor of neurotic are you?

A couple of months ago, the creator of one of my favorite webcomics launched a website, with two guys I had never heard of, called Writing Excuses. I finally got around to listening to the podcasts yesterday, and I highly recommend checking them out.

Keep reading ‘Writing Excuses (dot com)’

Arthur C. Clarke died. I don’t consider myself a rabid fan of his (I haven’t even read 2001), but I own one of his books. I still haven’t even read the whole thing, which makes me feel weird for saying he has had an enormous impact on my imagination and the way I approach writing.

My first encounter with Mr. Clarke’s writing was a story called “The Nine Billion Names of God”. It was in one of my lit textbooks, though it was not assigned reading for the class. I was flipping through the book to get to the forgettable classic I was required to read that night and the title caught my eye. The author’s name looked familiar, but I didn’t know where I’d seen it before. I decided to give the story a go.

Obviously I wouldn’t be writing this if I hadn’t been mesmerized. The story was short, but the characters all had the kind of depth that lit professors gush over. On top of that, and probably the reason it wasn’t included in my class, the events that took place were a few levels beyond ordinary. This wasn’t another politically-charged story about a guy who experiences the same things I go through every day — this was an exploration of our assumptions about reality, played out in some unnamed mountains, with an unspecified religious order and a couple technicians from a computer company. It was different from the drivel that is force-fed to English majors. It was fresh. I wanted more.

Of course, school being what it is, I soon found myself swimming in papers and readings and forgot about the concept of “leisure reading.” It was more or less an accident that I stumbled upon the massive tome of Clarke stories. As I said before, I haven’t read the entire book. The thing is huge, and I had some other things I wanted to read — things that fit more neatly in my backpack. What I did read, though, was amazing. It’s been over a year now… I hope I can find that book when I move.