Hurricane Henn blew into town this weekend, and as his reputation would suggest–and my scars prove–Rich left my world with the lawn furniture up in a tree.

Rich, who like yours truly, was recently laid off, and decided to come up from New York City (from the Baltimore area) to attend a book signing by Niel Gaiman, a writer who made his initial fame in comics, with Sandman, and has since progressed onto novels. The movie Coraline 3-D is based on his Gaiman’s book.

In classic Rich fasHurricane Henn blew into town this weekend, and as his reputation would suggest–and my scars prove–Rich left my world with the lawn furniture up in a tree.

Rich, who like yours truly, was recently laid off, and decided to come up from New York City (from the Baltimore area) to attend a book signing by Niel Gaiman, a writer who made his initial fame in comics, with Sandman, and has since progressed onto novels. The movie Coraline 3-D is based on his Gaiman’s book.

In classic Rich fashion, he was supposed to be on the road on Friday at 2:30, after seeing Watchmen (for my review, see the Movies, TV and DVD section). The plan was that he was going to bring some of his key Sandman books for Neil Gamain to sign, but, due to a delivery screw up, Rich was delayed (without his planned books), and so had to scour his basement for something else for Neil to sign. Rich finally got on the road at 4 pm, and rolled into Manhattan by 8 pm. There I met Rich and fellow writer Jim Chambers. We chowed and had a few drinks, including some powerful martinis at the Westin bar at 43rd and 8th Avenue. After a few more beers at my place, Rich and I closed up shop around 1 am.

On Saturday, we went down to the book store around noon, and it took until 3 pm before we could get his books signed. But that’s when the real mayhem ensued.

We stopped off for a slice a Jay’s pizza, and then took the L train into the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn to meet Rich’s niece, and her boyfriend. We met at Barcade, which is just what it sounds like–a bar that has video arcade games. We sucked down a few beers, and played Frogger, Q-Bert, Galaga, Ms. Pacman and all the old-school classics. We then moved onto Alligator bar. It’s a dive bar which had one unique plus–for every drink you bought, you get a ticket for one personal brick-over pizza. We drank, we chowed, we shot pool.

Afterwards, Rich and I headed back to the city, but not before I took some bruises. The doors were closing on the L train heading back to Manhattan, so in my rush to catch it in time, I ran over there to stick my foot in the door, but since the platform was slick … [i]whamo! [/i]… I went flat on my back. I’ve got the bruises on my elbow and hip to prove it. Still, not to be deterred, Rich and I headed up to the Grand Hyatt bar in midtown, where my buddy Kevin is a bartender. Rich and I knocked out a drink each before meeting Kevin for a few beers around the corner. From there, Rich and I headed over to meet film-maker on the rise Todd Gilio (www.drawingwithchalk.com) at an Irish pub near Madison Square Garden, where Todd works as a waiter.

Finally, a few more beers and chicken fingers down, and Rich and I were headed back to Queens. Thankfully, I woke up just in time to catch our stop, or we would have woken up at the end of the line! We were both so hammered I had to literally drag Rich off the subway, until we could stumble back to my place.

By the time we finished the journey, we hit one book signing, five bars and drank at least a 12 pack each.

It was a hell of a time indeed, but I’m paying for it now.

Post edited by: rcolchamiro, at: 2009/03/09 17:16

The big question has always been whether the classic, 12-issue comic book series Watchmen could be successfully adapted into a movie. It’s a daunting task for sure, given how textured and complex the story is, and all the themes running through it.

This movie adaption is definitely faithful to the original story, it looks just like the comic, and there are some truly inspired moments. The opening montage is great, and

the best character in the comic–Rorschach–is by the far the best chaThe big question has always been whether the classic, 12-issue comic book series Watchmen could be successfully adapted into a movie. It’s a daunting task for sure, given how textured and complex the story is, and all the themes running through it.

This movie adaption is definitely faithful to the original story, it looks just like the comic, and there are some truly inspired moments. The opening montage is great, and

the best character in the comic–Rorschach–is by the far the best character in the movie. Night Owl is also particularly good. There’s a great prison sequence, and some of the visuals are stunning.

The director deserves all the credit in the world for finally bringing Watchmen to the screen in this incredibly ambitious experiment. But overall I found Watchmen to be a long, slow, dreary, humorless, poorly acted mess that simply doesn’t work well as a movie. At large, the movie lacks the comic’s charm. Many of the other main characters fall flat–and some dreadfully so–while many of the smaller, supporting roles are just awful. The script is another problem. Even though it’s taken almost verbatim from the comic, the words that read so amazing on the page don’t translate to the screen. They’re stiff and dull so that I almost always felt I was watching something fake. The sets were like that, too.

Even at 2 hours, 40 minutes, Watchmen may have been helped be being longer. There were too many quick scenes–trying to jam in so much information–that the plot was hard to follow, each scene seeming incomplete. The depth of the plot really needed more time to breathe, which was just an inherent problem from the beginning.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of individual pieces to like about this movie, and it’s a crazy experiment for sure, with some truly great moment. There are certain scenes, and a few performances, that I’ll always want to go back to. But as a stand-alone movie, Watchmen doesn’t hold together well. In the director’s noble quest to stay faithful to the comic, he seemed to forget that he was making a movie that has to work on it’s own merits. In all fairness, it was a very difficult undertaking. Unfortunately, it just didn’t all come together.

As I head into the home stretch on CROSSLINE, book number 2, I find myself wanting to finally be done, to get the point where I can say to myself, yep, this is it. First draft is complete. But as with many things, the closer we get to obtaining what we want, the more illusive it can seem. So to give myself an extra jolt, I challenged myself this weekend.

Typically, a good writing day–or what’s considered a productive writing day–is knocking out 1,000 words in a sitting. The idea being tAs I head into the home stretch on CROSSLINE, book number 2, I find myself wanting to finally be done, to get the point where I can say to myself, yep, this is it. First draft is complete. But as with many things, the closer we get to obtaining what we want, the more illusive it can seem. So to give myself an extra jolt, I challenged myself this weekend.

Typically, a good writing day–or what’s considered a productive writing day–is knocking out 1,000 words in a sitting. The idea being that if you can write 1,000 words a day for 90 days, you’ll have 90,000 words. And that’s a book. Right now I’m at about 75,000 words, so I’m close, but I’m not there yet.

Saturday was a good day. I indeed knocked about 1,200 words, so I did my job. But for Sunday, I summoned my inner Emmeril–[i]bam![/i]–and cranked it up a notch. My challenge was to write 5,000 words in one day. Yep. 5,000, or five times the word count for a normal "good" day.

When Sunday came along I was at the desk by 10:30 a.m., and with Liz out in the city visiting friends, I had the apartment to myself. No distractions, no excuses. And so I went.

Of course, the big question is: did I actually write 5,000 words?

In a word – no.

But … but … I did write almost 2,000 words, so even though I fell far short of my goal, I still wrote twice as much as on a normal good day. I feel pretty good about it, too. Going into Sunday I really thought I had a shot at 5,000 words, but as the day wore on and I realized I needed to do more plotting–just hammer out the sequence of events–than to work on the fine print, I found it deep in my heart to let myself off the hook.

It may not have been 5,000, but I’ll take 2,000 words any day.

Last night I attended a book signing at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble. They have a great events space on the third floor, which I didn’t even realize was there until I showed up.

The book signing was for Christopher Moore, one of my absolute favorite writers. He wrote my all-time favorite comedy, [i]Lamb[/i], and he’s got a few other doozies, including his vampire comedy [i]You Suck: A Love Story[/i], and his latest book which he’s promoting, [i]Fool[/i].

I saw Christopher MLast night I attended a book signing at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble. They have a great events space on the third floor, which I didn’t even realize was there until I showed up.

The book signing was for Christopher Moore, one of my absolute favorite writers. He wrote my all-time favorite comedy, [i]Lamb[/i], and he’s got a few other doozies, including his vampire comedy [i]You Suck: A Love Story[/i], and his latest book which he’s promoting, [i]Fool[/i].

I saw Christopher Moore a few years ago at a signing, and he’s great. He doesn’t do a reading, but gives a talk and then takes questions. Well, for anyone who’s never seen him in person, he’s hilarious. Wow. I mean, he’s just loads of fun. He’s really not so much a writer of humorous books, or an absurdist, which he is, as he is a true comedian. He’s that funny. He should be on Leno. This guy can hold court for an hour and have the room in stitches. He’s actually so good at entertaining his crowd that I’m more than mildly jealous.

(Okay, okay, enough with the fawning over him …)

Having been to one his signings before, I knew that he draws a big crowd. I expected at least 100 people, maybe more. In fact, I think more than 200 people finally showed. But I was prepared. I showed up at 6:30 for a 7:30 signing. I figured that was plenty of time to get a good seat, and, more importantly, be close enough to the front so that I wouldn’t have to wait too long to get my book signed after his talk.

Herein lies the problem. They way they had the space set up is that, when you first walk in, there were six rows of chairs–about a dozen across. But adjacent to those rows were another six rows of about 20 chairs across, and these rows were situated on an angle, so it was really hard to tell which set of chairs was going to be considered [i]up front[/i].

I guess I don’t have to tell you which section I was in.

%$#@!

Taking a chance, I sat in the first seat of the third row–of what turned out to be [i]the second set of chairs[/i]. So in reality I was in the ninth row, which meant that there was about 100 people ahead of me, even though I was there before most everyone else!

But it gets worse. In the second row of the front section, there were four empty chairs, with paper signs on them saying RESERVED. There was a musical event before the signing, so nobody seemed to know if the RESERVED chairs were from the previous event, or for the reading. Well, after awhile I decided that I was going for it. And, one of the chairs didn’t have a sign on it, so I said, "that sucker’s mine."

Not so fast. The event organizer–typical organizer ball-buster type–tells me no, no, no that’s reserved, you can’t sit there. Annoyed, I said okay, fine, not wanting to be the guy who makes a public stink about his seat (although I was really tempted). And back I went. But then …

The room was completely packed so that there people standing outside the event space because all 200 chairs were filled. And yet the Ball Buster let in four people–who got there [i]way[/i] after me–and put them in those empty seats in [i]the second row! [/i]I was so pissed! So naturally I said to the Ball Buster, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s not right. I’ve been here an hour and you already kicked me out of those seats."

And she said, "you’re right, it’s not fair, it’s not right," and then dropped off those four late comers, essentially telling me to stick it.

Well … Chris Moore was a great speaker, as always, and it really was fun. But underneath I was fuming the whole time, and when he was done, the line was just too long for me to wait, so I never got my book signed after all.

Post edited by: rcolchamiro, at: 2009/03/03 10:22

Five or six years ago I started up a writer’s group in New York City, with the goal of getting regular feedback on my early pages of [i]Finders Keepers[/i]. I put up an ad on Craiglist and interviewed about a hundred writers until I settled on the four would ultimately join the group.

We met once a week, reading and critiquing each other’s work. We were all at different skill levels and wrote n different styles, which, at the time, I thought was a good idea. Ultimately, however, the group Five or six years ago I started up a writer’s group in New York City, with the goal of getting regular feedback on my early pages of [i]Finders Keepers[/i]. I put up an ad on Craiglist and interviewed about a hundred writers until I settled on the four would ultimately join the group.

We met once a week, reading and critiquing each other’s work. We were all at different skill levels and wrote n different styles, which, at the time, I thought was a good idea. Ultimately, however, the group did not work out for various reason, and it broke up within six months. Such is life.

But one of the writers in this group–Robert Cabell–was working on an outlandish adventure story based on the James Bond series. Only the lead character was a gay hair dresser who also battled evil corporations. The name of the character was Jayms Blonde. The writing needed polish, but Robert had a funny idea that had potential if executed well.

Well, check this out from today’s news.

Crazy.

***

(from the NY Daily News)

The creator of a gay comic book hero accused Adam Sandler Monday of ripping off his idea for a blow-dried public avenger and turning it into "You Don’t Mess with the Zohan."

Author Robert Cabell sued Sandler, Happy Madison Productions, Sony and Columbia Pictures for copyright infringement in Manhattan Federal Court.

Cabell says "Zohan" steals from his "Hair-Raising Adventures of Jayms Blonde" comic book series.

"He’s gorgeous, he’s gay, he makes the bad guys pay," Cabell boasts on a Web site plugging his adventure hero. Cabell says he created Jayms Blonde in 2000 and published the first story on the Internet two years later.

It chronicles a former Navy SEAL-turned-hairdresser out to get corporate evildoers armed with an Uzi-style blow-dryer.

Cabell says he pitched Columbia on the idea of a Jayms Blonde movie in Los Angeles in the fall of 2007, around the same time Sandler was filming a "Zohan" disco scene nearby.

In the movie, Sandler plays an Israeli special forces officer who fakes his death and takes a job as a New York City hairdresser.

Post edited by: rcolchamiro, at: 2009/03/01 12:35

If there was ever a time when I needed to get away for a few days, a week, and just let the steam out of my head, now’s the time. Only problem is, as much as I need a vacation, I can’t take a vacation!

The collective stress of getting laid off, looking for a new job, networking, doing contract work, and just, you know, living … is making it just a tad difficult for me to relax. I’m trying, but let me tell you, it ain’t easy. Still I try.

Thing is, while I have a few pennies storedIf there was ever a time when I needed to get away for a few days, a week, and just let the steam out of my head, now’s the time. Only problem is, as much as I need a vacation, I can’t take a vacation!

The collective stress of getting laid off, looking for a new job, networking, doing contract work, and just, you know, living … is making it just a tad difficult for me to relax. I’m trying, but let me tell you, it ain’t easy. Still I try.

Thing is, while I have a few pennies stored away, enough to take a little vacation, I can’t afford–networking and job-hunt wise–to be away for too long. Sure, I could probably sneak away for a long weekend, but even that’s been problematic, because Liz and I are on different schedules. She’s down in Florida right now visiting her parents (who rented a house for the month), and I couldn’t go because I’ve got some contract work lined up, which is a good thing.

But Liz has also had to travel for her job, and sometimes the trips pop up suddenly, so it’s been really difficult for us to take any time away together.

Ugh …

Still, still, still … for someone who’s been laid off I’m actually doing pretty well. Like I said, I’ve been working almost every day since I got laid off, I’ve been networking like crazy and I’ve got a few irons in the fire.

And yet …

Beer me. Beer me now.

So far, I’m thankful to say, my unemployment has not been prolonged. I put in three days of contract work this week, with at least another two lined up for next week. There’s opportunity for continued work here, so who knows? It’s gone pretty well and hoping that will continue.

I’ve also got a meeting lined up for later this afternoon for an interesting opportunity. It’s a bit of a long-shot, but it’s absolutely worth my time to check it out. At minimum, I get to rub elbows with some prettySo far, I’m thankful to say, my unemployment has not been prolonged. I put in three days of contract work this week, with at least another two lined up for next week. There’s opportunity for continued work here, so who knows? It’s gone pretty well and hoping that will continue.

I’ve also got a meeting lined up for later this afternoon for an interesting opportunity. It’s a bit of a long-shot, but it’s absolutely worth my time to check it out. At minimum, I get to rub elbows with some pretty-well connected executives, and at best, there’s a nice payday in it for me down the road.

Beyond that I have a few other leads to follow up on. And as they say in the biz, it only takes one to make it work.

Post edited by: rcolchamiro, at: 2009/02/21 10:38

Maybe I should have been tipped off from the beginning, but my first day of work at what is now my old job, was March 31–the day before April Fools.

And my last day on the job?

Thursday. Feb. 12 — the day before Friday the 13th.

Coincidence? Don’t know. But it seems to me that maybe I was tempting fate by messing with the uber mojo. April Fools? Friday the 13th?

They say that timing is everything. Tell me about it…Maybe I should have been tipped off from the beginning, but my first day of work at what is now my old job, was March 31–the day before April Fools.

And my last day on the job?

Thursday. Feb. 12 — the day before Friday the 13th.

Coincidence? Don’t know. But it seems to me that maybe I was tempting fate by messing with the uber mojo. April Fools? Friday the 13th?

They say that timing is everything. Tell me about it…

With all the news of an economic downturn, pretty much everybody is worried that their job might be in trouble. If there’s any good news on that end for me, I don’t have to worry. Because I don’t have a job! I am officially unemployed.

My (former) employer eliminated my position as part of their corporate belt-tightening, so I’m back out on the job market. Thankfully, I’ve known for a while and so have been networking and going on interviews, and have a few leads. Also, I’ve got a lot of pWith all the news of an economic downturn, pretty much everybody is worried that their job might be in trouble. If there’s any good news on that end for me, I don’t have to worry. Because I don’t have a job! I am officially unemployed.

My (former) employer eliminated my position as part of their corporate belt-tightening, so I’m back out on the job market. Thankfully, I’ve known for a while and so have been networking and going on interviews, and have a few leads. Also, I’ve got a lot of people knocking down doors for me, so with a little good fortune I’ll be back on my feet sooner rather than later.

And the thing is, I understand all the reasons for cutting back, but when they cut me back, well, it’s just a little harder to be understanding! If there’s any consolation it’s that my situation had nothing to do with me. Corporate saw me as a salary on a balance sheet that they could eliminate. In a good market I probably would have gotten a raise, a bonus and a promotion, so my fate wasn’t personal. Just business, as they say.

Still doesn’t pay my mortgage, but it’s something.

I’m sure I’ll have lots more to say about this, but for now:

%$#@!

All in all I’m actually doing okay, and I fully realize that for getting laid off, I could be in a far worse position. Thankfully I have skills and experiences on a variety of levels and in several disciplines that opens a lot of doors for me. And I’m going to keep telling myself these things until a new paycheck comes my way.

As a parting gift, I picked up a nasty cold from someone in the office, so I’ve got that going for me, too. For now, however, I’m on the couch watching reruns of Scrubs, and at some point today I have to file for unemployment.

I’ve never been laid off before, so I’m just chalking this up to one of those rites of passage that comes along–hopefully just this one time.

I’ll keep you posted.

Check out the PHOTOS section for new pics added every day…

Post edited by: rcolchamiro, at: 2009/02/26 06:46Check out the PHOTOS section for new pics added every day…

Post edited by: rcolchamiro, at: 2009/02/26 06:46