Cornfield Meet

Where'd John go? And what about Jim's photos?

John Booth has moved his blog to:

http://www.johnbooth.wordpress.com

Jim Carchidi's photo galleries are still here:

A sampling - rock photos, interiors, features, news

Hank Williams, Jr.; Clarence Clemons; Joe Perry & more

The 501st Legion - Vader's Fist

Shuttle Atlantis Launch, Sept 9 2006

Guitar legend B.B. King

B.B. King opening his namesake Blues Club in Orlando

Daytona Beach Bike Week

Star Wars Celebration III - Indianapolis, 2005

Car Show - Celebration, Fla.

Chinese New Year 2008 - Orlando, Fl. (one of Jim's most popular galleries)

Eric Clapton (and Robert Cray) - live in Orlando, 2006

Daytona Beach Bike Week 2006

Florida Music Festival 2006, 2007 and 2008

Interiors and still life

MegaCon (Orlando) 2008

MegaCon 2007 parts one and two

Munny art shows one and two

Super Bowl Saturday - The NFL Experience 2009

Phil Noto art show

Phil Noto's "Victory" art show

Thomas Wynn & the Believers Real Big Deal

Sam Rivers in concert

Star Wars Weekends at Disney in Orlando, 2006

Star Wars Weekends 2008, parts one, two and three

Uberbot art show

Virtual Moving Van

Among the things the recent change in my life has given me is copious amounts of free time. While I'm hoping this doesn't last too long, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't glad at least to have the time to do some things I've been meaning to, like rework my blog and give Fieldsedge.com the old blow-it-up-and-start-over. The latter is still under way, but part of the former includes moving my blog over to WordPress, partly because it's a system I've been meaning to learn anyway, and partly, well, for budgetary reasons.

I'm still keeping this blog open, though, at least for now, because it remains an ideal home for showcasing the pile of tremendous photography Jim Carchidi has contributed to the site, and it seems to make more sense to keep his impressive galleries online here so that all existing links stay active than to undertake the effort of tearing down and rebuilding them someplace else.

So if all goes as planned, this is the penultimate post at this site. I figure I'll write one more with the new URL linked prominently, along with a full listing of Jim's viewable galleries.

>beep! beep! beep! beep!<  (That's the "backing up" alarm as my virtual truck heads out of the driveway and heads off down teh series of tubes.)

>ggrrrrrindsssschkkkklunk!< (Stick shift.)

See you.

Things that Matter

I spent much of today feeling a few degrees off-kilter.

Partly, I think, because I'm not going to work tomorrow.

That is, I'm not getting up, showering, driving 57 miles to Cleveland and going into an office. I mean, I've got PLENTY of work ahead of me. It's just that there's no boss but me here, boss, and there are phone calls to be made and emails to be sent and PDF clips to be corralled and seven million other things I'll probably think of between 2 and 3 a.m.

It has not been an unproductive day: I've got my WordPress switchover under way, and I've backed up all the Fieldsedge.com pages (I'm keeping the domain but plan to pretty much blow the site up and rebuild it). I've managed some email duties. Jenn and I took the dog for a walk before she went to work. (Jenn, that is.) And I've washed a load of towels.

But there's still so much organizing and planning and execution ahead that I felt strangely like I hadn't gotten anything done.

And then about 6:15, Kelsey asked me if I wanted to go outside and play catch. Honestly, I didn't. It was a little chilly. I was a little surly. And she said she understood.

And then we put some macaroni and cheese in the oven and went outside to play catch anyway because something in my head said, "Hey, idiot: This is important."

The sun slipped, my nose got cold, the shadows stretched across the backyard, and we threw a baseball which, every few minutes, would land in my glove with a smack hard enough to sting.

And I felt more than a little bit better.

Collect All 21! - A Good Word from Wales

Big thanks to Rob Wainfur of Retro Finds for this incredibly nice review of Collect All 21! (Also for bringing it to my attention in the comments to a post that was clearly not much fun to have to write, thus throwing some good stuff into the mix of the chaos that's going on right now.)

Rob's been posting some really fun 1980s stuff over at Retro Finds, including some reassuring evidence that I am not the only person on the planet who remembered "Automan."

(Hey, Rob - I'll see your Automan and raise you "Whiz Kids," which has both Tempest AND a Commodore in the opening theme sequence!)

Got time to check out my latest short story?

Yes. Yes, you do. It'll take like two seconds. Six if you decide to have an over-long blink in the middle, because this is a Thaumatrope short story written for the 140-character limitations of Twitter.

So, here's the link to my first Thaumatrope publication. It's the second of the two tweets today - and how cool is it that I'm right there with  Alethea Kontis? (Reason 42 to love Thaumatrope? Where else am I going to wind up on a contributors list like this?)

Could I have cut-and-pasted my story here? Sure I could! But if I did that, there'd be no chance of you getting sucked into the regularly clever and odd and entertaining science fiction, horror and fantasy Twitter feed that is Thaumatrope. (A heads-up - the hashtag designations either signal a Thaumatrope book, game or film review, or more likely, an entry into an ongoing serial - Alethea's entry today, for example, continues her Diary of a Mad Scientist Garden Gnome.)

I got the thumbs-up on this a few months back and have been itching to share. That its publication comes on the first day of spring and my last official day of employment (One of those, of course, was on the calendar for a long time. The other was, um, not.) could be a very encouraging sign, if one prefers to believe in such things. Which I do.

Quo vadimus

The good news is that I've been wishing for more time to work on my blog and creative writing. The bad news is that I've got it. By the freaking bucketload.

The Crain's corporate axe swung down from Detroit this week, whistling through the air over Lake Erie and landing with a thunk square in the middle of my desk in Cleveland. (Multi-headed blade that it was, it stuck itself in three colleagues' desks, too.)

It made for a surreal Wednesday afternoon in the newsroom and an evening at home spent with a legal pad and pencil within arm's reach at all times so I could jot down names, ideas and reminders as they came. I made several phone calls in which I found myself repeating assurances to and accepting encouragement from friends and family and hoping I truly believe it all myself.

I managed to go to bed before 11 p.m., but found myself wide awake from 1 to 3 a.m. today, then up again at 6:15 when my daughter got up to go to school.

And then the house was empty but for me, four cats and a dog. (And a couple hermit crabs, but they pretty much keep to themselves unless they smell us cooking spaghetti, in which case they're like tiny lions chasing prey. No, not really.)

"Well, well... Here we are." (Jobs come and go, but oh, Breakfast Club, I know you'll never leave me wanting for a suitable quote.)

So now begins a multi-level campaign to find work, hit the phone call and email circuit with a vengance, and (even more) shamelessly promote "Collect All 21!" and "Crossing Decembers." (And to start right in on the former, I've got some cool news about some updates to the project. But not yet...not...yet.)

Things could be worse. Far, far worse.

I'm blessed to have a brilliant and fully-employed wife and a healthy daughter and a complete lack of sharp wooden objects jammed into my nasal cavity. And for a writer looking for project work, I could have done worse than spending the past four years working a business beat which covered a huge swath of the advertising, marketing and PR industry across Northeast Ohio. (Friends, former sources and contacts: You are hereby notified that I'll likely be getting in touch, and you can finally talk as far off-the-record as you want.)

I've got no excuses now not to buckle down and go after that WordPress install I've been itching to try, write that list of blog entries I've got scribbled in a notebook, revamp Fieldsedge.com, get more into the workings of Ubuntu and the intimidating-yet-alluring Linux Command Line, and get my office fully re-organized.

Oh, and find someone else to pay me to write. Yeah, that too.

I actually had to take a 23-minute break after that last sentence, because even though I knew what I was calling this post, suddenly I got a mental smack of reality, and I needed to fight it with a dose of the final episode of "Sports Night," which did the trick nicely, thanks.

Quo vadimus: Where are we going?

Time to find out.

A nice surprise...

...just popped up on Twitter:

The Hero Factory: Don't Hold Out

The Hero Factory. (FYI, watch your computer's volume level if you're at work, unless you're in the sort of place that won't mind supersynth versions of '80s pop.)

I have yet to figure out if this is part of some ad campaign or not - sometimes it's tough to tell with Crispin Porter + Bogusky - but it is an awfully damn fun way to spend five minutes and wind up with make-yourself-into-a-comic-hero coolness like this:

Wings? Check. Corrective-lens mask? Check. Old-school joystick emblem? Check. Lightsaber? Well, DUH.

(The randomly-generated name? Could've been better. Still, I'd trade my vintage Lobot if I could get Sergeant Masked Knight here in an action figure form.)

Edit: According to this blog, this was created last December for CP+B's holiday party invite.

The first rule of Star Wars prequel enjoyment: Do not talk about Star Wars prequels.

    Ten years ago, I was:

    Twenty-eight years old, working at The Orlando Sentinel.

    Living in Orlando with my wife and daughter and our first house.

    Still a relatively new dad. Kelsey was on the verge of turning two. And yes, at the time we couldn't believe how fast she was growing, and yes, now that she's closing in on the last of her pre-teen years, I'm even more floored.

    Absolutely ridiculously dorktastically geared up for a whole brand new Star Wars movie!!!! (And yes, spoiler-free, baby, SPOI - LER - FREEEEE! Woohoo!) Oh, man, this was totally going to rockrockROCK!

    We all know what happened next. But despite the many, many flaws in Episodes One, Two and Three, I'm still emotionally attached to the Prequel Era because so much of my enjoyment of the saga over the past decade has had, really, very little to do with the movies themselves. It's been about things like road trips to Star Wars Celebration in Indianapolis, getting to meet people who worked on the original trilogy, watching my daughter grow to enjoy the movies,and summer cookouts with friends where we watch our kids fight with foam-noodle lightsabers.

    And this was a fun thing to explore in "Collect All 21!" - here's an excerpt:

    I was working in the Sentinel’s ad dummying department by the time the buzz was building over the first new Star Wars movie in 16 years.

    I’d read a fair amount of speculation about the movie – my buddy Ivan and I once mailed each other copies of the Entertainment Weekly issue with an article about Ewan MacGregor as Obi-Wan, neither of us having any clue the other was chucking the same thing in the mail – but when it got closer, I decided to stay spoiler-free, limiting myself to the occasional sterile Lucasfilm-issued statement or picture.

    Which means that by the time The Phantom Menace teaser trailer showed up online, I was hungry for it. I downloaded it onto my workstation the first chance I got, and it took me a bunch of tries because the connection kept timing out or locking up.

    When the words “Every generation has a legend” appeared, I actually felt a lump in my throat. God, yes: Every generation – my generation – and this was our legend, returning to the big screen...

    I watched it over and over and over. I downloaded a screensaver program that would play it silently on my desktop when I wasn’t there, and I’d come back to find people hovering at my cubicle. The paper’s movie writer asked how we could get the file up to his computer since it was too big to send through the office email system.

    When they showed it on the local evening news, I videotaped it. I may not have known what to make of it, but I had the thing memorized within days.

    When the second trailer came out and debuted on “The Today Show,” I videotaped that one, too. And grabbed it for the work computer. And when my brother-in-law and I went to see The Matrix, we called ahead to make sure we were catching a showing with the Episode I preview attached.

    That spring, my friend Jim went to the first Star Wars Celebration in Denver. He said it was a rain-sopped, poorly-planned crowded mess – and he had a blast anyway, so I was jealous as hell.

    In the mornings, Jenn left for work before I did. I’d get Kelsey ready to go to her grandma’s and drop her off on my way in to the Sentinel. She was a little over a year old, and we made a habit of watching the two videotaped Phantom Menace trailers every day as we sat on the carpeted step between our dining room and our living room putting on our shoes.

    One day, either before or after this little ritual, I quoted part of the trailer out loud to myself: “Wipe them out. All of them.”

    And my daughter, without hesitation, delivered the follow-up line: “Nooooooooooooo!”

    It was gorgeous. Not even two yet and already quoting Star Wars. That moment alone is worth the price of the Prequel Era. 

       

    Two seconds after re-reading those last two sentences, I just watched my daughter head out the door for another day of middle school. In her bookbag is a permission slip I was asked to sign last night allowing her to watch a movie in class for a unit they're studying.

    It's Star Wars.

 

   

   

   

   

   

Unrelated Moments of Awesome

While I was driving northbound this morning, the sunrise was preceded by a monumentally gorgeous sun pillar that rose just as I was reaching a stretch of highway where I could see hills and trees to the horizon. If I hadn't been on an interstate, I would have pulled off and taken a picture even though all I had was my crappy cellphone camera. The column shifted from deep red to a rich orange and finally butter yellow before the sun itself was visible.

And now for something completely different but still impressive and joyous: Recently, Artist Glen Mullaly pulled off an amazing bit of marriage proposal magickery involving a bookstore, an original illustration, and Ripley's Believe It Or Not. Congratulations!

Finally,Adam unveiled the full cover of "Deus ex Comica" today, and it's Awfully. Freaking. Schweet. Gonna look good on my shelf, that one!