Social media wizard

My favorite thing I heard on the subway this week: "Today is a holiday, so trains are running on a weekend schedule. There will be no B, V, or W trains. That's B as in Boy, V as in Victor, and W as in Water." Who in the world mishears the letter W?

I'm still doing tons of social media at work. Studies show that people are surfing the net via recommendations of their friends on social media a lot more than surfing via search engines. Here's a song from Rhett and Link about social media:



Yeah, since the T-shirt War, I've subscribed to Rhettandlink on YouTube and have been catching up on some videos. Here's some favorites: Drive-thru folk song, Space Junk song, Perfect Bathroom Trip song, follow up vlog about how Jamie from Mythbusters doesn't wash his hands, prank.

media news

Happy Valentine's Day

A bit of Red Dwarf

One of our authors at work is going to be on Craig Charles' radio show .

This week on Robert Llewellyn's Car Pool is RD writer Rob Grant and Llewellyn's new show Gearless is live.

Check out Danny John Jules' new YouTube channel.

Other media news

Splice is getting a wide-ish release in summer!

Saw the new comercial for this show:

I have mixed feelings about this poster. The slogan is cute and "a series of off-color conversations" is appropriate. But I remember how funny Ricky thought the poster for The Invention of Lying was because he was airbrushed to death on it. Looks a bit of that here too--did they fix his teeth on it? Also, the cartoon would be more accurate if he were wearing PJ bottoms than Jeans and a belt. Haha.

New preview clip about dinosaurs.

Live clips below...

This is probably my favorite one because Ricky and Steve absolutely lose it twice because Karl tries to remember the phrase about being a big fish in a small pond and ends up talking about a pond in "someone else's garden."

Karl tries to explain how babies are made via yogurt:

Oh, and I also saw that new tv show SURVIVORS. Tons of recognizable faces: 3 from Dr. Who, 1 from Torchwood, 1 from Demons, and even Phil Rhys who I haven't seen since the Disney Channel's Zenon. There was some potential with the subject of having over 90% of the world killed off in a flu virus, but none of the characters are engaging enough to bring me back. And the big mystery coverup seems like a superficial government conspiracy that's been done before.

Crazy Day

First of all, let's get this out of the way:

Happy Chinese New Year.

We had our "blizzard" this week. I didn't think it was that bad--just a bit of Wisconsin weather, really, but it's a blizzard to New York because they shut down all the schools. One man's snow is another man's storm.

Yesterday was a little crazy. I had an interview in the morning. I felt that it went pretty well, but time will tell. I've got my fingers crossed on this one because it's an excellent position with an excellent company. Granted, I would be sad to leave my internship at such a critical moment. They're giving me a title now, rather than just "intern" and way more responsibilities and some more hours. I'm social networking it up over there. You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter if you want. We have five imprints, so five facebooks (one, two, three, four, five) and five Twitters (one, two, three, four, five).

An then to make things really interesting, when I got to my internship after the interview, there was a building on fire literally around the corner from my job.

"NEW YORK -- An explosion in a transformer underneath a Manhattan sidewalk sent flames up the front of a landmark building Thursday, shattering windows and blackening the front of several stories. No injuries were reported." --silive.com

Time for a laugh

Comedians
Above is a drawing in my drawing journal of some of my favorite comedians--drawn with pencil, painted in Photoshop.

Page 1: Michael Palascak, Danny Kaye, Josie Long, Lee Camp
Page 2: Ricky Gervais, Dan Ahdoot, Daniel Kinno, Robin Ince, Derek Hughes

Job News
Exciting interview this week!

Animation
If you've seen our podcast, you know I dabble in animation. So, I'm always curious to see what other people are doing with animation. If you're interested in stop-animation or just want to have a good laugh, over on YouTube, Rhett and Link are being adorable and innovative with some amazing stop-animation with 222 t-shirts. I've pasted it below. You can also watch the behind the scenes special and buy your very own t-shirt from the video. This is pretty hilarious stuff.





More stuff to laugh at -- Karl Pilkington
Want a link to all the free downloads from the 4-season XFM radio show starring Karl Pilkington, Ricky Gervais, and Stephen Merchant? Here's the link on therickygervaisshow.com. Just pick the series and episode you want and click the jump drive image (or right click to save). You can also check out Pilkipedia for episode descriptions (more seasons on the orange/brown/gray box at the bottom). Want an example? Here's a clip where R & S try to get K to break the world record for eating hamburgers:

Not the best weekend ever

Well that was a fun weekend of lying on a mat in the living room for 24 hours. The kids picked up a stomach flu from school and almost everyone in the house got it, and as always, I get the worst of it. Thankfully it was only a 24 hour thing, but having not eaten anything in 48 hours, my digestive system can't remember what it's supposed to do with food, so it might be another day before I get my energy back.

When I had the strength to climb back upstairs to my room, I watched the behind the scenes features to Doctor Who The End of Time which just came in the mail and an episode of Life on Mars (the first six episodes are now on YouTube, which is a relief because my region-free DVD player broke and I only own the series in PAL). I've also just started watching Lost with my roommates. I know, I'm so behind the times.

Drawing Journal / Ricky & Steve's first film

I realized that I have quite a few pictures from my drawing journal that I haven't uploaded. It's hard to scan in the crack of the book, so I started taking photos of the pictures which makes them a little blurry and skewed, but not too bad. You can now view my drawing journal on this site.

Note: This is not all my drawings or even my best drawings. Just the ones that are in my journal that I started last year in drawing class. Here's a good one with some Karl Pilkington quotes:

(on the site you can click to enlarge)
That's Karl in the middle and Ricky and Steve looking perplexed.

Speaking of Ricky and Steve, the trailer for their FIRST MOVIE is now out. Check it out below. CEMETERY JUNCTION is about Reading, the little town where Ricky grew up. This is written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, but it is not a comedy like The Office.

My goodness, is there anyone who ISN'T in this movie? I even caught a glimse of Burn Gorman from Torchwood in there. IMDB says that Karl's to appear in the movie too. Don't know if that's true or not.

Week of Awesome Stuff

1. Okay, first off, the good job news is that I'm getting a lot more responsibilities at my internship and probably even more hours a week. With three days a week and clever budgeting, I might be able to break even each month rather than watch my bank account spiral down into nothingness, which is what I have been doing the last six months, especially with that $365 plane ticket. Oi! But now I'm in charge of the new social media strategy, which is pretty awesome, you have to admit.

2. I finished listening to the audio book of UNSEEN ACADEMICALS by Terry Pratchett. You can read my review on my writing blog. Want to win a personalized and signed copy of this book? Go over here and donate to Haiti to enter the raffel. Lots of other stuff available, especially if you like Harry Potter.

I also cartooned the picture above.

3. I finished reading the last two stories of NIGHTWATCH by Sergei Lukyanenko. You can read my review on my writing blog. I've also drawn the above image from the movie DayWatch where Anton gets ridiculed by his boss because he's a Light One drinking dark beer.

3 News and 3 Life

3 Things that Happened to Me

1. Trying to get health insurance. Turning out to be a slow process.

2. I did not get the job that many people were wishing me luck on, but I hold no grudge as I didn't have experience in that particular area of publishing. I hope they will invite me back for one of their new open positions because they are more up my alley.

3. Had to sit on a train with crazy lady. This poor teenage kid comes on the shuttle and sits down quietly, and this lady starts SCREAMING at him about how he's the anti-christ and is going to die today and should have never have been born. The guy ignored her until the next stop whereupon he switched cars.



3 Things that Didn't Happen to Me
Writing and Publishing

1. Amazon versus Macmillan -- childish spat
Click here for amusing coverage

2. Rest in peace JD Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye



3. Maureen Johnson talks about what it is to be a professional novelist




Additionally...

4. iPad sucks, says Hitler

Book signing

Do you remember a couple posts back, I said that I had just finished reading Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris? Well, Thursday, I went onto timeoutny.com because I'm getting a little stir crazy working only two days a week, and what's on the front page of the book section? That's right: Joshua Ferris book signing Friday night.

So I went to Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, which is this nice little shop with a modern look (clean white shelves and those dangling bulb lights). I get there 15 minute early and all the seats are already occupied. By the time 7:30 rolled around, there were probably about 50 people there--a very good turn out for 17 degrees and viciously windy.

Joshua Ferris came in and read two sections from his new novel, The Unnamed. This book is said to be as good as the first book, but very different. It is a more serious book about a lawyer who has an illness that causes him to sometimes start walking unable to stop himself until his feet literally can no longer take it. This affects his career and his relationships with his wife and daughter.

Ferris read what he said are the funny parts of the book, despite it being overall a more serious book. And they were certainly funny parts! One was a story about a rich man who cannot have sex unless there is a deadly snake in the room, a fetish that ends up getting a prostitute killed.

During the Q&A, Ferris said that he is not an outliner because if he comes to the page knowing what he wants to write, the chasm between what he wants to say and what he actually writes is so vast that he feels like doing horrible things to himself. It was refreshing to hear someone say that because, though I've never put it into words, I know this chasm well!

About The Unnamed, he says that the trigger was walking. He knew the book would be about someone walking before he knew anything else about the book. This is a nod to the romantic poets (I assume Thoreau can be counted among them, though he didn't name him). A very English passtime, walking.

He also talked about character development in Then We Came to the End. He met the characters as they appeared on the page, just as the readers do. Whenever he needed a name, he'd come up with something and then write the name in the back of the notebook (He writes long hand too!) for later reference. The characters are so well developed, I wouldn't have guessed at his method.

After the reading and Q&A, there was a book signing. Thankfully Ferris is one of those authors who seems, and likely does, genuinely want to be there. There are author signings I've been to where you can tell the author is tired or not really listening to you or was made to do this by someone else. But he was conversational. I bought his second book and got it signed. We talked about the spelling of my name and how I'd first run across his book at NYU.

Linkage

Random links:

Ricky Gervais, David Tennant, and Catherine Tate on Jonathan Ross Radio Show (you only have one week from now to hear it) LINK

Joshua Ferris on podcast LINK

Doctor Who TRUTH OR FAIL LINK