I’ve been really, really busy and haven’t really made it to the Saturday night art zooms for a while, but I did buy a couple of new sketchbooks with the goal of filling them over the summer. One’s going to be a summer project with my son, I hope, just fast sketches stuff, and the other is a smaller one for me to just pick up whenever. So I did a couple sketches this week. My rules were “no more than ten minutes and no erasing.” (Actually I did 3…
Picoreview: Hit Man: fairly entertaining I like actor Glen Powell, and the reviews said he was good in this Netflix Original (at least, I think it’s a Netflix Original; it’s on Netflix, anyway), which they also said was sexy and funny and stuff. To my surprise, it’s actually pretty sexy, which is very unusual for modern movies. And it is funny, if also sort of over-the-top unbelievable in ways that I didn’t just settle into, but instead kept kind of looking askance at. But it’s also apparently sort of based…
Last week I had to go down to Dublin, and a friend brought me out to lunch to celebrate having signed with an agent. We went to Bar Italia, which is fantastic btw, and when the waitstaff arrived to ask if we’d like to look at a dessert menu, my friend said, “Yes! We’re CELEBRATING!” They asked what we were celebrating, and I explained I was a writer and I had just signed an agent after looking for one for a very long time. They gave me, and then my…
Look, this is neither here nor there, really, but some friends have suggested I’m some kind of weird supertaster/smeller or something because I find wine and coffee and several other foods so off-putting*. I’ve never put much credence into it, but: I can’t use some of our silver forks because as they oxidize they begin to smell like garlic, and it’s disgusting when I’m eating not-garlicy food. Nobody else in the house notices this. I can only use certain dishwasher tablets because there are some lemon-scented ones that leave a…
Along that whole topic of ‘books don’t have shelf lives…’ I’ve been aware of Julie Czerneda’s books since they first came out, and somehow just sort of hadn’t ever gotten around to reading any. I specifically remember the title A Thousand Words for Stranger, which I still think is a great title, and I specifically remember the cover art for the Species Imperative trilogy. Well, the other day, book one, SURVIVAL, was on sale at Kobo, so I thought “yes I should buy this” and I did, and read it,…