Merry Day After Christmas!

My Thoughts on the New Batman Trailer, Visualize

Commentary courtesy of me. Screenshots taken from the amazing new trailer for “The Dark Knight Rises.” You can watch it here:

Tags: batman, christian bale, christoper nolan, the dark knight, the dark knight rises

Pulp Trash

“Accordions & the Men Who Play Them & the Women Who Love Those Men” was a nasty, sarcastic book written in very plain english. It’s no surprise, then, that it would end up on a little girl’s bookshelf.

The sarcasm and irony was lost on the little girl and she merely considered it the story of a great adventure. She longed and hoped for that kind of adventure in her life.

Years later, when the fate of her world was in her hands, it was the memories of herself as a little girl and that book kept her steady. The existence of that stupid, throwaway story to her made it more important than anything else that was ever written before.

She re-read it again recently. It was still as moving to her as the first time, even with the camp. She’ll always be really into the story of accordion players and love, even if it’s not meant to be taken seriously.

Today’s flash fiction story was prompted by Jess Kirby, via Twitter: accordions & the men who play them & the women who love those men.

Delivery Guy

A weed delivery guy’s job is oddly prone to developing friendships. Most everyone is on a schedule for when they pick up. You’re on a schedule when it comes to your delivery hours. Within a few weeks you’ll have a good idea of who’s ordering and where they’ll be, before your shift even begins.

So you get to know these people. And, because only people with expendable income ever bother to pay the weed delivery premium, these are good folk that you can be comfortable around. It lets you get intimate.

But at any moment it can all be ripped away without a chance to say “bye.” It happens every couple of years. You’re doing fine and then a wrong turn or a red light and the cops are all over you. You go away. Someone else takes your number and your customers get their new guy — after all, you were once just the replacement for a guy who went away — and you still wonder: “do they ever think about what happened to me?”

Today’s flash fiction story was prompted by @effedparkslope‘s tweet: “weed delivery dudes in Park Slope. GO.” I just so happen to write for Fucked in Park Slope so that’s extra reason for you to go check them out.

The Cow’s Moo

Note: The following was translate from the bovine vernacular.

“Your sons are going to kill you!” I shouted at him. But he didn’t understand it anymore than I understand the noises humans make. He knew I was agitated, so he took a moment out of chewing his straw and contemplating life (which is what I imagined him doing during those breaks he took to stare into space) to give me a reassuring pet.

That night I heard the gunshots. I imagine it happened how I saw the big son pantomime to the dumb son (they have a harder time grasping the human language than I do): they’d shoot the father while he slept, then they’d stage it to look like a robbery.

I’m not sure why humans do that to each other. All I know about humans, now are:

1. The sons run this farm now.
2. I miss my friend.

This website has crossed the one year mark and I celebrated by missing last Thursday’s post and this Monday’s. But I’ll try to make it up by posting a flash fiction story every today thru Friday. That’s four stories! And I’m taking suggestions. You could give me a word, an idea, a character, a plot, a pictures, or whatever you want and I’ll write a flash fiction story inspired by it. I’ll be taking the first three suggestions that make their way to me. You could post a comment here, twitter at me, email me… whatever.

This first story came from a tweet by Jonathan MacFarlane. When I asked for someone to throw out an idea for my flash fiction story he tweeted back: @j_macfarlane A cow that knows a terrible secret but can’t tell anyone because it’s a cow.

New Feature: Comic Book Club Highlights

Awesome art by CBC guest Cliff Chiang

A while back I wrote about Comic Book Club, a weekly show at The PIT Theater here in New York. It’s a weekly, live comic book talk show. I’ll be writing up a few of my personal highlights every week I go. Normally this feature will be included in tandem with another post but for this first one, they’ll have ROSHOW.net all to themselves. So, without further ado, my highlights (in no particular order) from last Tuesday’s CBC:

1. I don’t remember what this was in reference to but Pete asked a question and ended it with a totally straight faced, non-ironic delivery of “no homo.” I’ve never heard anyone actually say, other than Kanye West. Awesome.

2. Alex’s reaction to the X-Men porno being named X-Men: A Porn Parody, when the obvious title is XXX-Men: “that’s disgusting.” It really is.

3. Everyone making fun of M. Night Shyamalan joining twitter, especially whoever said “he was good until he started putting himself in more of his tweets.”

4. Cliff Chiang being the guest. His art work on Wonder Woman rocks. Everyone should be reading that book.

5. My buddy, Andrij, taking home the $25 giftcard to Midtown Comics.

BONUS! My low-light of the show: the douche in the audience who broke his glass in the middle of the show. That douche, by the way, was me. It happens.

You can listen to the whole thing right now by checking out their website where they post a podcast of the show.

Tags: comic book club

30Character 2011

November is over and with it goes the 30 Character Challenge. Last year it was quite literally a life-altering event for me. This year, Mike and I managed to get 10 characters done. Sounds like a step down, huh? Well, you’d be very wrong if you thought that.

We knew there was no way we’d come close to 30 but we took the challenge anyway for fun. And fun it was. But this is what I realized last night after posting our tenth and final entry: goddamn, I fucking love the stories I wrote this year. Even more than what I wrote last year. It made me stop and realize how far I’ve come. It made me realize that I’ve done a lot more than just write a lot over the past year; I’ve improved and I’ve made significant strides towards closing what Ira Glass of This American Life describes as the creativity “gap”.

People say shit like “write the stories you’d like to read.” Well, the 10 characters I did finish are stories I would love to read. So I feel like my attempts to take on the challenge weren’t just successful, I think they exceeded my expectations.

Here’s a look at our 10th and final entry, Mernok. You can find the rest on the 30character website. Thanks and rock on.

Mernok:

Billions of light years away, a body of water trillions of times Earth’s size exists in space. The center of this unique celestial body is a pulsing quasar. Misguided Earth scientists, never once considering that there could be intelligent life there, built an unstable wormhole connecting our corner of the universe with that quasar. Although they only managed to maintain the bridge open for a matter of microseconds, the results on the other end were catastrophic.
An advanced amphibian society had developed near the quasar over thousands of years. A group of their own scientists, on a standard data-gathering expedition, were ripped from their home world and pulled to Earth through the wormhole bridge. All but one, Mernok, died in transit. In a blink of an eye, Mernok found himself alone, without any of his own kind, on a strange planet. His initial reaction was rage and hostility. He abandoned all his advanced intellect and let loose with the primal, unstoppable rage his species was capable of.
Before Mernok could anything he might later regret, a group of Earth’s heroes lead by Revenger subdued him. Their nobility brought Mernok to his senses. To repay them, he pledged to use his skills as member of their heroic community, at least until he could find a way back home.
Today, Mernok is known as one of the most brilliant scientists on our planet… and one of the fiercest warriors too. He dreams of the day he can solve the problem of creating a stable wormhole and return home to tell his family about the adventures he’s had on Earth.
[Fun fact: there actually is a body of water surrounding a quasar, 12 billion light years away from Earth. Check it out.]