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I just watched Sunshine. Yes, it was “pirated” – on account of it doesn’t premier in the US for another 5 months. Yes, it was a “CAM” which means someone set in a theatre with a camera, so the sound is echo-y, not to mention the amplified coughs and popcorn rustling from the guy sitting next to the camera. Yes, the picture quality wasn’t great, which is probably too bad on account of all the special effects required by the story.

Yes, it made me cry.

Excellent, excellent movie. For a while, the bad picture and sound and distortions and distractions were almost too much, but at some point during the movie, the story and the characters were so much more compelling than the delivery method was bad that I was on the edge of my seat. I noticed at some point that I had actually begun to care about some of the characters (even though I couldn’t always make out their faces, or what they were doing). I know CAMs are horrible, horrible experiences, and as a general rule I don’t bother to download them. But I was too excited about seeing this film to resist.

You should go see it. Pay for this movie.

If you live in the UK, where it is in theatres, go see it now. If you live in the US, see it in September. I cannot wait to see this one on the big screen, I cannot wait to be immersed at full quality in an experience that was able to grip me so powerfully through such a terrible delivery.

So, *poof* there went the money from the tax returns, I just applied online for my ISBNs. I also ordered my new business cards (two-sided, Modern Evil Press on one side, wretched creature on the other) this weekend. I also bought $40 in hardware for my paintings, which I already mentioned at least part of. And I’m buying supplies for other arms of my marketing efforts as I go. Money, money, out the door.

So, after I get my ISBN prefix assigned, I can start assigning ISBNs to my books, and after I do that I can register them with the Library of Congress, and after I do that I can apply with Lightning Source (a subsidiary of Ingram, which combines print-on-demand with international distribution so small presses and out-of-print and small market books can be available as though there were thousands of copies sitting around warehouses, which I hope to do business with), and after I do that I can order the fancy new “real” versions of my books and send them to the Library of Congress and for Copyright registration, and can also form a business relationship with Amazon.com. See the forward momentum which was held up because I kept irrationally putting off spending the nearly $1k to buy the ISBNs?

So, wanna buy a book? I’m going to do my best to compel you to buy one or more of my books soon. I have 34 books (from seven of my eight available books) on hand right now that I need to sell (to fund some of the rest of that forward momentum I just mentioned), and sell relatively fast. More on that later. For now:

Yay, I’m a little over two weeks from being “officially” a publisher!

First, I’d like to point out that I seem to be using my Google Calendar as a personal journal (or “blog” as the kids call any sort of online writing these days) lately. You’re welcome to read it – I find the whole thing quite useful, generally – though I haven’t made my calendars public, so you’ll just have to ask me for an invite. I’m using my gmail account though, not my modernevil.com address, so when you try to add my calendar, it’s under tmcclanahan (at gmail dot com). I like to include details, so be sure to look at the descriptions and comments on each “event”. They’re like time and event-specific journal entries, laid out with the flow of time as the organizing principle rather than the flow of text.

Let’s see… what next… Saw 300 tonight… it was … good. I’m thinking of going to one of the screenings tomorrow of The Last Mimzy – that’s really caught my attention, somehow.

I’ve been struggling with a couple of paintings lately. I turned one of them into a painting about how I was struggling with it… I’m not any happier with it now, it certainly doesn’t contain the answer to the question I forced into its mouth, and that’s the problem. It’s like I spent the last two months painting a painting about the problems I’ve been having painting the painting itself. I’m thinking it must be called ‘…and why?‘ (which makes more sense if you can see it, I think). I have another one that I did part of long, long ago, and have been struggling with for not less than a month… At one point, a perceived problem became an anxiety attack multiplied by being angry with myself for fucking it up, and I hurt myself trying to correct it only to learn later that it may have been fine anyway, and my corrections made the prior work less appealing. The things I’ve done to it since then … I just can’t get happy with this painting.

Which doesn’t mean someone else might not like it. One time I made a painting that I disliked so much that I just started painting over it, and I didn’t like how the painting over it was going, so I started trying to cover that up, and it was just getting worse and worse by stages, and I decided the next thing to do would be get out the white paint and go-for-blank… but someone saw it behind the counter and against my protests purchased it. And hangs it in their home. So maybe someone will like this one, too. At this point … well, I could go back, I could spend some time touching up this or that, get it back to close to where it was before the freak-out, then go from there and see if I can get it to where I was originally aiming, but … the whole procedure … the freaking out, the anger and resentment and frustration and anxiety I had about the whole thing, especially under the cloud of this other painting that’s been driving me mad, really changed the vector of the work. Now I’m exploring … where do we go from here? Where can one proceed from disaster? Do we cover it up, do we restore things to the way they were before things changed, or do we find a new path, try to embrace our new history and move forward without erasing it?

I suppose I’m going to have to write something to go with the painting. I don’t think that the journey will be as obvious as it is to me. I’m not sure people will see it at all. It seems very dark, and every time I work on it, it seems to get darker.

Continue reading Blah, blah, blog

I have a friend who did one of those “meme” things, and I’ve never been very good at those “meme” things, but this was a particular sort I’m particularly … odd at. It walks you through a series of questions and tells you things “about you” based on the sorts of answers you give, and so it’s like one of those tests I basically don’t bother posting my results to here, because I think they’re silly and usually can’t find an answer that suits me. This one, however, was one of those which walks you through a narrative, rather than just throwing multiple choice questions at you. I do terrible at those, too, sometimes my responses to the prompts taking me (quite naturally) way out of the narrative they thought they were directing, but my mind certainly builds an interesting and distinct story from the prompts. So … results, whatever, here’s the narrative, as I imagined it as I read the questions. (My friend’s original post is here, though you can’t see it if you aren’t her friend, too, so I’ve copy/pasted the original instructions in below my story, if you’re interested.)

     It is a warm day, but the shade of the forest instills the air all around me with a calm coolness as I walk. The sounds of nature are diffuse, gentle, welcomed almost as silence in contrast with the everyday aural congestion of civilization. My shoes’ light, rhythmless addition matches well with the environmental background noise and connects me with this place. Occasionally, preceding a gentle breeze weaving through the trees and across my skin, there is a sound like the waves of the ocean breaking at a distance; the leaves and branches dancing playfully in a cascade of motion that sweeps across the forest the way the memory of a child’s laughter sometimes sweeps across my mind.

     As though he’d the same thought as me, the young boy who walks beside me releases a brief, delighted laugh to join the air that tears the sound playfully from his lips and frolicking through the forest. I smile and look at him as we walk, pathless, between the trees. We share a mutual silence as we each enjoy the beauty of nature in our own way, but glad to be together. Looking at him should feel like looking backward or behind – he is myself as a child – but instead the moment feels timeless and eternal, present and future at once, not looking backward but reaching forward with the best of me. The air is crisp and clean as I breathe, refreshing and invigorating and helping me feel as though I were still the youth at my side.

Continue reading …the sound of laughter

So, I had an email conversation today that really upset me. Not that there was a really (really) good reason for me to be upset, just that I was already having a reasonably bad day, and then this sortof shoved me into an intense and prolonged anxiety attack. (Which, if my documentation can be trusted from inside said attack, also included behaviour symptomatic of Asperger’s.) The drive home was calming, largely because most of the driving I do is calming. I should post about that, too. Anyway, I’m still a bit on edge, even after talking on the phone with Mandy for the last couple of hours and otherwise working to continue calming myself after getting home, but largely I’m okay-ish now.

Really, I probably ought not to have reacted this way at all. But … here’s the emails (with the other person’s name removed):

Continue reading Bad evening tonight…