Favorite Game, not so favorite cereal.

Growing up (and yesterday) I loved Mario.  Mario was the coolest game that I was awful at.  It was the end bosses that got me.  And the water levels.  But I was pretty good at all of the levels that just ended with a flag.  None of this is pertinent except:  Mario.  Or, more specifically, Super Mario.

Over the weekend I found this sitting in the Kroger grocery:

Of course, I had to buy it.  It is SUPER MARIO CEREAL! How could I not buy it?

But, for the rest of you:  Don't buy it.  Is was Super Not Great!  I'd give it a 2 out of 5.

It tasted kinda like Frankenberry Crunch, but with less overt strawberry flavor, so it wasn't as awesome.  It also had a hint of Smurf Berry Crunch, which was THE best cereals from the 80s that turned to mush in 3 minutes.  But if you ate it fast it was delicious.  Super Mario Cereal was something of a blend of those.  My guess is this cereal could not stand up to Frankenberry or Smurf Berry because they were trying to make it pseudo healthy.  That'll ruin a good sugar indulgent cereal every time.

If you take a look at the fine print under the name you'll see something that struck me as odd.  "Naturally Flavored with OTHER Natural Flavors."  WTF does that mean?  What are the "other" flavors?  And what are the flavors other than the "others?"  I'm confused.

Also, and this is just a guess, but I think Kellogg's might be ashamed of this cereal.  They didn't put their name on it.  Usually the company name is plastered across the front of the box, but look for yourself.  It isn't there.  They must have known this was a poor effort.  I was halfway through my third bowl when I realized I had no idea who made this cereal.  For all I knew it was made my Inspector Arsenic.  I suddenly felt an urgent need to know whence came the foodstuffs I was stuffing into my food hole.  Finally I found it, clearly printed on the bottom of the box and in the fine print on the side.

I don't know.  It wasn't great.  I probably won't buy it again.

Editing

So, you’ve finished your first novel and you want to get it published.  What next?  As it happens this is exactly where I am.  I will document my efforts to accomplish this very thing and hopefully we can both learn from it.

Let’s talk about editing.  This is the most tedious part of the writing process, but it is necessary.  I read and reread my book until I had found and corrected all of the errors.  Most of this is part of the writing process.  When you are writing a novel you don’t write it all in one sitting and boom, you’re done.  You writing until you hit a wall and then you go back and you read and reread what you have written until the next piece comes to you.  While you are reading, you are editing.  However, after I was finally done with the last chapter and I was satisfied that everything flowed and made sense, I still had to read my novel three times before I found all of the errors.

Once I thought the editing process was over, I was still worried so I went through it one more time using MS Word’s search function.  I was looking for all of those homonyms that are technically spelled correctly, but are used incorrectly:

there/their/they’re

you’re/your

its/it’s

whose/who’s

Once satisfied that all of those were correct I scanned the entire story looking at every place where Word suggested my grammar or spelling was wrong.  Just because Word says it’s wrong doesn’t mean it is.  Word hates contractions and long sentences and passive voice.  Sometimes you cannot get rid of those without ruining the feel or flow of your text.  So take it with a grain of salt.

If you can afford to, hire an editor to read your book.  No matter how good you are, or how hard to try, you cannot be expected to find everything.  Neil Gaiman loves to joke that when he gets the first copy of a new book he wrote he opens to a random page an invariably finds an error.  It happens.  If you cannot afford an editor, but you have friends that can read quickly and know how to edit, ask for their assistance.  If you are financially capable, give them some kind of gift for their services.  Something to expedite their reading.   

If you don’t have friends, or your friends cannot be motivated to read the manuscript you gave them two months ago, then you simply must move on.  Time waits for no one and, it is my belief, that if you don’t publish your work soon someone else will.  By this I do not mean that someone will steal your work.  I mean that ideas are in the ether.  They are in the zeitgeist.  Your idea may seem brilliant and original, and I’m sure it is, but it is also someone else’s brilliant and original idea.  Reference “The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia,” by Samuel Johnson and “Candide” by Voltaire.  Both were published in 1759.  Both are relatively famous and original pieces.  Both are basically the same friggin novel. 

Now, let’s be clear.  Candide and Rasselas were very different.  Rasselas was a mind numbingly boring novel about a nobleman searching for happiness by going on an adventure to exotic places and ultimately finding none and returning home.  Candide is an incredibly entertaining novel about a nobleman searching for happiness by gong on an adventure to exotic places and ultimately finding none and returning home.  The novels were very different, but there were huge similarities that led people at the time to think that one of them had ripped off the other.  They had not.

I have never been blatantly ripped off before.  However, I have found kernels of my ideas in other works.  Ideas I thought were too unique to me to be repeated anywhere else.  But there they were.  More embarrassingly, I have written something I thought really funny only to find later had been in someone else’s work for years.  Oops.

My point is, the ideas are out there.  If you don’t get your book published soon all of those ideas will show up somewhere else.  Perhaps a little bit here and a little bit there, but each time it happens it will hurt you.  Because you will know that you sat on your book and let the world pass you by.  DO NOT DO THAT.  Get it edited and then get it out to publishers.

Getting Published

I have had this blog “tobecomeawriter” for about 12 years now (off and on).  In the beginning, I discussed my efforts to do just that – become a writer.  Primarily my posts focused on getting a job with [adult swim], but they were not limited to that.  In fact, I actually got a job with Florian Satzinger, an Austrian cartoonist. If you have been reading this blog for long, you are probably aware of all of this and you recall that the Florian Satzinger job fell.  Anyway, over time my writing here slipped away from my goal of becoming a writer and focused on just writing.  That was not so bad because, I believe, the writing was, for a while, still entertaining.  Then I slipped away from writing at all and I stopped posting.

Now I have returned to posting, but I still find myself divided.  I find that I don’t have a lot to write about.  In my free time I do a lot of writing, but I cannot post most of it here because I intend to submit it to various magazines for publication.  They do not like printing articles that are already out there for publication.  But I want to post here.  So it occurred to me: go back to posting about my efforts to get published.  So, henceforth I will tag all of my posts about getting published with “getting published”.  This will be for short stories, poems, novels and any other creative work I attempt to get recognized.

Your support, comments and advice is always welcome.

Frustrated, but not too much.

Ok, so I go to the store every morning to get something cheap and relatively healthy to eat for lunch.  I've been eating a lot of soup at work because no one in my family but me likes it.  I used to have a wide selection of choices from the Campbell's Soup selection, but recently I've gone Pescetarian, which means I don't eat meat, except fish.  I will eat cheese, eggs, milk and other animal by-products, but nothing that requires the death of the animal.  

For simplicity sake, I generally look for vegetarian meals, especially with soup.  I like fish soups - clam chowder, shrimp gumbo (provided there is no sausage).  But generally I have to be in the right mood for those.

Anyway, my reasons for why I have gone pescetarian are not important to you.  But for this very short post it is important because Campbell's does not have any strictly vegetable soups that I can find.  Not even a regular vegetable.  So I've switched to Progresso, who do make six or seven different vegetarian soups.

For the record, I love Split Pea soup.  So when I saw the above can I was instantly excited that I'd get to have split pea soup for lunch.  But as I was about to grab the can I noticed something wrong.  Did you see it?  If not, here it is:

Now, I know that "Vegetable Classics" does not say, explicitly, "Vegetarian," but I don't think I'm the only one who would've assumed it was vegetarian.  And for those of you who haven't made the connection yet - this includes you Progresso - Bacon is not a vegetable.  So this Vegetable Classic is flavored with meat.

Oh well.  That's one less soup I can enjoy.

Iceman, the Human Torch and Pyro

I think that it makes more sense scientifically for Iceman to be made of fire.  In case you are not a comic book reader, Iceman is the character from X-Men who shoots ice from his hands and generally looks like a snowman or, as his name would suggest, an iceman.

Here’s my reasoning.  According to the laws of physics energy cannot be created or destroyed.  It can be converted, to some degree, such as when nuclear fusion splits and atom and creates energy.  But that is not a “true creation” of energy.  That is releasing it from the matter where it was stored.

We also know that in order to cause a phase change in water from vapor to liquid or from liquid to ice there must be a transfer of energy.  Specifically, the water must lose energy to become colder.  In nature this takes place over time with a dropping of the surrounding air and land temperature.  But in the comic books Iceman converts the water vapor in the air straight to ice.  So where does the energy go.  When a puddle of water turns to ice that energy goes into the land around it or into the air.

I propose, that since Iceman is the one turning the water vapor to ice the energy must be going into him.  And with all of that accumulated energy he should be very hot.  Ergo, Iceman should be on fire.

The opposite can be said of the Human Torch.  He actually excites the atoms in a given object to the point of catching fire.  This would cause a significant release of energy from him.  So he should be icy while the thing he is touching would get hotter until it reached its burning point.

Pyro is a different story.  Pyro is the “bad guy” who can control fire, but Pyro does not actually create the fire, so there is no reason to suspect a loss of energy on his part.  But how, exactly, does he control the fire.  The only real way for him to do this is if he is controlling the fuel on which the fire is burning.

Fire requires two things to burn, fuel and oxygen.  Without both you have no fire.  I have never read a comic where Pyro is in space, so I do not know if he can create the oxygen on his own.  I suspect not since that would make him more of a plant than a person.  Though, if he created his own fossil fuel it might just be that he is more plant than animal.  Perhaps the fuel he creates is resin.  Since that makes the most sense I now must also suggest that Pyro is a tree.

It is settled.  Iceman should look like the Human Torch, the Human Torch should look like Iceman and Pyro should look like Groot.

44

44

I turned 44 last week.  I have very positive feelings about this year.  I cannot exactly explain why, but I think this year is going to be a good one for me.  That said, I am not just going to wait for good things to happen to me.  My past has proven that a great way to never have anything happen at all.  Instead, this year I am going to work hard on all of my various projects.

To that end, I have decided to begin an analog journal, a hard copy.  My effort with this journal is to record all of the little things I do throughout the day, such as water intake, steps taken, cardio, sweets eaten, et cetera, as well as all of the stuff I do toward one of my artistic goals.  I am hoping that over time a pattern will emerge that shows what actions I take that help facilitate good work and which ones hinder it.  Maybe by knowing that skipping my workout, and eating ice cream, and sleeping in generally result in the following day sitting on the couch watching Star Trek Voyager reruns again, I’ll be more likely to get off my butt and do something.  We’ll see.

It is still too early in the new year for me to have any solid results.  What I can tell you is that so far 44 seems more farty than 43.

Cuss Words

Is it a scientific truth that once the mind has learned a worse word, and the mouth has acclimated to saying it, that a lesser swear will not sate the angry spirit?  Or is it just me?  

Is it perhaps another symptom of my untethered spirit?  

The tongue, perhaps, being so much the closer to the brain than the hands is more easily influenced to corruption by the Mr. Hyde within.  Proof to the latter being that I am far less likely to type an inappropriate word or phrase than to say it, even when angered.  And I have never felt the urge to write a swear word in the sand with my foot.  

Never may be an exaggeration, still it has been long enough that I cannot recall a specific instance.

It has been proved that swearing from the mouth can mitigate certain kinds of pain.  I wonder if this also works for anger.  If the pain from stubbing my toe in a dark room can be lessened by singing fuck into the air with a strong enough wind to carry it to all of the bedrooms in the house, can it also ameliorate my displeasure when I feel I have been crossed?  Also, does it work for people who use sign language?  Can they lessen their fury with swears of the hands?  Or is there something in expelling the air?  Are we ejecting a tiny piece of tainted soul that is corrupting our bodies?  Or, like a locomotive, is the smoke we're releasing just evidence of the fire within?  Or is the swear word not an indication of our internal selves at all?

I don't know.  I'm tempted toward belief in the latter, though I must disclose that I swear a good bit and I would hate to think of my soul as being corrupt, especially by something so mundane as a growing thesaurus of vile words.  So I have a bias in the argument.

I was born of a word puritan and a word libertine.  My mother has spoken the word "Damn" twice in my memory; each time a quote.  My father has scarcely gone a day without saying it.  In the 80s "shit" was all the rage; especially in what is to me a nostalgic phrase, "Well, shit fire!"  A turn that I'm certain is much more entertaining to say and hear than it is to do.  The phrase "God Dammit" was highly frowned upon, and "fuck" was forbidden.  In my life my father has said "fuck" only a handful of times and never in the same state as my mother.

I knew all of the cuss words by middle school, roughly age 11.  Some will be invented in the fullness of time, and some will lose their punch, but as they stand right now I know them and have so for some 33 years.  It's something that young children share on the bus and in the quiet corners of the classroom when the teachers are not around, or are not paying attention.  But knowing is not using.  Not all children will take that danger path from the verbal straight and narrow into the murky fields or corruption.

I did not say a lot of bad words when I was in middle school.  "Bitch" was funny to say, especially with incorrect context or meaning.  "What the bitch?" was something I might have said within earshot of a given friend who would laugh at it.  But it wasn't in anger.  I did not begin saying cuss words in anger until my life took a turn down a road I never wanted it to go and got hopelessly lost trying to find a short-cut back to the highway.  There may be causality there, but in which direction?

Never once has saying, "God Dammit" corrected a wrong.  More often it compounds the problem by upsetting my listening children, or angering my wife because my listening children are, in fact, listening.  It has, at times, lessened my own anger.  Though whether it lessened the anger because I had expelled some frustrated steam or because of the immature humor felt from figuratively stepping my toe over the line of maturity and into the sand of the taboo, I do not know.  Science has not answered this to my satisfaction.  Or is it just that said utterance caused immediate embarrassment at my personal loss of control which countered my anger?

What I can tell you is that prior to the scenic route my life has taken I never said, "God Dammit."  Ever.  Now it is a daily phrase.  Every time something goes awry, from spilling paint on my favorite pants to discovering someone else ate the last Pop Tart that was never meant for me.  "Fuck" won't do.  "Shit" and "Dammit" do not come close.  Only "God Dammit" makes me feel an inconsequential amount better.  Except that it doesn't really.

I wonder if, rather than being causally related to my problems, it is instead a symptom of my lack of discipline.  That same untethered spirit that doesn't want to practice music or practice drawing or re-edit a story, and subsequently never has a truly refine piece of art, is the one that doesn't want to care about the words coming out of my mouth.

The Soft Ninja

It has been a while since I updated this blog with my latest Soft Ninja comics.  While this does not include everything I missed in the last year, by a long shot, it does include everything in 2018.

The Soft Ninja wants... no.  The Soft Ninja NEEDS to know which of you decided to switch from yummy Honey Nut Cheerios to gross, plain, stupid Cheerios, and why?

The Soft Ninja is disappointed in your cheap carpet brush and your generic carpet cleaner and the fact that you didn't Scotch Guard the floor, but mostly that you only had red wine to pair with your leftover shellfish.  If you had white wine none of this would have happened.

The Soft Ninja does not usually read romantic novels.  But this one has ninjas.

The Soft Ninja draws a blank.

We've Got a Stacker!

I dreamed that I took my family to this new restaurant called Stackers.  It was a fancy, but very weird hamburger joint decorated nothing like a hamburger joint.  It had this amazingly ridiculous jungle theme.  Tree leaves and vines were hanging on everything and you could barely move without touching some kind of plant.  They did not need walls because the trees and shrubs obstructed your view of just about everything.

You would expect the wait staff to be dressed in some kind of Hawaiian garb, or maybe something tribal, but you'd be wrong on both counts.  They were wearing slacks, a tuxedo shirt and a vest.

The moment we were called to be seated my wife, kids and I were split up.  This was part of the restaurant schtick.  They split groups up and seat you just about anywhere they could find an open seat.  You could not avoid this.  All parties were broken up, no matter the age.

The restaurant predominantly sold stacked hamburgers; up to five or six stacks of meat, but they forbade anyone from doing the stacking themselves.  You could order a three stacked barbecue burger, but if you dared to order three barbecue burgers and stack them yourself, you could be ejected from the restaurant.

The whole of your meal the waiter staff walked around on the lookout for stackers. At any point in your meal you'd hear, “Are you stacking? That looks like stacking!” And you had to argue your case with the waiter that you weren’t stacking, these burgers came this way. But once in a while you’d hear, “WEVE GOT A STACKER!” And a group of waiters would come and move you by force. Stacking could get you ejected or just moved to another table. So people would take the risk that stacking would get them moved to a table near their party or they’d try to sabotage the strangers they were sitting with in hopes of making room for one of their original party to be reunited with them.

I spent the entire dream mostly confused about what was going on while at the table with some woman I didn't know.  At least three times in my dream we were having a pleasant conversation when a waiter came up to me and yelled, "Are you stacking?  That looks like you're stacking!"  I played a long at first, but by the third time I was tired of it.  As the waiter and I were arguing some kid claiming to be my son came running in and said, "Daddy, I told you it's against the rules to stack!"  So I just stood up and ran into the jungle of trees, hoping to find a table with someone I knew at it.

So... if I ever decide to change careers to "restaurateur"...

Kevin Smith big and Kevin Smith little

Kevin Smith big and Kevin Smith little

Kevin Smith had two bit parts in my dream last night.  He played them simultaneously; one as Kevin Smith before he lost the weight, the other as Kevin Smith now (after weight loss).  They were walking side by side in my dream.

So, in my dream sharks could swim underground.  Every now and then they’d swim up to the surface of the ground and eat someone.  After a while people figure out that the sharks could detect and locate humans by the sound and shock waves made by our walking.  In case you are thinking this plot sounds a lot like Tremors, you are correct.  I admit, my brain was not terribly creative last night, so it ripped-off an old, but awesome B movie.  But don’t judge me, Hollywood is way worse.  You know good and well you are planning on seeing Avengers 24 or Saw 19 or Aliens Recovenanted Again 2.

Anyway, I was walking through a parking lot with a large group of people; my two kids, some others I knew, some I did not; when we hear this sound from below. A person from the group I don’t know – we’ll call him Kevin Bacon – says something like, “Shit, it’s the sharks again.”

Kevin Smith big says, “Guys, stop moving.  We know they can hear us if we move.”

Kevin Bacon says, “We can’t just stand around here all day.  We’ve got to get to those cars.”

“No,” Kevin Smith big says, “We need to get to the boats.  Boats are safer.”

It’s at this point in the dream that I look out beyond the parking lot and see a dock full of boats that had hitherto not been there.

“Why boats?” I asked.

“Because these are sharks. They belong in the water.”  Kevin Smith big said.

In my dream this made perfect sense, even though every Jaws movie I’ve ever seen has some boat getting torn apart by a shark that then proceeds to eat everyone that had been in said boat.

So everyone is standing still, but we know it’s a losing situation.  We can hear the sharks circling below us.  Then Kevin Bacon says, “No way, man, if we all move at once, as least some of us can get to the boats.”  But no one moves, not even Kevin Bacon.

Then Kevin Smith little says, “Man, you just want us to move so the sharks come for us.  Then you can make a run for it while we get eaten.”

Then we hear another sound and Kevin Bacon says something like, “Screw this,” and he starts to run.  But he doesn’t make it more than a few feet when the square of sidewalk he’s on juts up from the ground and he falls head first to the other side.  In my dream we never see the shark because I have a very low budget dream factory.  But we do see Kevin Bacon get dragged below ground kicking and screaming.

At that point, Kevin Smith big and Kevin Smith little yell, “Now’s our chance!” and they start to run.  Several others from the group of those I don’t know run as well.  My kids look back at me, but I’m frozen in fear.  So they choose to stay still.

In the distance I hear some people get eaten and others get to safety.  Kevin Smith and Kevin Smith both make it aboard a boat.

Finally, a little too late, my kids and I make a break for a nearby boat.  A shark gives chase, but we make it in time.  Sadly, the boat I chose was in dry dock, so we aren’t exactly home free.  The dream gets weird after that.  

We find some paragliders in the boat’s storage.  I’ve been playing a lot of the Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild, in which you use a paraglider a good bit.  So my kids and I use paragliders to sail down from the boat, several hundred yards to the ocean, where once in the water we are safe from the sharks.

Then my wife comes by in another boat and picks up and the dream is over.

-The part of "First Guy Eaten By Sharks" was played by Kevin Bacon.  Kevin Bacon was not actually in my dream last night, but I figured that since this was clearly a Tremors rip-off, and since Kevin Bacon was the main character of the first Tremors movie, he should have a role. 

Two Pack!

I had a dream that I worked out really hard for a while and managed to get the top two segments of my abdominal muscles (rectus abdominis) in shape.  So I had a two pack and below that I had my normal gut.  In my dream the two pack was smooth, but the rest of my gut and chest were hairy.  So I guess I just shaved the part of my stomach that I was proud of.

Anyway, I showed my two pack to my wife and she was not impressed.  In fact, she was a little jealous that I was getting in shape faster than her.  For the record, on the average of our marriage my wife has been in shape FAR MORE than I ever have.

So, that’s it.  It wasn’t a stellar dream this time.  No revelations about Tom Cruise or David Bowie or Joey Ramone.  Just a short snippet predicting a future where I manage to work out enough to whip 2% of my body into shape.

2018 Resolution (twelfth verse, same as the first)

Hello, Blog!  Happy New Year!

2017 was fairly busy and, as you probably guessed in early 2017 when I said I was going to try and post more in 2017, I failed.

I actually didn’t totally fail.  I post to social media at least once a week.  But I usually post to Instagram. Instagram has a very user friendly app and it is more conducive to art than the Blogger app – which in my opinion sucks.  So I do most of my Blogger blogging on my work computer.  That’s not so great when you are posting to some accounts all over creation, at any time of day, but you have to wait until the following morning in the office to catch up in other accounts.

Don’t get me wrong, Instagram does have its limitations.  If it was perfect, I’d simply transfer all of my Blogger posts to Instagram and delete this account.  Instagram is great for posting art, but it is my personal opinion that the writing I post with my art frequently – though not always – gets overlooked.  And since I fancy myself a writer, this doesn’t sit well with me.  Blogger is my one account where I can feel free to go on and on and on and on………… (crickets chirping).  

Ok, technically I can do this on my Tumblr account too, but there is still something missing with Tumblr.  It’s hard to put my finger on it, but I just can’t get used to the format.  Suffice it to say that this Blogger account was my first foray into social media and I’m reticent to just let it go.  So, I'm not going to.

Resolution:

So, in 2018 I am – again – going to try to sync my accounts so that, for the most part, what is on one account will be on all accounts.

Due to the difference in formatting, there will be slight discrepancies between one account an another.  For example, most of what I post on Blogger or Tumblr or Instagram won't go on Twitter because of character limitations, but some will.  Also, Facebook is a giant waste of time, so I probably won’t post anything to it at all.