Upcoming and Downgoing

I woke up on the wrong side of the week, but I have some administrative stuff to address and a few other things to say, so here's a post anyway.

1) I referred to a secret project a few posts back. Tomorrow, that project debuts: I helped to copy-edit a series of comics for the creator of Ctrl+Alt+Del, one of my two most favorite webcomics. While labor-intensive, this project was so much fun that I am having a hard time adjusting back to my normal copy-editing job. If you somehow got here from there, welcome!

2) I mentioned it on Facebook and in a group e-mail, but not here: Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #45, with my story "Kingdom Automata", aka the crazy robot story, which I have written about at great length in this blog, is available here. For free in electronic forms, and for a nominal fee in paperback.

3) Opera season started on Saturday. Get ready for opera posts for the next several months! Woooo!!!!1!

4) I was the only one to volunteer a story during the first week of workshop in my UCLA class, so one of my stories is going to be drawn and quartered workshopped by 17 other students tomorrow night. I agonized over the choice, and spent most of the last four days regretting the story I picked, but there's nothing for it now and I must have had a reason to select that one in the first place.

The instructor got the class to give me a round of applause for being brave enough to volunteer during the first week, before we know anything about each other. I waved it away: "I'm just a show-off." Because I am.

5) One of our assignments for this class is to find a paragraph or two of fiction that we love and bring it in at some point to read aloud. I am stumped. I looked at all my best-loved books and realized I love them in macro ways; because the story connects to itself, and the characters shift over time, not because one paragraph stands out. (This is not so for movies - I know plenty of movies where just one shot will send me to heaven.) I'd do Chandler or Leonard, because they're masters at the level of the sentence, the paragraph, but our instructor has mentioned that he's going to bring in some Chandler, so.

The one I'm considering right now is Rebecca, some of the first chapter: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Rebecca emerged from my youth as my Fahrenheit 451 book - the one I'd choose to memorize, to become, in the event that books went extinct. Rereading it last year, I realized it's really not a perfect book, but I still stand by it as one of the most evocative books I've read, and one of those books calculated to make you fall in love with itself. So, reading from that first spell-setting chapter seems to fit in with the point of the exercise, even if the book isn't one I can defend on the whole. Maybe I'll figure out something else before it's my turn.

Wish me luck with the rest of the week.