Sunday, August 27, 2017

Short Post and a Song #128: Well, we had a good run.


[watching Alien]

Me: You know John Hurt's in this movie.

Danlien: Oh yeah, which one is he?

Me: The one with the alien on his face.

ExtraterrestriDan: Heh, is that how he got hurt?

Me:

Superdan:

Me:

Danvin the Martian:

Me: Get out



~*~*~*~*~


"Call Me" by St. Paul and The Broken Bones




This 2014 song sounds like it came straight out of the 70s, right down to the phone number's lack of area code and use of the term "pick up that telephone", and I love it so goddamn much.

Sunday, August 20, 2017

Short Post and a Song #127: right in the brain face


me: got a lot of work to do, better get a large coffee today

brain: you know coffee will only increase your anxiety and actually make it harder for you focus on work

me: *slaps brain right in the brain face* shut up idiot



~*~*~*~*~

"Hey" by The Pixies




I first became familiar with The Pixies the same way I get into a lot of bands: I heard one of their songs in a movie I loved. The movie in question was Fight Club, and the song was the wonderful "Where is My Mind?".

Much as I adore that song, this one was the first Pixies song that really shifted me into full "Holy shit this band is amazing" mode. "Hey" manages to sound bluesy, rocky, and punky all at once. And everything going on guitar and bass-wise from 1:15-2:05 is so great it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

This song is also good for writing deeply emotional scenes. I've used it more for pretty passionately unhappy scenes, but it could also work well for a cathartic kissing scene (as it does in this scene from "How I Met Your Mother"). That kind of versatility is just one more reason "Hey" is one of my very favorite songs.

Saturday, August 19, 2017

Buy me some jeans then

You might be surprised to see me here on a Saturday. You might be thinking, "What the fuck is this, she only blogs on Sundays anymore." 

I don't know why you sound hypothetically hostile over this. Like many others, you probably have trouble embracing change.

I'm sorry this has been pretty much the "Short Post and a Song" blog for so long; it wasn't intentional. But I do have a few longer things in the works for the blog, which should be popping up in September sometime.

A lot of the online writing I've been doing these days has been telling jokes over on Twitter. It helps me practice being concise and being funny, both things I want to bring to my fiction writing (or at least that's what I tell myself). 

There's also a lovely community of jokesters who are some of the nicest, funniest, most supportive people you'll ever meet through your computer screen. We have joke contests sometimes, and I started drawing my winners' tweets as their prizes. I also drew a few for friends' birthdays

I recently had a tweet I liked do pretty decent, so I decided to try drawing it too, and thought I'd post it over here as well:

Sunday, August 13, 2017

Short Post and a Song #126: I'm still gonna practice my wood-punching, just in case.


Watching Kill Bill Vol. 2 makes me nervous about whether or not I'll be able to punch my way out when I get buried alive.

...And then I wonder why I'm so sure I'm going to be buried alive at some point in my life.



~*~*~*~*~


"You Never Can Tell" by Chuck Berry




Like "Misirlou" and "Stuck in the Middle with You", "You Never Can Tell" has become a Tarantino song to me first, and a regular song second. It's the song Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace dance to in a contest they later win (or at least steal the trophy to make it look like they won). 

I saw Pulp Fiction at age seven and many, many more times since then, so this song and that scene in the movie are inextricably linked in my mind. 

Still, when "You Never Can Tell" recently popped up on a playlist of mine, I was finally able to notice what a great song it is without John Travolta and Uma Thurman's Twist moves distracting me. This is an amazingly fun song. And just listen to that piano! No wonder all the icons of rock and roll stole their songs from Chuck Berry.

Sunday, August 6, 2017

Short Post and a Song #125: What a cute, little boo-boo bear!


Guys! Since we don't have much of the book left, this is going to be the last day of our "Amerex: Land of the Unicorns" adventures. I hope you've enjoyed it, or at least had a kind of "meh" sort of feeling about the whole thing.





Translation: "What a cute, little boo-boo bear!" Then Jenna started to laugh. 

Kindor yelled, "What? No!" And he disappeared. When she got back to the castle Dolly had a huge smile on her face. 

"You've broken the spell!" That night the royal family held a huge banquet in Jen's honor. Then she went to sleep.


So the super funny yet also suspenseful thing the grandma said was "What a cute little boo-boo bear"? I feel gypped.




Translation: She woke up in her own bed. As long as Jenna lived she never had another dream like that but she never forgot Amerex: Land of the Unicorns.

The End


I'm so glad that I said "Amerex: Land of the Unicorns" one last time before the end of the book.




Translation: About the Author

Jill Karger is, 11 years old. She goes to Parkview and has two sisters. She loves acting, singing and dancing. She is very excited about her first hardcover book!


Aaaand it's over! Thanks, guys, this was a fun little trip down memory lane for me. 

You may have noticed that I said in my "About the Author" that this was my first hardcover book. Implying that at age eleven I had already written softcover books. As luck would have it I found one of them the other day, and will regale you with its powerful prose next time I run out of jokes.

The other book is a total rip-off of that Olsen twins movie It Takes Two, only there are two sets of twins. 

The title?

It Takes Four, obviously.


~*~*~*~*~


"She's a Riot" by The Jungle Giants





Spotify Discover tracked this song down for me and I've been listening to it a lot while writing, or walking around thinking about writing (something I do kind of a lot). The part of the song I'm most in love is most definitely the guitar line, and it makes me like the song even more now that I know a badass chick with amazing hair plays it.