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The Sandwich Wizard Tries to Branch Out
Over the first and second weekends of the Olympics there was a sudden epidemic of street food between Green Park and Chancery Lane, like a portal had opened to another dimension of falafel-based life-forms: mostly human, but about one-quarter tahini. Within the micro-festival, if you were inclined to look for them, you could map out the micropolitical boundaries between, say, the Greek and Mexican quarters, just across the Long Acre from the cheeseburger vans encroaching on Peruvian territory by the day. No blood in the air, yet, but a lot of foreign swear words.
Somewhere in the shanty sprawl, a forkful of makeshift restaurants had parked themselves in Red Lion Square and refused to move until the council actually came down there to drag them off with their own hands. One of them was a great white broken thing without even its wheels to hold up the haphazard collection of chipped-paint boards. Sagging slightly at one end, it looked like a beach hut had come through the portal and got turned around on the set of a Californian sitcom, getting confused and plonking itself down just outside Soho.
A legend built itself around this funny little beach hut and the ageing hippie inside it, and the people picked their way towards the square to have a look at these things. All of them asked the same question. The so-called hippie was sick of answering it.
“Yes,” the hippie said. “I’m a wizard.”
According to the internet, it is (Inter)national Flash Fiction Day, so I’m reposting this in case you’re interested. Why wouldn’t you be interested? You get to print stuff out and cut it up and staple things together!
It’s a fun afternoon activity!
Notes on Being Lost is a very short sci-fi story about a friendship crumbling under the pressures of semi-controllable time travel. Internet favourite Ele Jenkins did the cover illustrations, and they are amazing. I butchered a section of the cover to make that header image. See? Amazing.
In the interests of doing something interesting with it, Notes on Being Lost is designed to fit on a single sheet of A4 paper — with a bit of DIY — and I’ll be leaving copies in silly places, e.g. London. Here’s how to put it together.
If you don’t live in London, you’re in luck! You can download it for free at Ge.tt. And as a bonus, Ele posted some process images for the cover on her sketchblog.
On 16th May 2012 ᔥ jamiedrew ↬ jamiedrew
Rules for “Supernova Johnson” (working title)
- Don’t be cheesy;
- Don’t be “meta.”
- Just be funny.
Film Review: The Cabin in the Woods
On a whim, I went to see The Cabin in the Woods at about midnight last night. Then I reviewed it for Csicon, on just about as much of a whim (another writer was on “Cabin in the Woods duty” but it didn’t work out). In short, it was ridiculously awesome in ways all films should be. In long, it was awesome, but there are a couple of nitpicks.
Picture related: Kristen Connolly was great. And, I mean, obviously, I fancy her. But mostly she was great.
"The world is going to end tomorrow, which is why Grace no longer has a trust fund, a summer holiday in the family’s caravan in the Lake District, or any homework for the rest of—well, forever."
I have a story in the latest issue of SmokeLong. It’s called WHERE RU. It’s about crazy people, helium-filled gentleman’s leisure items, and the end of the world.
As a bonus incentive, they interviewed me as well, so you can see me make an idiot out of myself. Or catch a glimpse of the “creative process” and the “genius mind at work.” Call it whatever you like.
The interview contains gems of pretentiousness like “what sane person has faith in humanity? Humanity counts Piers Morgan among its number.“ Oh, Past Jamie, you are such a fabulous wit.
Sadly, I can’t spell the noises of vomiting.
My point is, I have a story in the latest issue of SmokeLong Quarterly, and that’s just swell, and in a turn-up for the books I don’t hate the story with a fiery passion that burns deep within me like a tealight that got knocked over by a breeze while I was out getting some wine to celebrate the fact I’d submitted something somewhere.
It was a Shiraz, but it doesn’t matter. There was no tealight. It was a metaphor; I gained a metaphor bonus when WHERE RU went live on the internet. Why are you still reading this? Go read the other thing.
Comic Book Pitch: Titans Together
Last summer, suffering from an influx of spare time, I wrote the first draft of a Teen Titans miniseries. Three issues into said draft, DC Comics rebooted their entire universe, rolling all their big properties back to issue 1 and starting from scratch on pretty much everything.
So even if I had decided to take it to anyone, it’s probably invalid. This morning, I found the proposal for the miniseries on my hard drive and thought I’d share. It needs ironing out, certainly, but I really like the concept: at the very least, Titans Together would at least be different from most of the other superhero titles.
It is, however, just messy with sixty-plus years’ worth of continuity – part of the reason I’m sharing this is because I don’t want to waste all that research – so if you don’t know what a Green Lantern is, this is probably going to be lost on you. But I’ll provide links.
Here’s the awkward one-liner, and if that piques your interest you can click the “read more” tag:
The members of the ‘Titans Together’ project, a support group for superpowered teenagers, take on the case of a young Gotham girl who has become Earth’s new Red Lantern on a mission to kill the Penguin.
Tiny Little (Indie Publishing) Love Story
After about thirteen pages it was clear that this book about zombie robots was going to be terrible in all sorts of ways the English language doesn’t have words for yet. He couldn’t tell one character from another, didn’t care what they did or if they got chomped on with giant metal teeth, but the science was pretty solid so that in itself earned a two-star rating for the author.
I wrote a tiny little love story for an awesome tumblr operated by renowned internet nerd Joel Golby. It starts out simply enough, then gets weird within a couple of paragraphs — a new personal record.
Click through for the whole damn thing.
Questions raised: am I going to count this as “published work” on my portfolio? There’s only one way to find out: watch this space, true believers.
NOTE TO SELF
I have three deadlines today, so this is a placeholder because I will forget.
Wait, no, five. I have five deadlines today.
This is a reminder to my future self: future self, remember to blog about the Saturday Film School and also, that short film I made aged sixteen that I had purged from my memory until yesterday when dozens of people asked me what I’d actually done in the past. It was called Sex and Violence. It was rubbish, obviously, but mercifully short.
To include:
- a couple of jokes
- Tarantino references
- my super-interesting origin story
- pathos
- bathos
- Aramis
- the time I was a drug dealer in a friend’s short film
- the time I turned out to be the villain in that film because the actor playing the real villain didn’t show up that day
- the time I met Elliott Grove, Founder of Raindance at the bar and had no idea what to say so just muttered something about not being able to find a cash machine and he just looked at me from behind his dark glasses being just about the coolest gooddamn person in the room
- that last thing was yesterday
- I’m still not over it
- I may never be over it
