Advice:

Don't ask me for advice. I'll accidentally ruin your life.
    -Internetexplorers

MIA: BOSL Radio

What happened to BOSL radio? That was my favorite radio station. I used to love rezzing into my home and hearing what was playing. It's been off the air for weeks now without any explanation. Does anyone know what's going on?

By the way, BOSL is an abreviation for the "Best of Second Life". I don't know about the clothes and products they sponsored, but the tunes on their radio stream were great.

What a Waste:

So you've wrung your eyes of all their tears
And you caught them in a glass
To save them for some day next year, when you're waxing over your past
And should you ever begin to believe
That the good part was worth all the waste
Find your glass of last year's tears and you take a taste 
-Find the Out, Slobberbone

 Have you ever considered what a waste SL is? Not just the hours spent, but also the money on getting a better computer with a decent graphics card. What if the money and time had been spent on something worthwhile? What skills could you have acquired already?

How many times has LL deeply disappointed their users? Rodvik going back on his promise to allow first and last names. Pushing out the poorly designed CHUI that everyone hated. And the latest outrage? LL plastering ads on its website in which some of the ads are unsafe and insert scripts that shouldn't be on the page.

Was the good part worth all the waste?

How Lois Lane Got Started:

How Lois Lane Got Started, from SUPER BOYS: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster--The Creators of Superman:

Across town, a girl pins her hair back, looks at her younger sisters and her tired, scrubbing mother, and wonders what her own future will hold. There is not much money, but she goes to the movies and sees a world that somehow seems more real than her own. She writes for school newspaper and brings the papers home to show her dad, named Mike, who is covered in black from the steel mill. His job will end soon. Her name is Jolan Kovacs, but nobody at school can say "Jolan" (her parents are Hungarian), so she goes by Helen. That too will change.

She lives in Cleveland and times are tight and has little sisters so what she does is think as big as she can. Even though she has no experience at this sort of thing, how hard could it be? She's seen the movies and read all the magazines. So she takes out an ad in the local paper and announces that she is a model and wants work. She is really that interested, that desperate or just that something. When her ad shows up in the paper, she reads it and laughs out loud. She then gets a little scared.

The letters fly in.

Most of them are from guys looking for dates. That makes her grimace but also smile just a bit. One is really bad. She eventually gets to one letter that actually sound genuine. It is from an artist, a cartoonist, who has been published, won contests and is seeking a model for a cartoon strip. She likes the funnies, especially on Sundays, and thinks that wouldn't be too bad at all. That might be perfect, actually. She is impressed, so she writes him back. His name is Mr. Joseph Shuster.

Makes a nice story doesn't it? It's actually a true life love story. It's from a reading that literary agent Janet Reid attended by Brad Ricca, the author SUPER BOYS.

Sometimes:

There's a zen saying:

Sometimes it rains on the good people.
Sometimes it rains on the bad people.
And sometimes it just rains.

However an important part is missing, the ending. The missing ending is as follows:

Mainly it rains on the good people because the bad people grab most of the umbrellas in a downpour.

I can't remember where I read that, but I wonder if it's true. 

You Removed Me?

"You removed me from your friends list?"

"Why not, you removed me from your Second Life."

The Holden Age:

If you're looking for motivation in all of this, here it is. Decided to move Los Angeles fifteen days after I buried my father, seven days after I discovered a drawer filled with his writings—six screenplays, eleven short films, one play, a few short stories, and one unfinished book abandoned after less than four chapters. He worked in advertising as a copywriter, but I never knew he wrote like that.

That's the opening paragraph for the Holden Age of Hollywood. That paragraph is not available in the Amazon preview of the book, which surprises me because it's my second favorite part. At a high concept level, the Holden Age is Moby Dick, with a great writer taking the place of a great white whale.

The great writer is Holden Meyer. His screenplays are sure blockbusters and the studios all want to get one of his scripts under contract. Meyer, however, has dropped out. He hates Hollywood. He now submits his work under pen names to see if anyone can actually tell a great screenplay from a bad one without his real name to tip them off. Anybody that identifies one of his screenplays under his pen name is said to have found a Holden ticket. The main character is obsessed with find the next Holden Meyer screenplay.

The main character is hard for me to relate to. He has a gorgeous girlfriend and is able to spend outrageous sums of money on his obsession with nary a qualm. Moreover he's unemployed. He has so much money he could leave his job to focus full time on his obsession without the necessity of making a living. His father evidently left a substantial inheritance.

That's why the opening is my second favorite part because it gives me a reason to like the main character. My suggestion for the movie version of this work, is to give the main character additional problems to make him more sympathetic. At the very least, he should have some money problems.

My favorite part of the book is the conflict resolution at the end. The main character is forced to choose between his obsession and love. It's the character arc that makes this novel work.

I can tell the author poured his heart and soul into this book. It must have taken years to write and driven him half mad. It's a brilliant first novel and I thank him for writing it and giving me the opportunity to read it.

What If:

What if it was your life's second chance? Would you do the same things you did in your previous one? -xbabylonx resident

No way. There would be some changes.

Breaking News:

This just in from Phil Brody:

BREAKING NEWS: From now through July 15th, my novel, The Holden Age of Hollywood, is a FREE eBook Download on Amazon (Kindle), Barnes & Noble (Nook), and iTunes (iBook).

If you've been aiming to read it, this is your chance to do it...Free Of Charge!

If you've read it and have been meaning to recommend it to anyone/everyone, this is your chance to do it...Free Of Charge!

If you're wondering why we're giving the book away for free...it's a proven tactic to help spread the word about a little-book-that-could -- a story that's been well received, a novel that's won a few awards, and a book we feel will benefit from more exposure. 

That's where you come in...

Tell all your friends.

Forward this email.

Enjoy the free download. 

And if you enjoy(ed) the read/ride within the pages of The Holden Age of Hollywood, please help spread the word by telling your friends and maybe writing a brief review on Amazon. It all helps, and my publisher and I wholeheartedly appreciate your time and effort.

I posed about the Holden Age of Hollywood previously in this post. Get a copy while you can.

Never Fall in Love:

      What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?
      That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.

That's the beginning of Love Story by Erich Segal. It hooks you right at the opening. The snappy dialogue gets you deeper into it:

      "What the hell makes you so smart?" I asked.
      "I wouldn't go for coffee with you," she answered.
      "Listen-I wouldn't ask you."
      "That," she replied, "is what makes you stupid."

It's not a great book, but it's short and cute and oh so bittersweet. At 125 pages, it's a novella not a novel. What can you really say about love? It always ends in tears. The last sentence of the book is perfect:

       I cried.

Can't Stop the Bleeding:

All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

If my life had a theme, that would be it.