At MegaCon today, so not much time to blog, but:
On the subject of the Black Art of Comic Book Punctuation, it turns out Comicraft’s Nate Piekos has it pretty much covered in this excellent post. We’re not 100% in agreement–as an editor, I hate hate hate hate seeing a question mark amplified with an exclamation point (almost as much as I hate double exclamation points) because I’d think the fact that the words are in bold italics and maybe bigger and with in a burst balloon SHOULD PRETTY MUCH CONVEY THE EMPHASIS–but other’n that, Nate and I are in harmony. I’ve even been trying hard to erase my habit of putting two spaces after a period like Mrs. Flannigan taught me to do in high school typing class, but that may be a losing battle.
I practically did nothing all day Tuesday but stand on my front porch and await my Kindle 2. This thing is a dream. It has its shortcomings–I wish the buttons were silent, and it’s not easy to find your way around magazines that have no Table of Contents–and while, no, it’s not the same as a book, I’ve already read three times as much fiction in the past 48 hours as I did the previous 48 days, and with eleven hours of flying this weekend, it was a blessing not having to decide which three or four books to take on the plane, two of which I was never gonna get around to, anyway.
On a related note, Roy Blount, Jr., president of the Author’s Guild, is being a complete asshat about the Kindle’s robotic text-to-speech function, which no sane person could listen to for five seconds and confuse for a genuine audiobook. Text-to-speech is primarily a function for the vision-impared (or the indescribably lazy). Thanks for so loudly making all writers look petty and greedy, sir.
Finally, I think my next vacation is planned out.
