Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Four legs? good! two legs? we’re not so sure…

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

I can’t take this shit today. I just can’t.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Deploy the moving finger of emphasisity!

Are you … from the future?

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

These guys can go mcfuck themselves.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

We still have time to mess this up!

This fight is for everything.

It was down to kool-aid drinkers and next of kin at the trump White House

We are aware of all internet traditions.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

There will be lawyers.

What fresh hell is this?

Hot air and ill-informed banter

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We need fewer warriors in public service and more gardeners.

You are here: Home / Archives for Balloon Juice / Celebrating Jackals

Are things ever going to settle down?  With everything that’s going on, that’s probably not in the cards for the near future.  Which makes it even more important to celebrate our victories and our accomplishments.

I hope this can be a place where we can all be excited when one of us has something good going on.  You don’t need to have published a book, to have received an award, or be featured in a gallery, but those work, too!  Maybe you moved into your dream house, or you finished rebuilding your 57 Chevy, or you just got married or you’re retiring, or you had a kid, or you just passed your boards.

When you have something to celebrate, I hope you’ll be willing to write up a little something and share it with us.  Send me an email if you’re interested.  ~WaterGirl

Help a Jackal in Queens

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Citizen Alan needs a few pointers and some help:

Barring something unexpected happening between now and then, I will be starting the Bankruptcy LLM program at St. John’s University in Queens NY this August. Yes, the loud-mouthed liberal from Mississippi is moving to the Big City. However, I am now in a panic mode about housing, as I missed the deadline for student housing and am on a waiting list. It’s probably too much to hope for but are their any Jackals from the Queens area who can give me some advise on where to get an apartment reasonably convenient to St. John’s?

Open Thread

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Celebrating Jackals: Frankensteinbeck Has A New Book!

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Frankensteinbeck mentioned in the comments the other day that he has a book coming out soon, so I asked if he would be willing to write something up for a Celebrating Jackals post.  He graciously agreed, and what he wrote could lead to some good conversation, I think.

Read on and see for yourself!

Frankensteinbeck

I have a book coming out on May 4th!

Many of you know that my most successful set of books are the Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Supervillain series.  I’m finally back to it, which raises a topic worthy of a post:

Selling out, and money vs art.

This is a tough one, folks.  Author gotta eat.  My previous publisher stealing from me nuked my career.  But the topic went back to before they went bad.  A writer is an artist, and an artist needs to make money, but also care at least two figs, preferably an entire cargo ship’s worth of figs about his art.  It’s hard to do that and keep it from wedging itself sideways in the canal of your career and blocking…

I think I’ve stretched that metaphor too far.

When Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Supervillain took off, I was faced with a problem.  I hate story creep.  Open-ended series end up wrecking themselves.  But again, author gotta eat, and here was my chance to live the dream and support myself on writing!  So, I made a deal with myself.  I’m not going to write the same book twice.  I could make a longer series out of Penny’s story, but it would have an ending, period, decided on before I started.  I wrote book two knowing generally what would be in book five.

Now I need to bring my career back to life, and the dark, exotic fantasy I write for passion ain’t gonna do it.  A Supervillain book had to happen.  What to do, without compromising my need to create stories I am proud to tell?  I decided to go the Discworld model.  I will write books about different characters in the same world, branching out as each book gives me more people to write about.  Maybe some of those characters will deserve more than one book.  This I can do while keeping things fresh, although I mourn that I don’t have the freedom of time and creative resources to write the freaky stuff in my heart.

I’ll add an extra twist, that’s on topic for art vs money.  I don’t like repeating myself.  I wanted individual ridiculous names for each book.  My original title for the second Supervillain book was At Least I Didn’t Blow Up Our Moon.  But… artistically, titles and cover art don’t matter.  They’re marketing.  They’re the thing that’s supposed to get someone to take a peek so you have a chance to snare them with your writing.  So my initial publisher insisted on the Please Don’t Tell My Parents title formula, and since I badly need to reclaim my former fan base, I stuck with it here.  Similarly, my new publisher goes way cheaper on cover art (Watergirl said she was going to attach this book’s cover) so what I worked out with the artist is something that thematically resembles the covers of the previous books.  What I need for this book is a sense of continuity.

As an ironic twist, after writing this new ‘back to the Supervillain world’ book, I needed a break, to write something purely for me.  It… turned out to be another Supervillain world book.

And so, on May 4th enjoy Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Work For A Supervillain, about a teenage girl who wants to be a heroine, finds out she doesn’t have what it takes, and finds a kind of adventure and fame that does suit her.

And then once I get through the beta reader phase, my publisher and I will put up Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m Queen Of The Dead, about a teenage girl (get used to that in my books) who finds out being the only necromancer in a generation means trouble.  Lots of trouble.

Enjoy, and may your art be meaningful and profitable!

If you have something to celebrate, don’t be shy.  Let us know in the comments or send me an email message.

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Open Thread: An Interesting Life

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Subaru Diane has an interesting story to share.  As always!

Editor’s note: Why is she not writing a book?

Auto Draft 39

This is a picture of my mother, Elizabeth Cannon Lowry, standing next to President John F. Kennedy at the White House, in January 1962. Here’s a bit of backstory:

In March 1921, following the inauguration of Warren Gamaliel Harding, the new President was wandering around the White House, unable to sleep and looking for something to read. He found nothing — the Executive Mansion had no books!

Word of this reached the American Booksellers Association and they determined then and there to stock the WH Library with reading material for the President and the First Family. They selected 200 American books that had been published in the past four years, and in early 1922 they presented them to Harding in a low-key White House ceremony.

Every four years from that point on (the year following inauguration year) the ABA made a similar presentation, always focusing on American authors, publishers, and themes in their selections.

Presenters were usually members of the Executive Committee/Board of Directors of the ABA, and it so happened that my mother (who owned and managed our family bookstore) was on the Board in early 1962 and hence part of the WH delegation.

Of course JFK was probably the best-read POTUS since Jefferson or Lincoln and until Obama, and probably already owned most of the books presented! But the point is, the books were not selected with specific presidents in mind, nor to be part of their personal libraries.

Instead, the 200 books every four years were meant for a permanent, cumulative, ever-growing White House library, for the use and pleasure of the President, the First Family, and WH staffers during their four-year stint, then left in place for their successors.

I haven’t heard about the program in years. I hope it’s still operational. A few years ago I emailed the ABA asking about it, but never got an answer. I should try again.

Open thread.

 

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Two Budding Balloon Juice Commenters (in about 18 Years)

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Balloon Juice commenter, hitchhiker, has some wonderful news to share with us.

I post/lurk as hitchhiker, and I thought if you want you could share some happiness from a longtime juicer. On Wednesday morning, just an hour or so before the riot got underway, our younger daughter delivered a pair of brother/sister twins.

Brand new citizens, brand new humans, and none of us can take our eyes off them.

It’s been a great counterpoint to the madness.

To which I say, welcome little ones!

Two Budding Balloon Juice Commenters? Two Budding Balloon Juice Commenters? 1

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Programming Note: Two Jackals Have Christmas Performances Online Today & Tomorrow

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Two fun opportunities for a bit of Christmas magic!

🎁 🎁 🎁

Ruemara’s Zoom Reading of Gift of the Magi (and more) at 6pm ET Today

Today I’ll be performing an African folktale, & O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi, at about 6 pm ET.

If anyone is interested, feel free to shoot me an email for the zoom reading link. Just doing something fun for people who don’t get to witness a table read.

Next year, I’ll be starting a table read workshop (The Rising Workshop) focused on giving under-represented minority writers a chance to have their works read/performed. We’ll see how it goes, I’m not exactly a very important person. We’ve nearly made it to the end of 2020. That’s not a bad thing.

Christmas Eve reading at about 6 pm ET.
Email ruemara or me for a link.
(Her address is just like mine, only ruemara instead of watergirl.)

I had to ask Rue if she has a fundraising link, in case anyone is so inclined.  She does!  Any donations will go to fund the table read workshop she mentions above.  Donations welcome but not required.

🎁 🎁 🎁

Miss Bianca’s Christmas Play with a Modern Twist tonight at 10 pm ET and tomorrow 8 ET

Letting you know, in case you find yourselves with an odd hour to kill, that my theater, The Westcliffe Center for the Performing Arts, just did a radio production of “The Business of Good Government: A Christmas Play”, by John Arden – a Nativity/Epiphany Play, but with a modern twist – will be airing tomorrow night, Christmas Eve, at 10 pm ET, and Christmas Day, 8 pm ET, on our local community radio station, KLZR-FM – you can stream it here: https://klzr.org/

It’s rough-cut, not polished – we basically knocked it out in a couple days, in the theater, all masked up and with socially-distanced microphones scattered around the stage. Some stuff got cut that I wanted to keep, and some stuff I wanted to cut, got left in. You can hear pages rustling and footsteps and hum from the room. The sound quality differs depending what day we were on.

In short, it sounds like…a community theater doing a Nativity play. On the radio. : ) But it’s got heart. Like Arden would have wanted, I think. We threw it together for KLZR, but also for ourselves – we hadn’t seen each other or tried to do anything for almost a year. I’m sure you can understand.

Christmas Eve performance time is 10 pm EST
Christmas Day performance time is 8 pm EST

I asked Miss Bianca about a fundraising link, too.  Donations welcome but not required.

OPEN THREAD.

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Celebrating Jackals: Narya – Kitchen Reveal (finally . . .)

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Time for the big reveal! And apologies for taking so long to organize this; I was so stressed about the election that I couldn’t think, much less try to write coherently. It’s not that big a space—but I was also having trouble fitting things into the frame (not least because I’m not a good photographer). Of course, that will make the tour easier.

Things I would have done a little differently: I might have replaced the butcher block with new butcher block and with a little more of an overhang. The cabinet handles stick out a bit, and I occasionally snag a hipbone on them. The light over the sink shines directly in my eyes—I should have had that light under the cabinets. The microwave kinda sucks—the light over the stove is too dim AND it gets very hot (it might be halogen, which would be stupid); I had no idea that that was something I needed to even think about. The fridge is only adequate—there’s no light in the freezer and no cheese drawer in the fridge—but it was really the best I could find that wasn’t French doors or freezer on the bottom. It is SUPER quiet, though, so I now realize just how close to dead the old one was.

Things I like even more than I thought I would: all of the storage space! The stacked cabinets were totally the way to go. The stone counter—it is so nice to not have to watch my countertop rot. Three racks in the oven—awesome. The floor is wonderful, and the light color means I end up cleaning it WAY more often, so there’s that. And the tile—I love having some color in the kitchen. May I point out that the tiles are all the fault of John G. Cole: after his last trip to the Fiesta factory outlet, I was noodling around on their site and discovered that I could get tiles in licensed Fiesta colors, from a factory in Pittsburgh. I have Fiesta dinnerware, in multiple colors, so spending the extra on that tile was a no-brainer. 

And now that I’ve been using it for a couple of months, I realize just how many workarounds I had in place. I’ve added a curtain to the window (I MacGyvered a roman shade that looks . . . okay, but I will make a new one when I get the sewing machine fixed), which, in the two days it’s been up has already improved the temperature in there. All in all, the whole thing is such an awesome upgrade—definitely a thing for which I am grateful this year.

Celebrating Jackals: Narya - Kitchen Reveal (finally . . .) 5
DR to porchNovember 27, 2020

First up: This is looking from the doorway into the kitchen; the fridge is out of frame on the left, as is the long counter. Here you can see that there’s now a stone countertop where there was once rotting butcher block, and you can see there’s an undermount sink, as well as a faucet that doesn’t leak. (There’s also no garbage disposal, because it turns out the sink is too deep and there was no room; I don’t really care.) You can also see the floor, and the new storm door.

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Let’s Give It Up for DougJ

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Most of us won’t get a normal Thanksgiving this year, but today I am thankful for DougJ.

We all know that every little bit helps, and we know that it all adds up, but holy shit – I never dreamed that our collective giving at BJ could add up to what it has.

The Four Directions people wondered what the heck Balloon Juice was and how we came to be giving to them, boosting their fundraising to “advance equality at the ballot box across Indian Country.”  How did we get there?   A series of tiny little acts.

MazeDancer talked about Four Directions in the comments during the primary.  A couple of weeks ago, Kattails mentioned 4 groups banding together to try to raise 10,000 to set up a shuttle service to get Navajo voters to the polls, many of whom live 50 miles from a polling station, hoping to mobilize 38,000 voters.  I forwarded the information to DougJ in case he had missed it.  That group wasn’t set up in ActBlue, but Four Directions was one of the 4 groups, and they were in ActBlue, so DougJ put up the BJ thermometer.

I would like to think that a whole lot of people are getting to vote today who might not have been able to vote otherwise.

And that’s just one example.  Every person who wrote a comment that said “my congressperson could use some help” or “this state senate candidate is really great, can we help her” – every person who did that made a difference.

From a series of small actions here at BJ, we created a wave.  Maybe even our own  tsunami.

Every person here who donated, or wrote a comment, or did some research, or worked for a campaign, or worked to get out the vote, or is working at the polls today, every bit of that time and money made a difference, and got us where we are today.  We don’t know the outcome yet, but I like our prospects.  I like our team, and I’m proud of who we are and what we’ve done.

It was DougJ who gave us this particular outlet for our desire to do something.  Our money helped some people vote who couldn’t have otherwise.  It gave candidates options.  It put ads on the air, it put flyers in our mailboxes, and yes, sent annoying text messages to our phones.  It gave people hope, including us.

For all of that, and more, thank you, Doug!

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