First of November... on the Eleventh

Happy V-Day Everyone!

I begin by thanking all you veterans who rock enough to protect not only our lives, but our livelihoods. God bless you all, keep doing what your doing!

Now, I could go back and review all those tasty back issues of comics I've been putting off in favor of my schoolwork, but I doubt you care to read how "Booster Gold is still good," "Batman and Robin is awesome," and "Dark Reign is still pretty lame except for Iron Man."

Instead, I have a few unique treats;

No poetry! Yay!

My experiment into Twitterfiction, that is, a flash fiction piece I wrote for my Fiction Workshop entirely from a Twitter account. You can find it here: http://www.twitter.com/illinoisjones (Remember, the Tweets are in REVERSE order, so you have to scroll down and read from the bottom)

And, a sneak peek at the next novel review I'll be throwing up, Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth.

I recently attended James Branch Cabell Library's First Novelist Award Festival (the 8th I believe?) at VCU and heard this year's winner, Deb Unferth, read from this, her first published novel. She has a youthful spark and a passion for storytelling matched only by the wit with which she writes. (She's a fan of lists, and I love the amount of characterization and detail you can achieve through the use of a well-placed list).

I'm only part of the way through her novel (yes, I bought it) and I'm enjoying the nonlinear passage of time, and its quirkiness. My only peeve thus far is the lack of quotation marks. I assume it is an effort on the writer's part to avoid disrupting the flow of words that is very crucial to the work's wit and punchiness.

Full review to come, and now that I have less to do for the next couple of weeks, I'll start comic reviewing next week with a nice little tabula rasa.

Happy hump day.

-Steve