I very much enjoyed perusing his things for sale, each of which you may buy a small part, including:

If you give me $3,143 I will go as far away as possible. I live in New York. I will go to Perth, Australia the farthest distance from New York on Earth. I will mail you a photograph of me standing in New York. I will then mail you a photograph of me standing in Perth. I’m a little sad right now and I would kind of like to escape, so if you are thinking about getting one of these and not sure what you want, please take in consideration my emotions and pick this one.

and:

If you give me $437 I will go to Seattle and hang out with my best friend, Naseem. I will send you a photograph of us hanging out everyday. If we fight, and it is inevitable that we will, I will make a video of us apologizing to each other and explaining our position as to why we are angry at the other and how we will resolve the situation. I will post this on Youtube for you. Maybe we won’t fight! But we probably will.

David Horvitz things for sale.

Here are a few random pics from adventures so far (click them to make bigger). What’s your Summer look like?

My brother Ezra, standing in a lake in Vermont.

Naming plants is totally going to be my next job.

For my money, Moment of Truth looked suspiciously like Computer.

Self portrait. (procrastinating an edit, I believe)

Truck being eaten, San Juan Island.

Tiny crabs, San Juan Island

Windmills in the Columbia Gorge

Beehive, BZ Corner, Washington

A cat named Ned. He’s awesome. And named after my friend Ned, also awesome.

Vermont. So pretty

Hey! We have a post office box. Did I mention this already? So far, Laura and I mostly use it to place strange little objects for each other…since there’s not much mail yet. Hey, I know, you could put something in there!

This city looks familiar.

That’s all for now!

Even better than sneaking some of the ice cream?

Blaming it on the dark side.

He’s currently back in the freezer (the nights on Hoth are terrible cold – hopefully he can cozy up to a Tauntaun — for example, the one in the popsicles (cough cough)). Laura doesn’t know yet – So don’t tell!

Ever since, it’s taunted me, calling out in its helium voice: “Are you ready to become a smart writer?” Apparently my plodderly, non-smart-writer-footfalls shakes it into sudden, optimistic action. It wants to save me. It wants to pump me up.

Link to file if it doesn’t play
Go head, play it a couple of times. Now a couple of more. Now imagine you’re up in the dark of the morning trying to figure out how in the hell to resolve the inverted convolution that is your plot. That snarled, brambly, thorny patch of chaos? Yes, that one. The cat wants out, the cat wants in, the coffee maker is slowly leaking, and this guy, this guy is asking you if you’re ready to become a smart writer. Well, are you?

Here’s a close-up of his face.

You can tell by his coked-up eyes, he’s quite confident in his own writing ability. He just wants to help you with yours. On the bright side, there’s a button on the gizmo that I’ll be using to write my next book, or possibly I’ll use one of the others to create a smart doodle or a smart shape. The future is mine!

That’s all.

I saw Diana Rowland do this at the Rio Hondo Writer’s Workshop. While hers had way more zombies in it than both our novels put together, it was a very fun exercise. Though made significantly less fun by the fact that no one was eating anyone else’s brain.

Laura’s (and Laura) is on the right. Orange bits represent unwritten scenes — she’s pointing out her strategery here. (you can click the picture to see it larger, but not really large enough to read the text.)

Mine is all in rows on the left, with just those last four pink squares at the end signifying unwritten scenes. Quite by chance our books are at about the same place — just a few short steps away from completed first draft. At one hopeful, innocent moment long ago I thought perhaps that I’d only need a few edit-passes through before completion. Since then, and mid-way through the book, I radically changed what the book was about, so, well, I suppose you could say I’m a lot less innocent now.

I’m not yet sure what I’ve learned from the exercise yet except that Post-it notes make terribly garish wallpaper, and that whenever I enter the room I feel how my book looms there brightly-colored and ominous. Though I do revisit the wall now and then and move the papers around, and then move them back. So I got that going for me.

‘The Secret’  + ‘And so it is’

Apparently they’re going to make a movie out of the not-at-all-related-to-this-website book called ‘The Secret’, for which you may read my favorite review of the book here ‘The secret saved my life‘ by Ari Brouilette. My cursory plumbing of the internets to figure out why the phrase ‘and so it is’ is related to the movie turned up …well, this blog. So there you go. Something must be brewing, but apparently it’s still a secret.

This blog is likely the top result (hey!), because in a fit of guarded, privacy-hoarding introversion I named this blog ‘secret’, and quite coincidentally I have a category here called ‘And so it is‘. Which has a few nice things in it, if I do say so myself.

Actually, I’m quite sure I’m using the power of The Secret right now (and some basic keyword fixing) to acquire all traffic related to this search query right now! Because – well, let’s be honest – it makes me giggle. So there you go, there is a connection.

Just to really go the full length, here’s a picture of The Secret, and so it is. Which, after you’ve viewed it, will allow this search query, and this blog entry, to remain just as obscure and, I don’t know, secretive? As it was upon your arrival:

Secret - And so it is

Also, I put together a ‘works‘ page to keep track of published pieces and other projects. I think I forgot some, but they’ll come to me eventually.

Update: Ah, it appears that Superficial Flesh‘s current issue went live today as well. I have a short essay and photographs on Brazilian graffiti in this issue, and there’s an interview with me as well. Once you register at their site, you can access the entire issue.

Have a great Monday!

A designer reverse-engineered face detection algorithms to find face painting patterns/make-up that could hide your face from detection.

In other words, fashion camouflage.

Adam Harvey is a designer and technologist with NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

via io9

“PINOY SUNDAY tells the story of Manuel and Dado, two Filipino migrant workers who discover a discarded sofa. This transforms their normal Sunday into a tale of adventure, perseverance and self-discovery.“

…

“MANUEL and DADO carry the couch out of the city and into the industrial hinterland. The adventure never stops; they further encounter a near-suicide attempt and an old man who offers to ferry them and their couch—only to bring them farther from their destination. Once back on track, they decide that following the river is the shortest way to their dormitory.”

But from afar, here are two writer-related items that just makes me feel incredibly happy to have a president that is so radically different than our last.

#1 – Obama sent Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, a fan-letter. (!)

Martel says:

“If there was a way of tattooing it on my back, I would. What amazes me is the gratuity of it. As you would know, there is a large measure of calculation in what public figures do. But here, what does he gain? I’m not a US citizen. In no way can I be of help to President Obama. Clearly he did it for personal reasons, as a reader and as a father. And in two lines, what an insightful analysis of Life of Pi.”

There is irony here, since Yann Martel has been on a multi-year campaign to send Canadian Prime Minister  Stephen Harper a book a week, along with an inscribed letter from him, in order to raise arts awareness. This is all documented on the website http://www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca. In the most recent post (in which Stephen Harper receives a copy of King Leary by Paul Quarrington, guest author Steven Galloway gives a sort of nice tagline for the site:

“In a way, you’re in what must be the world’s most exclusive book club, albeit somewhat unwillingly. I bet Mr. Obama is jealous!”

Read Obama’s letter on Fiction Writer’s review

#2 – Look at the edits that Obama put on this speech. Just look at them.

I’m sure to someone receiving an edit like this on the job (speech writer Jon Favreau) it must be frightening, but right now the only edits I see are mine. Pages like this are gold — it means that the text has been worked, and worked hard. That someone cares about what is said, and how it is said. The piece has been honed. Bravo.

All other things aside, I really love having a smart president.

Original article here: Editor in Chief found via John Scalzi’s Whatever

Reading Local’s astute interviewer Karen Munro interviewed both Laura Moulton and myself here. They were great questions.

Tom Spanbauer, Ariel Gore, Kevin Sampsell and Margaret Malone will also be reading. Sponsors include Dark Horse Comics and Hawthorne books and it will be held at the Writer’s Dojo (March 16th @ 6:30pm). Needless to say,  it’s going to be a rad night.

Get all the  details at Reading Local’s page on Read to Rebuild: A Haiti Benefit Reading