(via Ravelry)
Just Say No.
(via Ravelry)
Month: July 2012
ZZZZOMBIES, a Short Film
“ZZZZOMBIES – a stop motion animation on overhead projector”
ZZZZOMBIES from David King on Vimeo.
This one made me actually laugh out loud. In the living room. By myself. Which is weird, and made me feel like a dork. But I loved it, and I think you will too.
It seems to be Stephen King week here at SniderWriter…just this last one, promise. I loved this review of Christine by Leslie at I Know I’m Not Normal Because…
Nice work!
Excerpt from “You Only Live Once”, a Horror Story
“What they don’t tell you is what it feels like not to die.
They don’t tell you that the casket isn’t actually padded; that there’s only a bit of cushion under your head and shoulders, and that’s for your family to feel better, not you. You’re supposed to be dead.
They don’t tell you that the backs of your clothes will be cut away, and that you’re not so much wearing them as being covered by them, like lying under a quilt whose pieces are unattached. No one worries about decency, or dignity for that matter, when it comes to dead guys.
There’s no such thing as comfort, when you’re supposed to be dead. Take me: my left leg is broken just under the knee, because by the time they found my body it had stiffened oddly to the side. It’s all in how you fall, see, and it’s hard to worry about the convenient alignment of your body when you’re trying not to die in the first place. They cracked the bone to make it lie neatly in the casket, in case an inquisitive relative (nosey, they said, because they didn’t know I was listening) should happen to peep under the closed end of the box. They want you to look like you’re just resting, like even if you were able to get out, you’d still be there because it’s just so damned comfy.
No one sleeps like this: body ramrod straight, arms on chest, hands twined together. When you go to bed tonight, try it, then tell me if it’s how you’d want to spend eternity.
God, I hope I wink out before eternity.
At least now they’ve stopped fussing at me. I wouldn’t have thought myself a prudish person in life, but somehow when you know that you’re being stripped out of your soiled clothes and laid out, naked, to be washed by strangers, you develop sudden surprising shynesses. You try to remember whether you showered the morning she killed you, and whether or not you wore clean socks. It becomes paramount that the rubber-gloved attendant now seeing to your final needs not be embarrassed or disgusted on your behalf.
That’s not how you’d be remembered, if you could have a say. If they could hear you.”
– from You Only Live Once, a short horror story by Stefanie N Snider.
Get your copy from Amazon or Smashwords now!
Comic: How I Get Most of My Ideas
When in doubt, explode somebody.
I snagged this comic from somewhere a while back and had forgotten to note the source. When I Googled “and then your insides explode” I found this:
“Can your insides to [sic] explode if you smoke too much weed?”
Oh, Internet. Never change.
What I Did This Weekend
I made some satisfying progress my continuing struggle to be an organized person this weekend.
Friday:
– took back library books, early
– finally upgraded my credit card to one with better benefits
– FINALLY changed my name at the bank (after being married a year this past May)
– scheduled another banking appointment to set up some new investments (holy shit! I’m a grownup!)
Saturday:
– bought more storage/organization bins and, y’know, actually used them for their intended purposes
– stocked up on sale pharmacy items AND took advantage of a one-day-only deal for store points
Sunday:
– got up early, bought and assembled a laundry-sorting hamper
– revised my daily to-do’s for this shift
– customized our Quicken program
I feel pretty good about things right now. I didn’t manage to get any writing done, but now that some of these niggling tasks are dealt with I feel like I can get further ahead this week than usual.
Stephen King’s Advice to Young Writers
Seeing as Spike TV denied myself and my fellow Canadians our 8:00 showing of The Shining, I went looking for supplementary King material. I came across this brief excerpt from a talk he did at Yale:
Short and sweet. Read a lot. Write a lot. Simple.
Hopefully the Canadian version of the Stephen King Marathon gets back on track tomorrow…in the meantime, I’ve posted the (apparently American) schedule here.
Stephen King Marathon This Weekend
It’s probably pretty obvious by this point that I’m a big King fan.
(see: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7)
So you can imagine that I’m FREAKIN’ EXCITED! about the Stephen King movies playing on Spike TV this weekend. Here’s the lineup, in Eastern Standard Time:
Tonight, Friday July 13th
7:00 PM – Christine
9:30 PM – Cujo
11:30 PM – Creepshow
Tomorrow, Saturday July 14th
11:30 AM – IT
3:30 PM – Christine
6:00 PM – Cujo
8:00 PM – The Shining — MY FAVOURITE!
11:30 PM – Dreamcatcher
Sunday, July 15th
11:00 AM – The Shining
I’ll be watching, will you?
Make Something.
Yesterday I was showing my husband the bracelet I made (and by “made”, I mean I savaged* a store-bought bracelet and added an evil eye bead). Part of the modifications involved bending a head pin. I did a…passable…job, for a first-timer.
He asked why I don’t just ask our chain-mail-making friend to do it for me.
Because it’s better to make your own stuff, is why.
There’s nothing nicer than making something. I don’t know if it’s ancestral memory of when we had to make everything ourselves, or maybe it’s the novelty of handmade in a world of mass-produced. But something about holding something that wouldn’t exist if not for you is wholly satisfying.
Granted, the bracelet I “made” was put together using stock parts, but still, my hand was involved in the final product. I make other things, too: I knit, I bake, I cross-stitch, I paint a teeny tiny bit. Oh, and I write, in case you missed that somehow (!).
Friends and family have seen (and read!) the stuff I’ve made, and the comment is nearly always the same:
“I could never do that.”
Of course you can! I taught myself to knit with YouTube. I learned how to bake bread by making some really shitty bread. I’m learning how to draw right now, and believe me when I say that my drawings suck mightily. But that only means I’m learning.
Do you ever wonder what happens to all the writing I talk about? The daily quota has to go somewhere, right? Some stories don’t come together and get put on hold. Some, frankly, suck ass and get tossed. But I’ve gotten better only by coming back again and again and making something. Every night when I go to bed I want there to be something I made that wasn’t there before. It’s a powerful feeling to leave your mark, however small, on the world every day.
Have you made something recently? Go on, do it: make, bake, saw, sew, glue, paint, grow, make a tremendous mess. Life is too short to be passive. Go create something that’s all yours.
*Yes, I mean “savaged”, not salvaged. I ripped that sucker apart.
sniderwriter 