Last night, I finally buckled down and fired up Audacity to begin the editing work on the audio commentary that I taped with Lyssa for the first installment of Saw, in advance of Saw 3D’s opening this coming weekend. According to my time stamps, I started working on the project, around 11:17 pm and stopped working on it at around 3:02 am. In that time, the file shrank from being 2 hours long to being about 1 hour long.

And there’s only 20 min. or so of good material so far.

Editing audio down is actually pretty fun, and the sound quality’s pretty awesome. I had my headphones plugged into my computer and I could hear the softer conversations in the movie quite well. That really came in handy when it came to making choices on where to cut based on our reactions, especially when we started riffing on some of the dialogue.

I’m going to work on it again tonight, and hope that I’ll be done tonight. Then, after that, I have to write my The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest review, and then I think I’m gonna start working the second part of my NYCC review.

It’s good to be working on the GeekingOutAbout.com website again.

Now, if only I could start writing up my new Smut Peddler story idea…

Hey Kelly,

My birthday two days ago was pretty awesome. I celebrated it by waking up to a ton of celebratory messages on Facebook which kept coming throughout the day from friends, former high school classmates, networking contacts, and readers of the blog I finally started which I hope will be a corner piece in my wee publishing empire. I worked non-stop at the day job and was able have a great dinner with my boyfriend.

Yesterday, I had a bad day at work, and all the communication techniques I’ve been learning in therapy failed me. Only my best friend was able to help me make sense of things, and I woke up to the news that one of my boss’ clients suffered a tragic loss earlier this summer and we didn’t even realize it.

On the positive side, I haven’t had a cigarette in about six months, since my aunt died. (I wonder if you’ve met her over there in that other plane of existence.) I also cut my hair really, really short and will blog about that once I ship the pony tail of hair off to Pantene Beautiful Lengths, which I will do today.

That’s what days are like now. Some days are really awesome, some days are not. My group of friends is smaller and more localized, but I do still try and keep in touch with the friends I met when I first met you. Hell, I made it up to Toronto for a subdued DexCon, and I even edited a book for your husband, and doing that and working on the blog was and is one of the most fun things I’ve done with my professional aspirations. Baby steps, I know…

I hope that I’ll have more that I can tell you about next year.

Miss you, a lot,
Trisha Lynn

Thanks to a good friend, this page is finally bursting with content and I hope to be able to keep you updated on all Saucy Goose Press-related news here.

Of course, there’s still some things I need to fix here with regards to reorganizing things into new categories, but I figure I’ll try and do that before I make the next big update.

My aunt passed yesterday at 8:20 am, EDT.

If you can, please donate to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Ever since Kelly died and I also learned that one of my dad’s sisters has lymphoma, I’ve been growing out my hair so that one day it will be long enough to donate to an organization like Locks of Love or Pantene Beautiful Lengths.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve got fantastic hair: it’s thick, grows well, and can be pretty damn shiny when I remember to leave the conditioner in for at least two minutes. If you don’t believe me, take a gander below:

Hey Kelly!

A lot’s happened since you died. I finally tipped over into being an agnostic and have been going through a lot of intense therapy. I really wish you could have been here to rant at when I lost some friends because of my behavior because you were always awesome at getting me to see the funny side of things or to commiserate with.

Ever since I changed jobs and pared down the list of people whose LiveJournals I read, I’ve been spending a whole lot of time in my head and I think about you now and then. Most often, I think about the vow I made to make each day of my life better because it’s one more day I have that you don’t, to say “Yes, and…” to more opportunities, and the promise I made when I turned 31 to make you proud of me wherever you are.

That last part? I’m not entirely there yet, and I am also wondering if it’s something I should give up on because I don’t see in myself the kind of near-universal compassion, friendliness, and acceptance that surrounded you. The fact that you still liked me despite the faults I am learning that I have still astounds me, and I wonder if I’ll ever find another female friend like you again.

Today I’m going to talk about you in therapy. I’m going to talk about why I’m still pissed off that you’re dead, how I feel like a failure because I don’t think I’ve done enough to honor your memory, how I’m finally as old now as you once were because my birthday will always be two days before the anniversary of your death, and how next year (if nothing catastrophic happens) I’m finally going to be older than you.

Anyway, I love you still, and I miss you a lot.

Take care, love,
Trisha Lynn

As many of you know, Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder is one of the best indie comics both on the web and off of it. I’ve been a fan ever since my days at Sequential Tart, and I was beyond pleased to learn that she had finally won an Eisner award this year at the San Diego Comic Con, even though some people don’t believe she should have won for “Best Digital Comic”.

And in a way, I agree.

I make a lot of promises to myself and while I’m not very good at keeping all of them, I’m glad (and sad) that I was able to keep this most recent one.

In April, I was talking with a friend in Houston, Texas named Corey with whom I’ve kept in sporadic contact for about eight years. We were having a catch-up conversation when he mentioned that his father had finally succumbed to the cancer that he’d been suffering through for at least a year.

That’s just one more person who has been claimed by “this fucking disease” as another friend of mine whose father died about a year before Kelly did said at her wake. Corey and I compare notes on our therapy process often, but I’d say he’s way further down on the atheism scale than I am. He’s angry, and hurt, and alone, and it hurt me to know that he’s been doing all this hurting by himself.

So when he said that with a little bit of the money he and his sister had gotten from his inheritance, he wanted to fly me down to visit him over the Memorial Day weekend, how could I say no?

This morning, I was sitting down to enjoy a cup of hot chamomile tea with lemon and honey at the Starbucks on the corner of 66th and Lexington when I overheard a man talking to a woman seated at a table against the wall a little behind me. The table was littered with the pages of one of the tabloid newspapers, and he was talking about one of the things he had read.

I don’t exactly recall how his rant started, because I was trying very hard not to overhear, especially when he started talking about how New York Governor David Patterson has been trying to introduce a same-sex marriage bill into the state constitution. What followed was the usual rhetoric I hear from homophobic people who call themselves Christians, sprinkled with some truly bizarre comments on how President Obama might be gay, something about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and fellatio…

Really, it was all a blur because inside my head and out loud on Twitter I was trying to decide if I should say something to him.

Yes, I know.

I have blog entries to write, thoughts about fiction to post, etcetera, but if you’ve been following my Twitter feed (see link list on right) you can see that I leave the office very late most of the time and have been having home Internet problems and thus can’t write.

However, the ‘tubes have been unclogged, the last of the three people I needed approvals for regarding my big Texas vacation post is getting a chance to look at it again, and tonight! I will be making a guest appearance on the Triple Feature movie podcast along with my editor Gordon McAlpin of the Multiplex webcomic, Joe Dunn creator of Joe Loves Crappy Movies, and our host Tom Brazleton, creator of Theater Hopper. Topics of discussion will include the debated Top 10 Science-Fiction movies list, Moon (short version: It’s freaking amazing!), and other things.

To listen in, sign up using this link, and I’ll see you tonight at 10 pm Eastern!