TerenceDorman.com

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of my upcoming projects is to provide exciting new written content for TheSpoils.com. Today marks the first step towards completing that goal.

Starting today The Blarg has been revived and will feature new content every Tuesday. This content will be a series of rotating articles written by four members of The Spoils staff, including myself.

If you’re at all interested in checking out the Blarg, or just want an idea of what is in store for its future, check out my introductory post here.

I sat down at my living room table yesterday with a bowl of soup and a glass of milk as my healthy lunch. As I do most days, I flipped on the television to find some sort of sitcom to watch during the half hour it takes me to enjoy my meal. The television clicked on and, as it always does, started on NBC.

I happened to catch a few minutes of some news program that must run during the lunch hours. The particular segment I caught was some attractive woman doing a quick rundown of some headlines, appropriating about thirty seconds to informing her viewers of the news and then giving her own opinion on the subject. The first headline I happened to catch in its entirety was regarding Facebook.

As I’m sure most of you know, a little while back Facebook implemented this new Timeline interface for profiles. Nobody had to switch to it and people generally didn’t like it, but it was a new option. According to this NBC news program, a few weeks from now all Facebook users will be forced to switch to this new Timeline interface, whether they like it or not.

I don’t really care at all about Facebook’s Timeline or what it does with its users. I use Facebook and I certainly don’t like every change they have made. The fact of the matter, though, is that I have nothing to do with those decisions and there is nothing I can do it about it short of deleting my account. I’m definitely not a fan of Timeline but I’m sure I’ll get use to it.

My issue is that Facebook changing its user interface classifies as news. I understand that almost the entire world uses Facebook and that the information is relevant to pretty much everyone. But is it really news? Does it really deserve a minute or two on a news program? I’m extremely curious to know what this Facebook news edged out as far as importance or relevance goes.

I’m not going to get into a giant rant about the media and news programs as that is meant for another day when I’m focused on that particular topic. Instead, I’m using this story to segue into a piece I wrote during my senior year at St. John’s University.

The piece was written for a Fiction Creative Writing class and our instruction was to write a monologue in the voice of another person, real or fictitious. I chose to write in the voice of Spider Jerusalem, the main character of Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan, one of my absolute favorite comic series. The piece kind of exemplifies and shares some of the thoughts I have about the media and the government and how people see both entities, and this recent Facebook news bit reminded me of the piece.

I hope you all enjoy it. If you like it, or thought I did a terrible job imitating Spider Jerusalem, please let me know.
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Before I dive into working on a website for a my friend Dan for the day, I thought I’d take a moment to give you all an update on how things have been going the past two weeks since I made my resolutions. I’ll also take a quick second to update you all on some upcoming projects, which will hopefully be exciting and interesting for you all.
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I have never really been one for New Year’s Resolutions. Come to think of it, I don’t think I have ever really made any. This year, however, I’ve decided that is important for me to create some resolutions and to write them down, that way I can look back a year from now to see how I’ve done.

All of the resolutions I’m about to relay to you all are most certainly goals I hope to achieve throughout the tenure of 2012. None of them are particularly specific to being “New Year” goals, but instead I’m choosing the start of 2012 as my not so arbitrary start point for these goals.
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As I’m sure all of you are aware, the holiday known as Christmas was celebrated all across the world three days ago (barring time zone confusions). While Christmas started as a religious holiday, it has transformed over the centuries to take on new forms of life and celebration. For some it is still that deeply religious holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, while for others it is simply a time of merriment, cheer, and gift-giving. Regardless of it’s meaning to the individual, Christmas is an event that cannot be ignored and has become a mainstay in our social and economic cultures.

I have been a huge fan of Christmas for as long as I can remember. My parents and family always made Christmas a wonderful spectacle and it really stuck with me. From the moment Thanksgiving dinner is over my entire body is stuffed with Christmas spirit. I have so much Christmas spirit that I created my own custom red hoodie that resembles Santa’s outfit, which I only wear between Thanksgiving and Christmas of each year, and I wear it every day. I even go to great lengths to dedicate my car with lights, ornaments, a tree, candy canes, and the like, the spread Christmas cheer as I drive around the neighborhood.

This year, on top of my usual traditions, I decided to bring Facebook into the fold. I woke up on Christmas morning, opened gifts with my family, ate our traditional breakfast, and then sat down the computer with one goal in mind. I decided that on this Christmas I would start a new tradition, one that would see me write “Merry Christmas!” on the wall of each and everyone on of my Facebook friends.

It seems, however, that Facebook is not a fan of that.
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My apologies for my lack of posts this past week. I have been rather busy working on the next expansion set for The Spoils and haven’t had as much time to write as I would like.

I did, however, find the time to write up a new tournament report for Diannara.com. In the report I cover a recent Battlegrounds Tournament held at Grasshopper’s Comics and detail each of my matches. To read the full report and my thoughts on the matches, click here.

Next week I hope to get back on schedule with a few posts. I will likely e writing up another tournament report for Diannara as I am expecting to be playing in another event when this post is published. I also have a lot to say about Frank Miller’s recent comments regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement, so expect see a piece about why I think he should keep his mouth shut, or at the very least choose his words more carefully.

Until then, though, be sure to enjoy this Autumn weather while getting yourself ready for the upcoming holiday season.

Believe it or not but one of my favorite moments in comics is found during the conclusion of Brian Azzarello’s twelve-part Superman story “For Tomorrow”. This is one of four Superman stories that I actually enjoy and respect and, oddly enough, it is the only one of the four that takes place in regular continuity. Of course every Superman fan hated it and DC has basically ignored it since it finished, but that’s to be expected from a story in which the only people who like it are people who hate the Superman character.
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Just wanted to take a moment to let you all know that I recently posted another article over at Diannara.com. The article is a full report of the Hallow’s End tournament at Grasshopper’s Comics this past weekend. I give a brief overview of what my deck is meant to do, followed by a breakdown of each of the five matches that I played.

If you’re interested in how my “Trust the Fungus” deck performed, be sure to read the article here.

After an evening of reflection and a few wonderful conversations with my good friend Max, I’ve come to quite a few conclusions. Not all of them are about writing or my own work, so I’ll save them for a later post and get down to the meat of it.

I’m finally, seriously, going to go ahead with publishing my novel. The first step in doing so, though, is finally admitting to myself that I’m not going to publish it as a novel. The work is a memoir, one covering about four years of my life, that I had always planned as releasing as a novel. I planned on changing some of the names and places just to make it a bit less obvious, but anyone who knows me would be able to figure it out rather quickly.

The way I see it now, there really is no point in doing that as I would just be lying to myself and my readers by trying to pass the work off as fiction. It’s a true story, all of it, and it’s a wonderful story. That’s the reason I wrote it. I thought it was a story worth chronicling and preserving in writing, and as a writer I had the means to do it. Who knows, maybe revealing that it is a true story will add some impact to it for my readers. I can only hope that will be the case.

So this is it. This is my formal, official announcement, that I will be pursuing the publication of my currently unpublished memoir, It’s a Love Story. I am likely to follow the same route that my good friend J. Elliot Riley did with his novel, Dangerous Clay, and publish the book for e-readers with a print on demand version, but of course that is all speculation at this point.

At some point in the future I’ll post a few glimpses of the memoir for you all to read as previews. Hopefully they’ll generate some feedback and interest in the work.

Come to think of it, It’s a Love Story: A Memoir has a nice ring to it.