V(w)orpal sword
A quick bit of blawg, so I don’t break my non-stop blogging streak:
VWORP!1 is undergoing last-minute revisions after a brutal editorial once-over. I had someone look it over and, you know, when you have someone look things like this over, you expect them to be uncompromising. The good news: it’s a good book, it just needed lots of little persnickety grammatical and punctuation fixes. But the knock-on effect has been a little bit of a delay and an increased page count (I realized, very late in the game, that there was stuff I’d left out). This is why you have someone else look over your crap. Sort of like the little internet meme graphic making the rounds: proper punctuation is the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit. That, and some minor formatting/layout fixes, have pushed the page count dangerously close to 400.
I printed out a copy, from beginning to end, on paper, just to look at it. I learned two things from doing this.
- That’s a good way to kill two ink cartridges.
- I’ve written a big-ass f@#$ing book.
I hope you like it. It should still be ready for OVGE.… Read more
There are few incidents worse than a TV station over which you’re supposedly riding herd “going black” – i.e. something, somewhere, has stopped working, and you’re broadcasting an empty signal. In the control room, this is known as “oh shit time.”
Okay, I only thought this stuff was buried under a mile of soft peat somewhere.
So where were we? Oh yeah – seeing off our former TV weather guy with a bang. He was leaving us anyway, so we gave him a memorable sendoff that no one watching at home would ever have known about.
Sit back for this one. I’m about to tell you how I became a teevee weatherman. And what happened to the teevee weatherman I replaced.
When I was going into high school, there were two shows that had my full and undivided attention: Max Headroom and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not necessarily in that order. Trek was more escapist, and I was more than happy to lose myself in it. Max Headroom, of course, was escapism of another kind, with a day-glo facade of more gritty down-to-Earth reality. Edison Carter always got the Big Story, and always Caught The Bad Guys In The Act. For a kid who was on the journalism track that everyone expected him to be, you couldn’t ask for a better hero. Little did I know that I’d later find myself identifying much more with Blank Reg. Played by the instantly-familiar-and-yet-nobody-remembers-his-name W. Morgan Sheppard, who has had a guest starring role in everything (seriously: check IMDb to see if there’s ever been a show called “Everything.” I bet he’s been in it…), Reg voluntarily lived on the outskirts of society, a kind of hi-tech gypsy running his own pirate TV station from an impossibly spacious VW minibus, refusing to buy into society – or to sell out to it. (Seriously, that minibus was bigger on the inside than the outside – it’s only fitting that he finally got a chance to guest star in Doctor Who not so long ago.) Now that I’m closer to 40 than to 20, I realize Blank Reg was the real hero of the show.
When I was going into high school, I was on a journalism track. That’s what I was good at, that’s what I was excelling in, and it was just assumed that I’d go from having been an MVP in journalism in junior high and high school to doing pretty much the same thing in college. There were a few factors that no one really could have predicted, however: starting with my mother’s death in 1987, home became anything but a welcoming place, and more and more I was concentrating on opportunities to work, because work was a bulletproof excuse for escaping the hell that was home. I flamed out as a college student in 1992. I’ve never set foot in a college as a full-time student again. And before that happened, I had surprised everyone by opting out of the journalism track I was on in my freshman year. I had an instructor who was challenging; any other time that would’ve been fine, but I was being subjected to daily doses of full-blast adversarial at home. In my mindset at the time, anyone who was even slightly challenging toward me was reading as adversarial. My failing, not my instructor’s. It was probably a good idea to drop out of school when I did – actually, I still think to this day that my life would’ve turned out very differently if I had spent a couple of years trying to make it in “the workforce” (of which, as a part-time radio DJ, I was barely even a part) and then gone to school. I probably would’ve had a much better idea of how hard it is to eat and keep a roof over my head with no degree, and I probably would’ve worked my ass off for it.