March 11
Just the other day, I found myself thinking that maybe I should be doing more in terms of audio, instead of just writing everything. I think there was more than a little bit of frustration after a day spent typing for 10 hours in there, when I thought it; the moment of Well, if I’m doing audio, then all I have to do is talk, right? Nonetheless, this week has turned into an unusually audio-heavy one for me; this afternoon, I’ll be doing two different audio things, with one of them potentially opening the door to much more down the line. Now that the possibility is here, I find myself impressively, stupidly, anxious about it. At least when you’re writing, you get the chance to hide behind your words and more carefully consider what you’re saying.
I suspect this is one of those “Be careful what you wish for,” deals. I’ll report back on whether or not I shouldn’t have wished for anything soon enough.
Can you even?
“There just aren’t enough hours in the day,” you mutter as you check another item off your to-do list. Little do you know that your pen was forged from a sliver of the most precious of cosmic wonders—the Time Gem. You, Graeme McMillian, have now been granted an extra twenty-four hours. Two Tuesdays in one! What do you do?
The first line of this makes me laugh so hard, because I have five massive to-dos staring at me from another window that I just checked again before reading this.
If I really had an extra day out of nowhere, right now, what I’d do is set aside some reading time for myself, take the dogs for a long walk, do some baking – I’ve promised Kate that I’d make her some almond biscotti for ages now – and just generally try to decompress a bit. Recent events have made me go all-out for awhile and I’m feeling as if a day where I have no deadlines and can be a little selfish would be the greatest gift of all.
Now I wish I had a Time Gem pen for real.
I love your radio show(s) but I cringe when you say stuff like “George Perez really gets off on…” or “Bendis is wants everyone to know he’s smarter than…”. For me: that’s the line–if you have journalistic evidence someone’s a dick, then that’s one thing (and I realize you have more information than we do about that), but ascribing a fucked-up personality trait unequivocally to a creator because there’s an aspect of the work you don’t like is, for me, where the line is. Where is it for you?
Hrm.
Part of me wants to start with “When I say ‘someone’s getting off on,’ it’s more a way of saying that they’re clearly into it than anything else,” but I think that might be me being defensive. I’m unsure how to respond to this, because it’s something I’m uncomfortable with – I think I’ve gone waaaaay over the line in the past on the podcast, and I’m trying to rein myself in from continuing to do so, so my first response to “where the line is” is something like “probably about three steps back from where I am, worryingly.” It’s something I’m very bad at, and trying to get better about.
That said, occasionally, I’m saying things because I do know that people are massive dicks from firsthand experience.
You guys talking about 5 Years Later on the podcast got me thinking. Do you know the history or if there is a story about how Death showed up later on in that run?
I could be wrong – and this being the Internet, if I am, someone’s sure to tell me – but I think it was simply a case of Keith Giffen wanting to use her. Wasn’t this around the same time as her appearance in Captain Atom? Maybe it was just that she was popular and DC thought it had a new personification of the concept it could play with.