to write, to live, to work, to laugh

As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?
- Stephen King

The Spring '08/5th Anniversary issue of Elements dropped this past Wednesday - how exciting!! - with several articles by Alex and me, as well as a featured contributing writer who you might know =)

If you want a copy, just let me know, and Alex will send you a box. Quite literally, he will actually send you a box of magazines.

This morning, Alex and I stopped by a Ferrari/Maserati dealership to pick up the Maserati GranTurismo for a test drive. Alex drove while I was content to play the role of attentive, picture-taking passenger. At $125,000, it was quite the ride. Even at top speeds, it was incredibly smooth and agile, turning heads on every street. The Lotus is still my future sports car of choice, but if a Maserati ever ended up in my driveway, I don't think I'd turn it away.


I just got the results for the the Short Story Challenge 2008 that I entered a few months ago, and while I didn't get 1st place in my heat, I got 2nd place instead =) So I don't move on to Round 2, but considering that there were more than 550 writers, of which 45 have moved on to Round 2, and I got 1 of the 30 2nd place spots out of all the heats (mine had 19 writers), I actually did pretty good!! (Did you catch all those numbers??) Check out the results page:

http://www.nycmidnight.com/2008/SSC/1stRound/15.htm

Then there was this interesting bit of news from the photographer (ImageWorksNYC) who recently took my headshots - one of my pictures is now up on one of his websites:

http://www.imageworksnyc.com/headshots

As for VM, we got a new round of drawings and layouts this week, and with them, progress looks promising in the next few weeks.

So that's about it for updates this most busy of months. Still writing, still editing, still plugging away. It gets tough, and perfection is elusive, always two steps ahead of me, making me slap my forehead every other day. But hey, perfection is overrated. Sometimes a flaw here or there, a question mark or two, makes you smile more than if you hadn't noticed anything at all.

And with that, here's the cutest tree ever: