To live like cats. Know what you want, and fully realize your self-worth. Be affectionate, but always remember to take care of yourself as you take care of others.
AuthorBrandon Schatz
Stick to your guns, and don’t let people push you around. You’re doing good things for good people, and everyone else isn’t your problem. They’re their own problem.
Save the worry for things that matter.
Breathe.
Do things because you want to and not because you have to.
To run.
To go, and do.
Whatever it is, whatever you want.
In which WE’RE BACK and we’ve FORGOTTEN HOW TO DO THIS.
Remember when we were weekly? Apparently we don’t. In a particularly inebriated outing, Danica and Brandon (that’s us!) are talking about this year’s Christmas Special – which apparently was at one point intended to be Steven Moffat’s swan song? What? Anyway. “The Husbands of River Song”. Rompy as hell, and tons of fun. But probably not as much fun as we had talking about it while super hammered after an… interesting Christmas.
Also: The Mindy Project! Supergirl! More! And an announcement about our schedule in 2016! YES!
Outro music is “Locomotion” by Kylie Minogue. No reason.
Podcast picture is by GIRL NAMED SHIRL PHOTOGRAPHY.
++PODCASTING
A little while ago, Danica and I were lucky enough to be asked to appear on a wonderful local podcast called The One, to which we eagerly (if nervously) agreed to.
For those who don’t know, The One is a podcast about everyday people, and their love stories. Naturally, the part that was making us a bit nervous was “talking about ourselves in a public forum”, but I think we managed okay. Maybe. Probably.
So.
The episode went up on Wednesday, and you can listen to it by heading over here, or subscribing to the podcast, and downloading the sixth episode.
Thanks again to Robyn Wilson for having us on!
In which we celebrate out 75th-ish episode the same way we always do: stumbling through our thoughts.
It’s Series finalé time with Clara and The Doctor as Brandon and Danica discuss “Hell Bent” – the final episode of Series 9. What did we think of Clara’s re-return and good-bye? Also, all that Gallifrey stuff? And Me? We have a feeling that if you listen, you’ll find out. Call it a hunch. A SEXY HUNCH.
Also! With the series concluded, and the holidays approaching, we’ll be taking some time off. (It is really hard getting hammered on a weekly basis when you only get one day off from work every 3 weeks or so.) You’ll be able to catch our next episode before the year is over as we discuss this year’s Christmas Special – and then we’ll return in the new year with weekly (!) episodes and a new(ish) format.
Thank you so much for sticking around for 75 episodes. Hopefully we’re around for many more!
In which our timing is perfect, and everyone needs to calm their shit, probably.
We start with narrating Cat Life, because of COURSE we do. Then it’s straight into “Heaven Sent” – the 11th episode of Doctor Who’s 9th Series, which we were too drunk to get emotional about. These things happen, right? But also: Capaldi, yeah? Yeah. Then it’s onwards to very VERY light spoilers regarding Jessica Jones’s fight against patriarchy wearing a David Tennant suit, and general stumbling about. Yay!
It’s December, so of course I’ve skipped over focusing on sticking the landing as 2015 rolls to a close, and am already looking forward to the new year. It should be an interesting one.
In 2014, Danica and I got engaged and got married. In 2015, we opened a comic store. In 2016, we’re going to be tackling something new once more. We’re still trying to shape exactly what we want to do, but we have a few goals in mind, and as soon as we can share some more information with you, it will appear here. For now, you’ll notice the site’s name has changed to Submet Industries, and old episodes of Doctor Whooch have slowly been appearing in the archives. These are portents, maybe. Or omens. But probably portents.
In the meantime, I have a few different relaxation projects that I want to try in 2016. I want to try and get a solid piece of fiction done. More specifically, I want to try and get the first story in a buddy detective series finally written up. I was thinking of making 2016 my year of no on the fly rewrites, which would mean forcing myself to get out a first draft in full before scraping the whole thing and working the bones again from the start. I spend a lot of time focusing on beginnings, rewriting and rewriting, never getting further than the first few pages. This is a metaphor for my life, he said, on his blog with several posts denoting unfulfilled plans for the future.
The only big project of mine that has really worked out has been Variant Edition – and honestly, that’s because I have some business partners who are helping with the whole “focus” thing. This will very much be the buzzword of 2016. Focus.
Beyond writing though, I’m looking forward to tackling something I’m calling The Douglas Adams Project. Which means I’ll finally get around to reading the rest of those Douglas Adams books that I’ve let sit unread for far too long. And hey, knowing me, if I can turn that into a series of blog posts, then it actually might happen.
And that’s it for today. December, you guys. It’s been a hell of a year. Let’s see how it ends.
Lately, I’ve been a bit blocked. This happens more frequently than I’d like (just by virtue of happening at all) and lately I’ve been having a harder time getting back into writing. So it goes.
A few days back, my lovely wife Danica sent me a link to a blog post about how output is sometimes (most times) related to input – meaning if a writer is not digesting, they have less reserves of energy to expend on creative endeavours. I’m starting to suspect that is the case with my current state of being. Running the shop has been a dream, but it takes up a lot of time and energy and creates a lot of stress. Some nights, it can be hard to sleep. Most days, it can be hard to take in anything substantial outside of the realm of comics – and as much as I love the medium, the work of it all sometimes gets in the way of enjoyment.
A lot of this problem, I bring on myself. In order to connect people with comics they will enjoy, Danica and I spend a lot of our time reading comics that we’re not terribly interested in. Most of them are very good comics – they just don’t match up with what we like to read aesthetically or stylistically. But as we continue to input items that don’t light our fires, we are finding that time to experience and digest things that we love is becoming scarce. Both of us are working on a plan to balance this out a little more in the new year. For myself, I’ve been trying to limit my “week of” reading to Tuesdays and Wednesdays, saving the other days for either books that I truly love, or endeavours that will bring me more joy. As of yet, I haven’t seen a drop in my ability to match people with books they’ll love, partly because reading every #1 still remains a solid part of the regimen. We’ll see if this gives me more time to tackle more non-work things. I kind of hope so, because we have such glorious plans for 2016.
++WORK RELATED
This past weekend was Local Comic Shop Day, which the store did not partake in. Structured to run like the exceedingly popular Record Store Day, there were quite a few reasons why we didn’t jump at the chance to participate in this event. If you want the long version, you can click here. The TL;DR version of it is this: we built Variant Edition with a core of providing comics to readers at affordable prices – focusing on content to read, rather than items to seal away and put into a box. And while there is nothing wrong with the collector’s mindset, we feel as though the market for readers is underserved and sometimes ignored – especially with events like this that provided very little in the way of new, exciting content (all were reprints with different covers or formatting), while committing the bonus crime of heavily allocating many items. That’s not an event that enriches the reading experience, it is one that enriches the collector’s experience, and that’s not something we wanted to encourage.
Again, the post I linked to digs quite a bit deeper into a lot of the hows and whys, but suffice to say, while we didn’t spend the weekend making some sweet, sweet speculator money, we slept well knowing that the products we sold that day were going to be read and enjoyed by the folks who purchased them. Turns out, being principled doesn’t mean you’ll be rich, but it can make you feel better about things.
++STAY TUNED
There’s a lot that I want to get to this week, and I’m hoping that I have the wherewithal to really dig in. I want to finish out the year having written 12 articles for Comics Beat, equalling out to roughly one a month, but that means I have to get cracking on… three? Yikes. Way to go, Brandon. But hey, I’ve had several articles percolating for weeks in my head. Now is the time to get them down onto a glowing screen.
In the meantime, be nice to yourself. You deserve it. Yes, even you. We’ll talk soon.
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