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Impostor Syndrome

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Saturday, Harold and I went to the North Carolina MakerFaire. I really enjoyed New York MakerFaire, both times I went, and I planned check out all the projects, take some fun photos, and just enjoy a show without worrying about covering it for work. I wasn’t going to frame any articles in my head, or try to network, or look for interview opportunities. I didn’t even bring any business cards.

Ten minutes in, of course, I was wishing I had. So many awesome projects!  There’s an adage about loving what you do enough that you never work a day in your life. It is definitely my goal, but I think I’m doing it wrong. Instead, I like what I do enough that I’m always working.

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MakerFaire NC

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I have three pieces in the June issue of iPlay Gamer Magazine!  This one is a snarky review of the new Fast & Furious game spinoff of the new Fast & Furious movie spinoff, and the magazine also includes my reviews of social shooter Six-Guns and retro platformer Random Heroes 2. The staff here was great to work with, and the finished magazine looks really good!

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iPlay Gamer June Issue

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The Mermaid of Brooklyn is set in a very real Brooklyn. Park Slope moms whisk their babies from baby language classes to expressive fingerpainting. Changing times are bringing her in-laws’ candy gift-basket company to a slow, painful bankruptcy. The city manages to be both glowing with possibility, and summer-sticky.

Jenny’s apartment is just a little too small, with too many stairs. The summer is sweaty sticky, the nice things that her friends and neighbors have are just a bit out of reach, she never gets quite enough uninterrupted sleep, and a string of other seemingly-small irritations leave Jenny in a constant state of almost snapping. (I have no idea how one could feel like that in Brooklyn, or how one could feel any other way in North Carolina.)

Magical realism just doesn’t get enough attention in adult literature, but as a fan of superheroes and other modern mythologies, I have no problem with a real-life mermaid. Jenny encounters a russalka, a bitter Russian mermaid. And Jenny has a degree in Russian folklore, one of those “useless liberal arts” degrees that introduces students to the mysterious need for story and magic across all cultures, and points the reader to all the places a mythical creature could live…

The russalka pulls Jenny out of her top-of-the-laundry-basket outfits and into the gorgeous shoes and sundresses she’s been saving for special occasions that never seem to come. She also starts Jenny sewing again. (This is the only chicklit theme in the novel, that our heroine uncovers her secret artistic talent that is the key to both Personal Fulfillment and Financial Independance. But it works, because the dresses she can’t really remember sewing are such a fairy tale theme.)

Each relationship in the book is so amazingly real, whether it’s Jenny’s crush on the neighborhood Cute Stay-at-Home Dad, her marriage to her troubled, missing husband, loaded conversations with her well-meaning and impossible mother-in-law, or almost daily interactions with the girlfriend she isn’t sure is a real friendship or just the accident of living nearby, with young children.  Even the bitter russalka is realistic, in a mystical way.

I was unable to stop reading this, long after I should have been asleep.

This is based on a review copy from the publisher. (Thank you!) Opinions are my own. Free books have never stopped me from snarking about a book before.

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Amy Shearn’s ‘The Mermaid of Brooklyn’

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“I just talked to someone you already talked to!”
“Who?”
“In the artists alley… With the cool business cards…”
“Not narrowing it down any.”

I think that sums up the artists at Animazement AND covering a show with another journalist really well. Also at the con, I got to go to samurai class, a 3D-printing workshop, and talk to cosplayers. Really good times.

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Animazement Conversation

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Skinny Bitch In Love

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Also I first read Screamland on my way back from covering a show in Los Angeles and Club Monstrosity on my way back from covering a show in New York. I’m just saying.

Club Monstrosity features a delightful cast of monsters in hiding. Swamp Thing, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a mummy, a vampire, the Blob, and the Invisible Man. Also, the obligatory Hot Werewolf. The protagonist, Natalie Grey, is a Frankenstein’s monster. It was lovely to have a supernatural female who wasn’t a glitter vampire or a naughty version of a Halloween standard, and the author never once waffles into a sexy version. Natalie has full body scars, mismatched features and limbs, and brute strength, and never turns magically pretty in the right circumstances. Predictable results regarding Hot Werewolf, though.

 The story starts with the premise that all the monsters all meet regularly, and don’t particularly like each other, which is a pretty realistic possibility, and in line with the novel’s themes of urban alienation, but a difficult narrative opening. It makes for a few awkward spots of plot exposition. We’re constantly panning around a room of monsters to note that each one is dressed in character, or that the werewolf is ordering red meat while the mummy drinks extra water to stay hydrated. It doesn’t make you want to close the book, but it does remind you, again, that you are reading about a group of Very Different Monsters.

When the Invisible Man doesn’t show up one week, the rest of the monstrous support group figures he’s just invisibly eavesdropping on them all. Then Bob The Blob doesn’t turn up at the next meeting… When a few of the concerned monsters make their way to Bob The Blob’s apartment, it’s a distinctly Manhattan scene. Of course you’d spend time with someone for months and years without ever seeing their home! Apartments are just for sleeping, not socializing! Without revealing too much of the storyline, the Very Different monsters must put aside (most of) their differences to figure out who is stalking and killing Manhattan monsters, and put an end to it.

Once the group is defined, the misfit monster interactions make this a worthwhile read. The complex relationship between Jekyll and Hyde is an engaging narrative by itself. So is the shudder that passes through the group when Halloween is mentioned — as if someone has indelicately mentioned a bodily function that polite company wouldn’t discuss. There is a lot to enjoy as classic monsters navigate my favorite city. The novel ends with a very clear setup for a sequel (I just Googled, and The Monsters in Your Neighborhood is out next month) so they can have more monster adventures in New York!

Sure, Club Monstrosity might use a scarred corpse-construct, an ancient vampire who won’t freaking dorm down in public, and Van Helsing’s crazed daughter-in-law to tell the story. But it’s really a novel about the moments of alienation in a crowd.

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Club Monstrosity: Classic Monsters In Manhattan

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The game has six surfing bird characters for players to meet. Here are some of their background stories:

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Amazing Birds

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I got to go cover Animazement with Faith, one of my editors at Geek, and it was great to meet an internet friend in person. We also compared stories about random copywriting jobs. Weigh in, friends: Which is less likely to be ever be read: a training manual for fast-food employees or a press release with “e-greetings” as the keyword?

I always think that getting a press badge is a fluke. Maybe the con organizers happen to have one pass left over, and they decide to give it to me so it won’t go to waste. Or maybe they mixed up my name with a real journalist and let me in by accident. Maybe the conference organizers just very quickly scanned my clips, and if they’d had more time, they would have realized it’s all a big mistake and they’d  really regret allowing me to attend. Also I’m pretty sure that anyone I’ve ever run into at a show is just pretending that they have read my work, just to be nice. I am not saying this is terribly rational, just saying that I’ve been covering industry events for years, and I’m always convinced that I’m some blogger who got in by mistake.

I don’t know if it was attending a show with a colleague, or my newfound familiarity with the Raleigh Convention Center (I was camped out in the Marriott Starbucks while lesser journalists were still cursing the convention center’s lack of wifi!), but I felt like a real working journalist at Animazement.

Overall, I really enjoyed going to Animazement. I liked seeing fans sharing their hobby with their parents or children, I liked being part of a subculture that is so accepting of fluid gender, I love that anime has led fans to learn more about illustration, or costume artistry, or to study Japanese language and culture. I would not mind some more showering and bathing by some of the attendees, though.

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Animazement

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That Time I Had To Talk To Strangers

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