Tip of the Quill: A Journal

Monthly Archives: August 2004


This is my favorite feeling in the world. I just had a client unchain me – not fire me, but say “Look, go to town on this. Knock yourself out. Do what you would if this were one of your personal projects.” Mwa. Ha. Ha.

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Cribbed from Warren Ellis, apparently the bodies of three WWI soldiers have been found preserved inside of a glacier. I’m not sure what’s more creatively intriguing, that image or this passage that occurs late in the article: Among the relics left in Italy by World War One Austrian troops was a series of tunnels buried […]

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There’s a scene in Zach Braff’s Garden State where Natalie Portman looks at Zach and says, “You’re in it right now, aren’t you? That’s what my mom always says when she looks at me and sees I’m trying to work something out in my head. You’re in it.” I’ve been in it all morning. This […]

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Ah, the neverending refrain of my life: bang bang hammer hammer. If my life had a soundtrack, it would be an infinite symphony of metaphorical power drills and electric saws. A quick note: Adam Greenfield has once again made my linked-list with a very insightful piece on the psychology of a redesign and the state-of-the-art […]

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OK, well, “high score” might be a weird term for it, but I just finished typing in almost all of the stuff I’ve been writing lately. My current page count as of this moment is 129, with a word count of just over 33,000. In the last two weeks I’ve written almost 7,000 words and […]

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A brief observation here. It’s no secret that my favorite writers on the planet are Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Carroll. I wear my influences proudly not just on my sleeve, but tattooed across my forehead. I also like Stephen King, Nick Bantock and Dave McKean. (And, here, I want to throw a quick Bad Dave, […]

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Wow. I guess I should have posted that quasi-obituary months ago. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve plowed through almost the entirety of Act Two for Bones of the Angel and laid almost all the groundwork for Act Three. I’m writing as fast as I can, filling several of those little Moleskine journals with […]

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I found a trailer this morning for a new movie called I Heart Huckabees, which is billed as “An Existential Comedy” and looks like it could easily become my favorite movie since The Royal Tenenbaums. In select cities October 1; I am hereby sincerely, deeply hoping Chicago is a Select City. Also! I am looking […]

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This will probably come back to haunt me someday, when my musical tastes have evolved a bit more, but right now, as I write this, I can’t stand Björk’s music. She does, however, have fantastic taste in artwork, as evidenced by the kick-ass aesthetics that accompany her new album, MEDULLA. Of special note is the […]

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I should have done this a long time ago. By starting work in earnest on a new project and getting myself neck-deep in client work, I’ve managed to unblock myself on Bones of the Angel. Since I was in Ohio two weeks ago, I’ve written fifty pages’ worth of new material and plowed almost three […]

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