I never heard back on my Arkham High pitch. Did they not like the fact that the chapters were inexplicably named after Carpenters songs? Was the drug dealer as protagonist a little much for them? Did they find it too derivative of Boaz Yakin’s 1994 movie Fresh? (This one would have been pretty fair, and if you haven’t seen Fresh, I highly recommend it.) I’ll never know!
I thought I’d take one more crack at this. I decided to pitch a pretty obscure character, figuring I’d have way less competition for a Zatanna book than with something involving one of DC’s Big 3.
Back in 2016, I got a call from the person who was my literary agent at the time. They told me that their agency had been contacted by DC comics because they were in search of YA authors for a line of YA graphic novels. They wanted a big-name kidlit author that the agency represented (I won’t name names, but Don’t Let the Penguin Drive the Bus would have been a good DC Comics property for this person to write.).
But that author wasn’t interested, so my agent asked if I’d like to pitch a project. I went to New York during Comic Con and met with a DC editor and had a great conversation. I pitched a Superman story. She liked my idea, so I wrote up the pitch and had my agent send it off.
Apparently some editors loved my pitch and other hated it. The haters won out, so I got to work on another one. I used a bunch of the ideas I’d pitched to DC in my high school noir I SEE RED, which is forthcoming from…me. But said editor had also informed me that someone in the company came up with a Gotham-based idea called Arkham High. So I pressed Kaitlynne from Shelter in Place into service and wrote a pitch for it. It follows below!
The owners of the new NWSL team in Boston have made a pitch to have their home field at White Stadium in Franklin Park, quite close to where I live. So I went to a community meeting to check out their proposal.
So, first of all, I’m aware of the irony. The very act of writing this implies a certain amount of ambition. Like the great majority of writers, I write because it’s fun, but also because I want to be read. I’m large! I contain multitudes!
But we use ambition in two senses. One is the ambition to achieve something or get better at something. I, for example, am finding a strange ambition to get good enough at guitar to play some fingerpickin’ blues. (I haven’t picked up a guitar in probably ten years) I also have an ambition to write a long piece in iambic pentameter. These are ambitions I have to stretch myself, to do something difficult, and I think that kind of ambition is fine.
But then there’s the ambition to make a name for yourself. To do something that matters. To become a person who matters. And it’s this ambition I think is ultimately destructive.
I’m trying to manage my mom’s life while she’s incapacitated, and it’s a gigantic pain in the ass. Nobody likes to think about being incapacitated, but here’s something I would like to beg you to do on behalf of whoever might have to deal with the logistics of your life should you become incapacitated. (if it helps, let’s not think of this as a permanent incapacitation. Let’s say you lget mono or something and you’re just too damn tired to pay the bills, but you’re going to get better. Okay?)
In the past, language pedants used to get very exercised about the difference between “will” and “shall,” insisting that one was correct in certain circumstances, while the other was correct in others.
Calvin woke up at 7, vomited, crawled back into bed, got up at 9:52, vomited again, and spent the next hour in bed cursing himself for being a cliche. Well, first cursing himself for drinking too much, again, and then cursing himself for being a cliche.
The Boston Globe is re-investigating the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart. Apparently the Marky Mark song wasn’t the last word on the case, and after all these years, there is still new information to uncover.
I have no objection to this except for the way the Globe, and for that matter the entire Boston Media, treats the deaths of people who are not wealthy white women from the suburbs.
So here’s what I know about one such case with a lot of unanswered questions. I’ve been pestering journalists to look into this for years, but since it concerns the death of a Black man with a criminal record who lived in public housing, nobody seems to care. I’ve given up hope that the Globe or HBO or anybody with resources will ever bother to try to get to the bottom of this case. I’m presenting it here because Burrell Ramsey-White was a real person I knew, and while I have no hope he’ll ever get justice, I don’t want the official story of his death, riddled with holes and inconsistencies, to be the one we remember.
