4/5/08

madrobins: It's a meatloaf.  Dressed up like a bunny.  (Default)
Anyone heard anything about Creative Byline? It appears to be a sort-of-literary-agency crossed with a submissions tracking service crossed with an editorial service. It appears to be affordable ($8 a month, waived while they're in Beta, plus $19 per submission), and they claim contacts with several Real Publishers (that would be Dutton, SMP, Tor/Forge). It's a handsome, well-designed site with a clever logo (can't help it; I'm the daughter of a man who designed corporate identification materials, and a good logo gets my attention) and well-written copy. The only name I could find on the site, Brad MacLean, belongs to a guy who used to work for Hermann Miller (high-design furniture and decoration), who says his wife (unnamed) is the author of several children's and YA books. It all looks slick and reputable, and it might be. But my spider-sense starts tingling when I see things like this, and I can't tell if I'm just an old fogey who thinks things should be done the Old Way, or if there's something genuinely dicey about this. Anyone heard anything?

Irony

4/5/08 23:19
madrobins: It's a meatloaf.  Dressed up like a bunny.  (Default)
I have now seen Iron Man twice--once last night with Avocado and the Spouse, and once tonight with Sarcasm Girl. It holds up to repeated viewing, largely because Robert Downey, Jr. so inhabits that character. Without dragging us through a dossier of Distant Father/Unsocialized Genius tics, you get it all from him. He's more comfortable nattering with his waldoes and working on machines than he is talking to people. And Downey is surrounded by people who are also good: Jeff Bridges (the most amiable villain imaginable), Gwynneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard, and Paul Bettany being the vaguely Alfred-like voice of Stark's household computer, Jarvis. And, even for a chicken like me, they make single-person flight look hazardous but really really fun. The suit is amazingly cool. And the plot points are left lying about deftly enough so that I thought "I wonder if they're going to come back to that" without being distracted into wondering how they were going to work them in.

As Sarcasm Girl put it, "hella good movie."