The Mystery of the Music Trolls

Listening to Into The Ocean by Blue October

Alas, I thought I had finally rid myself of the Music Trolls nearby, but that was obviously only for a week. In this place, I will never be wanting for a night full of loud, pounding, incessant, bassy, terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad music banging my desk, rattling my keyboard and knocking pictures off my walls.

I discovered the most horrifying thing of all yesterday. While the music was forcefully threatening the structural integrity of my eardrums, I decided to go check the mail. The second I stepped outside, however, the music STOPPED. I am not kidding. It just went absolutely silent. Then, to test it, I stepped back in. IT STARTED AGAIN. I did this back-and-forth motion for some time, and came to this conclusion:

In spite of that, I am just about finished with the first round of revisions. So far I have cut thousands of words of Pure Fluff that has no place in a finished novel. There were two scenes that were particularly hard to chop out. However, I managed to salvage them, tie them into a bag of bones, and I will be putting them on the website after the book is in stores, as some special outtakes.

I wasn’t able to make it to New York but I did watch the entire event for Stephenie Meyer there. It was wild even on screen. You would not believe the fans there. I watched both online shows and in the second one I sat in my site’s chatroom with about 25 other people watching too. By the time this song came on, most of us were hugging computer monitors or waving cell phones in the air. As for me, let’s just say the concert series turned me into a Blue October fan.

On a similar note, I also heard that I was indirectly responsible for messing with someone’s autograph. He he he.

Meanwhile, on those random days that I do flee my apartment in search of outside human interaction, I have still been scouring this city for a copy of the Entertainment Weekly with my interview in it. Although I was promised a free copy, it has yet to arrive, and I am impatient. My list so far:

• Walmart
• Target
• Krogers
• Tom Thumb
• 7-11
• Shell
• Chevron
• The University bookstore
• The haircut place
• Jack In The Box (I was getting desperate and hungry)

and the only thing I got in return was a sunburn. I found one copy of it, 45 minutes across the city at a store that claimed to be a Borders (the phone book said it was a Booksamillion), but I simply refuse to travel that far for one stack of papers.

While I was at Walmart, I literally got lost in the store. I was somewhere between where they sell the washrags and Hannah Montana country. I turn a corner, and suddenly I’m at a dead end. There should be no dead ends in a Walmart. It is something that will send a sane person silly. I just stood there: how is there a dead end in a Walmart! Is this real? Am I imagining it? Is this what hell is like?

Worse: an enormous, poster-sized face of Hannah Montana was sitting at the end of this place, staring back at me. I had somehow gotten lost in Miley Cyrus town. That is enough to send me running. And I did, spinning about, only to find to my horror that when I moved, the face on the poster CHANGED. Right before my eyes, Hannah Montana transformed into SOMEBODY ELSE. I am not kidding. The picture just fizzled and changed like magic. When I stepped backwards, it changed BACK AGAIN.

My reaction:

After I escaped that store relatively unscathed though mentally scarred, I got my provisions home and got right back to editing.

For those who haven’t been keeping up with the TwilightGuy.com blog, I’ve had a lot of good press recently. Although my interview got cut from the Businessweek article I got the issue in today, and happily enough there was a mention of me in there. I had my first telephone interview last week which was fun and a bit nervous at the same time. Thankfully, I wasn’t misquoted, although for the life of me I don’t remember a word I said, so they could have made up pretty much anything they wanted to.

Other than those I was told I was in the Globe and Mail on Thursday, in Canada. I think I have another interview coming out in Canada this week sometime…not sure. I also had a mention in the Gilette New-Record and a mention on Salon.com — just in time to pass the 1-million hit mark for my site! Excitement ensued.

I was hit with an idea for a new Youtube video yesterday and I should be making it soon (hint: this one will appeal to writers). Editing for days on end has left me pale and zombie-ish, so I’d want to return to my human state before filming. Along that same line of thought, my channel was recently approved into the Partners program and passed 2000 subscribers (yay!), which means I got to put the really cool banners at the top of my page. More excitement ensued.