Quotation of the Day

"The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything."
Theodore Roosevelt ~

Happy Inauguration Day!

And to celebrate, the single best version of our national anthem, recorded by perhaps the only individual cooler than our new President.

Hugh Jackman on Creative Courage

"I've always felt that if you back down from a fear, the ghost of that fear never goes away. It diminishes people. So I've always said 'yes' to the thing I'm most scared about. The fear of letting myself down -- of saying 'no' to something that I was afraid of and then sitting in my room later going, 'I wish I'd had the guts to say this or that' -- that galvanizes me more than anything."
--Hugh Jackman

I've often wondered if this kind of fear fuels creative drive.....

Me and Christopher Rice on TV interview

Here's me and the inestimable Mr. Rice doing an interview on the Patti Gribow show, where we discuss research, writing gay characters (as a straight vs. gay author), choosing plots, and generally make fun of each other.

Wit and Wisdom

Josh Billings, considered by many to be our country's second greatest humorist (behind Mark Twain) is overlooked by many.

I thought I'd ring in the new year with a few favorite quotations:

-- -- --

I have never known a person to live to be one hundred and be remarkable for anything else.

As a general thing, when a woman wears the pants in a family, she has a good right to them.

Learning sleeps and snores in libraries, but wisdom is everywhere, wide awake, on tiptoe.

Life is short, but it's long enough to ruin any man who wants to be ruined.

Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.

Most people when they come to you for advice, come to have their own opinions strengthened, not corrected.

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.

The best way to convince a fool that he is wrong is to let him have his own way.

The road to ruin is always in good repair, and the travellers pay the expense of it.

There are people who are always anticipating trouble, and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen to them.

There are two kinds of fools: those who can't change their opinions and those who won't.

There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together.

Words are often seen hunting for an idea, but ideas are never seen hunting for words.

The End of The Punisher Arc

The final book of my Punisher arc, JIGSAW, came out yesterday. I had more fun writing this story than anything I've yet done in comics. It will be collected in a trade shortly, I'd assume.

Look next for a short comedic Wolverine piece I did in SWITCHBACK, coming out Jan 7.

Happy Holidays, Bub

Ring in the new year with some mutant violence.

Swallowed the Spider (alternate title: Flies to a Web) now available at fine comic book establishments everywhere. Art by Jerome Opena, cover by the infamous Tim Bradstreet.

The Shield Finale

Now any of you who know me know that I love this show. The final episode was the best ending to any TV series I've seen, and the party proved pretty jaw-dropping as well, particularly when the head of FX read off the list of accolades that the show gathered over its 88-episode run.

My favorite character was Lem, and when Lem was killed off, I was so angry with Shawn Ryan (the show's creator and a buddy of mine) that I refused to speak to him for days. I mean - how could you kill Lem? Even years later, the injustice still smolders. So I began a running joke with Shawn -- "Hey, I have an idea. You should have an episode where Lem comes back from the dead and solves crime!"

"Ever think about giving Lem his own spin-off?"

"Do you think Lem will go with me to prom?"

Et cetera.

So at the finale, where the last episode was presented on the big screen at the Hollywood Arclight, I took my seat, and then left to grab some more popcorn. When I came back, someone was hiding under my coat. I thought it was someone fooling around, so I gave him a good smack and when the guy lowered the jacket from over his head, it was.....Kenny Johnson, the actor who plays Lem! Despite years of harassment from me, Shawn had brought him over to meet me -- an indication of Shawn's graciousness, and proof that no bad deed (harassment) goes unrewarded.

It was also great to see other cast member buddies - Jay Karnes and David Rees Snell in particular - enjoy this time looking back at what they had created. I met Walton Goggins, who was exceptional throughout the show, and I had a good talk with Michael Chiklis about Shakespeare (or as he likes to think of him, Edward de Vere). Thanks to Jason Ryan for the photo.

All in all, it was a remarkable night capping one of the most remarkable shows in the history of television. Congrats to all the cast and crew for what they accomplished here.

Horton Foote

"I live to write."

I've long maintained that writing—for those of us who really write—isn't a hobby or a love or a job, but a compulsion. I came across Foote's quotation today, and I was trying to think what it would be like to live WITHOUT writing. I'd make it a few weeks, I think, and then my head would explode. I suppose there's a certain illness or instability in someone who requires eight to ten hours a day of sublimation to maintain a sense of purpose, but hell, I guess you dance with the one who brung you.

So much of a writer's life is filtered through a narrative lens. Most every exchange, event, subtlety raises questions: Can I use that? How could I tweak that in a plot to evoke the same sentiment? Can I mirror that language for a character? It's distracting, yes, and sets one at a certain remove from life at times, but it's also a lot of goddamned fun. Sort of like playing a game in your head your whole life.

So Foote's line seems particularly apt, since for some of us, there doesn't seem to be any other way TO live.

This Says It All

I thought this quotation, from the cover of this month's Vanity Fair, appropriate for a writer's blog:

"Amateurs dream. Professionals work."
--Garson Kanin

Or, as I've often remarked about Los Angeles: "I meet a lot of people who want to be writers. I meet very few who actually want to write."

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Would you have flunked eighth grade in 1895?

A Tale of Book Savagery

Check out Bookreporter.com for a holiday tale involved me, my sister, Michael Connelly's The Black Echo, and that dumb-ass, Sandy.

A Fistful Of, uh, uh, Asskicking

Unveiling today, the final Foolkiller in my second limited series, White Angels.

And the fourth Punisher of my run - perhaps my favorite cover, by artist and devil pig, the Good Reverend David Cornelius Johnson.

Crime Novelists Beware

Life is imitating art.....

Ten Most Irritating Expressions

Thank you Charlotte Bailey of The Telegraph, UK.

What's your most irritating phrase? Mine is probably the oft-misused "Hopefully."

Oxford compiles list of top ten irritating phrases

A top 10 of irritating expressions has been compiled by researchers at Oxford University.

BBC Radio 4 presenter John Humphreys described the phrase 'I personally' as the linguistic equivalent of having chips with rice Photo: MARTIN BEDDALL

The phrases appear in Jeremy Butterfield's Damp Squid, named after the mistake of confusing a squid with a squib Photo: Oxford University Press

Heading the list was the expression 'at the end of the day', which was followed in second place by the phrase 'fairly unique'.

The tautological statement "I personally" made third place – an expression that BBC Radio 4 presenter John Humphreys has described as "the linguistic equivalent of having chips with rice."

Also making the top 10 is the grammatically incorrect "shouldn't of", instead of "shouldn't have".

The phrases appear in a book called Damp Squid, named after the mistake of confusing a squid with a squib, a type of firework.

The researchers who compiled the list monitor the use of phrases in a database called the Oxford University Corpus, which comprises books, papers, magazines, broadcast, the internet and other sources.

The database alerts them to new words and phrases and can tell them which expressions are disappearing. It also shows how words are being misused.

As well as the above expressions, the book's author Jeremy Butterfield says that many annoyingly over-used expressions actually began as office lingo, such as 24/7 and "synergy".

Other phrases to irritate people are "literally" and "ironically", when they are used out of context.

Mr Butterfield said: "We grow tired of anything that is repeated too often – an anecdote, a joke, a mannerism – and the same seems to happen with some language."

The top ten most irritating phrases:

1 - At the end of the day

2 - Fairly unique

3 - I personally

4 - At this moment in time

5 - With all due respect

6 - Absolutely

7 - It's a nightmare

8 - Shouldn't of

9 - 24/7

10 - It's not rocket science

Last Shot Now Out....In Russian!

The Russians, I think, make the coolest, toughest covers. This one for Last Shot looks like a movie one-sheet. Having just visited Russia and acquainted myself with various personalities there, I had to laugh at Guy Ritchie's portrayal of the Russian hitmen in Rockandrolla. No matter the injuries, they keep coming! Garth Ennis also had a great Russian hitman in his Punisher MAX run -- one of my favorite new characters he introduced.

So I consider this cover a celebration of everything that's bad-ass about Russia.

Tomorrow is Punisher/Foolkiller Day

Wolverine is Coming to Town

December.

Comics on Comics

With Marc Evanier, Asterios Kokkinos, Kathryn Lyn, and Robbie Peron, I did a panel called Comics on Comics at the West Hollywood festival -- comics book creators and comedians discussing (in smart-ass fashion) the state of the comic-book industry. It was a blast and really funny - available for watching here, or iTunes download here.

Smoking in Moscow

I love cigars. In the scene in The Crime Writer, where Drew Danner gets home from court, goes out back, and smokes a cigar on his back deck....well, that's my deck. And it was my cigar too (fictional cigar-swiping bastid!). When I was in Russia, Smoke Magazine interviewed me, and photographer Dima Gushchin took a bunch of pictures for a big feature article. Here's a few of them, showing me puffing smugly away, with furrowed brow and a (I hope) an aura of gangsta gravitas.

On the entertainment front, I suggest you all see Burn After Reading, which embodies the level of brilliant quirkitude we've come to expect from the Coen brothers. Appaloosa has some great scenes and moments (Two men lying wounded in the dirt after a shootout. "Well, that was quick." Reply: "Everyone knew how to shoot.")

And, lastly, if you're not reading Eric Powell's The Goon, why the hell not?