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| Who? What? Why? (Alternatively: Who the hell do you think you are?) I think I’m a grad student/writer who has a lot of sites, and wanted to put them at one easy URL so people could find them more conveniently. You want a shrine to your ego? Go make your own; mine costs less than $10 a month. Why do you need a FAQ? Because people keep asking me the same questions over and over, dammit. I mean, uh… I’m just trying to save you the time and effort of having to ask. Yes. Is your real name Cleolinda Jones? No. Why do you have so many sites? Because I have a lot of interests and I talk/write too much and then Ibite off more than I can chew. This listing doesn’t even include the defunct sites and features that I’ve also run (but let’s not speak of the dead). Also, I have a compulsion to try out every little new thing—which can be great, or otherwise I’d still be stuck on Easyjournal. Otherwise, it’s a sickness, man. Fortunately, I’m learning to delegate more, so that I can conceptualize and create sites and then hand them over, at least partially, to other people. How often do you update? (Alernatively: Why don't you update more often?) The theoretical update schedule for each site is listed on the Websites page—for example, the Digest is now supposed to run on a M/W/F schedule, but illness or a term paper or a deadline comes around and oh well. Can I email you? As it is, LiveJournal comments are actually a surer tack, because they do get emailed to me, and a personal email may not make it through my spam filter, and my email has been known to crap out for hours at a time. At least with LJ comments, there’s a separate record of the comment outside my email. What’s your AIM/MSN/Yahoo messenger ID? I hate to say this, but I’m rather ADD, and I work at home at this point, so I’ve had to restrict myself to IMing a very few people in order to get any work done. Like, friends from college, family, significant others, etc. I’m not giving out any IM usernames at this time, and if you happen to hunt one down, you won’t get a response. >> Re: Short Attention Span Theater Why do you have a journal and a blog? Because I had a Blogger blog first, and then I got a LiveJournal, and… shut up, man. Actually, I find that the blog is more useful—particularly with the Blog This function—for going around and posting interesting links, and that way my friends list doesn’t end up shrieking about the constant linkspam. But yeah, there’s some overlap, mostly because I fret that no one checks both and I get all neurotic about where I should post what. >> Re: The Daily Digest Do you have connections in the entertainment industry? Usually people ask this in the sense of, “…and is that how you get your movie news?” I get my movie news by trekking around to 50+ movie sites, maybe 100 on a long day (I’ve lost count), and compiling it myself. I’d love to get sooper sekrit inside scoops, but as of this writing, I don’t. I have a second cousin who’s a set decorator, and while I tend to watch her movies more closely than I might otherwise, I mostly hear what she’s working on through the family grapevine. So, basically… if you’re in the entertainment industry and would like to be a supersecret anonymous Digest spy… call me (*holds thumb and pinky up to ear*). Can you help me get cast in [some movie]? I’m really sorry, but I don’t even know anyone who knows anyone who can help you on that one. You need to start looking up casting agencies in your area or the local film bureau for information on productions coming to your area; movies always need extras, and that’s a good way to start. Just so you know—when they say they’re looking for “an unknown” to star as Violet Baudelaire or Lucy Pevensie, what they mean is “Someone Joe Moviegoer hasn’t heard of, i.e., not Dakota Fanning.” Read: “Someone who’s probably been in some movie or on some TV show at least once, not some random girl we found in the parking lot.” So if you want to be in movies, approach the process realistically and start small. >> Re: Occupation: Girl (Livejournal) Can I friend your LiveJournal? Sure! I love new friends. My only problem is that I don’t have room to friend anyone back, because for a while I friended everyone back automatically. So it’s nothing personal if I don’t friend you back—I do go around and browse friends-list LJs when I have a little spare time. Can I take icons you made? Dude, that’s why I made them. Want/take/have, make your own, have a party. I mean, it’s tacky to run off and be all like, “Look what I made! Cough cough!,” but other than that, I don’t really mind or care. >> Re: Movies in Fifteen Minutes Why are you making fun of these movies? Did you hate them that much? A lot of people seem to have a hard time understanding the concept of making fun of things that you like. The word “fun” is in there for a reason, people—we’re not talking about mocking the movie until it goes home crying to its mommy. But this is why I’ve started posting “Disclaimer and actual opinion” at the beginning of each “Fifteen Minutes,” because people have read these parodies entirely the wrong way. They're written with love. Most of the time. Can I join and/or friend the m15m community? Of course! That’s the point of the comm—I ran out of room for friends on my personal journal; plus, it’s nice to get casual readers out of my personal Kool-Aid and over at a separate journal. Friend away. Can I post at m15m? This is going to sound terrible, but no. The point of the comm (despite the fact that it’s… a community) is that, while I’m the only one posting, it has a larger friends capacity than a personal journal. Can I make icons based on lines from m15m? Go for it. I love icons, so leave them for me in a comment to look at, if you want. Are you reading all the comments people leave? I fell behind on the “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in 15 Min.” comments after Mugglenet linked to it, but generally, yes, I have read every. single. comment—I have email notification turned on. I really appreciate all of them, and wish I could reply to every single one. Again, commenting is a surer way to get your message to me than email, because LJ comments definitely make it through my spam filter. You know what you should have said about that last movie you did? You should have said this. Thanks. I’ll, uh... keep that in mind. Have you thought about doing [this movie]? Most likely? Yeah, I probably have. It’s hard to parody something you’re just not in the mood for, you know? So I have a very specific list of movies I feel like I could do, and it’s about a mile long as it is. Keep an eye on my LiveJournal for more on this—sometimes I do take requests or suggestions. PH34R? Noob? Hor? I get asked about this more than I expected: PH34R or PHEAR: You know how people do that l33tspeak h4x0r stuff? Yeah. That’s all it is— hackerspeak for “fear.” You know, just to make Agamemnon look that much more like a jerk. Noob: Short for “newbie,” but with a difference. A “newbie” is someone who is literally new to a community or an activity. A “noob,” to my mind, is someone who may be new or may be established, but still acts like a clueless jerk. When Agamemon says, “STFU, noob,” it’s along the lines of saying, “What are you, new?” Hor: Yes, I am aware that the correct spelling is “whore.” This is a slang spelling I picked up on JournalFen. I like it because it’s non-gender-specific and it looks really funny. A Scottish-inflected variant: hoor. Other internet/chat abbreviations can be found here: http://www.stevegrossman.com/jargpge.htm#Dictionary http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wrader/slang/index.html Can I write my own [Whatever] in Fifteen Minutes? My standard answer to this is that I certainly didn’t invent the concept of movie parody, and I can’t stop you from writing anything. However, I’d really prefer if you didn’t use the actual name “Movies in Fifteen Minutes,” or stated that yours are unrelated to mine, because of confusion that has arisen in the past (“Who writes those Fifteen Minutes things?” “Oh, this girl Jane on my friends list does”). Also, if you send me a link to a parody of a movie I haven’t written about yet, I probably won’t be able to read it (at least not until I’ve safely written my own), because I’ve been trying to protect myself from “OMG YOU STOLE MY IDEAS!” accusations. Can I post your work on my site? Really, I’d prefer that you didn’t—what with the book coming out, it’s out of my hands and into the publisher’s. However, under the Fair Use clause, it’s perfectly okay to post a brief excerpt or two and link back to the site (my Livejournal, cleolinda.com, Black Ribbon, FictionPress, etc.) where you found it. >> Re: Publishing Where have you been published? Before the book deal, I was published a few times in extremely minor publications. “Animals” in Imaginary Club (I think that was the name?) sometime in the ‘80s when I was in grade school (don’t get too jealous; it was a teacher-student magazine that edited it into the complete opposite of what I’d intended, and I cried for five days); “Dog Days” and “The Witness” in Merlyn’s Pen when I was in high school, after winning their fiction contest; several pieces in my high school’s lit mag and my college lit mag; and I think “Written on the Body” was published in a national undergrad lit mag called Spires, or somesuch. I also won the Writing Today Hackney short story contest with “August” when I was in college; the Patricia Finley Watkins scholarship at Birmingham-Southern; honorable mention for “Night Terrors” in a Seventeen fiction contest; and second place (I think?) for “Private Room Eleven” in a contest run by a science magazine for high school students (can’t remember the name). I ended up getting $50 in royalties when “Dog Days” was anthologized for a Merlyn’s Pen collection, but other than that… you’re looking at your basic young writer/student with a smattering of minor credits. I don’t think I’ve even mailed out a short story or a poem to a magazine since mid-college—I decided to sit down and work on something worth getting published before I worried about sending my poor ragged children out for judgment. Can you help me get published? If you mean, “Can you pull some magical strings and get me published,” well… really, I don’t have the connections you think I do. If you mean, “I’m working on getting published and I’m not sure I’m going about it the right way, can I ask you a few questions?,” then, sure, email me. How did you get a book deal? This is why I am such a bad person to ask for publishing advice: an editor emailed me and said, “Hey, someone sent me a link to your stuff, and I like it. Could we make a book out of it?” Hand to God. How did you get an agent? This was the part where I actually had to do some work. After I taked to the editor, I went to literaryagents.org and started doing some research, and found the listing of an agent currently seeking new clients who—in a delightful coincidence—covered exactly the three or four genres I was writing in at the time. I sent her half of “Troy in Fifteen Minutes”—the beginning and the end—plus a summary of the book proposal and another summary of my other projects in general, with links to those available online and the offer to send her hard copies if she wanted them. In the query letter on top, I mentioned that I had already been offered a deal and wanted official representation to handle the contract phase, if she would be interested. Three days later, she called me from New York, and we started talking. If you want to get an agent but don’t have an offer from a publisher—because that’s what got her attention—I’d suggest that you follow exactly the same process, except that you substitute a packet of samples from your work for my book-related sample. Or, for that matter, whatever your chosen agent asks for in her own listing. The literaryagents.org site has more guidelines on how to do this. If there is somehow something else you would like to know, there's always my email. << back to index |
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