courtney summers » photog

Happy Canada Day, Jason Vorhees!

courtney — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:58:19 +0000

Happy Canada Day! Being Canadian, this day has some significance to me. I love Canada very much. My friend Lori posted this on her Facebook and I decided to steal it from her and share it with you because I don’t know how many of you know this about Canada (or at least, Eastern Ontario, which is where I’m from):

image via my confined space

Yes, that’s right.

image via wikipedia

I like what Google did with their logo to mark this wonderful day:

image via google

True story: Canada also has ketchup flavoured chips and Poutine (which is divine). And what Americans call Smarties, we call Rockets. And what Canadians call Smarties, America does not distribute. Also we spell things with a u, which I think looks a lot better. How does colour get by without U? It has no balance otherwise! And we all know there is no honour without U. Favourite isn’t even without U. I could go on. Sara Zarr wrote a fun blog entry about Canada after a recent visit. You should read it.

Fun Fact about this Canadian: I did not always say “eh,” but my friends did. And I wanted to be just like them so I forced myself to say it until it finally became second nature. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if they decided to jump off a bridge? Probably I would have done it with them while screaming, “EEEEEEH!”

And they would have thought I was so cool and finally accepted me for the person I pretended to be when I was around them. *sniff*

I am celebrating Canada Day with this movie:

The Friday the 13th remake! I also celebrated June 30th with this movie. I watched it twice. I may watch it twice tomorrow! I really liked it a lot. It had a good “feel.” I also got Freddy vs. Jason, but halfway through watching it, I had to stop and start up the remake again because sometimes Freddy doesn’t take things seriously enough for me. Actually, I don’t know if you guys know this, but Freddy Kreuger’s a bit of a jerk.

jerk

Anyway, I like how the remake brings the FEAR back into it. Whether or not it’s a truly scary movie (jury is out; I just like watching Jason!), I feel like there’s something more TRUE to the original installments in this one than the later ones. Like, I could feel the summery-ness and the desperate need to SURVIVE emanating off of Jason’s victims, which is something even Jason Takes Manhatten managed to keep alive, NEW LINE CINEMA WHEN YOU DON’T PRODUCE WITH PARAMOUNT JASON X. Anyway. Did that paragraph sound too involved? I take my Friday the 13th seriously, okay.

Also I liked how many artful Jason Vorhees shots it featured:

Tyra would call all that posing FIERCE.

True story: this part of Friday the 13th Part 2:

Inspired me to take these photographs:

Does this make me a certain type of geek? I have always wanted to take photographs inspired by horror movies, but what would the neighbours think? And speaking of neighbours, what is that word without U? And what horror movie will YOU be watching this Canada Day? Er. I mean, how will you be celebrating? And if you’re not Canadian, did you know in Canada, milk comes in BAGS?

IT’S TRUE.

Anyway, sometimes I look at where these blog entries begin and where they end up and I am amazed I write books.

eeeee

courtney — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:17:46 +0000

My second guest blog is up on The Swivet. It’s about how rejection can be a positive thing. Even heartbreaking rejections from Jeff Probst. Check it out!

The election results were an unsurprising disappointment and that is all I will say about that. The most exciting part about Tuesday was when I walked up the hill to the voting station with my family and realized just how out of shape I was. Oh my God, people. I should really do something about that.

Last week, my family and I checked out the local fall scenery which was pretty awesome. I took a million pictures and vowed not to share any until I had the bulk of them digitally post-processed and could make some kind of blog entry picture show, but I haven’t had the time because I am a time management FAILURE, so here are three!

How about them fall colours, huh?

I can’t remember if I said this, but I am working on my third book while I whip the second into shape. This is sort of daunting and also exciting because I’ve never really worked on multiple projects at once. I mean, without failing horribly. This time around, I fully intend to pwn, though, so that’s good (ha ha ha!). But it occurred to me that BOOK 3 NEEDS A RIDICULOUS WORKING TITLE for my blog. I considered passing Your Mom onto it, but YOUR MOM’S BEEN DONE, so I brainstormed and here are the contenders for my new ridiculous working title. Help me make my choice:

Your Dad
Your Sister
~*Sparklepants*~
Bessie

I don’t know. They all seem sort of vaguely uninspired, don’t they? I mean, maybe I should just let the good thing have its day, give up on the ridiculous working titles and call it the name I’ve graced the word document: book3. How compelling is that?! I would say it is more compelling than ~*RPATTZ*~’s sexy ridiculous hair and sexy movie star glasses, both of which he was wearing in third and final Twilight trailer, which OH MY GOD YOU GUYS IT WAS SO HOT I COULD CLIFF-DIVE TO SHOW YOU HOW COMMITTED I AM TO SEEING THAT MOVIE.

See see see!!!

DID YOU SEE HIS HAIR AND HIS GLASSES (0:53!). AND ALSO HIS MAD FALLING APPLE CATCHING SKILLS. I feel so faint from the sexy. If I do not walk out of that movie thoroughly dazzled and blinded by the vampire sparkles (which I hope will be done with CGI and I want them to be REALLY HUGE so Edward looks like ONE BIG GIANT WALKING SPARKLE), I am writing an angry letter to Summit Entertainment.

Sometimes I pity my sister, who I am taking to this ~*sparkly vampire movie*~ affair because all she will hear through the whole thing is one long continuous EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE from the person sitting next to her (aka me).

teeny summers

courtney — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 04:33:14 +0000

So the other day I was sitting outside with my sister and I saw this:

It is a teeny frog! It was so cute. I have named it Teeny. I don’t know where Teeny is anymore, though. Shortly after I took his picture, he hopped away. I think about him at night sometimes.

Godspeed, Teeny.

Anyway, things here are pretty quiet and I am woefully behind in getting back to people about stuff. Canadian Thanksgiving is coming up which means food! Also giving thanks. And I hear we’re having an election next Tuesday. I made a promise to keep most politics off my blog, so I will refrain from telling you that I am voting Liberal. Meanwhile, I am doing the writing thing.

(Blog topics, I needs them!!!)

Cracked Up to Be round-up: the trailer can be found on bookscreening.com–bookscreening is a regular visit of mine because I think I’ve made it clear my life depends on watching book trailers–and was also briefly featured on veoh’s front page (it’s down now, but Daisy Whitney and my twitter pals witnessed it, I swear)!

Michelle reminded me that Cracked Up to Be is also in this Library Journal article about tracking down first fiction of 2008 (like I said, my book is a Time Lord). Scroll way down the list of forthcoming debuts and it is one of the two books under ‘Canada.’ You also still have time to enter my Last Lazy Galley Giveaway, AND, tonight while google-stalking myself (what), I discovered Cracked Up To Be is part of LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. If you’re a member of LibraryThing, you can request an ARC under the stipulation you review it, I guess! Check out the rules to see if you’re eligible etc. It’s over here.

If you are sick of all that Cracked Up to Be talk, I suggest taking a breather from it by reading the first two chapters of C.K. Kelly Martin’s upcoming release, One Lonely Degree. They are amazing.

eeeeeee!

courtney — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:05:30 +0000

The cover saga continues! My editor called on Thursday to let me know that they were doing a photo shoot for the new face of Cracked Up to Be! And, if I remember correctly, I made this noise at her: “Eeeeeeeeee!” until we hung up. I should be seeing the results of this photo shoot soon and then hopefully you will all be seeing the new cover not too long after that.

Eeeeeeeeee!

My author page is up on the St. Martin’s Press website, which is surreal. There is an ‘Interview with Courtney Summers’ on it, even! I think I would have talked less about zombies if I had remembered the St. Martin’s Press author pages were written in a Georgia font, which just seems very zombie-disapproving as far as fonts go.

AND on the Cracked Up to Be page–it has a page too!–there is a Q&A, also with this Courtney Summers person, whoever she is. The answers there are slightly more serious. So I think I have unintentionally done an excellent job of presenting myself as a big inconsistent flake with a zombie obsession. Except I totally did that on purpose. YES.

Also: ‘I enjoy watching zombie movies in my free time.’ Note how I couldn’t even expand on that. No, I don’t go out or have friends or even watch zombie movies inside WITH friends. I just sit in front of my TV and watch reanimated corpses eat brains by myself. 24/7.

I’m kind of tempted to sign up for my own author alerts. Is this egotistical? I figure it would be a good way to find out what I was up to since I don’t even know half the time. Like right now I thought I was typing a blog entry but I’m actually playing an air guitar.

Here is a photograph of a cow that I took over the weekend:

It wanted me to tell you “hello” and “YOU’RE NEXT.”

help me pick an author photo! please!

courtney — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 03:34:15 +0000

After many photo sessions and pitfalls along the way, like the time(s) I tweezed off my eyebrow and couldn’t go out in public until it grew back, two (2) photos are in the running to be my author photo. I told my editor I would let her know which one tomorrow, after I thought on it and polled everyone I know. Hello, everyone!

Here are the photographs:

I know which one I am leaning towards, but this is the kind of decision you can’t undo and so I thought I would collect as many opinions as I can. Please give me your opinion so that I might collect it and make an informed choice about this.

But before you give me your input (please), here are notes on the photos, which we will call Canadian Brick Wall Face and Australia T-shirt Face respectively.

Canadian Brick Wall Face was in the running, then it was out of the running and now it is the running again! It was taken at the end of May. The PROS for this photograph is that the brick wall is pretty hot (please note the green will be cropped out if selected) and check out my hair! That was a pretty good hair day and I wouldn’t mind immortalizing that, since they don’t happen often. It looks like it was intended to be an author photo. The CON is that I have been told the photo makes me seem aloof and unapproachable.

Australia T-shirt Face was never meant to be an author photo, which is not a point against it. I just thought I would mention that. It was taken like, 5 months ago. The PROS for this photo is that I have been told it is warm and smiley, and I like to think I am both of these things when I am not giving you a death glare while secretly judging you. Also, people might assume I am Australian and Australia’s pretty hot. That’s a pretty big PRO right there, actually. The CON is that you can totally tell I am holding the camera and taking a picture of my face and that makes me think of self-portraity MySpace photos, which do not exactly exude an author vibe.

So.. what do you think, everyone? Which one do you prefer? Canadian Brick Wall Face or Australia T-shirt Face? Because between all the social networking sites I’ve got going on, there’s not enough angst in my life. Gimmeh gimmeh moar, as Britney would say. Judge my face!

(Thanks!)

bed surfing

courtney — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:36:07 +0000

I think people who claim they can laptop from bed are dirty liars. Whenever I try to, my brains get sucked into my pillows and I start clicking around the stupidest things on the internet and then I fall asleep and then I wake up and turn my computer off and then I fall asleep again. Anyway, the point is, this does not happen at my desk. Please share your success stories about laptopping from bed in my comments section so I can call you a dirty liar.

I took this photograph yesterday (the white space is a part of the photo):

Because the dress has just been sitting in my closet and I don’t care what happens to it, which is a pretty good reason to take a photograph, as far as I’m concerned. High Tension came in the mail which I bought PURELY FOR AESTHETIC REASONS and the fact that it would be good minus the ending and now I want to take a million horror movie type photographs but to be honest that would be a lot of work and I’m lazy. Also Land of the Dead came in the mail too, which I bought because I love it (zombies + class issues FTW!) and also Carla Bruni’s debut CD came too, which is beautiful.

I think God would not have invented Hello Kitty pajama pants if he did not want me to live in them.

Also, I think if you had sex with a zombie, you would probably become one.

I think a lot of things.

I’ve had a twitter account since June 10th and have decided the internet is much richer for having a place where I can tell you exactly when I am eating skittles and how much I’m enjoying them. I’ve discovered most of the social networking sites I belong to give me a heightened sense of self-importance, except for MySpace, which does a pretty good job of keeping it in line.

10%

courtney — Sat, 03 May 2008 05:47:00 +0000

I was messing around with the zoom function in MS Word because writing is pretty much 80% messing around with the zoom and 20% writing and ANYWAY, this is what Your Mom looks like zoomed out to 10%:

And now you know. Because you totally wanted to know.

This is what a degu looks like at 10%:

My percentage might be off there, I don’t know. I doubt it, as I’m not usually wrong about anything. That’s Ichabod! In the second picture, he is admiring my face at 10%. Most people and animals do.

insert title here

courtney — Thu, 01 May 2008 06:12:35 +0000

The problem with reaching 10,000 words quicker than you expect to is it gives you this illusion that you have the time to chill out. Like, oh yeh, I’m at 10,000 words, which is like 6 day’s worth of work so if I spend 5 of those days playing my SNES I won’t be behind on the book writing or anything, YES. Ah. Yeah. That’s not true. So anyway…

PSEUDO-FAST DRAFT MAY!

I’m really excited. I’m going to pseudo-fast draft the hecks out of this book. It worked for Cracked Up to Be and it is going to work for Your Mom.

And I am not jinxing myself by saying that.

Welcome to Day 1.
12, 618 words so far.

tomorrow is another day

courtney — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:46:36 +0000

Me: I just took 300 photographs.
Innocent Bystander: 300?!
Me: Yeah! And the memory card wasn’t even full yet, I just got bored of pushing the remote button.
Innocent Bystander: Wow.
Me: Anyway, the point is, if one of these is not an author photo, I will cry.

30 minutes later

Innocent Bystander: How goes it?
Me: I am down to 100 photos now.
Innocent Bystander: Huh.

15 minutes later

Innocent Bystander: Progress update, please.
Me: Uhm, less than 20 photos. I have to see if I can edit them nice…

30 minutes later

Innocent Bystander: I can’t help but notice that you are a crying.
Me: Where is the point-and-shoot.

20 minutes later

Me: This is ridiculous. I look better on this little 5 mega-pixel point-and-shoot than I do on my D80.
Innocent Bystander: Stop dissing my camera.
Me: Maybe I have digital camera intimidation. Like, I just freeze up and get tense-face whenever that sexy D80 sets its sight upon me.
Innocent Bystander: Surely that is it.
Me: I am going to load these onto the computer now.
Innocent Bystander: Good luck with that.

5 minutes later

Me: I hate these too.
Innocent Bystander: They’re not as bad as you think they are. You just have to learn to RELAX in front of the camera.
Me: I THOUGHT I WAS!

10 sulky minutes later

Innocent Bystander: I bet those 300 photos you took to start with were fine. You know what you should do? Look at your picture like you’d look at someone else’s and you won’t be so critical of them.
Me: I would be even MORE critical.
Innocent Bystander: Why?
Me: I’m secretly a very judgmental person.
Innocent Bystander: …
Me: Every time you move, I am judging you.

10 minutes later

Me: I am just going to find a public domain picture of a whale shark and ask if I can use that as an author photo instead.
Innocent Bystander: You are ridiculous.
Me: Imagine picking up a book and thinking it was written by a whale shark, heh.
Innocent Bystander: Maybe tomorrow will yield better results.
Me: Hee hee hee.
Me: Wouldn’t that be hilarious?
Innocent Bystander: It’s not that funny.
Me: ‘Look, that whale shark wrote a book!’

~*FIN*~

I am going to win this thing. I swear.

also blue-ringed octopodes can kill you

courtney — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 04:25:22 +0000

Things:

- C.K. Kelly Martin’s book trailer for I Know It’s Over. I can’t wait to read it!

- Last week I was thinking about Cracked Up to Be and emailed my rockstar editor and asked her if it was too late to change something in it and she was all rockstar about it and told me it wasn’t and so I did and I sent it off and then there was peace in the land.

- I still need a myspace URL. This weighs heavy on my mind.

- A few days ago I decided my new workspace would be my bed because I heard a comfortable writer is a highly productive one but do you know what that is a lie.

- In related news, I am very well-rested!

- I am watching Friday the 13th series. Godspeed, Kevin Bacon, Crispin Glover!

- Jonathan Penner has a myspace! I totally added him and decided myspace is okay after all.

- Every time I watch this Trailer Park Boys clip, I laugh so hard I cry. I guess I should put a language warning here even though it’s Trailer Park Boys. NSFW.

- The other night nothing was on television so I watched What Not to Wear and then I started wondering why there were hardly any men on the show and why was this construction working mother of many housewife on it felt so guilty about ‘letting herself go’ and even guiltier for investing time and money to get herself ‘back’ and whether or not it was because of the way society is or if it was because of her family who ran her into the ground and were mad because she didn’t look good while they were doing it and then I decided maybe I shouldn’t watch What Not to Wear anymore because I was seriously like RAWR about it (probably it was society). Also what do you say to your friends who get you on that show? O hay, thnx for being too good a friend to tell me I can’t dress myself because you didn’t want to hurt my feelings and having the TV people do it instead!

- idk.