"Huge" news for one friend, another is pro-rate, and a couple more are Bleeding Cool

So all this talk lately about getting "Nova" ready for submission, and I haven't really taken the time to congratulate some folks on their real accomplishments.

The first, and the one that I've wanted to post about the longest, is at least tangentially related to "Nova" though a much, much, much bigger deal. As I've mentioned before, my friend Savannah [friend is a vast understatement, but I'm afraid most people wouldn't understand if I called her one of "my girls"] turned me onto the competition, probably because she knew how downhearted I was by all my other projects falling apart in such short-order. What I haven't mentioned is that said Savannah is none other than the Savannah Dooley, writer and developer behind the upcoming ABC Family show "Huge."

Let me pause for a minute, to bend down and pick that name back up.

I have been criminally negligent in keeping up with my west coast friends the past several months [a fact that's made me really uncomfortable tonight, considering the whopper of an earthquake they just had -- if you're reading, I hope you're okay, Dooley], but I still know a little about the show, that Savannah and her mother [veteran TV writer Winnie Holzman, of My So Called Life fame] adapted it from a book by the same name, and that it deals with a group of teens working at a weight-loss camp -- more in the vein of "Glee" than, say, Heavyweights. Several name actors have already been cast, with go-to curvy actress Nikki Blonsky on board, and second-generation stars, or soon-to-be-stars, Haley Hasslehoff and Zander Eckhouse [look them up if you don't know who their daddies are] also on board, not to mention several relative newcomers I probably couldn't do justice with my limited knowledge of TV personalities after 1995[and one of my few celebrity crushes, Gina Torres]. So instead, I direct you to this plethora of links about "Huge" on "ohnotheydidnt," TVStar, Hitfix, Zap2It, and the super-classy Jezebel. Not to mention ABC Family's main page for the show, which includes a blog that is a tetch sparse now, but hey, it's pretty early on still.

I'm just so unbelievably jazzed for Savannah that collecting these links is almost like scrapbooking for me, though I have to admit I'm already starting to miss write-ups among all the buzz. And as awesome as it is to see a such a recognizable name as Blonsky's attached to "Huge," just the fact that a fellow writer and friend is getting this opportunity is just amazing to me. I have a small stack of writings from my Bennington peers that I saved from workshop classes, and one of Dooley's pieces [a screenplay called "Eddie"] is something I occasionally turn to for comfort reading, sometimes even inspiration -- I liked it that much. She's very skilled at what she does, and I can only wish her success, and maybe that I had some better way to congratulate her than just gushing about knowing her here.

I'm proud of her though. I can't say it enough.

While we're on the topic of friends and their accomplishments, I'd be remiss to point out that our buddy John over at the Bathroom Monologues recently got a pro-rate story over at Flash Fiction Online. The story in question is "Alligators By Twitter," or as I will always colloquially know it, "Holegators." It's quite the achievement, and great exposure for him. Tell your friends.

Finally, and this is a week old, and I hope they'll forgive me for that, but my online compadres Eric M. Esquivel and Dave Baker, hell, the whole Modern Mythology Press crew recently got a mention on the big-name comic news site Bleeding Cool. This is great exposure for them, and it happened under what might be the strangest of circumstances, so I encourage everyone, as always, to go check out what they're doing. If I had artist I was working with on a regular basis, I'd always be looking to the Mod Myth guys as my measuring stick to how good the work was. And I hope one day, if I do make this comic book thing work, that I'll be lucky enough to work with folks that talented.

Salud!