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Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Mom News

The first few days after my Mom passed were tough, but the funeral (which I must admit I was terrified of) was just an incredible (overused word coming) celebration of who she was. We laughed and cried and tried to keep laughing in her honor. Best moment was when my Dad said goodbye to her -- it's this private moment with me and him and her brother and my Dad's brother and the coffin.



My father pours his heart out in a way he never does and then leans down and kisses the coffin, which is when my uncle reminds him that her head is: up here (as he points to the other end of the coffin). So my father blurts, "Y'mean I just kissed her ass?" And we all shoot back: It's about time.



So pathetic. But such a needed laugh. My Mom would've loved us piling on him.



But I must also say that seeing all the responses you left to the announcement in the last blog...What a moment you gave me. I treasure that one. The best moments come when you realize you're not as alone as you thought.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

My Mom

My Mom, Teri Meltzer, passed away this weekend after an incredible two year battle with breast cancer. Needless to say, we've kept it pretty private throughout the time she was sick. But the only reason my Mom first got diagnosed was because another of her firend's was diagnosed, so she decided to do a self exam. So for that, please, for yourself, your girlfriends, and especially your Moms, go encourage them to do one.



Over here, the loss is still hitting us. I've always been a momma's boy. And in my Mom's honor, I'm not apologizing for it.



Here's the obituary:



MELTZER, TERI,


Precious daughter, sister, wife, mother, and Nana was born in 1944 in Brooklyn, NY, which gave her a loving childhood, a true sense of humor, and an unmistakable accent. With an unrelenting and meticulous sense of style, she was an interior designer who decorated homes for family, friends, and hundreds of clients, eventually moving to Florida in 1983 and settling in Aventura.



Her true love, however, was saved for her family. It was this love of family that she learned from her father, Ben Rubin, who predeceased her, but whose influence she proudly carried everywhere. For the past two years, she fought an incredible battle with breast cancer, never once complaining, forever trying to spare her children any pain, even as the battle was lost on April 26. Her legacy lives on in: her ninety year-old mother, Dottie Rubin; her brother and sidekick, Richie Rubin; her husband, Stew Meltzer, whom she adored and protected during their 43 years of marriage; her children, Brad & Cori Meltzer and Bari & Will Norman; her grandchildren, Jonas, Lila and Theo Meltzer, and the rest of her family and friends, all of whom now carry her influence with them everywhere. No one loved her children more.



Teri’s funeral is scheduled for 1:00 p.m., Monday, April 28th at Temple Sinai of Hollywood, 1400 North 46th Ave, Hollywood, FL 33021.



Instead of flowers, please consider a donation to Sharsheret, which helps young (and young at heart) women battling breast cancer. 1086 Teaneck Road, Suite 3A, Teaneck, NJ 07666. www.sharsheret.org.



To visit this Guest Book Online, go to www.MiamiHerald.com/Obituaries

Monday, April 21, 2008

Paul Pope

This is why being an artist is cooler than being a writer. For your nephews.



Source: PULPHOLE



BRACES


URBAN SQUIRREL



Tablecloth drawings with my nephew, waiting on spagetti. "Do a cartoon animal we haven't seen before," he says.



"Like what?"



He thinks a minute. "Bugs Bunny as a squirrel teenager who comes from the world of Fat Albert."



"With braces?" I ask.



"With braces."



Posted by pulphope at 4/17/2008 10:48:00 AM


Thursday, April 17, 2008

Broken email

Just an apology to all those who have tried emailing me through the site (bradmeltzer.com). We know, we've had a major breakdown in email there, so if you sent me something and you're like, "what a pud -- didn't even reply," bear with us and please resend in a week or so when we finally get our pants back on.



Also, thanks for all those sending love for the Eisner nomination. Neither Gene Ha nor myself had any idea until someone else emailed us and said, "Schmucks, you're nominated." Needless to say, JLA 11 is one of the stories I'm most proud of. But the real love needs to go to Gene (and colorist Art Lyon!), who really are the ones who pulled it off and made a hack like me look far better than I am. If I had enough, I'd love to give that issue away during the book tour to anyone who's never read a comic.



Enjoy the weekend and don't do drugs.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Coming To Scranton And McArthur, Ohio!

For those in Scranton, PA and McArthur, OH, I'm coming this week.



If you're around, come say hey. And of course, I'll sign whatever you want including all body parts (though that still has never been offered to me).




This Thursday, April 17
Bestselling author Brad Meltzer will give the first talk of the 2008 Library Lecture Series at the Scranton Cultural Center at 7 p.m. The lecture is open to the public and is free with a library card. An autograph session will follow the lecture, and book club participants will have an opportunity to meet the author at a pre-lecture reception.



This Saturday, April 19
The Herbert Wescoat Memorial Library presents Brad Meltzer, delivering the keynote presentation at Vinton County Middle School. The event is free and open to the public.
For more info, see: http://www.vintoncountypublic.lib.oh.us/Spring%20Arts%20Festival.htm

Friday, April 11, 2008

Audio Man

Have I mentioned how much I love Scott Brick, the dear friend and deep baritone who is the voice of all our audio books? And now, it truly is all, since he's now re-recording The Tenth Justice and Dead Even (giving us full unabridged versions for the first time) just in time for when The Book of Lies is launched in September.



So here's his recent blog post acknowledging what a pain in the ass I am.



BTW, the website itself is scottbrickpresents.com.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

EW's First Comics

This is fun.


Especially seeing how much that first comic so so effected the craft that each person puts out. Read into it all you want. It's true.


BTW, Kirkman's first comic was an Erik Larsen Spider-Man. F***. WE ARE OLD!!!



Comic Books: The One That Hooked Me! (Entertainment Weekly)


Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Book of Lies. Copyedits done.

Copyedits are officially done and off and in the mail. Managed to sneak in a really good comic reference. Gotta make these things harder than just the Watchmen names in Tenth Justice. So today working on two new projects. One comics, one TV.



Also, see below from today's Washington Post. And people say it was all fiction.




The Washington Post


April 9, 2008 Wednesday
Regional Edition


A Capital City With The Devil in the Details?; These Roads Aren't Paved With Good Intentions


BYLINE: Dan Morse; Washington Post Staff Writer


SECTION: STYLE; Pg. C01


LENGTH: 981 words


Presidential candidate John McCain keeps calling Washington the city of Satan. Turns out he's not alone.



"McCain was right," said David Bay, speaking by phone from Lexington, S.C., where as director of Cutting Edge Ministries he has long asserted that Washington's streets are positioned to usher in Lucifer as "the ultimate master of Government Center."



"You will need to have your maps of Washington, D.C., opened in front of you as we proceed," reads a treatise on the subject posted on Bay's Internet site.



Using Dupont and Logan circles as northern points, Bay instructs, you can trace various interlocking streets to form a demonic pentagram, one that bores directly into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.



"It must be true, it's on the Internet," Larraine Wolman, a British tourist, said in perfect deadpan while gazing at the White House just before midnight recently.



She agreed to review Bay's map. Could she feel Satan?



No.



Wolman and her three British companions turned to walk back to their quarters at the Mayflower Hotel. This reporter followed, determining what they knew about the place. They knew that former New York governor Eliot Spitzer had stayed there, reportedly with a high-priced call girl. They didn't know how near the hotel is to the center of Bay's pentagram.



"He didn't get in trouble with Satan," Wolman said of Spitzer, as she stood in the Mayflower's lobby. "He got in trouble with his wife."



McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona, has regularly called Washington Satan's City over the past 10 years. He did so twice last month, including during a visit to the Atlanta headquarters of Chick-fil-A, the fast-food chain whose founder is such a devoted Baptist he keeps the eateries closed on Sundays.



"It's harder and harder trying to do the Lord's work in the city of Satan," McCain said, according to an Associated Press account.



Brian Rogers, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said the Satan comments are obviously jokes. Indeed, on the stump, McCain doesn't refer to the District per se, but to the culture of special interests and ethical lapses in Congress he has long railed against.



Satan and Washington go back. After John Wilkes Booth murdered Abraham Lincoln, printers rushed out images of a horned and clawed devil whispering into Booth's ear at Ford's Theatre, according to "Manhunt," a book about the search for Booth.



On Aug. 20, 1949, The Washington Post weighed in, greeting readers with a headline atop the front page: "Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil's Grip."



The story told of a 14-year-old Prince George's County boy who underwent "between 20 and 30" exorcisms, most of which had him breaking into violent, cursing tantrums and bouts of Latin, a language he had never studied. The article quoted unnamed "Catholic sources."



The case inspired a book that became the 1973 movie "The Exorcist," set in Georgetown, which scared the wits out large swaths of America. The Archdiocese of Washington knows of no officially sanctioned exorcisms since the 1949 Mount Rainier case, said Susan Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese.



The most persistent rumblings about Washington as the devil's workshop seem bound up in history about the city's design and the role of Freemasons in building it. It's a connection explored in the three-hour DVD "Riddles in Stone: The Secret Architecture of Washington, D.C.," which notched a respectable 90th out of 1,363 titles recently in Amazon's general history documentary category.



Among the film's highlights is 1993 footage of Mason Strom Thurmond, then a U.S. senator from South Carolina, cement trowel in hand, marking the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Capitol in a Masonic ceremony. And while Masons served as architects to the White House, Capitol, Supreme Court and Washington Monument, the suggestion their leaders worked with Satan is "absolute nonsense," said Akram Elias, Grand Master of the Masons of D.C.



"It's an old story," Elias added. "They don't come out with anything new."



In the 2007 New York Times bestseller "The Book of Fate," a central character named Nico Hadrian advances the demonic pentagram theory of Washington's street layout and describes the White House as the doorway to Hell itself. Author Brad Meltzer said he designed Hadrian, a crazed killer who shoots his way out of a mental hospital, to be a "walking Internet" of various beliefs about Freemasons, among the "great bogeymen of history." And "The Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown, according to his Web site, is at work on a novel that "explores the hidden history of our nation's capital," as "set deep within . . . the enigmatic brotherhood of the Masons."



Other satanic hot spots cited by believers include the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument. The latter was described by Bay, the South Carolina author, as a filthy, phallic and satanic homage to the god Baal.



Unlikely, said an avowed Satanist from Laurel.



He agreed to meet at the Washington Monument recently, strolling up the Mall in a long black robe and passing through a throng of sun-drenched tourists. A government contracting employee, the 37-year-old spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his satanic name (Gwydion Tiamat). Friends' houses have been firebombed, he said, and they're just pagans.



A husband and father and the director of the East Coast office of the Brotherhood of Satan, he said "a couple of thousand" Satanists live in the Washington area. This is a group that is widely misunderstood, he said: Members don't sacrifice cats; they're not out to hurt people; they simply acknowledge that humans are carnal animals and enjoy the freedoms and indulgences that flow from that understanding. "Having a whole Sara Lee strawberry cheesecake, for example," he said.



And in one sense, he mused, while looking toward the Lincoln Memorial and the infinite regions beyond, McCain is right.



"Satan," said Tiamat, "is everywhere."



Monday, April 07, 2008

Last Lecture

Yes, you've probably heard the story. And yes, it's everywhere. But that doesn't mean it's not still a great story.



Randy Pausch's "The Last Lecture" was put together and chronicled in book form by my pal Jeff Zaslow, who is a true nice guy. And on those days when you start stressing over the crap stuff of life, this is the thing that reminds you what really matters.



So take a look at www.TheLastLecture.com and enjoy the message. It's a vital one.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

My Birthday

Yes, it's not an April Fool's joke. Today really is my birthday. Really. Now I know most people tend to either: 1) love and cheer themselves on their birthday, or 2) mope and be sad. I'm certainly not 1. And though I tend toward the melancholy, I just want to refuse that for the moment. At this time, on this day, I'm thankful. I'm thankful for my family. For my friends. And I'm thankful for those of you who read this blog, and in doing so, have become part of the family as well. Over the past two weeks, I've had two different people from college email me out of the blue and tell me that even though we weren't close at school, they've bought every book from the start and have beeen pulling for me from day one. In response, my father said that I can't possibly know every person who buys my books. But he's wrong. I do know you. Just like you know me. That's why we are a couple.



Is that weird?



Maybe.



But it's true.



For the most part (and yes, I'm overgeneralizing, but not by much), nearly every single person I've met at a signing or book event over the years seems like, well, "one of us." They're nice and thoughtful and kind. How do I know? When you meet anyone, you shake their hand and look them in the eye and you know. Indeed, I once had a signing with a fellow author who writes more macho-y books. And his readers were all, well, macho-ier. Mine were softer and nicer. The other author's readers asked questions about guns (and trust me, nothing against guns). My readers asked questions about character and comics and the beauty of writing Batman. I know the other readers kinda thought we were a bit mushy. But I am a bit mushy. I've been like that since birth. That was my high school experience. And that's how I was for the four years I scooped ice cream at Haagen Dazs in the Aventura Mall. I know who I am. And I'm okay with it. In fact, I'm thankful for it. Because after ten years of doing this, I've gotten to meet thousands of people just like me -- thousands just like you -- who are shy and outgoing and quiet and hysterically loud. But who are never dicks. And who would never laugh at the quiet kid in the corner (because we've all been that kid for a bit). And who never ever ever forget who they are.



So there's my birthday rant. And the best present I have for you: I was in the men's room the other day and there was a guy mopping the floor and cleaning up, and some older man washes his hands and goes to leave, and then looks at the janitor-guy and says, "Thanks for keeping it clean."



My hero.



I did it yesterday at a baseball game. Felt amazing.