Various and Sundry

More About Work as Religion

Continuing this week’s series of video posts, I came across this video from The Atlantic that touches back to an earlier article I linked to about work becoming people’s faith. I’ve long been interested in work-life balance and finding joy or at least satisfaction in work, perhaps because, as mentioned in the video below, conventional wisdom is no longer satisfied with jobs or, to a certain extent, no longer even satisfied with careers. No, it…

Continue reading

Writing

A Writer Autobiography, Carl Reiner Edition

I’ll probably share some other videos done by the Writer’s Guild as I watch them in the future, but here’s a treat for those of you who are fans of Your Show of Shows or The Dick Van Dyke Show and so on. Carl Reiner talks almost for almost an uninterrupted hour and it flies by as he gives you not only his history and development as a writer, but all sorts of wonderful tidbits…

Continue reading

Various and Sundry

DC Comics Encounters Corporate Kryptonite

Back in March, I had a longer post discussing the notion of comics as “idea incubators.” This isn’t my brilliant idea, it’s coming from comic veterans. Now as a storyteller is general and a fan of comics in particular, I’m perhaps predisposed to like this argument. However, I think it’s important to remind the bean-counting set that humans like stories. Audiences flocked to Avengers: Endgame because they had invested in the story and characters, not…

Continue reading

Various and Sundry Writing

80% of Books written before 1964 in Public Domain?!?

I’m always interested in the state of works in the public domain, especially as works in the U.S. have started entering said domain this year. So I was surprised, bordering on elated, to learn that the majority of books published in the U.S. before 1964 may actually be in the public domain: we don’t need to wait another 1-40 years! Here’s a link to the change covered by Boing Boing as well as the actual…

Continue reading

Various and Sundry Writing

Recommended Reading: For Love or Money (or both!)

The other week, I mused about giving your young’uns a steady diet of scares, inspired in part by reading an article by artist Greg Ruth. Well, as probably comes as no surprise, Ruth also has some thoughts about the eternal struggle to make a living from one’s creative work and yes, it’s naturally pertinent to illustrators, but I think his points should resonate with writers as well. By the way, if you want to check…

Continue reading

Various and Sundry

Navigating Being Online, Offline, and Increasingly In-Between

After Wednesday’s post that focused a great deal about how to curate one’s persona online, I was surprised that I hadn’t written at length about Jenny Odell and her efforts to help people curate their involvement in the “attention economy.” I’ve found the article bears repeat reading, because there’s so many different ideas it raises and so much that you, personally, need to reflect on. And yes, I mean need. At its core, and related…

Continue reading

Producing Writing

“Guilt can’t scale”

Let me start by giving credit where credit where credit is due. The inspiration for this post, and indeed the title above, comes from a post this past May by Russell Nohelty on his Complete Creative site. His post hit on the current issue I have with Jabberwocky Audio Theater. It’s perhaps the most difficult metaphorical needle I’ve ever had to thread — and so I’m writing it about it here in case you’re in…

Continue reading

Raves

One Giant Leap

This past weekend, there were numerous celebrations and commemorations of the Apollo 11 moon landing. I was lucky enough to be able to go to the National Mall where they had a special presentation –including a projection onto the Washington Monument itself– celebrating the achievement. I posted on social media then that no video or pictures could do it justice (and for people to try and make it to the later showings that night or…

Continue reading