Monday, August 28th (yesterday) marked Jack “King” Kirby’s 100th birthday. He isn’t still around to celebrate it, but we certainly have a tremendous body of work with which to celebrate his storytelling. I had made a comment on social media, but he seems to have cast a large enough shadow across pop culture that people may well be celebrating his centennial all week. One of his assistants, Mark Evanier, who also wrote the biography Kirby:…
Some of my past few Monday posts on motivation have been a bit on the grimmer side, so I wanted to share something that was more in the “You Can Do It” vein. On Scriptnotes a couple weeks ago, John August’s One Cool Thing was a physics paper about the power of dominoes to topple bigger dominoes. In fact, the domino the size of a sliver can start a process by which dominoes the size…
There will be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning. And by “toast” I mean theater-related joy. And by “the neighborhood,” I mean “American theater.” And by “this morning,” I mean… well, I don’t know how long, but it’ll be longer than a morning. Actor, playwright, and director Sam Shepard has died at the age of 73. I first learned about it in a piece in Broadway World, which is worth checking…
I’m working on a longer piece regarding Star Trek in advance of its 51st anniversary on the air and the upcoming premiere of Star Trek: Discovery. And while I was writing, I came up with a phrase that I think is too good not to share. In fact, I would be so bold as to suggest it should be spread to hither and yon among all your geek colleagues. That phase is “Vulcan up” as…
Continuing my series of Monday posts about motivation, I wanted to share another favorite post about staying motivated by Terry Rossio from the inestimable resource that is Wordplay. It arguably builds off the tough love/cold water of The Speech two weeks ago. And while I’m going to focus on writers and motivation, I have observed (and been told) that this sort of motivation (and procrastination) is something that all creative folk encounter. But back to writers. There’s a notion…
Continuing the last few Monday posts I’ve done about motivation, I figure it’s time to add in a link to something that serves as cold water in the face: a wakeup in both ways. Mark Evanier, whose series on rejection is one I’ve referenced, has a certain speech he’s delivered on occasions to fellow writers and creatives… and occasionally he’s needed to hear it himself. Maybe you need it because it’s Monday. Perhaps you’re just wondering…
Since I wanted to cover motivation for the next few Mondays, as I mentioned last week, I figured it was important to bring up procrastination. One of the most entertaining articles about the subject was written by Tim Urban on his longform blogging site, Wait, But Why. In fact, the procrastination article is actually several articles, but well worth delving into. Now, I enjoy Wait, But Why quite a bit, but what if some of…
There is a theory that placing two coat hangers in a closet produces more coat hangers through some frenzied yet illogical process of inorganic reproduction that’s best left unexamined outside of a Philip K. Dick short story. If someone suggested that placing two web articles in the Internet equivalent of a closet would produce an article about writing, I would believe them (whether or not the person suggesting it was Phillip K. Dick). This may explain the overwhelming amount of articles about…
I realized that I have a number of potential posts that relate to motivation, so for at least the next few weeks, I’ll have Motivation Mondays! Because that sounds like exactly the kind of engagement program corporate HR would institute. Anyway, I came across a pair of articles by Melissa Dahl in New York magazine. One is about how to motivate yourself to work when you don’t want to, which provides an intro to the…
After last week’s post about being a self-sufficient artist who slices, dices –and probably self-publishes– I thought it was a good idea to look at the evergreen topic of creatives not getting paid. Writers being undervalued and being underpaid is an oft-told tale — and not just because there are writers around to write about it. Writer Matt Wallace created a freelance rebuttal guide that covers about just every usual reason given to not pay writers — or…