Category: Writing

Acting Various and Sundry Writing

The Court Jester’s Duel with Ravenhurst is great. Get it?

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I am still following accounts of the Writers’ Strike, which looks like it’ll be a long one, but while you can continue to check out information, like the Strike Diaries from the Hollywood Reporter, for today, I wanted to just post about film, specifically a great example where writing, performance, and fight choreography comes together beautifully. I’m talking about the climactic duel in the 1956 comedy The Court Jester. I love the duel because, as…

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Various and Sundry Writing

More Context for the 2023 Writers’ Strike

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

So the not-quite-a-week-old writers’ strike is still on my mind, in part because much of the online forums I visit are full of, well, writers. So here’s a few more resources that I feel give you a bit more context about what’s being demanded, how the studios usually respond and what is officially on the table. First up, an 8 1/2 minute video from Nerdist that sums up the strike: If you’ve been following other…

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Writing

And so it begins: Writers’ Strike 2023

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

Last Thursday, I wrote a little bit about the potential strike between the Writers Guild and the major studios (those groups are generalizations, nuance with the links). The contract between the WGA and AMPTP expired last night with no extension. That means as of this writing, about 11,500 writers of film and television are on strike. Discussions have popped up on various online forums I’m part of and even at my dayjob, so I figured…

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Writing

Standby for Pencils Down

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

In the host of posts on this site, this one may be one of the least evergreen, but I had mention something about the impending, still-might-be-avoided WGA strike set to go into effect this coming week on May 2nd. The Writer’s Guild membership has overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike, and strike guidelines have been sent out. Not only that, the Writer’s Guild has a recent victory –a major one that you may not have…

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Writing

Jack Kirby and Autobiographical Elements of Captain America

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I haven’t gotten around to reading more about Jack Kirby’s life (Mark Evanier’s book is on my to-read list), so I found this article by Roy Schwartz about how much of Kirby’s life went into Captain America intriguing. For example, I didn’t know much, if anything, about Kirby’s service in World War II, something that I’d be interested in learning about all the comic creators of that era (similar to what was covered with the…

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Producing Writing

The Anthropology of The Expanse

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

How I managed to miss this article last year is something I chalk up to the vast depth of the Internet, but still: I love The Expanse and part of that ardor is absolutely the multi-layered world-building. Those of you who have checked out my space opera Rogue Tyger and its ever-growing “Encyclopedia of the Imperium” will not be surprised at that fact. So I was all into this article by James Hoare for The…

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Writing

One Week in Rochester

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

To kick off this week, where I’m fitting in writing every moment I reasonably can, I’m thinking of an article I read last year, knowing I’d want to share it on the blog at some point. It’s a little quiet memoir of a piece, about a young student shepherding a visiting writer about the city of Rochester, New York. Is Alison Smith’s piece about wandering about town with Ursula Le Guin writing motivation? Maybe. Maybe…

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Writing

Where’s Mister Electrico? A Ray Bradbury Mystery

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I’ve been a fan of writer Ray Bradbury since reading The Martian Chronicles and listening to Bradbury 13, a fantastic series that did audio fiction adaptations of, well, 13 short stories (the latter is still an inspiration for our work with Jabber Audio). So when Bradbury passed in 2012, I read the various obituaries and remembrances and several mentioned an anecdote Bradbury had told about an encounter with a magician in the 1930s. It’s a…

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Writing

“I’m more of an Idea Bot”

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I continue to talk to people online and offline about machine learning and the current zeal for AI doing creative work and one of the writers, Chuck Wendig, who I linked to last month (and who, unsurprisingly, does not find AI-authored writing as a wave of the future to be surfed). One of his posts from last week drills down to one of the reasons I find the AI creativity craze so annoying: the fact…

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Writing

HarperCollins Strike Reaches Tentative Agreement

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

Hey, it’s not just future TV I’m interested in, I find all sorts of creative industries of interest. In this case, one of the “big five” publishers, HarperCollins, recently reached a tentative agreement with its union. So right about now, you might be asking: Well, to learn more, you can check out: It’ll be interesting to see what changes this has on the other publishers in the “Big Five.”

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