I’ve never been to a Worldcon, but I’m thinking I ought to for when it’s in my backyard.
George R. R. Martin, however, has been to just about every Worldcon he could for several decades running.
This year’s WorldCon is in Dublin, so the Irish Times caught up with him and he mused on WorldCons and fandom and all sorts of things.
If you want more of Martin musing on his career and art, you can also catch an interview of him on Maltin on Movies.
Well, technically, it’s a 96-minute press conference moderated by film historian, author, and critic Richard Schickel. However, it really is a bit of a masterclass as Alfred Hitchcock, quite confident in what he does and doesn’t do, gives pronouncements about how he goes about things.
Note that you may want to watch Family Plot, his last film, before watching this as that’s the reason for the press conference. You may also find that he’s rather old school and private in his answers, compared to what you might expect from a modern talk show. That should in no way distract some great nuggets of wisdom as to how he approaches filmmaking as a craft. I especially appreciated his observation on keeping the audience engaged and, above all, not confused.
Also, a pro-tip from the comments. If you play the video at 1.5 times speed (under the settings menu in YouTube), you’ll finish faster and Hitchcock will, frankly, not sound like the spokesman for the Slow Talkers of America (which he clearly isn’t, what with being British and all).
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 has to be a calling.
And when you read things about “ikigai” of just finding flow, it seems like a calling is not that far-fetched a goal. But it so clearly is, because we’re just not set up for a surplus of those types of jobs. In fact, perhaps we’re asking too much of our jobs. Take a look at the video and consider.
After Monday’s post, I didn’t want to take up too much time. The weight of the week is probably dragging on you in any case. Here’s Stephen King with some brief writing tips.
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 about writing… and human nature, naturally.
While not all, it seems an inordinate number of games these days — including games targeting kids — are designed to be addictive in ways that may not be in line with Federation ideals, so to speak.
Do I mix franchises? yes I mix franchises. My fandom is vast. It contains multitudes.
Posted in Various and Sundry
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 because the visual effects content in their blood was getting low. And before you outlay $356 million dollars to make that film (itself the last film of a long series), you might want to do the equivalent of prototyping some story ideas. And where can you do it in comparably inexpensive ways? Comics.
Alas, corporate titan AT&T may not see it that was as Rob Salkowitz details in his article about the questionable future of DC Comics.
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 posting they reference. I’ll update this post as I get more information.
Posted in Various and Sundry, Writing
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 out more of his work, his website is here.
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 to my Wednesday post (which was mainly for creative folk looking for fans) this article raises questions about you define your boundaries with engaging online. Being a luddite is probably not the answer for most people, though ignoring whole swaths of the Internet might be.
In other words, it’s about you taking agency for how you define “getting real.”