Various and Sundry

#Inkspell2020 – Art Challenge for October

The seven or nine regular readers of my blog will recall I have, over the years, advocated setting aside time to do creative work, even if you’re not good at it! (from January, March, and December of last year). One of the activities I love doing is “Inktober,” an annual art challenge every October where you try to do an ink drawing every day based on a one-word prompt. I’ve done this as an after-dinner…

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Writing

Banned Book Week, 2020

Librarians, archivists, and bibliophiles are well represented in my family, so I’ve always enjoyed Banned Book Week. Since many library systems are closed due to the pandemic, many of you probably can’t saunter over to your local library and see their cool “Banned Book” displays. The site does have plenty of resources to read and download — as well as the always interesting top 100 books challenged or banned. That list also provides me with…

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Various and Sundry Writing

John August on Professionalism

Back in 2006, writer John August wrote (and presented) a really great talk called “Professionalism and the Rise of the Amateur.” It drew on his own experience as a writer, but it could be applied to other jobs — basically, anywhere where you’re trying to be “professional” — and what that word means, really. Well, lots of things have happened since then, as he recounts as he revisits and expands (and corrects) some of those…

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Writing

A Writer Writes… to What End?

For whatever reason, I’ve been seeing a bunch of memes about writers writing, writers writing ’til they’ve finished (whether or not it’s good, they can always rewrite, etc.) and so on. So what if you’re wondering about the point of all this? Well, for a motivation Monday, Monica Leonelle has a bunch of questions and exercises to ask yourself. Now I’m going to get back to writing.

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Various and Sundry

Star Trek Day – Panel Videos

Given my post on Monday, there really wasn’t much doubt that I’d go ahead and link to a bunch of the videos CBS did for Star Trek Day on Tuesday. They have a bunch more videos on the CBS All Access YouTube channel, some of them snippets of these below, but this should keep you stoked for Trek. TOS TNG/Picard Deep Space Nine Voyager Enterprise Discovery Lower Decks Strange New Worlds

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