As friends know on social media, I’m a big fan of Banned Book Week that occurs every Fall. Given that people continue to challenge books and, really, are only looking out for you, whomever you might be, I find it a good tradition to continue. Several members of my family are or were librarians — and I well remember challenges to books growing up from parents who were worried our dainty minds would be perverted…
Unlike Starbucks, I’ve held off until this, the first official day of Fall, but now that’s it’s here: Resistance is futile. Search your taste buds, you know it to be true! But why is that anyway? And why do people hate it so much? Rebecca Jennings is glad you asked.
Look, writers are gonna write… except when they come up with voluminous excuses not to. So, periodic posts like this one to help motivate people are always handy. In other words, enjoy this piece about how Laura Vanderkam gets her writing done while having 4 children, blogging, speaking, and presumably breathing and eating.
Okay, so I implied on Wednesday that I try and help people work smarter, not harder… because working on projects that go nowhere doesn’t help anyone. So imagine my umbrage when I read an article by Jacopo Prisco about all the “placebo buttons” that are out there designed to give people the illusion of control. Do you people not know conspiracy theorists will run with this?!? Of course, I have to wonder which is worse: being…
We haven’t had a wonky Wednesday in a while, have we? All right, so let’s tackle something that affects businesses big and small. In fact, it affects families, too. How many times have there been “too many things” to do or deal with in a week? As it happens, I deal with project selection at work — and it makes me long for the family-based stuff. Why? The number of players involved in “what to…
However your week has gone, you deserve to learn about the important history of cookies from the Neil Degrasse Tyson of cookie knowledge: Happy Friday!
I touched on notions of fandom with my Crisis of Infinite Star Treks series and certainly toxic fandom has been more on people’s minds in the past year or so in any case (see, for example, these pieces on CNET and in Wired). So it was interesting to read Ryan Britt’s piece in Den of Geek talking with the writers of So Say We All, a new book about the Battlestar Galactica remake… including the…
For this Labor Day, a day where many of us are sure not to labor, it somehow seems appropriate to share this piece by Mark Marino about how to have more joyous writing exercises. Sounds like pretty good motivation to me.
As something to shake things up with your writing, consider this piece on “still eating oranges” I see pop up from time to time. It’s about Kishōtenketsu, a storytelling structure familiar in many Asian narratives. The article here focuses a lot on how it’s different from the Western focus on conflict, but I think it’s also worth looking at simply for the notion of the third act twist. Within a given narrative, say a narrative chock…
I was a screener for a film festival recently. It’s something I’ve done before many times — and just like writers reading a lot of others’ writing, watching a lot of films can give you perspective on both what you want to do and what you don’t want to do as a filmmaker. As you might imagine, a screener’s job is partly to vet films. You’re trying to score all the submissions to see which…