Various and Sundry

Real Secret Societies You May Not Know

What with the casting I’m working on for our show, Quorum, I’ve been thinking about actual secret societies, and how secret they actually are. Enter Jackie Mansky writing for Smithsonian magazine. Per the article, actual secret societies are often centered around good causes (certainly as far as the members are concerned). Not only that, but these days, they’re aren’t not too secret. Indeed, their existence is often in plain sight even if their purposes might…

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Writing

9 Steps to Build a Strong Plot (NaNoWriMo Prep)

NaNoWriMo will be upon us next month, and so for a lot of people, October is National Novel Prep Month. (I’m mainly going to hype my writing in an anthology this month… and also work on some scriptwriting). Now, if you read last week’s post and decided that you are more of a plotter, writer Derek Murphy has a 9 step “plot dot” for you. For some, you’ll quickly pick up on the fact that…

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Acting

R.I.P. Angela Lansbury: A Grand Dame for the Ages

Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury has died at the age of 96. You can read obituaries and appreciations of her career in: The AV Club Collider Deadline NPR The New York Times Variety Vogue The Washington Post, and Disney (she was, of course, a “Disney Legend”) And if you want to celebrate her many parts singing memorable songs, Playbill has a wonderful video compilation. Amazing that she simply termed her voice “serviceable.” Indeed, if you find…

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Writing

Are You a Pantser or Plotter? (NaNoWriMo Prep)

NaNoWriMo will be upon us next month, and so for a lot of people, October is National Novel Prep Month. (I’m mainly going to hype my writing in an anthology this month… and also work on some scriptwriting). This Monday’s entry is important, as we’ll be midway through this prep month before you know it and you need to ask yourself: am I pantser or a plotter? Will Soulsby-McCreath walks you through some thought exercises…

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Writing

Sci Fi versus Fantasy

A meme tickled Twitter users’ fancy late last month and for good reason: it was a pair of pithy comments contrasting science fiction and fantasy and skewering the related tropes for both. Mignon Fogarty has a good collection over at the Grammar Girl, but be warned! You’ll start wanting to do your own. To whit: Sci Fi is this blog on an encrypted server you’ll need some cyberpunk hacker to access. Fantasy is this blog…

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Producing

The Big Media Landscape of Fall 2022

For whatever reason, I get a lot of hits for my “Future TV” posts especially the one about the future of Netflix in the Fall of 2017. Well it’s a whole new world out there in media-land these days because Netflix is far from the only streaming game in town. Heck, traditional Big Media aren’t the biggest of companies in media these days either. To learn more, check out the graphic below and the article…

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Writing

8 Things to Consider Before Writing Your First Novel (Possible NaNoWriMo Prep)

NaNoWriMo will be upon us next month, and so for a lot of people, October is National Novel Prep Month. (I’m mainly going to hype my writing in an anthology this month… and also work on some scriptwriting). But let’s say you haven’t written a novel before and were anxious about it and were wondering about what will work and what won’t work and what will work for you… Well, since I featured one Vlog…

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