Back on March 1st, 2015, I re-entered the web world with a personal website, something I really hadn’t had since the 90s, which in Internet terms is ancient history. Perhaps because March 1st doesn’t correspond with any other anniversaries in my life, I keep on meaning to do an annual retrospective about posts and such on the blog, but keep on forgetting. This year, however, I made sure to set a reminder for myself. As…
I’m always interested in different people’s writing processes, including how they balance non-writing. Okay, I should probably specify productive non-writing. It’s pretty easy to procrastinate and not write. Novelist Vincent Zandri has an interesting approach that I’ve heard from other writers in how they approach the business of writing by being very definite about both the writing part and the business part. I appreciate the level of detail.
Still thinking of the Oscars this week and I came across this piece in Forbes which mentions a small coup in terms of credits. You see, for the longest time, the iconic character of Batman was credited pretty much only to Bob Kane, when in fact, that particular caped crusader was not a solo act. In fact, there’s a Bill Finger award that has been established specifically to recognize comic book writers whose work in…
I’ve been musing on the old –and to my mind, inaccurate– advice to “write what you know” and I’ve been meaning to write a post about it. But in the meantime –and perhaps for the better– how about I just link to a piece by novelist (and occasional Tohubohu screenwriter) Barry Lyga? There’s a whole lot of nuggets in here, but I won’t spoil them for you. Suffice to say I agree with a lot…
This week, I joined the Streaming Nonsense crew in their mission to review lesser known films available online. This time, we looked at The Velocipastor. Is it everything you want from a disillusioned-priest-becomes-dinosaur-and-fights-ninjas movie? Give a listen.
The New York Public Library (NYPL) released a list of its most checked out books in its 125 year history (it was founded in 1895). Coming from a family that includes librarians, archivists, and avid history readers, this was delightful news. I learned about it as the NPR story covering it was shared widely among my social media channels. One curious note in the NYPL release: an honorable mention for Goodnight Moon, which I suppose…
I’ve mentioned author and indie published Russell Nohelty a couple times on the blog, both specifically about his book on selling your work and in his detailing his efforts to build his business. So, as a bit of follow-up, all last year he did a monthly income and expense report about his business, often detailing what worked and what didn’t, what his predictions were, and what the basis of those predictions was. It was wonderfully…
Magic and writing? Redundant, I know. But anyway, this is from last year, but Japanese writer Haruki Murakami‘s birthday was yesterday, so it popped up in some of my feeds. Emily Temple over at LitHub collected several of his observations on writing and –what can I say?– they’re a good way to start off the week.
Public Domain is a topic I periodically cover here on the blog and what with works beginning to enter said domain once again in the United States as of last year, I suppose this might become a January tradition. Thousands of works from 1924 are now yours for the re-imagining as detailed here in Smithsonian Magazine, Vice news, and art news site Hyperallergic. I expect a heavy metal version of “Rhapsody in Blue,” stat. Get…
Moving on from trying to make hobbies conspicuously unproductive, there’s the notion on not waiting on one’s creative aspirations and making things. I wrote a longer post a couple years ago about this need to do and complete creative works, in part referencing the column above. Time is finite for us mere mortals, so you need to figure out where to feed your creative side while life happens. Maybe it’s on the job, maybe it’s…