Various and Sundry

Re-visiting the Four-Day Workweek

Part of the silver lining of experiencing a horrendous global pandemic has been people re-examining how they do things. I referenced Joe Pinsker’s article for The Atlantic last year, which is well worth a read if you haven’t checked it out already. Well, Alex Christian over at the BBC has an article exploring what’s going right, what’s going wrong, and some of the challenges of moving to a four-day workweek. The main issue is making…

Continue reading

Writing

The Work, not Art, of Screenwriting, via Billy Ray

Given last week’s post about David Lynch and screenwriting, I knew I wanted to do another screenwriting post. And then last night’s Oscar ceremony got me thinking about the film industry and its future and I remembered a column by screenwriter Billy Ray. It’s from 2016, but it doesn’t seem any less apropos in its calls to action. Note that the column is very much about Hollywood/mainstream film industry filmmaking, but it’s not like the…

Continue reading

Various and Sundry

An Instrument Which, By Definition, Is a Blast to Play

Okay, I was going to post something else today, but then thanks to Andrew M. Edwards of Blue Police Box Music, you’re getting a short, but so, so sweet video. There was an online discussion of the upcoming ultra-HD release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and conversation, quite naturally, turned to the iconic score by composer Jerry Goldsmith. Now, Goldsmith loved “esoteric instruments” as this article points out — and for the noise of…

Continue reading

Various and Sundry

Go Boldly, Any Way You Can

I’m working on some more writing this week, so it felt like time to share this: In my own series, Rogue Tyger, the characters refer to an “FTL drive,” but they also talk about “jumps” so you can deduce that ships in the ‘Tygerverse’ use a form of jump drive. Visually, it’s probably best been represented with the recent incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, but a major inspiration for how the drive works and the variations…

Continue reading

Writing

Screenwriting through the David Lynch Lens

Last week, I posted a few videos about David Lynch and how to hook yourself an idea or two. Well, as you might expect, I plowed through a number of Lynch videos at the same time, in part because the two I shared last week are just about the nature of getting ideas. But, in fact, the first video I watched was a piece asking Lynch about his screenwriting process… and since it’s just over…

Continue reading

Writing

Where do Ideas come from? David Lynch Edition

The post from the other week about how hard hobbies are to schedule time for made me think of something I recently saw regarding how to generate ideas… and from a man generally known for having some out-of-the-box type ideas: David Lynch. As many of you might know, I love using Workflowy, including for capturing ideas. I mean, I love the habit of always carrying around an old-school notebook to jot things down in –and…

Continue reading

Various and Sundry

It’s Not a Balloon, it’s an AIRSHIP!

As one person in the CNBC video below points out, there’s something almost magical about watching airships in flight… sort of the inverse of what you feel when someone says, “dirigible,” which I swear makes me think of required safety trainings, possibly involving protective gear. So I’ve paid attention to the articles here and there, now and then, that say airships might be making a comeback, including ones specifically to haul freight. And then, I…

Continue reading

Producing Writing

Fast. Cheap. Good. Pick Two.

Many of you have seen the sentiment expressed in the title above, but it’s always worth remembering… and remembering we, as a species, will likely figure out how to go faster than the speed of light before we break the above constraints. A post by writer Mark Evanier reminded me of how these constraints can often come into play in the writing world, which led to a good musing on his part: How does one…

Continue reading