Maybe Today
“Hellerman Retirement Home.”
The name is on the front of the building and printed on the stationary provided to the residents. Stationary most of them don’t use. Why bother? No one answers.
You wrote letters when you first arrived. Your children didn’t respond. They said,
“No one writes letters anymore. People text or email.”
Continue reading “Maybe Today”My Brief Fling With Hollywood
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think just about every writer has the dream of seeing their work adapted for television or the movies. Or anywhere, really, where our work will get exposed to a wider audience.
I’ve always thought my book, AUTUMN MOON, would make a great television series. Or at the very least, a movie (with options for sequels, of course).
It was about two years ago when I came across a Facebook post from a friend.
Continue reading “My Brief Fling With Hollywood”Cutting The Cord, a.k.a Why I Deactivated My Facebook Account
Part of writing these days, if you want to make any sort of career out of it, involves promotion. Self-promotion. The kind of promotion I hate. I’d rather tell you little stories here and there, drop a few witty lines from time to time, and then fade away into the background until the next brilliant story/thought/line occurs to me.
Unfortunately, that’s not the way things are done in today’s social media run world. If you’re a writer, you have to have an online presence. Twitter. Instagram, Facebook. That kind of crap.
Continue reading “Cutting The Cord, a.k.a Why I Deactivated My Facebook Account”Tattoos And The People That Love Them (a.k.a. This has nothing to do with writing.)
I always liked tattoos.
My brother’s friend had two full sleeves, and a few on his chest and back. The running joke was, he couldn’t walk past a tattoo shop without stopping inside to get one.
An exaggeration, of course, but he did have a lot of tattoos. So many, they blended together on his arms into a swirl of Jackson Pollack-type images and colors.
I thought that was too many. I like tattoos where you can tell what the individual image is. It stands apart from the others, like a panel in a comic book. My brother’s friend had so many on his arms, they were a blur.
Continue reading “Tattoos And The People That Love Them (a.k.a. This has nothing to do with writing.)”Interview With Author Timothy Johnson
1. What made you want to be a writer?
It was probably a mixture of narcissism, masochism, and the right teacher in the right class telling me I had potential in something when I felt I had potential in nothing but had to decide what I was going to do for the rest of my life.
I took a creative writing class in college when I didn’t have a major, and when I started writing, I thought I was brilliant. At the time, I had been writing songs, so it seemed natural that I’d become a poet (because that’s a practical decision in this world). Then I was in a room with friends who literally laughed at my work, and I realized I wasn’t good.
Continue reading “Interview With Author Timothy Johnson”SLADE 2.0 (a.k.a Children Are The Future)
My six year-old son and I play a game he calls “Voices.”
It’s called Voices because I do different voices of different characters, and it developed from when I would play with him with his stuffed animals. I gave each animal a different personality and they, along with my son (as himself), would get involved in various adventures.
Continue reading “SLADE 2.0 (a.k.a Children Are The Future)”GLASS is a good movie and anyone who disagrees is wrong.*
*If you haven’t seen the movie and are planning to, you probably want to stop here. Come back after you’ve seen it.
Now…
Full disclosure: I’m a fan of UNBREAKABLE. I liked it better than THE SIXTH SENSE. I’ve watched it probably six or seven times. And every time I’ve watched it, I manage to pick up something new I missed the previous times.
Continue reading “GLASS is a good movie and anyone who disagrees is wrong.*”Judging A Book By Its Cover
“You can’t judge a book by its cover.”
Sure you can. Most people do. And the thing is, it doesn’t matter if their assessment is right, because they’ll never know.
If someone looks at a book cover and judges it to be of poor quality, or not interesting, and they believe the contents of the book are the same, what are the chances they will read the book to see if they’re right? Zilch. Nada. Because there are too many other books out there, books with far more interesting covers that will draw their attention, and ultimately their reading time. Continue reading “Judging A Book By Its Cover”
The State of Publishing (a.k.a “Same as it ever was.”)
NOTE: I wrote this a few years ago after attending the Writer’s Digest Writer’s Conference. I was working as a temp for a retired literary agent who was there promoting a software program to help writers construct book proposals. Or something. Whatever. Doesn’t matter.
The important thing is… Since I wrote this, the publishing world hasn’t improved.
Attending the Writer’s Digest Writer’s Conference the weekend of January 21st through the 23rd, I was struck by more than one “sad but true” revelation:
1) Writers are desperate, needy, and borderline delusional;
2) Literary agents are egotistical and condescending.
Wait, wait, wait. Yes, I am making generalizations about a large group of people, some of whom I did not have opportunity to speak with on a one-on-one basis. And yes, there are exceptions to every generalization made, especially ones made by an opinionated bastard such as myself. But for the most part, my descriptions are apt.
Continue reading “The State of Publishing (a.k.a “Same as it ever was.”)”