Do as I do: Cover a wide variety of topics. Post sporadically. Write various lengths, from quick dashed-off notions to long think pieces. Get personal one post, professional the next. Take long breaks. Give people the strong impression that your mind runs all over the place. I’m trying to do better, but blogging is not in even the top five of my daily A tasks. Therefore I’m doomed. Don’t be like me!...
This post contains spoilers. It also will come off as negative to the point of sounding harsh. Apologies. I generally don’t like to post negative reviews. What’s the point? So let me say right off that I did not hate Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. But the movie does not really work. As a writer, I want to understand why. Luc Besson’s science fiction I’ve been a fan of Luc Besson’s movies since the 1980s, when I first saw his first feature....
On Quora, someone posted the question: Why am I so intimidated by a blank page staring up at me in my sketch book? Why is it so hard for me to just dive in? My answer goes way back to something I learned getting my MFA, and basically it comes down to this: A book (or short story or painting or movie or any creative work) comes to life and dies several times over....
The story and the telling of the story are two different things. In other words, the narrator and the character in the story are not necessarily the same person. Oh, they have the same name and all that. But the narrator knows the story she is telling, while the character within the story does not. This provides opportunities that few writers explore. I’ll use an old classic movie as an example of what I’m talking about....
An early cover for “Mabel and the Yellow Jackets” To outsiders, she may seem like a nice older “woman next door.” But the redoubtable Mabel is nobody’s fool, and she’s anything but helpless. When a horde of stinging insects invades her space, they experience the wrath of a woman who’ll have none of it. My short story “Mabel and the Yellow Jackets” is free—as in free free, not just subscription free—this weekend, February 23–26, on Kindle....