LOOPER A Sony/TriStar Pictures Release Dir-scr: Rian Johnson Throughout the history of storytelling, writers and other artists have toyed with a Big Impossible Idea: that of attaining the power imbued through an ability to move outside the parameters of the flow of time. It’s irresistible for one reason alone—the individual who has the ability to […]
UPDATE: After viewing all 13 episodes, the Netflix Original series House of Cards builds to a thrilling conclusion in which all of Rep. Underwood’s machinations, some of which have turned deadly, demonstrate both how far he will go to achieve his ravenous ambition, and how far that naked, amoral hunger will take him. Only an […]
As a fan of master filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, I’m naturally eager to see the new documentary Room 237 currently making the rounds on the festival circuit, and thus not readily available for review. Instead, I thought I’d look at some of the doc’s source material, and what I found was a troubling, fascinating document that in its […]
Seen at the time as a return to form for Woody Allen—never mind that prior to this movie he’d gotten wonderful reviews and Academy Award nominations for Broadway Danny Rose and The Purple Rose of Cairo (two of his best, incidentally)—Hannah and Her Sisters garnered as much commercial and Oscar acclaim as his prior, late 70s […]
So you’ve completed and revised a manuscript that’s a thriller, that’s a character study, that’s suspenseful and literary and exciting . . . an easy sell, right? Right. What if it’s set in a milieu that could be seen as distasteful or icky, however . . . like the brutal blood-sport of dogfighting?
Backstory: A number of years ago I began a YA I called VISUAL PURPLE, in which an emotionally disturbed young woman, Courtleigh, 25, pretends for a variety of reasons to be 15 again—she interacts with actual teenagers, has a love affair, and through her actions engenders tragedy, violence, and her own downfall. During a few […]
Readers of my Saturday Evening Post short story finalist ‘Trailer Trash‘ (a version of which also currently appears in Petigru Review, the journal of the SC Writer’s Workshop) have not only told me what a vivid picture I paint of my young protagonist’s ordeal in extreme housecleaning, but also in my scene-setting during the story’s […]
As I suspect many authors also experience, since my career’s started gaining some traction I get asked more often by aspiring writers for advice—to read pages, usually, or simply to give them some sort of insight or ‘secret’ to getting published. I can’t do that, though, mainly because there isn’t one surefire route to publication, only a […]
I came across this blog post yesterday, and felt compelled to propagate these very useful writing concepts from the lauded German author W. G. ‘Max’ Sebald, a likely Nobel winner had he lived to receive the honor. Credit to poster Richard Skinner (and, of course, David Lambert & Robert McGill, who took Sebald’s workshop and […]
Backstory: I completed the first draft of last summer’s new novel, LET THE GLORY PASS AWAY, on August 21, 2012, after which it lay resting and untouched for nearly five months. With the turning of the calendar’s page and the dawning of a new year (and with 20 pages of notes and ideas at hand), […]
