My Salt Lake Comic Con Schedule

Hot on the heels of Dragon Con last week, I'll be at Salt Lake Comic Con this week.

Both conventions have kept me very busy, and I'm looking forward to Salt Lake. I'll be sharing a booth with the rest of the guys from Big Shiny Robot! and some other great artists. I'll have plenty of books and will be signing them, including The Serpent's Head.

For those interested, here's my panel schedule:

Thursday

4:00 pm - An Hour With Sam Witwer
5:00 pm - Room 250a - What we know and what we think we know about Episode VII (Moderator)
7:00 pm - Room 255c - Salt Lake Comic-Con Film School Part 1: Development, Screenwriting, and Pre-production
8:00 pm - Room 255b - The Big Shiny Geek Show Pub Quiz

Friday

1:00 pm - Room 250a - Star Wars Rebels (Moderator)
2:00 pm - Room 151g - The Future and Legends of Star Wars Canon (Moderator)
8:00 pm - Room 255f - The Cinema Behind Star Wars (Moderator)

Saturday

2:00 pm - Room 255b - Nerds vs. The News
3:00 pm - Room 255c - Salt Lake Comic Con Film School Part 3: Post-Production, Marketing, and Distribution
4:00 pm - Room 255c - How to Create and Run a Successful Kickstarter Campaign
5:00 pm - Room 251a - Star Wars Roundtable: An in-depth discussion of Film, Comics, Television, Novels, Toys and more (Moderator)
6:00 pm - Room 151d - Full of Sith podcast recording
8:00 pm - Room 255e - The Princess Bride, John Carter, and other movie marketing failures (Moderator)

This is all still subject to change. I've heard tell they want to add some things to the schedule, but we'll see. In the meantime, I'd say your best bet to get a book signed will be on Friday, which is my lightest panel day.

I also promise I'll be updating this space more often. I've just been writing. A lot.

Anatomy of an Opening: The End of the Affair

Instead of breaking down a scene from a movie, this time we'll break down the opening of a book. (Previously, I've done scenes from City Lights, Citizen Kane, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I've also broken down the opening to Starship Troopers.)

Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is absolutely one of my favorite books. The writing is lyrical and story heart-wrenching and beautiful. Greene's style of writing is such that he always has me gripped, whether it's the beginning of the book or the end. And he shows you so much about the character in his opening lines.

So, here are the first two paragraphs from the book:
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which, to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who - when he has been seriously noted at all - has been praised for his technical ability, but d…

The Symbiotic Relationship Between Art and Politics

Art is inherently political.

Let's just get that out of the way. We all have things we want to say (or things we want to not say) in our personal lives that shape the art we make. And artists, more often than not, are trying to say something with their art, even if their goal is to not say something.

There is no doubt that this has been a turbulent week in the country I live in. There are many of us that are confused and shocked and afraid of what might be to come in the future. That's understandable. As artists and writers, I feel like we're typically more empathetic than the general population. It's easy to think about what it's like to be in someone else's shoes because we spend so much of our creative time almost literally in someone else's shoes. And we need to pass that understanding on to our readers or viewers or however else they're consuming this art.

I've seen this troubling idea, though, that art needs to be purely for escape and that p…

50+ Rules and Tips About Writing I've Collected Over the Years

I have twenty or thirty notebooks and journals filled up with snippets about writing, my plans for stories, bits of dialogue, interesting ideas, plotlines, scraps of short stories, and a dozen other things. I carry one with me at all times and it takes me a couple of months to fill one up.

One of the things I've kept in one of my notebooks was a collection of writing tips and rules that I've collected over the years in my travels. From teachers, from books, from wherever. Most of my career has been spent screenwriting, so a lot of these are most applicable to that, but I wanted to present them so they might be of use to you as well.

I've never stopped collecting these over the years and I never will.

To start the list are Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules of writing. They are the first in my notebook and, I think, the most useful. I'll add a star to those I think are applicable most to screenwriting. Some of these aren't applicable to everyone in every situation, but…

The stories of Bryan Young

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