Skip to main content

Tuesday Update

In an effort to keep my space here more regularly updated, and to get you warmed up to the idea of checking in regularly for my vlog experiment.

Fortunately, I have a lot of news this week.

On Saturday, I wrapped up the draft of the most recent novel I'd been working on, my eighth. I haven't settled on a title yet, but I really like "An Original" (which is the title of the short story it's based on) or "The Counterfeit Man."

I can't overstate enough how good it feels to finish a book. I'm already resisting jumping into my next one since I have so much I need to revise and polish on deadlines for other people.

I've published quite a bit this last week over at Big Shiny Robot!, mostly to do with Star Wars: Rebels, but there was some other stuff in there, too.

For StarWars.Com, I wrote a piece called The Cinema Behind Star Wars: Treasure of the Sierra Madre that I think you'll all have a lot of fun reading. I also did two different Star Wars interviews. The first was with Paul S. Kemp (who did the foreword for A Children's Illustrated History of Presidential Assassination) about his upcoming book Lords of the Sith, and the second with Del Rey editor Shelly Shapiro for Full of Sith.

As for the video portion of this post, I go back to the next part of my series that was done for Arizona State University. In this clip, I talk about the use of technology in novels:


Chew on that until next week.

And please, please, please don't hesitate to buy any of my books and if you've read some, please review them on the website or online marketplace of your choice. If you'd like to get my books directly from me, signed, you can go to the shop page.

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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…
Read more

Anatomy of a Scene - City Lights

We're going to break down another scene this week, and it's one of my favorites in cinema history. It comes from the ending of City Lights by Charlie Chaplin, which I think is the greatest romantic comedy ever made. 
It's a touching film from 1931 and I would make it mandatory viewing for anyone who wants to learn to tell a story.
The scene we're going to be breaking down comes from the very end of the film, so if you haven't seen it, I don't want to spoil it for you. Go watch the film. You can rent it for $3.99 in HD on Amazon or for free on Hulu with a free trial or plus subscription. You should just buy the Blu-ray, though. You're going to want to revisit it.
For those of you familiar with the movie, or for those of you who are going to ignore my pleas to watch it and go ahead with this post anyway, I'm going to set this clip up a bit before you watch it.
City Lights tells the story of Chaplin's Tramp and how he falls in love with a blind flower …
Read more

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…
Read more