What? You didn’t think Spike Lee’s Kickstarter campaign was a success? You didn’t even know he had one.
Sheesh! Get with the program, kids. How else are you/we ever gonna be taken seriously as, you know, being in the biz?
Luckily for all concerned, The Bitter Script Reader’s been keeping his eye out for all of us:
by Bob TinsleyWhen last we talked I had the “shooting script” in hand and was ready to publish an ebook with it.
Well, not quite ready. What I had was the body of the book. What I didn’t have was what is called the “front matter”. This stuff is usually taken care of by the publisher without the author having to worry too much about it. Guess what? YOU’RE the publisher. You’ll see this again.
Take a look at a book, either dead-tree or ebook, doesn’t matter. I’ll start with an overview, then take each element individually.
by Peggy BechkoHad a computer crisis this past week that pretty much shut down my writing and couldn’t do a whole lot since the work I was in the middle of was on the computer. So I cleaned up the office, read, made a few notes and couldn’t help but take some of that extra time to refocus from being irritated with the whole computer thing and contemplate some aspects of my writing career.
One that popped to mind was taking a break from writing (since I was ‘enjoying’ just such an enforced break at the moment).
You might say “I’m a writer! I write every day! I don’t take no stinkin breaks! I’m a writer!” (yep, with all those exclamation points)
Hmm, well, sit back, relax, take a mini break and read on.
There really are times to take a break.
No, no, chill, please. Those aren’t our words. They’re the gist of words uttered by the D-peeps over at Legendary Pictures. Words that inspired this brilliant rant analysis of the current cinema situation:
You probably haven’t heard of Legend of the Red Reaper. The passion product of Tara Cardinal, who also stars, it’s about a Reaper, or guardian of humanity, who goes on a quest for vengeance against those who betrayed her kind. It’s the sort of high-fantasy action story that’s gotten more popular since Game of Thrones hit it big. But you probably won’t be seeing it in a theater, since Legendary Pictures passed on it. Why? They don’t think people want to see action movies with female leads. Because Sucker Punch failed. Yeah.
Noted novelist and self-publishing pioneer Cary Doctorow wrote this article on how to get your writing self to actually do your writing work back in 2009, but his wisdom is more apt than ever:
by Cory Doctorow
We know that our readers are distracted and sometimes even overwhelmed by the myriad distractions that lie one click away on the Internet, but of course writers face the same glorious problem: the delirious world of information and communication and community that lurks behind your screen, one alt-tab away from your word-processor.
The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn’t help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from. Every now and again, when I see a new website, game, or service, I sense the tug of an attention black hole: a time-sink that is just waiting to fill my every discretionary moment with distraction. As a co-parenting new father who writes at least a book per year, half-a-dozen columns a month, ten or more blog posts a day, plus assorted novellas and stories and speeches, I know just how short time can be and how dangerous distraction is.