Month: September 2013

Joshua Hudson: FOX has Nine-Nine Problems, but This isn’t One

by Joshua Hudson

brooklyn-nine-nine-tvwriter.comMany cop shows are heavy on the drama, action, and surprise twist endings. They are also very light on the comedic elements to lighten the mood to avert from the travesties they love to portray to hook you in.

FOX’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine says it is time for a change.

Nine-Nine is the latest comedy to attempt to build a strong following on FOX’s Tuesday night schedule. Last season, none of FOX’s comedies hit – I’m including The Mindy Project in that statement even though it was picked up for a second season – so it was time to regroup. read article

Writing at the Speed of the Unconscious

Sometimes I lie in bed pondering, well, pretty much everything. Except maybe how fast my subconscious mind might be. Cuz, hey, with all the regret I have on my plate, who has time for speed?

Kate Arms-Roberts, OTOH, is so into this thing that she has me spinning too:

typewriter-tvwriter.comby Kate Arms-Roberts

What The Subconscious is to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse. ~ Ray Bradbury read article

Robin Reed: The Disney/Marvel Shows You Don’t Know About

DevilDinosaur-tvwriter.com
Sorry, this isn’t the version of Devil Dinosaur you’ll see in the cartoons this article discusses. Aw…

by Robin Reed

While the Marvel movies and the upcoming “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” show get the headlines, if you flip channels enough you will find that Disney has not wasted any opportunity to get a return on their investment in Marvel. These under-the-radar shows are animated and appear on Disney-owned cable channels. I knew about (and hate, for the cutesy comments by a cartoony Spidey) “Ultimate Spider-Man.”

I have also come across shows that are set in Japan and seem to be sub-contracted out to a Japanese animé studio. One featured Iron Man and another the X-Men. (I don’t know if Disney can use the X-Men in animation when another studio owns the movie rights. What the corporate relationships are behind the Japanese shows I couldn’t tell you.)

Yesterday, on an early Sunday morning cruise through the desolate wastes of cable TV, I stopped on a show I hadn’t seen before. “Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H.” is the title. It has a fully talking and thinking Hulk teaming up with other iterations of himself, including Red Hulk, She-Hulk, and A-Bomb. A-Bomb, you say? It’s Rick Jones in blue armor. If you don’t know who Rick Jones is, I don’t have time to tell you. read article

Writing and Loneliness

Nathan Bransford isn’t just a good writer, he’s a writer who’s aware of…the benefits of the writing life.  And the not-such-benefits too:

Toulouse-Lautrec_de_Henri_Vincent_van_Gogh_Sunby Nathan Bransford

I don’t find the act of writing to be a lonely one. There’s something about the concentration, the empathy required to imagine what characters think and do, and being immersed in another place that never makes you feel you’re actually by yourself. It’s comforting to have the control over an imagined world that we can never have in the real one.

But the act of writing is a solitary one, and the writing life forces you to shut off the outside world for long stretches of time. To complete a huge task like a novel you have to say no to outings with friends and time spent in the sunshine, and choose instead to chain yourself to your computer or notepad and stare at it for hours on end. And because you have to spend so much time writing, you might not leave enough time for friendships and fun. read article

Peggy Bechko: The Writer’s Questions

by Peggy Bechko

i-love-mystery-tvwriter.comI’ve been a writer for some years now and published frequently and I can remember clearly writing entire scenes and describing little or nothing, not pinning down a character’s character and more distracting missteps.

Questions create a story and if you, as a writer, don’t answer those questions you’ll lose your readers. “What if…” is a big question. So is “What would someone do if”… or “if the world was a much different place in these ways, what would happen…”

Questions, so many questions, but isn’t that our nature, to want to unravel ‘mysteries’? read article