Star Wars Anniversary

It was roughly 2003. I was in ninth grade, and my friend Chris, several years older, approached me for help with his short film. He called it Star Wars: The Gifted, and it was an attempt to bring Star Wars into the real world (as we know it). There’s a slow and ongoing effort to remaster the film, to build out the bones of the larger story that we had initially planned. But more important than the film itself or the story behind it is what it represents. It was…

Re: Talent is Cheaper than Table Salt

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’ve been skeptical for a while about Kristin Lamb. I haven’t read her book, We Are Not Alone – The Writer’s Guide to Social Media. The growing obsession with social media “experts” turns my stomach, even when I recognize I could probably use some more of that expertise around the spillway. The #MyWANA community on Twitter, a sort of group-therapy session and navel-gazing exercise for writers, has both drawn me in and turned me off more than once with its promise of positive, passionate interactions and…