So the other night I was up late and I watched The Twilight Zone on Me-TV, the Chicago channel that boasts Svengoolie and SciFi Saturday Night and otherwise broadcasts nationwide television shows from the Fifties through the Eighties. The episode was “The Masks,” and those of us well-read and of… Continue reading
Word day, I guess. Sometimes I latch onto a word and roll it around in my brain, I don’t know, just to do it because it is a word. In the current issue of Vanity Fair (yes, I subscribe, both to mock the rich and famous in the photographs of… Continue reading
Yeah, it was the worst year in memory, and it hit most of us very hard. However, at the end of each year and the beginning of the next, I try to remind myself that the world didn’t end (although we came close this time) and that there always seem… Continue reading
New day, new year, new— Not exactly a new website, but a revised and revived one. I have Pete Pollack to thank for this. I stopped blogging a long time ago, but now I am retired from my fulltime job as a medical editor, and I guess I am ready… Continue reading
NOTE: Spoilers follow. Where to start with Birdman? It is brilliant to have Michael Keaton, who has always been first rate, carry as extraordinary a picture as this one. All those years since the Batman movies doing smaller, sincere pictures, cable work, and voiceovers, and now here he is in this exceptional, dark,… Continue reading
Oron, originally written in 1973-1974 and published by Zebra Books in 1978, is going to be reissued by Wildside Press/Borgo Press—next year, I hope, but relatively soon, in any event. I’ve scanned in the text—all 93,000 words of it—and am now revising the novel. I have several reasons for doing… Continue reading
If I were ever to teach a class in basic storytelling, especially one in which the class and I discussed popular imaginative fiction, I might very well start off with this book as a perfect example of how to structure a story. The edition of the Walt Disney Cinderella story I mean… Continue reading
When I was a kid—10, 12 years old and later—I used to stay up late at night on Fridays and Saturdays and watch old movies. Monster movies hosted by Ghoulardi on channel 8 in Cleveland, for a while there, in the early sixties, but later, just about anything—film noir from… Continue reading
For the past 10 years, going back to 2003, at least, I’ve pitched ideas to agents, hoping to interest one of them in the commercial potential of one or another of my ideas, and the effort has come to nothing. I had literary representation decades ago, and what I wrote… Continue reading
Whenever I hit a rut in my writing and need to be reminded why I am at the keyboard, I pull out one or another story or novel by Leigh Brackett to get me back on track, to remind me why I wanted to learn how to tell stories in… Continue reading
