I keep thinking, "Oh no. ReaderCon's in like two weeks, I'd better get organized."

I keep thinking I can get my inbox to zero if I forward them all to a different account.

I keep thinking I'll get up earlier if I go to bed sooner.

I keep thinking that the reason we're building prisons faster than schools is because we're building prisons faster than schools.

I keep thinking. Which is probably why I'm having trouble falling asleep.

I need to get my sleep cycle back on track because ReaderCon's in like two days.

[	Tags	|	bookly, buffy	]
[	Current Location	|	framingham	]
[	Current Mood	|	tired	]
[	Current Music	|	none	]

Catching Up With Amber Benson

Geoffrey H. Goodwin

[interview about her recent novel]

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=35381#more
 

Acting and the act of writing fiction do not overlap as much as one might think. Bram Stoker still reigns as one of the best and too many people have forgotten Thomas Tryon. Viggo Mortenson is actually quite good. Carrie Fisher has chops. But those two don't write genre even though they're well-known for acting in it. Plenty of Star Trek actors have done Trekker or Trekkeresque fiction. Plenty more have written material for the big and little screens, but that seems more like a job hazard than a true drive to write. There was even an anthology of Highlander writing that had some stories written by Highlander actors. There are a few others.

The best candidate for the most talented genre fiction writer who is better known as an actor and is still living is Alan Arkin. His output isn't substantial, but he was in Galaxy twice in the fifties, his story "The Amazing Grandy," about a James Randi-like debunker who meets Jesus on an airplane, was in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2001, and two of his YA books have talking animals.

Anyone else who's actually good?

Is it that acting makes one worse at telling stories or is it that actors are as likely to be writers as any other random sampling?

Ray Carver, as you might well imagine, was a born storyteller. He'd come to the craft by a different route and was less clumsy, bookish and shy than most writers. For many of his writing years, he was a heavy drinker who got himself into a number of wild and wooly scrapes. Toby Wolff served in Vietnam but never had the exciting and/or chaos-driven kind of personal life that Ray did. In the scene then, early to mid 80s, Toby, Haydn Carruth and others loved to hear Ray's adventures. He was respected for his ability to be candid about deeply personal things.

Finally, one night, just the two of them, Toby's jealousy boiled over (which was surprising because he was a prim military man) and he told Ray a long story he had never told anyone about being a heroin addict for much of Vietnam. The next night, Toby called Ray up and confessed that he had made the whole thing up to try to compete with Ray's stories.

Ray paused and said, "Well, Toby, that's okay but I think I might have told a few people." To this day, people come up to Toby Wolff (a gifted writer in his own right, even played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie based on his memoir) and ask him how he is doing with his heroin problem.

(In truth, this story is only 94% true.)

Things I think I forgot to remember:

Interview with Ben Parzybok:
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2009_01_013995.php

Interview with Paul Tremblay:
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2009_04_014311.php

Interview with Jedidiah Berry:
http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2009/05/conversation-with-jedediah-berry.html

Prime's anthology, Phantom, which contains my story "Jonquils Bloom" is up for pre-order. An amazing number of writers who are better than I am are in there:
http://www.amazon.com/Phantom-Steve-Rasnic-Tem/dp/1607012006/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243002751&sr=8-1

[	Tags	|	i love everyone	]
[	Current Mood	|	tired	]

On Syfy (they decided not to do that, right?), I just watched the lead in some Shark Movie: Part 3 forget her line, look over at the director, remember her line, say it, then look back at the director and smile because she was glad she remembered her line. That's not how you do that. I'm too sleepy to finish, but I hope she dies at the end even though she seems like the lead.

A month or two ago, I saw a Tom Petty wannabe in a tiny basement bar. I was there to see an earlier act. I have no use for people who are older than Tom Petty who are trying to act like they were Tom Petty before he was Tom Petty. In the middle of the only halfway decent song, he explained he was having a "Youtube moment," so he stopped playing, went over to the side of the stage where he could look cooler and played the song again a little faster while his friend filmed it to post online. I walked out and I think everyone followed me. That's not how you do that either.

"That shark's not just rare. It's supposed to be extinct."